SPORADIC MOTION
(starring Savage Henry and Steve Roach) "You wanna talk wasteland," chuckled Savage Henry, hunching low over his half-filled mug of amber ale. "Lemme show you something..." With the twinkling of an eye, Savage Henry and Steve Roach were elsewhere. Gone was the Geological Tavern, replaced by a chaotic landscape of concrete slabs that seemed to stretch on forever in each direction. They stood now on the uneven surface of a ragged cement fragment, one which thrust from an oily pool of viscous black liquid. Manifestly ancient, the concrete was weathered by time and seismic distress. All about them, other chunks of asphalt were scattered in an endless rubble. For an instant, Steve had the impression that the landscape had once been a vast pavement that had suffered from some cruel earthquake, leaving this devastation as testimony of the tectonic thrash-dance. But then he realized that this environment had suffered something more drastic than a simple geological disaster. That smell! Henry handed Steve an airfilter, showing him how to attach it to his nose. "Where are we?" gasped Steve. They could be anywhere, considering Henry's ability to shift between alternate realities. Henry was rather widely traveled in an interdimensional sense. Steve had met Henry months ago while on tour. Henry had traveled across numerous empyrean boundaries to enjoy a Steve Roach electronic concert. After the performance, they had been introduced by Lord Lyre (the cosmic musical deity). The two mortals had hit it off from the start, finding much to discuss of common interest. For Henry was a musician too. He played guitar with the infamous Bulldaggers, who hailed from the legendary reality of Bugtown. If even a few of the ugly rumors he had heard were true, Steve knew that Bugtown was a terrible and savage place. (Although he spent most of his time on his native reality, living in the Arizona outback and generating intriguingly dense ambient electronic music, Steve was no stranger to interdimensional weirdness.) When Steve had recently run into Henry at the Geological Tavern, they had retired to a booth to compare current events. Henry had mentioned some experiments he was conducting involving the effects of lunar gravity on guitar strings, which had prompted Steve to comment on the desolate nature of the lunar landscape. That was when Henry had brought them here. "I don't think it has a name," admitted Henry. "One of the other Bulldaggers members uses this place as his lair. It used to be a world like yours, a couple of centuries ago. There was some kind of disaster...a war or a plague. It happened so long ago that there's not much evidence left to identify what caused the ecological downfall." The vista of concrete slabs was not the only disturbing aspect of this wasteland. The atmosphere was clearly poisonous, and colorful beyond description-literally. The air was thick with brilliantly tinted streamers, while overhead hung a dense and kaleidoscopic cloudcover that masked any trace of the sun. So exotic were the toxins in the air that their vile particles reflected light in a manner that teased undiscovered colors from the visible spectrum. Often, these new tints were so fleeting that observers found themselves hard-pressed to recall the nature of their uniqueness after they had faded. A tremendous wind tore across the shattered landscape, driving the clouds into roiling shapes that were quite aqueous in their properties of motion. The slab on which they stood resided at the edge of a large black lake. The surface of the pool of ebony fluid possessed a strangely solid nature, as if the liquid was too congealed to allow any object intrusion into its depths. "Okay," Steve conceded. "You win. This is a wasteland to top all wastelands." He gestured to the sky. "Awesome colors though." "Exactly," Henry agreed. He produced a pair of bottles containing a hearty stout, and they got comfortable on the slab's upper buttress to regard the panoramic sky. This world was a pitiful planetary corpse, blasted lifeless by some forgotten (probably man-made) destruction. For centuries, it had mired in its own virulent decay. Still, the dead world possessed a breathtaking grandeur that was impossible to ignore. Suddenly Steve jumped. Was that something moving out in the distance? Yes! Far off, barely discernible through the colorful haze, a tall dark cylindrical shape was tottering along, heading into the windstorm. He waved, pointing Henry's attention in the direction of the strange movement. Henry shrugged, settling back to his perch. "Just one of the bone-things. They don't have names either." "You mean this place actually supports life?" Steve was incredulous with this revelation. "Sure. The bone-things are descended from cattle mutations. They live in the towers up north, the ruins of the planet's previous owners' cities. They're pretty weird creatures," Henry said. "They look like big mutant skeletons, with no meat or flesh. All their organs are located inside their bones. They're funny-they wear tennis rackets on their horns like jewelry." "They're sentient?" Henry nodded, chugging back his ale. "Yup. Not too articulate though. They tend to be pretty skittish. Comes from living in the shadow of Big C." "Big C?" "The Lord C'Thulu. The other Bulldagger, remember? He's an ancient deity, so he kinda bullies the bone-things around sometimes." Henry noticed Steve's worried expression, and promptly reassured him, "Hey, don't worry. Big C isn't around today. He's off with Caroline shopping for a new DMX processor. He wouldn't hassle us anyway. It's cool." Henry certainly kept strange company, Steve pondered, realizing that he too could now be numbered among Henry's versatile acquaintances. He was about to query who Caroline was, when he recalled that Henry had mentioned her: his lady love. She was a clone. "Well," Steve settled down beside Henry, "so, what's it like to have an ancient deity in the band?" "It has its perks." They had been drinking for a while, and were achieving a momentous state of inebriation. According to Henry, the bone-things, despite their weird physiology, brewed a wicked beer. Steve declined the option of trying some out, admitting that he had reached a pleasant enough plateau in his head with the earthly-brewed stout. Henry produced another bottle for himself, fumbling to pop the cap. Failing, he lost his grip and the bottle fell from his hands, rolling from the edge of the slab to disappear into the dry crevasse formed by proximity with the next concrete slab. "Drat," he mumbled. Squirming around, Henry reached down into the crevasse, balancing on his waist. "Almost..." He strained deeper, kicking his black leather boots into the air. "Too far..." His legs disappeared into the crevasse. "Ooops." With a weary sigh (careful to restrict his breathing to his nose, so that the airfilter he wore could provide him with purified oxygen), Steve turned around and peered over the edge of the slab into the dark crack. "Are you okay, Henry?" "I think so..." "You need help getting out?" "I'm not alone down here." Now, that was an odd thing to say. "Excuse me?" Drawing a pocket flashlight from his pocket, Steve directed a beam of light into the crevasse's depths. The chasm was not unduly deep. Configured like a narrow V, it descended about four meters. The slant of the neighboring concrete slab created a slight overhang. In the shadow of this extension, something was glowing with a twinkling luminescence. Already upside-down in the crevasse, Henry was examining the glow with reckless immediacy. "Does it have a name?" Steve asked. "I don't know. I'll ask it." Henry squirmed into a more comfortable position. His face still hovered above the glow. "Hello. Do you have a name?" "Who are you talking to?" Steve sidled over in an attempt to see around Henry. "I think it's a mold." "I'm coming down. I've got to see this." Swinging his legs over the edge of the concrete slab, Steve carefully slid down the embankment of the crevasse. He came down beside Henry. Aided by his pocket flash, he could now see what was giving off the eerie yellow light. Indeed, it appeared to be a mold. The culture, a reddish brown fuzz, covered an expanse measuring about a square meter in size. The light was not actually coming from the mold itself though. A twinkling haze hung over the rust-colored fungi, as if the culture exhaled a gas that gave off illumination. Beneath this haze, the microscopic tendrils of the mold trembled with concentric wave patterns. "We are We," said the mold. "Not-We is threatening in its mobility." "I guess it's sentient," commented Steve. "This is cool," Henry chuckled. "Big C never mentioned this stuff. It must be newly-evolved." 
The preposterous presence of life-intelligent life!-in this terrible wasteland fascinated Steve. He had seen the hostile environment as a degeneration of the human-friendly world he knew; because it could not support terrestrial habitation, he had classified this world as dead. Now that he knew different (animated bone-creatures who wore jewelry, and now this articulate fungi), Steve realized that what he had dismissed as devastation was simply an alien climate, which nurtured its own deviant ecology. The milieu of toxic gases and broken asphalt was home to a pair of intelligent species (one the product of degenerative genetic evolution, the other resulting from ascendant evolution), and heaven only knew how many insignificant lifeforms lurking under rocks or hiding as airborne microbes. This lifeless landscape was potentially a lush panorama of foreign flora and fauna. Even in decay, he thought, life will flourish. The indomitable spirit of invertebrate organisms saw no better testimony than this wasteland. "We defend We against Not-We's mobility." So saying, the mold puffed a cloud of spores into the faces of Henry and Steve. "Uh oh..." grunted Henry before erupting into a sneezing fit. Despite the best efforts of his body, though, the aggressive spores dug in. Passing through the air, they lodged on his skin, where they released liquid crystals that leaked into the bloodstream. Traveling with unerring purpose, these crystals went straight for his brain, tainting the cerebral cortex. A foreign order of perception was inflicted on Henry's synapses. Steve underwent the same infection. Together they entered the surreal delusion. Brown tubers twice as thick as a man's waist undulated all about them. They were buffeted by these huge worms, whose skins were fuzzy with fractal progressions of smaller tendrils. In the distance sounded an irregular burping sound. Slowly, Henry and Steve were conveyed along through this forest of worms. They gave no resistance, stunned by the incredulous nature of the experience. Finally, the swaying tubers deposited Henry and Steve before a growth that was far wider than its brethren. Several spasming vents ran the length of this squat worm; it was these slits that produced the blapping noises...and the sparkling yellow fumes. "Tasty," announced Henry, catching a whiff of the fumes. Steve pulled a face of dubious reassurance. He was glad of the airfilter he wore in his dreamtime nose. "Smells like chocolate," Henry told him. "I'll take your word for it," Steve smiled. The fumes had a particularly unhealthy yellow tint, reminiscent of a toxic chemical spill in some New Jersey marsh. "These Not-We things talk!" the fat worm blapped. "What sort of colonies are they?" "I'm Henry," he told the pulsating column. "This is Steve." "These Not-We things are abominations!" another worm wheezed. "Dissolve them!" cried a third worm. "Before these Not-We things contaminate Us!" "Hold on there," Steve exclaimed. "We never threatened you-" "How are these Not-We things capable of motion?" burped the second worm. "That knowledge could be very useful to Us." "Tell Us how you move," the fattest worm addressed its blaps at the humans. "We-uh-just do it," Henry shrugged. "We are different lifeforms from you," Steve tried to explain. "You're plants; fungus, to be exact. We're animals, human beings. We possess an internal structure of rigid props connected to a series of fibers which contract when subjected to electrical stimuli." "We do?" Henry grunted. "That sounds cool. Oh wait-you mean bones and muscles. Yeah...we got those." "Teach Us how to move," the fat worm declared. "You can't move," admitted Steve. "You're a mold culture. You're physically attached to a rock." He pointed at the coarse concrete surface that the base of each worm gripped with adhesive secretions. "Teach Us to move!" the third worm burped loudly. "Or We will dissolve you!" "That's not very polite," Steve said. "How have we offended you?" "You refuse to teach Us how to move!" brapped the fattest worm. "We were just hanging out, enjoying the colorful clouds," mumbled Henry. "I'm sorry if I dropped my bottle of ale on you. We didn't even know you were down here." Glancing up, Steve realized that they were at the bottom of the crevasse. Somehow, the mold's spores had reduced them to near microscopic size, bringing them down to confront the mold on its own scale. Then he noticed the huge forms of Henry and himself that stretched above them. They were the size of planets! He had almost mistaken their massive bodies as part of the walls of the crevasse that extended into the distant sky. No, they had not been shrunk by the spores. The spores were in their brains, inducing some hallucinogenic telepathic contact between the humans and the alien mold. If the mold succeeded in dissolving them in this psionic state, would their consciousnesses return to their massive bodies? Or would their minds actually be dissolved, leaving Henry and himself living vegetables? "Anyway," snorted Henry, "you're already moving." Steve's attention lowered to find the worms (actually the tiny fibers of the mold culture) thrashing about, agitated and farting with denial. "We do not move. We-" "Look at yourselves," Henry pointed. "You're writhing and twisting." The mold's burping fell silent. The worms paused their undulations, then they hesitantly resumed their contortions, slowly, as if unfamiliar with the experience. They began burping among themselves. "We are moving!" "Look at that!" "Why did We never notice that?" "Maybe you just never had a reason to look at yourselves," Henry shrugged. "We know what We look like without having to look at ourselves," announced one of the worms. The air was growing thick with the yellow fumes produced by the mold's flatulent language. Henry had loosened his airfilter, to allow some of the luminous gas to sneak up his nose. He smacked his lips, savoring the sweet taste of the mold's speech. "Problem solved," Henry grinned. "These Not-We things have taught Us how to move!" burped the worms. "We are in your debt," announced the fattest worm. The tableau of writhing worms faded, swimming away into mists more colorful that the wasteland's impossible sky. Henry and Steve experienced a sensation of growth, expanding from microscopic size up to fill their immense bodies. Steve became aware of the cracked cement against the palms of his hands. He and Henry were back in the crevasse again, back in their normal-sized bodies. They turned to look at each other, exchanging silent blinks that assured each of them that they had just shared a telepathic moment with a sentient mold culture. Peering in unison at the mold at their feet, they noticed the tiny filaments were hyperactively twitching. For a minute, they watched the mold dance with glee over its discovery of self-motion. Then, with careful haste, they extricated themselves from the crevasse, scrambling atop the slab of concrete under the wasteland's turgid sky. Savage Henry wasted no time shifting them back to Steve Roach's home reality, where they discussed their experience over mugs of hot coffee. Henry smiled, enjoying how the taste which the fumes had left in his mouth gave the coffee a mocha edge. For more information on the following subjects: Steve Roach (http://www.steveroach.com/) Savage Henry (http://www.matthowarth.com/) Henry/Bugtown Publications (http://www.bugtownmall.com/4.htm) Matt Howarth Reviews of Steve Roach's Music (http://www.soniccuriosity.com/sc084.htm) More Howarth Music Reviews (http://www.soniccuriosity.com/) |
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