Blood : A Southern Fantasy

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CHAPTER ONE

A Victim of the Game

The heat of the New Orleans night passed against the window like an urgent lover. Jack Karaquazian stood sleepless, naked, staring out into the sweating darkness as if he might see at last some tangible horror which he could confront and even hope to conquer.

"Tomorrow," he told his handsome friend Sam Oakenhurst, "I shall take the Star up to Natchez and from there make my way to McClellan by way of the Trace. Will you come?"

(The vision of a sunlit bayou, recollection of an extraordinary rich perfume, the wealth of the earth. He remembered the yellow-billed herons standing in the shadows, moving their heads to regard him with thoughtful eyes before returning their respect to the water; the grey ibises, seeming to sit in judgement of the others; the delicate egrets congregating on the old logs and branches; a cloud of monarch butterflies, black and orange, diaphanous, settling over the pale reeds and, in the dark green waters, a movement might have been copperhead or alligator, or even a pike. In that moment of silence before the invisible insects began a fresh song, her eyes were humorous, inquiring. She had worked for a while, she said, as a chanteuse at The Fallen Angel on Bourbon Street.)

Sam Oakenhurst understood the invitation to be a courtesy. "I think not, Jack. My luck has been running pretty badly lately and travelling ain't likely to improve it much." Wiping his ebony fingers against his undershirt, he delicately picked an ace from the baize of his folding table.

For a moment the overhead fan, fuelled by some mysterious power, stirred the cards. Pausing, Mr. Oakenhurst regarded this phenomenon with considerable satisfaction, as if his deepest faith had been confirmed. "Besides, I got me all the mung I need right now." And he patted his belt, full of hard guineas--better than muscle.

"I looked for a moment as if our energy had come back." Mr. Karaquazian got onto his bed and sat there undecided whether to try sleeping or to talk. "I'm also planning to give the game a rest. I swear it will be a while before I play at the Terminal." They both smiled.

"You still looking to California, Jack?" Mr. Oakenhurst stroked down a card. "And the Free States?"

"Well, maybe eventually." Jack Karaquazian offered his attention back to the darkness while a small, dry, controlled cough shook his body. He cursed softly and vigorously and went to pour himself a careful drink from the whisky on the table.

"You should do it," said Mr. Oakenhurst. "Nobody knows who you are anymore."

I left some unfinished business between Starkville and McClellan." Quietly satisfied by this temporary victory over his disease, the gambler drew in a heavy breath. "Anywhere's better than this. Sam, I'll go in the morning. As soon as they sound the up-boat siren."

Putting down the remaining cards, his partner rose to cross, through sluggish shadows, the unpolished floor and, beneath the fluttering swampcone on the wall, pry up one of the boards. He removed a packet of money and divided it into two without counting it. "There's your share of Texas. Brother Ignatius and I agreed, if only one of us got back, you'd have half."

Jack Karaquazian accepted the bills and slipped them into a pocket of the black silk jacket which hung over other chair on top of his pants, his linen and brocaded vest. "It's rightfully all yours, Sam, and I'll remember that. Who knows how our luck will run? But it'll be a sad year down here, I think, win or lose." Mr. Karaquazian found it difficult to express most emotions; for too long his trade had depended on hiding them. Yet he was able to lay a pale, fraternal hand on his friend's shoulder, a gesture which meant a great deal more to both than any amount of conversation. His eyes, half-hidden behind long lashes, became gentle for a moment.

Both men blinked when, suddenly, the darkness outside was ripped by a burst of fire, of flickering arsenical greens and yellows, of vivid scarlet sparks. The mechanism squealed and wailed as if in torment, while other metallic lungs uttered loud, suppressed groans occasionally interrupted by an aggressive below, a shriek of despair from xylonite vocal cords, or a deeper, more threatening klaxon as the steel militia, their bodies identified by bubbling globules of burning, dirty orange plastic, gouting black smoke, roamed the narrow streets in search of flesh--human or otherwise--which had defied the city's intolerable curfew. Mr. Karaquazian never slept well in New Orleans. The fundamental character of the authority appalled him.

CHAPTER TWO

Two of a Kind

At dawn, as the least of the garishly decorate, popishly baroque mechanish blundered over the cobbles of the rue Dauphine, spreading their unwholesome ichor behind them, Jack Karaquazian carried his carpet bag to the haste to board L'Etoile d'Memphes, anxious to leave the oppresive terrors of a quarter where the color-greedy mechinoix, that brutal aristocracy, allowed only their engines the freedom of the streets.

Compared to the conscious barbarism of the machines, the rivervoat's cream filigree gothic was in spare good taste, and Mr. Karaquazian ascended the gangplank with his first-class ticket in his hand, briefly wishing he were going all the way to the capital, where at least some attempt wa made to maintain old standards. But duty--according to Jack Karaquazian's idiosyncratic morality, and the way in which he identified an abiding obsession--had to be served. He had sworn to himself that he must perform a particular task and obtain certain information before he could permit himself any relief, any company other than Colinda Dovero's.

He followed an obsequious steward along a familiar colonnaded deck to the handsomely carved. By way of thanks for a generous tip, he was offered a knowing leer and the murmured intelligence that a high-class snowfrail was travelling in the adjoining suite. Mr. Karaquazian rewarded this with a scowl and a sharp oath so that the steward left before, as he clearly feared, the tip was snatched back from his fingers. Shaking his head at the irredeemable vulgarity of the white race, Mr. Karaquazian unpacked his own luggage. The boat shuddered suddenly as she began to taste her steam. her paddle-wheel stirring the dark waters of the Mississippi. compared to the big ocean-going schoomer on which, long ago, the gambler had crossed from Alexandria, the Etoile was comfortingly reliable and responsive. For him she belonged to an era when the time had been measured by chronometers rather than degrees of deliquescence. He was reminded, against his guard, of the first day he had met the adventuress, Colinda Dovero, who had been occupying those same adjoining quarter and following the same calling as himself.

(Dancing defiantly with her on deck in the summer night amongst the mosquito lamps to the tune of an accordion, a fiddle, a Dobro and a bass guitar, while the Second Officer, Mr. Pitre, sang "Poor Hobo" in a sweet baritone ... O, pauvre hobo, mon petit pierrot, ah, foolish hope, y grief, mon coeur ... Aiee, no longer, no longer Houston, but our passion she never resolves. Allons dansez! Allons dansez! The old traditional elegies; the pain of inconstancy. La musique, ma tristesse ... They were dancing, they were told in turn, with a sort of death. But the oracles whom the fashion favored in those days, and who swarmed the same boats as Karaquazian and his kind, were of proven inaccuracy. Even had they not been, Karaquazian and Mrs. Dovero could have done nothing else that what they did, for theirs was at that time an ungovernable chemistry ...)

As it happened, the white woman kept entirely to her stateroom and all Karaquazian knew of her existence was an occasional overheard word to her stewardess. Seemingly, her need for solitude matched his own. He spent the better part of the first forty-eight hours sleeping, his nightmares as troubled as his memories. When he woke up, he could never be sure whether he had been dreaming or remembering, but he was almost certain he had shouted at least once. Horrified by the thought of what he might he reveal, he dosed himself with laudanum until only his snores disturbed the darkness. Yet he continued to dream.

Her name, he said, was West African or Irish in origin, he was not sure. They had met for the second time in the Terminal Cafe sharply defined walls constantly jumped and mirrored, expanding space, contracting it, slowing time, frantically dancing in and out of a thousand mirrors matrixes; its neon sign (last heat on the beach), usually lavender and cerise, drawing power directly from the howling chaos a few feet away, between the white sand and blue ocean, where all the terrible wild colors, that maelstrom of uninterpretable choices, were displayed in a smooth, perfect circle which the engineers had sliced through the core of all-time and all-space, its rim edge by a rainbow ribbon of vanilla-scented crystal. Usually, the Terminal Cafe occupied roughly the area of space filled by the old pier, which itself had been absorbed by the vortex during the early moments of an experiment intended to bore into the very marrow of ultra-reality and extract all the energy the planet needed.

The operation had been aborted twenty-two seconds after it began. Since then, adventurers of many persuasions and motives had made the sidestep through the oddly colored flames of the Fault into the inferno of a billion perishing space-time continua, drawn down into a maw which sucked to nothingness the substance of a whole races and civilizations, whole planetary systems, whole histories, while Earth and sun bobbed in some awkward and perhaps temporary semi-parasitical relationship between the feeding and the food; their position in this indecipherable matrix being generally considered a fluke. (Or perhaps the planet was the actual medium of this destruction, as untouched by it as knife which cuts the throat of the Easter lamb.)

Even the least fanciful of theorists agreed that they might have accelerated or at least were witness to a universal destruction. They believed the engineers had drilled through unguessable dimensions, damaging something which had until now regulated the rate of entropy to which human senses had, over millions of years, evolved. With that control damaged and the rate accelerating to infinity, their perceptions were no longer adequate to the psychic environment.

The multiverse raced perhaps towards the creation of a new sequence of realities, perhaps towards some cold and regular conformity; perhaps towards unbridled chaos, the end of all consciousness. This last was what drew certain people to the edge of the Fault, their fascination taking them step by relentless step to the brink, there to be consumed.

On a dance floor swept by peculiar silhouettes and shifts of light, Boudreaux Ramsadeen, who had brought his cafe here by trail from meridian, encouraged the zee-band to play on while he guided his tiny partners in the Cajun steps. This professional dancers travelled from all over Arcadia to join him. Their hands on their swaying hips, their delicate feet performing own dimensions, they danced to some other tune than the band's.

Boudreaux's neanderthal brows were drawn together in an expression of seraphic concentration as, keeping all his great bulk on his poised left foot, describing graceful steps with his right, he moved his partners with remarkable tenderness and delicacy.

(Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker, fingering the sensors of his kayplay with deliberate slowness. Only here, on the whole planet, is there a reservoir of energy deep enough to run every machine, synthetic reasoner, or cybe in the world, but not transmittable beyond the Terminal's peculiar boundaries. Only those with an incurable addiction to the past's electronic luxuries comer here, and they are all gamblers of some description. Weird light saturates the table; the light of Hell. He is waiting for his passion, his muse.)

Colinda Dovero and Jack Karaquazian had met again across the blue, flat sheen of a mentasense and linked into the wildest, rikiest game of "Slick Image" anyone had ever witnessed, let alone joined. When they came out of it, Dovero was eight guineas up out of betting range which had made psychic bids almost seasoned players never cared to imagine. It has caused Boudreaux Ramsadeen to rouse himself from his mood of ugly tolerance and insist thereafter on a stakes ceiling that would protect the metaphysical integrity of his establishment. Some of the spectators had developed peculiar psychopathic obsessions, while others had merely become subject to chronic vomiting. Dovero and Karaquzian had, however, gone into spacelessness together and did not properly emerge for nine variations, while the walls expanded and turned at odd angles and the colors saturated and amplified all subtleties of sensations. There if no keener experience, they say, than the act of love during a matrix shift at the terminal Cafe.

"That buzz? It's self-knowledge," she told the Egyptian, holding tight as they floated in the calm between on bizarre reality and another.

"No disrespect, jack," she had added.

Copyright © 1995 Michael and Linda Moorcock. All rights reserved.