The Western Lands (17 page)

The styles change faster and faster as the Ultimate Arbiter issues directives weekly, daily, hourly. People strip off unsuitable garments in the street, sneering at less agile contenders who have not taken the Alexander course in smooth, quick undressing and re-dressing. Everyone carries toilet kits, in case hair styles should suddenly change, and they are to be seen shaving off untrendy long hair or beards in restaurants, in the streets or in subways, their hairs drifting about and sifting into food like fine herbs. They learn to whip around like boomerangs. You come in leather and get the "sorry, sir" treatment, or you come in a tux and get the same from a leather bar.

The Arbiter's face is like gray wax, his lips very red, his eyes sparkling with dazzling malice. He is going mad: loincloths to full dress, skinheads, eighteenth-century dandies, togas, djellabas. Everyone now carries huge suitcases about.

Waghdas, City of Knowledge, is a center for outfitting pilgrims to the Western Lands. Since the dangers are manifold and different for each pilgrim, what equipment and provisions he will need is conjectural. However arcane, recherché, rarified, outré, Alexandrian your requirements, the Waghs can meet them.

Sharp practice and purveyors of the deadly illusion drugs abound: The Western Bubble gives a vista of lake and valley, vast cities and temples and avenues through which the pilgrim moves without effort, free of his body to roam at will without hunger or fatigue or thirst. All this fades in a few hours, leaving the traveler with his hunger, his thirst, his carnal needs, his awkward, bungling body, abrasive, dreary, dead-end surfaces where everything is exactly what it seems to be. There is no mystery, no magic. Death is as prosaic as the daily paper to flattened minds, a bedpan to a terminal cancer patient. There can be nothing beyond, since there is nothing in front or to the sides in this dead empty place without purpose or meaning. The unfortunate traveler, having poured all his magic into the bubble . . . POP . . . gritty surface with nothing behind ... a smell of burnt plastic and rotten oranges.

The traveler stops by a concrete wall painted in pyramids of pastel blue and pale pink, a broken box, some lathes, an empty concrete sack. A framework in front of the wall supports a roof of tattered plastic broken into jagged patterns. You can see stick people frozen on the wall, like the shadows of human figures left on the walls of Hiroshima. The shadows don't move. There are windows, used to be a store . . . list of prices on a slab of white wood.

You know no one is behind the wall. Nothing is there but the photograph. Look at the shadows that should dance with the wind. They don't move. Look at the big dark-gray window: on the left side, what could be a man's stick-thin leg with a brace. His head is on the right side of the window, mouth open, a mustache.

The Thuggees operated in India during the early years of the nineteenth century, before the railroads. At that time travelers and pilgrims moved in groups, and it might be weeks or even months before they were missed. The Deceivers would join a caravan of travelers separately and seemingly unknown to each other. Each Deceiver had his cover: some were merchants, some druggists or soldiers or smiths, and they were all competent in their cover trade. Their word for their victims was Beethos, "outsiders."

At a given signal, the Stranglers would dispose of the travelers and rob them. Then the bodies would be perforated with pickaxes so that the gases would not attract dogs, hyenas and jackals, and buried under camphres lit over the graves. It is estimated that the Deceivers killed a million Beethos in about twenty years. It has been called one of the greatest criminal conspiracies in history. The Thuggees were all servants of Kali, goddess of destruction.

Pilgrims to the Western Lands travel in groups, and latter-day Deceivers operate in the area, equipped with modern weapons. At encampments a number of soap opera scenes are enacted:

Here is the young couple in a lean-to. She is a liberal Vassar girl, he is the aging ingénue Deceiver. Deceiving keeps him young.

She: "You and I are going to have to talk about our relationship."

He: "Well, darling, I think we have a beautiful thing really."

She: "Is that all it is to you, Jerry? A thing?"

He: "Don't move, Wendy!" .

He shoots a black mamba in the air as it slithers down toward her pearly throat.

He (looking down at the dead snake): "You see, Wendy, that's what it is. One human being knowing he can depend on another in the face of death."

She: "I think I understand, Jerry. No matter what happens we'll always have that."

Beetho!

Her eyes widen in horrified comprehension, and her face goes slack and blank. She sinks to the floor. He wipes off his knife, his face blank, empty, serene.

An ex-cop and two hoodlums drink on supply boxes in an improvised bar.

"We cruise around in the car, spot some shine . . . call to him really friendly, 'Hey, come over here a minute,' and he comes over all grins."

The man shows his awful yellow teeth in a hideous grimace. "Then bust him right in the teeth." He goes through the smile act again. "Then bust him right in the teeth."

The cop says, "Just jab them in the nuts with your stick. Then they are dead meat. Do anything you want with it."

"Bust him right in the teeth . . ."

BEETHO!

The third hoodlum takes out a silenced gun and shoots the raconteur in the mouth. Shoots the cop in the crotch.

The Beetho Caller is a skilled operator since he must decide on the precise moment of action. Some specialize in these relationship things, and have been known to fall in love with a Beetho and escape with him or her. But the call of the Beetho runs deep. There can be heartrending scenes between a man and his ordained Beetho, but we got a simple job to do for Kali.

Encampment of pilgrims. They have been delayed for some weeks by floods. They sit around at campfires or fidget aimlessly. There is a smog of duplicity and vague fear that dampens conversation. People throw out remarks, hoping they will mean something. People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face. Everyman fears his neighbor, and with good reason, for the Deceivers are paid in death.

Horus Neferti is a bit tired of being the perpetual ingénue, the eternal reflection of unbearable radiant boyishness. But then radiance is a potent weapon that has served him in a number of awful engagements, a light weapon. You have to conserve and pace your kilowatts. Otherwise you can blow a fuse in a tight spot.

Dusk in a Necropolis slum. The streets are so deep that some are in darkness at the bottom. Light is the most precious commodity here. And always the streets are worn deeper by the mindless, gibbering dead . . . stratum after stratum of tombs, down into darkness. The rich live in the Light Streets on the sunny side, where there is light for an hour each day. The others are sinking deeper and deeper into the lightless depths.

Neferti was outside on the rubbly outskirts of the Necropolis, in a deep valley but still above ground. Dusk comes early and in the gray dusk, with the smell of death heavy in the still air, about ten huge scavenger dogs were closing in around him, behind them a ragged pack of snarling grave robbers.

He looks at them and smiles and turns on his radiance. He emits at first a pale glow like a firefly's, just enough to guide the dogs right to his crotch and his throat and the backs of his legs. When you don't know what to do, do nothing. Can feel it now, a ball of fire just below the navel, sweeping up and out his eyes in a brilliant flash of light. The dogs and the grave robbers are thrown back. They turn and run, yelping, whimpering, snarling.

Horus Neferti turned aside into a Jump Joint, where your dreams come true. Yeah, sometimes. They work like this: you got a scenario in your mind, usually made up of dreams. Sophisticated electronic equipment makes the dream solid. Or rather there are infinite nuances of solidity. There is Death Solid. It can kill you. Or maybe just knock you down with brass knucks, like the ghost of Joe Varland in "A Short Trip Home." Wavering, ebbing strength gathered for one last solid punch.

Death Solid is more or less the Gold Standard around'here. Some people are pikers, darling. And there are plenty that order something and then try to dodge the check. Got news for you welchers: it can't be done. Because it's
your check.

People out for a lark, don't want to go too far, that's all right. They got the shallow end of the pool if that's what you want. We never lose a dreamer—unless he slips into deep water, that is.

How does the machine work? Largely, by concentrating what is already there. A dream amplifier.

Neferti strolls around languidly with heavy-lidded, bored disdain . . . guides, steerers, pushers, whores of every persuasion. A pusher pads in beside him. The pusher's face is shriveled and stained.

"Plenty good Jump Junk!"

Jump Junk is the worst habit a man can contract. You get out for eight hours at first. When you come back down, it's like a coke letdown with an alcohol and barbiturate hangover and acute junk yen. Takes more and more to stay out for less and less time.

He dismisses the pusher with a backhanded gesture.

Health Food Stores guarantee natural products . . . snake venom, insect, fish and mollusk. Unexplored territory for the most part. Stonefish poison, which is contained in barbed spines that break off in the flesh, is perhaps the most excruciating pain a man can experience. The pleasure of junk is relief from pain, so how about stonefish poison cooled out with King Cobra or blue octopus? You can smell it going in and coming out. The urine reeks of rotten fish.

A technician engaged in packaging dried cobra venom inadvertently inhaled a small quantity. He described a state of serene euphoria. Cobra venom, under the title of Cobraxine, was even used in the 1930s as a painkiller in terminal cancer. It was discontinued because of the high cost of production and . . . "We don't want another addiction in our laps," said a highly placed narcotics official. "They'll be raiding the zoos."

An old snake man in Florida has been taking a King Cobra shot every day for forty years and he looks very young for his age, which God only knows, and He has forgotten. The only man who can take a full load of King and survive.

The neurotoxic venoms like the cobras, sea snakes, kraits, tiger snakes, mambas and blue-ringed octopus are painless and may even be pleasant in correct dosage. Hemotoxic venoms like rattlesnakes, water moccasins, centipedes and most vipers produce extremely painful swelling at the entry point. And there is always the possibility of gangrene and other lingering infections. Many snakes, like the Gaboon Viper, possess both hemotoxic and neurotoxic poison. The animal extracts can be rendered down into injectable or sniffable preparations.

Dandies in eighteenth-century garb have reverted to snuffboxes. Bufotenine, extracted from a poisonous toad, brings one out in a strawberry rash,
so
becoming with pink lace. Some looners have a creepy thing about anal administration. They are being fucked by the Mamba Spirit, turn green in the face, and green spit hangs down off the chin in streamers.

Neferti runs into some old Red Night buddies and they turn aside into a snakepit just for jolly, wouldn't you? Two frantic young fags got up as Cupid with little wings and bows and quivers shoot at each other with darts of tiger snake venom. Chances are about fifty-fifty, and what could be fairer than that? The decor is tasteful, all ancient Greek faggot, backdrop of marble couples and glades and colonnades where naked youths lounge.

A hit! The stricken youth drops to his knees, face slack with idiot lust, his lips and tongue swell, blood sings in his ears, the painted blue sky fades to black, he is dying, ejaculating . . . the other youth cradles him in his arms, looking down with a smile of hideous complicity, naked comprehension stripping his lover down to the last bone-wrenching spasm. The dying youth squirts a great jet of blood from his phallus with a scream of ecstasy.

"What idiot games are here!"

A clutch of centipede freaks, naked, on top of each other's faces, sit with idiot grins, covered with erogenous perforations to the bone, slowly scratching iridescent sores that burst under caressing fingers, yielding gushes of foul-smelling yellow ichor streaked with blood as the addicts twist in galvanic spasms.

This is under the head of sideshow so far as we are concerned. Not about to get involved in these animal drugs. Many purists prefer to administer the venom straight from the living animal, like Cleopatra applying the asp, and they swear they have such an affinity with a snake or even a spider that it will inject exactly the correct dosage.

Two Boons each take a graze of the fangs of a huge Gaboon viper, thirty pounds, he growls like a dog. They are making it, blood coming out of their eyes and prick and ass and all the pores of their skin, slower and slower as the neurotoxic venom takes effect. Now they lie in a coma, covered with blood, and their medic steps forward with the antivenin and symptomatic treatment. They will make it, just a brush with death. The viper emits a somnolent moan and settles down to digest a rabbit.

And of course the inevitable faggot in Cleopatra drag, my dear, he's ninety if he's a day, billed seventy years ago as the most beautiful man in the world, comes out with an asp which he applies histrionically to his breast as a medic shoots him in the ass with antivenin.

"Cleopatra, is this well done?"

"It is well done and fitting for a
queen
.
. . ah, soldier . . ."

He advances wantonly, then falls on his face shit dead. A heart attack. Or maybe it was the antivenin killed him. Anyhoo, he died like a true queen.

And frantics who want to be repulsive go about with scorpions and centipedes crawling over them—"Oh my dear, I'm terribly down. I need a lift from my Pede!" and right there in Ma Maison he pulls down his pants and applies a foot-long centipede to his erect member. The diners were electrified.