Barrington Bayley - The Zen Gun

He ushered Hesper down a narrow passage that ran just behind the café. “Apparently you’ve been taught certain ideas regarding our attitude to sexuality,” he said. “I’d like to show you that those ideas are a misconception. Actually many people in Diadem think provincials can’t separate sex from reproduction. You are described as erotically uneducated. But perhaps that’s not true either.”

The corridor contained several arched doors. One opened as Archier placed his palm on it. Inside there was only a vague diffused light, until Archier slid the door shut behind them and touched a contact.

At once the room had defined limits. They were surrounded by—themselves; their own images thrown back at them in multiple, from every possible angle, at every stage of enlargement.

He smiled at her as he hit a second contact, flooding the room with aphrodisiac. “In here is our own universe, consisting only of ourselves.”

Quickly he stripped off, throwing his garments in a corner and moving towards the shell-shaped couch that, reflecting imagery as completely as the walls, floor and ceiling, was almost invisible. His images moved as he moved, piling flesh tone on flesh tone, totally submerging Hesper’s vision.

“Why, this is perverted ,” she said delightedly. She was grinning, and the gas was getting to her. Trying to keep her eye on the real Archier amid the image flood, she unpeeled her uniform and stepped from it.

“I wanted to thank you for saving my life,” Archier said.

The endless mural of writhing limbs and organs engulfed them as they came together.

The natural colour of this planet’s sky was a blue so pale as to be almost white. The sun was large and alum-pale, glaring behind that sky like a ghost of a sun, shimmering, casting a moderate heat.

Hako Ikematsu was interested in neither sky nor sun, but he frequently peered overhead nevertheless. The processes that took place in the sky, in the air, sometimes reaching down to the ground, were interesting indeed.

They were, of course, the same as had appeared on board ICS Standard Bearer , but here the range of their operations was easier to view. It was rather as if the space near the planet had been engulfed in a sort of linear cobweb which entered the atmosphere occasionally, blown by a cosmic wind. Long glistening threads, always dead straight, always parallel. He had, of course, guessed the nature of those threads, even since being transposed, in the twinkling of an eye, from the corridor of the flagship to the surface of this world.

It was surprising he was still in one piece. He suspected he would not be so for long if those threads should touch him again. In the days that the weaponless kosho had been searching for his nephew he had come upon the remains of numbers of people, beasts, buildings and artifacts. In every case they had been dismantled; not clumsily, as a butcher or a demolitioner would do it, but with extraordinary finesse. In the case of the organic remnants there was often remarkably little blood. Separations were apt to be along natural lines of division: membranes, sinews, systemic functions. Nerves were left dangling, sometimes pulled out of their ensheathing flesh to a length of several feet, or with receptor organs still attached. How such careful dissection had been accomplished, by beings who did not even seem to be beings, and who lacked any apparent means of manipulation, was a mystery.

Neither did the disassemblers seem to be able to differentiate between what was organic and what was not. Besides separated limbs and organs, Ikematsu had seen bits of machinery carefully laid out as if ready for assembly, and whole buildings unfolded like packing cases and laid flat. Even stretches of landscape had been pulled apart and rearranged, leaving weird patterns in soil, vegetation and concrete.

The agents of these mutilations were not hard to identify. Ikematsu paused, his shrewd brown eyes intent, as they came down again, the limitlessly lengthening lines slanting down like hawsers of steel sunlight. The cluster stroked the landscape midway to the horizon. It was moving sidewise, progressing towards him.

Uncharacteristically Ikematsu tensed. But the lines vanished, as quickly as they had come.

He continued on his way. This region appeared to have been thinly populated. So far he had found no one left alive apart from himself. But he would not rest until he knew what had happened to Sinbiane, even though there was no guarantee that the boy had materialised anywhere near him—or, indeed, that he had rematerialised at all.

A road ran from planetary west to east through meadows of bluish grass. A mile away to the west he saw a solitary house—the first standing building he had seen for some time.

He reached it in half an hour, approaching slowly and cautiously, to find that it was no more than a cottage. In a neatly tended garden furniture had been tumbled, mixed amid flowers and miniature trees.

Ikematsu knocked on a door panel, finding no call plate. When there was no answer he attempted to slide the panel aside; it failed to yield. He pushed it; it swung inward upon hinges.

He stepped directly into an empty room illuminated by a wide one-way window. The kosho halted. So as to be able to take in the nature of this room, he suspended all emotional reaction.

A blue eye, distinctly human, stared at him from the surface of the wall opposite. In the wall to his right two equally human brown eyes were similarly embedded, but separated by a distance of about ten feet, one near the ceiling, the other, placed vertically, in the corner near the floor.

The match to the blue eye Ikematsu found near the door jamb.

But not until he had seen much else. There were human fragments fused throughout the walls, floor and ceiling. Ears toes, fingers and young male genitals sprouted like pale fruits. Here and there the surfaces bulged, in shapes resembling a heart, a liver, or a pelvic bone.

And running throughout walls, floor and ceiling, like an embossed design, were tiny pipelike protrusions: arteries and veins. Ikematsu stepped closer, inspecting the glistening surface. He saw a faint tracery, spreading over the wall like fronds.

Nerves.

Suddenly a whispering, muffled voice came from somewhere. “Uncle! This is me, Sinbiane! I am alive!”

“Sinbiane!”

“Yes, uncle, I am here. And Trixa too.”

“You can see me?”

“Yes.”

Ikematsu took up a position in the centre of the room and stared straight into the blue eye, paradoxically aware that Sinbiane must thereby have a double view of him, both front and back. “Tell me what you understand of your situation,” he ordered.

“I know what has happened, uncle,” the hidden voice said. “Our bodies have been dispersed throughout the walls of this cottage. It is a strange experience. I am wrapped right round you. With each eye I look at the other eye.”

“Is there any pain?”

“No, not even hunger.”

“What of your mental condition?”

“I am all right, uncle. I have stayed collected. But if we get out of here my friend will need considerable psychological help. He is in a state of total shock.”

“That is because he lacks mental training.”

Taking care where he trod, Ikematsu moved to the window and looked out. The sky was clear of alien rods.

Briefly he reflected. Apparently the intruders from the other facet were not content with simple analysis; they were trying to manipulate the world more positively.

It was remarkable that they were able to disperse the boys’ bodies while still maintaining the integrity of all the somatic systems, particularly the vascular and nervous systems. It said much for their own mode of perception.