The soldiers, having laid down their arms, are ordered to remove their uniforms, boots and socks. Clad only in undergarments, they are marched to the garrison and locked in. The officers, the Governor, the wealthy inhabitants, and the clergy, protesting the indignity, are locked in the prison after all the prisoners have been released.
We post notices to the inhabitants to go about their daily business and to fear no harm. We set up the Articles in public places, impound all ships in the harbor, and post guards at all exits. No boat may leave the harbor and no person may leave the city.
For the next two days, while we are catching up on our sleep, the soldiers, officers and hostages are to be given adequate food, but the partisans who guard them and bring the food have orders not to talk or to answer any questions.
On the third day, fully rested, we gather around a conference table in the governmental dining room. News of our success has spread throughout the area, and there are now more than five hundred partisans gathered in the city, more than enough for routine guard duty. We consult maps and formulate plans for a series of attacks on the Spanish-held garrisons on the east side of the isthmus. These garrisons are for the most part small, and will be no match for our mortars. Within a month, we will control a string of garrisons from Port Roger to northern Panama. It is decided that the post of Commandante shall rotate each day. Since the ambush was largely according to my plan, I will assume the first shift.
We are the language
As I was reading the Cities of the Red Night text, the Iguana sister brought some books and put them down on the table. I laid aside the folder.
"Who wrote this?"
"A scholar who prefers to remain anonymous. Research into this area is not reinforced. If, as he suggests, conception is the basic trauma, then it is also the basic instrument of control." She gestured to the books stacked on the table. I saw at a glance that they were elaborately bound in a variety of colors. They looked very expensive.
"These are copies. Please study them carefully. I will pay one million dollars for recovery of the originals."
"How good are the copies?"
"Almost perfect."
"Then why do you want the originals? Collector's vanity?"
"Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form. Without being an idealist, I am reluctant to see the originals in the hands of the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile and the pickle factory...."
"I don't need a pep talk—but I do need a retainer."
She laid out a check for two hundred thousand cools on the table. I began examining the books, skipping through to get a general impression. They are composed in a variety of styles and periods. Some of them seem to stem from the 1920s of The Great Gatsby, old sport, and others to derive from the Edwardian era of Saki, reflecting an unbearably flawed boyishness. There is an underlying current of profound frivolity, with languid young aristocrats drawling epigrams in streets of disease, war, and death. There is a Rover Boys-Tom Swift story line where boy heroes battle against desperate odds.
The books are color comics. "Jokes," Jim calls them. Some lost color process has been used to transfer three-dimensional holograms onto the curious tough translucent parchment-like material of the pages. You ache to look at these colors. Impossible reds, blues, sepias. Colors you can smell and taste and feel with your whole body. Children's books against a Bosch background; legends, fairy stories, stereotyped characters, surface motivations with a child's casual cruelty. What facts could have given rise to such legends?
A form of radiation unknown at the present time activated a virus. This virus illness occasioned biologic mutations, especially alterations in hair and skin color, which were then genetically conveyed. The virus must have affected the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. The virus information was genetically conveyed, in orgasms that were often fatal. It seems likely that the burnings, stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, and hangings were largely terminal hallucinations produced by the virus, at a point where the line between illusion and reality breaks down. Over a period of generations the virus established a benign symbiosis with the host. It was a mutating virus, a color virus, as if the colors themselves were possessed of a purposeful and sinister life. The books are probably no more representative of life at the time than a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell represents the complex reality of American life.
"Are these complete copies of the originals I am retained to find, or should I say uncover?"
"No, these are fragments."
"You have some idea as to what the other books contain?" I asked.
She glanced at the check. "Do you?"
I nodded. "They may contain the truth, which these books cover with a surface so horrible and so nauseously prettified that it remains impervious as a mirror." I put the check in my wallet. "And as misleading," I added. I returned to the books.
As I read on, I became increasingly aware of a feeling of faintness and malaise. The colors were giving me a headache—the deep electric blue of the southern sky, the explosions of green by the pools and waterways, the clothes of tight-fitting red velvet, the purples, red, and pinks of diseased skin—rising from the books palpable as a haze, a poisonous miasma of color.
I loosened my collar, my thoughts hazy and somehow not my own, as if someone were delivering a lecture on the books, of which I caught an occasional phrase ... captions in English? "At one time a language existed that was immediately comprehensible to anyone with the concept of language." A World War I ambulance?
As I tried to examine it more closely, I could not be sure, but I had seen it with photographic clarity ... an old sepia photo circa 1917. "They have removed the temporal limits."
I looked up with a start, as if I had been dozing. The Iguana and her brother were not in the room. I had not seen them go. Jim was sitting on one side of me and Kiki on the other. They seemed to be equally affected.
"Whewwww ..." said Jim. "I need a good hooker of brandy."
"Muy mereado," said Kiki. "No quiero ver más...."
Jim and Kiki walk over to a cabinet bar in the corner of the room. I pick up a book bound in red skin. In a deeper shade of red: The First Redhead.
A blond boy with a noose around his neck blushes deeper and deeper, red washing through his body, his lips swelling as the red tide sweeps into his hair and ripples down his chest to the crotch, down his legs, dusting his skin with red hairs that glisten in a soft fire, heart pounding against his ribs like a caged bird....
I pick up a book with a heavy blue cover like flexible metal. In gold letters: The Blue Mutant. As I open the book I get a whiff of ozone.
A boy with a blue rash around his crotch, neck, and nipples, burning his asshole and crotch, a slow cold burn behind his ear, the blue color in his eyes, pale blue of northern skies washed across the whites, the pupils deep purple, blue shit burning in his ass like melting solder ... the smell of the Blue Mutant Fever fills the room, a rotten metal meat smell that steams off him as he shits a smoldering blue phosphorescent excrement. His pubic and rectal hairs turn bright blue and crackle with sparks....