Cosmocopia Read online

  Down her long exquisite body, repairing the wounded neck first, then the chest, the breasts and their nipples, lifting the massive glands to get underneath. Stomach, hips, the corpse all the while assuming an enameled perfection.

  He spread her cooling, stiffening legs and painted all her sex and crotch. Wherever the paint flowed, it assumed a coherent shell-like quality, as if he were not merely coating the women but embalming her like some Egyptian technician.

  After Lazorg had devoted care and reverence to each toe and the soles of her feet, he realized he would have to turn Velly over to finish the job. She’d smear, but he’d repair that.

  So with immense struggle, splotching his own clothing and exposed skin with paint from her body, he flipped her, and began painting her dorsal side, the well-defined blades of her shoulders, the roundels of her buttocks.

  Again, the struggle, the awkward moments when she painted him with her body, and now she lay again on her back.

  Lazorg fretted that now the coat of paint on her back would be mussed, but there was no getting around that. For a brief moment he contemplated flipping her in an endless loop, painting and repainting what was marred each time from his bottomless bucket until he died of inanition. But in the end he contented himself with merely touching up her front, rendering her a perfect candy-apple eidolon.

  His task finished, Lazorg suddenly felt all the accumulated weight and stress of his mad exertions. He dropped bucket and brush, staggered backwards a step or two, then sideways, then forward, to fall upon his final masterpiece in a last embrace.

  Lazorg anticipated the feel of the tacky paint, beneath which rapidly coarsening flesh would resist his fall.

  But he never received these sensory impressions.

  Instead, he found himself dropping onto and into a woman-shaped hole, an anthropomorphic crimson portal that opened into an infinite crimson tunnel, down which he plummeted forever, too stunned even to shriek.

  PART TWO

  2. Dweller in the Bonecellar

  CRUTCHSUMP KNEW THAT A TROVE of valuable fresh bones awaited her on the Shulgin Mudflats at the edge of Sidetrack City, where the metropolis met the waters of the Rodinian Sea. The myriad shimmering shifflets would have mortally spawned by now, as they did every year at this time, and their exhausted luminescent flesh would have quickly evanesced, leaving behind their delicate skeletons. These lightweight traceries of calcium and rare minerals awaited any bonepickers experienced enough to navigate the sinkholes, grapple-gnaws and mockmucks of the flats.

  Normally, Crutchsump would have already shared the generous harvest with three or four other veteran bonepickers, laboriously earning a minim toward her continued sparse survival.

  But not this season.

  This season, the Shulgin Mudflats were haunted.

  Haunted by an otherworldly monster.

  Few had actually seen this beast up close. Yet its presence was incontestable.

  Mournful wailings issued from the Mudflats by day and by night, solemn heart-rending ululations. From Huid Avenue, separated by a labyrinth of tall pouf-topped reeds from the Mudflats, passersby at night had witnessed the silhouette of a naked shambling figure—face-naked as well as body-naked!—crashing aimlessly through the reeds. The fruit and gorgit vendors along the Golden Boardwalk reported inexplicable thefts of their wares, victuals doubtlessly stolen by the hungry monster.

  All these manifestations of something uncanny kept people away from the Mudflats—not that many had cause to trespass there in the best of times, save in search of bones or other natural materials, driftwood and miscellaneous seawrack. The Mudflats produced nothing wholesome by way of foodstuffs.

  But forbidding monster or no, Crutchsump was, day by depressing day, nerving herself up to attempt the shifflet harvest.

  Her expenses and her depleted savings drove her to such a risk.

  Not that her lifestyle was extravagant. Far from it.

  The monthly rent on her three shabby basement rooms amounted to only thirty scintillas. She subsisted contentedly on a simple diet of quorn and livewater. Her clothing consisted of various ragged garments secured from several charities. She boasted only a single caul—an unfashionable model several years old, its formerly rickracked eyeholes all frayed—which she washed daily and mended as needed. As for Pirkle—well, her pet managed quite well on alley scavengings and handouts from local merchants.

  Now, however, Crutchsump had reached the limits of her economy. All the bones she had of late managed to accumulate from the streets of Sidetrack City—haunting abbatoirs, rummaging through mucky waste tips, cadging at back doors of diners—had been cleaned and sold to the wholesalers in the bone trade, the businessmen one level up from freelancers like Crutchsump, those who sorted and classified and packaged the osseous relics for subsequent sale to manufacturers of various stripes: the glue and gelatin factories, the corset- and button- and armor-makers, the producers of oil, char, ash and meal. The room where normally Crutchsump stored her haul was empty now, only greasy floor and walls and a fading redolence left behind to denote its function, while the tools of her trade—wire brushes, delicate picks and awls, a colony of hungry carrion ants—gathered dust.

  So one bright morning with the sun Watermilk climbing the sky, when Crutchsump could no longer tolerate the rumbling and griping of her stomach, nor the unsubtle reminders from her landlord, Vannegar, about a certain approaching day of fiscal responsibility, the bone-scavenger resolved herself to attempt the Shulgin Mudflats.

  Arising from her pallet, she pulled her lone caul off a peg and snugged the tailored sack over her head, pulling tight the drawstring around her neck. The jutting forefront of the caul, stretched tight over her introciptor, threatened vulgarly to split old stitches, and Crutchsump sighed. One more purchase to make. …

  The rags she wore in public served also as nightclothes, so no change of garments was necessary. Crutchsump slid her broad calloused feet into a pair of straw huaraches. She reached to a shelf for a flask of livewater. The shallow argent contents of the flask reacted to the approach of her hand by seething. Crutchsump drained the livewater flask dry, figuring that she would need the sustenance most today, and that if she met with success, she could easily replenish her larder. If not—

  But that alternative did not bear contemplation.

  Meanwhile, Pirkle had uncommonly roused himself. The nocturnal wurzel enjoyed his sleep, and generally spent the daylight hours, while Crutchsump was abroad, at the foot of the pallet, chirring rhythmically, the garish false eyes ringing his circumference mounting a bold bluff against antediluvian predators unseen in Sidetrack City for millennia. Now the lids of his true eyes opened, revealing bright blue orbs. Pirkle used several of his feet to scratch his rugose underbelly, flexing with pleasure the padded toes of the remaining feet as they pressed into the floor. The wurzel’s mandibles clacked ecstatically.

  With a hand on her door leading to a flight of steps streetward, Crutchsump was about to order Pirkle to remain behind. But at the last moment she relented. She would appreciate the companionship of the creature while out on her scary, necessary errand. So, securing a large coarse sack used for collecting, Crutchsump set out, with Pirkle skittering along behind her.

  The streets of Sidetrack City bustled with activity. Crutchsump’s own ghetto neighborhood, the Telerpeton district, hosted a vibrant commercial life, although admittedly the products, vendors and customers were marginal at best. The bone-scavenger had to dodge pails of slops flung into the gutter from eel-soup booths. Late-blooming or early-rising whores monopolized a stretch of sidewalk, their cauls made of shockingly thin fabric. Crutchsump crossed the unpaved street to avoid them. She passed a pottery shop where giant ornate urns used as ghost-catchers filled a display window. Hailed by a neighbor, Grippo, she waved a pleasant hello. Grippo traded in old knives and other tools.

  All the while Pirkle trotted contentedly at the heels of his mistress, darting off now and then
to investigate with his delicate vibrissae one attractive bit of offal or another. Crutchsump’s hunger made even the trash look appealing.

  Entering the Bellefoyle district, Crutchsump experienced a grander surround. The streets became paved with broad mica-flecked stones, the pedestrians were better dressed and healthier, the stores more luxe, the civic scents pleasanter. Wagons and carriages, pulled by trundlebrumes and padlopes, racketed down the cobbles. A solemn Noetic seemed to float down the sidewalk. His long robe, woven with stylized Cosmocopian symbols, concealed his slippered feet, and a hat like a crown-dimpled loafcake perched atop his head. Feeling out of place, Crutchsump moved cautiously, sticking to walls and using alleys wherever possible. To live amidst such genteel splendor—what must it be like?

  An hour later, Crutchsump reached broad, curving Huid Avenue, which followed the line of the bay. The cryptic, fecund odors of the sea dominated here. The daylight from Watermilk, reflected off the nearby waters, assumed a thicker, more penetrative aspect.

  Hastening to the railing that separated the avenue from the reedy Mudflats, Crutchsump saw that the tide was high, water lapping among the reeds just yards away from the seawall of the avenue. In her haste, she had neglected to monitor the tidal conditions at Shulgin Mudflats. Now she would have to wait for the water to retreat before she could attempt a harvest. And that circumstance would not occur, she knew, until perilously close to dark. (The second sun, Zarafa, would not fill the skies again for days.)

  Return the long way home empty-handed? To an empty larder and an importunate landlord? Impossible.

  Resigned to her fate, Crutchsump settled down on her haunches at the head of a ramp that led down from the avenue and into the wasteland. The ramp was flanked by heaps of trash dumped there illegally by lazy refuse carters unwilling to make the long trip out to the Kossuth Middens. Pirkle began to root among the garbage, looking for anything good to eat. For lack of a better activity, Crutchsump joined her pet.

  She turned up a handleless drinking cup; a two-scintilla coin; a long scarf of cheap fabric, quite dirty of course but still useful for patching her caul; and a knife with no handle which she could sell to Grippo. All into the sack.

  Then Crutchsump excavated a discarded sex toy. The rubber model of an introciptor, freakishly large, embarrassed, disgusted and compelled her. She tossed the thing away. Pirkle lunged after it across the mud, as if playing a game.

  “Pirkle! Stop! Get back here!”

  Obedient but unchastened, Pirkle returned to the side of his mistress. He cleaned all the mud from his legs with his strigil organ, then folded his many limbs beneath himself as he lowered his body, completely concealing them. His true eyes closed, leaving his many false ones mounting their standard protective charade. Chirring noises soon emanated from the lumpish form.

  Crutchsump sat, bringing her knees up to her chin, clutching her legs and staring morosely but not unhopefully out to sea.

  Watermilk was biting into the aquatic horizon, sending long shadows of the reeds across the land when Crutchsump decided it was safe to venture out onto the drained flats. She roused Pirkle and descended the ramp. At the base of the ramp she removed her huaraches, slinging them over a shoulder, and stepped barefoot onto the mud. Each step immersed her to the ankles, but no further, and so while progress was laborious, she was in no immediate danger of becoming mired.

  Here and there among the reeds, Crutchsump found an occasional drifted shifflet skeleton which she promptly bagged. But she knew that the bulk of the harvest lay beyond the reeds, closer to the ocean’s marge. The shifflet bones were anchored by organic threads formed during the decomposition process of the parent to the heavy, stable egg clutches, providing a protective cage for the future generation of shifflets. Removing each bone cage would doom that clutch. Nevertheless, despite the harvest, shifflets returned in force each year, so Crutchsump had no remorse.

  As she forced her way through the reed jungle, Crutchsump looked warily around for signs of the monster.

  She came to a dry mound, a trampled area of the reeds that might have denoted a person-sized nest elevated above the high tide. And indeed, there were discarded fruit rinds and gorgit skins there. But no monster.

  Yet.

  Crutchsump’s steady passage through the reeds was interrupted once, when Pirkle chanced to tangle with a grapple-gnaw. The wurzel stumbled in its eager bumbling explorations on the grapple-gnaw’s burrow and was instantly wrapped by three slimy ribbed and striped tentacles that shot forth from the mud. But Pirkle’s stout mandibles severed those fleshy ropes easily, and in the end it was Pirkle who dined, not the grapple-gnaw.

  When Crutchsump finally reached the actual beach, she was rewarded by the sight of innumerable shifflet skeletons. Scintillas practically in her pocket! She began to reap them hurriedly, discarding the worthless eggs, for only half of Watermilk remained above the horizon.

  Her back sore from repetitive bending, her sack full, Crutchsump turned at last, amidst deepening twilight, toward the shore.

  There at the edge of the reeds, just yards away, stood the monster, watching her.

  Crutchsump let out an involuntary shriek. Pirkle, an egg clutch dangling from his mandibles, looked up. Spotting the monster, the wurzel commenced a shrill metallic keening and began to charge the apparition.

  Expecting her pet to be torn in half, mutilated and tossed aside, Crutchsump cried out, “Pirkle, no!”

  But the wurzel did not listen this time, and continued its charge.

  The monster did something utterly unexpected then.

  It collapsed in a heap to the muck, shielding its obscenely naked head with its arms, and emitting an all-too-human wail.

  Realizing her golden opportunity to flee with her life and harvest intact, Crutchsump darted inland, the bag full of lightweight bones thumping against her back in encouragement.

  But then she stopped, awash with anxiety.

  Pirkle! She couldn’t abandon her pet! Life was lonely enough with the beloved wurzel as her companion. How could she live after consigning Pirkle to such a horrid fate?

  Every nerve ablaze with anguish and fear, Crutchsump turned back to face the monster and advance upon it, to rescue Pirkle. She prepared the swing her only weapon, her lightly laden sack.

  What she saw utterly confounded her.

  Sunk in the muck, the monster was clutching Pirkle as if for comfort, its obscenely naked face pressed against Pirkle’s back. And the wurzel was licking the amniotic mud from the monster’s legs with its raspy strigil.

  Slowly, Crutchsump advanced on the unlikely tableau, ready to flee or defend herself at any second.

  But the monster made no threatening moves, continuing instead merely to clutch Pirkle like a man adrift at sea clutching a log, all the while sobbing and wailing.

  As Crutchsump got closer, she could make out words of distress and pain in the monster’s unceasing lament.

  “Dead! Dead! And I killed her! The bloody cane! Blood everywhere! This must be hell! Yes, hell! And I deserve it! Devil’s red lacquer on her skin! The smell! The taste! Dead, my world’s all dead!”

  Crutchsump was hardly reassured by the tenor or content of the monster’s babbling speech. But somehow, she nonetheless received the distinct impression that the monster itself intended her no harm.

  Bolstered by this intuition, Crutchsump came to within inches of the monster. Tentatively, she reached out a hand to touch its arm.

  Receiving the touch, the monster raised its naked face, and ceased its lamentations.

  Braced for unwelcome intimacy, Crutchsump nevertheless reeled back at the proximity of horror.

  The creature was a eunuch, obviously castrated sometime in the past. For where its introciptor should have jutted proudly forth was a mere blob of flesh, a cruel scarification, healed ugly long ago.

  Other than that absence, however, its features were human enough, within a certain latitude: eyes, mouth, chin, ears, the wh
ole countenance besmeared and runneled with tears.

  The monster spoke, rationally this time.

  “Help me. Please.”

  Crutchsump felt an immediate pity for the creature. She knew what it was to pass whole days in poverty, ignored by all, unspeaking.

  “Help? All right. All right, I will help you. But first, we need to cover your face.”

  Rummaging in her sack, Crutchsump pulled out the long scarf she had earlier found in the trash. After picking tangled shifflet bones off the fabric, she wound the dirty stinking cloth around the monster’s face, leaving only the creature’s eyes exposed, before knotting the fabric at the back of its neck. Not a proper caul, but good enough.

  “Now stand up. I don’t have any clothes for you, but at least your face is decent. That’s all that really matters.”

  The monster released Pirkle and stood.

  Crutchsump received another shock.

  Pegged to its groin was some kind of amorphous, bumpy tri-lobed growth, plainly a kind of goiter or cancer. Crutchsump’s pity for the monster only increased, once her initial revulsion was past.

  Luckily, the lashings of mud and muck across the monster’s whole body blurred the anomaly, as did the oncoming night. Crutchsump prayed the smelly caked-on covering would last until they reached her home.

  Now Watermilk had vanished wholly from sight, and full darkness had descended.

  “Pirkle! Lead us back to the street!”

  The wurzel had stood by in patient approbation of the whole process of making friends with the monster and rendering it decent. Now Pirkle proudly led his mistress and new companion through the maze of reeds and back to Huid Avenue.

  Once she had attained the familiar highway, Crutchsump experienced anew the unreality of her situation: side-by-side with a creature from who-knew-where in the Cosmocopia. Oh, well, having adopted this strange refugee, she could hardly abandon it now.

  “Come, let’s move.”

  Crutchsump set off down Huid Avenue at a speedy clip—as fast at least as her tired flesh could move.