projected: white circles with black-circle eyes and screaming yaws of mouths.
His:
Skin felt loose and gelid. Without pain it sloughed off from his bones and streamed behind him as he fell and (sloughing and reforming, hauling itself back in and tangling, twisting around, transmuting into something bright, so bright, and metametallic that he…)
He:
Hit the floor of the cavern headfirst. Again, there was no pain, merely the
abrupt cessation of motion. He lay there for a moment, face buried in a soft
and decomposing mulch of what might be meat—or the idea of meat—then
hauled himself up.
The skeletal remains of hands attached to forearms sprouted from the fleshy
cavern floor, rotted to bone that was a bright and absolute white—far whiter
than any bone one might encounter in any real world. The hands were shrouded
in a haze of branching microtubular filaments—it was as if something had
rotted the flesh away with such peculiar precision as to leave the neural
matter intact.
The hands moved. They clutched and scrabbled at him, grabbing at him with a
cloying intimacy that seemed to slide around inside his head. Something hot
and clotted bursting in his
head
…
And he:
Screamed. Screamed so hard he thought his lungs might painlessly burst. And
from him came a Big Light—like a reflex-sting, a burst of white-hot plasma,
blasting the clutching hands away from him and burning them to nothing.
He:
For a moment he stood in the smoking crater of charred meat, staring ahead
dumbly. After a while he realised that he was holding his hands in front of
his face, realised what he was looking at: mirror-bright, his hands were, his
whole body was, as though sculpted from solid but nevertheless in some sense
fluid chrome.
The sense of cool air on his face.
The explosion of plasma that had come from him had ripped a hole in the
membrane-wall of the cavern. Bright light came from it, bright shapes moved
beyond.
Feet slipping in grease, crunching on the burned remains of clinging hands,
Eddie Kalish walked towards the rip.
“There you go. That’s a boy!”
Eddie Kalish opened a bleary eye to see something he had never seen before.
Well, he had, but the transformation of it was of such a nature that it left
the pattern-recognition areas of the mind temporarily wrong-footed.
When you thought of Trix Desoto, you thought of her in a comedy-nurse costume,
wounded, close to death—and about to turn into some diabolical monstrosity
from the very lowest reaches of Hell. If Hell actually existed, of course,
which of course it didn’t.
Looking at her sitting there, now, on the edge of the hospital bed, relaxed
and cheerful in an underwired patent-leather catsuit that would do wonders for
the self-esteem of any girl, and so on Trix Desoto contrived to be
spectacular, it took the mind a moment to adjust.
“Now, my advice to you,” said Trix Desoto,”would be to get the ‘what happened’
and ‘where am I’ out the way with the minimum of fuss. Everybody tries to find
a new way of saying it, and it never works.”
Eddie looked blearily around the room. Some part of him vaguely expected it to
be a sterile environment, white-tile walled and lit by harsh and buzzing
fluorescent tubes. Instead, it was just the kind of neat little room you might
find in an expensive private nursing home called Sunny Gables or the like.
Plaster walls and cornicing. Drapes over the window. Discreet little oil-pastel landscapes dotted around.
(And it would only be later, much later, that he would finally work out what
had been wrong with this. It was simply that the very idea of “A private
nursing home called Sunny Gables” would have never occurred to him in his real
life. It was simply not in his mental lexicon. Somebody, or something, must
have actively put it into his head.)
At the time, though, the room just seemed prosaic and comforting. This was
probably to offset the tangled horror of the items that were currently plugged
into him,
His:
Skin felt loose and gelid. Without pain it sloughed off from his bones and streamed behind him as he fell and (sloughing and reforming, hauling itself back in and tangling, twisting around, transmuting into something bright, so bright, and metametallic that he…)
He:
Hit the floor of the cavern headfirst. Again, there was no pain, merely the
abrupt cessation of motion. He lay there for a moment, face buried in a soft
and decomposing mulch of what might be meat—or the idea of meat—then
hauled himself up.
The skeletal remains of hands attached to forearms sprouted from the fleshy
cavern floor, rotted to bone that was a bright and absolute white—far whiter
than any bone one might encounter in any real world. The hands were shrouded
in a haze of branching microtubular filaments—it was as if something had
rotted the flesh away with such peculiar precision as to leave the neural
matter intact.
The hands moved. They clutched and scrabbled at him, grabbing at him with a
cloying intimacy that seemed to slide around inside his head. Something hot
and clotted bursting in his
head
…
And he:
Screamed. Screamed so hard he thought his lungs might painlessly burst. And
from him came a Big Light—like a reflex-sting, a burst of white-hot plasma,
blasting the clutching hands away from him and burning them to nothing.
He:
For a moment he stood in the smoking crater of charred meat, staring ahead
dumbly. After a while he realised that he was holding his hands in front of
his face, realised what he was looking at: mirror-bright, his hands were, his
whole body was, as though sculpted from solid but nevertheless in some sense
fluid chrome.
The sense of cool air on his face.
The explosion of plasma that had come from him had ripped a hole in the
membrane-wall of the cavern. Bright light came from it, bright shapes moved
beyond.
Feet slipping in grease, crunching on the burned remains of clinging hands,
Eddie Kalish walked towards the rip.
“There you go. That’s a boy!”
Eddie Kalish opened a bleary eye to see something he had never seen before.
Well, he had, but the transformation of it was of such a nature that it left
the pattern-recognition areas of the mind temporarily wrong-footed.
When you thought of Trix Desoto, you thought of her in a comedy-nurse costume,
wounded, close to death—and about to turn into some diabolical monstrosity
from the very lowest reaches of Hell. If Hell actually existed, of course,
which of course it didn’t.
Looking at her sitting there, now, on the edge of the hospital bed, relaxed
and cheerful in an underwired patent-leather catsuit that would do wonders for
the self-esteem of any girl, and so on Trix Desoto contrived to be
spectacular, it took the mind a moment to adjust.
“Now, my advice to you,” said Trix Desoto,”would be to get the ‘what happened’
and ‘where am I’ out the way with the minimum of fuss. Everybody tries to find
a new way of saying it, and it never works.”
Eddie looked blearily around the room. Some part of him vaguely expected it to
be a sterile environment, white-tile walled and lit by harsh and buzzing
fluorescent tubes. Instead, it was just the kind of neat little room you might
find in an expensive private nursing home called Sunny Gables or the like.
Plaster walls and cornicing. Drapes over the window. Discreet little oil-pastel landscapes dotted around.
(And it would only be later, much later, that he would finally work out what
had been wrong with this. It was simply that the very idea of “A private
nursing home called Sunny Gables” would have never occurred to him in his real
life. It was simply not in his mental lexicon. Somebody, or something, must
have actively put it into his head.)
At the time, though, the room just seemed prosaic and comforting. This was
probably to offset the tangled horror of the items that were currently plugged
into him,
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