…He was a river of sound tumbling over rocks of pain; bloody scented noise as water, drowning a cursed and broken land in his unrepentant sorrow…

…The sun—no something much closer and more brightly white, flashed in his eyes—no, all around. He was rising from a river of corpses, each ripple a body, each bubble an angry ghost, every drop an avenging hand pulling him back in, back down to the Man Below. He had thought he was done fighting, and, paradoxically could not think now, not at all. He was utterly disconnected from the machinery of his brain, a brain that had oft failed him anyhow. He just felt the encroaching world, perceived the planet-sized organism that sought to extinguish this thing that had remained of him after his heart had beat its last…

…Pain—a memory of the searing pain, the pain of the breath that was ripped from him, blown from his failing lungs by her wicked kiss even as she rocked on him. He had a consciousness, though not a personal one—no ego. He could not even appreciate the irony of death at the hands of a female rapist, no less to die by her tongue and a set of lungs that could have powered a bellows in old Don Tinoco’s camp. Just as his automated reflections seemed to elevate him above the River of Damned Hands; above those that he had consigned to oblivion with arrow, bullet, blade, claw—no hand—no, clawww...and…and…fang, he began to fall back in.

They were now clutching at his legs—no, not legs, he had no legs! They were clawing with their broken mad hands at his soul, at him, at what remained. A river of mad vengeful hands passed the forlorn wisp that had been him down, and down, as they themselves floated to their final destination. Each and every soul of them was destined for the same hellish eternity. But, each soul must have its vengeance. As they passed him along a deep sucking coo accompanied his progress toward, toward the Black Pit, the place where the River of Damned Hands plunged beneath—the light?

He was no longer in such a state of remoteness; felt somehow a part of something that he did not want to be a part of again. Just as a weed pushes skyward through the remaining dirt of winter that nurtured it in a previous growing season, he sought ‘above’, anything but below. He began clawing without his claws, snarling without his slathering jaws, and howling without his bloody snout!

As he struggled he formed, and then felt, and soon savored the spark that had been extinguished within his old meat-puppet carcass. He snarled and snapped and slashed off the mad gripping hands with his powerful slashing jaws. As he neared the bank, scrambling over their many clutching hands, his forepaws grew into claws and he tore the rocky shale of the cruel wall-like bank with those great soul-consigning nails. At last, digging his rear dewclaw into the palm of some vengeful hand, he launched himself upon the cruel black-stone bank, a riverbank made of black rock, the rock that the meat-puppets burned when they shivered in their little hide-over-branch dens—and he howled triumphantly into the rising sun!

A fountain of red erupted before his eyes as pain indescribable ripped him from the Soul Place. His eyes felt like bursting as the metallic monstrosity of light hovered over him doing things inside of him with the automated whine and precision hiss of a resuscitation drone. Soon the fountain of blood—blood that was being replaced by some exterior pump—that was hosing down the drone stopped. The metallic soulless hands continued to work as his peripheral vision began to expand.

He was pinned to a graviton board, the invisible restraints that immobilized him, powered by the huge molten-iron rock-covered ball beneath them, which he could sense moving as it hurdled through space. He recalled then [a recollection that was far deeper than a memory] that his design was essentially lunar and that he had been retro-adapted and enhanced for terrestrial deep-retrievals—here, no in a gestation pod down the hall.

Her crackling voice then came to him, the voice of Moth—no, Doctor Wyeth, “That’s my Baby Boy. Welcome back Yule Alpha Seven. You might be my black sheep, but you can still think of me as your little Bow Peep.”

He could not talk—something was yanking on his tongue and moving his Adam’s apple around. He could here suturing in his chest and feel his lungs having air forced into them. Still—ah shoot my hand. That is way beyond pain, more than a feeling. Where is my hand?

You loped it off dummy, so they couldn’t call you into the past again; so you’d have no way back, and had to push forward and fight—fight this skanky genius bitch!

Like Cortez burning his ships behind him?

Not bad dummy. Death did a brain good. You’re not nearly as retarded as normal.

His peripheral vision had expanded and unclouded enough to take in the fact that three figures stood around him, and her voice came again, but not to him, “Nurse Gonzales, have the augmentation unit prepare the stump of the left forearm for bio-rack symbiosis.”

Cool, I’m getting a new hand!

Her thoughts then came into his mind as he was reminded that the gens that had created him, and those who had been generated to handle him, could perceive his thoughts and project their own into his mind, Not so soon my dear, bad, Baby Boy. You intended to kill me, your mother, over some squabble concerning what group of savage organics might scratch their inadequate brows pondering the meaning of life on the banks of the Ohio!

“Doctor Benson, pull up the archetype suite on the halo. Tap into the Mother Wolf Archetype for a full-spectrum debriefing from Sedation Alpha. Nurse Gonzales—we done?”

A sweet Latina voice chimed in, “Both lungs at ninety-seven Doc. Heart at a hundred—about two-hundred-and-fifty of normal—what a blood-pump! Ulna and radial marrow exposed—good to go.”

He felt a waterfall—no heard it—in the back of his mind, and his ears burned. A man’s voice then echoed in the barren stainless steel chamber, “Locked in Doctor; compliance feed and uplink—a go.”

The drone, with its empty glass face and artificial sun-like heart, retracted into the ceiling and the three pencil-necked twerps who were his collective mother—well, not Gonzales, she was new; it had been a fat Eskimo chick before—looked down into his immobilized face. Doctor Wyeth had stringy gray hair, a pug nose, and a pointy chin—no tits at all. Benson was a tall narrow-shouldered pear-hipped queer that should have had a lisp but sounded like a gunny sergeant. Gonzales was a scrawny chick who had hopefully been blessed with the standard Puerto Rican butt, because she was not much to look at.

As they stood over him, around his head restraint, Doctor Wyeth appeared upside down with Benson on the left and Gonzales on the right. Benson spoke first, “Look at the mug on this guy. He was a hunk when we matured him in the extrapolation matrix. What happened to him?”

Doctor Wyeth was all business. “Hence the need for a full spectrum debriefing. I am sure you will ace it Benny.”

Gonzales seemed put off. “What does he do back there Doctor? I mean, who would not run as soon as they saw this guy? He scares me.”

Benson laughed and Wyeth consoled her, “Gonzi, you asked me to get you out of Children’s Entertainment. I understand the burnout that comes with design work, and I respected your request to stay out of Military Generation and Prostitution Augmentation. But Gonzi, the World is ‘The World’, and that doesn’t leave much. This piece, as beat up as it is, was my masterpiece—got me the Nobel nomination for Mothercorp. Sure, he doesn’t look like much from this perspective. But I think you will have a more appreciative view of Yule here after his debriefing. Just, just, stay away from the incisors sweetheart. His Contingency Cannibalism Protocol apparently malfunctioned back in the Twenty-first Century.”

Benson chuckled while Gonzales let out a repressed squeak of horror and said with a sulking tone, “Could we cover up his genitals please. It’s, it—”

Benson cut her off cruelly. “It’s been recalled; sending it back to reclamation. The Executive V.P. of Hegiland Securities wants a new boyfriend, and this model has been discontinued for three cycles; worth fourteen-million credits. We’ll slap something standard on this meathead, that won’t do so much to disturb your lesbian equilibrium.”

What! You freaking junk pirates!

Doctor Wyeth’s voice was a cool hiss, “Somebody is listening in there! Doctor, take us to Sedation Omega for a moment. Nurse, look at this hypothalamic response. This is why I brought you over from the Theme Park division. Look at that Baby Girl: positively crocodilian! There has been trouble though with his personality attachment processing—a bit more than we…”

He trotted across the naked land. There was, as of yet, no grass on which his prey might feed, no trees under which they might hide. His snout was moist and his spine tingled just below his thick sloped skull, as if from the understanding stroke of the paw of some great beast in the sky above. Mountains rose sheer in the distance offering little. But closer, down below the rolling swells of melted rock that threatened to bruise and scuff his paws, he saw it: the river, choked with mud scoured from the distant mountains. That mud represented his future; something for the bitter plants to take root in, the plants that would feed the prey that would feed him with their sweet yielding flesh. In the meantime there must be another such as him. Would it be a mate he could couple with, or a rival he might tear to shreds and eat into the long nightless day while he waited for the herds, for his prey?

Off in the distance, below the far riverbank, far away under the star-specked winter sky, he saw her there. She rose beautifully above the distant swell of the horizon. She dominated the star-specked sky lit faintly as it was by a sun that had yet to rise—or would it ever? He sat back on his haunches and watched her rise, the great all-knowing eye. At last, just below the peak of the starry vault, where suns past had hovered to torture him with thirst, she stopped.

He sat expectantly, waiting for Mother’s all-seeing eye to rise above the arc of the sky, to cause him to turn and regard her over his shoulder. She did not rise. Rather she gave birth to others, others of his kind, but lesser. They issued from her womb and loped across the sky as he had across the land. Their long easy strides took them ever earthward, until they were running toward the far bank of the river. Then they plunged in and swam it. Their snouts above the water, they eyed him from afar, intent on joining with him, of forming his pack.

They soon emerged from the muddy river water. As they did so the banks became mud and the river ran foamy and clear. As they trotted up the muddy bank the barren land grew plush, herds grazing in the distance, and trees bunched into thickets between them. On they came, trotting, panting, seeking his company as Mother’s great all-seeing eye began to fall toward the far horizon, to sink behind the hurdling world. They were soon about him, sniffing and nuzzling and submitting to his snarls. But in the distance there was something troubling, something unnatural, some evil from the Other Hunt he had lived. He knew instantly, without the need to sniff the breeze, that that evil was meat-puppets striking up their smoky fires.

They turned as one and followed his gaze, to fix their clear blue-gray eyes on the wisp of smoke behind him in the distance, from that quarter of the barren world whence he had come. They looked at him expectantly. When he caught the scent of uncertainty from the small dusky-furred female he felt his penis unsheathe. She whined in fear and cowered, so he decided to put off mounting her until night—whenever night fell in this land. The tall pale male then snarled a query, wondering what he, their pack-leader, remembered of meat-puppets past; what he recalled of his long lonely hunt that had occurred somehow at once upriver and downstream, downwind yet behind them, despite the breeze that ruffled the bristles on his snout.

He turned to snarl dominantly at the lesser male, who questioned him so. The lesser male seemed to whine, How did they flee? Where did they hide? How did you feast so greedily? And, mighty pack-leader, how did they taste!

A memory of a hunt, until this moment unremembered, struck him from paw to snout and he howled triumphantly to Mother, even as she sunk behind the spinning World.

This concludes the online postings for Cities of Dust.

Seven Moons Deep, the next book of the Sunset Saga, will begin posting as an online serial this coming December.

If you would like to continue with God’s Picture Maker, make my lovely niece’s day, and order a copy via this link.