John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

Money! Money seemed as puny to us as the papers from which the overseers had scratched our names. Or it did until we at last began to learn how our guiding lights were put together.

That night, an unusually large number of newcomers started to shiver our group all at once. Perhaps there’d been a machine-gunning of an entire nation's dissidents, in some backwoods countryside below. We don’t know; as always they came to us with no useful memories. Instead they murmured with surprise at how their wounds had stopped aching, or at how our own gaping slashes fluttered whenever one of them passed close by. So many men and women wriggled in among us just then, with arms and legs splayed and crisscrossed in such vicious tatters, that it was as if we saw, advancing across the sky, roughcut sentences in the world's first alphabet.

We couldn’t help but stop our march and stare. Then behind these murdered souls we noticed a handful of ghosts unlike any we’d seen before.

They weren’t dust, weren’t nameless. But they weren’t stars yet either. Chips of mica against the sky's black gravel, maybe, or the diamondlike refractions of rain-spatter on a pair of glasses. No doubt this newly discovered brand of dead couldn’t be seen from earth at all. But now that for the first time we actually stopped and studied the dark, instead of rushing through it brainless as a kid, we could begin to see what these strangers were. There were eight of them. Of course the precise number doesn’t matter, all that matters is that there were more than one, but at that moment we counted and doublechecked as if we’d just discovered numbers. We identified three women, five men. None had wounds that couldn’t have come from ordinary living and dying. Yet they were dead: visible only to other dead like ourselves, and capable of things only spirits could accomplish — such as what happened next.

These eight crammed each other into each other. Their movement didn’t look sexual, but plastic. It looked as if a mosaic were composing itself, a gold mosaic, the hot pieces running together so prettily against the black that we felt sorry for those back on earth who couldn’t see the show. And then came the real mystery. Out of nowhere — without even the cloud-trace of a warning that one of our kind would have given — an uncertain black density attached itself to the golden heat. A chunk of jet-stone, sucked out of nowhere, into the bright wheel of the eight others. The rest happened too fast for us to follow. Only, after an implosion whose blast even we could feel, after we took in the constellation round this newmade star and reckoned its place, we realized that we’d witnessed the birth of a church. Or rather the birth of Church in essence, the perfect and eternal thing, the one from which all other churches get their echoing soild swag.

“Ask it!” one of us shouted then. “Ask it now !”

The voice took us by surprise. We’d sunk into such unanimous unspeaking shock that we’d half-forgotten we were separate individuals, with separate voices.

“Ask it while it's weak!”

The speaker was a woman who’d been scalped. A corona of bloody hair exploded round the corners of her stripped skull, the tips curled slightly by the star's hot birth, and her eyes were wild with her new idea. She looked like the hieroglyph of a lion god.

“Ask it our names !” she shrieked.

Of course. So far as we knew, every star we’d gone after had been in place for an eternity. Every star had seemed like an entirely different order of being. But this one had come together out of bits and pieces we could list and count. Even its ebony core, though unknown, was just another part of the assembly. The rest — seen it with our own eyes — was human.

We wheeled our entire sandbox-full of dead round towards the new light. We lumbered over at full brokeback speed, tumbled to our knees before it. But this time we kept up our questioning. This time its silence wouldn’t make us despair. If for a minute some section of us grew uncertain, the hieroglyph-woman would rush over to rally that part again. “Tell us!” she’d shriek. “ Tell us! ”

When we noticed its newly-cooled surfaces had started to flicker, when we glimpsed again its mysterious black centerpiece, we knew we were about to hear something at last.

On my first deal , the star told us then, I still thought a million dollars was a lot of money .

How long did it take us to figure out what was going on? Some among us began to keep track of our visits, counting off each constellation, keeping records for the first time. But for most the trips remained a cramped and measureless enigma.

Look , a kiln-fired number 3 told us, the history is what you’ve got to watch. The history will tell you, demand always picks up at the end of the year .

Did we really hear such talk and not understand? Some of our number learned to distinguish the sky's pockmarks, to tell a planet from a sun and a sun from something larger. But most of us scrabbled on ignorant.

A star who sounded like a sage said: I always go by what W.B. tells me. I consider W. B. money in the bank. And W. B. says processing won’t dent the market for years .

W.B. Speaking to us, yes, they’d use a name. Then how could it have taken so long to come out of our ages in the dark? Some learned, kept track, even tried to explain. But so many others in the group remained fervent children on a hideously misled crusade. We’d gather and pray at every gleaming facade, but each soon proved to be the red keep of a slavetrader.

A firecracker star told us: When they see how the old money system hurts today's market, people are going to start getting out fast .

What these far branding-irons were doing, of course, was giving us advice. By now it seems so obvious. They were talking markets, talking demand, talking money, money, money. Advice! As if we were some greedy pack of living souls, as if we’d come to them merely strapped for cash! It's hard to believe that the revolt which eventually tore us apart didn’t come sooner.

As it was, instead, we suffered through the time of our mass dropouts.

How many? Easier to tote up the galaxies themselves. At least you knew that those milky tilt-a-whirls would remain visible for a while. But whenever another knot of our comrades gave up the chase, in a matter of minutes they’d have seeped out of sight into the surrounding blackness. We could never stop them. We’d try, rumbling and clattering to a halt. We’d gather by the hundreds around, say, a half-dozen of our comrades who’d started to weep in each other's arms ominously. But we could never get between them. Squealy and huggy as teenage girls, these soon-to-be-gone would congeal into something like a single wailing stone. At last the combined weight of their doubts would pull them out of our ranks, away into the night forever. And our dropouts were so quickly petrified, so completely changed, they didn’t leave behind even the cloud-trace of a goodbye one of us would have. Worse, it always took a while to get our main body once more under way. We’d always have to hang there and watch them disappear.

Naturally we could also see what this was doing to us. Whenever we drew close to our latest guiding light , we could see. A single glance along our shape, along our pitiless toughening and lengthening, a single sobering onceover to note how the earlier fat had gotten stretched taut — one look and we knew we were less. The replacements could no longer keep up with the casualty rate. Once a vast whorl of dust, we’d tightened into a coil and grown hot from the wear and tear. Against the night sky we must have looked like a thumbsmudge of loose smoke, or a faraway wheel of smoldering cosmic gas. A sense of self we’d never set out to gain — a sense of how little we amounted to.