Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Read online

  VISIONS OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST

  Robert Frazier

  Bruce Boston

  Crystal Lake Publishing

  www.CrystalLakePub.com

  Stories in this collection first appeared in Amazing Stories, Asimov’s SF Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction. “Going Green in the Mutant Rain Forest” and “The Tale Within” appear here for the first time.

  Poems in this collection have appeared in Amazing Stories, Asimov’s SF Magazine, Chizine, Dreams and Nightmares, Illumen, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Masques III (St. Martin’s), Nova SF, Omni, Outposts of Beyond, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Tropical Chills (Avon), Weird Tales, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s), and Year’s Best Horror (Daw).

  The following poems appear here for the first time: “Deserted Altars in the Mutant Rain Forest,” “Ghost Devils Deep in the Mutant Rain Forest,” “Mycelium Valley,” “The Rain that Falls in the Mutant Rain Forest,” and “The Reach of the Mutant Rain Forest.”

  Crystal Lake Publishing

  www.CrystallakePub.com

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  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition

  Copyright: © 2017 Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston

  Interior Illustrations: Copyright © 2017 Luke Spooner

  Cover Art: Fotolia.com, rendered by Bruce Boston

  Cover Design: Ben Baldwin

  Ebook Layout: Lori Michelle

  www.theauthorsalley.com

  Proofread by: Guy Medley, Tere Fredericks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  OTHER TITLES BY . . .

  Robert Frazier

  Phantom Navigation

  The Daily Chernobyl and Other Poems

  Perception Barriers

  Nantucket Slayrides (with Lucius Shepard)

  Co-Orbital Moons

  Invisible Machines (with Andrew Joron)

  Bruce Boston

  Brief Encounters with My Third Eye

  Sacrificial Nights (with Alessandro Manzetti)

  Resonance Dark and Light

  Dark Roads

  The Guardener’s Tale

  Stained Glass Rain

  Crystal Lake Publishing

  Eden Underground by Alessandro Manzetti

  Tales from The Lake Vol.3 edited by Monique Snyman

  Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories edited by Doug Murano and D. Alexander Ward

  Tribulations by Richard Thomas

  Devourer of Souls by Kevin Lucia

  Wind Chill by Patrick Rutigliano

  Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast by Jonathan Winn

  Flowers in a Dumpster by Mark Allan Gunnells

  The Dark at the End of the Tunnel by Taylor Grant

  Check out other Crystal Lake Publishing books for Tales from The Darkest Depths.

  CONTENTS

  FICTION

  Cruising Through Blueland

  Holos at an Exhibition of the Mutant Rain Forest

  The Tale Within

  A Trader on the Border of the Mutant Rain Forest

  Going Green in the Mutant Rain Forest

  Descent into Eden

  Aerial Reconnaissance of a Conflagration . . .

  Surrounded by the Mutant Rain Forest

  POETRY

  Prelude

  A Cautionary Note to Travelers . . .

  Three Evocations of the Mutant Rain Forest

  Tracking through the Mutant Rain Forest

  Night Fishing on the Caribbean Littoral

  Nights with Genna’s Field Journals

  The Rain that Falls in the Mutant Rain Forest

  Meteorological Reckoning in the Mutant Rain Forest

  A Decadent Romantic Afflicted . . .

  Luminous Decay

  Ghost Devils Deep in the Mutant Rain Forest

  Mycelium Valley

  Seduced by the Mutant Rain Forest

  The Pavonine Addict Speaks

  A Gourmand of the Mutant Rain Forest

  Rio Dos Mutantes

  Mutant Illumination

  Stigmata

  Summer in a World of Two Seasons

  Winter in a World of Two Seasons

  Return to the Mutant Rain Forest

  A Missionary of the Mutant Rain Forest

  Phantom Limb

  The Reach of the Mutant Rain Forest

  Children of the Mutant Rain Forest

  Genna Takes a Lover

  Flower Gardening in the Mutant Rain Forest

  After Things Fall Apart

  Consumed by the Sentience . . .

  The Mutant Rain Forest Meets the Sea

  A Compass for the Mutant Rain Forest

  The Music of the Mutant Rain Forest

  It’s Okay to Listen to the Green Voice

  Confirmed by the Mutant Rain Forest

  Bromeliad Brain

  Deserted Altars in the Mutant Rain Forest

  Das Sensible Chaos

  Death of a Dome City

  The Mutant Forests of Mars

  Contributors

  GENESIS

  CRUISING THROUGH BLUELAND

  Robert Frazier

  In the dry season of a feverish year, when the earth baked throughout the Brazilian Shield, Jeri Cristobel sensed a change of climate, and like any gold miner who lived on rations of fear and superstition, he assumed that with it would come personal tragedy.

  It seemed impossible to shrug off the smell of impending rain and concentrate on shouldering his dirt bags out of the pit to the placer troughs on the rim above. He rested atop each box-like plot busy with Serra Pelada’s workers. Taking extra care, he climbed the tall ladders that clung against the walls like vines from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and he made comparisons between the pride and sin and avarice of that biblical city and life at the mine, although Serra Pelada was devoid of details like vegetation or carved stone. Just dirt and men. It reminded Jeri of a movie scene in which army ants had stripped a vat of beet sugar. The key element was motion . . . the dirt was shoveled into sacks, which in turn shifted to men’s backs, who themselves moved up and down the crudely lashed ladders like beads on an abacus rack. Since the plots were so small, with their digging levels uneven, miners in the deepest recesses needed to move their loads in elaborate patterns that altered each day. The walls resembled a map of writhing flesh. And all of it at dusk on Saturday, including the dust-laden air, turned an eerie blood-red as Jeri quit work for the week.

  ***

  It was pitch dark when Skaff Rios found Jeri nursing a warm glass of rum in town at the Plaza of Lies. After introductions, they discussed the quick onset of the rainy season and speculated if it, indeed, were an omen. Then the man produced a letter with news of the sickness that gripped Jeri’s brother. Jeri’s apprehensions found an immediate focus. He made his decision to return home, and notified the administrators that he was abandoning his plot deep in the pit, which, as several friends had pointed out, would soon be submerged by torrential downpours. He packed what mattered to him in a single duffle and squeezed it and his long limbs into Skaff’s CJ
-7, a rusty antique punctured with as much air as the man’s personality.

  Skaff looked soft under his blue suit, with manicured nails and scented oil on his jet-black hair; the physical opposite of Jeri, who had turned gaunt and deeply-tanned in the mine pit, worry lines grooving his face. At first, Skaff drove in resolute silence, enduring two days of violent showers and roach hotels, before he grew talkative, almost brotherly in tone—about his adventures as a drug smuggler. The big scores and expensive whores. His investments. His bribes to Blueboy soldiers in San Juan de Caceres. Jeri considered Skaff useful for entering Caceres, now capitol of the restricted zone of war games called Blueland, so he feigned interest in such talk. In his head, though, another voice mourned for the close fraternal ties his true brothers had shared, ties that the Blueboys had shattered. This infused his replies with bitterness. By the time they passed into the new affluence of the Mato Grosso, Jeri felt weak as a man twice his age, yet he sensed that the grueling ride had less impact on him than the inescapable conclusion that people like Skaff preferred their lives to be fractioned to a single elemental value . . . like greed.

  Had he done any better by leaving Caceres for the gold mines? He liked to think so, liked to think the support he’d paid for his brother Eric kept the scales in balance.

  The wet weather cleared on the third evening of travel, yet strips of cloud sailed across the moon and divided its light into swatches of silver and lagoons of shadow that threatened to swallow the jeep, to offer as dark a resolution to the journey south as the one Jeri feared awaited him at its end. The jeep dropped axle-deep in a mud hole. Skaff swore, wrenching the wheel to avoid the deep center. Jeri’s gut fluttered with nausea. Hurled against his door, gulping for air, he almost regretted his acceptance of Skaff’s ride from the working hell in the mines to the living horrors of Blueland.

  ***

  Eric Cristobel slept spread-eagled in an underground level of the Jiboa Hotel, pinioned to his bare mattress. Underwear soaked and sheets balled on the wooden floor beside him. Sweat beaded under his dark bangs. He flowed in and out of consciousness like a wave breaking then receding on a ghostly shore, and though he tried to raise himself up, his movements were sluggish, ineffective. He tried again and jerked upright, contracting his stomach to get his torso sitting straight.

  Muscles refused to relax. He felt like shit.

  He wanted to imagine something beautiful, someone uplifting. He wondered where his brother Jeri lived, what exotic lands he traveled to. But this didn’t matter, not really.

  It felt like he was still dreaming, and he did not believe he would ever awaken.

  ***

  The road smoothed out along a recently logged ridge, and Jeri could see flashes fifty kilometers to the south. He shuddered as he pointed at the storm gathering there.

  “That’s malo,” he yelled to Skaff over the whine of the engine. “A mean squall.”

  It looked to Jeri as if they had plunged into the barrel of an immense artillery piece, where the thunderheads, held to a horizontal axis by strange meteorological forces, formed a corkscrew spiral, and lightning danced through its dark eye like threads of current jumping inside a supercharged coil.

  “Yeah. I bet it’s close to the city,” Skaff said.

  Jeri grunted in reply. He stared at the blue forks of light and wondered how he could have left his brother there. Blueland, a place where weapons like these were tested.

  A stiff wind gusted through the jeep. Skaff waved a fleshy fist at the storm and beat the dash to a tune that crackled on the radio. The samba was loud and plaintive, and it seemed to Jeri that it was the music that tossed Skaff’s greasy black curls and lashed them about his jowls and sunken eyes. Huge rain drops drummed on the windshield, leaked through from the roof. They rolled their windows up, and Jeri arranged his poncho around the neck of his shirt and under his chinos until it covered all but his face. As Skaff maneuvered on the rutted highway, the headlights stabbed high and low through the roadside homesteads and shadowy tunnels in the forest ahead like the brush strokes of a painter filling a dark canvas. Billowing clouds obscured a pewter grey moon. The discharges flashed brighter.

  “It’s the Blueboys,” Jeri said after a few more kilometers. “Playing for the hell of it. I’ve seen them tie tornadoes in knots.”

  Skaff nodded, but Jeri knew that he was still intent on the radio and didn’t see what Jeri saw when they looked into the tempest. Skaff concerned himself with the high life, with running drugs into Blueland. He hadn’t been born there. Skaff’s older brother hadn’t been pancaked under a building when the Blueboys caused heavy rain: percipitant sheets made heavy with isotopes. And his younger brother wasn’t trapped in Caceres now, confined to a sickbed. Jeri wondered what he would think of Eric, how Skaff would react to such a destitute soul.

  “Fucking Blueboys.” Jeri spat with vehemence. “Caceres was beautiful until they came.”

  Jeri imagined packets of Skaff’s drugs strapped somewhere under the jeep, and this paranoia heightened his agitation, as if the coke radiated homing signals that could attract every Blueboy in the territory. He swallowed hard. When the jeep hit a series of deep potholes, he grasped the armrest until his knuckles whitened.

  “Yeah, places like Caceres go sour.” Skaff rolled his window down as the rain abated some, and he brushed the water off his suit coat. “Damn this mugginess. Makes your balls cook.”

  He turned to Jeri with a toothy grin, but Jeri refused to smile back. Just nodded and pulled at his new growth of beard.

  “Yup,” Skaff continued. “I’m hot, and I’m almost home to Carlita!” He grabbed his crotch and let out a sarcastic laugh that was drowned in a sudden riff of static from the radio.

  As they exited a funnel of trees onto another open stretch of hilltop, the jeep spooked a menagerie of birds that flapped about the windshield and winked out of the headlights, their existence reduced to absolutes, either in bright blurs or blackened smudges. Jeri recognized none of the species. A pterodactyl-like flyer lifted above them; Skaff braked and came to a bone-jolting halt. Meters from the steaming grill of the jeep stood the biggest wolf Jeri had ever seen, an Amazonian maned wolf of incredible proportions. Two more wolves loped up beside the first and held their ground in the bright headlights, pawing the dirt. They stood taller than draft horses, with bat ears and madder-colored hair bristling in a collar of fire about their heads. Their slick bodies seemed bound in place, sinews rooted in the soil, and they inched forward, their long tapered noses to the ground, night-reflective eyes flashing golden as coins.

  Skaff babbled and gunned the accelerator, but the engine cut out. In the pale half light from the dashboard, Jeri saw a blue arm as it snaked away from the steering column. He looked past Skaff’s scared profile, glimpsed the face of a Blueboy in a combat suit and a visorless helmet molded like brain coral. The wolves vanished, holographic projections that melted to fog. The trooper held up Skaff’s keys.

  “Real glad ya stopped by,” the Blueboy said. His voice sounded no louder than a whisper, yet its coarse English sonics made an incision in Jeri’s brain, worming its way inside. “Leave yer lights on. We’ll be needin’ to see papers on yer business in the region.”

  Skaff reached for the wallet in his coat. Aware that the Blueboys might take undue liberties in their inspection if he remained passive inside, Jeri opened his door and stepped down to the mud road on wobbly legs.

  “We live here,” he said, but could say no more.

  The trooper moved to the passenger side of the jeep with impossible speed, and held Jeri under the chin, pinned him against the hood. Jeri began to struggle yet thought better of his heroics when the Blueboy applied pressure. He slid his hand behind him, hoping to reach his own ID card, but the trooper interpreted this as a hostile move and lifted him off his feet, smacked his head hard against the windshield. Jeri felt a ridge of coarse, synthetic skin cut off his wind pipe.

  “Stop it,” Jeri gasped.

  “Ya ain’t in
no position to tell me nothin’. Some rebel’s been takin’ shots at us. And we’d just as soon torch this junker. Watch ya boil like crawdaddies.”

  “Listen here!” Skaff said from inside the cab.

  “Oh, I am. And I don’t like what I hear. Ya took the wrong road tonight.”

  “Got trouble, Trigger?” The new voice spoke with a smoother North American accent. “If not, then ease up.”

  The trooper released him, and Jeri slipped off the hood to his knees in a puddle. He coughed and rubbed at his chaffed neck. His stomach spasmed and he tasted bile, imagining it to be an emotion he’d built up over the years from this kind of treatment.

  “Who is this?” asked the voice.

  Jeri said as he stood, “I wasn’t allowed to show my . . . ”

  The soldier throttled him again. “Ya don’t talk to General Berkey unless spoken to.”

  “Trigger, let him loose.”

  General Berkey stepped from the shadows behind Trigger and covered the distance to them in two power-augmented strides. She was dressed in light battle armor with an officer’s pentagram insignia, and she smiled, revealing a mouthful of shark’s teeth inlayed in gold settings. Her lapis exoskin failed to mask the delicate structure of her face. The features were striking, and a dragon tattoo twined from her bare scalp around one eye. She reached out her empty hand. Baffled, Jeri stared at the burn scars that trailed along the lengths of her graceful fingers. Plastic nails retracted under flexible exoskin cuticles and left their hollow points showing. Instead of a thumbnail, a tiny video screen held a view of Skaff’s jeep from a camera above and beside them. She cleared her throat. Jeri understood then and handed her his wallet.

  The Blueboy leader flashed him a quizzical look when she read his ID, then strode off punching numbers on a row of pinpoint keys below the screen on her thumb. She returned after ten minutes of consultation, her face changed, as if to say, “I know who you are, Mr. Cristobel.”

  ***

  Eric awoke from yet another nap. Eyes fixed on the wall beyond the end of his bed.

  Wallpaper began to breathe, to melt, its patterns of hibiscus flowers fusing into a large reddish blotch about five feet off the floor. Something pushed through the center of the blotch, and the wall stretched out taut and rubbery on the knobby protrusion. At first it appeared smooth, without detail, but the more Eric stared at the knob, the more it resembled a fist with four parallel fingers meeting at a bony row of knuckles. And as his full attention centered on this, a blue hand punched through the red stain and groped for the end of the mattress.