Stained-Glass World

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

A mind-shaking glimpse into the future of the earth: a brilliantly imagined, horrifyingly plausible glimpse into a world where the social elite, the Uppers, live in absolute luxury, boosting themselves with 'Joy Juice'. The 'Joy Juice' is the vital life fluid extracted from the workers, the second class citizens whose life is a constant search for and movement from one trip, one hallucination to the next. It is only when the workers are tripping that the Uppers can extract the 'Joy Juice'. But what happens when the good trips turn into bad ones? When pleasant dreams become nightmares?

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 160

Sample

He knew his way around the Twentieth Century; but at what precise instant of time complete and detached from the mill-run of common time itself he first placed his naked foot into the muddied water, brown as paint, in the gutter on the other side of the road, he afterwards recollected only dimly, luridly in patches, shot through with the zig-zag red-greens of mocking pseudo-memory.

He could feel the water, cold and absorbing, around his ankles. He could feel the night wind, sharp and toothy, biting into his skin beneath the cheap cotton pyjamas. Blue lights pea-podded the concrete road with vague illumination. Blown papers scuttled. Soon the rain would drive in with tongued lashes to drench but not clean this tawdry town.

A minute or two ago – he thought – he had been settling down comfortably on a couch in Guztav Lawlor’s Luxury Relax Palace to take a trip.

He had decided, this time around, to call himself Wendell. An idea capered at the back of his preoccupied mind that he had gone down into the lower end of the city to find something out. A crisis had been threatening, a crisis, the gravity of which Sturm had failed to notice, was menacing the whole city. He was concerned only with his own city. Other cities in the world grappled with their own worries. One city contained enough of a man’s life to illustrate the way of the world.

He took his feet out of the water and at once they seemed to swell, to contract with a loud crash, and then to warm up like mittened toast. He rubbed his hands together, feeling the bony knuckles smooth, like miniature skulls, and looked about him.

Where was he?

In the cold, that tiny part of his mind that never really let him be, said tartly. Take all this as real. Accept it as though it really existed. In face of the cold discomfort now bewildering him – a discomfort as chilling as the strictures of the Moral Aid cranks – he must find shelter and reorientation.

He stumbled back across the street, headed for the neon-lit bar with flapping doors. Darkness shrouded the pavement. A swooping isolation engulfed his spirits. He had no clear idea what was going on, or why. Acceptance of a pseudo-reality could not negate the coldness of the water, the scorching wind wickedly razoring his ribs.

Wendell was a tough enough man of his middle age group battling to keep fit with badminton and squash, light-handed with liquor, nor addicted to ordinary tobacco, taking his kicks in a jolt of Joy-Juice, and his body could absorb a reasonably high dosage of this kind of punishment. But he just did not relish the idea of wandering the cold and wet streets of a barren hicktown in the middle of the night. Particularly not when clad only in thin cotton pyjamas. Not even for kicks.

He hitched the trousers up and the cord broke.

Bending over and beginning a comprehensive anatomical curse, he glanced up, his eyes drawn by a new light source, and he did not bother to finish the curse.

Half bent over as he was, one fist gripping the waist of the pyjama trousers, the other fumbling at the flapping end of the broken cord, his face jutted out on a level with the apparition.

Central in a sickle-shaped opening into nothingness, hanging chest high in the night, the head gibbered and mewed and mauled, beckoning with wide grimaces, with rolling eyes, with suggestive nose-wrinklings. Wendell stared motionlessly at the apparition.

This was his kind of trip?

He would want this – a glowing Arab moon-shaped hole into insanity?

He would conjure this – a head that simpered and mewled and leered, urging him to join it in unknown, nameless sins?

Well, possibly. Yes, possibly, Wendell conceded, grasping his pyjamas and slipslopping across the road into the shadows beneath the building where the bar glowed like an illuminated cave of promised debauchery. He couldn’t rule it out.

‘Come back!’ The head called after him, writhing its purple lips. ‘Come back, my lumpkin! You doanow what I c’n ofrit yuh! C’mon back, ninnynonkins!’

Wendell had no idea – no unearthly idea, no subconscious idea – what the thing could be. But subconsciously it existed as real as the ground beneath his slipperless feet.

The rain chose that blustery moment of choking insecurity to sweep its first broom-bristle swishings across the town, flinging water clamouring from tin roofs and echoing guttering, spouting from broken pipes, boiling white into the brown water of the gutters. Wendell hunched futilely into the sodden pyjamas and splashed like a ghost through the rain mists and silver bouncing bubbles of the rain.

They weren’t even his own night attire.

He hopped agilely up on to the far sidewalk, straddling the swelling current. Old cans, orange skins, scraps of paper, obscene artefacts, chips of packing cases, all floating in that murky miniature Nile. He had to get out of the rain muy pronto; but the combination of thin cotton and water had made of the pyjamas a nudie show and, here in the twentieth century, if that was where he was, haven had become that much more difficult to find.

The moment had long gone when he could no more pretend he was enjoying all this. As an experience it had been great and salutary; but now he must be pushing along. He tried for a transition, expecting the emerald and brown interpenetrating squares to come pulsing down; but nothing happened. The wind dashed a spray of muddy water into his face. He looked at the bar, fuming.

The sign, half obliterated by rain, shone out ruddily.

LEAN EDSCH AP RAT S HO W TER

With the rain dripping from his face Wendell looked up, squinting his eyes. What the hell …?

Then he saw the unlit bulbs.

Clean Beds. Cheap Rates. Hot Water.

Oh.

He shouldered the door open, still clasping his sundered cord. If he had to he would invent some way of payment later. He was in no mood to argue. If this was one kind of reality he’d be hurled back into the gutter … This just couldn’t be his own trip!

His apprehensions receded a little when he saw that the receptionist, alone and aloof in a glass cage, was a uniformed orang-outang. It smirked at him, wiping its wide rubbery lips, pouting.

‘Yes, sir – a nasty night. Come in, come in. Put your bags down. The dromedary will take good care of those. Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t have any bags,’ Wendell began.

‘Just leave them right there. We understand.’

They’d not so far, Wendell thought, achieved this degree of humanisation of an orang-outang. They’d tried, of course, as they had tried all kinds of other animalistic tricks in the effort to create a planetary partner for homo sapiens. So that more or less reinforced this experience as a normal hallucination.

The light gleamed green and golden from the glass reception area, receding quietly from the vague tenebrous shadows beyond, creating the quietness and dust-tasting mausoleum-effect of small hotels. He would not go into the bar just yet. He could feel, the cheap cracked linoleum beneath his feet, could hear the water drip-dropping from the sodden pyjamas, could taste the flat sourness in his mouth.

A woman with a half-masked angel’s face and eyes like wasps glided from the shadows, her bejewelled midnight-blue gown aflame with coruscations, smiled obliquely at him, mounted the rickety stairs. She carried her leopard’s tail in one bejewelled gloved hand. The black and yellow fur glowed against the half-concealing dress.

At once Wendell felt more at ease. Cat-women were familiar phenomena to him. Her smile had no power – now – to itch down his back, to make him flinch back with canine obstinacy.

‘Room Twelve A, sir.’ The orang-outang rubbered out the words glueily. ‘You’ll find it very comfortable.’

‘You’ll find it very – comfortable.’ The Leopard-woman giggled, over-scarlet lips pouting around the words.

‘Thank you.’ Wendell felt this to be a normal trip hallucic now. He had been badly shaken. His annoyance over the uncontrolled existence of the hallucination clashed with relief that at last events were falling into an understandable pattern.

He allowed himself to wonder if this place could ever have been real. In time? In space? He didn’t really know and he doubted if anyone at all would ever know. Not that it mattered. Time and space were concepts far too big and outside his domain. He dealt with more subtle areas of life. Now he would cheerfully allow himself to be carried along by the illusion.

He walked towards the stairs.

‘Your bags, sir.’ The orang-outang smiled with toothy deprecation. He looked like an incredibly evil old man.

An hallucinatory bite from those sharp teeth could take an hallucinatory mouthful of his flesh and shed quantities of hallucinatory blood and give him an abominable hallucinatory pain.

‘Thanks.’ He went back and bent down without looking to where he would have put his bags if he had had any, and his fingers struck polished plastic handles. Resignedly he hefted the two zip bags, feeling their weight and seeing with a comical quality of detachment the many airline and hotel stickers mottling their red rexine plastic. Not his bags. He wouldn’t trust himself in reality to an aeroplane.

He felt too weary to say tartly: ‘Give the dromedary a tip for his services, will you?’

The stairs creaked a fiddle obbligato as he ascended.

A rapid oscillating pattern of indigo, emerald, ochre and ivory impacted squares flashed like a descending and enveloping curtain before his eyes. His foot struck a riser instead of landing on a tread. He bent forward with his hands grasping the cases like straws. His trousers stayed halfway up his legs, tacked glueily to his flesh. He blinked. The multi-chequered pattern blipped and vanished.

An interesting transition at last.…

There was no transition.

‘I’m waiting, Bung.’ The voice below him spoke with a touch of acerbity like bitten bitterness.

Wendell looked down hastily, nearly overtoppling. The man waiting below, wearing a leather jacket and carrying two cases identical to those carried by Wendell, tapped a leather-booted foot impatiently on the stair. Dust puffed.

Nothing could be as it seemed. Caution turned Wendell about and sent him climbing the stairs.

‘Twelve A!’ shouted the orang-outang insultingly.

‘I’ll have to rest up a bit. Then I’ll attend to this confounded hallucic.’ Wendell pushed the imitation mahogany door open and blundered a pace into the room. A sour smell of unventilated places slicked unpleasantly on his tongue and he made a face. The darkness closed down with a denseness stifling reason. A uterine fog possessed him. He dropped the cases and stretched out his hands, feeling like an infant along the wall, seeking the round reassurance of the light switch.

At his touch light sprang out.

He stood on a single bare plank, his back pressed against the wall, staring out on nothingness. No room. No bed. No walls. No ceiling. With the light came wind. Wind that scorched at his tissue-thin pyjamas with a thousand scalpel edges. Below his naked feet the gulf waited blackly, its hollow darkness riddled with millions of flecked crimson flames, the watch fires of the unappeased dead.

Around him the air rang with laughter, the terminal laughter of the surreal pushed beyond the brink of despair.

A scattering of hammocks in the Mary Roberts Ward already hung empty, each like an abandoned nylon chrysalis, still swinging blankly. From most of the hammocks arms and legs projected uncaringly. The air held a flat dead taste of lavender. The whole area of the ward had been utilised to swing hammocks, a hundred and fifty feet by ninety under the vaulting pre-stressed ceiling, and Conrad had either to duck under or squeeze past in a manner displeasing to him in its affront to his own ideas of propriety.

Not that the trippers would feel anything if he jabbed an angry toecap into a rounded bulge as he passed. But the principle of the thing obscurely annoyed him, particularly as he well knew there was ample room in the other abandoned wards of the disused hospital.

He did not like the sleazy feeling of the hammocks against his dark green shirt and slacks. His shuffling footfalls sounded a deadened note against the floor as though he wore wax earplugs. Outside in the sunshine on the concrete ramps his footsteps had rung loud and crisply.

There seemed no way of relating the people in the hammocks to the capabilities, for the ambiguous labour codes on the ident labels at each hammock head would inevitably be smudged. Conrad flicked peevishly at two or three, trying to unscramble the wavering illegibilities of men and women too far gone in anticipatory debauch to bother over writing a clear hand – those that could still bother to write, this was. Many – too many, Conrad felt with impatience – compromised their indifference to the world with a thumbprint.

Tony Lawrence shouted across the hammock-packed ward, his voice bouncing unexpectedly in the acoustic maelstrom. ‘Hey! Zack! Found it?’

The words zithered and skittered, like high-hysteresis globes: ‘He -ey -ey! Zack -ack -ack!’ ‘Found it -oundit -oundit?’

‘No -oh -oh!’ Conrad yelled back, wishing the deadening floor would swallow the echoes, too. ‘What chance do we stand -and -and?’

‘If we don’t find him,’ Lawrence said through the echoes, ‘we’re all done for! Finished -inished -inished!’

Well, that was true enough. Distasteful though the concept must be to men of the stamp of Tony Lawrence and Zack Conrad, and repugnant though it might be for them to venture into this end of the city, they had to face those concepts and venture down here. If the crisis Sturm feared proved insoluble then they and their kind faced an extinction as definite as that of the dinosaur. Conrad, perhaps alone among his fellows, shrank from the prospect that others would write a notation on their story in the footnotes to history.

‘No luck so far.…’

‘Check over the far end. I’ve finished here.’

‘Damn labels … Stupid workers. They’ll never qualify for the whole sewn-up saga.’

Conrad fished a label around, wiped a thump across the dusty face. ‘Nothing.’ He squinted in the pearly washed-out light across at Lawrence. ‘A sewn-up saga’s a one-way trip.’

Lawrence ducked clumsily beneath a hammock sending it swaying. A woman’s leg dangled down, scraping the floor irritatingly. ‘So they say. But someone’s supposed to have managed to return – why, beats me.’

‘Stories,’ said Conrad, flicking labels. ‘I don’t believe them. Nothing to come back to here. Any luck?’

‘No.’

‘He’s not here then. Oh, damn and blast and saga the man! This is a foul dump, the dregs of the dregs. What by the light of LSD would he want coming here?’

‘He goes everywhere = you know. Passim.’

The echoes made of ‘Passim’ a bee-buzzing swarm.

‘Let’s get out of here -ere -ere.’

Bludgeoning swaying hammocks out of their way the two men fought through to the exit. Golden sunlight slanted down into the ward, a golden miasma against lustreless pearl within, warm. Neither man noticed it.

Before moving into the sunshine Conrad stopped to scan the city end. He lifted the scanner – the model was old and trustworthy even if the gadget itself had only recently been manufactured and therefore must automatically be suspect – and panned it carefully across the scene.

He could detect no significant increase in any of the body-heat loci the scanner identified. Not that infra-red detection could any longer be trusted one hundred per cent, the concept had fruited and withered beyond its useful term; but now Conrad could not linger. Pressures dictated by personalities with whom he shared a permanent servitor relationship drove him on, so he said: ‘A dozen people out there, Tony. No significant increase in bo. . .