Toxicology. Steve Aylett
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One guy made the stone-faced assertion that belching was an actual language. Another displayed a fossilized eightball of mammoth dung and said it was “simply biding its time.” Another stated merely that he had within his chest a “flaming heart” and expected this to settle or negate all other concerns.
Then it was straight in with Skychum, known to the host as a heavy-hitter among those who rolled up with their lies at a moment’s notice. The host’s face was an emulsioned wall as he listened to the older man describe some grandiose reckoning. “Nobody’s free until everyone is, right?” was the standard he reached for in reply.
“Until someone is.”
“Airless Martians still gasping in a town of smashed geodesics,” he stated, and gave no clue as to his question. After wringing the laughs out of Skychum’s perplexed silence, he continued. “These Martians—what do they have against us?”
“Not Martians—metaversal beings in a hyperspace we are using as a skeleton cupboard. Horror past its sell-by date is dismissed with the claim that a lesson is learnt, and the sell-by interval is shortening to minutes.”
“I don’t understand,” said the host with a kind of defiance.
“The media believe in resolution at all costs, and this is only human.” Once again Skychum’s sepulchral style was doing the trick—there was a lot of sniggering as he scowled like a chef. “Dismissal’s easier than learning.”
“So you’re calling down this evangelical carnage.”
“I’m not—”
“In simple terms, for the layman”—the eyebrows of irony flipped to such a blur they vanished—“how could all these bodies be floating out in ‘hyper’ space?”
“Every form which has contained life has its equivalent echo in the super-etheric—if forced back into the physical, these etheric echoes will assume physical shape.”
“Woh!” shouted the host, delighted, and the audience exploded with applause—this was exactly the kind of wacko bullshit they’d come to hear. “And why should they arrive at this particular time?”
“They have become synchronized to our culture, those who took on the task—it is appropriate, poetic!”
The audience whooped, flushed with the nut’s sincerity.
“The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.”
“But I call you a fraud, Dr Skychum. These verbal manipulations cause a hairline agony in the honest man. Expressions of the grave should rival the public? I don’t think so. Where’s the light and shade?”
Skychum leant forward, shaking with emotion. “You slur me for one who is bitter and raging at the world. But you mustn’t kick a man when he’s down, and so I regard the world.” Then Ramone the chimp sprang on to his head, shrieking and flailing.
“Dr Skychum,” said the host. “If you’re right, I’m a monkey.”
The ringmaster of the Lobster Circus was declared the winner. The man with the flaming heart died of a coronary and the man with the dung fossil threw it into the audience and stormed off. A throne shaped like the halfshells of a giant nut was set up for the crowning ceremony. Skychum felt light, relieved. He had acquitted himself with honor. He enjoyed the jelly and ice cream feast set up for the contestants backstage. Even the chimp’s food-flinging antics made him smile. He approached the winner with goodwill. “Congratulations, sir. Those lobsters of yours are a brutal threat to mankind.”
The winner looked mournfully up at him. “I love them,” he whispered, and was swept away backwards by the make-up crew.
At the moment of the turn, Skychum left the studio building by a side entrance, hands deep in his coat pockets. Under a slouch hat which obscured his sky, he moved off down a narrow street roofed completely by the landscape of a spacecraft’s undercarriage.
During the last hour, as dullards were press-ganged onto ferris wheels and true celebrants arrested in amplified streets, hundreds of multidimensional ships had hoved near, denial-allow shields up. Uncloaking, they had appeared in the upper atmosphere like new moons. Now they moved into position over every capital city in the world, impossible to evade. Fifteen miles wide, these immense overshadow machines rumbled across the sky like a coffin lid drawing slowly shut. New York was being blotted out by a floating city whose petalled geometry was only suggested by sections visible above the canyon streets. Grey hieroglyphics on the underside were actually spires, bulkheads and structures of skyscraping size. Its central eye, a mile-wide concavity deep in shadow, settled over uptown as the hovering landscape thundered to a stop and others took up position over London, Beijing, Berlin, Nairobi, Los Angeles, Kabul, Paris, Zurich, Baghdad, Moscow, Tokyo and every other conurbation with cause to be a little edgy.
One nestled low over the White House like an inverted cathedral. In the early light they were silent, unchanging fixtures. Solid and subject to the sun.
The President, hair like a dirty iceberg, slapped on a middling smile and talked about caution and opportunity. Everywhere nerves were clouded around with awe and high suspension. Traffic stopped. Fanatics partied. The old man’s name was remembered if not his line—a woman held a sign aloft saying I’M A SKY CHUM. Cities waited under dumb, heavy air.
Over the White House, a screeching noise erupted. The central eye of the ship was opening. Striations like silver insect wings cracked, massive steel doors grinding downward.
The same was happening throughout the world, a silver flower opening down over Parliament, Whitehall and the dead Thames; over the Reichstag building, the World Bank, the Beijing Politburo.
The DC saucer eye was open, the bellow of its mechanism echoing away. Onlookers craned to see up inside.
For the space of two heartbeats, everything stopped. Then a tiny tear dropped out of the eye, splashing on the White House roof.
And then another, falling like a light fleck of snow.
These were corpses, these two—human corpses, followed by more in a shower which grew heavier by the moment, some crashing now through the roof, some rolling to land in the drive, bouncing to hit the lawn, bursting to paint the porticoes. And then the eye began gushing.
Everywhere the eyes were gushing. With a strange, continuous, multiphonic squall, the ragged dead rained from the sky.
Sixty-eight forgotten pensioners buried in a mass grave in 1995 were dumped over the Chicago social services. Hundreds of blacks murdered in police cells hit the roof of Scotland Yard. Thousands of slaughtered East Timorese were dumped over the Assembly buildings in Jakarta. Thousands killed in the test bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki began raining over the Pentagon. Thousands tortured to death showered Abuja.
Thousands of Sudanese slaves were dumped over Khartoum. The border-dwelling Khmer Rouge found themselves cemented into a mile-high gut slurry of three million Cambodians. Thousands of hill tribesmen were dropped over the Bangladeshi parliament and the World Bank, the latter now swamped irretrievably under corpses of every hue.
Berlin was almost instantly clotted, its streets packed wall to wall with victims. Beijing was swamped with tank fodder and girl babies.
The Pentagon well filled quickly to overflowing, blowing the building outward as surely as a terrorist bomb. Pearl Harbor dupes fell on Tokyo and Washington in equal share. The streets of America flooded with Japanese, Greeks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Dominicans, Libyans, Timorese, Central Americans and Americans, all beclouded in a pink mist of Dresden blood.
London was a flowing sewer—then the bodies started falling. Parliament splintered like a matchstick model. In the Strand the living ran from a rolling wall of the dead. A king tide of hole-eyed German, Indian, African, Irish and English civilians surged over and against buildings which boomed flat under the pressure. Cars were batted along, flipped and submerged. The Thames flooded its banks,