The Western Lands Read online

  Despite their bloated and torpid appearance, they can move with great rapidity to catch a rat in the air, or a horrified hand. The venom is both hemotoxic and neurotoxic, often leading to severe neural damage. The blood venom holds the nerve venom in place, and the nerve venom renders the victim liable to gangrene and other infections. If one does not die from the Gaboon's huge dripping fangs, he is often left a permanent invalid. One case is paralyzed from the neck down, another is slowly dying of encroaching infections. His arm has already been amputated, the infection is spreading to the brain.

  To top it all, the Gaboon growls like a dog would, if a dog were cold-blooded. It's a growl dates back to some models that appeared at the end of the Reptile Age, about the size of a wolf, part reptile and part emergent mammal. May have been coldblooded, with fur and reptile teeth. Looked quite promising. Others were warm-blooded with scales and wolf teeth. What happened? Trouble with the thermostat most likely.

  The Bras cultivate an alert, malevolent somnolence that can shift to the cold hysteria of deadly rage. The cult embraces many venomous snakes who chew and eat and live on death: the mamba, dropping from trees in a green streak, his little jaws open, for this long slender delicate snake, no thicker than a heavy walking cane, is six feet in length. "Very fast. Very good," as Hemingway said about General Omar Bradley. The fangs are small, and there is no local irritation or swelling. One may not even know he has been mamba bit, until his speech begins to slur and slobber, his gait to lurch and stagger and fall. DOA an hour later, if there is a hospital to be DOA at. No pain.

  The Bras find the Boons rather common.

  A group of languid Bras have gathered in a Cheney Walk flat that attempts to capture the effect of an Egyptian garden in the drowsy noon heat. Unfortunately the storage heaters aren't working. The man from London Electric, who alone are authorized to repair a storage heater, muttered something about "the element" three weeks ago, and hasn't been seen since.

  Sandun has them all spreading and hissing with his account of how three Boons emptied a gay bar in Chelsea:

  "There they are at the bar, in full white tie like a 1920s Arrow Collar ad by E. C. Leyendecker, and without a frame's transition they are starkers from the shirt down, still being nonchalant with a Murad and sipping champagne while the hideous Boons growl and spurt deadly venom all over them. They trap fifty screamers stuck in the exit.

  "The Boons are looking for a Receptacle that will fertilize their deadly sperm, so now and then they do a spot search like this. But the faggots is dropping like poisoned pigeons. The venom is corrosive, eats its own hole. The Boons draw themselves up:

  "'Unworthy vessels. Let's toddle along and leave these chappies to stew in our juice. They're filthy.'

  "Good show, that. Good enough to steal."

  The area controlled by the Pharaoh's troops is dwindling. Beyond that line is a power vacuum, empty lands and palaces and villas that are anyone's for the taking.

  "For the rich became poor and the poor became rich. This state of things continued for a hundred years," a chronicler states.

  The landed aristocrats who fled to the city joined the ranks of the new poor, supporting themselves by menial work and charity from the Palace. And their estates fell to the partisans who, having no means to merchandise large-scale produce, turned to subsistence farming, fishing and hunting. . . .

  Thirty men and boys are gathered in the room, their bows and spears stacked against a wall, sitting at a long table drinking distilled wine. They are discussing the various demons they can expect to encounter after their physical deaths, which they can meet at any time. Feuding tribes, disgruntled mercenaries and ex-soldiers roam the countryside like dog packs. They are referring to the Book of the Dead and other texts and maps laid out on the table.

  The demon guards have made mummification a prerequisite for immortality in the Western Lands. Why, exactly? Obviously the mummies serve as receptacles to collect and store the plasma of the fellaheen needed to preserve their masters. In return, the sucking mummies are given conditional immortality, as vampires to be milked like aphids.

  So the One God, backed by secular power, is forced on the masses in the name of Islam, Christianity, the State, for all secular leaders want to be the One. To be intelligent or observant under such a blanket of oppression is to be "subversive":

  "What are you looking at?"

  And the old gods will eke out a wretched, degraded existence as folklore for the tourists.

  "Ju-ju doll, meester? Shrunked-down head? Pointy bone? Velly feelthy! Velly stlong!"

  The One God can wait. The One God is Time. And in Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke. And what makes an old joke old and dead? Verbal repetition.

  So who made all the beautiful creatures, the cats and lemurs and minks, the tiny delicate antelopes, the deadly blue krait, the trees and lakes, the seas and mountains? Those who can create. No scientist could think it up. They have turned their backs on creation.

  Ju-ju doll, meester?

  Fill with nails

  Got good Ju-ju

  Never fails

  Shrunked-down head?

  Hair will grow

  Pointy bone?

  Velly feelthy

  Velly stlong

  It is of course assumed by Western savants that the Egyptian animal Gods are the fantasies of a primitive and backward people, who did not have the advantage of the glorious gains of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution in which a standardized human product overthrows himself and replaces his own kind with machines (they are so much more efficient).

  However, all fantasy has a basis in fact. I venture to suggest that at some time and place the animal Gods actually existed, and that their existence gave rise to belief in them. At this point the monolithic One God concept set out to crush a biologic revolution that could have broken down the lines established between the species, thus precipitating unimaginable chaos, horror, joy and terror, unknown fears and ecstasies, wild vertigos of extreme experience, immeasurable gain and loss, hideous dead ends.

  They who have not at birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us?

  The Hawk cults, blue eyes harsh and pitiless as the sun; the Owl cults, with huge yellow night eyes and wrenching needle talons; flying weasels and reptiles. . . .

  But the One God has time and weight. Heavy as the pyramids, immeasurably impacted, the One God can wait. The Many Gods may have no more time than the butterfly, fragile and sad as a boat of dead leaves, or the transparent bats who emerge once every seven years to fill the air with impossible riots of perfume.

  Consider the One God Universe: OGU. The spirit recoils in horror from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. Because He can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition. He knows everything, so there is nothing for him to learn. He can't go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta.

  The OGU is a pre-recorded universe of which He is the recorder. It's a flat, thermodynamic universe, since it has no friction by definition. So He invents friction and conflict, pain, fear, sickness, famine, war, old age and Death.

  His OGU is running down like an old clock. Takes more and more to make fewer and fewer Energy Units of Sek, as we call it in the trade.

  The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerfuL all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil and death, does not arise.

  "What happened, Osiris? We got a famine here."

  "Well, you can't win 'em all. Hustling myself."

  "Can't you give us immortality?"

  "I can get you an extension, maybe. Take you as far as the Duad. You'll have to make it from there on your own. Most of them don't. Figure about one in a million. And, biologically speaking, that's very good odds."

  We have notice of knives, rebirth and singing. All human thought flattened to a dry husk behind a divided pen. He w
alks in the glyphs and flattens man and nature onto stone and papyrus, eliminating, except in stone and bronze, the dimension of depth. We were not ignorant of perspective. We deliberately ignored it. A flat world was ours and everything in it had a name once and all the names were ours once. With perspective, names escape from the paper and scatter into the minds of men so they can never be held down again.

  The means of suicide haunts their position. We are not averse to a king had a name and had once stone statues to be sure secret in the usual sense and bronze perspective . . . rage of animated dust that growls like a dog . . . barks and snarls of black granite serene crystal converse in sunlight . . . relive in boats a slough to the sky dotted with rafts, the smoke of cooking fire in dawn mist. All human thought flattened there in present time . . . flashes of innocence . . . birth and singing in the marshes.

  God of the Long Chance, the impossible odds, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up off the floor to win by a knockout, blind Samson pulling down the temple, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, God of perilous journeys, Helper in the voyage between death and rebirth, the road to the Western Lands.

  To be reborn at all makes your condition almost hopeless. He is the God of Almost, the God of If Only, the God of Miracles, and he demands more of his followers than any other god. Do not evoke him unless you are ready to take the impossible chances, the longest odds. Chance demands total courage and dedication. He has no time for welchers and pikers and vacillators.

  He is the God of the Second Chance and the Last Chance, God of single combat, of the knife fighter, the swordsman, the gunfighter, God of the explorer, the first traveler on unknown roads, the first to use an untried craft or weapon, to take a blind step in the dark, to stand alone where no man has ever stood before . . . God of Mutation and Change, God of hope in hopeless conditions, he brings a smell of the sea, of vast open places, a smell of courage and purpose ... a smell of silence confronting the outcome.

  The Great Awakening arose from the horror of a dead, soulless universe. All the old answers have failed: the Church, the State. All the hundreds of cults with their answers, all seen as lies in the inexorably gentle white light of the White Cat, lies with nothing but terror and emptiness behind the lies.

  It started in the sensational press, The Enquirer, People, The World: ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS DEMONSTRATES THAT LIFE AFTER DEATH IS WITHIN THE REACH OF EVERYMAN.

  One of those life-after-death flutters in every issue: some housewife got a tip on the stock market from her dead husband. However, soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions for reaching the Land of the Dead. The message falls on summer golf courses waiting for rain, on the parched deserts of mid-America, dead hopeless wastes of despair, a glimmer of light and hope on a darkening earth. The great mushroom-shaped cloud always closer.

  Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anyone ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space.

  The Pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet, awash in seas of silence. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death.

  Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures, deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents, are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control. Of course. Don't intend to be there when this shithouse goes up. Nothing here now but the recordings. Shut them off, they are as radioactive as an old joke.

  Look at the prison you are in, we are all in. This is a penal colony that is now a Death Camp. Place of the Second and Final Death.

  Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

  Neferti lived at this time in the Trains beside a river. This was in what used to be the Kansas City yards, a maze of switchbacks and passenger cars and freight trains. New tracks are constantly being built and the cars shifted around by various motors and pulley devices. More or less a thousand people live here.

  Train whistles outside. We amuse each other with train whistle arrangements passed through echo chambers, ruined warehouses, broken windows, empty railroad stations, cheap hotel rooms, lonely sidings, misty, muffled foghorns, the cries of lost cats, farm ponds at twilight, croaking frogs, fireflies, music across the golf course. Some with old steam engines make trips to Denver and St. Louis. Others on abandoned, rusty, weed-grown switchbacks aren't going anywhere, and there is some sense in that.

  Now these young fellers so hellbent to get to the Western Lands wouldn't know if they was there already. Gotta keep moving and moving and moving . . . where? The faster you move, the more it looks the same. Corn and grass grow between the cars, many of them covered with vines.

  Neferti parts some rose vines and enters the dining car. Boys in white suits and blackface rush forward.

  "Good evening, white boss man, got catfish boiled alive in asparagus piss . . . it's piquant."

  They pull off their masks and sit down wearily.

  "I wonder if we could ever get this thing moving?"

  "You want moving trains, they got 'em. Got an itch for St. Louis, the Valley maybe? Go to the House of David and watch the girls eat shit? Dayumn! Makes you feel good all over. Or find yourself a drowned whore, cured two weeks in the River des Peres, and roll and snort and wallow in her? Peoria and Panta-pon Rose's cathouse? Denver and Salt Chunk Mary?"

  The boys are frying catfish on an alcohol stove. So why not just set here and look. Look at that old river down yonder.

  The boys serve each other martinis.

  "Here you are, Jones." He hands him a shiny dime.

  "You sure is a fair white man, boss, a fine old whitey. When I die I want to be buried right on top of you with your prick up my ass."

  "Your attitude is commendable, Jones. How does 'Head Porter' sound to you?"

  "Like the music of the queers ... I mean the spheres, boss."

  But this waiter—white-man act is wearing thin and we know it. Just let these things run on and on until they stop. Your death is always with you. You don't have to run around looking for it.

  He looks out across the river at the setting sun.

  "Where are my smudge pots, Nigger? I want a smoky sunset."

  "Got used up as smoke bombs in the Last Riot."

  The Last Riot was a confrontation between the old tired way, Church and State, rule of the unfit for the unfit, biologic suicide. When the smoke cleared away, wasn't much left . . . just empty buildings and Sekhu, human remains.

  Neferti strolls down to the market after dinner. The merchandise is laid out in houseboats and stalls along the river.

  He picks up a revolving blowgun. Six darts can be loaded into a cylinder, which revolves by hand and blows them out one after the other. The gun is two feet in length and looks like a flute. He buys two extra cylinders, darts and a selection of poisons: blue-ringed octopus, sea snake, stonefish, cyanide. He chooses a functional model of ebony, the cylinder of aluminum.

  Single-shot tubes, no thicker than a pen, made of ebony, teak, bone and ivory. They fit into a Scribe's kit, the little ink pots containing the poisons to be blended as a painter blends his colors. A smooth-bore revolver, each bullet shooting six nail-size darts that spread out a foot wide at ten feet. You can't miss, and you can take out a roomful of assholes or a pursuing crowd, falling all over each other.

  Rested from his sojourn in the trains, cleansed by emptiness, Neferti is ready now to resume the endless journey over the hills and far away. His clothes are an intricate arrange
ment of pockets to accomodate tools, drugs and weapons.

  He has studied, at the Sleight-of-Hand Academy. Disguised as a nude dancing boy, he once pulled a hog castrator from the crotch of a rival sheik, who subsequently pined away and died of shame. With his painted eyes, his lithe, slim figure and his deadly hands, he looks more like a beautiful evil woman than a man—which is to say he has incorporated his female component into a deadly concentration of incandescent purpose.

  Neferti moves on, his purchases discreetly distributed about his person. He wears a light backpack. In his hands is a cane of whip steel, with a crook at the end. He can hook an ankle or a throat, an extension of his arms to touch, to move aside. There is reason for caution here—from the corner of his eye, he catches the deadly silent rush of an assailant from a down-slanting side street. Neferti whirls and gives him cyanide darts right across his chest. The man turns blue in the air, and his knife clatters ahead of him as he falls.

  As he walks along, a boy pads in beside him.

  "What you look for, meester?"

  "Clothes, young man, rather special clothes."

  "You mean maybe clothes from El Hombre Invisible?" "Precisely."