“I no no who I be. I be you? No. I be me? No.
“I no no who I B. I B U? No. I B me? No.
“I no no who U go B. I B U. U B no B.”
The hall is empty. Stagnant light in a hall inside a building inside a dome inside your split head. You bang your weak left fist on your face, to stop your talking. Quiet quiet here. You put your left hand up under your chin like the Easter bunny and pull back your lips and make slow chewing motions. Your right hand cross-cues and copies. Mind glyph: The Flesh-Eating Rabbit. Quiet quiet hippity hop.
You stop at a door in the hall and lefthand it open as easily as you opened the building’s front door. You slip in fast and freeze, standing still and limp, zombie-style. It’s dark in this room, and in the next room, but there’s light in the room after that. It smells good here, it smells like sex and merge.
You stand still for a hundred slow rabbit-chews, counting subvocally for the cross-cue . . . and listening. Splish in the far room where the light is, splishsplish. Oh yes it’s good to be here. Everything’s still smeared and webbed together and split, but now it’s not you running it anymore, it’s God running it, yes, it’s the lovely calm voice in the right half of your brain.
Your zombie hands wake up and get busy, like two baby bunnies, sniffing and nosing, and coming back to share their Know. You follow them around the room, tiptoeing, slowly slowly, oh so quietly, your hands hopping about, not this, not this, something longer, something heavier, this.
Your left hand is holding a heavy smooth thing, it’s a . . . uh . . . your right hand takes it over, it’s a chromesteel copy of the Brancusi sculpture, Flight. Your left hand hiphops into your pocket and gets a little viaclass="underline" the life.
You are ready now, new life on the left and death on the right. Blunt instrument Brancusi bludgeon just right to lift and smash flubby goosh. Whiteblackwhiteblackwhiteblack. Your breath comes too fast. You tap your forehead hard with the bluhbluhbluh. A star blooms. Stand there for a hundred heartbeats, the voices bouncing back and forth, and out of your mouth leaks a whisper that grows into a scream:
“Twas the week before Cwistmas and Aaall Thwough da CUBBY, Da Fwesh-Eating WABBIT CWUSHED DA FUNBOY FLUBFLUBBY!”
“Who is it?!?!” yells a voice from the far room with the splishsplash light, and you’re already running in there fast, with your smasher raised high, and your tongue stretched out to touch your chin. The girl is melted in the tub, pink flesh with eyes on top, and the black man is sitting on the edge, just starting to melt, and he’s trying to stand up and he can’t, and his screaming mouth is a ragged drooping hole, oh what perfect timing your headvoice has, swfwack, oh how neat, his head fell off , thwunk, the arms, the legs, smuck smuck.
The pink puddlegirl shudders, her eyes see only the shadows on the ceiling, she can’t see you or her dear funboy, but she knows maybe, through her ecstasy, that the Flesh-Eating Rabbit has come.
What have you done? What have you done? More orders flow in, the calm voice says it’s right, you can’t stop now, you have to crouch down, yes, and open the vial . . . can’t open it. Hands peck at each other like little chickens. You turn your head back and forth, eye to eye, moving the field, mother hen, cross-cuing till your hands get it right.
Right. Left. Top off, yah, the pink jellybean embryo, reach into that pink puddlegirl and put it where it belongs. A sudden flash of orgasm spasms you, sets your teeth on edge, brain chatter, you twitch all over, lying there by the love-puddle, blackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite.
5
Whitey and Darla
When Mooney’s flare-ray grazed Whitey Mydol’s shoulder, the heat blistered his skin. It hurt a lot. Whitey bought some gibberlin lotion at a drugstore and walked the few blocks to the chute that led down to his neighborhood, a cheap subterranean warren called the Mews. Whitey lived four levels down. The chute was a large square vent shaft, with fans mounted along one side, and with a ladder and a fireman’s pole running down each of the other three sides. To go down, you jumped in and grabbed a pole; and to get back up you climbed a ladder. In the low gravity, both directions were easy. Whitey slid down to his level and hopped off into the cool, dusty gloom of his hallway.
The boppers had built these catacombs, and there were no doors or ventilation pipes; you just had to count on air from the chute drifting down your hall and into your room. To keep thieves out, most people had a zapper in the frame of their cubby door. When the zapper was on, the doorframe filled with a sheet of light. You could turn it off with a switch on the inside, or by punching the right code on the outside. Air went right through a zapper curtain, but if you tried to walk through one, it would electrocute you. All the zappers in the hall except Whitey’s were turned on. His door gaped wide open. Odd. The inside of his cubby was lit by the pink-flickering vizzy. Bill Ding. A fuff show. Besides the vizzy, the cubby held a few holos, a foodtap, and a bed. There was a naked woman lying on the bed, with her legs parted invitingly. Whitey’s mate.
“Oh, Whitey! Hi!” Her legs snapped shut and she sat up and began fumbling on her X-shirt, which was a T-shirt silkscreened with a color picture of her crotch. Everyone in the Mews was wearing X-shirts this month, so that was nothing special. But.
“Who were you waiting for with the zapper off and your legs spread like that, Darla?” He checked the vizzy camera; it was on. “Were you running a personal?”
“What do you mean, waiting?” She pulled on a panty-skirt and went to the mirror to rummage at her long, strawy black hair. “I’m just getting up from a nap. I finished off the quaak and played with myself and I must have blanked out . . . what time is it? Did you get some merge?” Her voice was shrill and nervous. She dabbed more paint on her already shiny lips.
“If a dook shows up now, Darla, I’m going to know what he came for. You don’t have to jive me like an oldwed realman. I just want to know if you had a personal on Bill Ding, or if you have a specific boyfriend coming.”
Darla fiddled with the vizzy till it showed a picture of a window, with a view of blooming apple trees. A gentle wind tossed the trees and petals drifted. “That’s better,” said Darla. “What happened to your shoulder? It’s all red.”
Whitey handed her the gibberlin and sat down on the large bed, which was their only piece of furniture. “Kilpy rental-pig burned me, Darla, trying to score. Rub the lotion in real soft, pleasey.” He liked coming on sweet to Darla; it made up for the way he treated everyone else.
She peeled off the loose, blistered skin and began rubbing the cream in. “Near miss, Whitey. Whadja do back?”
He breathed shallowly, staying below the pain. “I can find him and kill him anytime, Darla. Maybe merge him and pull out all his bones. The merge’ll wear off, and he’ll be layin there like a rubber dolly. You can sit on his chest to smother him. That might be tasty. I can always find him because I planted a tap on him this morning. He’s an old rental-pig called Stahn Mooney. He was in the bopper civil war ten years ago? Was called Sta-Hi? Bei Ng put me on him.”