Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [7]
Around him, his abakhaya, “home people.” Men and women, boys and girls, in sacred white, with staves, stand in the fog—it must be Sunday morning. And they sing.
A girl. A face. So familiar—who is she? She walks toward him, hangs a necklace over his neck. She points at him. She gestures with her hands. She wants him to dance.
A song picks up. What Zulu doesn’t love to sing? Under his feet are round, polished stones, concealed by fog. He dances, lightly touching them. He writes his name by steps.
The girl! He’s recognized her face—his wife. But she had died in the first Wizard War, before he had become immortal. How is she here? He does not recall her name.
Why cannot I recall her name?
And where’s the song? It’s gone. He can’t recall it anymore. The others are impatient, asking, “Has the bride danced?” No marriage is in force, until the bride has danced.
“Has the bride danced?”
But she is only walking round him, just staring with those sad, sad eyes. And now he is stamping hard, until the stones begin to crack. The guests all disappear. Children stay. They gather round him, they join hands in a grim and silent circle—then, a little girl pulls on his sleeve. The sound passing between their smart suits, through the fabric, as a tactile undertone to her words. “Please, please, the bride must dance!”
The bride must dance.
He looks back at the girl. Her face…. Serene, except her eyes—the eyes that’ve never opened while she has been in coma, except when his manipulators lifted up her eyelids, to reveal a blank, unseeing look. Now they’re pleading.
Nathi blinks, and she is gone. They all are gone. The fog is no more. He stares at the ground—at the polished, gleaming white of human bone. At his name written all across the neat rows of skulls.
He screams. The plasma gun in his hands roars. No, not in his hands; he doesn’t have them anymore. And he is not on Mars, although the sky is burning red. The air is too thick, except he doesn’t breathe it, for he doesn’t need to breathe. He is a posthuman, newly made and ghosting inside the electronic mind of an airborne InsectiEye destroyer, loaded with deadly armaments. He’s confident, content. He knows none escape his roaming, all-seeing eyes. They peek among the leaves, they find each bug. They can’t get out of his mental focus. None escapes.
A tiny bug lifts something, tries to aim its sting. Nathi reacts. His plasma focus gun discharges in a triple fountain—a fern-like shape, with plasma leaf umbrellas on a central stalk. The blast develops in a curve to maximize area damage, burn the bugs.
But…. Suddenly, he sees. The bugs are people. And the sting—a little boy’s Y-shaped sling with a stone. Trees are burning. The rainforest is on fire. He’s on Earth. And no matter how much he cries, inside the dream he cannot shake it off—not even a bloodthirsty urge, nor blind indifference, but a serene, profound satisfaction.
NATHI RAN.
From visions in his dream—the burning forests, lava flows of skulls erupting from a neat arrangement of golf holes peppering mass graves the size of craters. Ran from screams, and from a silent death—the screams robbed from the dead, erupting now from his cyber-throat with a taste of vomit. Ran from a burning touch—of fire washing around his destroyer’s electromagnetic shielding, and of lasers slicing through his battle cruiser’s skin. The human senses running after him, invading every corner of his cyber-interfaces—images of algorithms, the bile of information