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he'd found something.
The Beetle turned to me. "You see that snake in the tank, Scribb?" he asked.
I nodded, not taking my eyes off the slithering bitch.
"That's one big fucker, yeah, Scribb?"
Just watching the tank, my eyes caught on the violet and the green, and the
slow undulating body. Must have been all of twelve foot long.
Beetle turned back to Icarus. "You wouldn't want that big fucker to get
loose."
Icarus looked up at him, just for a second. "That's my best snake," he said,
and then lowered his face back to the dream mist.
"What you got?" asked Mandy.
Icarus looked over at Mandy. "Come see," he said.
Mandy bent low, putting her eyes to the viewer. She looked in there, close up,
for maybe a full minute. During that time the dreamsnake did a complete
reef-knot of movement. Each slither brought another bead of sweat to my flesh.
My left leg was stinging.
"Nothing," said Mandy, finally. "Can't see nothing."
"You need to look close, real close," Icarus said.
"It's just smoke."
"You ain't got the juice, girl. Not like me." And something real bad came to
me then.
Icarus was telling us that he had some Vurt in him. Christ knows, must have
been a tiny amount;
you wouldn't guess it to look at him, but maybe that's how he did this job.
But the bad thing was this -- maybe I could steal this fat guy and force him
into a swapback. Maybe I didn't need the
Thing after all, but then he waddled over to the snake cage and I saw just how
useless that guy was. He was worthless. No use. Way below Desdemona. Way below
Hobart's Constant.
"It's just smoke!" Mandy was saying. "There's nothing there."
"I'm turning mist into Vurt. That's my job. Not even that, this time. I'm just
cutting bits
out. Chopping out the bad bits, making it suitable. I'm making it legal.
That's my job. It's not much of a job is it?"
No answer to that. None at all. We all just waited, in the silence, whilst the
shimmyographer focused in on the errant scene.
"That is one big snake," announced the Beetle. "You really wouldn't want that
snake to get loose. Would you?" He made it sound like a threat. A bad threat.
The Beetle was good at that.
Icarus wasn't fazed. He reached up and clicked one catch on the tank, then the
other. The lid raised up slow and sexy, like a breath exhaling. The dreamsnake
unwrapped itself eagerly. I
stepped back slightly, just slightly, trying to control myself. My leg hurt
was stinging.
"Is there something wrong with the boy?" asked Icarus.
"Ignore him," said Mandy. Tell us what you see."
The shimmyographer jerked the mist to a frozen standstill. "There she is!" he
announced.
"Offending article. You see, Chimera send these Vurts out to the provinces,
but we're just getting the bad cuts. There's stuff still in there. Non legal.
I gotta check every second. It's a fucker's job, and I'm doing it. This looks
like mist to you. To me it's a dream, somebody's dream, and you can't show
everything. It spoils it. People want love. This bit here, the hero's stabbing
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his father with a kebab skewer. Through the eye. You just can't show that. Not
in a Pornovurt. It's a passion killer.
Cut that fucker!"
Icarus reached inside of the tank and grabbed the dreamsnake by the neck. It
writhed around like a whiplash crack, but he had it between his fingers, and
with the other hand he reached for a small ball hammer. He pushed it into a
jar of paste, coating the hammer head with sap.
This was the squeezed-out flowers of the snakeweed, the only known cure for
dreamsnake bite. It grew on the plains of Utanka, an obscure high-level Vurt,
available only to the cognoscenti. Icarus gently tapped the ball of the hammer
on the top of the snake's head. The head proceeded to droop, as the slit eyes
glazed over.
We watched as that snake took a vicious bite out of the dream. He lifted it
away from the mist, and the two streams of smoke coalesced into a new state, a
clean state. "That's better,"
Icarus said. "Feels clean now." He stepped closer to me. There were tiny
yellow flecks in his eyes, which seemed to glow brighter as he held the snake
up to my face. I stumbled back, knocking against a feather bank. Streams of
mist were pouring out of it, choking the room.
"What's wrong, young man?" Icarus asked. "Don't you like snakes?"
"Get it off me!" I screamed.
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