“Slee-Z was unavailable for comment but sources close to the music, clothing and prostitution mogul have told this station that Slee-Z is unlikely to take Freak-E’s defection, especially to his biggest rival, lying down.
“In other news, aspiring Independent presidential candidate, William Hicks, has announced that he has proof that the information linking the Democratic Confederation of the Congos with the Basque Reunification cell who took out the Washington Memorial last spring to be entirely fabricated.
“What kind of President, asks Hicks, could be so addled and opportunistic as to confuse two entirely different and separate world powers purely on the basis that he considers them both to be dangerous foreigners with guns?
“A White House source, speaking off the record, sez: ‘William Hicks might once have had a first-class mind, but these latest statements show that he’s now completely delusional-delusion evidenced by his belief that he could ever become President in any real world.’
“And if the independent candidate is delusional then it looks like these things are catching. We here at WWAXZY have been receiving some very strange reports today.
“In Tokyo, more than a hundred subway commuters have spontaneously developed symptoms consistent with that of a Sarin attack. Physical traces of any kind of contaminant has yet to be found.
“The images of ghost-like and gigantic women have been glimpsed floating over several of the world’s most isolated communities, variously described as resembling the Angel of Mons, Winged Victory of Samathrace and, in the New Hegonomy of Bangkok as that of Rati, Ragalata the vine of love, Kelikila the Shameless, Mayarati the Deceiver-a multiple deity currently appearing in her aspect of a huge-breasted woman who drives all who might behold her mad with carnal lust. To which, all WWAXZY can say, is that some godless savages get all the luck.
“And speaking of massive goddesses who drive all who might behold them mad with carnal lust, we now return you to our back-to-back marathon of Freak-E hits. Here’s the hot new mix of ‘Be My Pimp’…”
6.
He was:
Caught and killed and falling through darkness, tumbling head-over-heels with his heart in his mouth; boogiemen in the dark, their juju light shining bright behind the ragged holes of their eyes; still he continued to fall and it was heard to breathe… razor-shards in his lungs and blood on the walls and sick, slick mucus on the walls and something was happening to his-
He was:
Plunging through a cavern of membrane, tubular clusters of matter clinging to the sides and small lights flashing among them in a manner reminiscent of readouts. Here and there the membrane walls were ripped open to expose a darkness in which hideously distorted images of human faces were projected: white circles with black-circle eyes and screaming yaws of mouths.
His:
Skin felt loose and gelid. Without pain it sloughed off from his bones and streamed behind him as he fell and (sloughing and reforming, hauling itself back in and tangling, twisting around, transmuting into something bright, so bright, and metametallic that he…)
He:
Hit the floor of the cavern headfirst. Again, there was no pain, merely the abrupt cessation of motion. He lay there for a moment, face buried in a soft and decomposing mulch of what might be meat-or the idea of meat-then hauled himself up.
The skeletal remains of hands attached to forearms sprouted from the fleshy cavern floor, rotted to bone that was a bright and absolute white-far whiter than any bone one might encounter in any real world. The hands were shrouded in a haze of branching microtubular filaments-it was as if something had rotted the flesh away with such peculiar precision as to leave the neural matter intact.
The hands moved. They clutched and scrabbled at him, grabbing at him with a cloying intimacy that seemed to slide around inside his head. Something hot and clotted bursting in his head…
And he:
Screamed. Screamed so hard he thought his lungs might painlessly burst. And from him came a Big Light-like a reflex-sting, a burst of white-hot plasma, blasting the clutching hands away from him and burning them to nothing.
He:
For a moment he stood in the smoking crater of charred meat, staring ahead dumbly. After a while he realised that he was holding his hands in front of his face, realised what he was looking at: mirror-bright, his hands were, his whole body was, as though sculpted from solid but nevertheless in some sense fluid chrome.
The sense of cool air on his face.
The explosion of plasma that had come from him had ripped a hole in the membrane-wall of the cavern. Bright light came from it, bright shapes moved beyond.
Feet slipping in grease, crunching on the burned remains of clinging hands, Eddie Kalish walked towards the rip.
“There you go. That’s a boy!”
Eddie Kalish opened a bleary eye to see something he had never seen before.
Well, he had, but the transformation of it was of such a nature that it left the pattern-recognition areas of the mind temporarily wrong-footed.
When you thought of Trix Desoto, you thought of her in a comedy-nurse costume, wounded, close to death-and about to turn into some diabolical monstrosity from the very lowest reaches of Hell. If Hell actually existed, of course, which of course it didn’t.
Looking at her sitting there, now, on the edge of the hospital bed, relaxed and cheerful in an underwired patent-leather catsuit that would do wonders for the self-esteem of any girl, and so on Trix Desoto contrived to be spectacular, it took the mind a moment to adjust.
“Now, my advice to you,” said Trix Desoto,”would be to get the ‘what happened’ and ‘where am I’ out the way with the minimum of fuss. Everybody tries to find a new way of saying it, and it never works.”
Eddie looked blearily around the room. Some part of him vaguely expected it to be a sterile environment, white-tile walled and lit by harsh and buzzing fluorescent tubes. Instead, it was just the kind of neat little room you might find in an expensive private nursing home called Sunny Gables or the like. Plaster walls and cornicing. Drapes over the window. Discreet little oil-pastel landscapes dotted around.
(And it would only be later, much later, that he would finally work out what had been wrong with this. It was simply that the very idea of “A private nursing home called Sunny Gables” would have never occurred to him in his real life. It was simply not in his mental lexicon. Somebody, or something, must have actively put it into his head.)
At the time, though, the room just seemed prosaic and comforting. This was probably to offset the tangled horror of the items that were currently plugged into him, by way of tubes and what appeared to be actual electrical flex.
The med-units seemed to be some hybrid mix of the inorganic and decidedly organic -hearts and livers held in steel and polycarbon rack-cages, stimulated by servo-motors and pumping liquids which, by the colour, could be anything except saline fluid and blood.
The units seemed to twitch and fibrillate, like insects with their carapaces split open and their insides laid out.
“The fuck..?” Eddie Kalish managed to croak at last. “Wh’ happened? Fuck am I?”
“You see?” Trix Desoto said with a small smirk. “Nobody ever finds a new way of saying it.”
She stood up with a creak of patent leather. The catsuit covered her belly and midriff, but was sufficiently tight and clinging for Eddie to see that the flesh under it was flat and toned, no sign of a wound of any kind.