Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

“I’m a hive,” she said, grinning to show a cracked front tooth. “Buzz buzz.”

Trip clenched his fists, fighting the realization that his body could be so terrifyingly free of his control. Strands of percussion and synthesizer fused into a relentless high-pitched drone. His ears ached; the bitter taste flooded his mouth again and he spit, wiping his mouth on his shirt.

“—yo there, buddy, looks like you drank the wrong punch!” A hand clasped his shoulder. Trip looked up to see Clovis Tyner, his tattooed face creased with amused concern. “First time?”

“Ahh—” Trip gasped and shook his head. “Nooo.”

Clovis nodded. His eyes were wide, a shimmering blue; the pupils were all but invisible. “That can make it worse. You get the surge but not enough to carry you through. An’ all this—”

He cocked his head to indicate the room around them—the quickening dance, speakers humming like wasps, abandoned shoes and empty bottles spinning across the floor. Within all the frantic revelry Trip glimpsed flickers of blinding white light, as though someone was aiming a laser at the crowd.

“—it just makes it worse. Contact high.” Clovis laughed, a sound that made Trip’s skin crawl. “What you oughta do is take some more—now, before things get really crazy. Once they get the light show going—”

Trip shook his head so fast he felt dizzy; felt again as though he were perched above the whirlpool at Hell Head. “No! Just tell me how I can get out —”

“I told you, buddy: you’re in here now.” Clovis stood swaying at Trip’s side, his gaze unfocused. “They never open the doors till morning. Especially tonight. Cops. Can’t have all these fucked-up people spilling in the streets—that’s a bad fucking scene, man, I saw it in Austin once, and here they don’t even have anyplace to put you, I mean it’s not like they got spare room in the Tombs or something. I heard they just like, dump you in the river. Bodies wash up—But you don’t need to hear that, right? You’ve been in the scene, right?”

Trip shook his head.

“No? Well, shit!” Clovis whistled. “What the fuck you doing here? ’Cause I was gonna say it’s like that scene—”

“Hive?”

“Yeah, man. ’Cause of the ice. I mean, you’ve done it, right? You know what I’m talking about. Contact high. Contact …”

Clovis repeated the word under his breath, as though he’d never said it before. “Contact—yeah, that’s what I mean. Like X, you know? You get that rush…”

His voice drifted off. The music shifted, channeled into a familiar backwash of guitar chords and feedback and gongs, a shrieking dub version of a song Trip recognized but couldn’t name. His skin yawned open, his mouth filled with saliva, salt; the scent of roses and lilacs. A girl’s breathy voice plucked at his spine—

And she was there, her kingfisher, her small hands pressed against him, her fingers icy as they kneaded his skin, her breath hot and coming in quick bursts.

“Marz—” He tried to pull her to him, felt her hair between his fingers like water. “Marz—”

She was gone. Another girl stood in front of him, long dark hair whipping around a heart-shaped face, eyes carefully outlined in kohl and gold dust. Skin glowing as though doused in flame. She was singing, and as she sang her arms threw off birds like sparks. There was an odd perturbation in the air around her, a cloud of grey and white that was like a hole. Trip could see through it and glimpse the ruined library, flailing shadows. The dark-haired girl laughed, a sound thick with the scent of burning grass, and reached for his hand. He felt her fingernails drag across his palm and shook his head, took a shuffling backward step as she sang.

Her body shimmered. He could see vines tattooed upon her bare arms and a tiny green lizard skittering down one leg. Her voice rose into a howl as she twirled into a thicket of flame. Behind her another figure knelt, a black-skinned man coaxing a blaze from something on the floor, smoke and scorched metal. Trip swallowed as it all came together, words and music and a movie he’d seen once in a hotel room. For an instant the man raised his head. His eyes were yellow, like a cat’s. Iridescent green beetles crawled inside them.

Then a shaft of brilliant white light ripped through the air. The dark-haired girl and the kneeling man blinked from sight, then back again. Feedback echoed. Streamers of lavender and lilac threaded down through the crowd. The dark-haired singer stared right at him, her eyes flexing like wings.

She began to dissolve into blobs of yellow and orange and chartreuse. People were cheering and shouting. Where the girl had been fiery letters traced across the air, like the tracks left by sparklers on a summer night.

Above him ripples of green and gold and violet lashed the air. There was a brilliant pulse of orange in one corner of the room, a sound like low thunder. Then it was as though the ceiling were torn away. Trip blinked, staring into the prismatic sky. The room grew still, voices hushed, feet shuffling impatiently. There was a smell of the sea; there was the scent of lilacs. Something damp pressed against the palm of his hand, like an open mouth. He jerked backward, saw more words spinning in the air.

Small teeth tried to pierce his skin. Warmth probed his ear, a woman’s voice that made him go rigid.

“Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing …”

Something began to spin in front of Trip’s face: a golden pyramid no bigger than an insect. As he watched it began to grow larger. Beams of light played across it, a clamor of gongs and bells where they intersected. The sky was gone, and the hive of stoned dancers. There was only that monolithic golden shape, and within it a pulsing core that resolved into a vast irradiating eye, its iris sky-blue. The eye wheeled away, growing smaller yet more brilliant, until it hung like a tiny perfect star upon the brow of a boy with glowing blue eyes and sinuously moving hands.

“ I possess the keys of hell and death,” he sang, “ I will give you the morning star: the end of the end …”

It was the icon. Face tilted upward as it sang, eyes staring into the shattered sky as it danced. From its head reared a glittering ornament like a pagoda that sent forth dazzling sparks of aquamarine and ruby and emerald green.

Trip felt the same stirrings of bewitchment that he had in the studio at MIT. The icon grinned. It was real. Between the crowd of dancers and the earlier image of the girl singing there had still been a veil, the blinkered effect of senses struggling with what was before them.

This icon was different. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was all but unrecognizable as an analogue of Trip Marlowe, even to Trip himself: if he hadn’t experienced it before, if he hadn’t remembered writing the words and melody it sang, would he have known it wasn’t real? He wasn’t sure; and the uncertainty terrified him. His entire body yearned for it, even as some spark of his consciousness recoiled.

He felt sick and feverish; revolted. The icon commanded desire and adoration and awe: it danced upon an invisible plane several inches above the library floor, and its dance made that unseen stratum more real than anything else. Something crashed beside Trip. He wrenched his gaze from the icon and saw a weeping girl sprawled beside him, her eyes huge and black and staring, though it was not Trip they saw. She had tried to follow the dancer, and fallen.