Komodo did not look up as he spoke. “My own true friend, do you recall a statement made by Budd Hazard pertaining to the Tenacity of Genes and Dreams?”
“Rings a dim bell,” the reptile grunted.
“At the time, it seemed a mere aside, a vague corollary to the Reprimordialization texts indicating that even if a Bunch becomes a Bunch in the twinkling of an eye, that moment of change has long been genetically foreshadowed. Yet now, it strikes me that the same is true for ideas, or, in the Muse’s parlance, dreams. It occurs to me that some dreams are too big to be experienced all at once, that they must be passed on, piece by piece from generation to generation, until they can be glimpsed in their entirety by a single individual.”
“What are you getting at?” This was exactly the sort of talk that made Gojiro nervous.
Komodo peered deeper inside the stereopticon. There was a rising urgency in his voice. “It is so strange, my own true friend, but sometimes I look into this frame and imagine these people are trying to tell me something. A secret that means everything to them—a life’s work—something that it is my duty, as their son, to carry on, to impart to my own children.
“It is insane, I know. These people cannot be my parents, it is only an image. Yet I
feel
it, an imploring in their eyes. Finish what we started, I hear them beseeching me. Don’t let our efforts go undone. That is why I believe we have no choice but to answer Ms. Brooks’s letter.”
“Say what?” The monster, greatly moved by his friend’s sentiments, had been running a soothing clawhand over Komodo’s neck. Now he recoiled.
Komodo looked up, tears running down his face. “I sense that there are others who feel as I do, and that Ms. Brooks might be one of those people, that the work her father started might secretly live in her, straining for culmination.”
Gojiro’s brain gearground. “Whoa, Nelly.”
Komodo didn’t stop. Suddenly
that look
was in his eyes. “But my own true friend, don’t you sense a yearning to express what is already known to you, yet somehow fleeting, beyond conscious thought? Is it not possible that critical information is passed involuntarily, by means of a kind of Alchemical Heredity resonating from one generation to the next? Is that not how it was in your own Hallowed Homelands?”
“Leave my Hallowed Homelands out of it! This is totally different! What kind of secret you think Brooks’s daughter would carry on—a better recipe for the witch’s brew, a redoubled toil and trouble? Alchemical Heredity, where do you come up with this crap?”
“I’m only saying that perhaps she might be able to help us. And we might help her!”
“Help
her
? Why should we help her?”
“Because she is in terrible danger! Look at this letter. Read what she says.”
That letter, the lime-green paper! It stopped the monster in his tracks. Komodo began to read it.
From: Hermit Pandora Pictures
To: King of Monsters, Friend to Atoms Productions
Re: Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
Dear Sirs,
I don’t know how to say this—
Gojiro broke in. “What do you mean, you don’t know how to say this?”
“No,” Komodo said, “that’s what it says. I’m reading.
I don’t know how to say this. I don’t do business. I have no head for it. Bobby says I do, but I don’t. The only thing I know is I’m going crazy. I have things in my brain that are driving me insane. I have to get them out. If I don’t, I’m going to kill myself. Everyone thinks I’m too nuts to do it, but I’m not. I have a gun. It’s in my purse. I’m looking at it right now. You have to help me. You’re the only one who can. Please regard this as a matter of Life and Death.
I look forward to your reply,
Sincerely yours,
Sheila Brooks
Gojiro broke out laughing. “Why, it’s just some crank letter . . . some loony G-fan mad because his T-shirts didn’t arrive on time.”
“I don’t think so,” Komodo said somberly, gripping the lime-green paper. “There is something written at bottom that convinces me of its genuineness. A mysterious message. A new kind of supplication.”
“A supplication?” So that was it. Gojiro knew why the letter made him so uneasy. Those creepy supplications weren’t supposed to get through to him. They were to be flagged on lime-green paper by the less deranged Atoms in the Radioactive Island mailroom, and then, according to the monster’s decree, dumped into the sea beyond Past Due Point. What was Sheila Brooks doing sending him a supplication, and what was the big idea of Komodo breaking the banning order and bringing the thing down here? “What kind of
new
supplication?” the monster demanded.
But by then, Komodo’s visi-beeper was ringing, its eight alarms drowning out all other sounds. He pulled the machine from the pocket of his black pajamas, enhanced the screen. Crag and Slam, those two discipline-problem maladapts Gojiro had long insisted be repatriated to whatever São Paulo shitbox they’d come from, were shoveling mounds of chomping sawtooth flatworms onto the bodies of four other Atoms, who were bound and gagged inside electrified tiger cages.
“Oh no!” Komodo shouted. He ran out of the ’cano, leaving Gojiro alone.
The Black Spot
T
HE SICKEST THING ABOUT THE WHOLE SITUATION
had to be what a freak Gojiro was for those Sheila Brooks pictures.
Tidal Wave
, the first one, turned up on the Dish during one of the electronegativity zap-pows that often afflicted the Cloudcover, the kind that really messed up reception. The behemoth was whirling the dials, catching only static, when on what seemed the clearest of channels,
Tidal Wave
bled across the screen.
Right off, the monster sensed this wasn’t just the dimbulbed disaster film it pretended to be. It was the look of the girl, how sweet she was, her ponytail behind, how all she wanted to do was ice-skate. She didn’t care that the multinationals’ illegal krill-spawning project had dried up all the water in the world—she had new skates! She walked across the endless Sahara, determined to find a real pond, not one of those mall rinks where the dry ice scorched your skin and no double axel could be turned.
It wasn’t until the part where the little girl journeys to see the Diviner that Gojiro began to get edgy. It was crazy! The monster had seen the thinfaced, popeyed actor they had playing the role a hundred times. He was always frying Boris Karloff’s eyeballs sunnyside up or watching some portrait go grotty on a Victorian wall. Campy to the max. But this time, when that old hack poked his whitepowdered head out from behind the heavy wrought-iron door of his sandswept house outside Samarkand, Gojiro nearly jumped out of his leathers.
The face . . . it was so terribly
familiar
. “Hey!” the reptile screamed to Komodo, who was busy with the beakers and bunsens. “Something kooky about this movie, check it out.”
“He gave her a potion, told her to dissolve it in liquid,” Gojiro explained when Komodo joined him. A tremendous tumbler took up the whole frame. Behind it, shadowy, the girl could be seen, opening the packet the Diviner had given her, dispensing it like Bromo. The whole Dishscreen seemed to shake. Suddenly there was water, water, everywhere. Over England, Russia, Timbuktu, and Kalamazoo.
Then came the Tidal Wave: a rolling wall across the Atlantic, ten thousand feet tall, dwarfing the Empire State Building. And there, cowering in a doorway on St. Mark’s Place, crying, bawling, was the little girl.
“She thinks it’s all her fault!” a mortified Gojiro shouted. “She thinks she’s drowning the world, because she wanted to skate.”
“Who’s that?” Komodo asked, terrified, as the tall, thin man in black walked up the deserted Second Avenue.
“It’s him! The Diviner.”
Komodo and Gojiro grabbed each other when the wizened, harsh-eyed man spoke. “So you wanted to skate?” he said, low-pitched and thunderous. He handed the little girl another envelope and told her to wait until the wave was close enough to touch, then throw the powder in the water. “Then you’ll skate.”
“Throw it, throw it!” Komodo and Gojiro screamed as the little girl stood at the tip of Manhattan, the wave almost upon her, a blinding energy curve of which no Silver Surfer ever caught the crest. The little girl let go. The powder hit the water, stopped the swell solid, turned it to a concave lurch of ice.
That last scene killed the monster. How sweet the little girl looked in her ruffled red skirt, turning her figure eights at the base of that great surge of Doom. And how the robins chirped as the sun broke through the clouds, and the first buds were on the trees.
Back then, neither Gojiro nor Komodo took note of the final credits tacked on to the end of
Tidal Wave
. What could a florid logo indicating the picture was “a Brooks-Zeber Film for Hermit Pandora Productions” mean to them, so far away, on an island Mercator never projected? It wasn’t until they read those tabloids, part of the “circulating library” that washed up on the Corvair Bay Beach shoreline every day, that they learned the identity of
Tidal Wave’s
creator.
“Look!” Gojiro shouted to Komodo some time later, reading from the syndicated “Gollywood Agog” column. “No wonder they call the reclusive SHEILA BROOKS ‘the Hermit Pandora.’ Word is that the daughter of America’s late great atomic scientist JOSEPH PROMETHEUS BROOKS will not be present yet AGAIN to accept the scads of kudos her most recent releases,
The Bottom Line’s the Swipe of the Scythe
and
Atlantis Came Up This Morning and It Was Anaheim
, both up for Best Picture, are certain to garner. This will be still another disappointment to the Dreamer of the Sad Tomorrow’s teeming throng of fans. BOBBY ZEBER, director of the couple’s hot-hot-hot pictures, will represent the team, but he does not seem particularly thrilled about it. ‘What does it matter, anyway?’ ZEBER sighed to your Golly Agog correspondent. To them, we say: ‘Come off it, guys! We love you! Get with the program!’ ”
Alongside the copy was a murky photo captioned “The Brooks-Zeber team.” It was clearly not a new picture. They were sitting on a red motorcycle. The man, a brooding presence whom Gojiro took to be Bobby Zeber, sported a fringed leather coat and an upper lip crimped to a Brando curl. As for Sheila Brooks, she sat on the back of the bike, her face turned away from the camera. All you could see was a mass of white hair.
“Brooks’s daughter? I didn’t even know he had a daughter!”
“Nor I, my own true friend,” Komodo put in.
After that, even though he’d sworn, on principle, to boycott Brooks-Zeber products, the monster never failed to find himself rapt whenever the pictures appeared on the Dish.
Tidal Wave
remained his favorite, but he also confessed to liking
Rockefeller’s Rocket
, that one about how all the glass towers in the Big City weren’t buildings at all, but rather the spawn of seeds planted in financial districts by avaricious dupes of cannibalistic aliens. Gojiro loved it when, at germinational maturity, the buildings developed propulsion systems and flew off into space, interplanetary baguettes to be baked in massive micro ovens out beyond the stars. The sight of the stunned plutocrats trying to make one last hostile takeover before lift-off never failed to tickle the perennially class-antagonist reptile.
“Brooks’s daughter, my fellow cineaste,” the monster laughed to himself soon after Komodo left the ’cano that day Sheila Brooks’s letter arrived. He was feeling a lot better. Komodo’s wacko chatter about Alchemical Heredity and that business about facing off with Joe Pro Brooks put the monster into a panic-paranoia red alert, but a major inlay of the hardcutting 235 spruced things up quite nicely. He Radi-fired a heaping superspoon and was soon flying higher than a Chinaman’s kite in Mr. Parker’s tokebunk.
Yeah, the stupored reptile mused, it was nutty okay, Sheila Brooks writing to them, saying only they could help her.
Life and Death!
What could she be talking about? Life and Death? What could those words boil down to for the offspring of Joseph Brooks? Maybe her career was a mess. Faithful fan that he was, Gojiro had pored over the rampant speculation that Hermit Pandora’s reputed nightmare blockage was putting a serious dent into the Brooks-Zeber balance sheet. Might be so, the monster imagined. That most recent entry,
Ants for Breakfast
, no way it was so hot-hot-hot. There was just something
missing
.
“Maybe she’s looking for a comeback too,” Gojiro chuckled, noting that Sheila Brooks’s supposed shortfall of ideas roughly coincided with the ban he placed on the further export of his own rotten pictures. Then, his lids suddenly brick heavy, the lizard dropped off to sleep.
* * *
Almost immediately Gojiro found himself back in that dream.
“What? How could I be here again?” he cried within his slumber. It hadn’t happened for years, not since those unhappy evenings when the Black Spot Dream had invaded the Quadcameral with numbing regularity. “Can’t be just a dream,” the monster would yowl to Komodo back then, bolting upright in his burrow. “It’s like, alive. A psychotropic tapeworm inside my brain, corkscrewing through the parietal down into the private stock.”
Now it was back. Again the monster found himself transported to the Great Promontory he had so long envisioned as his Hallowed Homelands. Lavarock! That’s where he was, bellydown on the Precious Pumice, a mere child of a ’tile, quarantined along with his fellow zardplebes. In the distance, he could hear the slow drawl of the fullgrowns.
“Hear tell there be a variety of us over in Africa,” a grizzled eightfooter said, basking in the noonday sun,
V. exanthematicus
. “Said to ovipare in termite nests.”
“No shit?” another mature replied.
“Yessir! Termites dumber than a stump over there. Use their formics to spitbuild big bulgy paperthin nests. Then a zard comes along, tears a hole, ovipares, moves on. Couple minutes later, termite comes back, scratches his head, says, ‘How come I left this hole here, must of missed a spot.’ Builds that nest right back up again, hides that herp’s eggs perfect. Termites never catch on. They only see the puncture, not the purpose behind it. In this world, a zard got to take what glitches is given him.”
That kind of talk was always going on in the monster’s dream. Not that the youngest zardplebe, less than five weeks on the Rock, would think of joining in. It wasn’t a junior’s place to address his seniors. He was not fit, physically, mentally, or morally. All his basic equipment was installed, he was wired and ready to go, but the most vital juice wasn’t flowing through him. He hadn’t yet leaped into the Black Spot.
That was the crux: the Black Spot. The nexus of Knowing! Gateway to all Zardic Life! The fixing solution of Identity!
Without a plunge to the Black Spot a zard was not a Zard, couldn’t take his place in the Endless Chain. Without the rush of the sacred viscous over his novice leathers, his biologies were nothing more than colorcoded chutes and ladders of DNA, a pointless arrangement of blood and sinew. The Black Spot alone possessed the Big Switch, infused all the standard issue with the Identity of the Bunch.
“Think it’s gonna hurt?” one zardplebe asked from the bottom of the juvenile’s tangle.
The others shook their heads; they had no idea what the Black Spot had in store. “I heard that if you look on the Spot before you’re ready, then you never become an Initiate,” one plebe whispered. “You turn into a buzzy dragonfly or a scuzzfurred goat munching on grass.”
“Dee-gusting,” the others retched, shaken at the thought.
This chatter only served to make that particular zardplebe of Gojiro’s dream more anxious. The youngest and most withdrawn of the group, he’d always been on the outskirts of the clique. The others seemed so much slicker, more prepared to accept the mantle soon to be bestowed. Identity? What could it entail? Who was he to seek it? His apprehension grew as, one by one, his former playmates suddenly broke from their bellydown and went four-on-the-floor over Craggy Ridge. Hours later they would return. They didn’t look any different, but they were. Their callowness was gone, you could tell it from their carriage. Now they basked amongst the Initiate, discoursing on topics the youngest zardplebe could not decipher.
By and by a strange incident occurred. A giant silvery bird came out of the sky and set down in the calm waters off where that youngest zardplebe sat. A seaplane! The door opened and out came bipeds, three of them. The fat one, sweat seeping through his soldier suit, was wiping his red jowls with a fluttery handkerchief. The second was smaller, with bushy eyebrows and a sweep of rich brown hair. Elegant in his tropical suit, his gold watch gleaming, his cultivated comportment did not seem affected in any way by the hot and unremitting sun. Then there was that other one. The one in black. Six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight, he had the severe look of the most ascetic missionary. He stayed apart from the other two, walking several steps behind. The meager surf lapped over his canvas shoes, not that he seemed to care. He was looking around, his long neck swiveling so as to ensnare the whole horizon, a special intensity to his scan.
What’s he looking for? the youngest zardplebe wondered, looking at the dark flamingo of a man. How white his skin was, the color of bone left to bleach in the sun. And his eyes! They were as black as the starless night.
Then they were screaming at one another, the three bipeds. The zardplebe couldn’t make out the words, just the frenzy. Suddenly, the fat soldier, more agile than he looked, hurled himself at the man in black, knocked him into the water. The debonair one tried to intercede, to no avail. Finally some other soldiers, a half a dozen of them, pulled the men apart. The fat soldier’s shirt was ripped, his hat was gone, his balding head shining in the afternoon glare. The man in black had a cut above his eye, blood stark red as it ran down the nearly colorless cheek.
The soldier, who appeared to maintain dominance over the others of his stripe, kept on yelling, something about how he “wasn’t going to let what happened in the Valley happen here.” The youngest zardplebe followed the soldier’s gesticulating finger. Followed it to a face. A small face looking out the window of the silvery plane. The zardplebe strained, trying to see. There was something in that tiny face, something unsettling, an emotion he didn’t know.
Suddenly a forbidding dread filled the air. The zardplebe flicked out his tongue to taste the wind and turned cold. The chemosignal impulsed only death.
“Danger! Danger!” he hissed. Across the ruddy rocks, over the igneous outcrops, through every burrow and den that youngest zardplebe impulsed his warning.
But he was alone. His fellow zardplebes were gone. In the time he’d busied himself with the indecipherable affairs of these sapiens, all his counterparts had been summoned to the Black Spot. He was the only immature upon the Precious Pumice. “Danger. Danger!” The fullgrowns paid no attention. Why should they? They’d been Immersed, in them was a sense of Self and Community built over millions of generations, the product of the most delicate of refinements—so what could a mere zardplebe, the rawest of the raw, tell them that they didn’t know already? “They are right to shun me,” the youngest zardplebe thought, a single ’tile etched against the implacable blue of the ocean sky. “I have no Identity.”