Cosmocopia Read Online Free Page B

alive and eager.
    The first stroke went across Velina Malaspina’s open sightless eyes, sealing them behind a crimson scrim, turning eyeballs to pupil-less cherries and rendering them more artful than reality.
    Lazorg painted the rest of her face with just a few confident passes. Then he went to work on her hair, plastering it with clots of paint to her skull and neck and shoulders. The effect was not ideal, but what mattered was to coat her entirely.
    Down her long exquisite body, repairing the wounded neck first, then the chest, the breasts and their nipples, lifting the massive glands to get underneath. Stomach, hips, the corpse all the while assuming an enameled perfection.
    He spread her cooling, stiffening legs and painted all her sex and crotch. Wherever the paint flowed, it assumed a coherent shell-like quality, as if he were not merely coating the women but embalming her like some Egyptian technician.
    After Lazorg had devoted care and reverence to each toe and the soles of her feet, he realized he would have to turn Velly over to finish the job. She’d smear, but he’d repair that.
    So with immense struggle, splotching his own clothing and exposed skin with paint from her body, he flipped her, and began painting her dorsal side, the well-defined blades of her shoulders, the roundels of her buttocks.
    Again, the struggle, the awkward moments when she painted him with her body, and now she lay again on her back.
    Lazorg fretted that now the coat of paint on her back would be mussed, but there was no getting around that. For a brief moment he contemplated flipping her in an endless loop, painting and repainting what was marred each time from his bottomless bucket until he died of inanition. But in the end he contented himself with merely touching up her front, rendering her a perfect candy-apple eidolon.
    His task finished, Lazorg suddenly felt all the accumulated weight and stress of his mad exertions. He dropped bucket and brush, staggered backwards a step or two, then sideways, then forward, to fall upon his final masterpiece in a last embrace.
    Lazorg anticipated the feel of the tacky paint, beneath which rapidly coarsening flesh would resist his fall.
    But he never received these sensory impressions.
    Instead, he found himself dropping onto and into a woman-shaped hole, an anthropomorphic crimson portal that opened into an infinite crimson tunnel, down which he plummeted forever, too stunned even to shriek.

PART TWO

2. Dweller in the Bonecellar
    CRUTCHSUMP KNEW THAT A TROVE of valuable fresh bones awaited her on the Shulgin Mudflats at the edge of Sidetrack City, where the metropolis met the waters of the Rodinian Sea. The myriad shimmering shifflets would have mortally spawned by now, as they did every year at this time, and their exhausted luminescent flesh would have quickly evanesced, leaving behind their delicate skeletons. These lightweight traceries of calcium and rare minerals awaited any bonepickers experienced enough to navigate the sinkholes, grapple-gnaws and mockmucks of the flats.
    Normally, Crutchsump would have already shared the generous harvest with three or four other veteran bonepickers, laboriously earning a minim toward her continued sparse survival.
    But not this season.
    This season, the Shulgin Mudflats were haunted.
    Haunted by an otherworldly monster.
    Few had actually seen this beast up close. Yet its presence was incontestable.
    Mournful wailings issued from the Mudflats by day and by night, solemn heart-rending ululations. From Huid Avenue, separated by a labyrinth of tall pouf-topped reeds from the Mudflats, passersby at night had witnessed the silhouette of a naked shambling figure—face-naked as well as body-naked!—crashing aimlessly through the reeds. The fruit and gorgit vendors along the Golden Boardwalk reported inexplicable thefts of their wares, victuals doubtlessly stolen by the hungry monster.
    All these manifestations of something uncanny kept people away from the