Susurrus on Mars Read online

  Table of Contents

  SUSURRUS ON MARS | Hal Duncan

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  Copyright

  •

  BAREFOOT, TRIMMED IN pirate slops of: white linen britches to his knees; doublet unbuttoned to air his carnelian chest; red Monmouth cap of Phrygians, French or Phobian revolutionaries. Master Jaq of the Flaxblond Scruff, Esquire, scrambles a rope ladder of hemp and hardwood, brigantine rigging between an English Oak and Silver Linden grown from grafts of Robin Hood’s own secret GHQ and the very tree Carl’s father Nils sucked his teeth at as he frowned out over his Swedish homestead, searching for a family name to replace the patronymic Ingemarsson on his admission to the University of Lund, settling on the lind tree, settling on von Linné, which his son Carl would AKA to Linnæus. And now here they are, far elsewhen and elsewhere, oak and linden, two tree trunk masts grown centuries into each other’s canopies.

  Satchel slung over his shoulder jouncing, Jaq scrambles up through thickening leaf scent and rustle to a crow’s nest cabin treehouse, ramshackle perch looking south, past a prow jut of basalt fo’c’sle, over a meadow of perennial ryegrass, leftover of ley farming, over his sward Sargasso rolling down to shores of copse, far hedgerowed fields and hills beyond his acre, the woods and glints of the Rio Erehwyreve beyonder, and beyonder even, the snowy peak of Euripus Mons, ten miles to the south.

  The sky is blue and broad as the summer’s span unfolding before him.

  Latitude minus forty five degrees of arc, longitude one hundred four, Jaq sites himself by the sun and the fob, golden shirt-stud and silver scythe in the sky respectively, the latter a shattered scattered moon, it tickles him to know, Phobos of his forefathers. Two hundred miles inland east of the Hellas. Two twenty seven pee em on Saturday, first of Resh, six seventeen New Common Era. Sails set out of five sharpish months of spring, months short in stint, skin-tight in span, but ever so keen in shift. Sails set out of certainty.

  •

  PUK’S VOICE, FROM inside:

  Thirty one days in Alef, Daleth, Zayin, Yod and Mem.

  Thirty one days in Ayin too and Qof and Tav, and then?

  All of the rest have thirty days, but one year every five

  There’s three more days for us all to play

  Cause the leapfest has arrived.

  A wean’s rhyme made for the questioning years afore enabling that Jaq can scarce imagine now let alone mind, whole other eon of infancy poldered by touchscreens and tutor interfaces, not just knowing that the Martian year has twenty-two months, fourteen of thirty days and eight of thirty-one, evenly waltz-stepped but for the bookend finish and start months nestling side by side in the clasp of the cycle, six hundred and sixty eight days in total each year, with a three day leapfest every fifth year, which Jaq discovered was fun for a three year old, all parades and pageantry weaving through the Old Town at the height of summer, straining to see the peacock-pinioned hussars on their quaggas till his Papa hoiked him to his shoulders—discovered was even more fun for an eight year old in the evenfall stretching to midnight bonfires on the braes out of town, getting moroculous on home-made poitín, mangled on mushrooms with Joi, Shim and Don, high wasters of adolescent abandon draped in glass beads won by feats of audaciously sordid stancing, Shim flashing tits, Jaq fluffing tarse, and more, lying on their backs in the grass after it all, scented with each other’s sweat, looking up at the stars and the fob, the luster of necklace worn by Mars himself sparkling in the indigo for eyes widened by psilocybin.

  His PAN not long enabled, he ran his fingertips through the grass and babbled the wonders gushing up from the hylenet, theories of hunter-gatherer evolution sparked by entheogenic use as rendered in the mesolithic rock art of the Tassili n’Ajjer, rituals in Mesoamerica and recreation in pre-Interregnum Xanthe, the chemical structure of 4-hydroxyl-methyltryptamine, the looping and lolloping of sense rendering the shift of time as palpable as it could ever be to the human mind, the span of it too, mass being energy coiled, energy being time—extent, action and potential rearticulable as axes of six dimensional timespace, events as topologies, every force a form, every form a force.

  He can scarce clench in his nous now how it was before, let alone savvy how Puk must feel, newly-enabled to hylenet access and extra-shook surely, raised with the whole interworld an infernal Sodom decried by his Geister kith—barring the geisted parents and sis Ana who brought her sixer bro here for the sanity. The rhyme, Jaq tracks, sprung from a call via his matelot’s PAN, natürlich, the immigrant simply savouring access to a childhood he never had on Earth where everyone is always already twice as old as they are really.

  Wild to think.

  Jaq unslings the satchel from his shoulder as his barefeet slap planks warmed by the sun, the treehouse true Tarzanian, upturned claws of oak and linden branches cradling a rough hut with railed Widow’s Walk all round, achieved by: the pack will of four refuseniks of practicality; a truly glassy carpentry interface sourced by Shim, gleaning the surfeit of interworld to a honed how-to; a nod of Sifu Renart at his new prentice-cum-project Jaq’s keen pleas of could they could they could they build in the stead’s outback and could he cannibalise detritus needing cleared from neath the rooms anyways, an amused for sure; the providence of a gravity forgiving craftsmanship of a slapdash sort Puk baulked at on first wary glance, quipped at, daggering Jaq’s pride to a huff.

  Apologies, remonstrations followed, and forgiveness, keen-shifting weeks of friendship.

  Yesterday he shanghaied the lad. It was a natural progression.

  •

  WHY NOT? SAYS Jaq.

  Because, says Joi.

  Jaq flicks a browned shrivel of apple core off a bollard into the river, gives a petulant fuff. Don and Shim are strolled on ahead down the Left Bank esplanade, talking of Carthage, Hiroshima, Tempe, oblivious in the throng of tourists and hawkers, Shim passing one of the beers for the sauna to Don.

  The cadres met up after a visit home as brief as Jaq could keep it, dutiful son checking in on Maman and Papa Cartier, answering phatic interrogations with sheepish assurances that, yes, all was Bristol fashion with Sifu Renart, more stanced down on his haunches though, to the scruffle of Diogenes’s tummy, as the dog, no doubt, meted only fair. The honour of his presence, as his Maman hies it wryly, lasted all of half an hour before the scarper to hook up with his cohort, meeting Shim and Don in the Old Town, Joi at the docks just back off the barque his old man had him slogging all spring on. Jaq knew Shim and Don would be cliqued, but was hoping Joi would have a hanker on for after the beery steam and plunge pool, bored to blissom from his stint away. They could hit the Jardins Rochester, the Libertine Meadow where anything goes. Knew he was pipe-dreaming—saved as a geist, said Shim, shaking her head—but still... it’s a scunner.

  At ease with his kinsey of two-going-on-three in adolescent flex, Jaq spent last summer fankled with Don and Shim in the quilted snug of the treehouse, the blood cadres, even Joi for some of it, a tangle of limbs and lips, exploring quirks of yen and trigger. Each already, of course, a wide-minded polymath of tumblespace cocks and cunnies, boobs and butts, erudite in the razzmatazz of show-off peers and hoary old freaks casting fetishes to goggle young lewdsters, make them kench and retch. Jaq a caster himself indeed, of some ambit indeed, followed in Xanthe, Kasei, Tempe, all over. Been teasing the touchscreen walls since he could.

  So, hardly ingénues letting the interworld inside for the first, dancing in the carnival for the first. But. Debuting fleshwise, versing each other in the fondle, not just vision, of girth and gape, hood and nubbin. Best was the sandwich, Jaq in the middle, crushed and exploding, fucke
r of Shim, fuckee of Don—lavish maybe, but basking in other’s regard is his craft, his vocation. Hence his prenticing to Renart; a pataphysician needs the skill of brazenry in any project, and Jaq is nothing if not brass.

  Only... Don and Shim are swans for each other these days, and Joi has no hanker at all, refuses point-blank to tweak himself even for the propriety of ludic empiricism. And Jaq’s hanker is well stoked.

  It’s the scientific method, says Jaq, theory and experiment. We could be proving each other right now.

  No, says Joi.

  Why not?

  Because.

  Because why?

  It’s as Joi rolls his deadlights to the skies that Jaq’s sigh turns his doldrum gaze to clock two arrivals daunering off the Gunnison Pier, skirted by Don and Shim who disappear behind these dazed exotics, her and him in startle of synthe filligree trews and jerkins unbuttoned, hight Ana and Puk Massinger on the New Davenport barque’s manifest, embarked at Gunnison Airport, hailing from Tempe afore, from Earth afore that, as if the Geister garb weren’t advert of such; she’s a freelance academic, pataphysicist on contract at Erehwyna’s Hovendaal Institute; he’s her kid brother emancipated to her custody after—

  Jaq clocks the note of his query’s dint on the brother’s face, the turn of eyes afluster at casual gandering, savvies sharp that it’s a jostle for the Earther more than any milling of Erehwyna’s Left Bank clamjamfry in tourist season, bites it back. He’s framing a sorry and intro when the backdint in his own nous tells of gandering in return, a swatch at name and tumblespace, at casts.

  A pause.

  Puk Massinger cocks his head at him from down the street, eyebrows raised to stance: oh my.

  Jaq actually blushes. For the first time, like, ever.

  •

  A SOFT BREEZE rustles leaves of linden and oak, a susurrus. Jaq pulls the cap from his head, scruffs hair. Up anchors and away.

  What Jaq games to a port behind him: onyx-slated roof jumble of Erehwyna, town-state on the banks of the Erehwyreve, which flows off north by northwest between Gunnison and Mikkel-Nikolai, to the five mile wide Rio Reullvale, to Harmakhis Bay and New Davenport’s glass urbanity; jumbled Erehwyna with its second century Old Town stone stockade crumbled to park wall of the Jardins Rochester here, co-opted into conurbation and bastion conversions there; closer, the southern outbelt of subrural steads woven with asphalt trails through woodland; the gimbaled spires that rise high over foliage, gracile powermill vanes wheeling slowly to the susurrus and the sun; closer, Sifu Renart’s rough stead of adobe, overgrown ever-open gates into the horseshoe courtyard where prentice Jaq postures like a Harlequin for Picasso; closer, the brambling border of the stead, a copse as crowd at his imagined docks, thin trail blazed weavy through it, to be run as a buck darting fast, leaping dead branch and straythorn tripwire, to be run as a pickpocket dodging artful to his den, soles slapping off a springboard gangplank, monkeyboy arcing through lithe Martian gravity to catch the rope ladder and freck his way up, trimmed in pirate slops and élan, barefoot.

  Cocked to an idle weighting on one heel, he drapes an arm over a branch, other hand shading fire opal eyes for a peer to the horizon. Time is a volume, measured in ticks and yonks, two moments of the same stint condensed by different acuities of shift, charged to different intensities of span. If shift is gradient, span is breadth. If shift is attack, stint is sustain. With the shifts of the end of spring, this month of Qof was a mountain Jaq has come tumbling down to find himself beyond it. Ahoy of him, the future is another world, Earth, growing its roots ever deeper into ever deeper soil.

  Through the canopy engulfing his den, a susurrus whispers.

  No, the susurrus whispers.

  No...

  •

  SUSURRUS WHISPERS THROUGH the grass and gorse, godling of the Martian wind, gene-spliced tyke of Zephyros and Ares. His story needs no Ovid, tells itself in the rustle of striplings and flowers he loves, the tale that he is: a zygote collaged from: spermatazoa flensed to nuclear caducei; a mathematical transform by the Fréres Fourier, Jean and Charles, flip of an axis changing Y to X; and the egg from which Eros hatched, is always hatching, offered up blithely to a god of war gone broody, Ares a sharper marksman than any brat with bow and arrow, no more to be argued with than the groundling Renart in a frum.

  It’s all quite impossible, of course, temporally, physically, logically, but quite viable pataphysics as pioneered by Burroughs and Braque, in scissors and paste. Susurrus can’t exist, but he doesn’t have to exist in the sibilance of air swirling soft through foliage, no more than the number six exists in the perianth of a daffodil. No more than the colour carnelian exists in the lad in the treehouse built within Philemon and Baucis, Jaq Cartier of Erehwyna, the back of whose neck Susurrus tickles just to see the shudder of spine.

  Jaq turns now, satchel in one hand, cap in the other, towards the door of the treehouse. Susurrus slides inside his open doublet to tickle skin, a thumb of air brushing nipple. He approves wholeheartedly of the lovers’ scheme, even if the fleshling is mixing the piratical and the Peloponnese in his imagination, matelots and myrmidons. Susurrus wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for such antics.

  Twisty it is, that the solitary hold-out in a pantheon of lad-lovers should be the first to sire with a stud. Not the king of lightning with his fetching garçon fetched by eagle. Not the mouse with his flower cut down by discus, nor the ocean with his jambalaya boy rebuilt with bionic ivory shoulder. Not the lion-skinned circus strongman with his sailor led AWOL by the nymphs. The hoplite in helm and cuirass was the first co-father, his cold and arid wilds gentled warm by Zephyros newly arrived from Earth with the fleshlings. As the little bald monkeys danced out across the red churl, swaddled in their white romper suits, driving tin can coracles on jets and wheels, building geodesic domes, Zephyros slipped out among them, tentative, questing.

  And we met, your further and I, he’d tell young Susurrus as he hoiked the lad into the air, whirled him upside down, squealing—

  We met, your feather and I, burly Ares would butt in, huchling the infant from his grip and twirling to set him aright upon the soil—

  Atop Olympus Mons of course, they’d say together, where else?

  And it was love at first sight? says Susurrus.

  And it was love at first sight.

  •

  THE FIELD MOUSE scurries over Puk’s rondeling palms, shy dun but as sprack in whiskers and scamper as Puk’s eyes, those aureate-flecked amber irides around wide pupils, blinking to Jaq and back. Apodemus sylvaticus, Puk says, Apple by name. Cross-fertilised derivation from the fruit and deity, Apollo Sminthius, who was worshipped as a mouse god on Tenedos.

  He lies prone on the quilt that rugs the inside of the treehouse, clothes shucked in a corner. The quilt is a patchwork of baizes, every nap and hue of meadow, pasture, field, orchard, a tablecloth of green fields, just a little rumple here and there. Puk upon it is a deep shade of sard, smooth, almost as swarth as Joi and Don, raised on elbows so the inverse arch of his back slopes sigmoid down to pert plum rump, an arse made for tarse he proudly claimed to Jaq as they hung out in Market Square first day they met proper, Puk having taken the Erehwyna native up on the offer of a Sherpa of the city, the wandering’s end wound up with Jaq lounged on the Cenotaph plinth at the angle of late afternoon, back to the brass plaque, earning scowls from passing grand dames in silk kaftans, Puk posed in front of him like Peinte’s Orpheus, twisting to display said posterior and peer back over his shoulder as if to admire it himself, Diogenes as a pup curling to catch his tail. It was indeed comely, Jaq agreed then, not the full girly plump of an Antinous but a cute convexity, fit to his neat hips.

  Now in the naked ephebic flaunt of it, it seems perfect.

  Jaq crouches to flick his Monmouth onto the pile of clothes, a cherry of vermilion wool on the leathery, silvery grey.

  His legs kicked up at the knee, Puk’s feet dangle in the air, crossing at the ankles, uncrossing. Earthen as the mouse, pack
aged compact of frame but snug rather than squat, he’s a wildcat to Jaq’s cheetah, withy to his lissome. Jaq was strung to this for the first few days they hung, unsure if his stance of appetence was maybe clueless Martian cock-fluffed just by the exotic, the Earther as Other. There’s no erasing the centuries of abjection under the Xanthean Dominion, the scorning of those who quit civilisation to rebuild Earth, prodigal fathers of a new frontier.

  Jaq slumps the satchel on the floor, flicks the flap open, roots.

  There is no utopia. It is a fact of how the word stunted works now, of the scatter of its import—primitive, puerile, puritan—that an Eryhwynan stance is like to pivot at Puk’s head-and-shoulders brevity, whether the tuning is sensed or not. To an Erehwynan, the Earther’s undersize can’t help but signal inhibition of growth, signal a barbarian as buttoned-up in stance as in style, by Geister rhetoric of weak flesh transcended in death. Jaq is not immune, even as a stancer of talent, even savvy since his own Phobian roots, advertised in cinnabar freckles speckling jasper nose, shoulders and forearms, carry heritage of hate from a century when his refugee forebears were all criminal, cunning, capricious. He knows of bigotry and the sneaky fetish too.

  Doesn’t it smack of dodgy to you, Jaq asked when they were scheming the summer, the whole cultivate the Earther thing?

  You are thieving me, Puk said and flicked thumbnail on upper teeth. Scallie.

  Dirter, said Jaq.

  Waveson, said Puk. Fob-filcher.

  In the end, Jaq was settled by the facticity of Puk’s axial kinsey, as utmost as his linear six, rendering him as sub as homo, and Puk with no more inclination to tweak it than Joi with his hanker. Or as Puk put it: you’re the top; lump it. So, they hatched the plot of this summer’s shift.

  Jaq closes fingers on the waxy orb buried under muslined cheese and bread, lurking down with the jarred Harmakhis olives, the flask of Kasei red. He draws it out with a flourish, an offering.