ODD? (7 page)

“It is all the work of machines,” he says.

“What, all this?” X. asks, waving at the village buildings.

He turns, smiling broadly, and nods.

Disappointment sweeps through X..

“I had thought there were people here, greeting us,” X. says sadly.

“No!” he replies, his gaiety still increasing. “Only machines.”

“It seems . . . inappropriate somehow. These quaint, rustic buildings. That they should just be masks for some impersonal machinery.”

“You would expect that in a city, wouldn’t you?” he asks, still gaily.

“Well, yes! The modern city is nothing but machines.”

“The modern city . . .”

He says this in a tone that suggests more to come, but adds nothing. When he does speak again, it’s as if he were making a rejoinder to someone in another conversation, and now his voice has a bitter, recriminating tone, even if it has lost none of its gladness. It’s the embittered tone of one who can accuse another from a position of unquestioned innocence.

“Modern cities . . . cruel cities . . . cities of weakness, cities without ritual.”

“Yes,” X. says, eagerly. He wants to hear more.

“When you dream,” the man says, suddenly addressing X. directly, “you dream of the city of reason and ceremoniousness.”

“Of liberty and rest,” X. says.

“Of order, uncoerced and spontaneous as a dance.”

“Ordered with the precision of an improvisation.”

“You can hear the singing of those machines which mankind slanders as being alien and inimical to it, and to nature itself, when it is by human hands that the innocent particles of nature are transformed into machines, and set to work by the application of natural principles. Machines are made in the human image. Man does not imitate them!”

A weird light plays around his features as he says this. While he never ceases to look human and natural, at the same time there is a temptation to see his face as a hollow glass mask with luminous gases inside. As that luminescence grows, more lights come on all over the town, and X. begins to realize they are connected.

“You are . . .” X. says, and stops, unable to manacle together the words he needs.

“I am,” he says, nodding, evidently guessing X.’s thought. “Do you think this is something?” he asks, with the air of someone who is about to unfurl something more astonishing.

The other can only nod.

He tugs at his tie, undoing it, and pulls it from his collar. Then, twisting his hand around as if he were working a dial, he undoes his collar button, and begins to undress, begins to laugh, as the black void of the sky above the village behind him explodes in countless lighted windows soaring up tall towers whose tops are impossibly high. Laughing, stripping off his clothes, with a lurid brilliance that steadily grows more intense about his face and eyes, his image begins to dance before X., and, with a crash, dazzling rays of light burst out from behind X. X. turns to see yet more towers, and on all sides — this is not a village, but a city of colossi, wafers of night pressed between headless dragon spires whose flanks are scaled with terrible, illuminated windows. His vision seems to drop away down the endless, canyon-like streets to the massive buildings beyond, as they burst alight one by one, and still further and further. An intense, silent vibration suffuses the air and the ground at his feet, as his companion, whose mind
is
these buildings, these lights and this power, continues to strip himself.

A jolt pulls him at once entirely out of his dream, and the man is there by his side, clapping him on the shoulder and telling him it’s time to get off the train. Blearily, X. rises and follows him, his legs moving in what feel like convulsive jerks, shot through with cold, glassy pains like darts of ice.

They are in the same station, the same station as ever, but the doors open on the wrong side of the train. Together, they stand on the narrow ledge opposite the platform. The train leaves with a dull roar, and people spill from the stairways, refilling the platform, streaming endlessly into the station, lining up along the tracks, bent wearily over fluttering white books. The man leads X. to the panel, which is only a step or two away. With his finger, he scrapes a thick layer of encrusted dirt from the wall, tracing the outlines of a rectangular panel. With some knocking, he clears the dirt from a recessed handle, and draws the panel open with a sharp tug, revealing what looks like a clockwork mechanism within the wall. With a glance at X., he pulls the irregular ring from his finger. Now X. sees clearly that it’s a gear, which the man fits neatly into the mechanism. The machinery spins, and the panel glides up into the wall without a sound.

The man crosses to the other side of the panel and gestures to X., bowing a little and inviting him, without a word, to crawl inside. From this angle, facing him again, he can make out something of the man’s features a little better than he has up until now. The singular light shining from the platform throws them into an altered relief, and seems to shadow that vague, interior luster that had leant so much variation to their composition. The man is not himself, nor is he another. The idea crosses X.’s mind even as he crouches to enter the wall through the open panel, and the ambivalent alarm that it brings in tow competes with an intense curiosity.

The aperture is a bit like a closet, lit only faintly by the glow from the platform. It is an upright tomb in the wall, and it was empty until X. climbed inside it. With sudden fear, X. turns to face the man, as best he can, but of course he can only see the feet, and that with effort. They recross in front of the aperture as he stoops awkwardly in the narrow chamber to look, and he hears a soft tinkle of metal. That is the sound, he knows, of the gear being removed from the machinery, and replaced on the ring finger of the left hand. The panel . . .

The panel drops steadily into place, to seal him in total darkness, inside the wall.

As the panel begins to descend, neither slowly nor rapidly, in a flash he inventories all that he has within reach and determines which of these things — his head — is the hardest. Already stooped, he thrusts his head violently forward just in time. The panel settles its weight across his temples. The thickness of the panel extends above his eyes like a canopy, but he is still able to see the tracks, the station, and the people on the platform, the trains as they come and go, as long as the lights remain lit. The panel rests on his head as stably as if it was part of his skeleton, but bones also fall off each other, and everything moves in time, including the trains, which are far heavier than the panel. So the darkness is not quite complete, because there is, certainly dampened and partially blocked by his head, also a bar of light.

Perhaps there will come a time when X., standing on the platform, will see the train pull in behind him as he is reflected in the glass windows of the kiosk there. The reflection is just bright enough to make it seem as though there are two trains in the station, although one is spectral and dim, like his own reflection. The doors of both trains will open. It may be that he will turn and board one, and his reflection will turn and board another, and it may be that these respective reflections will eventually arrive in unfamiliar and necessarily unforeseen destinations.

SLOW COLD CHICK

Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican science fiction and fantasy writer and editor who lives in the United States. Her novels (
Brown Girl in the Ring
,
Midnight Robber
,
The Salt Roads
,
The New Moon's Arms
), and short stories such as those in her collection
Skin Folk
, often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.

They'd cut off the phone. Blaise slammed the receiver back into its cradle. “Oonuh couldn't wait just a little more?” she asked resentfully of the silent instrument. “1 get paid Friday, you know.” Now she couldn't ask her mother to put milk or water in the cornbread. Chuh. Blaise flounced into the kitchen and scowled at the mixing bowl on the counter.

Mummy used milk, she was almost sure of it. Blaise poured milk and oil, remembering her mother's homemade cornbread, yellow-warm smelling, hot from the oven, with butter melting more yellow into it. Yes, Mummy used milk.

And eggs. And Blaise didn't have any. “Damn.” It was almost a week until payday. She made a sucking sound of irritation. Frustration burned deep in her chest.

A movement through her kitchen window caught her eye. From her main-floor apartment, Blaise could easily see the Venus-built lady in the next-door garden. The Venus-built lady's cottage always gave the appearance of having just popped into existence, unexpected and anachronistic as Doctor Who's call box.

Chocolate-dark limbs peeking out of her plush white dressing gown, the Venus-built lady waded indolently through rioting ivy, swollen red roses, nasturtiums that pursed into succulent lips. Blaise had often thought to ask the beautiful woman what her name was. But to meet the eyes of someone so self-possessed, much less speak to her . . .

Branches laden, an otaheite tree bobbed tumescent maroon fruit, so low that the lady could have plucked them with her mouth. Blaise's mother sometimes sent her otaheite apples from Jamaica, but how did the tropical tree flourish in this northern climate?

As ever, the Venus-built lady's gingered brown hair flung itself in crinkled dreadknots down her back, tangled as lovers' fingers. Blaise had chemically straightened all the kinks out of her own hair.

The Venus-built lady was laying a circle of conch shells around a bed of bleeding hearts. She reached out to caress the plants' pink flowers. At her touch, they shivered delicately. Blaise looked down at her own dull brown hands. The Venus-built lady's skin had the glow of full-fat chocolate.

The woman bent and straightened, bent and straightened, leaving a pouting conch shell behind her each time, until pink echoed pink in a circle around the bleeding hearts. Blaise thought of the shells singing as the wind blew past their lips.

The lady turned away from the flower bed and swayed amply up her garden path. As her foot touched the first step of the cottage, a fat, velvet-petaled rose leaned beseechingly towards her. She tugged the rose from its stem and ate it. Then she opened her gingerbread door and sashayed inside.

Weird. Blaise imagined a spineless green grub squirming voluptuously in the heart of the overblown rose. And an avid mouth descending towards it. She shuddered.
I don't want to eat the worm.

It had gotten hot in the apartment. The fridge burped. Distractedly, Blaise went to it and opened it.

There was an egg huddling in one of the little cups inside the fridge door. Where had that come from? Exactly what she needed. She was reaching eagerly for it when a stench from deep inside the fridge slid into her nostrils, a poisonous, vinegary tang. The Scotch Bonnet pepper sauce she'd made, last year sometime? was rotting in its glass jar. The pepper crusting the jar's lid had begun to corrode the metal. A vile greenness bloomed on the surface of the red liquid. Blaise kissed her teeth in disgust and dumped the mouldering sauce into the sink.

Cornbread now.

The egg was a little too big for its cradle, a little rounder than eggs usually were. Blaise picked it up. Its cold, mercurial weight shifted in her palm, sucking warmth from her hand. She cracked it into the bowl. With a hollow
clomp!
a mass disappeared below the surface of the liquid. A sulphur-rot stench filled the kitchen.

“Backside!” Blaise swallowed a wave of anger. A bubble of foetid air popped from the depths of the bowl. Blaise grimaced and began to pour the swampy goop down the drain. The tainted milk and oil mingled with the pepper sauce.

Something rubbery thumped into the mouth of the drain and lay there. It was small and grey and jointed. A naked, fully formed chicken foetus. Blaise's gorge rose. When the thing moved, wallowing in the pepper sauce remaining in the sink, she nearly spewed the coffee she'd drunk that morning.

“
Urrrr
. . .” rattled the cold-grown chick. Slowly, slowly, it extended a peeled head on a wobbly neck. Its tiny beak was thin as nail parings. Its eyes creaked open, stretching a red film of pepper sauce from lid to lid. It shrieked tinnily as the pepper made contact with its eyes. Frantically it shook its head. Its pimply grey body contorted in agony. It shrieked again. Fighting revulsion, Blaise grabbed a cooking spoon and scooped it up.

“Shh, shh.” She wadded a tea towel in her free hand and deposited the bird into it. It wailed and stropped its own head against the tea towel. Through the fabric Blaise could feel the bird's cartilaginous body writhing against her palm. Her skin crawled.

“
Arr
. . .” the chick complained. Blaise filled the cooking spoon with water and trickled it over the grey, bald head. The bird fought and spluttered. Reddened eyes glared accusingly at Blaise.

“Make up your mind,” she flared. “You want fire in your eyes, or cool water?” The chick tried to peck. Blaise hissed angrily, “Well here, then, take that!”

She scooped some drops of pepper sauce from the sink with her fingers and flicked it at the bird's head. It yowped in indignation. Then, worm-blind, a tiny grey tongue snaked out of its mouth and licked some of the pepper sauce off its beak. “
Urrrr
. . .” This time it didn't seem to mind the taste of the pepper. It licked it off, then blinked its burned eyes clear.

Its body a blur, it shook the water off. It sat up straight in her palm, staring alertly at her. It seemed a little bigger. It did have a few feathers after all. Blaise must have just not noticed them before.

Her anger cooled. She'd let loose the heat of her temper on such a little thing.

The chick opened its mouth wide; Blaise nearly dropped it in alarm. Its hungry red maw looked bigger than its head.

Well, it had seemed to like the pepper, after all. Blaise scraped a stringy mass of it out of the sink and dangled it in front of the cold chick's beak. The chick gaped even wider, begging to be fed. Blaise let slimy tendrils fall. Red threads wriggled down the bird's throat. Ugh.

The chick swallowed, withdrew its pinny head into its ugly neck, and closed its eyes.

“That do you for now?” Blaise asked it.

The chick purred, a low, rattling sound. It radiated heat into her hand. It wasn't so ugly, really. She tucked its warmth close to her breast.

Someone knocked at the door. Blaise gasped, jolted out of her peaceful moment. She dumped the chick into a soup bowl. It squawked and toppled, legs kicking at the air. “Stay there,” she hissed, and went to answer the knock.

It was the guy next door, lanky and pimply in a frowsty leather jacket. “Hi there, Blaise,” he leered. “Whatcha up to?”

The red tongues of his construction boots hung loose and floppy. He was gnawing on the gooey tag end of a cheap chocolate bar, curled wrapper ends wilting from his fist.

“Nothing much,” Blaise replied.

Tethered by a leash through its studded leather collar, the guy's ferret humped around and around in sad circles at his feet. Something about its furtive slinkiness brought to mind a furry penis with teeth.

The guy took a hopeful step closer. “Want some company?”

Not this again. “Um, maybe another time.” She remained blocking the doorway, hoping he'd get the point. The ferret sneezed and rubbed fretfully at its snout. Oh, goody: The guy next door's ferret had a head cold. Gooseflesh rose on Blaise's arms.

“What, like this evening, maybe?” asked the guy. His eyes roamed eagerly over her face and body. The familiar steam of stifled anger bubbled through Blaise. Why couldn't he ever take a hint? She wished he'd just dry up and fly away.

There was a thump from the kitchen. The ferret arched sinuously up onto its hind legs, its fur bristling. Blaise turned; her blood froze cold. A creature something between a chicken and an eagle was stalking menacingly out of her kitchen. It was the cold chick, grown to the size of a spaniel. Its down-feathered neck wove its raptor's head in a serpentine dance. Its feet had become cruel, ringed claws. It stared at her with a fierce intelligence.

The guy goggled. “What the . . . ?” At the sound, the chick's fiery-red comb went erect. Nictitating membranes slid clear of its eyes, which glowed red. Blaise felt a peppery warmth flood her body briefly. Frightened, she stepped aside. The chick turned its gaze full on the guy. It hissed, a sound like steam escaping. The guy next door looked down at it, and seemed immediately held by its stare. He whimpered softly. Heat danced between the chick and the guy next door, then he just, well, vaporized. In a second, all that was left of him was a grey smear of ash on the hallway carpet, and a faint whiff of cheap chocolate.

“Oh my God,” Blaise said, feeling frantically for the open doorway.

The ferret growled. The chick pounced. Blaise leapt out of the way. Jesus, now they were between her and the way out.

The ferret wound itself around the creature. The chick's beak slashed. The ferret yipped, sneezed. Drops of ferret blood and mucus flew. The cold chick flexed a meaty thigh to slice a talon through the ferret's middle. The ferret arched and writhed in extremis. Knots of bloody intestine trailed from its belly. The cold chick twisted the ferret's head between the cruel tines of its beak. Blaise heard the ferret's neck snap. Holding it down with its claws, the cold chick began to devour the ferret with a wet crunching sound. Blaise could hear her own panicked sobbing.

The chick sucked up looped coils of gut with little chirps of pleasure. Then it blurred. When Blaise could see it clearly again, it was the size of a rottweiler. Its feathers had sprouted into rich burgundy and green plumes. It snapped up the rest of the ferret, then crouched in the doorway. It looked at her, and Blaise knew it would burn her to death. A keening sound came from her mouth. Heat washed over her, but then the membranes slid down over the chick's open eyes. Blaise could still see its piercing stare, slightly opaqued.

“Mmrraow?” it enquired fondly. It had a satisfied look on its beaky face.

It wasn't going to eat her. It had done this to please her, and now the guy next door was really dried up and gone. “That isn't what I meant,” Blaise wailed. The chick cocked its head adoringly at the sound of her voice.

Blaise sat down heavily in her tattered armchair, trying to figure out what to do next. The chick groomed, rattling its beak through its jewel-coloured feathers. Its meal was still altering its body. It blurred again, it morphed. Four clawed, furred front legs sprouted to replace its chicken feet. The chick—cocka-trice—looked down at its own body, stomped around experimentally on its new limbs. It made a chuckling noise. Would it have stayed a slow, cold chick if it hadn't eaten the ferret? Or the burning pepper sauce?

It belched, spat up a slimy black thread; the ferret's leash. It pounced on the leash and started worrying at it. Sunlight danced motes of colour through its plumage. It was very beautiful. And it would probably need to feed again soon.

I not going to be second course
, Blaise thought. She moved to the door. Happily torturing the leash, the cockatrice ignored her. She grabbed her jacket from its peg and locked her door behind her. She left the apartment.

The clean fall air cleared her mind a little. The animal shelter, yeah, they'd come and take the beast away.

She had to pass the Venus-built lady's garden on the way. There was a man in the yard with his back to her: a slim, bald man with a wiry strength to his build. Shirtless, he was digging beside the otaheite tree. His tanned shoulders made a V with the narrowness of his waist. With each thrust of the shovel, corded muscles flexed like cables in his arms and back. Blaise slowed to admire him. He pumped the shovel smoothly into the earth with one bare, sturdy foot, but something stopped it from sinking any farther. He went down on one knee and began tenderly pulling up clods of dirt, crumbling them between his fingers. Blaise crept closer to the gate and craned her neck to see better. The man sniffed at the dark soil in his hands and poured a handful of it down his throat. His Adam's apple jumped when he swallowed.

Was everybody eating something strange today? All Blaise had wanted was cornbread.

The man looked round, saw her, and grinned. It was a friendly expression; there were well-worn smile lines pared into his cheeks. She grinned back. His lean face had the rough texture of chipped rock. Not handsome, but striking.

He reached into the womb of soil again and tugged out the rock that had stopped his shovel. His fingers flexed. He crushed the rock between them like a sugar cube and reverently licked up the powdery bits.

The cottage door opened, letting the Venus-built lady out. She had changed into a sweater and close-fitting jeans that made her hips heart-shaped. She had a basket slung over one shoulder.

A smile broke onto the man's face the way the stone had cracked between his fingers. He offered a stone-powdered palm. “It's sweet,” he said in a voice like gravel being ground underfoot. “The fruit will be sweet too.”

The Venus-built lady smiled back. Then she looked at Blaise. “So come and help us then, nuh?” she asked in a warm alto that sang of the tropics. “Instead of standing there staring?”