Lordosis

Having failed to write anything “proper” I thought I’d try to join in on the “something, anything” front, and post something I’d scribbled in my notebook a week or so ago, but abandoned. It was supposed to be SF, but evidence suggests I still can’t write SF. For lack of rulers, I’ll do the 1,2,3 thing.

1. He watched the waves silently break as the scorpion approached him from behind. He closed his eyes and hung his head silently mouthing a prayer. As each of its limbs fully embraced him, he let the air be squeezed from his body. He felt the smooth edge of its stinging point run the length of his back, and briefly withdraw in preparation. He flexed his body in lordotic anticipation.

Shattering, then silence.

2. They wre not of the species of secret police who wear trenchcoats and shades in Hollywood films; they failed to arrive in high-powered cars with blackened windows. Most were unshaven, unclean, soiled: one even arrived on the bus. They had no mastery of technology, nor bureaucracy. They were state blackmailers and government pimps, confidence tricksters and white-market racketeers. The operation, such as it was, had the air of a gangster’s daytrip to the seaside, turned brutally violent with booze and sun.

Two middle-aged agents, some muscle perhaps given way to fat, broke down the door of the pavilion, and stumbled inside. The director’s sun lay face-down on the floor, as the Atlantic ocean battered at the large, curved window. The boy, 21, perhaps 24, twitched, sometimes with violence, as toxins pulsed through his body. The wound in his back frothed unnaturally with a scummy white fluid, bloodless and clean.

A secret policeman rolled the boy onto his front with his boot: “He’ll be fine”.

3. “People have been killed for less: taken to the woods and shot. I bet there are few who have let themselves be stung who aren’t now at least building roads in the desert”

“It’s best not to think these things through”.

The doctors whispered in a tiny dispensing alcove at the end of the ward.

“My father has never liked doctors” shouted the boy, now sitting brightly against plump, white hospital pillows. “Always skulking in corners”

He spoke with good humour, but the doctors immediately separated and walked purposefully away, one this way, one that, like sentries parting at a gate.

“They’re rounding up the scorpion men, you know! Shipping them off to reservations in the outer planets.” The patient opposite was spoiling for a fight: he smiled over to the boy a broad, sarcastic smile. “But I suppose you knew that already”. The impossibly old man raised his eyebrows and bit his bottom lip. He demanded a response.

“And what exactly do you know about the scorpions?” asked the boy.

“Well, I’ll admit that I’m not on as personal terms as some people hereabouts, but a General sees enough as he goes about his vocation.”

The boy removed his earphones, and threw them onto his bed in frustration. “Regiment?” he barked.

The old, crumpled man laughed. “What’s daddy going to do? Put me out of my misery with a bullet? Better treatment than any of us get from these quacks.”

A nurse arrived with a sedative for the boy, who waved her to place the tiny plastic cup on his bedside table.

“You’re no General” he laughed, at last, after an extended period of brooding. “Generals are amongst the best rewarded people in our country. And I can see that your locker is empty”.

4. “This man does not earn his living operating this machine”

“Director?”

“I have seen people who work machines all day: traitors, counter-revolutionaries, whatever degeneracy, still they can work them. They … they know them. Inside their head is …. This man here, he is imitating affection to this machine, he is an actor, a stranger”.

“He is a hero of the empire, director. He is here to be awarded a senior honour by our glorious president.”

“Not him! Not this man. Stop this charade! Cut the power! Sort it out, root out the cancer. Unravel things. Apply surgery. You know what to do.”

The director and his deputy left the laboratory as secret policemen flooded in, and took the situation in hand.

“Tell me about my son”, the director asked the deputy calmly.

“He will recover, director. Be as healthy as ever. He is already causing trouble in the hospital; nothing serious”.

“Don’t let him off too lightly. For every action there must be an equal and …”, he tails off. “He hates me I think”.

“Oh no, director.”

“Well he bloody well should! I sure as hell hated my father when I was his age. I was marching on the old regime’s palace when I was only a few years older than my son. This scorpion thing, he hates me I think: becoming a deviant; the lowest thing he could do. He must hate me, and all this”. He gestured broadly. The director paused, and spoke more softly before the two middle-aged men in poorly-tailored suits resumed their walk along the dull, brown corridor.

“How are the reassignments going?”

“According to schedule, director. Most of the northern sea-board is scorpion-free. Ships depart for the off-world colonies four times a day. We’re even finding planets not so immediately lethal to the scorpions. Mainly a house-to-house operation, going through the streets, the postcodes.”

The two men reached the glass-panelled entrance to The Palace of the People. “Keep me informed, Amon”. He nodded and headed along another corridor leading from reception, as the director left the building.

5. The boy opened the door of the small dilapidated flat to see his scorpion before him, standing in the street, in broad daylight. Angrily, and nervously he invited it into his rooms, checking along the street, side-to-side before he closed the door. The scorpion started clicking and screaming at him inside his front room.

“Quiet!” the boy spat, in an angry whisper, “quiet!”, but the scorpion continued to squeal. “I don’t have a translator box. Hey, look, no translator! Fuck! Where can I get a translator around here?”

The boy put on a shirt whilst nodding to himself as he anxiously considered options. He walked to the front door. “Wait here! Quietly!”

They asked for ID at the counter: “only available for law enforcement”. He always enjoyed being asked for ID. The delayed reaction was what clinched it.

Back home, he pointed the translator in the scorpion’s direction, as if waving a Geiger counter at radioactive cargo. Finally it interpreted his clicks and screams.

“I do not understand you” came the tinny, robotic voice of the translator. The boy thought the translator faulty, or the scorpion’s dialect too strong: he hit it against the wall. But again it translated, “I do not understand who you are. Your identity is a mysterious object to me”.

“For love of the goddess!” He threw the translator into a corner of the room near the fireplace, where it burst open and its circuits were eviscerated. The boy opened the door, grabbed the scorpion by its tail, and dragged it screaming through the startled streets.

6. Next to the ministry is a mall, where secret service agents buy camping supplies and extra socks, for their weekends away with their families; buy quarts of milk and specialist cheeses; and flowers when late from the office. A few years earlier there were explosions, gas leaks it was said, after which security was immeasurably tighter. With almost every shopper working for the ministry, the extra cameras, barriers and control points seemed almost to be homely reminders to their occupations.

In the central hall, a glass lift rose from the basement levels, revealing a boy dragging a scorpion man by its tail: heresy inside the inner temple. The scorpion shouted as if on fire, in uninterpreted cascades of screams and clicks. Spooks acted as they were trained to: they went about their business as if nothing were amiss. The boy reentered the elevator, leaving the scorpion in the mall. As the doors closed, he shouted “Now you know who I am”.

The boy returned some few hours later to buy a slush puppy from a barrow-stall, and there was no sign of the scorpion.

7. No longer a boy, he stood at the pram-stop on the promenade. After the other species had been dealt with, the regime had reduced in ferocity; the secret police cut back. His father, the first to leave the post of director alive, would retire shortly from a directorship of the state-owned nuclear fuel reprocessing corporation. His son, the man who was once a boy, sold air-conditioning to hotels. He had had a successful day of customer meetings. Atlantic salt added a bite to the autumnal air as he gazed at the rusting bandstands of the promenade.

After a time waiting calmly on the platform, the middle-aged man thought he heard music on the wind, a brass band perhaps. But he couldn’t place its direction, nor name the tune, which he was sure he knew well. Looking over at the old bandstands, the lack of any evidence of a band disturbed him, and he agitatedly looked in all directions. The music grew louder, more dissonant, more familiar, closer, is if from inside his head.

The tram approached just as a rolling nausea took hold in his belly. He turned to face the tram as it approached the platform. There was a disturbing, indescribably property of the shape of the cab: its sharp, pointed nose, its round blank lights. High above the carriage, a pantograph bent to an easy tip where it met the overhead wire with a spark, an immeasurably poignant, beautiful spark.

His stomach filled with a substance as unpalatable as sea-water, but much, much heavier, and his body tumbled forwards, like a diver from a board, to the ground beneath the wheels of his tram.