Toxicity Read online

  ~ * ~

  Toxicity

  [Anarchy 02]

  Andy Remic

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  AND LO! The earth dries up, and dost wither,

  the world languishes, and dost wither,

  and the exalted rich posh dudes of the earth languish!

  The earth is defiled by its people dudes;

  they have disobeyed the nine toxic laws,

  violated the statutes and nature and

  broken the everlasting covenant.

  AND LO! Therefore a curse consumes the earth.

  The new wine dosteth dry up, and the vine withers;

  and all the merrymakers do groan from fat aching bellies.

  The gaiety of the gay tambourines is stilled,

  the noise of the puking reveller dudes hast stopped,

  the joyful harp is - LO! - silent.

  No longer do they drinky drink wine with a merry song;

  the beer is (lo!) bitter, to its drinkers.

  AND THUS! A curse dost consumeth the earth.

  And its people must bear their guilt.

  New Isaiah 24:4-6

  The Revised & Rewritten Testament

  Bible II: The Remix [Manna Edition]

  ~ * ~

  PROLOGUE

  RENAZZI LODE, DIRECTOR of the Greenstar Recycling Company, stood on a barren, scorched heath and surveyed The Lirridium Store. A lake of concentrated shuttle fuel, it spread away in a glittering flat platter, still and silver like glass over mercury. Renazzi turned, and with one finger touched the comm at her ear. She surveyed the prisoners, who were cuffed and on their knees, without emotion. Behind them stood fifty Greenstar soldiers wearing olive-green uniforms and bearing the flash of gold on their berets which was the mark of The Company.

  The captured, once members of a nearby village clan, had made the choice decades earlier not to leave the planet of Amaranth when Greenstar moved in to begin its new Recycling Policy. Over the years, many of these unfortunates had been altered by the severe toxic waste pumped into the water table, into the air and into the soil. Now, they were a sorry bunch of twisted deformations, kneeling, and drooling, and twitching.

  And Company Policy?

  Renazzi smiled, a narrow, tight-lipped smile. She signalled the soldiers, who drew short black swords. They could not use bullets here; it might ignite the unrefined lirridium. What, then, would the Shamans of Manna use to fuel their starships?

  “Are you sure?” she said into the comm, lips hardly moving, words little more than a murmur.

  “Yes. Do it.” An instruction. Hell, a command.

  She paused a pause bordering on insubordination. “There are women. And children.”

  “So? They need to learn.”

  Renazzi gave the signal, and fifty swords cut down, followed by the dull slaps of bodies hit the ground. Renazzi watched blood soaking into the toxic soil, returning to the earth; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. She clicked her fingers, and a Z-chopper was there in an instant. She climbed aboard, and it soared into the smoke-stacked, pollutant-overloaded sky.

  ~ * ~

  IT WAS NIGHT. A green-tinged Amaranth night.

  Renazzi stood barefoot on the thick glass carpet of the Director’s Office, which occupied the entire top floor of the Greenstar Factory Hub. It was a vast space, with massive plate-glass walls overlooking the subordinate factories around them. Her vision was filled with a manic bustle of activity: chimneys belching sulphur and smoke, men scurrying like ants, pipes vibrating with full lirridium payloads, shuttles loading and unloading, cranes and trucks working and roaring and churning mud, fumes spilling out, engines drooling black oil.

  Behind her, a voice said, “She will come back to us. I know she will.”

  “Yes.” Renazzi lit a thin cigarette and smoked. Her eyes watched the constant activity, searching for error. She was neat like that. Pedantic and anal. “But... I fear you will regret it when she does.”

  “Nonsense! It is ordained. You said so yourself. Those fucking psi-children predicted the event. The outcome.”

  “Yes. Only their prediction was... more than just a simple visit.”

  The male voice laughed, a deep rich sound. He moved forward, placed large hands on Renazzi’s shoulders and gazed out over Amaranth. “You put too much faith in these toxic freaks. You know, if the Shamans heard you talking like this... Well. We’d both be dead.”

  “The Shamans are machines,” she snapped. “Floating like lords through Manna in their vast derelict battle ships. They seek to control us by intrigue and diplomacy. Sometimes, as today, there is a need for violence; although I do not agree with murdering children.” Her voice was iron. Then she sighed, and broke. She was a woman without choice. “However. I recognise that with certain primitive peoples, it is all they understand.”

  “Primitive?” He raised an eyebrow, but she did not see. “So you believe in love over violence? Forgiveness over revenge?”

  “No,” said Renazzi carefully, watching the ten-lane freeway. It was full of digging and mining equipment. Huge machines with buckets and drills, hammers and hydraulic pistons. Many were as big as a hotel, and they lumbered down the freeway with lights blazing, lirridium engines pouring out streams of pollutant to fill the skies over Amaranth - over what the media had christened Toxicity - with even more filth and poison and death.

  “That’s a great shame,” said the man, turning Renazzi around. He kissed her, then, but her face did not change. Renazzi did not have emotions; or if she did, they were buried in a deep, dark, key-locked place. Emotion was something that happened to other, weaker, people.

  As he kissed her neck, she said, “The world can only take so much waste. If we continue, we will destabilise the environment with a toxic overload; and the Shamans would be... displeased. They like to maintain an equilibrium. We are getting too large, my love. Greenstar is becoming too powerful.”

  “Fuck the equilibrium,” he said, pulling away, his dark, glittering eyes staring at her. “Look out there! At what we’ve achieved! Look at our wealth! Our power! We will go to war against the Shamans if necessary... We will bring back a natural order of chaos. We are flesh, not machines. We cannot be controlled. We cannot be defined with binary code. We don’t want everything nice and cosy. We want random deaths. We want agony. We want war!” He smiled. “Because that is life. That is chaos. That’s reality, my love.”

  Renazzi pulled back and gazed up into his face. “The psi-children. You recognise they are a very real danger to Greenstar? To everything we have built, or fought to destroy?”

  The man turned away, waving his hand and reaching for a drink. “Go on, then. Hunt them down. Kill them all. I know this prophecy frightens you.”

  “I do not need to hunt them down,” said Renazzi. And now it was her turn to smile. Her turn to narrow glittering, malevolent eyes. “The psi-children are a part of this place; integral to the planet of Amaranth. I will not need to hunt them down because... because they will come to me. In time. You will see.”

  Outside, three thousand Terraform-Class Excavators rumbled on.

  ~ * ~

  ONE

  ALL HE REMEMBERED was the heat. A searing inferno. And screaming. Lots of screaming...

  ~ * ~

  ENGINES HUMMED. MACHINES whined. Against the folded velvet of deep space, where neutron stars glowed and red dwarfs died, where nebula clouds oscillated in coruscating waves of pulsating colour and fire and energy and exploded heavy metals, it slammed suddenly into existence - from nothing to something, from Cable Jump to Stationhalt, from snakehole to freedom in the blink of a blink of an eye. It hung there, solid, a mammoth ship in the shape of a bulbous, fattened donut, polished alloys and steels gleaming under the ra
ys from a nearby green star. In discreet letters stencilled on the hull, the ship’s name read: The Literati.

  Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV, Third Earl of Apobos, lay back, naked, oiled, pleasured and fulfilled, sipping from a ruby-skin goblet of honeyed titakya as the mercury bed beneath his languishing, pampered shell massaged his hard, fatigued muscles, and two furry gahungas rubbed his feet with expert tentacle-pods. “Ooh,” he said, closing his eyes to the rhythms of ecstasy. “Yes, just there. Between the toes. Purrrfect.” His head lolled to the right, mouth gaping open and slack for a moment, drooling titakya like a SLAP smuggler as he stared through the kilometre-wide portal at the glowing, throbbing words splashed green from the light of the sun:

  TOXICITY WELCOMES

  ALL

  YOUR SHIT

  “Oh!” he gurgled, managing to begin to rouse himself. There was surprise there. And a glimmer of interest. “Are we there already? I didn’t hear the back-drives kick in.”

  “We slipped the snakehole an hour ago,” crooned Lumar, reaching forward to snort kulka powder from her own flat, green belly. She, too, was naked; lizard-skinned, she was one of Svoolzard’s thirteen resident mistresses on the Titan-Class Culture Cruiser, The Literati.

  Svool held out his goblet. “Lumar. Here, girl. More wine.”

  “Yes, Svool, my master.”

  She poured him more wine, keeping her gaze averted low.

  “Lumar! More nibbles!”

  “Of course, silly me, more nibbles, Svool. Of course. Right away.” She crossed to a fireslab table and picked up the bowl of nibbles, returned, and leant over him, popping them into his mouth one by one by one. After all, she wouldn’t want his genius over-exerting, pointlessly expended on having to actually stretch for a nibble.

  Svoolzard frowned, and stared at the words outside, chewing and popping the nibbles between his teeth; then he rubbed drug-weary eyes - although only after considering asking Lumar to do it.

  Svool sighed. Oh, I’m too thoughtful, he thought, idly.

  He felt suddenly and strangely exhausted - which was odd, because for the last three weeks he’d done nothing but snort drugs, drink kemog-wine and pleasure his many women, two men and this creature, Lumar, a lizard-skinned alien from Thung who was blood-sworn to serve him until she died. Or so it said in the paperwork. Very... interesting.

  Outside the ship’s portal, the three-thousand-kilometre-high hydrogen-strand fusion-sign bubble-bobbed on streams of diffusing hydrogen, against the pin-prickled twinkling velvet blanket of the Manna Galaxy. Its molecule-tether was a looping, curving, shining silver umbilical which spun away, down, down to the distant, vast lumbering spin of Amaranth far below.

  Amaranth.

  The waste world. The toxic world. Streetwise citywide slang and drug-fuelled paparazzi called it Toxicity. Home and bedrock to all of Manna’s decadence and waste and effluence; and that didn’t just include the shit they chose to dump there.

  Intrigued by his new train of thought, Svool hoisted himself onto one elbow, which took a lot out of him for it was physical effort for sure, and Svool would rather not do physical effort. The action made him whimper a little, as he brushed away an errant golden curl from his forehead.

  He dismissed the massaging gahungas with a lazy flap of his bejewelled fingers, his feet not completely satisfied, and the funny little creatures waddled off, trailing long brown hair. Svool sipped his drink, keeping the drugs in his veins alive and bubbling, and stared at the sweeping vista of the vast world below. “It looks...”

  “Yes?” Lumar’s head snapped up, short green dreadlocks swaying. Her bright green eyes narrowed, nostrils twitching at her sudden narcotic intake.

  “Looks like the sort of place I should write a poem about.”

  Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV was a celebrated poet across the whole of the Manna Galaxy, that vast unity of universes which formed the Collective. In fact, he was probably the most famous and celebrated poet who had ever lived. He was certainly the wealthiest. The most talked about. The most revered.

  “Lo! Yonder green and pleasant star” he began, brow furrowing a little at the effort of composition, and watched as Lumar settled back on her cushions, forked tongue licking her black lips, her hands folding over her lizard breasts as a display of rapturous ecstasy crossed her features. After all, it wasn’t every day a lowly norm, a prole, a liz or dwat got to observe a genius in the act of Poetic Synergy.

  “Oh, how I wonder what ye are,

  Is thine lone eye all green and round,

  O’erlookin’ every mollusc on the ground?”

  Svoolzard gave a little shiver, and opened his eyes, which had closed in this fabulous moment of rapturous ecstasy. To Svool, nothing beat the act of composition. The act of fucking creation, baby. Creation. To Svool, it was better than drugs, sex and money - all rolled into one. There could be no greater achievement. No superior satisfaction. No greater... worth.

  “Magical,” purred Lumar.

  Svool extended one hand toward her as his chin tilted upwards, eyes closed, golden curls spreading down his chest. Lumar took his hand and kissed his fingers and their jewels.

  “I am the Poet Master,” he said, without irony.

  “You are,” crooned Lumar, nodding, green eyes gleaming.

  “Kiss me again.”

  She kissed his hand again.

  “Still. Despite the obvious enjoyment in this little endeavour, in these little sexual buzzes of electricity, we are here, now, at Amaranth, and it is time to deliver my speech. Do you still feel that my words - my ideas - my writing - buzzes with the electric of a billion different stars?”

  “Oh, I do,” said Lumar, sucking his fingers, her forked tongue a sultry and enticing thing. Her face beamed up at him. She was glowing. In awe.

  “Does my monologue sparkle like starbeams from the hull of the New Pink Titanic? Is my wordage suitably academic in nature to please even the most nihilistic of today’s gathered post-grad researchers? Hmm?”

  “Svool,” she mumbled, sucking his digits most erotically as her hand roved over his naked belly, stroking, and nipping, and kneading, “you are without shadow of a doubt, the most educated, the most daring, the most inspired and the most brilliantly genius writer ever to crawl from the womb of a human. When you enter Tennyson Hall, you will see; they will worship you as the God you are! When you enter Tennyson Hall, it will be like the perfect sexual climax of every man and woman and alien there present!”

  “Yes, yes. Of course, of course.” He ran a hand through his curls, leaving a V through the thick wax, as Lumar’s hand strayed like a green spider across his belly and began a teasing taunting crawl towards his bulging HotShorts. Poetry always made him hard.

  Lumar’s eyes met his. Her tongue flickered in that teasing way he knew and loved. He imagined it, flickering over him... and shivered.

  Lumar winked. “Have we time for another...?”

  “No!” Suddenly, Svoolzard’s eyes were hard like flint, and he gently pushed her hand away. “I am a...professional! I must prepare...” - he licked wet, panting lips, and again his eyes went distant, and hazy - “for my fans.”

  ~ * ~

  THE TENNYSON HALL of the The Literati was a truly grand affair. A kilometre-high cube, its walls were lined with tumbling gold and blood-red fabrics, the ceiling lights vast green globes in honour of the planet around which they now weighed anchor, and the floor surface had been specially constructed for this wonderful, opulent, magical occasion, tiled with specially-hardened pages taken from the self-published pamphlets of lesser poets. Never one to miss an opportunity to bask in the glory of his own genius, Svool was the first (and most vocal) to recognise his superiority to every other living (and, debatably, dead) novelist, playwright and poet in the long, long history of Humanity.

  Gathered around the many tables on hollow stools, made of green glowing glass and filled with the finest of tolka wines (so all one had to do was dip one’s Drinko-Straw™ between one’s own legs to savour the fin
e green liquid and, as had been pointed out by Svool in his opening speech, thus precipitate a vision of near-circulatory catheterisation which required only one more tube and a little imagination, a-ha-haha) were the crème de la crème of Old Earth’s resident academic royalty. Thousands of people were present; most of the educated and most-respected academic brilliance of Manna, the Galaxy which had first consumed and then elevated Earth to its rank as one of the Prime Planets sporting life. Earth was recognised as a Seat of Power for the Arts in Manna, and here on this Culture Cruise, the gathered Who’s Who of the arts had been brought together (in fact, had paid extortionate fees from university coffers just to be included) in order to meet and celebrate Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV. The fact Svool was about to narrate for the first time his no-doubt incredibly ground-breaking paper, On Literature, which obviously would celebrate himself above all others, was simply an added bonus.