
Winter 2007
In this Issue:
The following features are in this issue:
• Column: An Interview with Elizabeth Bear, conducted by Sarah Monette
• Column: Bears Examining #4 by Elizabeth Bear
• Column: Lansdale Unchained #1 by Joe R. Lansdale
• Column: Lansdale Unchained #2: ROBERT E. HOWARD AND THE WORLD OF ALMURIC By Joe R. Lansdale
• Column: The Life and Work of Godfrey Winton: A Panel Discussion on One of Science Fiction's Lost Masters
• Fiction: Carnival Knowledge: a Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick
• Fiction: Snowball's Chance by Charles Stross
• Fiction: An excerpt from One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King by Elizabeth Bear
• Fiction: Black is the Color by Elizabeth Bear
• Fiction: Coat by Joe R. Lansdale
• Fiction: Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind by Rachel Swirsky
• Fiction: Make a Joyful Noise by Charles de Lint
• Fiction: Stone Shoes by C.S.E. Cooney
• Fiction: Unrequited Love by Gene Wolfe
• Interview: Patrick Rothfuss By Alethea Kontis
• Review: Race for the Rocket by Anne KG Murphy
Reviews: THE SPACE OPERA RENAISSANCE and THE NEW SPACE OPERA: ALL NEW STORIES OF SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURE
Column: An Interview with Elizabeth Bear, conducted by Sarah Monette
Q: New Amsterdam is an alternate history. How does that world diverge from our own?
EB: Hah! That's a good question. And one I'm going to sneak up on from a weird angle, starting with a non-answer. But please bear with me.
It's not really an alternate history. It's a contrafactual universe, which is a bit different in a technical sense--an alternate history takes place in a universe that's just like ours, except some thing turned out differently. In a contrafactual universe, the physical laws are different.
Generally speaking, contrafactual universes are classed as fantasy and alt-hist is classed as SF, but honestly, there's a good deal of handwaving in either. For example, you might try to write a rigorous alternate history, but this thing happens as soon as you start changing, where even the language and the people change. If there's no American revolution, for example, a whole bunch of things change, and the same people are not important, only in different roles, a hundred years on. but of course one of the conceits of alternate history seems to be that you can take the same historical people and do ahistorical things with them.
Unfortunately, a moment's thought would show you why that wouldn't work. Change one border, and you start a butterfly cascade effect: people just don't get born. Different people get born. Kill somebody in a war, and so on...
On the other hand, it's a heck of a lot of fun to take, say, Marie Curie and stick her in an entirely different setting. Fun for writer and fun for reader: it's a thought experiment. So, we are engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief to get her there.
This is why I think that the pretense that alt-hist is somehow "rigorous" is a little disingenuous.
So, anyway. New Amsterdam in contrafactual. The laws of physics are entirely different. Magic works, in certain limited ways--it's a system of magic that Sir Isaac Newton would have been completely comfortable with, I suspect, codified and dare I say scientific.
As a result of this, I arbitrarily decided that certain things would be different--that the Native peoples of North America would have been able to fight European settlement to a standstill, for example, because Mayan and Iroquois alliances proved too powerful for the colonists.
Therefore, the European settlements are limited to narrow bands along the coasts. Also, the Dutch retained possession of New Holland--our New York State--until the equivalent of the Napoleonic wars, at which point they ceded it to England to avoid French conquest. Now, of course, I've admitted above that I am just making this stuff up. But I did try to make it logically consistent.
All fiction is a tissue of lies, of course. It's just even more evident to me when writing alternate history or contrafactual history than elsewhere.
Q: What's your favorite thing about writing in that world?
EB: Oh, the ability to play. I can put vampires and sorcerers and ghosts into a society that codifies everything in rigorous and even closed-minded hierarchies, and watch the sparks fly. because of course one of the things vampires and sorcerers and ghosts--thematically--are about is overturning hierarchies. So I have these characters who are, by their very existence, an overthrow--a downfall--of the stratified society and scientific method... and they are engaged in using rigorous methods--forensics, deductive logic--to reinforce that
society.
It's so much fun.
Q: What are the influences on New Amsterdam, and what drew you to them? What made you decide to combine them?
EB: Well, of course, there's a basic debt owed to the work of Randall Garrett, the Lord Darcy mysteries. Which I have long loved, and my protagonist, Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett, is named for him. I had some reactions to the unexamined class issues in those, and some of what I was writing about grew out of that. I'm also incredibly fond of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and I tried to borrow some of the air of those. Abby Irene is Irene because of Irene Adler.
And then there's Sebastien, the Great Detective. Who also happens to be a wampyr. The classic Victorian monster, as recollected for us by Bram Stoker. Sebastien is not a particularly Dracula-esque wampyr, however. Once I had the forensic detective story, and the Victorian setting, he was a natural as an additional character.
They seemed, in other words, to go well together.
And in addition, because I had this scientific magic system in place, I could bring in all sorts of steampunk elements. Dirigibles, for example. Any excuse for dirigibles is a good excuse, I think.
Q: The Promethean Age books are secret history rather than alternate history, and they're also quite diverse. What is it that unifies them (conceit, theme, etc.)?
EB: Oh, yes. I have five of these written and four of them sold. One's in print, one more is coming out this summer, and then the next two in 2008 and 2009. And then, like Frodo and Samwise, we shall see.
Tim Powers talks about the research that you do for secret-historical fantasy, and how as you start uncovering all these odd connections, your brain starts telling you, "Oh, wow, I'm not making any of this up." And it's true: the brain is a pattern-sensing machine. A pattern-manufacturing machine. It makes you understand how conspiracy buffs get that way: there's a tremendous satisfaction, a dopamine rush, in that kind of problem solving. I suspect it's the same satisfaction one gets from reading a good whodunit--the aha! function--or solving a tricky math problem. The brain rewards us for mastering new ideas, because it's adaptive to do so.
I don't know if there's a unifying theme in the series, beyond the unifying theme in all of my work, the ur-story, which seems to be something along the lines of "you're not dead until you stop kicking, dammit."
The conceit of the series is that "all stories are true," that narratives, in other words, have an objective reality. And that they are influenced by the way they are told, and how often they are repeated. The overarching conflict of the Promethean Age books deals with a conflict between the Prometheus Club, an organization of mages who are devoted to protecting human society from things that go bump in the night... and the things that go bump in the night.
Each book or pair of books (there's one duology) stands alone, completing a portion of narrative. And each one is told from different perspectives, and at different places in history. Some are modern, some are historical. Some are from the point of view of the Faeries and other "otherwise" creatures, and some are from the point of view of the humans of the so-called Iron World.
Behind it all is the idea that, like most conflicts, nobody really knows how it originated or who the good guys or bad guys are. Both sides are at fault.
Some readers love this aspect. Some find it a little difficult to divorce themselves from anthropocentric thinking, and firmly take sides with humans. Some... are definitely not on our side.
I find that fascinating.
They're meant to be pretty good adventures, too, and hopefully full of cool bits--dragons and Magi and warrior queens and Mythical Las Vegas and transformations and hopeless love and death-or-glory stands and betrayals and swordfights and abductions. If I do say so myself.
Q: Las Vegas. Five minutes. Go.
EB: You know, I lived there for seven years, and I'm still not sure what I think of the place. For a city that's only a hundred years old, it has a rich vein of mythology and a hammerlock on a certain archetype in world consciousness, right now. Sin City, the beating heart of American capitalism and kitsch.
But you know, a lot of people live there. And it's hard for many of them to imagine a future outside of Las Vegas. It's a city-state, in a lot of ways, very isolated--there's desert on all four sides, after all--and so it develops a particular culture all its own.
I had a very hard time living there. The climate was not comfortable for me, I ran across a lot of social assumptions that made me very unhappy, and my employment and personal situation frankly sucked. Now that I'm away from it, I have a better grasp on some of its good qualities, but while I was living there, I felt trapped.
On the other hand, I think there's nothing that inspires one to write about a place like being an outsider there. When you grow up in a landscape, you see it as a participant, not an observer. You're inside.
When you come in as an alien, you start thinking about how and why things are the way they are. You look for reasons, rather than assuming--that's the way things are done.
So Vegas really shattered my preconceptions about what society and people were like. I learned a tremendous amount about the entertainment industry, about relating to people with different backgrounds, and about the base assumptions of other people about New Englanders (we're actually not like that at all).
Las Vegas is a city in transition. A city of transition. It's always reinventing itself, like a giant television set. It's very unreal.
In One-eyed Jack and the Suicide King, I call it a mirage. A ghost city. And in a lot of ways that's true.
Oddly enough, I kind of miss it now. Not enough to move back. But certainly enough to visit.
Q: Let's call science fiction and fantasy a single genre. How does SFF reward a writer?
EB: It's the ultimate playground, isn't it? Once you start discarding, using, alienating, or subverting the genre conventions, there's absolutely nothing you can't do. You have to build your own frameworks to support the thematic and narrative structures you want to use.
The best game ever.
This is probably why I have this need to swipe elements from so many different subgenres--because for me, it's not writing to fit the various patterns that entrances me. It's how you can use those different narrative patterns as frameworks upon which to hang the things you really want to talk about.
The thing I really want to talk about is human reactions to stressful situations, when it comes down to it. I am just a sucker for people who demonstrate unholy grit in the face of the inevitable, and pay unbelievable prices for it. I love the American folktale of "John Henry," for example. People do amazing things, in extremis, and that there appears to be a biochemical circuit in our head that kicks in, in disaster, and triggers us to altruistic courage, doesn't do a thing to diffuse my awe.
Several people have opined that I write in too many SFF subgenres, but really, I only write in one. It's just not any of the established ones, though I am happy to borrow their elements for plots.
But all of my books have similar thematic and character concerns. (I call the style eco-Gothic, and a few other writers--Peter Watts, Chelsea Polk, Caitlin Kiernan--have adopted the term. But it's not a literary movement: it's just a description of a particular set of thematic concerns and stylistic elements. Stand on Zanzibar is sort of the Ur-text, if you're wondering what I mean when I say eco-Gothic.)
Q: How's the state of SFF today, from where you're standing?
EB: The state of SFF today is thriving. It's going mainstream. It's all the heck over the place--on my television, in the movies, in mainstream literary novels.
If you limit SFF to mean the genre ghetto, the answer might be different. We're always hearing about how book publishing is in crisis... but we've been hearing that for twenty years, just as we've been hearing that SFF is dead.
I think there's an element within genre that very much wants it to stay a club scene, that wants to maintain control. Ownership, if you will.
I submit that would be the best way to strangle the genre. As I think that drawing bright lines between SF and Fantasy and Magic Realism and Mythic Fiction is a great way to gerrymander speculative fiction and rob it of innovation and power.
The real danger, I think, is navel gazing. Trying to duplicate the same stuff we've been doing since 1933, staying too close to the existing genre. Writing to the existing audience. That's no good for anybody: it strangles innovation. It turns the genre into comfort food. And it's the best way to stagnate and die out.
Poetry grows through the broken places, you know? Through the cracks and interstices.
Q: What have you got coming out in 2007/2008?
EB: In May 2007, New Amsterdam --- editor's note: nearly sold out --- from Subterranean Press. In July, Whiskey & Water (A Promethean Age book) from Roc. In August, Undertow from Spectra. And in October, A Companion to Wolves from Tor (written with a certain Sarah Monette).
In 2008, another Promethean Age book, Ink & Pen (if it keeps that title), from Roc. And then there are two trilogies that will start coming out in 2008.
The first is the "Jacob's Ladder" books, from Spectra, which are science fiction--I keep calling them space opera, but they're not: they're gothic and overwrought, and the pocket description is Amber:Gormenghast::Upstairs:Downstairs... in spaaaaaaaaaace. This concerns the attempts of the remaining, highly physically modified crew to sustain a dying generation ship long enough to find a safe harbor.
And the things that get in the way.
It's all about cascading failures and people not getting what they want.
The first book is called Dust. It will be out next spring.
And the second is a thing I'm calling "The Edda of Burdens," at least until Marketing makes me change it, which is coming out from Tor starting next fall. It's periApocalyptic Norse steampunk noir high fantasy.
When I say periApocalyptic, I mean that there are three separate and distinct ends of the world in these books, and one that predates the narrative. It's sort of super dark, and heroes become villains, and vice versa.
It's such a cool world. That series concerns the bad things (and a few good things) that happen between three mythic beings over the course of about 2500 years, from an early iron age culture to a post-spaceflight one, while the world they live in cyclically destroys and reinvents itself.
Also, there's a steam-powered cybernetic flying warhorse. What's not to love?
Q: And what about those mismatched socks?
EB: You know, I always used to match by thickness, in high school. Then I got a real job, and they had to match.
Recently, I've realized that my new job allows me to work in my pajamas, so matched socks are strictly optional... .
Column: Bears Examining #4 by Elizabeth Bear
Every time somebody writes Spock/McCoy, God does not kill a puppy (or) Oh, god. Not this kerfuffle again.
This week, I thought I might dip a toe into the current debates over fanfic-for-profit (possibly a nice idea, but the execution seems, um, exploitative) and eternal copyright (obscene) that are sweeping the blogosphere. But then, I found something related but even more frivolous to talk about.
Recently, the estimable Cory Doctorow published an essay in Locus defending fanfiction. Cory is something of an Intellectual Property Rights Bad Boy, a freethinker, and opinions of him and his convictions vary.
Needless to say there was outcry.
Well, May is National Masturbation Month. I guess this is a suitable discussion to have now, on many metaphorical levels.
I'm on the record as approving of fanfic, and have been for a long while. In fact, when I started defending fanfiction, I hadn't ever written any. I was not active in any fandoms, media or print.
I did not start writing fanfic, qua fanfic, until after I was a published--dare I say award-winning?--writer.
In other words, I came to fandom as a professional interested in the kinds of storytelling they were doing over there, rather than coming to prodom as a fanfiction writer with a past to justify.
I think that gives me a novel perspective on the genre.
If you will forgive me a small and terrible pun.
(I did write a certain amount of what I would now identify as fanfic in junior high, but it was in isolation, and I had no idea that anybody else did that sort of thing. I thought of it as practice, actually--I knew about spec scripts, and I knew about students repainting masters to learn technique. I guess Denis McGrath has never heard about that, or visited a major art museum and seen the baby artists with their easels pitched in front of an old master, copying, copying, copying.
(I think it was John Gardner who made his writing students type out James Joyce's "The Dead" repeatedly as an exercise, but memory is fallible. In any case, I'm far from the only pro writer who writes fanfic, although as far as I know I'm the only one who does it openly.)
The interesting thing is that the reason I started writing fanfic was because there were properties that I wanted not to alter, but either to parody or to talk about on a thematic level, and it was much easier to show those things--to demonstrate them--than to talk about them. (I've been writing about fanfic for a while: a large part of what I wanted to do in One-Eyed Jack & the Suicide King is talk about narratives and how they build on older narratives--well, that's the whole gist of the Promethean Age books, really: it's all a snake eating its tail.)
We are pattern-finding and storytelling animals. It's what we do. We take the real world and turn it into narratives and symbols so our brains can manipulate them more easily. And once we have those narrative symbols, if they suit our needs, we don't stop manipulating them just because somebody says, "well, you shouldn't do that because it's nasty."
Any more than, you know, the vast majority of people ever stopped wanking because somebody told them it would make them go blind.
Now, writers and creators are, indeed, possessive of their creations. Which is natural. But fans are also possessive of the stories that speak to them. And they don't always have the same ideals or desires that the creators do.
I write stories to service my own narrative kinks. I am deeply aware of those narrative kinks. Among them are: death or glory stands, the cold realities of living with damage, people who are better than they have to (even at great cost to themselves), the mythologization or valorization of intellect, situations with no right answer--a comedy of ethics, as I've heard it called--and situations that are both over-fraught and under-sold.
This is stuff you will always find in my work. I can't help it. It's my myths.
And it's the myths that show up in the work I love, as well. They're what I react to.
It's possible that if my hardcore narrative kink was gay porn, I would be doing nothing but writing slash.
The other thing I'm aware of in my own work is how highly reactive and responsive it is. For pretty much everything I've written, I can point you towards the ur-text that made me go, "No. That's just not right." The Jenny Casey novels are a reaction to a bunch of philosophical issues I had with the science fiction of the seventies and eighties. Carnival is what you get when you put a collection of unworkable Utopias in a box and make them fight (am I the only person who reads Utopias and thinks, "That sounds like hell?"), Blood & Iron is what happened when I read one too many urban fantasies in which the Us vs. Them was clearly divided, and clearly All Right-Thinking-People must agree with the Us... And let's be honest, A Companion to Wolves is what happens when you start really thinking about the sexual and social dynamics in the Pern novels and their descendents, and decide to take it on the nose with regard to the inherent moral contradictions rather than brushing them under the fantasy wish-fulfillment.
You know, so it's perfectly possible to do that, to take a thematic argument and show a fresh angle in a work that's on some level derivative, but has had the serial numbers filed off enough for legal purposes.
So let's be honest here. That's all we're doing in those cases. We're filing off the serial numbers so we can go, "Hey! That's wrong!"
And then somewhere the work takes on a life of its own and becomes about more than "Hey! That's wrong!"
But that's not fanfiction. So why would anybody write fanfiction?
I can offer a dirty secret. Or a series of dirty secrets.
Fanfiction is fun. It's fun whether or not you're writing publishable fanfic--by which I mean, fanfic that's either about properties that are out of copyright (Hey, Blood & Iron is Tam Lin fanfic! Check it out! Ink & Pen is Christopher Marlowe slash!) or fanfic in which the serial numbers have been filed off far enough not to get your sorry rump sued--or you're writing fanfic that's identifiable and has an audience among other fans of the show.
It allows somebody who either isn't yet skilled enough or who doesn't want to be a pro writer to have an audience and express creativity. It's the moral equivalent of sitting around a campfire with a bunch of friends noodling out "Eleanor Rigby" on the guitar--and maybe posting the video on Youtube. You are unlikely to be mistaken for Paul McCartney, even if you play guitar left-handed.
It's easy. One of the most fun things about writing fanfic, for me, was that it brought back the joy of writing, the ease and fluidity that I used to have before I knew what I was doing. And that's, honestly, because somebody else has already done the heavy lifting for me. Somebody has set up the backstory, laid out the characters, and placed their issues and trauma in a harsh light. The warp and weft are there: you're not starting from scratch.
It's what we do. From a very young age, we take existing symbols and turn them into stories. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, Batman and Robin.
Four hundred years ago, professional writers were ripping off Ovid, and so were schoolboys.
Is a lot of it bad? Well yeah, you betcha. A lot of original fiction is just as bad. You should see my slush pile.
Heck, you should see what I was writing for original fiction when I was eighteen. Trust me, there's probably Sentinel/Enterprise crackfic out there that looks like award-winning literature next to my juvenile stuff.
The thing is, fanfiction is written for the writer, and other fans. It's not written for the market. It's written to service a kink, whatever that kink might be, and it's totally unapologetic about that. On that level, it's some of the most honest writing around, and one can learn an amazing amount about what fans want and how they read and view by studying it.
And frankly, it serves the property owners. It allows the fans to stay interested and engaged with the property during hiatus or in between books, to build community. It's another avenue for discussion, connection, and celebration. It can bring in new viewers or readers.
Simply put, it increases demand.
I have sympathy for the writers who feel that something of theirs is cheapened when they are ficced. I understand that possessiveness of one's own work, and it seems to me that a respectful fan (as opposed to a crazy stalker) will in those cases attempt to respect the wishes of the author.
Certainly, in the hands of some fan writers, fanfic becomes an arrogation--"Mine is better than theirs!"--and that can certainly chafe. But that's not a social faux pas limited to fanfiction. A certain group of fans are possessive. They have always been, and they always will be possessive, and nothing is going to change that.
It doesn't matter. They don't own the property: the copyright holder does.
Fanfiction is by definition not canon.
That is, in fact, the point of it: there's no profit to the fan writer in being mistaken for canon. It is a response. I have never read a piece of fanfiction that could be, or intended to be, mistaken for the canon material. There are close pastiches--as found in material derivative of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes--but the more-or-less unsuccessful attempt of a derivative writer to be mistaken for more of the original is limited to the pro-fiction arena. (How long have V.C. Andrews and Carolyn Keene been authoring through intermediaries, now?)
To misquote Anaïs Nin, my book is not made of soap. It will not wear out.
Column: Lansdale Unchained #1 by Joe R. Lansdale
JUST DO IT
Or
ENJOYING THE WRITTEN WORD WITHOUT BEING OWNED BY IT (but always have a savings account and a piggy bank, or in my case, I have a bear and a dinosaur and a Batman bank, and a few mutual funds.)
This is the first article of a column I'm calling LANSDALE UNCHAINED. I intend to write about pop culture: writing and art and comics and movies and anything related. Sometimes the relations may be tenuous, but I'll do the best I can.
Let me tell you a secret. Everyone enjoys recognition, a little fame. Let me tell you another secret. If you like it too much it'll eat your guts out. In creative endeavors, like writing, it's the curse, baby.
You start out writing because you enjoy reading and then you write to please a certain in-crowd, usually other authors, or for some, critics and reviewers, and then pretty soon you find an audience, and that my friends is both good and deadly.
We all like to have an audience. You don't have someone reading you, then you don't get to sell your nifty writing, and if you don't sell it, it doesn't matter if you've written a lot or not at all, because a creative endeavor for most people is sharing. No sharing. No writing. When it's in your desk drawer, it might give you a hard on when you go over it, or make your nipples stiff (depending on gender), but it's not satisfying if there are no readers. Reading aloud to the dog doesn't count.
There's something inside the creative mind that thinks it has something someone would want to read, see, or hear. It takes some ego to believe that. Even the quietest, most withdrawn of authors, like to believe they have some worth, if only in that one area. Writing.
But if you find an audience, you began to give your audience what you think they want. Some people can do this very well. They can become rich and famous. They can have so much money that when they fart they blow out spare change, but good as this may be, it can ring a bit hollow if your creativity is within one constant artery, because eventually, that artery gets filled up with plaque of the non-artistic kind, and you're just pumping it out, but it's not a clean pump, because all that plaque you know, it'll make you grab your chest from time to time, and eventually, it just might kill you, creatively anyway. Now, just knocking it out, find that audience and giving them exactly what they want at the expense of all else is not a bad thing if your job is as a prostitute where a certain rhythm of movement, or at least a willingness to take a fucking will get you by, but as an author, well, brethren and sisteren, (yeah, I made that one up) 'tain't so good.
Sometimes the publishers can be a problem. They may want to restrain you. Sometimes that can't be helped. If your publisher doesn't want you to say pussy or fuck or shit or prick or have pronouncements against the powers that be, if you think religion sucks the big ole donkey dick but they fear their readers like sucking the donkey dick, and they want your work to be about kitties and puppies and to be non-offensive, and you aren't that kind of writer, well, you can be, to put it mildly, disappointed.
Doesn't mean you can't modify if you have to, but it does mean there's a difference in modification or adjustment, and bending over and greasing up.
You write to please everyone else but yourself, you might as well get a job at the grocery store sacking groceries. Because you do everything but what you want to do, you aren't happy. You aren't writing for love. You will find yourself reading less, because you no longer know how to enjoy it. Or because you have developed your own formula for success, and it's frustrating to read others who don't share your formula. Perhaps because it sounds different and you think it should be only one way. You are a Baptist of a writer, and they are a Methodist of a writer. You're both working for the same deity, but you have different angles of attack, and of course, like all pious Christians, you think your sect knows the truth and theirs doesn't. The mind narrows, and so does your taste and your ability to absorb new things.
Face it. We're all a little that way. But if we recognize that we are, we don't have to let that aspect of ourselves overwhelm us like some sort of outer space parasite.
Bottom line is if you think you know how it's done and there's only one way to do it, you are on your way to creative destruction and will soon live in a creative world that lacks greenery and is nothing but dry, white sands. It's uncomfortable there. It sucks your soul empty and shits it down a dark gopher hole.
I know. I've seen it. I have friends who have done quite well financially through chasing what they thought was popular, only to be like the dog chasing the car. When they catch it, it wasn't exactly what they expected or wanted.
Now I'm not knocking money and I won't say I haven't written some things for a few bucks in my time, but it's never been my driving force. I have written the things I've wanted to write with as much passion as I could bring to them, and for as large an advance as I could manage. I'm no idiot or blind idealist. But I believe you have to do your work, not the work you think you should do to satisfy some unknown audience. You can't write for others, because, who are the others? You can't please everyone, so don't try. You can only write for yourself, and you can only be yourself. So if your ideas are sharp and clean, put them down. If your ideas are a bit messy, unzipped pants and exposed genitals, then you got to go that direction. Next time out, you might find your muse is all dressed up with a coat and tie, sophisticated. Time after that, the fickle witch may be wearing Bermuda shorts and a sports bra, drinking cheap beer from the bottle and scratching her ass. Time beyond that, nothing but a smile, her pubic hair shaved in the shape of a heart. (Remember, muses are traditionally female, so I've gone with that image. You want a boy muse, hell, you're the creator, go for it. Let him flap his pecker at you if you like.)
You have to follow that muse where it takes you. The bright places, the dark places, the distant planets, the center of the earth, or just over to the 7-11 where you think you saw the story of your dreams behind the doughnut counter.
So you go at your work because it is your work, and it grows out of your subconscious, not some overly conscious design to please. To put it together in such a tedious way that it hits all of the tenets of "good storytelling" will end up knocking you ass over heels, throwing you face down in a puddle.
Here's a secret. Listen up. Everyone wants the secret, and I'm going to be pretentious and offer it to you. Good storytelling is just good stories well told with conviction. You should want to know how grammar works, but you don't want it to work you. You should have some idea of structure, but you shouldn't be afraid to branch off the standard scaffolding. Hell, if you want, tear it down. Understand how it works, then mess with it.
Okay. A confession: I don't want to sound too high and mighty after giving you this valuable secret (later I'll reveal where you can buy all your ideas), but I want you to know, I've written for money. I like getting paid. I always want to know how much something pays and can I get more than that. That's just common sense, money jobs can be jobs for love, I still think like that. I want to get paid for doing what I can do that not everyone can do. Being paid for being in love, that's pretty high cotton.
On the occasions I took the work for money, because there was really no choice. I had to make a car payment, or stick something back so I could write one I was dying to write but knew had about as much chance to make big money as a crippled monkey selling pencils on the one street corner in a dirt road town called Podunk, but I always put as much of myself in them as I could. Sometimes there was less of me available, but I gave it what I had. In a few cases, because I still went at it like I loved it, I came to love it. And the results were a pleasant surprise. But there's a difference in working to eat, and just making more money. At some point, how much money do you really need?
There were other times when money wasn't a question at all.
I was just in the mood to write and I let it go. I wasn't thinking: Wonder where I can sell this? I was just writing. Nothing profound, but something moved in the back of my head and I sat down at the machine and wrote. Whatever came out I let come out. I wanted to be surprised. Sometimes the surprise wasn't all that good and had to go back in the box, so to speak, never to raise its ugly head again. Sometimes it wasn't amazing, but it was curious and I felt the world might like to see it, so I released it into the wild.
Often, I was right to release it. Now and again, maybe not so much.
These writings were not always brilliant, or my best work, but they were me and they came out of me in rush of excitement, or at least mild curiosity. I learned I was happier than the guy or gal who sat up late at night trying to figure how to repeat what they had done before so that they might repeat the success of before, and the one before that.
Again, I like success. Who doesn't? The Bestseller list is cool. You make big money when you hit it. That kind of success is good, but I don't want to be, and refuse to be its bitch. I get there, I want to get there on my own terms.
And let me tell you the most wonderful surprise of all. Sometimes these whims, these urges, turned into the best of my work, and they sold really well. That was a neat surprise. There's an old adage, and in my case it's been true. Do what you love, and the money will come.
Of course, when you the money comes, don't be stupid. Save some of it. We all like to eat. And the old adage, well, shit, it isn't always right. But mostly. So be smart with your money and never be so prideful as to not do a project for money, but again, don't base your career on that. The difference in a hack and a professional is attitude. Remember, I never said don't write for money. I said don't let money be the reason you write.
Oh, and that secret about where you can get all your ideas. I've changed my mind. I'm not telling.
Column: Lansdale Unchained #2: ROBERT E. HOWARD AND THE WORLD OF ALMURIC By Joe R. Lansdale
When I was a kid I read Edgar Rice Burroughs for the first time, and his stories blew the top of my head off and sent it into orbit. I'm pretty sure that shrapnel from that explosion is still circling the planet, if it didn't knock it all the way to the moon, or beyond. Perhaps it's way out there some place spinning in the black between the stars.
Before I read Burroughs, I already knew I wanted to be a writer, but after his assault of pulp sense of wonder, flashing swords and bold heroics, the die was cast. I had to be a writer. It had chosen me instead of me choosing it. I was wrestled to the floor, pinned, the demon whispering sweet nothings in my ear.
As the pulps might have put it, the shiny and wonderful doom was mine.
This reading, one of the Martian novels, led to a passion for all things Burroughs, and next, all things similar to Burroughs. I read as many stories in this vein as I could. Somewhere around 1970 or so I came across Almuric by Robert E. Howard.
Man. What a killer. There was a taste of Burroughs here, and a big ole dollop of Jack London, and some other influences as well, but there was a whole lot of a guy named Robert E. Howard. Already the things that made him unique were slipping through. Sure, the prose was often rushed and purple, some of these faults having to do with the style of the time, and some because Howard wrote for magazines that paid by the word and times were tough and he needed money.
His work was raw and savage and original and he was a lover of the primitive, or at least the primitive as he viewed it. But Howard was not a primitive talent. He was well read. This is proved by his correspondence with others, and by the discussions Ms. Novalyne Price, perhaps his one true love, reported in her book about Howard, One Who Walks Alone.
Howard was not just hammering at it. Sure, the storytelling was natural, but there was intent behind his work, even if it wasn't of a great literary ambition, and his main concern was that of entertaining the reader. No easy thing to do, I might add.
Take for instance this section from Almuric, as his hero Esau Cairn considers the life he has fallen into on his new world.
"I was living the life of the most primitive savage; I had neither companionship, books, clothing, or any of the things that go to make up civilization. According to the cultured viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I reveled in my existence. My being grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is artificial and without meaning.
"My life was not empty; it was crowded with adventures calling on every ounce of intelligence and physical power."
There is something of the little boy's yearning for adventure in all of this. The view that the primitive life is a good one, the whole noble savage bit. Spend a week in the woods in your skivvies trying to survive on ants and grubs, drinking creek water and hunting your food with a pointed stick, crapping behind trees with leaves as your toilet paper, and the primitive experience would most likely cause the bulk of us to long for our bathrooms and hot showers and bedrooms and soft beds, our books and our TV remote. But the idea of being free, of being eternally youthful and capable, is just the sort of thing to grab boys and young men by the throat and engage them on some level that has little to do with truth or literary criticism. Howard, like Burroughs, is reaching into that part of us that is forever Huck Finn; the wild boy free of all restraints and inhibitions, out for a ride on the world, spurs dug in, riding the bucks and the jumps like a rodeo rider.
And Howard is studied enough, purposeful enough, to do just that, give us that bucking, wild ride. In these kinds of fantasies, when well done, and Almuric is well done, you can project yourself into the main character, and fill him up, give him bits of yourself that are not in the narrative, become Esau Cairn, constantly capable, youthful, smart, and in the end, guess what?
Yep. You get the girl.
And we're not talking the local poke or the library spinster.
You usually end up with a hot little virgin who can't live without you. And even Howard backs off a bit, gives Altha the "gentler instincts of an Earthwoman". He couldn't quite go the whole hog. Womanhood in most of his stories was still that of the 1930's Texas woman who could cook your dinner, tend you in bed, and cut your throat with a razor if you done her wrong. There is something in the ending of Almuric that makes one consider that soon, Esau Cairn may not be quite so wild, since now there is peace between warring cities, and shortly he could be carrying out the trash, walking the Almuric equivalent of old Rover, wondering why he can't just put his feet up.
But thank goodness Howard doesn't go that far. He leaves us in our bubble, in this false but seemingly perfect world, or at least perfect to that aforementioned eleven-year-old boy, or the eleven-year-old boy inside of most men.
###
Again, Howard was very much aware of what he was doing. Even the name of his hero, Esau Cairn, brings up certain images. In the bible, Esau was the hairy one, not thought capable of carrying on the civilization he was, as the elder son, supposed to inherit and push forward. He was the outcast, the rough one, the savage. Howard saw this not as a loss, but as a positive, so it strikes me that the name is a purposeful connection. And Esau Cairn is not only savage, he is dangerous. Doesn't the name Cairn strike close to Cain, the man who killed his brother, Abel? When God asked him where his brother was, Cain replied: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
One gets the impression that Howard wanted to be free of all responsibilities, even the keeping of one's brother, or in his case, his ailing mother. It was all a double-edged sword for Howard. Sure, he loved his mother and was attached to her, but on some level he just wanted to be free. And in 1936, shortly after he knew she would never regain consciousness, had fallen into a death watch coma, he, not so much out of depression, but out of sense of no more responsibility, a lust for dark freedom, lit a blue steel candle that threw him out of this world and unchained him. Perhaps that snap of gunfire tossed him across the black void of space to one of his created worlds like Almuric.
My guess is he hoped so, or wished to be reincarnated in some other time, more savage, more in need of a man of brawn and quick wit.
And if you throw out this idea of his character's name being a connection to the biblical Cain, the name of the ultimate outcast, just leave the last name as it is, Cairn, and you still have an interesting and dark connection. A cairn is a pile of stones erected by someone to mark something of significance, often to mark a burial site or to stand as a memorial to the dead. Death was never far from Howard's mind, and it is interesting that his hero's name bears both the mark of the outcast, Esau, and a tribute to the dead, and if you want to carry the idea of Cain into it, which I admit might be stretching it a bit, but I believe it, you also have yet another reference to the outsider, an outcast, someone who has shirked the responsibilities and the actions of polite society and is living from moment to moment.
I bring this up, and perhaps belabor the point, to show that Howard was fully aware of what he was doing, had literary technique, even if it is with a small "l", and that he was tapping into our knowledge of words and images and archetypes. He was not a primitive creator of tales, a savage genius, but was a clever man of letters with a little boy's heart.
###
Burroughs was perhaps more able to suspend my belief quickly, but only slightly, for Howard was just gaining his chops with this one. A few pages in, and I was as hooked as a bass on a handmade fly, right through the gills. Soon I was with Esau Cairn, and in an even shorter time, I was him; a civilized man that didn't fit in and who all his life had held back his energies and physical powers for fear of hurting someone; I was him, loose now on a world that was designed for me, a world where mortal combat was the order of the day, a world where strange monsters slipped, slid, walked, and flew over the landscape; a land where I was forever vigilant, forever in top physical shape and something for the ladies, who I might add, were also primitives, always good looking and secretly lustful minus the pesky problems of real primitives, ticks, fleas and body odor; beautiful maidens who have saved themselves for me to ravish, with, of course, the aforementioned "gentler instincts of the Earthwoman", therefore not carrying the male reader too far from mama.
###
Howard, like Burroughs, had that ability to make you believe anything, even when the writing went off a little. I think Almuric has some of Howard's most convincing and natural writing, but there are moments when he strays, when the night oil has burned too long and the fingers have flexed too much on the typewriter keys; little moments any commercial writer will have, but they were blips, nothing more, and sometimes they were interesting blips. But the true measure of Howard was when he strayed we could forgive, because his internal storytelling compass constantly pointed true north.
This also has to do with the method he used to tell this specific tale. It was not a method Howard used as much as Burroughs, but I must admit up front that for me the first person method of telling a story is the best, the truest and the purest, and in the end the most convincing. It is in one way the easiest way to tell a story, and the hardest to do well.
Like Burroughs with his tales of John Carter of Mars, as well as others, Howard uses a foreword to set up the story, and by the time Esau Cairn starts talking, the narrative becomes smooth and swift, and because of the first person narration, believable, at least for the time it takes you to read the book. That's an achievement, friends.
But, it's not all about storytelling, or first person narrative, it's also about the prose, and Howard could turn a phrase, or several of them. He could engage you, excite you, and still stay on target with his theme--shallow perhaps, but constant.
Take this example:
"On his rude throne above us, old Khossuth lifted a spear and cast it earthward. Our eyes followed its flight, and as it sheathed its shining blade in the turf outside the ring, we hurled ourselves at each other, iron masses of bone and thew, vibrant with life and the lust to destroy."
This scene is the theme of the novel, and Howard never loses this thematic intent in his adventure. It is front and foremost, the idea that being close to nature and our basic impulses is the way men and women are meant to live, though there's no doubt that Howard's world is mostly a masculine one, a manly wet dream where one can constantly prove himself through combat.
When I was a kid, I ate that up. It allowed me, the youthful reader, to feel powerful. More powerful than I really felt, and that is the secret to this kind of fiction's success. Again, I belabor, but I am caught up in the spirit, so back off brothers and sisters, stand down and listen to me testify.
Howard gave me happiness.
He gave me adventure that went beyond my own part time Huck Finn experiences.
He gave me lust; what could be better than those savage dolls he portrayed in his fiction. Women who could be feminine one moment, and run with the wolves the next.
Yes, brothers and sisters, I say it once again unto you: Howard speaks to youth, speaks to the youth inside all of us, the frisky part of us that is tired of electric bills and water bills and phones that ring and children that need braces.
It takes a storyteller to truly take us away, to lose us inside the pages of his tale, and what makes a great storyteller is the ability to tell you a bald faced lie and make you believe it, make you part of it, make you the character.
Sure, his characters weren't Ahab or Nick Adams or Augie March, but they were in some ways better, for they were archetypes, and Howard could make us become them. When you get right down to it, some of our finest writers fail to do that. What Howard had was something that is often overlooked. He had the ability to make the narrative the character; it was the totality of the book that was the character, all else was there to serve the story, and to finally create this wonderful, bumpy faced novel with blood in its teeth.
Ray Bradbury, a more literary writer for sure, is still a writer of this ilk. His characters are not to me true characters, no more than his dialogue is real dialogue. What he does is sculpt out a story where a little of this, a little of that, bits of business we don't understand in pieces, but only as a whole, come together to create the story as character.
Burroughs did that. And Howard did that.
This, as well as the ability to convince, is more of an inborn talent than a skill, and it serves a writer well if he or she has it, not to mention it's helpful to politicians as well. Because it is not only necessary to lie convincingly to make your stories work, but on some deeper level, the good storyteller, or politician, must somehow believe his or her own lies to the extent that they become, well, characters of a sort, a thing you can embrace that somehow goes beyond mere words.
When Howard was writing Almuric, or the bulk of his tales, I don't doubt that he entered into a kind of trance that put him right where he was writing about. Made those worlds so real to him that they became real to us.
Maybe Almuric fails to be quite as convincing as John Carter's journey, but there was a similarity in approach, in conviction, and had Howard continued to write in this vein, which is just slightly to the left of his Sword and Sorcery, he would have been very successful. In fact, a series of short books continuing in this style might actually have solidified his career better, at least earlier on. But Howard was all over the map. Sword and Sorcery, Westerns, crime stories, horror stories, you name it, he wrote it. Unlike his peer, H. P. Lovecraft, he thought being a writer meant you wrote, meant you could write when you needed to, not just when you wanted to. He was all about making a living, being able to look any sonofabitch in the eye and tell them to go to hell, because he didn't need them. It was, in a strange way, as close as Howard, the good ole boy writer from Texas, could come to the freedom of the savage.
Column: The Life and Work of Godfrey Winton: A Panel Discussion on One of Science Fiction's Lost Masters
Panelists: Sarah Monette, Nick Sagan, John Scalzi Panel at Penguicon 5.0, Troy Michigan, April 21, 2007
--PANEL TRANSCRIPT BEGINS --
John Scalzi: All right, we're going to go ahead and start this panel. I'd like to thank all of you for coming. I realize those of you in the back are feeling like you're a little cramped and crowded, but just kind of squeeze in. One of the nice things about the room is that it does have oxygen monitors, so if things begin to get a little too heated, or the oxygen level drops, thing will come down from the ceiling, and then just attach them to your mouth. You know how that works. We're here to discuss Godfrey Winton, who is sometimes celebrated, sometimes neglected... Sarah Monette: Sometimes vilified... JS: : Sometimes vilified. Actually more than sometimes. Nick Sagan: Often. JS: : Often vilified. Unfairly, some say, though others do disagree. Now, one of the great things is that in discussing Godfrey Winton, when I first met with the Penguicon people about this, I said I really want to have this panel, and Matthew, who is the programming guy, said, well, we're in luck, because we have three of the greatest Godfrey Winton scholars attending. One of them of course is me, I'm John Scalzi, but we also have Nick Sagan, who knows a little bit about his time in Hollywood and doing movies, and we also have Sarah Monette, who knows quite a bit about him on a textual level, and we're really looking forward to getting into that. The fourth major Winton scholar is of course Chip Delaney; he's not here because he owes me money. One day, he and I are going to have an accounting about that, but today is not that day. Anyway, let's begin. Let's begin by talking, to start, about the fact that there are so many misconceptions about who he is, what he did, or even what he looked like. Now, Nick, I know you actually have a little bit of personal history with Godfrey Winton. NS: Well, I really don't claim to be an expert or scholar on Godfrey, but I am probably the only person on this panel to have sat on his lap. JS: : Okay. NS: Because my parents used to throw dinner parties back in the 70s, and I had this very kind of "Jonny Quest" upbringing, with scientists and science fiction writers. Godfrey was a frequent guest, along with Isaac Asimov, Francis Ford Coppola and other people, sort of an odd mix, and he was my "Uncle Godfrey." And so my memories of him are as this sort of towering figure, with a moustache. This is all from the memory of a three-year-old. I mean, if I sat in his lap when I was eighteen, this would be a very different story. JS: : It would definitely be a very different story, and probably a more salable one. NS: Probably. It would also probably scar me. JS: : Right. Exactly. Some things are better left unsaid; unfortunately, this panel is not about those things. NS: This is very true. JS: : So, we should move on. The first thing I actually want to address is that in the description of the panel, one of the things that is noted, and this is in the first line, so let's talk about the misperceptions, it mentions that he had eleven Nebulas, and twenty-six Hugos. This is a common misperception, which of course he actively promoted while he was still alive. SM: Well, yes. JS: : Exactly. Sarah, can you talk a little about this? For example, the Nebulas, which weren't actually Nebulas at all. SM: Well, no. There were a number of science fiction associations in the United States, many which had their own awards, which they give out every year, like you do. One them happened to be called the "Nebular." JS: : The Nebular. SM: The Nebular. JS: : With an "R." SM: With an "R." There was an unfortunate glitch in a convention program and the "r" was left off, and of course Winton, being Winton... JS: : He never bothered to correct. SM: Actively resisted correcting. Oh yes. NS: He might as well take advantage of it if he can. JS: : I suppose, I suppose. NS: He was always an opportunist. JS: : So the eleven Nebulas are, in fact, Nebular awards. Do we even know what science fiction association this was? SM: Not one that is currently active. One of the many great schisms of Midwestern fandom in the 1960s. JS: : Oh, yes, that's right. Was it Des Moines? Or was it Iowa City? SM: It may have been Cedar Rapids. JS: : And that's just a perfect example. Obviously, he's proud of these awards, he wants to promote them but at the same time, Nebula, Nebular... NS: Funiculì, Funiculà... JS: : Right, exactly. Tomato, Tomatoe. NS: Let's call the whole thing off. JS: : No, we can't. We still have forty minutes. The other thing is that I want to clarify about the Hugos. Now, it is true he won quite a few Hugos, perhaps more than quite possibly he deserved. But the thing that is really interesting to note about the Hugos -- well, there are a couple things. As we all know, the Hugo lineup has not been fixed over the 50, 60 years that they've existed; I mean, we all know that Robert Silverberg once won the Hugo for Best New Writer. There is no longer any Hugo for Best New Writer, which is of course a crying shame, and now we have the Campbell Award. But there have been other awards that have come and gone. At the same time there's also the thing where each Worldcon gets to create its own category. What is not often know is that Godfrey Winton had quite a lot of friends who were Worldcon attendees, and he did quite a lot of planning so that he could create categories for which he was, indeed, almost uniquely suited. And so, for example, in the stretch of time in which he was active, in the 50 and the 60s, he won some idiosyncratic Hugos. SM: That's a good word, John. That's a nice word. JS: : For example, he has the Hugo for the Best Punctuated Novel. He has the one for Most Enthusiastic Writer. Best Enjoyment of Dairy Products -- I believe that was a Worldcon that was held in St. Louis, so there was an agricultural theme there. Here is an interesting one, and I think you can speak a little to this one, Nick: He won the Hugo for Most Likely to Get Into a Bitter Argument with Isaac Asimov. NS: Oh, yes. Yes. Well. There was a very longstanding feud with Isaac, where they did not get along at all, and actually it was a source of a lot of bad blood at the dinner parties they went to. One illustration of this I remember: My dad, my mom got Godfrey and his second wife, I think it was Cathy... JS: : Cathy? Cathy's the third wife. His third wife. NS: Okay. I can't keep the chronologies straight. JS: : Jessica is the second wife. Cathy's the third wife. NS: Right. JS: : She's also the sixth wife. NS: Yeah. JS: : Also the ninth. NS: It gets messy. But as I remember, they all went to go see 2001 for the first time, and they came out of the theater, and I remember my dad talking about how Godfrey came out with a big, giddy smile on his face, this almost manic look. And the only thing he said was "So much for the First Law of Robotics!" So he did not like Isaac one bit. JS: : Well, Sarah, you were the one, I believe you mentioned something about that at the librarian level, there was some sort of bitter contest between the two to see who could get... SM: ...The most books published in a year. Yes. Because, of course, Winton is known for his competitive streak. I mean, we can see that with the Hugos. The constant scheming. And with the persistent refusal to clarify the difference between the Nebulas and the Nebulars. So, very competitive. And of course Isaac Asimov is tremendously prolific, astoundingly prolific... JS: : Suspiciously prolific. SM: Even. And truly it seems to have driven Winton almost mad that he could never catch up. He could never write as fast as Asimov. He could never write as much as Asimov. JS: : I do think a part of that was the fact he would do only one type of writing a day. And when we're talking about doing only one type of writing a day, we're not talking about just writing only science fiction, for example. He would specifically only write nouns on one day, and the next day he would go in and fill in the verbs, and then the adjectives and so on and so forth. SM: An unfortunate experimental period. JS: : Right. And this has problems. For one thing, he was most prolific in the time of the typewriter. What this meant was that he would have to plan ahead where all the nouns would be on the page. He would come back, put in all the verbs, and then go on, go back and put in all the adjectives. And if you don't get it right... you spend so much time rewriting. And of course that's where Isaac went ahead. NS: Was that not, as I understand it, one of the inspirations for Mad Libs? SM: So Winton has always claimed. NS: That's what I remember. JS: : This has been an argument between Winton and PSS Publishing, which are the people who publish the Mad Libs, and had been for years. He spent tons of money -- I mean, long before Harlan Ellison was out there suing AOL. Winton was extraordinarily litigious. SM: And with a competitive streak. JS: : Right. So this really was a problem. Now, one of the things that I think was interesting about the Most Likely to Get Into a Bitter Argument with Isaac Asimov Hugo is that in fact it was a contested Hugo, because Isaac Asimov actually won that Hugo. Which really drove Winton insane. We went and complained; he said the fix is in, you can't possibly get into an argument with yourself. NS: But Isaac, if you know Isaac, he certainly could. SM: Au contraire, Godfrey. JS: : Right, Right. So this went round and round and round, and I believe it went all the way to the very top of World Science Fiction Society, to the clandestine meetings of which we have only sketchy details of, because they were not supposed to take notes, and it turns out that he did manage to get that overturned. And indeed that was the final straw between Asimov and Winton for many many years, until, of course, their death bed reconciliation, when Winton was right at the end. But let's not get into that. I do want to point out one more Hugo, which he was nominated for an won, which was for Loudest Clothes Hugo. SM: Clearly only because he did not have to compete with David Hartwell. JS: : It's funny you mention that, because he did, in fact, compete with a young David Hartwell. SM: Oh! Not in his prime. JS: : Not in his prime. He hadn't reached his stride yet. This was the first of many Hugo nominations -- and sadly, failures -- for David Hartwell, up until last year. Indeed, I think if you ask David Hartwell, he would tell you Winton was an inspiration in so many ways -- one, if you're only doing verbs one days and nouns the next, you do actually learn something about editing. I do believe Hartwell did go back and study those texts. And also the clothes. NS: I would like to point out that although we are painting a picture of Godfrey as a bitter, deranged individual, he did have a sense of humor about himself. JS: : Oh, sure. He's the sort of person who you wouldn't mind putting your child in his lap. NS: Yes, well. That's another story. All I know, and you can correct me if this is untrue, is that before he started winning Hugos, he was so obsessed with it that he made a joke out of it -- he wouldn't drive himself, because he was very frightened of cars. But he had a driver named Hugo, and he would bring him around and say, have you seen my Hugo? Which was kind of a nice way to poke fun at the fact that he hadn't won the big one. JS: : The funny thing is that after he won the Hugo, he fired Hugo. And then his next driver was Oscar. NS: That's right. But nothing ever came of that. JS: : No. You can't go to the well more than once. I want to talk a little bit about his novels. One of the things that was very interesting about Winton was that as with many science fiction authors, he didn't make a lot of money writing science fiction. SM: Because you can't. JS: : Because you can't. Even today it's very difficult. And of course he had the various day jobs; I remember you, Nick, saying that he spent some time at JPL. NS: Yes. JS: : And we'll get to that in a minute. SM: He was very proud of his stint well-digging in Maine. He claimed it gave him more material for his books than any ten years of college. JS: : It's true. One of the interesting things about Maine is that its water table is so random because the rock shelf, it makes it actually very hard to farm there, and makes it hard to dig wells, so you do end up building some character. I would assume. SM: Yes, although unfortunately not an ability to dowse. JS: : No, and that did become a problem. He was run out of El Paso, I think, because of that. Is that right? In '56? '57? SM: Was it El Paso? JS: : Was it El Paso? SM: Yes. Yes, it was El Paso. In '55. JS: : The Great Drought of '55. That's right. He claimed to be a dowser. SM: To be fair to Winton, he was at that point extremely hard up. JS: : Yes. The things that you will do. And I believe he was exchanging his dowsing skills for, what was it? Two goats, and... SM: Piano lessons. JS: : ...A piano lesson, that's right. And he actually took delivery of the piano lesson. Although not of the goats. Which was good, because he was ridden out on a rail, and it's hard to take goats with you. SM: It would be very hard on the goats. JS: : Yes. It's just as well the goats weren't involved. But because was, as so many science fiction authors were, so hard up for cash, what he ended up doing -- well, we all heard how Robert Silverberg used to write erotica of some sort or another during his hard-up days. SM: Porn always sells. JS: : Porn always sells. What Godfrey Winton ended up doing was "answer novels." Now, if you know anything about music, a song will come out and will be very popular, and then parodies and responses called "answer songs" will come up and some of them will be popular too. NS: "Sweet Home Alabama" after "Southern Man," for example. JS: : Right, exactly. Well, there was a small paperback press called Lactic Press -- it was supposed to be "Galactic Press," I think. SM: Again with the typos that haunted Winton throughout his career. Thus, the irony of the Best Punctuated Hugo. JS: : And also the Best Enjoyment of Diary Products Hugo. SM: Yes. JS: : But he wrote answer novels, in which in the case of a very popular science fiction novel, he would write a novel that was more or less a response to that. So for example, Stranger in a Strange Land came out in 1961; immediately after, three or four months after , Winton wrote Stranger Who Couldn't Ask for Directions. Later on, 1963, The Man in the High Castle, Hugo winner, and Winton came up with The Man in a Smelly Tenement; for AE van Vogt's Slan, we had Slude, and then Something Wicked This Way Comes and Wants Lunch, which I believe is a favorite of yours, Nick. NS: Yes. Yes it is. It's actually one of his best. JS: : I think so too. And of course let's not forget his short story collection, I Have No Toes and Must Plié. Which I think personally is one of the most underrated science fiction short story collections in the world. NS: How did Harlan react to that? Wasn't there some bitterness? JS: : I believe... well. Famously litigious -- both of them famously litigious -- SM: And competitive -- JS: : And competitive. And of course it wasn't until the death bed reconciliation where I think everything got settled, or at least got settled in a financial sense. SM: Winton's great DeathCon. JS: : Yes, DeathCon. Up against, I think, IgunanaCon, which was very difficult, because Harlan was Guest of Honor at IguanaCon, so he actually had to catch a shuttle to attend both of those. It was good for Winton to know that he had that lingering disease. So he had planned it out, well in advance. And it was coincidental that he did die as soon as the last guest left. NS: It's like that line in MacBeth: "Nothing became him so much in his life as the leaving of it." He did a very good job on the way out. JS: : Yes. I do think that one of the great unfortunates is that we don't actually have his last words. I believe it was actually Harlan Ellison who shut the door -- actually slammed the door -- so the last word were sort of lost. There was some discussion what they were. As you know, he was a big fan of Millard Fillmore. SM: Yes. JS: : And so one of his great hopes, and wrote about this, I think it was in 1951, was that on his death bed, he'd be able to recite Fillmore's last words, which were, as you know, "The nourishment is palatable." Because he had been fed a thin gruel just before passing. NS: No, I didn't hear this at all. JS: : No, this is actually true. Unfortunately, what happens is Harlan Ellison slams the door. He could have said it, maybe he said it; the people on the other side of the door, we have conflicting reports. NS: See, I'd heard something, but now that I think about it, I think it wasn't actually Godfrey Winton, but I'd heard that his last words were "Quick! Get me money!" But that didn't happen. JS: : No. And of course he didn't get the money. Which was an endemic problem. NS: Well, he didn't have to spend it at that point. JS: : Well, he did have the TV on, so there were opportunities to call in now. NS: Like a Ron Popiel kind of thing. JS: : Right. But he wouldn't have gone for the installment plan. Now, Sarah, I know that you'd done some of your doctoral work on some of these answer novels. And I want you to talk a little about that. SM: Well, I have to admit that my favorite of the answer novels is Night of the Truffles. Which is, of course, what do you do with a dead triffid. Which is an excellent question, and I find Winton's answer compelling. And one thing I have to say about Godfrey Winton, although goodness knows he had his flaws both as a writer and as a human being, he was ahead of this time in his interest in and sympathy for gender issues. JS: : Sure. SM: And thus, taking this great work of science fiction horror, and turning it to the topics of women's work and women's concerns, and how do you bake a triffid? In some ways I think it's the gentlest of his parodies, and also a moving examination of how life goes on after a great disaster, and the role that women play in the 50s and 60s nuclear family paradigm, which his later works would begin to contest. But still, within that paradigm, he was saying that this work was valuable, that this work was necessary. So that's my favorite of the answer novels. NS: Is it fair to say that the more often he got divorced, the less the focus on women's issues? SM: Actually it depends. After the third divorce, there was a retrenchment into the Heinleinian model of women as sexually available nymphettes. It's a male fantasy common among middle-aged science fiction writers. JS: : And Winton was getting up there around that time. SM: But the interesting thing is that after the sixth divorce -- JS: : The sixth divorce? NS: To Cathy. JS: : Second divorce to Cathy. Does that actually count as a second divorce, an actual divorce? SM: It was a second divorce, once removed. JS: : Right. Exactly. SM: Well, the fourth time he had to go through the legal proceeding of a divorce, since that second divorce to Cathy was in the early 70s, and was in fact part of Cathy's sexual awakening, and since he did remain on excellent terms with Cathy and Cathy's life partner Jo Elle, through the remainder of his life -- JS: : Thus occasioning, actually, the third marriage to Cathy, and, subsequently, the first marriage to Jo Elle. SM: Yes. Although we don't know for sure because the relevant correspondence was destroyed, it seems to have been a very flexible and open arrangement. Mercifully not on the Heinleinian level. NS: This might be a good point to point out that he fancied himself a ladies' man, of course. SM: Yes. You don't get divorced that many times -- JS: : Twelve times? Twelve? Nine? NS: I don't know, honestly. I know it was a lot. JS: : I think he just rolled a 20-sided and let that be the number. SM: And remember he was prone to exaggeration. JS: : About everything. SM: And especially this. Because he did fancy himself as science fiction's Casanova. NS: Especially when he drank, and very few people could drink like Godfrey could drink. I remember these was a specific dinner party, my mother had taken classes in Chinese cooking and gotten a lot of people together for this, and Godfrey was famous of wrecking it by running around to every woman at the table, "Are those Jewish breasts?" It was just one of those mortifying things. He was obsessed with breasts. JS: : And he was obsessed with Jewish women. Strange, because he was Lutheran. NS: Yes. It was a forbidden fruit thing. JS: : Right. And this was one of the problems, which was that science fiction in that era was enabling for, well, let's face it, completely undersocialized men running around, grabbing breasts and asking questions about their religious background. NS: And yet, with the marriages, especially to Cathy and Jo Elle, there was a kind of loving quality to that. I remember that he was able to treat really serious issues with humor. I remember that when Jo Elle had her mastectomy, he famous for going around and saying he was married to a swinging single. JS: : I believe that was the occasion of the divorce, though. NS: Well, no one took his humor in the way that he meant it. JS: : What's interesting is that what correspondence we do have -- Godfrey Winton's surviving archives, stored at Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio -- is that many poems were written to his various wives, and written, to get back around to this, in the form of Mad Libs, where in fact the rhymes were there, but many of the relevant nouns and verbs were missing. And I believe the intent was whatever wife it was that we was with at the time could fill in what it was that she thought he was feeling at the time. Unfortunately, when he got some of these back, some of the verbs and nouns weren't ones that you would want. Now, we've talked a little bit about the bitter rivalry with Isaac Asimov, a little bit about Harlan Ellison. But in fact, pretty much at any one time he was having six or seven bitter rivalries going on with other science fiction authors. We know that Alfred Bester and he once got into it over a pool table --- NS: Right --- JS: : Not actually about a pool table, but they were actually standing on the pool table themselves. In a bar, and I believe it was in Nag's Head, North Carolina. SM: Yes, and that was at the end of Winton's experimental phase. JS: : Yes. SM: Emphatically so. JS: : Well, talk about that a little bit. What about that poolside gathering, so to speak, ended that phase? SM: Bester's right hook. JS: : One of the great clarifying things about Bester, as I've heard many times, is that he actually does knock grammar into people. SM: Yes. JS: : One doesn't want to believe that this is true, but anecdotally it happened to Winton, I believe at some point AE van Vogt and he went around, and there were others. SM: Bester had the sense, unlike many of Winton's endemic foes, to realize what was going on was about Winton's competitiveness, not any real desire, any enduring desire, to experiment with typography and -- JS: : --- Drugs. SM: Those too. But that is the bitter rivalry with Philip K. Dick. Which may be a contributing cause to Winton's death. JS: : That's true. Although they did reconcile. NS: At the death bed. But before you get there, I want to touch on this, I had heard rumors and I wanted to see if they were true -- JS: : Throw it out -- NS: That pool table brawl. Was that not in fact the inspiration for an Isaac Asimov mystery, in which a cue ball is used as a weapon, based on the force and the velocity? And then he titled it something, and then Godfrey, to try to top him, said, no, you should have called it "Dirty Pool"? And in the acknowledgements, Isaac says -- SM: "To Godfrey, you were right." NS: Right. Is that true? JS: : The rumor is, not only is that true -- SM: Well, certainly that dedication exists -- JS: : Yes. It's there. Not only is that true, but I will counter with another rumor that I believe is also true, which was that Isaac Asimov bought the pool table that was in the bar. It was a three-quarter sized pool table, so it could actually fit into his apartment in New York City. NS: Huh. JS: : Not only did he buy the pool table, he actually had the pool table bronzed. NS: Wow. JS: : Yeah. SM: And engraved. JS: : And engraved. SM: Not where it could be seen. On the bottom. "In memoriam, Alfred Bester's right hook." JS: : Exactly. It was actually underneath, and rumor has it that whenever Isaac Asimov was feeling low, he'd crawl under that pool table, and would come out with a smile on his face. Unfortunately, the pool table has been lost. SM: Sadly. As with so much of what would be an extensive collection of Winton memorabilia, given his propensity for signing other people's books with his name. There should be an entire library of them, and yet, only three exempli remain. JS: : It's a real shame. In fact, a lot of what it came down to, there is the belief that going back to DeathCon, Ellison slammed the door. As you know, Winton had a phobia of incandescent bulbs, which meant that every light in his house was actually a gas wick. So: Door slams, lamp falls over. Flames. They manage to get his body out in time. Which was good. SM: Not realizing that he had already died. JS: : Right. SM: It was truly a courageous effort on the part of the assembled science fiction writers. And a great honor, really, for Winton. JS: : Yes. They didn't let him burn. SM: That's right. JS: : Ironically, he was later cremated. SM: Completely different thing. JS: : But because of this unfortunate fire, which took up the whole house, so much memorabilia is lost. The shame is, of course, that the existing material at the Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio, is just a shoebox with a few notes, a figurine of Mickey Mouse from Disneyland and some old candy. Now, Nick, you know a little about his sweet tooth, because of the parties. NS: Yes. He would always offer me candy. JS: : Right. Right. SM: Did you take the candy from him? NS: I would, and then at a certain point my mother gave me a look, like maybe I shouldn't do that. But I don't think there was anything untoward about it. JS: : No, no. I mean, everybody loves candy. You and I have gone around on a particular topic I want to discuss, and feel free to pitch in, Sarah, but Nick, as you know, at a certain point our friend Winton basically said "To hell with America, to hell with everything," and he went to Europe, where he spent time writing screenplays for Italian science fiction movies. Now, I've been a movie critic for fifteen years. I've written a book on science fiction movies. And I am here to tell you, unreservedly, that Italian science fiction movies are the worse science fiction movies that have ever existed. In addition to being the genre of film that spawned the career of David Hasselhoff -- SM: Which is a sin for which it can never be forgiven. JS: : No, no. Generations future will curse -- SM: Curse! JS: : --- indeed. NS: Hasselhoff aside. JM: Hasselhoff aside, you actually think the screenplays that he wrote were sort of a creative highlight for him. NS: I just think it was very different. It's not the thing you usually see -- spaghetti space opera has a place, and you just don't see it very often. They dispensed with a lot of the scientific aspects of it -- JS: : And dialogue. NS: And dialogue, and they didn't use very good actors, and it was kind of a mess. SM: But! Nick says. There are redeeming qualities! NS: There are redeeming qualities. There's a Fellini-esque quality to it. We would actually put clowns in space. I thought that was very... JS: : Well, it's because the movie studio was timesharing the building with the Rome Clown College. NS: Yeah. JS: : So they were readily available. NS: You have to make use of what you have. JS: : But are you giving him too much credit? Fellini used clowns because he was making a point about clowns. Winton's using clowns because they were there. Doesn't that make a difference? NS: Yes, it makes a difference, to certain extent. But Winton is no Fellini. You have to build with what you've got. SM: And it true that by the end of his screenwriting career, the last film, I think it is heads and shoulder above any of his previous efforts. And I think it is because, you know, like you're saying, you have to dance with them what brung you. But if they want to square dance and you want to waltz... I think that was the problem Winton was having for much of his Italian screenwriting career, was that he was working in a medium without wanting to give in to what he had. JS: : Well, in fact, he absolutely maintained that he should be writing the screenplays in Italian, a language he did not speak. NS: Yes. He refused to learn it on principle. JS: : Right. Exactly. Because he felt that would detract from the quality. SM: Yes. But the last film, with the extended spacewalk sequence. In which there is no sound, because there is no sound in space. He broke through the terrible limitations of his form... JS: : Aaaah. Oh. Okay. You know what, this is another common misperception, and I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. The reason that there is no sound is because Winton pawned the microphones. SM: Yes. But still. NS: It's like guerilla filmmaking. JS: : And he did actually use gorillas, because in addition to the clown college there was also the gorilla training facility. NS: That's right. And when the gorillas killed a clown, at that moment they had to stop. And that was the end of his career. Once you kill a clown in space... SM: There's nothing you can do. It's all over. JS: : you can't go back. SM: You can't go forward, either. JS: : You have to float there helplessly. NS: Yes. With your greasepaint and your nose. SM: However it came about, it remains iconic. JS: : Okay. Now, Winton did come back to the United States after doing the Italian space stuff, and he actually started writing the original novels. Some of those titles: That's My Toe, which I think you like the best, Nick. Sarah, I remember you saying you actually liked The Star Accountants. SM: Yes. Yes. JS: : And let me put a shout-out to what is my favorite, Contractually Obligated Androids, which despite the title was actually written on spec. SM: Well, the interesting thing about Winton's late career, which is when it became financially almost feasible to make that career. Almost feasible -- JS: : Almost. SM: I mean, better than '55. JS: : Well, this was the same time and space where people were actually getting paid very well -- SM: Yes. Yes. JS: : --- and everybody was trying to compete, trying to get the best authors, and to the laggards go Winton. So Winton benefitted. SM: Yes. And it's true that Winton comes back from his European jaunt with a much better understanding of, and finer sensibility about not only about sexual politics, because this is the era of Cathy and Jo Elle, but he also learned a certain amount about Marxism and Communism. JS: : Right. Because he was in Italy. Red as the day is long. SM: But you can see this in the later works, both in The Star Accountants and in Contractually Obligated Robots. You can see that he's exploring, really in a way that we're only now beginning to see again in the work of China Mieville. JS: : And of course this is also after this fight with Bester, so he did write sentences in sequence now. SM: Which actually worked much better. JS: : It's strange that it would be that way, but for him it was a style that did better for him. NS: See, I may need to re-read that book again, because I read it purely as response to Asimov, that robots, instead of having laws, would be given actual contracts that they would have to fill out. Like, "Will you rebel against humanity? Check box one. " JS: : and indeed there was some discussion about this -- is this in fact just another answer novel? And there were two things going on. One, of course, Lactic Press had gone under, and the principals of that had gone to San Quentin. As you do. Accounting matters. And indeed, that's the theme of Star Accountants. SM: This is the period of Winton's life where is personal life and his philosophical concerns came together in his fiction in a way that he had never achieved before. Which makes his work much more interesting, and much more powerful. The contractual obligation instead of a law -- there's a strong Hobbsean element to that, and a much more honest and realistic assessment of the responsibilities of creating sentient creatures like a robot. Like Asimov's robots. JS: : And to lend credence to the theory that it might have been a response, the scene where the robots actually stab the lead scientist, named "Basimov." NS: Yeah. SM: Well, that was a little transparent. JS: : It was, and it was one of those things where, up until the death bed reconciliation, Winton maintained it was completely coincidental. Along with the scene in which the robots beat, on a jai alai court, the guy named "Lester." NS: But wasn't there that first draft where after he wrote these names, he'd write "ha, ha," exclamation point, close parenthesis? JS: : Went up in the fire, if it did exist at all. SM: There's still a great debate in academic circles whether "Lester" is Bester or Lester Del Rey. JS: : That is true as well, because as we know, Lester Del Rey and Winton did have problems, specifically over money, and a small dog. NS: Yes. JS: : What breed? NS: Wasn't it a Pomeranian? JS: : I think it was a Pomeranian. I remember it being some sort of fluffy dog. And I remember hearing from some of the old timers that it really wasn't even so much about the money, just that Winton really loved that dog. It was an unfortunate thing. And of course people want to make something of it. Like it was unseemly. But it really wasn't. It was a pure, clean love between a man and his dog. And then of course he sued Harlan Ellison, because he thought "A Boy and His Dog" was transparently about him and his affection for the Pomeranian. NS: Well, and he did think that he and the Pomeranian had a telepathic understanding. SM: Here again we see the influence of his need to compete with Philip K. Dick. It's sad, really, that at the height of his career, with Star Accountants and Contractually Obligated Androids, this is the pinnacle of his artistic powers and to talk about the things that matter to him, and to be funny about them, and to tell a good story. He's finally got all his ducks in a row... and they tell him about Dick, and his writing a novel in a weekend. It was like a red flag to a bull. JS: : He did write, to his credit, an entire novel, 60,000 words, he timed it as 18 hours and 17 minutes. Now, unfortunately, the problem was, due to his writing so fast he didn't enter spaces between his words. It was very hard to read. They couldn't hire an editor to insert the spaces. It's a lost novel. We will never know. SM: Winton was very bitter about the reception of that novel. Because, of course: Finnegan's Wake. JS: : Right. Exactly. And of course he was not able to have a death bed reconciliation with Joyce. SM: No. No. Joyce was already dead. JS: : Right. Now, we're coming close to the end, so what I want to do now is to throw out the rumors that we do hear with Winton, and tell us what you know about them. Sarah, to begin: World War II. There is a great discussion about Winton's involvement with the OSS. Was he a spy, or was he a janitor? SM: Janitor. The persistent motif of Winton's autobiographical discourse is self-inflation. I think this is absolutely a case in point. JS: : All right. Nick: The rumor is that he dated the Gabor sisters, in chronological sequence. NS: I never met them. I dimly remember that there was not an attractive woman out there who he did not claim he had dated, was dating, or was going to date. And this was often with his wives present. Just get a couple of Jack Daniels in him and he was ready to go. SM: This was the cause of how many of the divorces? JS: : Seven. I think seven. One of the divorces wasn't so much of a divorce as a settlement because of something along the line of her driving her car into his abdomen. And everyone decided, let's just walk away from that. NS: There was an annulment. JS: : There was an annulment. But we don't count that because it was an annulment, not a divorce. Now: Food fight instigator at Worldcon 12. SM: Yes. That is true. JS: : It's true. Muffins everywhere. SM: And whipped cream. JS: : Yes. We don't want to talk about that. NS: I thought it was catsup. JS: : No. I have to side with her, it was definitely whipped cream. There were no stains. NS: I had totally heard that he had sprayed Catsup on everyone, and that this was the start of the whole Star Trek "Red Shirt" thing. JS: : Wow, because that was what I was going to ask you next. You are indeed a former Star Trek story editor, is Winton himself he inspiration for the Red Shirt? NS: That's what I'd heard. But you never know what's real and what's not. SM: I think though that that wasn't Worldcon 12. JS: : Wasn't Worldcon 12? SM: No. It was the second food fight. JS: : Oh! So whipped cream one, catsup the other, it's entirely possible. SM: Food fights were a favorite pastime. JS: : Sure. As they were with many science fiction authors. SM: He claims to have been the inspiration for great pie fight in The Great Race. Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, the biggest food fight ever filmed. JS: : Yes, and he was very bitter about that with both Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. SM: Yes, and again, because of the failure of a death bed reconciliation. JS: : Right. SM: They did not attend DeathCon. JS: : Right. And with that, I think that also accentuates again: So many legends, so many things we hear about Winton, which may be true, which may not. We may never know the entire story because of the fire, possibly started by Harlan Ellison -- NS: Possibly -- JS: : I'm not saying intentionally -- NS: Unproven -- JS: : Unproven. But I can say that what we've done here is gotten a better understanding of him. Now unfortunately we've gone through this very quickly and we've run out of time, so we can't discuss his years as the story editor for the Sid and Marty Kroft Super Show, where the rumor was he was dating Witchypoo. We're not going to be able to get into that. We're not going to talk about him, at the very end, writing exclusively on ARPANET, where the rumor was he started the first flame war. NS: It would not surprise me. JS: : These things we're not going to be able to tell you. We're not going to be able to tell you about his collaborations with religious tract maker Jack Chick, "Jesus' Robot" and "Heathens on the Moon." But I am going to say this: He's having a resurgence now. Subterranean Press, a well-regarded small press, is soon to release Ten Toes and Others, which is a single-volume book of his work over the years. SM: Sadly we also don't have time to discuss the rumors of a toe fetish. JS: : Yeah, well... NS: It was all breasts and feet with him. JS: : One thing we can say about Ten Toes and Others is that apparently the Post Office has filed a suit to stop its publication on the grounds that it's just too damn heavy to deliver. But again, we're out of time. NS: Do have time enough just for a quick toast? JS: : A toast! Yes! NS: To my Uncle Godfrey. JS: : To Uncle Godfrey: May his lap be forever free for small children. NS & SM: Hear, hear. JS: : Thank you everyone, thank you for coming.
-- END TRANSCRIPT ---
Fiction: Carnival Knowledge: a Lucifer Jones Story by Mike Resnick
I wandered north and east until I finally came to Los Blancos, which had two hotels, three restaurants, a whorehouse, and five bars, none of which felt inclined to extend credit to a man of the cloth. I finally got a grubstake together when I taught some of the locals a little game what had to do with statistical probabilities and the number 21. It was when they became more interested in the number 54, which was how many cards there were in the deck once you counted the two aces that slipped out of my shirtsleeve at a most inopportune time that I felt a need to take my leave of that fair metropolis, and the sooner the better.
I'd won just enough money to buy passage with an itinerant bush pilot, whose profession was sadly misnamed as there wasn't a single bush aboard his little three-seater. I figgered I might as well go to Buenos Aires, since I was in Argentina anyway, but he explained that this was carnival week in Rio, and that's where people from all over South America was headed, and I figured if they were going to Rio probably their money was going along with them, and I just might get my hands on enough contributions, freely given and otherwise, to finally get around to building the Tabernacle of Saint Luke--and even if not, there had to be a passel of fallen women in serious need of salvation, and taking the sins of fallen women unto myself was one of the things I did best, me being one of God's personal representatives.
"Tell me about this here carnival," I said after I agreed to let him take me there. "Got a lot of sideshow games of chance in it?"
"No, Senor," he replied.
"Elephants and lions and other trained critters like that?"
"Certainly not, Senor."
"Well," I said, "we can play guessing games all the way to Rio, or you can tell me what makes carnival week different from any other time of year."
"Everyone dresses up in costumes, and they march through the streets, and everywhere there are bands and dancing. The whole city is filled with revelers."
It sounded a lot more like a costume party than a carnival, but I didn't want to disagree with him, especially not at 7,000 feet of altitude and no parachute, so I just sat back and started making plans. I figured I'd go dressed as a preacher what had been stuck in the South American outback for a couple of months, which would at least save me the cost of a costume, and with people coming from all over the continent, there figured to be enough sinners for me to get right down to the business of saving souls, since if you're going to save sinners you just naturally got to go to where they all congregate, and when the pilot started describing some of the ladies' costumes, which sure as shooting sounded a lot more like the ladies' lack of costumes, I knew that I'd somehow lucked out and was going to the very best place to find a bunch of blackened souls what was in serious need of some spiritual soap and water.
"Not only is it Carnival," he continued as this great big city came into view, "but if you are lucky you will have the opportunity to see the Pebbles of God."
"I speak to God every day," I said, "and He ain't never mentioned no pebbles to me. You make 'em sound like they're mighty special, at least as pebbles go."
"That is merely the name for them, Senor," said the pilot. "They are actually a matched set of perfect blue-white diamonds."
"You don't say? Worth a lot, are they?"
"A king's ransom," he answered. "Maybe an emperor's."
"And they're going to be on display during this here costume party?" I asked.
"They won't be out on the street with the revelers, of course," he explained. "But they have been moved to the Presidential Palace under heavy guard where certain select dignitaries will be allowed to view them."
"How do these here dignitaries get themselves selected?" I said.
He shrugged, which damned near sent the plane into a tailspin. "Who knows, Senor?" And then he added, kind of suspiciously, "Why do you ask?"
"Well, Brother," I said, "as a man of the cloth, I figger I might be offended by all the drinking and scanty costumes and the like. I kind of yearn for something more sedate, like admiring works of art."
"There is an excellent art museum on San Paulo Street," he offered.
I shook my head. "Probably filled to overflowing with paintings of shameless naked women," I said. "No, I think I'd better stick to admiring God's marbles."
"The Pebbles of God," he corrected me.
"Whatever," I said with a shrug.
Then he got busy landing the plane, and the conversation kind of lay there like a dead groundhog, and finally we bumped down--I was going to say that we touched down, but I wouldn't want my Silent Partner to strike me dead for lying to you--and I got out of the plane and wandered over to the Customs and Immigration shed, which was composed of rotting wood and a leaky roof, and lit by a gas lantern.
"Welcome to Rio," said a uniformed man with a bushy mustache and a toothy smile.
"Glad to be here, Brother," I said. "Which way to the diamonds?"
"It is the wrong time of year," he said apologetically. "We do not play baseball during Carnival."
"Okay, then," I said. "Just point out the Presidential Palace and I'll be on my way."
"I am afraid no one is allowed in or out of the palace since the robbery, Senor," he told me.
"What robbery are you referring to?" I asked, hoping that it was something trivial, like maybe someone stealing Mrs. President.
"The Pebbles of God, Senor," he said. "You have heard of them?"
"Once or twice," I said. "What happened?"
"I do not know, Senor," he replied. "I have been at my station all day. But we received word about an hour ago that an incredibly brazen thief somehow got past all our security and stole the Pebbles. They are searching the city for him even as we speak, but with Carnival going on..." He shrugged. "Ah, well. We have the finest police force in the world. I'm sure that eventually they will apprehend the thief and recover the diamonds. Now then, Senor, have you anything to declare?"
"Just that I'm as outraged as you are, and that Satan's probably warming up a seat in hell for him even as you and I shoot the breeze," I said.
"I mean, have you anything to declare for Customs?"
"No," I answered. "Us men of the cloth travel light." I showed him my wallet, which was empty, since I'd put what little money I had left inside my shoe.
"Thank you, Senor," he said, looking at it and handing it back to me. "By the way, your driver's license expired nineteen years ago."
"Yeah?" I said, taking a look. "You know, I could have sworn it was only seventeen years out of date. Thanks for pointing it out to me."
Before he could answer I was heading through the airport and out into the street, where I caught a double-decker bus and headed off toward the center of town. I figured since the Pebbles of God were no longer available, the least I could do was join the party that seemed to be going on all around me, and maybe share a little carnival knowledge with an obliging lady of quality.
Everywhere I looked people were wearing costumes (or in the case of some of the young ladies, not quite wearing them), and they all were smiling and laughing and dancing the samba, which for them of you what ain't never seen it is a kind of rhythmic form of palsy where you take a ton of steps but don't get nowhere.
The bus was slowing down for a corner when my eyes fell on the prettiest morsel of femininity I ever did see. She had long black hair flowing down to her waist, and the kind of figure that made you think she had room for an extra set of lungs, and her hips were vibrating like unto a rattlesnake about to strike. I couldn't quite figure out her costume, but mostly it looked like a naked lady covered with gold and silver glitter and maybe a set of false eyelashes and not a hell of a lot more.
I hopped off the bus and made my way through the dancers right up to her side.
"Howdy, ma'am," I said. "I hope you don't mind this intrusion, but I got to tell you that your beauty done dazzled me from afar, so I thunk I'd come on over and let it dazzle me from close up."
She flashed me a smile that would have made me bay at the moon if I could have spotted it amidst all the balloons and confetti.
"You are rich Americano, no?" she said in the most beautiful feminine voice.
"Yeah, that's me," I said, because I figured hitting .500 already put me ahead of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
"I am Conchita," she said. "You put me in movies, maybe?"
"Sure, I'll be happy to," I said, making a mental note to buy a little eight-millimeter camera the next morning, and maybe purchase some film in a month or two, after all the tourists went back home and the prices began dropping.
Well, we got to talking, and one thing led to another, and before long Conchita had samba'd her way to a little hotel on a side street, and then she samba'd up the stairs, and then she samba'd into the big double bed, and sometime during the night while I was snoring peacefully she samba'd back out and about an hour before sunrise she samba'd in back and brung her six brothers with her. One of 'em looked like Primo Carnera, only meaner, and he was the runt of the litter. She introduced us and asked me to name the date, and I told her I couldn't rightly remember but I thunk we were in June, or maybe April, or possibly October, and she laughed musically and said that she didn't mean today's date, she meant the date for our nuptials.
The whole family seemed mildly upset when I explained that offering to buy a cheap camera didn't constitute a bonafide proposal of marriage back where I came from. Then she started crying, and her brothers began ripping the room apart and looking like they was about to leave the room alone and start in on me, so I kind of rushed out the doorway and down the stairs. By the time I hit the main floor I realized I didn't know how to get in touch with Conchita in case she wanted to go out on another date at some point in the future when everyone had calmed down, but them brothers were thundering down the stairs so fast that I figured that it was better to have loved and lost than to have loved and been dismembered, so I took off down the street and tried to lose myself in the crowd, which was still there and still dancing, even though the sun was thinking of coming up.
"There he is!" yelled a voice, and I saw that one of Conchita's brothers--the one with steel teeth and hobnailed boots--had spotted me. I raced down an alley, turned onto the next street, damned near bumped into the brother who carried a hand axe for comfort, spun around, and headed off in a new direction. Before long all six of 'em was hot on my tail, and the only thing that saved me was that the crowd was getting thicker and thicker, and none of us could make much headway.
Finally I spotted a big building where a bunch of gents in sparkling white suits and ladies in sparkling pink skins were gathering, and I made a bee-line for the door. I don't think Conchita's brothers saw me, because they were no more than fifteen seconds behind me, and no one entered the place for the next half minute. I looked around, and saw that I was in a warehouse, and that this was where a bunch of men were getting into their costumes and a bunch of ladies were getting out of them, so to speak. I figgered the best way to become incognizant was to put on some of the duds the men were wearing, but they seem to have brung their own, because big as the place was I couldn't find no spare costumes hanging on the walls.
Finally I walked up to one of the men and offered him five dollars for his sequined tuxedo.
"Ten," he said.
"Okay, ten."
"And a date with Jean Harlow," he added.
"I don't know Jean Harlow," I admitted.
"Then the deal's off," he said.
"Hang on a minute," I said. "I know a right friendly local girl named Conchita."
"Conchita with all the brothers?" he said. "You and 500 others." He crossed himself. "Those brothers made short work of at least 490 of them."
"That's why I need a disguise."
"You need a priest."
"I am a priest," I said desperately. I held up my well-worn copy of the good book.
"Really?"
"Well, a minister," I said. "The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones. Same position, different league."
"If you're a minister, what were you doing with Conchita?" he asked me.
"Showing her what sins to avoid if she wants to move to the head of the line at the Pearly Gates."
"I think I may convert," he said with a great big grin. "Will you bless me, Father?"
He still had the wrong religion, but I didn't have no time to argue.
"Domino nabisco, my son," I said. "Now help me find some duds before them brothers of hers bust the building down."
Suddenly a trumpet blared and everyone began rushing to the door.
"I am sorry," he said apologetically. "My group is beginning our march through the city now. We must continue our discussion later." As he reached the door he turned and yelled back, "If I see Conchita, I'll give her your regards."
Then he was gone, and I was all alone in the building. At least I thought I was when I heard a very cultured, very familiar voice say, "I see Fate has brought us together once again, Doctor Jones."
I kept my eyes on the door, because I didn't want to turn around and find out for sure that the voice belonged to who I thunk it belonged to.
"Have you no word of greeting for an old friend?" it said.
"Show me an old friend and I'll let you know," I said.
"But it's me, Erich von Horst," he said, walking into my line of vision, looking as trim and elegant as ever, kind of like a headwaiter without a hair out of place.
"So it is," I said, walking around him and heading to the door. "And it's sure been nice seeing you again, but I got urgent business elsewhere."
"I overheard what you were saying," he replied. "If you go outside, you'll run into the girl's brothers."
"The worst they can do is bust my arms and legs and maybe break my back and gouge out my eyeballs," I said, still walking away from him. "That makes it an easy choice."
He grabbed my arm. "I believe the heat has gotten to you," he said. "You really should start wearing a hat. You know what the vertical rays of the sun do to Englishmen."
"I'm from Moline, Illinois."
"Same thing," he said, kind of pulling me over to a chair and sitting me down. "You look well, Doctor Jones. How has life been treating you?"
"Just fine until about two minutes ago," I muttered.
He threw back his head and laughed. "Good old Doctor Jones!" he said. "Always Johnny on the spot with a witty remark."
"I hope you didn't come here all the way from England just to bamboozle me again," I said. "Because if you did, I got to tell you on the front end that I ain't go no money."
"When did I ever try to relieve you of your money, my good friend?" he asked innocently.
"Tanganyika," I said. "Morocco. Mozambique. Greece. England."
"You may have emerged the poorer party, but you were not the innocent one."
"We ain't neither of us innocent of much," I said bitterly, "but every time we hook up I wind up un-innocent and broke and you wind up un-innocent and rich."
"Then perhaps you'll let me make it up to you," said von Horst.
"I don't want to hear this," I said.
"There are millions involved."
I got up. "I'm going out into the street and challenge Conchita's brothers. I'll be safer."
"The Pebbles of God," he said softly.
I sat back down.
He grinned. "I thought that would interest you."
"Only because I'm a religious man, and I won't have you robbing my Silent Partner."
"Oh?"
"Well, not alone, anyway."
"What if I told you that I know who stole them?"
"If I'd known you were in the country, I could have given 500-to-1 odds that I knew too."
"So...are we partners?" said von Horst.
"You already got 'em," I said suspiciously. "What do you need a partner for?"
"The police are watching my every move," he explained. "If I try to leave the city, they'll stop me and search me."
"No," I said.
"No, what?" he asked.
"No, I ain't gonna try to smuggle them out of the city for you," I said. "I'm a foreigner too. They'll search me, find the diamonds, and I'll rot in some Brazilian jail while you go free as a bird."
He shook his head. "Oh, ye of little faith."
"I got faith, and to spare," I shot back. "What I ain't got is a death wish."
"Everything has been arranged," he said. "You will be able to leave the city right under the nose of the police."
"And they'll ignore me, huh?" I said sarcastically.
"No, my dear friend," he replied. "They'll applaud you."
"What in tarnation are you talking about?" I demanded.
"It is Carnival!" he said. "And you are in a costume warehouse!"
"The most valuable diamonds in the country have been stolen, and you think that anyone wearing a costume can dance right out of town?" I said. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
He shook his head. "No, they'll search you top to bottom," he said. "But they'll never find the Pebbles of God."
"If they're that well hid," I said, "why don't you take 'em out yourself? What do you need me for?"
"While you're taking them to our appointed meeting place, I'm going to be convincing the police that I still have them," he explained. "I have been hiding since I stole them, but once you're on your way, I plan to show myself and lead them a merry chase in the opposite direction, which will take most of their attention away from you, and result in at best a cursory examination. Possibly the police will catch me, possibly they won't--but even if they do, they will eventually have to let me go since I won't have the diamonds." He looked sharply at me. "Your fee will be one-third of the take."
"Seems to me that the guy what's carrying the diamonds is taking most of the risks," I said, "and ought to be making most of the money."
"All right," he said. "Fifty-fifty."
"Sixty-thirty," I said.
He frowned. "That's only ninety."
"God gets ten percent. As His spokesman on Earth, I'll hold it in escrow for Him."
He considered it for a moment, then shook his head. "Fifty-fifty or it's no deal."
"What about God?" I demanded.
"You can split your half with Him any way you want," he said. "Now, are you in or out?"
"First show me how you think I'm gonna waltz right by the police and then I'll tell you."
"Here," he said, pulling a glittery toga and a pair of gold sandals out of a pocket. "Put these on."
He began walking off.
"Where are you going?" I said.
"Just get dressed," he answered, opening a side door I didn't even know was there. "I'll be right back."
I doffed my duds and clambered into the toga, which truth to tell felt a little drafty down at the south end of it, and then strapped on the sandals. I'd just finished when I heard a snort that sure didn't sound like von Horst. I looked up, and there he was, leading in a smart-looking chestnut horse what was attached to a gold chariot.
I took a deep breath and wrinkled my nose.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"Your horse smells of fish," I told him.
He smiled. "That's not the horse. It's part of your costume." He reached into the chariot and pulled out a trident with a pair of fish on it. "You're Neptune, King of the Ocean."
"Couldn't I lose the fish and be King of the Desert?" I said.
He shook his head. "Look at all the fish designs on your chariot. You've got to be Neptune. We don't want to draw any unnecessary attention to you."
"I'm a gringo riding a chariot, wearing a skirt, and carrying a bunch of dead fish," I said. "Don't you that that will draw attention?"
"Not in the middle of Carnival," he said, pulling a phony beard out of his pocket. "Put this on."
"No one's ever seen the King of the Ocean," I said. "How do you know he wears a beard?"
"Maybe he doesn't," agreed von Horst. "I suppose it all depends on whether you want every policeman in town to know exactly what you look like."
Which is how I wound up wearing a beard.
"You seem awfully well-prepared for this," I said suspiciously. "Why do I get the feeling that you were waiting for me to come along?"
"Because you have a suspicious nature," he replied easily. "I was waiting for someone to come along that I could trust. It was just serendipity that it was you."
"Okay," I said. "I look like an idiot and smell like a fish. What has all this got to do with God's Testicles?"
"The Pebbles of God," he corrected me. He reached into the chariot one more time and withdraw a glittering gold crown encrusted with diamonds. "Here they are," he said triumphantly. "You'll wear them right out of town under the noses of the police. There must be five thousand crowns in the parade, all covered with cut glass. There will be no reason for anyone to suspect that this is what the entire city is searching for."
I took the crown from him and studied it. "What do you think they're worth?" I said.
He shrugged. "Three million, four million, who can say?"
"The fence you're going to sell them to can say."
"Why guess?" he said. "You'll be standing right beside me when we make the deal."
"Where are we gonna meet?" I asked.
"There's a tavern named Carlita's two miles south of the city limit," he said. "Meet me there two hours after sunset."
"Carlita's," I said. "Got it."
"And don't forget to feed and water the horse," added von Horst. "If he dies on you, they'll probably arrest you for animal abuse, and if you're in jail for a few days, even these unimaginative minions of the law will figure out that your crown is more than it appears to be."
"Right. Feed and water the horse, follow the parade south out of town, and meet you at Carlita's after dark."
"Two hours after dark," he said. "If you are late I will assume you have betrayed my trust, and I will report you to the police and claim ten percent of the Pebbles as my finder's fee. We will both be a lot wealthier if you simply do as we have planned."
"I am shocked that you could think such un-Christian thoughts about me, Brother von Horst," I said. "Just see to it that you get to Carlita's on schedule. If you're more than a few minutes late, I'm going to assume that the police have picked you up and I'm on my own."
"Fair enough," he agreed.
I climbed into the chariot and grabbed the reins. "Has this nag got a name?" I asked.
"Dobbin," said von Horst.
"How about that?" I said. "We used to have a horse called Dobbin back on the farm in Moline, Illinois."
"A family pet?"
"Until my father got drunk and mistook him for a moose, or maybe a tax collector."
I clucked to Dobbin, and he trotted out of the building, and a minute later we were in the thick of things, surrounded by dancers and singers and drummers and a lot of ladies what was dressed for extremely warm weather. I stayed with them for almost a mile, until I was sure van Horst wasn't following me, and then I turned Dobbin into a side street, pulled him to a stop, and clambered out of the chariot.
If there was one thing I knew, it was that Erich von Horst didn't hand an honest bone in his body. This was the guy who salted the Elephant's Graveyard in Tanganyika, stole the Crown jewels in London, and otherwise flim-flammed his way around the world, usually taking unfair advantage of innocent trusting souls like myself. But I was onto him this time. I knew if he told me the diamonds were in the crown, that was the one place they weren't. They looked like cut class because they were cut glass.
Still, he wouldn't have gone to all this trouble if he had the diamonds on his person, so they had to be here somewhere. I knelt down and pulled the hubcaps off each wheel, but there wasn't nothing to be found. I went over the chariot with a fine-toothed comb, but I couldn't find no diamonds. Then I thunk of checking Dobbin. I went over every inch of his bridle and harness, checked his teeth for shiny fillings, even pried off his shoes in case von Horst had hid the diamonds there, but I kept coming up empty.
I'd wasted an hour and still hadn't found the diamonds. The sun was getting a little higher in the sky, the day was warming up, and the smell of the fish was making me sick. I figured as long as Neptune had a trident he didn't need no fish on it, and I was about to pull 'em off and toss 'em to a couple of stray cats that had mosied over to admire 'em close up.
And then it hit me. What was the one place von Horst was sure I wouldn't look for the diamonds? Inside the fish, which were getting so high and off-putting that he figgered I wouldn't want to have nothing to do with them, but I was just a little too smart for him.
I pulled one of the fish off the trident. The cats started meowing up a storm, figgering I was about to toss it to them, but instead I manipulated the trident and cut the fish's belly open with one of the tines, and sure enough, out fell half a dozen perfect blue-white diamonds. I tossed the empty fish to the cats, cut open the other one, picked up another six diamonds, and gave what was left over to the cats.
I knew I couldn't bring the diamonds out of town with me, because von Horst would be waiting at Carlita's. I looked around and realized I was standing next to a lamppost. I moved Dobbin right up against to it, climbed up onto his back, removed the top of the lamp, and put the diamonds there, where they couldn't be seen from the street. The guys who lit the lamps at night did it with these long-handled candles, so none of them ever climbed up there or got a close look, and I knew the diamonds would be safe until I got the opportunity to come back and collect them.
I got back down on the ground, hopped into the chariot, and turned Dobbin back in the direction of the parade. When we passed a fish market a little farther down the street, I stopped, bought a pair of fish that smelled almost as bad as the two I'd left behind, and stuck 'em on the trident.
Then it was just a matter of joining the revelers, who never seemed to run out of energy, as they danced their way through the streets of Rio. I even saw a couple of Conchita's brothers, but of course they never thought to look at Neptune, so we didn't have no unpleasant or deadly encounters. In midafternoon I struck up a conversation with a mildly-naked young lady what was dressed as a harlequin from the neck up and the ankles down. I invited her to join me in my chariot so's we could get to know each other a little better, and for a minute there I thunk she was going to oblige, but then she wrinkled her noise and said that she was happy to share the chariot and other things with me, but not with the fish. It was a tough decision, but I couldn't be sure I'd pass another fishmonger before we left the city, so I reluctantly bid her farewell. I never saw a gorgeous underdressed lady look so surprised in all my born days, and I've had some pretty surprising encounters with a passel of 'em.
In late afternoon I let Dobbin graze on a pair of fruit stands what's owner were off dancing. Pretty soon it started getting dark, and I realized that first, I was about three miles from Carlita's, and second, I was getting powerful sick of samba music, so I turned Dobbin south onto the exit road. I let him stop and munch on some grass and flowers and the like, and we pulled up to Carlita's almost exactly two hours after sunset. I didn't want von Horst examining the fish too closely while I was still around, so I laid 'em down on the floor of the chariot, hopped out, tied Dobbin to a hitching post, and walked into the tavern.
There was so much cigar smoke that I almost didn't see the sultry girl doing kind of a slow dance in the corner. She was barefoot, she had a cigarette dangling from her mouth, and she was kind of doing a solo rhumba in slow motion. The bartender was maybe 400 pounds and drenched in sweat, but just the same he never rolled up his sleeves, unbuttoned his shirt, or loosened his bowtie. There were half a dozen tables, most of 'em filled by people who looked like they either didn't know it was carnival week or didn't much care.
I sat down at an empty table. A couple of friendly young ladies wandered over from the bar, but before they could reach me von Horst entered the place, carrying a brown paper bag, and walked right over to me, waving them away kind of disdainful-like.
"Any trouble?" he asked.
"Only with the fish," I said, just to see his reaction.
His face got all tense. "What about the fish?"
"They smelled so bad that I couldn't get any young ladies of quality to ride with me," I said.
"But you still have them?" he said kind of urgently.
"Yeah, they're out there in the chariot."
He suddenly relaxed. "I'm glad to see everything went off without a hitch."
"I don't suppose you brung my clothes with you?" I said. "I don't like the way a couple of these guys are staring at my legs."
"As a matter of fact I did," said von Horst. He handed me the bag. "Maybe you should go change in the men's room."
And that was when I saw how I'd make my getaway.
"Thanks, von Horst," I said. I put a hand to my stomach. "I was about to head off there anyway. I been feeling a mite queasy all day. I think it was the smell of them damned fish."
"Take your time," he said. "My fence isn't due here for another half hour."
And then, because I didn't want him coming looking for me, I had another stroke of brilliance. I took the crown off and guv it to him.
"Here," I said. "You hang onto this."
He just looked kind of surprised, and a bit curious.
"What's past is past," I said, "and I just want you to know that there ain't no hard feelings. I trust you not to run off with the Pebbles while I'm in the john."
"I appreciate that, Doctor Jones," he said.
I picked up the bag and walked to the bathroom. I'd call it the men's room, but from the looks of it it served men, women, children, and the occasional mule what wandered in to get out of the weather. I took off the toga and sandals, got into my clothes, and then climbed out through the narrow window.
When I was about a block away I took a peek back. Dobbin was still tied to the post, and von Horst either hadn't come out to check on the fish, or had maybe got as far as the front door, took a deep breath, and satisfied himself that they were still there.
I hitched a ride into Rio in the back of a truck what was delivering a few hundred live chickens to market, which certainly got the smell of fish out of my nose. I hopped off when we were a block away from the lamppost where I'd left the Pebbles of God, then waited a few minutes until I was sure no one was out on the street where they might see me.
I climbed up the lamppost, reached in, and found to my relief that the Pebbles were still there. I pulled 'em out, stuffed 'em into my pocket, clambered down to the ground, and headed off in search of a place to spend the night, preferably one what wasn't frequented by none of Conchita's friends and relations.
I passed a bunch of Brazilian hotels, and finally come to an American one, and the reason I knew that was that it had a small tasteful sign, written all in American, what said: Bed and Broad, $7.
"Howdy," I said, walking into the lobby, which was about the size of a closet, only maybe a little better-lit. "You got any rooms for rent?"
"Nah, we just rent airplanes and gorillas here," said the clerk, which was the kind of answer what convinced me beyond any doubt that he was American.
"You need a better sign painter," I said.
"That's as big a sign as we could afford," he said.
"I wasn't talking about the size of it," I replied. "But it says Bed and Broad."
"I know what it says," he told me.
"And you got no problem with it?" I asked.
"None," he said.
"In that case I just may stay here a month," I said, pulling off my shoe and reaching for my folded-up bill, which I shoved across the counter to him.
"What's this?" he said, frowning.
"My last ten dollars," I said. "But don't worry; I'll have more tomorrow."
"If it's like this, I won't take it tomorrow neither," he said, shoving it back to me.
I picked it up and realized that it wasn't no bill at all, but instead a folded-up letter. It was too dark to read in there, so I took it out and stood under a street light.
My dear Doctor Jones:
If there are three certainties in the world, they are death, taxes, and the nature of Lucifer Jones. If my reading of your character is correct, and thus far it always has been, you instantly assumed that the crown contained nothing but cut glass. It would have taken you less than an hour to examine your costume, your chariot, and Dobbin's harness, come up empty, and finally realized that I must have had an ulterior motive for insisting that the fish be part of your costume. You of course would have cut them open, found the faux "diamonds", and secreted them away before meeting me at Carlita's. (You are welcome to keep them as a memento of our partnership.) I knew you would want to take your leave of the place before I could examine the fish, so I brought your clothes along, giving you the perfect opportunity to escape, which of course you took.
It may interest you to know that you were indeed in possession of the Pebbles of God all day long. They were precisely where I told you they were--embedded in Neptune's crown--but I knew that a man of your deceitful nature would never trust a man of honor and integrity like myself to tell you the truth. I feel your behavior in this endeavor clearly disqualifies you from your share of the profits.
And profits there will be. The diamonds are only part of this little enterprise. The creature you know as Dobbin is actually the champion racehorse Phar Cry, whom I borrowed for a few days and am now returning for almost as much money as I will realize for the Pebbles of God. All in all, a good day's work, thanks in no small part to you.
Your obedient servant,
Erich von Horst
A trio of amiable young men wandered up and asked me if I'd like to join them in a samba.
I kicked each of them in the shins.
Fiction: Snowball's Chance by Charles Stross
The louring sky, half past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy's head like a hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within.
His sometime conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. "Awright, Davy?"
Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. "Mine's a Deuchars." His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse's atmosphere--so thick you could cut it with an axe, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lop-sided snot-siphon, back in the day when she'd had aught to say to Davy. "Fuckin' Baltic oot there the night, an' nae kiddin'." He slid his glasses off and wiped them off, then looked around tiredly. "An' deid tae the world in here."
Tam glanced around as if to be sure the pub population hadn't magically doubled between mouthfuls of seventy bob. "Ah widnae say that." He gestured with his nose--pockmarked by frostbite--at the snug in the corner. Once the storefront for the Old Town's more affluent ladies of the night, it was now unaccountably popular with students of the gaming fraternity, possibly because they had been driven out of all the trendier bars in the neighbourhood for yacking till all hours and not drinking enough (much like the whores before them). Right now a bunch of threadbare LARPers were in residence, arguing over some recondite point of lore. "They're havin' enough fun for a barrel o' monkeys by the sound o' it."
"An' who can blame them?" Davy hoisted his glass: "Ah just wish they'd keep their shite aff the box." The pub, in an effort to compensate for its lack of a food licence, had installed a huge and dodgy voxel engine that teetered precariously over the bar: it was full of muddy field, six LARPers leaping.
"Dinnae piss them aff, Davy--they've a' got swords."
"Ah wis jist kiddin'. Ah didnae catch ma lottery the night, that's a' Ah'm sayin'."
"If ye win, it'll be a first." Tam stared at his glass. "An' whit wid ye dae then, if yer numbers came up?"
"Whit, the big yin?" Davy put his glass down, then unzipped his parka's fast-access pouch and pulled out a fag packet and lighter. Condensation immediately beaded the plastic wrapper as he flipped it open. "Ah'd pay aff the hoose, for starters. An' the child support. An' then--" He paused, eyes wandering to the dog-eared NO SMOKING sign behind the bar. "Ah, shit." He flicked his Zippo, stroking the end of a cigarette with the flame from the burning coal oil. "If Ah wis young again, Ah'd move, ye ken? But Ah'm no, Ah've got roots here." The sign went on to warn of lung cancer (curable) and two-thousand-Euro fines (laughable, even if enforced). Davy inhaled, grateful for the warmth flooding his lungs. "An' there's Morag an' the bairns."
"Heh." Tam left it at a grunt, for which Davy was grateful. It wasn't that he thought Morag would ever come back to him, but he was sick to the back teeth of people who thought they were his friends telling him that she wouldn't, not unless he did this or did that.
"Ah could pay for the bairns tae go east. They're young enough." He glanced at the doorway. "It's no right, throwin' snowba's in May."
"That's global warmin'." Tam shrugged with elaborate irony, then changed the subject. "Where d'ye think they'd go? The Ukraine? New 'Beria?"
"Somewhaur there's grass and nae glaciers." Pause. "An' real beaches wi' sand an' a'." He frowned and hastily added: "Dinnae get me wrong, Ah ken how likely that is." The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf two decades ago had inundated every established coastline; it had also stuck the last nail in the coffin of the Gulf stream, plunging the British Isles into a sub-Arctic deep freeze. Then the Americans had made it worse--at least for Scotland--by putting a giant parasol into orbit to stop the rest of the planet roasting like a chicken on a spit. Davy had learned all about global warming in Geography classes at school--back when it hadn't happened--in the rare intervals when he wasn't dozing in the back row or staring at Yasmin MacConnell's hair. It wasn't until he was already paying a mortgage and the second kid was on his way that what it meant really sank in. Cold. Eternal cold, deep in your bones.
"Ah'd like tae see a real beach again, some day before Ah die."
"Ye could save for a train ticket."
"Away wi' ye! Where'd Ah go tae?" Davy snorted, darkly amused. Flying was for the hyper-rich these days, and anyway, the nearest beaches with sand and sun were in the Caliphate, a long day's TGV ride south through the Channel Tunnel and across the Gibraltar Bridge, in what had once been the Northern Sahara Desert. As a tourist destination, the Caliphate had certain drawbacks, a lack of topless sunbathing beauties being only the first on the list. "It's a' just as bad whauriver ye go. At least here ye can still get pork scratchings."
"Aye, weel." Tam raised his glass, just as a stranger appeared in the doorway.
"An' then there's some that dinnae feel the cauld." Davy glanced round to follow the direction of his gaze. The stranger was oddly attired in a lightweight suit and tie, as if he'd stepped out of the middle of the previous century, although his neat goatee beard and the two small brass horns implanted on his forehead were a more contemporary touch. He noticed Davy staring and nodded, politely enough, then broke eye contact and ambled over to the bar. Davy turned back to Tam, who responded to at his wink. "Take care noo, Davy. Ye've got ma number." With that, he stood up, put his glass down, and shambled unsteadily towards the toilets.
This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement. Davy's forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman, who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder cartridge in one hand. "My round?" asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.
"Aye. Mine's a Deuchars if yer buyin'..." Davy, while not always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink--however well sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner had once done--and picked up two glasses.
"New roond aboot here?" Davy asked after a moment.
The stranger smiled: "Just passing through--I visit Edinburgh every few years."
"Aye." Davy could relate to that.
"And yourself?"
"Ah'm frae Pilton." Which was true enough; that was where he'd bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the Firth fro six months in every year, back before the rising sea level drowned Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur's Seat into a frigid coastal headland looming grey and stark above the the permafrost. "Whereaboots d'ye come frae?"
The stranger's smile widened as Katie parked a half-litre on the bar top before him and bent down to pull the next: "I think you know where I'm from, my friend."
Davy snorted. "Aye, so ye're a man of wealth an' taste, is that right?"
"Just so." A moment later, Katie planted the second glass in front of Davy, gave him a brittle smile, and retreated to the opposite end of the bar without pausing to extract credit from the stranger, who nodded and raised his jar: "To your good fortune."
"Heh." Davy chugged back a third of his glass. It was unusually bitter, with a slight sulphurous edge to it: "That's a new barrel."
"Only the best for my friends."
Davy sneaked an irritated glance at the stranger. "Right. Ah ken ye want tae talk, ye dinnae need tae take the pish."
"I'm sorry." The stranger held his gaze, looking slightly perplexed. "It's just that I've spent too long in America recently. Most of them believe in me. A bit of good old-fashioned scepticism is refreshing once in a while."
Davy snorted. "Dae Ah look like a god-botherer tae ye? Yer amang civilized folk here, nae free-kirk numpties'd show their noses in a pub."
"So I see." The stranger relaxed slightly. "Seen Morag and the boys lately, have you?"
Now a strange thing happened, because as the cold fury took him, and a monstrous roaring filled his ears, and he reached for the stranger's throat, he seemed to hear Morag's voice shouting, Davy, don't! And to his surprise, a moment of timely sanity came crashing down on him, a sense that Devil or no, if he laid hands on this fucker he really would be damned, somehow. It might just have been the hypothalamic implant that the sheriff had added to the list of his parole requirements working its arcane magic on his brain chemistry, but it certainly felt like a drenching, cold-sweat sense of immanence, and not in a good way. So as the raging impulse to glass the cunt died away, Davy found himself contemplating his own raised fists in perplexity, the crude blue tattoos of LOVE and HATE standing out on his knuckles like doorposts framing the prison gateway of his life.
"Who telt ye aboot them," he demanded hoarsely.
"Cigarette?" The stranger, who had sat perfectly still while Davy wound up to punch his ticket, raised the chiselled eyebrow again.
"Ya bas." But Davy's hand went to his pocket automatically, and he found himself passing a filter-tip to the stranger rather than ramming a red-hot ember in his eye.
"Thank you." The stranger took the unlit cigarette, put it straight between his lips, and inhaled deeply. "Nobody needed to tell me about them," he continued, slowly dribbling smoke from both nostrils.
Davy slumped defensively on his bar stool. "When ye wis askin' aboot Morag and the bairns, Ah figured ye wis fuckin' wi' ma heid." But knowing that there was a perfectly reasonable supernatural explanation somehow made it all right. Ye cannae blame Auld Nick for pushin' yer buttons. Davy reached out for his glass again: "'Scuse me. Ah didnae think ye existed."
"Feel free to take your time." The stranger smiled faintly. "I find atheists refreshing, but it does take a little longer than usual to get down to business."
"Aye, weel, concedin' for the moment that ye are the deil, Ah dinnae ken whit ye want wi' the likes o' me." Davy cradled his beer protectively.
"Ah'm naebody." He shivered in the sudden draught as one of the students--leaving--pushed through the curtain, admitting a flurry of late-May snowflakes.
"So? You may be nobody, but your lucky number just came up." The stranger smiled devilishly. "Did you never think you'd win the Lottery?"
"Aye, weel, if hauf the stories they tell about ye are true, Ah'd rather it wis the ticket, ye ken? Or are ye gonnae say ye've been stitched up by the kirk?"
"Something like that." The Devil nodded sagely. "Look, you're not stupid, so I'm not going to bullshit you. What it is, is I'm not the only one of me working this circuit. I've got a quota to meet, but there aren't enough politicians and captains of industry to go around, and anyway, they're boring. All they ever want is money, power, or good, hot, kinky sex without any comebacks from their constituents. Poor folks are so much more creative in their desperation, don't you think? And so much more likely to believe in the Rules, too."
"The Rules?" Davy found himself staring at his companion in perplexity. "Nae the Law, right?"
"Do as thou wilt shall be all of the Law," quoth the Devil, then he paused as if he'd tasted something unpleasant.
"Ye wis sayin'?"
"Love is the Law, Love under Will," the Devil added dyspeptically.
"That's a'?" Davy stared at him.
"My employer requires me to quote chapter and verse when challenged." As he said "employer", the expression on the Devil's face made Davy shudder. "And she monitors these conversations for compliance."
"But whit aboot the rest o' it, aye? If ye're the deil, whit aboot the Ten Commandments?"
"Oh, those are just Rules," said the Devil, smiling. "I'm really proud of them."
"Ye made them a' up?" Davy said accusingly. "Just tae fuck wi' us?"
"Well, yes, of course I did! And all the other Rules. They work really well, don't you think?"
Davy made a fist and stared at the back of it. LOVE. "Ye cunt. Ah still dinnae believe in ye."
The Devil shrugged. "Nobody's asking you to believe in me. You don't, and I'm still here, aren't I? If it makes things easier, think of me as the garbage collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle. And they"--he stabbed a finger in the direction of the overhead LEDs--"work by magic, for all you know."
Davy picked up his glass and drained it philosophically. The hell of it was, the Devil was right: now he thought about it, he had no idea how the lights worked, except that electricity had something to do with it. "Ah'll have anither. Ye're buyin'.""No I'm not." The Devil snapped his fingers and two full glasses appeared on the bar, steaming slightly. Davy picked up the nearest one. It was hot to the touch, even though the beer inside it was at cellar temperature, and it smelled slightly sulphurous. "Anyway, I owe you."
"Whit for?" Davy sniffed the beer suspiciously: "This smells pish." He pushed it away. "Whit is it ye owe me for?"
"For taking that mortgage and the job on the street-cleaning team and for pissing it all down the drain and fucking off a thousand citizens in little ways. For giving me Jaimie and wee Davy, and for wrecking your life and cutting Morag off from her parents and raising a pair of neds instead of two fine upstanding citizens. You're not a scholar and you're not a gentleman, but you're a truly professional hater. And as for what you did to Morag--"
Davy made another fist: HATE. "Say wan mair word aboot Morag..." he warned.
The Devil chuckled quietly. "No, you managed to do all that by yourself." He shrugged. "I'd have offered help if you needed it, but you seemed to be doing okay without me. Like I said, you're a professional." He cleared his throat. "Which brings me to the little matter of why I'm talking to you tonight."
"Ah'm no for sale." Davy crossed his arms defensively. "Who d'ye think Ah am?"
The Devil shook his head, still smiling. "I'm not here to make you an offer for your soul, that's not how things work. Anyway, you gave it to me of your own free will years ago." Davy looked into his eyes. The smile didn't reach them. "Trouble is, there are consequences when that happens. My employer's an optimist: she's not an Augustinian entity, you'll be pleased to learn, she doesn't believe in original sin. So things between you and the Ultimate are...let's say they're out of balance. It's like a credit card bill. The longer you ignore it, the worse it gets. You cut me a karmic loan from the First Bank of Davy MacDonald, and the Law requires me to repay it with interest."
"Huh?" Davy stared at the Devil. "Ye whit?"
The Devil wasn't smiling now. "You're one of the Elect, Davy. One of the Unconditionally Elect. So's fucking everybody these days, but your name came up in the quality assurance lottery. I'm not allowed to mess with you. If you die and I'm in your debt, seven shades of shit hit the fan. So I owe you a fucking wish."
The Devil tapped his fingers impatiently on the bar top. He was no longer smiling. "You get one wish. I am required to read you the small print:
"The party of the first part in cognizance of the gift benefice or loan bestowed by the party of the second part is hereby required to tender the fulfillment of 1 (one) verbally or somatically expressed indication of desire by the party of the second part in pursuance of the discharge of the said gift benefice or loan, said fulfillment hereinafter to be termed 'the wish'. The party of the first part undertakes to bring the totality of existence into accordance with the terms of the wish exclusive of paradox deicide temporal inversion or other wilful suspension contrary to the laws of nature. The party of the second part recognizes understands and accepts that this wish represents full and final discharge of debt incurred by the gift benefice or loan to the party of the first part. Notwithstanding additional grants of rights incurred under the terms of this contract the rights responsibilities duties of the party of the first part to the party of the second part are subject to the Consumer Credit Regulations of 2026..."
Davy shook his head. "Ah dinnae get it. Are ye tellin' me ye're givin' me a wish? In return for, for...bein' radge a' ma life?"
The Devil nodded. "Yes."
Davy winced. "Ah think Ah need another Deuchars--fuck! Haud on, that isnae ma wish!" He stared at the Devil anxiously. "Ye're serious, aren't ye?"
The Devil sniffed. "I can't discharge the obligation with a beer. My Employer isn't stupid, whatever Her other faults: she'd say I was short-changing you, and she'd be right. It's got to be a big wish, Davy."
Davy's expression brightened. The Devil waved a hand at Katie: "Another Deuchars for my friend here. And a drop of the Craitur." Things were looking up, Davy decided.
"Can ye make Morag nae have...Ah mean, can ye make things...awright again, nae went bad?" He dry-swallowed, mind skittering like a frightened spider away from what he was asking for. Not to have...whatever. Whatever he'd done. Already.
The Devil contemplated Davy for a long handful of seconds. "No," he said patiently. "That would create a paradox, you see, because if things hadn't gone bad for you, I wouldn't be here giving you this wish, would I? Your life gone wrong is the fuel for this miracle."
"Oh." Davy waited in silence while Katie pulled the pint, then retreated back to the far end of the bar. Whaur's Tam? he wondered vaguely. Fuckin' deil, wi' his smairt suit an' high heid yin manners... He shivered, unaccountably cold. "Am Ah goin' tae hell?" he asked roughly. "Is that whaur Ah'm goin'?"
"Sorry, but no. We were brought in to run this universe, but we didn't design it. When you're dead, that's it. No hellfire, no damnation: the worst thing that can happen to you is you're reincarnated, given a second chance to get things right. It's normally my job to give people like you that chance."
"An' if Ah'm no reincarnated?" Davy asked hopefully.
"You get to wake up in the mind of God. Of course, you stop being you when you do that." The Devil frowned thoughtfully. "Come to think of it, you'll probably give Her a migraine."
"Right, right." Davy nodded. The Devil was giving him a headache. He had a dawning suspicion that this one wasn't a prod or a pape: he probably supported Livingstone. "Ah'm no that bad then, is that whit ye're sayin'?"
"Don't get above yourself."
The Devil's frown deepened, oblivious to the stroke of killing rage that flashed behind Davy's eyes at the words. Dinnae get above yersel'? Who the fuck d'ye think ye are, the sheriff? That was almost exactly what the sheriff had said, leaning over to pronounce sentence. Ye ken Ah'm naebody, dinnae deny it! Davy's fists tightened, itching to hit somebody. The story of his life: being ripped off then talked down to by self-satisfied cunts. Ah'll make ye regret it!
The Devil continued after a moment: "You've got to really fuck up in a theological manner before she won't take you, these days. Spreading hatred in the name of God, that kind of thing will do for you. Trademark abuse, she calls it. You're plenty bad, but you're not that bad. Don't kid yourself, you only warrant the special visit because you're a quality sample. The rest are...unobserved."
"So Ah'm no evil, Ah'm just plain bad." Davy grinned virulently as a thought struck him. Let's dae somethin' aboot that! Karmic imbalance? Ah'll show ye a karmic imbalance! "Can ye dae somethin' aboot the weather? Ah hate the cauld." He tried to put a whine in his voice. The change in the weather had crippled house prices, shafted him and Morag. It would serve the Devil right if he fell for it.
"I can't change the weather." The Devil shook his head, looking slightly worried. "Like I said--"
"Can ye fuck wi' yon sun shield the fuckin' Yanks stuck in the sky?" Davy leaned forward, glaring at him: "'Cause if no, whit kindae deil are ye?"
"You want me to what?"
Davy took a deep breath. He remembered what it had looked like on TV, twenty years ago: the great silver reflectors unfolding in solar orbit, the jubilant politicians, the graphs showing a 20% fall in sunlight reaching the Earth...the savage April blizzards that didn't stop for a month, the endless twilight and the sun dim enough to look at. And now the Devil wanted to give him a wish, in payment for fucking things up for a few thousand bastards who had it coming? Davy felt his lips drawing back from his teeth, a feral smile forcing itself to the surface. "Ah want ye to fuck up the sunshade, awright? Get ontae it. Ah want tae be wairm..."
The Devil shook his head. "That's a new one on me," he admitted. "But--" He frowned. "You're sure? No second thoughts? You want to waive your mandatory fourteen-day right of cancellation?"
"Aye. Dae it the noo." Davy nodded vigorously.
"It's done." The Devil smiled faintly.
"Whit?" Davy stared.
"There's not much to it. A rock about the size of this pub, traveling on a cometary orbit--it'll take an hour or so to fold, but I already took care of that." The Devil's smile widened. "You used your wish."
"Ah dinnae believe ye," said Davy, hopping down from his bar stool. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Tam dodging through the blackout curtain and the doorway, tipping him the wink. This had gone on long enough. "Ye'll have tae prove it. Show me."
"What?" The Devil looked puzzled. "But I told you, it'll take about an hour."
"So ye say. An' whit then?"
"Well, the parasol collapses, so the amount of sunlight goes up. It gets brighter. The snow melts."
"Is that right?" Davy grinned. "So how many wishes dae Ah get this time?"
"How many--" The Devil froze. "What makes you think you get any more?" He snarled, his face contorting.
"Like ye said, Ah gave ye a loan, didn't Ah?" Davy's grin widened. He gestured toward the door. "After ye?"
"You--" The Devil paused. "You don't mean..." He swallowed, then continued, quietly. "That wasn't deliberate, was it?"
"Oh. Aye." Davy could see it in his mind's eye: the wilting crops and blazing forests, droughts and heatstroke and mass extinction, the despairing millions across America and Africa, exotic places he'd never seen, never been allowed to go--roasting like pieces of a turkey on a spit, roasting in revenge for twenty years frozen in outer darkness. Hell on Earth. "Four billion fuckers, isnae that enough for another?"
"Son of a bitch!" The Devil reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an antique calculator, began punching buttons. "Forty-eight--no, forty-nine. Shit, this has never happened before! You bastard, don't you have a conscience?"
Davy thought for a second. "Naw."
"Fuck!"
It was now or never. "Ah'll take a note."
"A credit--shit, okay then. Here." The Devil handed over his mobile. It was small and very black and shiny, and it buzzed like a swarm of flies. "Listen, I've got to go right now, I need to escalate this to senior management. Call head office tomorrow, if I'm not there, one of my staff will talk you through the state of your claim."
"Haw! Ah'll be sure tae dae that."
The Devil stalked towards the curtain and stepped through into the darkness beyond, and was gone. Davy pulled out his moby and speed-dialed a number. "He's a' yours noo," he muttered into the handset, then hung up and turned back to his beer. A couple of minutes later, someone came in and sat down next to him. Davy raised a hand and waved vaguely at Katie: "A Deuchars for Tam here."
Katie nodded nonchalantly--she seemed to have cheered up since the Devil had stepped out--and picked up a glass.
Tam dropped a couple of small brass horns on the bar top next to Davy. Davy stared at them for a moment then glanced up admiringly. "Neat," he admitted. "Get anythin' else aff him?"
"Nah, the cunt wis crap. He didnae even have a moby. Just these." Tam looked disgusted for a moment. "Ah pulled ma chib an' waved it aroon' an' he totally legged it. Think anybody'll come lookin' for us?"
"Nae chance." Davy raised his glass, then tapped the pocket with the Devil's mobile phone in it smugly. "Nae a snowball's chance in hell..."
Fiction: An excerpt from One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide King by Elizabeth Bear
Part I
[In Las Vegas in 2002, Jackie, one of the city's two Genii, loses his partner in a fight with the Genii of Los Angeles. In San Diego, simultaneously, the vampire Tribute destroys his creator. And in New York City in 1964, two spies discover that they are targets for assassination, and follow their would-be killer to Las Vegas.]
Tribute and the Scholar. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
My plane taxied up to the gate at McCarran International Airport a little after one A.M. I'm limited to short flights for practical reasons; the good news is, the redeye is usually uncrowded.
I love Las Vegas.
Nobody ever notices me in Vegas. Now that I was on my own, I was thinking of staying on permanently.
Don't get me wrong. I never expected to survive. I thought I'd go down into oblivion with Sycorax, red stain of my borrowed blood on her lips and a fistful of my hair knotted in her hand. I never expected to see another sunrise. Not that I've seen one in 25 years, mind, but you know what I mean. But one minute my gut was clenching, twisting around my poisoned dinner, and the next Sycorax was staring at me in glazed shock, her pale hands fastened on her own wax-white throat as she sank to her knees.
If I'd known it would be that easy I would have handled this years ago.
If I'd known Jesse would leave me alone for half an hour if I did it....
Eighteen hours later, I was on a plane, and less than two hours after that I was stepping across the band of desert heat between the cool of the airplane and the air-conditioned jetway and following the cattle through McCarran's D gates to the tram.
There's a funny thing about Las Vegas. You keep seeing people you think you might halfway recognize. Some of them are minor celebrities, lounge acts, washed-up actors and pop stars who were the Next Big Thing twenty years back. And some aren't.
So people turned to look at me, one or two, as I made my way from the tram over the gaudy carpet and down the escalators. But they weren't surprised, not at all.
I had no luggage to claim; we learn to travel light. But McCarran makes you exit through Baggage Claim whether you need to or not, and I had "Go Down Moses" stuck in my head, somehow---you know, Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt's Land. Tell ol' Pharoah, Let my people go---and was concentrated on not singing it too loudly where anybody could hear me. Which is how I almost tripped over the spy.
You have to understand, I wasn't supposed to know he was a spy. I was supposed to see an athletic, black-haired man in a polo shirt and khakis, turning to hand a cased tennis racket to his companion. The other man was black, broad-shouldered, wearing his hair parted on the side and greased in ringlets in a style I hadn't seen since I was a mortal man. They both reeked of Brylcreem.
It smelled like 1965.
I wasn't supposed to see the way their eyes met for a moment before they glanced over each other's shoulders, either, or to notice that their three-dialed waterproof wristwatches matched. But I've shot up a TV set or two in my time, and I noticed, and stepped wide to go around the pair of them rather than bumping shoulders with the athlete. A little faster, a little smoother than a mortal man should have managed, and the black man's gaze locked on me like a gunman's sights.
And he blinked, and tilted his head to one side, and then offered a wry, contemplative smile. "King," he said. "I didn't know you were in the game."
"I'm not," I answered without bothering to fix my voice. "I'm the real thing. More or less." And I showed him the fangs.
He stepped back: one, two---the racket case raised defensively in his hand---and I beat it for the exit while his partner was still turning to see what had caused his dismay. There was a taxi waiting.
I took it.
There's real, after all. And then there's real.
And if I was going to spend any time in Las Vegas, I was going to have to find out what was going on to bring two of those to the streets of Sin City. And not its native media ghosts, either.
No, a couple of strangers in town.
#
The assassin and the man behind the curtain. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
There were two men already in the office when the assassin got there; one dead, and one alive. The dead one stood behind the live one. The living one was hunched over a laptop computer. The dead one was peering over the living one's shoulder, trying not to drip brains down his back.
Bugsy Siegel looked up when the assassin walked through the door, and frowned. For a dead man, he had an effective stare. He hadn't died pretty, and it still showed.
Ghosts don't heal, and when Bugsy was shot, the hitman put enough lead into the back of his skull that much of his face came off the front side when it exited. One eye was missing, the cheekbone shattered, the empty socket oozing clotted blood and matter. The back of his head was a pulpy mess; it contrasted vividly with his dapper gray double-breasted suit.
Even by the assassin's standards, what was left of him wasn't easy to look at. But the slow trickle of gray matter down his skull hadn't slowed him any. "You didn't get him," he said, and walked through the desk and the Mage whose laptop he had been frowning at a laptop screen to glower at the assassin from closer in.
"No," the assassin said. There was no point in denying it. "Hello, Felix," he said.
Felix Luray didn't look up from the computer. "It's the stories," he said, and flexed his hands together to crack his knuckles. "You're going to have to find some way to work around it, so they can be killed. The bad news is their fans are still out there, keeping them alive. So they're real as...real as Robin Hood. Or the Easter Bunny. The good news is, capturing them should be no problem. That's in genre."
"I wouldn't have guessed," the assassin said dryly, and went to pour himself a drink. "And I can tell by the looks on your faces that Angel and Goddess didn't manage any better."
"Goddess is dead," Felix said. "The revenant John Henry Kinkead bashed her skull in with a sledge hammer."
Fumes stung the assassin's nose. The crystal was heavy in his hand, warming quickly from his skin. He sipped. "Well, saves me having to kill her, then. Who's 'the revenant John Henry Kinkead?'"
"The One-eyed Jack," Felix said. "John Kinkead was the third governor of Nevada. He died circa 1904 in Carson City. Fits the name and general description, and the timing's right."
"Huh." Felix was eyeing the assassin's glass speculatively. The assassin poured a second drink and passed it over; Felix poured half the measure on the rug, where it vanished, wicked up without a trace. Bugsy looked pleased. "What does his name win us, Mr. Luray?"
"Perhaps a little symbolic leverage," he said with a shrug, and tasted his drink. "We've got the dam, of course, but a little more never hurts. Jackie gave Benjamin a run for his money a few years back, I hear---"
Bugsy turned his head and spat. It didn't leave a mark on the carpet. "That faggot's no match for a real Mage, Felix. Sure, he knows a little hedge-craft. But it ain't real magic, not the sort of thing you boys used to do."
"Still do," Felix said easily, and tipped out a little more vodka onto the floor.
"Well, yeah," Bugsy said. "But what I mean to say is, there ain't no more like you, Felix. No more like the Prometheans that built the dam, right? Or the railroad."
"No," Felix said, very quietly. "I'm the last."
Bugsy grinned, sending a thick clot of blood skating down his ruined cheek. "See? You won't have no problem with Jackie."
The assassin smiled tightly. He didn't mention his own research and experience, or what they had taught him about Felix Luray, and why he hadn't been invited to the war that had put an end to the rest of the Prometheans. A pity, the assassin thought; he'd found them useful allies in the past, despite their desire to feel that they were pulling all the strings.
Still, half a Mage---a failed Mage, if you preferred, a defrocked one---was better than none.
"So I take it our next objective is neutralizing the other genius, the Stewart boy."
"Not at all," Felix said, swirling his drink and savoring a slow, pleased smile. "Angel took care of that while you were busy in London and New York. Everything's under control."
#
The One-Eyed Jack and the Steel-Driving Men. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
The John Henrys waited for me on the corner of Third and Bonneville, across the street from the chain-link around the construction site and in the shade of some old elms and a ragged toilet brush of a Mexican fan palm. The right-hand John Henry rested a twenty-pound sledge against his corded sweat-shining dark neck, his other hammer leaned up against the gray cinderblock wall behind him. He wore canvas pants and not much else, and if the girls giggling on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat could have seen him, they would have turned to admire the ridged expanse of his chest.
The left-hand John Henry, skeletal and paperwhite behind a luxuriant growth of moustache and blazing tubercular eyes, treated his terrible cough out of the silver flask in his breast pocket. That hack around a chest full of bloody slime was so much a part of his legend he couldn't get rid of it even dead.
Like the silk cravat with the diamond stickpin, like the nickel-plated six shooter concealed by the fall of his stylish gray coat. Stylish in 1881, that is. A little out of place as I crossed Bonneville against the light, walking through the wall of thermonuclear Las Vegas sunshine, and drew up in front of the dead men. They looked startled to be seen; as I hesitated in the gutter, a brunette in fuchsia short-shorts and not much else walked through the right-hand John Henry, head rocking in time to the beat of her portable CD player. The left-hand John Henry coughed into a silk handkerchief, leaving a spot like the jeweled heart of a snowy plain of Queen Anne's lace, and turned to watch the girl walk away. I was scared enough of him that my guts turned to water in my belly, but I thought of Stewart and I made myself walk forward. Ghosts. I called up ghosts.
The right-hand John Henry puffed up his enormous chest and looked away, free thumb hooked through the loops of his pants. His thighs strained threadbare dun cloth, much mended, as he shifted his hammer on his shoulder. The left-hand John Henry folded the cloth to hide the thumbprint of blood and tucked it into his pocket. Not the one with the flask. He sighed.
"She's a lady of ill repute, Doc," drawled the right-hand one. I stopped in front of them.
"She's a woman who knows her own mind," the left-hand John Henry---Doc---replied in a rich slow voice like seasoned honey, and drew himself up to face me. "And as for ill repute, I have a little of my own. Some easy virtue, too. Do I know you, sir?"
"No," I said, holding out my hand. I felt them taking in my cargo pants, Doc Martens and earrings, my tattooed biceps and the ring through my nose. The eyepatch didn't look so out of place in all that. A Cadillac crept behind me, wary of the construction dust. Pale eyes and dark tracked its purring glide. "But my name's Jack. One-eyed Jack, they call me." Neither moved to shake, and I let my hand fall to my side.
It got the smile from the left-hand John Henry I'd half-hoped for. A gambler. And a quick wit, too. "My given name's John, as well."
"It's why I called you back. You, Dr. Holliday. And Mr. Henry, here. You know---"
"I know I'm dead," John Henry said. He looked at the sledgehammer in his hand and set it down, leaned it back against the dust-colored wall. "Where are we?"
"Las Vegas."
"New Mexico? It's changed some." Doc Holliday leaned back on the heels of his shoes and looked up at the pale sky overhead, squinting after a jet contrail.
"Nevada."
"Huh." He turned his head and coughed into his handkerchief again. "Then that's changed some too, I imagine. What did you bring us back from the grave for, son?"
He died at thirty-five, and I'm over a hundred. But I wasn't about to argue age and life experience with Doc Holliday. Even if I was something more than mortal, myself. "I need help," I said. I had a pretty speech prepared, but looking up---way up---into the frowning brown eyes of John Henry left no room for anything but honesty. Might be because the man was a symbol for honesty. I swallowed and looked over at Holliday, but it wasn't any easier to meet his eyes. "I'm the One-eyed Jack. The spirit of Las Vegas, its anima. Somebody shot my buddy, and I want to get them back. So I called you up. Namesake rite, tequila and promises. But since there were two John Henrys who fit the bill, I got the both of you."
A pedestrian edged around me, seeing a ratty one-eyed homeless boy with a lightless dyed-black snarl of hair, standing on a downtown street corner talking to himself. We get that a lot around here: the straights are used to madmen out of doors in Vegas.
"What makes you think we can help with that?"
"You're---" Who you are. New World demigods in the making, the Chuchulainns and Beowulfs and Yellow Emperors of the Americas. Folklore creatures.
Like me. "You're Doc Holliday, sir. That there is John Henry the drillman. You're American legends, sir."
Holliday opened his mouth, but a coughing jag took him and he fumbled in his pocket for his flask and drank quickly, neatly, even when I thought he'd choke. The whiskey calmed his cough and he shook his head as he screwed the silver cap back on. "Jack, I never killed but three, four men in my lifetime. And every one of those bastards deserved to die."
John Henry shifted balance beside him, a mountain changing its stance. "I heard it was fifty, Doc."
"Stories grow in the telling, son."
I'd done some reading since Stewart got killed. "Wyatt Earp said you were the most dangerous man he ever knew, and the fastest gun."
Holliday laughed and stroked his moustache, straightened his cravat. "Wyatt never minded stretching a tale till it squeaked protest, and you know what the papers are like." He couldn't hide a pleased smile. "He was right about one thing."
"Doc?"
I was maybe three feet from Holliday. Before I could have moved, even shouted, his revolver was out of the hip holster and leveled at my chest. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger so quickly I didn't have time to close my eyes before the report boxed my ears.
So I saw the bullet hit my chest, go through, and pass without a whisper of sensation. Holliday laughed and spun his pistol back into his holster. "Ghosts," he said, and took another swig from his flask, squinting in pain.
"Well," I answered. "I called you up with a task in mind, gentlemen. And you can't go back to rest until we figure out how to do it. So---immaterial or not---I suggest we go get a drink and talk it over."
"I can't drink your liquor," Doc Holliday said, as John Henry fell silently into step on my other side.
"I'll pour it on the ground."
I led them toward the Strip. Dead men don't mind the heat.
#
The American and the Russian. Somewhere in the Desert Inn Hotel & Casino, 1964.
Bram Stoker---that Bram Stoker---said of Teddy Roosevelt that he was a man you couldn't cajole, couldn't frighten, couldn't awe. Some mornings, I wake up certain that the ex-president has somehow managed to get himself reincarnated as my partner.
He won't be cajoled. Neither will he be beguiled.
Someone must have lied to him once. Someone I would like very much to find, someday, and talk to.
Because if he weren't so darned frictionless, I might be able to get him to talk to me a little more about what he said about Oswald---
"What are you writing?" the Russian said, toweling his hair as he walked out of the bathroom, and the American crumpled the sheet hastily and dropped it into the wastebasket by his knee.
"A letter to my aunt, but it's not coming out well. Ready to go down and see if the café is still serving?"
"What's the expression? No locks, no clocks?" The Russian looked about for his shoes and sat on the bed to tug them on. "And then we need to try to figure out why the assassin's here."
"Because if we know what he's doing---"
"---we know where he is." Their eyes met, and a brief smile passed between them. "What do you plan to do with him if we do track him down?"
The American grinned, knowing he looked like a shark. What do you mean if? "Kill him. In cold blood. Preferably from a distance and from hiding. We'll work out a justification later."
"Excellent," the Russian said, stamping his feet into his black loafers. "Get your coat. And don't forget your concealed carry card. This is Vegas."
"Yes. They don't care if you have a pistol on your hip, but God forbid there's one under your coat." The American stood and followed his partner out, pausing for a second to hang the Do Not Disturb card and trap a strand of his own dark hair between the lockplate and the tongue. "Breakfast or drinks?"
"Both?" The Russian glanced over his shoulder hopefully, and the American nodded.
Halfway down the fire stairs, the Russian reached back and laid a hand on the American's sleeve, and the American glanced down to meet his partner's sidelong glance. His hand slipped under his coat, but he didn't draw the weapon, though his thumb rested against the safety lever. "Did you hear?"
"---footsteps?" The Russian flattened himself against the wall, one hand raised unnecessarily for silence. The American held his breath.
Always better to get trapped in a stairway than an elevator, if you have to get trapped. Of course, it could be a hotel guest, climbing for exercise. Two hotel guests. Climbing quickly. In complete silence, the American skipped four steps backward and crouched with his gun in his hands, covering his partner and the landing below them.
The footsteps came closer, hesitated before the turn. The American heard a noisily indrawn breath. "Gentlemen. If we promise not to draw our guns, will you put yours away?" A familiar voice, pitched in a light, ironical range.
"You tennis-playing son of a bitch," the American called back, delightedly. The Russian had already stepped away from the cinderblock wall and holstered his piece, and was moving forward as two tall, muscular men---one Caucasian, one black---gained the landing, shoulder to shoulder, and paused. The American looked from one to the other, at their polo shirts and skin-tight white jeans, a contrast to his own and his partner's sober suitjackets and monochrome ties. He burst out laughing, and was rewarded by a sideways, fleeting smile from the Russian. "What brings you two to Las Vegas?" He extended his hand to the tennis player, who clasped it heartily.
The black man leaned against the wall and crossed his arms, biceps bulging under the tight sleeves of his shirt. "The same thing as you two, I presume," he said, middle Atlantic accent and a light bass range. "Only a little more officially, if the rumors are true."
"We're here to see a man about a horse," the American answered, still grinning. The rational corner of his mind recognized the giddy relief as honorably discharged adrenaline, and his partner's second sideways glance told him the Russian knew it too. I'm more worried about the assassin than I thought.
"We're on vacation," the Russian elaborated, extending his right hand to the scholar. They clasped briefly, the scholar muttering something in a language the American didn't recognize, but which his partner apparently knew well enough to answer in. "We were just about to get something to eat. Would you care to join us?"
"Delighted," the athlete said, reversing course lithely. He grinned over his shoulder, and the American spread his hands in bemused acquiescence. Obviously the Russian thought it would serve some purpose for the four of them to be seen in public together, and the other agents were willing to play along.
"Do you, ah, need to head back to your hotel and get ties?"
The athlete shrugged, as if letting the suggestion slide off his back. "At seven o'clock in the morning, in Las Vegas? You don't suppose the Brown Derby's still open this late? Or open again this early?"
"There's a Brown Derby in Las Vegas now? I only knew about the one in Hollywood."
"Age of globalization, man," the scholar said, falling into step beside them. "Age of globalization."
#
One-Eyed Jack and the King of Rock & Roll. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
I paused on the east side of Las Vegas Boulevard, near the flat rubble-graveled lot where the old El Rancho had stood vacant for so many years, and watched the ghost of Bugsy Siegel smoke a cigar while brains dripped down the back of his collar. Bugsy didn't seem to notice me, or my entourage, but I had the weirdest prickle as if he'd just been staring at me. Anyway, he wasn't the sort of thing I was used to seeing in broad daylight; I preferred the John Henrys, frankly, who followed along single file, barely wincing when the tourists walked through them.
Little ghosts don't interact much, but they can be a damned pain in the ass if they're mad enough, and powerful enough.
Doc Holliday cleared his throat twice before I realized he wasn't coughing. He just wanted my attention. "Speaking of ghosts and shadows, Jack---" He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I followed the gesture.
I've seen a lot of strange things. The ghost of an imploded hotel sitting healed and shimmering like a mirage in the evening sunshine wouldn't take a prize by any means, but it was enough to make me blink and rub my eye. That was what Bugsy'd been looking at; a parking lot filled with tailfinned Cadillacs and Buicks with five-body trunks, with Nash Ramblers and a '63 Corvette, candy-apple red, a pedestrian in a close-tailored gray gabardine suitcoat and a skinny black tie slowing down to take a lingering look. I could see the rubble through his shoes.
"That's unusual," I said. John Henry grunted on my left side, and I chuckled a little nervously. "I hope I didn't call up every ghost in the city."
"If you did, you don't know your own power, Jack." Holliday ducked his head to light a cigarillo, shielding the flame of his Lucifer match with his hands. "That looks to my practiced eye like some sort of a natural supernatural manifestation, if you know what I mean. Where did you want to drink?"
"The Brown Derby," I said, checking the angle of the sun. It would be dark soon enough, and if we hurried we could hit the lull between the dinner rush and the post-show crowd.
If we hurried.
I beckoned the John Henrys along. We had a while to walk still, and I'd need better clothes for the Derby. Lucky for me there are shopping malls the length of the Strip these days. I hung on to my Doc Martens; they'd be fine if a little selfconsciously trendy under a suitpant, and the damned things take a year and a half to break in right. I changed in a washroom and stuffed my old clothes in a wastepaper basket. I never liked that t-shirt anyway, and the cargo pants were torn.
We walked into the Brown Derby at eight fifteen p.m. and were seated right away. Or, I should say, I was seated. The John Henrys followed, drifting through the table to take their chairs. It wasn't a bad table, in the smoking section with a view of the bar. I had just ordered a vodka martini and was hiding my small talk with the ghosts behind the menu when an Elvis walked past. Which is not unusual in Vegas, by any means.
Except he looked like Elvis Presley.
Nobody looks like Elvis. I don't mean, nobody dresses like Elvis, or apes his hairstyle, or tries to move like Elvis. Because sure, people do.
I knew Elvis Presley. Nobody looks like Elvis---except his daughter, that is---and nobody moves like him, either.
And this guy wasn't dressed like professional Elvi dress. Soft sandy blond hair fell down in his dark blue eyes, not dyed matte black, and not greased into a pompadour. He slunk across the gaudy casino carpet like a panther, total confidence and strength, and the collar of his black leather gothcoat was turned up to hide the hammer-edged line of his jaw. He scanned the crowd as if he were looking for somebody but he didn't quite know who, and it hit me with the force of a kick in the belly who he was. What he was. Who he had to be.
Elvis. Of course. I blinked hard. Which means Stewart is really---
---gone.
Surreptitiously, I raised my hand to flip the patch off my otherwise eye. And blinked harder, because the second I did it I could smell the old blood and the midnight on him, clots of darkness wound through his soul like so many slimy clumps of rotting leaves. Not what I thought he was, then. Not my new partner, my opposite number, my ally.
Oh, Vegas has enough problems this summer without one of those. Muttering an excuse to the John Henrys, I came around the table on a jagged line to intercept as he made for the casino. I trailed him casually, sidestepping MegaBucks and scurrying around the blackjack tables, trying not to move so aggressively that the eye-in-the-sky would spot me for a threat. I didn't mean to hurt him any; just warn him off. Tell him to head north for Chicago: the windy city's animae have always had a habit of taking in strays.
But I saw him stop, intent on something that had drawn his eye---a flash of golden hair alongside a strobing slot machine light---and my eye followed his, and I saw---
"Stewart?"
Walking hunched forward slightly as he made some sort of a point with his hands---jab, jab, jab---animated in conversation with three companions, the hairstyle different, longer, but the crooked nose unmistakably the same.
He didn't hear me. I wasn't close.
The vampire's gaze fastened on the four men crossing the casino floor, and he stepped back into the shadows behind a row of video poker machines, obviously eager that Stewart and his three companions shouldn't see his face. I glanced after the vampire as he faded from view, but Stewart took precedence. And if the bloodsucker chose to stay in my city, I'd run across him again eventually.
I hurried toward Stewart, making a mental survey of his companions as I came, trying to decide if an intercession was in order, or an introduction. Introduction, I decided. By the tenor of the conversation, these were Stewart's friends. Especially the shorter of the two strong-chinned, slender, black-haired men, who bore a superficial resemblance to one another. The final man was African-American, muscular and athletic, handsome in a rugged rather than a Tiger Woods sort of way. Familiar, too---but everybody looks like somebody famous, in Vegas.
"Stewart," I called, and held out my hand as the little group drew abreast of me and started to pass me by.
Stewart blinked and turned to me, a thin vertical line between his eyes. "I beg your pardon. Do I know you?" he asked, and my heart thumped once in my chest and went still.
It wasn't him. It could have been, from fifteen feet. From close enough to shake his hand, however...no. Not quite. Not the face, and not the faint European accent and subtle precision of pronunciation. But another one was the coldness of the equal subtlety and precision in his eyes.
"No," I said, and backed away. "I beg your pardon. But you look very much like someone I---"
I used to know.
I turned on the heel of my Doc and went back to the restaurant, cursing myself for failing to follow the vampire instead. Cursing myself for the hope I'd felt, however briefly, and for the fresh sharpness of the broken ache in my chest.
I knew who they were now; the penny had dropped.
Not just not Stewart.
Ghosts. More ghosts, summoned up out of the collective unconscious, called up out of the soup of story. I shook my head, sat down in my still-warm chair, and looked up into the eyes of the memory of two dead men.
At least I'd thought of something the John Henrys could do to help until I figured out how to manage Angel, immaterial or not. I bet they could be pretty good at keeping track of a vampire, if they were careful, and stayed out of sight.
Meanwhile, I could try to figure out what it was that I'd summoned home to Vegas. A namesake rite wasn't supposed to work that way---and I shouldn't have had the power to do it, even if it did. I was starting to think I'd managed to call home every ghost---media, legendary, and the 'little' ghosts, the ghosts of the unquiet dead, like Bugsy out there---with even the vaguest of connections to my city.
That could get confusing.
Especially if two or three Howard Hugheses showed up.
#
Part II
Tribute and the Streetwalker With A Heart Of Gold. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.
It was full dark by the time I left the mint-green glow of the MGM Grand behind me and walked north, counting the cracks in the sidewalk. The desert itself was my enemy, but at least the mountains ringing the valley gave me a long anticipation of sunrise and cut the sun's descent short when it slid down the sky in the West. Headed for California and points out to sea.
The skinny kid with the eyepatch troubled me, but I didn't know why I ran. Hell, I didn't quite know what I was doing in the MGM to begin with, other than staying out of the sun: they'd be unlikely to hire an Elvis impersonator. I needed a club, a cabaret. Someplace that wouldn't expect afternoon shows.
I could live by murder and theft. When I exhausted the resources Sycorax had left me.
That doesn't put you on a stage, does it?
But the kid. Thousand-dollar suitjacket bought off the rack, and a cheap high-school dye job. Scarred urban combat zone boots peeking out from under his pinstriped trousers. Hell, maybe he was a rock star. It wasn't like I'd been keeping track.
Except he'd been sitting at his table pretending not to talk to a couple of mismatched ghosts, and he'd practically leaped over it to give chase when he'd seen me. And then I'd run smack dab into the media ghosts I'd seen earlier, and they'd been all buddy-buddy with another pair, who also didn't belong in Las Vegas, all of them dressed as if it were forty years ago and most of the country watching television in black and white.
And I could swear I'd seen that black-haired kid's profile somewhere, before.
If I couldn't have a milkshake, I was ready to kill for an explanation. But since I didn't see a way to get either, I went out looking for gigs.
I got a little interest, too, even with my shift requirements. It was good to know, after so long, that I could still lay down a tune, and by the time I finished my third cold call I was feeling pretty good about myself. The manager stood me a beer, and I sat down in a booth beside the juke box to pretend to drink it and retie my shoes.
And found myself tidying the salt shakers while I watched a dark-haired girl who was far too young to be in a bar. Any bar, and the guy she was with wasn't quite old enough to be her father. He didn't look like anybody's father, anyway; in fact---
---in fact, he looked a lot like one of the media ghosts I'd ditched in the MGM Grand. The shaggy yellow hair, at least, and his profile when he turned just right. This one looked dazed, though, his eyes not quite tracking as he watched his skinny, no-doubt-about-it-hired-for-the-evening companion play with her French fries. What kind of a stoner John buys a hooker a meal and watches while she draws in the ketchup?
Maybe she was his kid sister, after all. Even if they didn't look a thing alike.
"She's trouble, Ace," Jesse whispered in my ear. But I ignored him, or pretended to.
I didn't like him to know how much of a comfort it was, having him there.
She looked up at me and quirked an eyebrow, then, and I saw the glow of city lights in her eyes. "Evening, King," she said. Soprano, no breath control.
"Name's Tribute." I abandoned my beer on the table when I walked over. The blond man scooted away from me at her hand gesture, and didn't quite offer a grunt by way of acknowledgment. He was all twisted up inside himself like macramé---any fool could tell---but when he tracked me with a scarred sideways glance I could see the lights shimmering in his eyes, too. Interesting. They really didn't look like they went together, if you know what I mean.
"Funny sort of a name," she said. "I'm Angel. This is Stewart. He's a local."
"And you're not?"
Her eyes sparkled when she dimpled at me. She reached out and laid one hand on my arm. Her bitten fingernails were painted chipped, glittering green. "I'm from Los Angeles. And I hear you're looking for a job."
"I might be." I was trying to sound casual instead of wary, and I wasn't sure I succeeded. There were thirteen fries on her plate, and seventy-two sesame seeds on the bun of her half-eaten burger.
I looked down and straightened the unused place settings. The last thing I needed in my recently simplified life was to get involved in some sort of a turf war between the genii of cities. My kind generally tried to stay out of the way of their kind. Them, and the media ghosts and race memories and legendary men and critters like the sasquatch and the squonk. I worry about spending time with any creature who is essentially a story made flesh. They change too much, too easily---and too many of them aren't even aware that a world outside their circumscribed reality even exists.
I ran into Dracula once. I'm hoping I never meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She'd kick my ass. "It would depend on the job."
"Bodyguard?" She smiled and reached out to take Stewart's hand when he curled himself back into the corner of the booth, drawing his heels up onto the vinyl like a child. He tugged his hand free and wrapped the arm around his knees, shivering. I couldn't quite tell if the look in his eyes was beseeching or simply flat blue madness, and I glanced back down at the girl.
"That's not really my kind of gig, baby---"
"King," she interrupted, tossing her hair over her shoulder. "Do you want to hustle in a dive like this for people who have no idea what you really were? Who'll think you're a bad imitation because they've stopped seeing how bad all the other imitators are?"
It was the wrong tack to take. Or maybe I was just tired of her coy, selfconscious gestures. Girls these days have an edge on them I don't remember from befre; they were like cagebirds then, pampered doves, their naivete the core of their charm.
Or maybe I'm talking about myself again.
"Take your time," she said, before I could say no. "Think about it. I'll find you again and we'll talk. Come on, Stewart."
I threw a twenty on the table to cover their tab, and stood up to let him follow her out.
#
The Russian and the Three Capitalists. Somewhere in Las Vegas. 1964.
The Russian expected trouble. Which wasn't unusual: he always expected trouble. Although it was true that conditions for Americans who weren't white Anglo-Saxon Protestants weren't quite as horrid as he'd been raised to believe, back home, they were bad enough. And Vegas wasn't called the Mississippi of the West for nothing.
So he was surprised and pleased when they were seated immediately, and not even tucked away in a corner near the kitchen doors.
"Man," the scholar said as the food arrived, laying his napkin across his lap. "Did we order enough?"
The American grinned as the athlete and the Russian simultaneously reached for the fruit plate. "Have you ever seen my partner eat?"
"No," the scholar answered, hands deft as he sorted his silverware. "Have you seen mine?" He jerked his head sideways, at the rapidly diminishing pile on the tall man's plate. "I have no idea where he puts it."
The Russian, already chewing, kicked his partner lightly under the table. The American's mouth closed with an audible snap, and he stuffed a bite of bread inside it to keep the words plugged up. "So," the American said, when he'd washed his mouthful down with steaming coffee, "can somebody explain to me why we think it's wise for all four of us to be sitting in a public place when we're on the hunt for a rogue agent?"
"Simple," the athlete answered, without looking up from his plate. "We're bait. This Cobb salad is the best. And it's huge. You should try some." He leaned back from his dish, raising his fork as if he expected his tablemates to lunge for the salad like a pack of feral dogs.
"If we're bait, who's our backup?" The American leaned forward, interested now. "And how did we wind up drafted?"
"You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, the Department briefed us on New York." A grin on the scholar's face as he lowered his voice---not to a whisper that might attract attention, but rather to a murmur. "The backup is classified, but they're from an agency that has an interest in protecting MI-6's reputation even if MI-6 won't do it itself."
"A team the assassin won't expect," the athlete finished for his partner, resuming his relationship with the Cobb salad. "Because he thinks one of the partners is badly hurt."
The Russian chuckled. "The English girl. It is good to hear she's on her feet again."
"We heal fast."
"So I've noticed. That doesn't answer the question of why we join you in serving as---bait."
The scholar nudged his partner, who gave him a dirty look from under a falling dark forelock. "You're not going to fit into your tennis whites if you keep eating like that."
"Perhaps we can play, later," the Russian said.
The athlete looked up, a predatory grin creasing his face. "Five dollars a game?"
"On my salary?"
"My partner is cheap," the American said, and the Russian rolled his eyes.
"Who is it that is always borrowing money from whom?"
"Cheap, but well-spoken---"
The scholar coughed, twining his fingers together over his plate. He had enormous hands, boxer's hands, the skin dark on the backs and pale across the palms. "You wind up helping because your faces are recognizable. Your identities are public and you're already targets. And it's not like you two have to maintain a cover. So it doesn't destroy your usefulness if you're made."
"Our controller put you on to us, didn't he? We're supposed to be here on vacation; the home office takes no responsibility for this mission."
The scholar grinned around his buttered bread. "Our home office does. At least State is staying out of this one---"
"They can have it, if they want it. But it's not exactly their cup of tea. They're better with conspiracies." The American turned his fork in his fingers, contemplating the light reflecting from the tines. "I don't know how you two live undercover all the time."
"Oh, it's not so bad. See the world, meet interesting people---" The athlete spoke with his mouth full of salad.
"---and be captured and tortured by them," the Russian finished. "Are you going to eat that dinner roll?"
"No," the American answered, and pushed him the bread plate, then looked across the table at the scholar and shrugged as if to say, what are you going to do? "I don't suppose you know what the assassin is playing at, do you?"
"Our English friend has a theory." The athlete's fork described a trembling circle in the air as he washed his salad down with sparkling water.
The Russian poured tea from the little pot on the table, surprised at the quality. Most Americans seemed to think that adequate tea was a matter of dunking a paper bag full of fannings into water that had been allowed to over-cool. This was brewed properly, boiling water over loose leaves. Earl Grey. He softened his voice, holding the cup to his lips to conceal the outline of his words, and modulated his tone to hide any trace of concern. "Will we meet the English team?"
"Not until the affair is over, if everything goes according to plan." The athlete forked through his salad, ferreting out crumbles of bacon and egg. "With any luck, the assassin will think they're incapacitated in England."
"Tell me the theory."
The athlete offered them both a wry grin. The American put his fork down and reached across the table for the saltshaker, idly leaning it at an angle in a vain attempt to balance it. It wobbled and fell; he caught it and tried again.
"You're doing it wrong," the athlete said, before he could make a third attempt.
The American looked up. "Ah, excuse me?"
"You're doing it wrong." His capable hand brushed the American's square-fingered one aside; the Russian glanced up for a moment and saw the wry, almost patronizing twist of the scholar's lips. The Russian traded a quick flash of a grin with the scholar, sure their partners were too engaged in their ridiculous competition to notice.
The athlete lifted the salt shaker from the American's fingers and tilted it upside down, letting grains scatter on the tablecloth. He pushed them into a pile with his fingertips and angled the base of the shaker against it lightly and precisely. The Russian held his breath as the athlete opened his fingers like the teeth of a crane and lifted his hand away.
The shaker never moved.
"Bravo," the American said, softly, and the scholar slapped the edge of the table and made the salt shaker clatter down on its side.
"Oh," he said, "the wonderfulness of you."
The Russian hid his smile behind his palm until he got it under control, set his teacup down, and leaned forward, elbows on the table as he drew a licked finger through the tumbled grains. The hairs on his nape shivered; they were being watched. "You American spies are all alike."
"Pampered?"
"Pah." The tea got cold quickly in these little china cups. Glasses were better. "Americans know nothing of pampering---Smug, I mean," he said, interrupting himself.
"You were worried about the widow?" The athlete dusted his hands together, lips pursing.
"The Englishman's partner is an old friend. I was concerned." Ignoring his partner's amused, sideways blink. "Share the theory, if you would."
The scholar's expressive lips twitched. "We think it has a bunch to do with your partner, in fact." He darted a glance at the American, who choked on his coffee. "Your partner, the widow's partner, and my partner---"
"Why would she and I be the targets, then?" The Russian leaned forward, intrigued.
"The widow, you, and myself. Work with me, man."
The Russian glanced at the American to see if perhaps he understood. The American raised his shoulders and tipped his head in his trademark exaggerated shrug.
"Because the assassin works alone." The scholar's tone made it seem as if the answer was obvious.
The Russian pursed his lips slightly and shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just don't understand what that has to do with anything. He works alone, so he thinks other agents must, as well?"
"Sure, if he's going to consume them."
"Con---" The American set his coffee cup down with a rattle that betrayed the unsteadiness of his hand. "Like, 'Two Bottles of Relish'?"
"Munch munch. Yum yum." The tennis player's grin widened cartoonishly. "Our partners are too different. But you and I---" an eloquent gesture with his fork "---have a great deal in common. And in common with the assassin."
"And the Englishman," the scholar added.
Something still tickled the back of the Russian's neck, and he gave the appearance of paying rapt attention to the conversation while, in fact, his eyes flickered from one reflective surface to another. He sat back in his chair, gnawing on a fingernail as the American protested. "But what does that have to do with any---"
And then the scholar and the athlete exchanged a look that the Russian knew very well: it was a look he had traded with his own partner many, many times. And the scholar shook his head, and said, "Pal, they don't know."
The athlete's eyes got wide, and the fork moved back and forth again. You-me-them?
The American ran a thumbnail along his jaw. "We don't know what?"
The Russian cleared his throat as a flash of movement in a silver cream pitcher on an adjoining table finally resolved itself into the image he'd sought. The black-haired young man in the strangely cut suit who had accosted them on the casino floor. Watching over his shoulder from a dark table in the corner. "Gentlemen," he said. "Explanations may have to wait. I believe we are being observed."
The American glanced over his shoulder, abrupt and unsubtle. The Russian felt him about to rise from his chair and braced himself to stand, but the athlete reached out and placed a hand on the American's sleeve. "Talk to us before you talk to him," the athlete said, when the American's golden-brown eyes locked on his own near-black ones.
The American hesitated, glanced at the Russian, and shook his head. "I'm just going to go make friends," he answered. "You can stay here if you prefer."
Silence, and then the athlete shook his head and withdrew his hand. "I think my man and I had better be there to hear this."
#
The Assassin is troubled. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
The assassin squinted through a telescopic sight which, for once, was not attached to a firearm, cursing convenience. Too convenient, rather, that all of his targets should gather in one place, at one time. Too convenient, and a bit unsettling that they had followed him successfully to Las Vegas.
He must have been careless. Carelessness would not do.
He would have to manufacture a convincing errand here in Sin City. The spies couldn't be permitted to discover the purpose of his visit, to discover his links to Angel. At least not before he could remove the Russian and the scholar, and...prevent their partners from reporting in.
He needed them. But he didn't need them here, and he didn't need them now. What he needed here and now was a sacrifice---and a ghost would not suffice. He pushed his forelock out of his eyes irritably and frowned. "All stories are true," he muttered under his breath, pocketing the scope and fading behind a half-wall as the four men slid their chairs back and stood, as one. "But some stories are truer than others."
Which made him think about pigs.
Which made him think about the Russian, and laugh.
#
One-Eyed Jack and the Four of a Kind. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
He didn't really look that much like Stewart. Not really, not now that I was studying rather than reacting. Broken nose, sure, but the jaw was different, and the way he moved, and the muscle on his forearms, and the exact shade of his hair---
I got caught looking, of course.
All four chairs slid back as if they were wired and all four men stood at once as if somebody had pulled on their strings. I didn't rise.
Instead I let the city lights shine in my eye and fixed their apparent leader with a stare. He didn't stop short, which impressed me. I can be pretty intimidating, when I try.
Instead he tucked his hands into the pockets of his trousers without bothering to unbutton his slate-gray suitjacket first. "We're still not whoever you thought we were," he said, an American with a flat Midwestern accent. He slouched, dropping his chin against his collar, his forehead wrinkling as he looked at me through his lashes. "But seeing as this is a second date, I thought it might be interesting to find out a little more about you."
The direct regard was meant to be unsettling, the body language disconcerting. He was good at it, and the blond with the accent hung back right where I would catch his cold blue stare any time my eye happened to slide off those of the spokesman. I wasn't about to let that happen, though.
I stood up and extended my hand. "I'm Las Vegas," I said. "But you can call me Jackie."
He drew one hand out of his pocket. His jacket pulled taut, momentarily, over the bulge in his left armpit, and I knew he saw me see it. "Las Vegas," he said, brow creasing more as he straightened and extended his hand. He glanced left and right, as if looking for the cameraman. "You're named after the city?"
"He is the city," the black man said in educated tones. "That's what my man here was going to explain to you before you got all hot and bothered."
The American's clasp was dry and callused, and he didn't flinch, although he angled a disbelieving glance at the taller men. Obviously, he thought he was used to getting some pretty strange things in his breakfast cereal.
"Pleased to meet you, Las Vegas," he said, eyes meeting mine again as our hands dropped apart. "I'm the Wreck of the Hesperus. Now that we're acquainted, do you mind explaining why you're following us?"
Oh, what the hell. These are the good guys, right? Always the good guys, modern day knights in their modern-day armor of suitcoats and shoulder holsters. That's why the world remembers them, hummed under its breath like the rhythm of a rhyme learned in childhood after half the words have been forgotten. A little something to kick the darkness back.
Sin City's not afraid to talk turkey, even to ghosts. Little ghosts can be a problem; a lot of the time they haven't got much of themselves left, and the ones that do are generally real angry about something or another. They might not even be people anymore: just collections of energy patterns. Legendary ghosts, like the John Henrys, are strong because they're made up of so many layers of fact and myth and memory. Media ghosts are really just modern legendary ghosts, but they're usually not as powerful, not having been...laminated out of the stuff of story for so many years. On the other hand, based on their games with the salt shaker, apparently media ghosts can do what legendary ghosts cannot, and lay hands on things.
And like Doc Holliday, all four of these carried guns. "Well," I said, keeping my hands in sight, "how much do you gentlemen know about animae and ghosts?"
"Animae?" the Russian asked, just as the scholar glanced over his shoulder at his partner and said, "some," out of the corner of his mouth.
"Geniuses," the athlete said, his eyes very dark. He held out a hand and I took it; his had ridged callus, like somebody who spends a lot of time holding a golf club or a tennis racket.
The scholar shook his head and shrugged apology at me. "Genii is the word the tennis bum is scratching his head over."
"Hey, man---"
It was a game, I realized---and the other pair knew it too, from the sly communicating smile they shared. The Russian stayed a little behind the American, covering his back, as the athlete stepped away. "All right," the American said, scratchy tenor voice and an arched eyebrow. "I'll play the idiot child. What are animae?"
The scholar coughed, and licked his lips. "This was the thing we were just going to explain before we came over here"---he shrugged, and looked helplessly at his partner, and tugged the American's sleeve a little to turn him away---"y'see, you and me, man...all of us, really. We're not exactly real."
#
Part III
The American and the end of an era. Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer 1964/2002.
The American looked at the Russian, who crossed his arms and tilted his head before nodding slightly--a gesture that encompassed a fifteen-minute conversation, brought them into concord, and formalized a plan. <>We're not exactly real. "You have five minutes," the American said. "Go."
The kid knotted both hands in his strangely cut hair. "It'll take more than five minutes, sir. Look--can we maybe sit down? Join me at my table--"
"We have to settle the bill," the athlete said, with a glance back at the spies' own table.
"I run a tab. I'll pay for it. Please. Just sit." He stepped aside and tugged a chair away from the table, turning it to display its seat. "You see, I think it's half my fault you're all here in the desert, and I've got problems of my own. And I'd like to buy you a drink and sort things out."
"My man doesn't drink." The athlete glanced over his shoulder.
The scholar wasn't smiling, and his brow had furrowed a little deeper. He leaned forward and crossed his arms. "I'll take a coffee," he said, and placed himself very definitely in the chair Jackie had drawn out.
"I'll take a coffee too." The Russian sat down across from the scholar.
The American watched, unsettled. We're not exactly real. He pulled out the chair beside his partner, while the athlete retrieved one from an empty nearby table, tilted it, and spun it around. The American leaned forward on his elbows once everyone was settled; the chill in his gut wouldn't slack. "All right," he said. "So you're the whole box top. Let's, ah, hear it. Explain to me why we're not--"
"--exactly real?" The young man smiled, showing even teeth above a pronounced jaw. "When it comes right down to it, I'm not exactly real either. We're conjured beings, embodiments of the collective unconscious, if you will."
"The zeitgeist." The Russian, sounding unwilling, but fascinated. The American shot his partner a look; he shrugged. It wasn't an apology. "Funky."
"Prove it," the American said.
"Well, for one thing," the scholar said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs, "there was no Brown Derby in Vegas in the sixties--"
"You say 'in the sixties' as if it's something else now."
"It's two thousand and two," the athlete said. "Don't look at me like that, man. I only know 'cause they woke us up again. We were walking through all the old ghosts and dreams same as you, caught up in our story."
"Who's they?" the American asked.
The athlete gestured broadly, taking in the restaurant patrons, the casino beyond it, the city and the world. "The ones who tell the stories," he said. "And your next question is going to be, 'What do you mean, ghosts and dreams?' Isn't it?"
"Yes--"
"Take an example." The athlete glanced up at the ceiling. "The MGM Grand wasn't here in the sixties. There wasn't anything here in the sixties. And the Desert Inn, where you're staying--it's a ghost as well. They imploded it. You guys are sort of a memory, something that got left over, created by the world's collective memory of the stories that were told about you."
"Jetways." The Russian, and the American knew that focused tone in his voice very well. It was the tone that meant a clue had just snapped into place, revealing a much larger section of the puzzle. It was a tone he trusted, although he couldn't always follow the twists that brought it on. "Jetways, jetways."
The kid--Jackie--was looking at the Russian, a thin smile playing with the corners of his mouth until the American couldn't take it any more and snapped, "What?"
"There are no jetways at McCarran Field--"
"There were no jetways at McCarran Field," Jackie said calmly. "It's McCarran International Airport now, and the seventh busiest in America."
"The lights I saw when we were flying in." The American's gut gave one more squeeze of denial, and then it settled down and let him think. When you've eliminated the impossible--
Hell, it wasn't as if his career hadn't spanned U.F.O.s, killer robots, and radio controlled vampire bats. His own nonexistence wasn't such a big stretch, after that. "You're telling me I'm a fairy tale? Make-believe?"
He ignored the Russian's sharp, offended stare. Whatever his partner had been about to say was cut off when the waitress arrived, was roundly charmed by the assembled, and departed with their orders. The American looked at Jackie again as Jackie shrugged, one-shouldered, and lit a cigarette. "I'm telling you what I know."
"Fine. All right. I believe you--" He could almost be amused by the surprise his friends evinced at his willingness to believe what they were telling him. Mind control rays, earthquake machines, being told one's life was a mass hallucination: all in a day's work. The coffee came, and he picked up his cup to hide the way his hands wanted to shake. "--now on to the interesting question, Mr., ah--
"Just call me Jackie."
"--Jackie." Smoke curled around the young man's fingertips and outlined the patch over his eye as he raised the cigarette again, but didn't puff.
"The interesting question. You said you summoned us."
"Yes."
"How? And to what purpose?"
"Ah," Jackie said, and dropped the cigarette in his ash tray before he reached for the creamer. "That's what makes the question so interesting, you see. I'm not exactly sure. But I have a couple of propositions to make, if you like." He locked gazes with the American. Neither looked down.
The mug was burning the American's fingers. He lifted them to his lips and blew on them, and laughed at the back of his throat. "I don't suppose you play chess."
Jackie smiled hard. He was missing a tooth far back in his mouth. "Only for money, my friend."
#
Tribute faces the music. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Half an hour before dawn, I found my way back to the room I'd rented at the Motel 6 just off the strip. It had enormous windows, but the blackout drapes reached floor to ceiling, and I made sure to overlap them and pin them in place with the chair. One of the consequences of what I am is that I can make out the patterns on the hotel bedspread and carpeting, even in the dark.
The bed was that spongy texture only hotel mattresses have. I squared my shoes underneath, lay down on it and pulled the pillow over my face. It was a little bigger than King-sized, no matter what they called it; I could have laid three of me down side by side.
I couldn't sleep.
By sunrise, I was ravenous.
Sycorax and the poisoning had taken it out of me in more ways than the metaphorical, and I would need something that night if I was going to keep passing for a mortal. And feeding--
Isn't quite what the romantic fancies of novelists and poets and moviemakers would make it. The stable of willing paramours, the idyllic pleasures of the feast--
No.
It's not like that at all.
It didn't matter when I was with Sycorax. I took what she told me when she told me and tried to put it off as long as I could, and I mostly pretended I couldn't hear Jesse. Especially when he asked me to have him exorcised, to let him go.
But things were different now that I was on my own. I found I had qualms.
In addition to my qualms, I had questions. Like Angel and Stewart, and why Angel was out of her city. And why they were with each other, and not with their own partners. And what was wrong with Stewart.
I rolled over in the dark behind drawn curtains, keeping a healthy distance from the scalding brightness that glowed faintly around the edges of the blackout curtains and contemplating whether coming to Vegas had been such a good idea. It didn't have to be here. I knew that.
But I wanted it to be here. Vegas had changed even more than I had; I barely recognized the place. But we'd been traveling for the better part of three decades and it wasn't like I could just go home to Tupelo. I haven't got much good to say about Sycorax, bless her black little heart, but twenty-five years with her filled in the gaps in a public school education pretty well. And besides. Las Vegas was a place where I could perform, and nobody would find it strange that they never saw me out in the sunshine.
I could pass.
There's nothing more pathetic than an insomniac vampire.
I sat up in bed, reached for the remote, and turned the television on.
Maybe forty minutes later, the corridor door opened. I'd heard the footsteps pause in front of it, but I didn't get off the bed, even though it didn't sound like a chambermaid. They usually don't wear military boots.
Once he opened the door, I caught the scent of leather and sweat and nicotine and the blood under his skin, and then I didn't need to turn. The black-haired kid in the suit and Doc Martens slipped inside and shut the door behind himself. "King," he said, smart enough to stay in the narrow corridor with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other and to keep his back to the door, "we've got to talk."
"How did you find me?" Not bothering to disguise my voice for once. Even though he had to be expecting it, he startled: fresh salt sharp in the cool musty air. His flickering heart kicked up a notch.
"I got lucky," he said, layers of irony lacing his voice. Something there I'd have to tease out someday. I didn't turn to look directly, but I saw him move out of the corner of my eye. He jerked his chin at the television. "You gonna shoot that?"
"Nah," I answered, thumb on the mute button. "It's too much of a pain in the ass when you haven't got a road manager to fill out the paperwork for you, and besides, I haven't got a gun. My next question is supposed to be how you got through the locked door, but that's easy. So--how'd you recognize me?"
The hurt in his voice was thick and evidently artificial. "You don't remember me, King?"
"I go by Tribute, these days." I left the remote on the bed when I stood up, rug fibers catching on my socks, and tightened the covers before turning to have a look at him. Just a mortal boy, but it would be cocky to let him get in between me and the window in daylight. "The King--that's somebody else. Where should I remember you from?"
"Vegas," he said, stepping forward so the bathroom light would fall across his face. One eye was covered by the eyepatch. The other one sparkled in a way I'd seen too much of lately. I squinted at the face, though--the eyepatch stood out, and there was no telling what color his hair was under a couple of gallons of Gothic black. He looked a bit like Dean Martin, maybe--a much skinnier Dean, with higher cheekbones and a thinner nose--and when I pictured him with shaggy dark brown hair or a slicked DA, I nodded.
There are always people around the entertainment business whose role is never made particularly clear. They're attached to somebody, or they know somebody, or somebody owes them a lot of favors or a lot of money. They're glad handers and compromisers and the sort of people who throw parties that nobody dares miss. I'd seen this kid before, all right, and I'd thought at the time he was one of those people. A good-looking little pansy, nice enough, better conversationalist than me.
But he hadn't aged a day in thirty years, and gold-and-white streetlights shimmered behind his unpatched eye. Yeah. I knew his name. "Jackie."
"You do remember." He folded his arms and stepped back, leaning, the crease in his trousers pulling tight as he kicked one foot up and braced the sole against the door.
"Yeah," I say. "I think I gave you a Cadillac."
A quick look down, and he scratched his ear. "It wound up welded to a stand at the 15 and Jones a few years back, being used as a billboard. They painted it pink. Perfect symbol of Las Vegas, if you ask me."
"Yeah. Perfect. I didn't know you were Vegas, Jackie."
"Would you have treated me any different if you did?"
"At the time, I'd never heard that cities had genii and I didn't believe in vampires or werewolves, so probably not." He didn't look down and his heart didn't skip when I smiled, and I smiled wide enough that even human eyes would catch the way my front upper teeth hooked over the bottom row. "You're here to run me out of town."
His breathing quickened, just a touch. The lines beside his eyes deepened. I almost heard the incidental music shift tempo, a little bit faster, a little bit louder. "I came to ask what you thought you were doing here."
"Just moving from Memphis to the Luxor," I said. He gave me the blankest look ever, and I sighed. No use wasting any jokes about the underworld on him either; he wouldn't get any more use out of them than I would have back in 1962. "Just looking for a place to stay out of the sun for a while."
"It seems unfair somehow that you didn't need my permission to be here."
"Walking into a city isn't like walking into somebody's house--"
"Las Vegas is my house. And don't you forget it, King--"
"--it's more like walking into somebody's hotel room." As dryly as I could pull off, and to his credit, he tipped his head to the left, acknowledging the hit. Hah. I wondered if I would have been that clever in the old days, if I'd given myself half a chance.
Probably not. As Ted Williams once said, if you don't think too good, it's best if you don't think too much.
"Touché," Jackie said. "We still have a problem, King. What are we going to do about you?"
"I've got no interest in hunting your city out, kid."
"I've got no intention of letting you hunt my city at all, King. And I'm older than you. I just aged better, is all."
What was his word? Touche. "Most people did. But that's all behind us now, isn't it? Tell me something, Jackie--"
I let it hang but he didn't jump in again, and he didn't uncross his arms. I wondered if he had a stake up his sleeve. Rowan and garlic, and a cross of silver threaded on a chain around his neck. There was no shortage of crossroads near here to bury the body under. My lip twitched up; I wondered if I could go on down to one and sell my soul for the power to sing the blues, the way old Robert Johnson was supposed to have done.
He was looking at me smiling, and I looked right back. "--what can you think of that belongs in Vegas more than me?"
He didn't blink. "Sunrise, King. I'll give you tonight to set your affairs in order and to get out of town. For old time's sake, I'll give you tonight. I'd head for Salt Lake. Not a lot of myth brewing up there, and those boys don't keep a very good eye on their town."
"Mormons taste like shit," I said when he hesitated. His lip curled, but I didn't manage to crack him up.
"You can't stay here. I've got too much on my plate right now to even think about having a vampire in town."
I'm embarrassed to admit it took that long for the penny to drop. I should have listened a little better to old Ted. "Your full plate, Jackie...."
He nodded, his one eye gleaming in the shadows, his gaze locked on mine.
"Has that got anything to do with why your other half is running around Las Vegas with a genius from LA?"
Touche, indeed. His heart kicked, and I smelled the cold sweat on his skin as he came toward me. Too smart to walk out into the room, but he was just out of arm's reach when he stopped. "What do you know about Stewart, King?"
"Call me Tribute," I said for the second time. "Give me your parole, Jackie, and I'll give you mine, and come sit down and we'll crack open the minibar, and I'll tell you."
"Your parole?" Incredulous: his rising eyebrows shifted the eyepatch enough to show a pale thread of untanned skin on his cheek. "You're going to promise me you won't hunt in Vegas? I don't really think--"
"Don't be dense. Of course I can't promise that." I stepped back, away. Closer to the window, but careful of the white-hot glow that still limned the edge of the curtain. "But I won't take any of yours, and I won't take anybody you'll miss."
He was watching, measuring, but I had the advantage. I could smell the eagerness on him, the need to know trembling on his skin. It smelled like a win.
I held my peace, humming a few bars of a Big Mama Thornton standard as I swung an armchair around, where it wouldn't be too close to the light.
He stepped into the room. "What do you know about Stewart?"
"It's not much, baby."
"I'll take it."
"I can stay?"
He stopped. His lips twisted, and he turned away to inspect the rack of bottles on top of the minibar. "Bit early for the hard stuff."
"Did you get any sleep last night?"
"This is Vegas. Baby. Nobody sleeps." He waited for me to look. His decision hung on the air around him like the smell of blood, delicious and thick. He'd have liked to have hit me; his frustration was metallic, harsh. "How do I know you're not jerking my chain?"
"If you don't like my peaches, Jackie--"
"It's not shaking your tree that concerns me." He picked a mini and cracked the seal, a sharp, limited sound. The scent of bourbon filled the hotel room and I sneezed. "All right," he said, and knocked the whole bottle back without bothering to dump it in a glass. He put it down and stepped away; I tidied it against the others. "Screw it. Tell me what you know, King, and I'll tell you if you can stay."
#
The Assassin and the ghosts of Gods. Los Angeles. Summer, 2002.
It had been a long time indeed since blood--with or without the trappings of authority--had bothered the assassin. He wouldn't flinch from the blood of a cop.
Not even the need to do it eye to eye, and hand to hand.
The assassin climbed the steps two at a time, the carpet sticky beneath his shoes where it wasn't threadbare. He paused at the landing and looked up, caught the eye of Angel, in a red pleather skirt, descending. Her hips swayed as she danced over worn treads to the industrial strains of Object 775. The music, loosely so termed, blasted from a chopped Honda Civic parked under a partially burned-out sign visible through the rain-streaked window on the landing. The window was stuck halfway open. The sign read Gilbert Hotel.
Angel nodded, and the assassin nodded back. "He's in the room?"
She smiled, an expanse of pricey dental work, and held up a hand to show a buck fifty in quarters pinched between her finger and thumb. "Two twenty seven. I told him I hadda buy rubbers." She winked, scraping a platform sole across the edge of the stair to cock her hip, and then made doe eyes. "Fifteen minutes all you need?"
"It won't take longer," the assassin said, and turned around to smile at her derrière as he passed her on the flight.
She'd left the door unlocked. The assassin slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and turned the handle silently. The cop was in the bathroom with the door just cracked; he hadn't thrown the chain.
If he'd had the opportunity to live more than a day or two, he might also have had the opportunity to learn better. "That was quick, sweetheart," he called over running water.
The assassin kept his back to the wall, his shoes shining despite the muddy streets outside, and slid his right hand under his immaculately pressed lapel to retrieve the Walther PPK from his shoulder holster. The silencer screwed down oiled threads like a kiss gliding down a woman's belly.
He thumbed the safety off.
"Don't call me sweetheart," he snapped, and shouldered aside the door.
The cop had stripped his shirt and his bullet-proof vest off, and stood before the mirror clad in a white singlet and his uniform pants. A wad of money lay crushed up on the scarred bathroom counter; peeled silvering on the back of the mirror and the sickly overhead light gave the cop's reflected face the appearance of leprosy. He was half-bald, Caucasian, a small paunch doming his belly. The assassin caught sight of his own chiseled face in the mirror over his target's thickly muscled shoulder, his black hair drooping over one grey eye, his scar livid white against skin flushed with excitement. He leveled the Walther.
The cop half-turned, eyes wide, reaching with a knuckle-crushed hand for the automatic holstered at his hip. He never touched it.
The assassin grouped two bullets through his target's heart, then sank the third one in between his eyes while he was still falling, blood and brains and bits of white like a dropped china bowl all over the place. The loudest sound was the crack of the bathroom mirror as a tumbling bullet exited the dead man's body and punched through glass to the wall behind.
He met Angel in the lobby four and a half minutes later. The blood hadn't spotted his shoes. "Did you get what we came for?" she asked.
He patted the pocket over his heart. "How did Los Angeles ever produce a police officer as her Genius?"
Angel smiled and took his arm so he could squire her down the steps and outside into the rain. The Bentley was around the corner. She squeezed his coat sleeve between long red nails detailed with tiny airbrushed unicorns. "He was on the take," she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss the assassin's cheek.
\*
Part IV
The Russian plays roulette. Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Jackie said he'd give them plenty of time to think about it, and the Russian didn't doubt he meant it. Still, the four spies didn't sit still long; the American and the athlete rose as one, the Russian and the scholar a half step behind. The American's hands were balled up in his pants pockets, ruining the line of his suit. The Russian was amused--as the Russian was often amused--to discover that he could now discern nuances in the gesture. This particular manifestation meant that his partner was thinking hard, and more than a little irritated.
"Where are we going?"
"Someplace private," the American said, shooting the Russian a sideways glance and then staring over his own shoulder at the athlete, a tacit request for permission. The scholar stayed at the athlete's back like a fetch, a frown carving the lines in his forehead deeper.
"If you're onto something, man, share the wealth--"
The American flashed the athlete one of his legendary smiles. "In a minute. I've got a question for you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. The Vegas my partner and I saw when we walked in here looked a hell of a lot like the nineteen sixties." He gestured widely, an arc that took in the roulette wheels, the card tables, the croupiers and the dealers and the jangle and wheeze of slot machines in uniform ranks like light-up tombstones in a military cemetery.
"It did, didn't it?"
"Yes, and this--doesn't."
The Russian felt his own smile tug his lips wide. He nudged the American with his elbow. "You want to know if it will help us get any privacy to go back there."
The American didn't look at him, just the other two. "Would it?"
"Well--" They traded a familiar glance. The scholar shrugged. The athlete smirked. "It won't keep the assassin off. That's his time as much as ours."
"What about that Jackie fellow?"
"I can't rightly say." The athlete had a gangling, slouchy habit of motion that the Russian thought would reveal considerable power and grace when he chose. "Worth a try." He looked around, craning his neck to take in everything from the gaudy carpeting to the jangling machines and the high, light-patterned ceiling in one sweep. "Here? Now?"
"No time like the present," the Russian said, and laid light fingers on the crook of his partner's elbow before he closed his eyes and concentrated. He remembered the walk from the Desert Inn to the MGM Grand; the athlete or the scholar must have done something to move them from then to now?
Mustn't they?
He pictured the Strip the way he'd last seen it, the Hacienda and the Desert Inn and the shell of the El Rancho Las Vegas hunkered down, a fire-raddled hulk. Heat struck his face, a wall of it like an oven, a weight of it like a punishing hand on his hair. He opened his eyes, let his hand drop, and turned.
Desert stretched around them, flat, the Las Vegas Strip a black ribbon in the middle distance spangled with teal and black and silver Thunderbirds and Buicks and a single candy-apple red Pontiac Tempest GTO with the top down, dust curling from under its whitewalls.
"Mmm," the American said, turning to watch the latter--and the blonde hair that streamed out from under a green and rust scarf behind the driver's wheel.
"The car or the girl?"
"It's too far away to appreciate the girl properly," the American said complacently.
The Russian laughed. "Remember, I'm farsighted." He turned and caught the athlete's eye, and then the scholar's. "Voilà, gentlemen." With an expansive gesture: "I give you--nineteen hundred and sixty-four."
The scholar slipped a hand under his jacket and came up with a snub-nosed .22 revolver. The Russian eyed it warily, but the scholar just flipped it open and started checking the loads. Five were chambered; the big man dug a sixth from his pocket and thumbed it into the chamber. He snapped the assembly shut with a practiced twist of his wrist and let the hammer down easy.
"That's a pretty dainty gun for a big guy like you."
The scholar hitched his thumbs through his belt loops and smiled. "You require a big pistol, son?"
The American's eyebrows went up. He glanced from the scholar to the Russian and back again in patent disbelief.
The Russian bit down on his grin as the athlete cleared his throat, pointed back and forth between them, and said, "You won that one. I think he won that one. What do you think? Do you think he won that?"
"I think I burn easily," the Russian said, and marched forward. "The Hacienda is this way."
"The Hacienda's a dump!"
"They have a bar, don't they?" The other three fell in behind him without further argument. "Tell me--who do you expect to meet that you require more than five bullets for?"
"It's nineteen sixty-four--"
"We have observed that." Sharply enough that the American snorted and the athlete coughed. The scholar sent the Russian an amused glance; he caught it and sent it back. "Who do you expect to meet out here?"
"Just about nobody," the scholar admitted, tucking his gun into his belt. "Except the opposition."
"It's even too early for Kolchak," the athlete said.
"Who?"
"My point exactly." The athlete frowned at the American, leaning across the Russian's line of sight to do it. "All right, pretty boy. This is as private as it gets. Let's hear it."
"Easy," the American said, smoothing his forelock out of his eyes. "I think our new friend Jackie needs us a heck of a lot more than we need him."
The scholar smiled. "He thinks he summoned us."
"By accident. Along with a whole bunch of other..."
"Ghosts." The Russian gave his partner the word bluntly. It wouldn't look like empathy to an outsider, but he didn't care what an outsider thought. He shouldered the American, and the American shouldered him back, packmates communicating.
"Ghosts," the American said. "But we know what we're here for, and we know why we came."
"Yeah, MI-6 leaving us to clean up their mess."
The Russian snorted at the athlete. "In my homeland, they have a more efficient manner of dealing with disgraced former employees. One finds a pistol loaded with a single bullet on one's desk. One is intended to know how to address the matter from that point."
"I've wondered about that. Why only one bullet?"
"It is not expected that one Russian will make two mistakes." Delightful, when they walked into it. It almost made up for the blistering heat on the nape of his neck and the packed earth under his soles cooking his feet in his shoes. One-handed, he loosened his tie. "In any case, my partner is correct. Our friend Jackie may be a poker player, but he's no spy. And if he means to use us to get his vengeance on the...genius...who killed his partner, it would take little in the way of moral suasion for me to use him in return."
The Russian glanced up from his shoes as they touched the melted, sticking tarmac of the Strip. The Hacienda was appreciably closer, and if he turned left, he could see the "drive carefully" side of the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign. He blew his hair out of his eyes, checked for oncoming traffic, and walked faster. The athlete and the scholar paced him easily, the American nearly trotting to keep up.
The athlete was nodding. He leaned forward one more time as they gained the western side of the highway. "So you think there's a way to use him to get to the assassin?"
"I think it can't hurt to give it a whirl," the American said, leading them up the driveway to the casino. "We're catching a cab back, gents--"
The scholar held the door for the rest of them, but the American balked a moment, glancing up. "No air curtain."
"You mostly get those downtown, where people walk in and out a lot. Come on; Uncle Sam doesn't pay you to air condition the Mojave."
"Uncle Sam doesn't pay me at all," the American retorted, but he stepped inside, and the Russian followed tight on his heels, breathing a sigh of relief as cool darkness closed around them. A moment later, and they were ensconced at the bar, the only four customers this early in the morning.
The scholar contented himself with orange juice. The American and the athlete ordered mimosas, and the Russian a bloody Mary. "So, what's your plan?" he asked his partner, when they'd each had a chance to get in a few pulls of their drinks, and suck on a couple of ice cubes.
"I'll let you know when I figure that out," the American answered. His eye lit on something over the Russian's shoulder, and he finished his drink in one long swallow and clinked the glass on the bar. "I'm improvising. Excuse me for a moment--" He stood, straightened his tie in the bar mirror, winked to his partner, and took off in pursuit.
The Russian checked his watch. "He'll either be back in fifteen minutes, or four hours," he predicted confidently, watching in the bartender's looking glass as the American strolled up to a pretty brunette near the one-armed bandits, exuding gallantry.
"What's his batting average like?" The athlete watched more openly, with a professional interest.
The Russian pursed his lips, working through the sports metaphor. "He swings at every ball," he answered at last. "He has to knock a few out of the park, yes?"
"What if we have to get in touch with him?" The scholar, looking less amused and more annoyed.
"He has his cigarette pack. I can call him if I must." A long sigh, and another sip of his bloody Mary. "So," he said, turning on his stool and glancing up at the athlete with calm interest. "About that tennis match--"
#
One-Eyed Jack and the house of the rising sun. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Vampires sneeze like cats. Who knew?
I concentrated on amusement to keep another image the hell out of my head--Stewart, alive, and bound to Angel somehow, drugs or magic or something else. It took a lot of willpower to walk down the stairs rather than stomp, but I thought I had my heart rate back to normal by the time I walked out into the parking lot. Both John Henrys waited by the front door of Jeremiah's Steak House. I paused in the shade as they crossed the asphalt and glanced over my shoulder, drawn by a whisper of breeze and the tang of ozone. Storm clouds piled up behind the Spring Mountains, not quite pushing over; another alleged monsoon season that was going to pan out mostly dry.
In '99, the rain nearly washed the whole damned town away. Just goes to show you never can tell.
In any case, the moisture in the air warmed the sunlight to a glow less like a welding arc and more like the sort of thing you might want to go out and walk around in and feel on your hair. It shone through the John Henrys, rendering them momentarily translucent, until they stepped into the shadow of the overhang.
"Did you find him?" asked the steel-driving man, shifting his hammer over his shoulder. Doc coughed into his handkerchief and reached for his flask.
I nodded and looked back up at the mountains remote behind a forest of power lines, billboards, and low-pitched roofs. I didn't feel like looking anybody in the eye, and the center of my chest felt like John Henry had caved it in with his hammer. "I found him. I want to thank you gentlemen for your help--"
"You know you can't dismiss us now," Doc said, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Not 'til the business you called us up for is finished. And this isn't it."
"No. This isn't it."
John Henry's hammer didn't ring on the concrete when he set it down by his feet and leaned the handle against his bulky thigh. He hooked thumbs as thick as two of my fingers together through the beltloops of his canvas trousers and dropped his head, staring at the ground in between my boots. "Do you want us to stick around and make sure he leaves town?"
"He's not leaving town," I said. They fell into step alongside me, Doc on the left and John Henry on the right. "He's helping me find Angel."
Doc's laugh turned into a coughing fit, his bony elegant white hand pressed against his lips hard enough to blanch away the little color left in them. "Think he'll be any use?"
"I think so," I said. "Turns out Angel offered him a job."
John Henry tossed his hammer idly, letting it turn in the air, end over end, before he caught it by the handle again. His muscles slid and writhed under glossy skin. "What kinda job?"
Stewart.
"Protecting her from me."
#
The American, the Russian, and the man who shot JFK. Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer 1964.
When the American rejoined the Russian some hours later, the Russian was crosslegged on one of the twin beds in their hotel room, his Walther disassembled on newspaper in front of him. His jacket was tossed carelessly over the foot of the bed. The black leather of his shoulder holster cut across an impossibly white shirt; the American made a note to find out what laundry he used.
"The mechanism won't rust in the desert," the American said, closing and locking the door.
"Sand," the Russian answered acidly, capping the bottle of gun oil without looking up. "You believe them."
"Don't you?"
"As much as I dislike admitting it." He reassembled the mechanism while the American leaned against the wall beside the yellow louvered closet door and watched. "Somehow, it doesn't surprise me that we would be the last to know."
"There are implications that could be worked to our advantage, once we understand the process."
This time the Russian did glance up, a flicker of a smile twitching his lips as he slid the magazine home. The click as it latched echoed with finality. "My thoughts exactly. I finalized some details with our colleagues while you were indisposed"--the American coughed--"and we are to serve as the primary bait. The other team will attempt to locate the assassin through more proactive measures."
"Tovarisch," the American said, delighted. "You've weaseled us out of the footwork, haven't you?"
"Weaseled may be an unfairly pejorative term."
"You have a better one?"
"Given how thoroughly you despise footwork--" The Russian rose from his place on the bed without using his hands, tucking his gun away as he fluidly stood. "I think you could manage politeness. You'll please remember this the next time you're sweating in the passenger seat of a Chevrolet, complaining how much your feet hurt."
"Still, your master plan leaves us getting shot at."
"All our plans leave us getting shot at."
The Russian ducked into the bathroom to wash his face and let cool water run over his arms, despite the air conditioning. His hair was still wet from what the American suspected was the latest in a series of cold showers. The American walked past him, crossed the garish carpet to the window, and flicked aside heavy drapes geometrically patterned in shades of rust and tan. "So, how do we play at being bait?"
"An endless succession of pricey meals and dinner theatre, leaving us ostentatiously exposed, would be too obvious a lure, unfortunately."
"Besides, we're not on an expense account." The American let the drapery fall. "Very frugal of the old man, getting us out here on our own nickel."
The Russian snorted. "He's nothing if not cheap."
"Pot."
"I am thrifty. I am also not eternally broke, like some profligate, bourgeois Americans I could name--" Their eyes met, and they both grinned in affectionate understanding.
"There's also the issue of Jackie," the American said, when the silence had lasted long enough.
"Ah, Jackie." The Russian snagged his jacket and shrugged into it, leaving it unbuttoned over his shirt. "Yes. He will expect us to pay his toll--and I admit to rather liking the fellow. If we can bring him this Angel person he described...spreading good will and so forth."
"Besides," the American said, "she killed his partner. And his partner looked like you. There's got to be an angle there somewhere..." The American looked down and fiddled with his pinky ring, attempting to conceal his secondhand wrath on behalf of Jackie, and Jackie's partner, and failing. "It, ah. It occurs to me--"
The Russian was looking at him, an expression playing across his face that would have been unreadable to anybody else. "You want to see if we can combine our tasks? Go back to two thousand and two?"
"I don't know," the American said. "How do you go about finding the genius of Los Angeles within Las Vegas City limits?"
The Russian looked at the American, and smiled. "Footwork."
#
The Russian's feet baked in his shoes and his toes felt as if they'd been gone over once lightly with a carrot grater, but he'd never let it show on his face. Not when his partner limped ostentatiously behind, muttering under his breath. At least the malevolent desert sun had slipped behind the mountains. "We haven't talked about the...the spooky thing."
"Jackie mistaking you for his partner?"
"Did he seem a little innocent to you? A bit of un naïf for his role?"
"His role as the spirit of Sin City?" The American craned his head back, looking up at the simulated skyline of New York City rendered in bright primary colors that lorded it over the south end of the Strip, wrapped in the yellow garland of a roller coaster reminiscent of something from a science fiction film. "Tovarisch, what could possibly be more naive than that? New York City with no crime, no grime, no Greenwich Village, no Soho, no Harlem--"
"--no jazz--"
"I bet the hookers even have all their teeth. Look at that place."
"I take your point. Venice without the toxic water. Remember how sick you got?..."
"Intimately." The American made a moue, and the Russian laughed at him, quite silently. It didn't matter; the American always knew when he was being laughed at. "You know, it occurs to me that our chances of finding one girl in all of Las Vegas when we have no photo, and the best description we have is 'brunette, five-three, one-ten, looks like an LA hooker who thought she could get a role in pictures' is probably a lost cause. We've been trying for hours. What do you say we call it a night?"
"Have we been shot at yet?"
The American checked his watch. "Not since 1964."
"Then we're not trying hard enough. The British team can't nab the assassin if we don't lure him into the open. Come on--three more bourgeois excrescences to go."
They walked in silence for a while. The American never seemed to sweat. The Russian mopped his brow with a formerly clean white handkerchief. The Luxor and the Excalibur yielded them nothing, and they wandered shoulder to shoulder, aimlessly, once they entered the tall gold building called Mandalay Bay. Some artificial scent on the air made the Russian sneeze. He dabbed his nose with the same handkerchief, and wiped his watering eyes. The place was huge, arched cavernous hallways oppressive as the sewers and catacombs of Paris. "Oh, brother. Is this the last hotel?"
"It's the last hotel on the whole goddamned planet--"
"Groovy. We haven't been shot at yet. Where to next?"
The American sighed and set his heels. "Did you just say groovy?"
"I like slang. Do you want to start on downtown?"
"What if I promised you dinner?"
The Russian bit back a grin. He'd been holding out for the trump card. "A casino buffet?"
"Bait," the American said, and pointed over his shoulder, back the way they'd come.
"A sushi bar in Las Vegas? Don't be ridi--"
"This is the millennium, tovarisch. There was a place in the last casino but one called Hamada of Japan. Looked promis...oh, my god."
"What?" The Russian turned, following the direction of his partner's shellshocked gaze, his smooth-soled shoes turning on the shiny, dark floor without a squeak. Years of training kept his jaw from actually dropping.
"That's Lenin."
"Correction," the Russian said, starting forward. "It's Lenin--without his head. Funky...."
"Did you just say?..."
"I wanted to see if you were paying attention. It appears to be a restaurant. And the statue is a replica."
"That's a relief. I'd hate to think any real works of art got their heads knocked off. Even Soviet propagandist works of art." The American was still grinning when the Russian shot him the filthiest look he could muster. He continued, "We eat here."
"We do not."
"Don't you ever get homesick?"
Constantly, the Russian thought. But not for this. But he stopped anyway, looking up at the bulky broad-shouldered statue, encrusted with faux pigeon droppings, and said, "Vladimir Ilyich, where is your head?"
"It's in the vodka locker," a smooth familiar voice said from the restaurant's doorway. "Viva Las Vegas. I think you two have a bit of history to catch up on. And I hear you're looking for a girl."
The Russian and his partner turned as one, shoulder to shoulder, reaching for but not producing their weapons. The man leaned against the marble framed entry, hands in the pockets of a voluptuous leather trenchcoat, dark blond hair fallen over his forehead, sunglasses concealing his eyes despite the dimness of the casino.
"Wow," the American said. "You know you look like--"
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Come on." He jerked his thumb in direction and turned his back.
Helplessly, the Russian exchanged a glance with his partner. They fell into step behind the stranger, who was carrying on a running monologue without bothering to glance over his shoulder and see if the spies were keeping up. "You're friends of Jackie's. And, unless I miss my guess, a little behind the times?"
The American coughed. "A little."
"American politics have been running downhill since the Kennedy assassinations, really. But the former Soviet Union's in even worse shape." The man in the leather trenchcoat shot a speculative glance at the Russian. "I doubt you'll be pleased--"
"Assassinations? Plural?" the American interrupted, at the same moment that the Russian said "Former?"
"Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles in June of 1968," the man who looked--and sounded--like the King of Rock and Roll said, checking his stride a little. The Russian hurried to keep up, matching his gait to the American's. "The Soviet Union dissolved its government peaceably in December of 1991, dividing into fifteen separate countries, most of which are still struggling, economically devastated, eleven years later. It happened just a little more than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was actually in Kiev when it happened--Ukraine's had a rough time of it."
"Ukraine always does," the Russian said, resignation in his breast. "Are there still roses?"
"Roses?"
"In Kiev."
The stranger stopped so short that the American almost walked into him. He paused and frowned. The Russian held his breath, his heart tight in his chest, and couldn't say why the roses mattered, except they did. His hands were sweating. He shoved them into his pockets, ignoring his partner's concerned glance. The man who looked like Elvis Presley pulled his sunglasses off, tucked them carefully into his breast pocket, looked the Russian in the eye and said, "There were in 1991. There's worse."
His partner's hand was on his shoulder. He leaned back against it, frowning. "Let me hear it."
"The power plant at Chornobyl--the nuclear plant--you know it?"
"The site had been chosen, but construction had not been started yet, the last I knew." The Russian dropped his chin, already knowing what the ghost of Elvis would say. His degree was in physics; he knew better than most that the proposed Soviet nuclear plants were an unsafe design. "There was an explosion."
"In 1986."
"Of course there was," he said, and looked up, something that didn't feel like a smile twisting his lips. "It's the history of Ukraine, my friend. If it weren't ideologically questionable, I'd wonder if there were a curse." He turned on his heel and stalked back toward the maimed statue of Lenin, the precieux faux-Russian bar--he recognized the chandelier, now that he thought about it; he'd seen it in one embassy or another--and, most importantly, the promised vodka locker.
His partner, still visibly rattled by the news that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, was right beside him. He needed the steadying hand on his elbow more than he cared to admit. "I thought we weren't eating in the tacky nightclub."
"We're not," the Russian said, crisply. "We're drinking."
There was Ukrainian vodka on the menu, and they served it both in martini glasses and in samplers of shots frozen into blocks of red-dyed ice. The bar itself had a strip of ice like a hockey rink down the center, and the walls were cluttered with peeling propaganda posters. Coupled with dim lighting, the effect was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, but the Russian's partner leaned against the bar on his left-hand side and the stranger in the trenchcoat leaned on his right, and there was a certain comfort to be had drinking silently between acquaintances while the decapitated head of Vladimir Ilyich glowered down at him from its high shelf in the glassed-in freezer behind the bar.
The Russian toasted it silently with his second martini glass full of Zlatogor and breathed out through his teeth. He didn't need to talk; his partner spoke for him. "Did Jack send you looking for us? To bring us...up to speed?"
"Jack sent me looking for his boyfriend. Look, what do I call you guys?"
The Russian and the American exchanged glances and shrugged. "What do we call you?" the American asked.
"Tribute."
"What's your real name?"
"Baby, you know that already." Tribute smiled and swirled the vodka in his shot glass. He put it back on the ice without touching it to his lips and squared his cocktail napkin precisely. The Russian swallowed vodka hard, watching the curvaceous brunette bartender as she slunk from one end of the ice-topped surface to the other.
"So how come you look so much like the Suicide King?" Tribute asked, after the Russian had finished his second drink.
"Suicide King?"
"Jackie's boyfriend. The Suicide King. Jackie calls him Stewart. Jackie's the knave of spades, if you hadn't caught on."
"The one-eyed jack. Yes, of course. And his partner then would have to be the King of Hearts." The Russian glanced up as he spoke, then glanced down as Tribute pushed the untouched shot glass toward him. "Boyfriend, you say? I suppose that's something else that's changed." He took the shot glass with a sigh. "I do not know. Do you have any more bombshells to drop on my head?"
"Not at the moment. Although I'm looking forward to your reaction to President Ronald Reagan."
Tribute had timed it perfectly. The American choked hard, flinching as fiery alcohol bathed his sinuses. He grabbed a napkin and covered the lower half of his face. "Currently?"
"No, back in the eighties. You all are just too much fun."
The American winced, set his napkin down, and sipped his drink again. "So who shot RFK?"
"Supposedly, a fellow named Sirhan Sirhan, but there are conspiracy theories about that, just like JFK." Tribute shrugged, drawing circles on the ice with his thumb. A passing matron turned to blink at his profile, shook her head, and kept on walking. The Russian ordered another drink.
"My friend here thinks Oswald did JFK all by himself," the American said, angling his head to include the silent Russian. The Russian snorted and looked down. "Why did you come looking for us?"
"I didn't," Tribute said, swiveling his chair to catch the American's eye. "I was looking for Angel. Apparently, given that people were talking about two guys dressed funny and asking the same questions I was, so were you."
The Russian glanced down at the munchie menu to hide his smile. If Tribute had found them, then perhaps the assassin would too. He blinked at the card stock in his hand. "Russian nachos? What on Earth?"
"Blame Julia Child."
"I love Julia Child. On PBS." The American was laughing at him, but it didn't matter. The American never had believed he could cook. "I suppose she's dead as well?"
Tribute smiled as he shook his head this time. "Still going strong."
Odd, how that little bit of continuity eased the congealed twist of worry in the Russian's chest. "What does she have to do with Mexicanized Russian food?"
Tribute shrugged. "Fusion cuisine. The world's gotten a lot smaller since your day."
"Our day?" The Russian recognized that tone in his partner's voice. The American was still working on his first martini. "I'd have guessed our day was your day too. Aren't you a, what did Jackie call us, a media ghost as well? 'Cause you'd be, what, seventy or so?"
Tribute turned to them and grinned; the Russian almost startled back into the American's arms at the glitter of white inhuman teeth. "I died in 1977. And I'm sixty-seven, for what it's worth."
"Wampyr," the Russian said. "Well, well."
Tribute's eyebrow rose. "You're taking it well."
"We've met your kind before."
"Twice," the American added, and the Russian turned his back on the vampire--a foolish thing to do, but ten ounces of eighty-proof vodka on an empty stomach after twelve hours in the heat perhaps had dulled his instincts--and shook his head.
"Only once," he argued. "The other one we never actually met."
"I was thinking of the fellow with the bats--"
"--random madman. Not a real supernatural being."
Tribute laughed, drawing their attention back. "That's refreshing. The next thing people usually say is that I've changed. When they actually get to live long enough to figure out who I am, I mean."
The cold glitter of the vampire's eyes arrested whatever the Russian might have said in reply. Carefully, he pushed his martini glass back an inch, using just his fingertips, and then steepled those fingertips against those of the other hand. "But you aren't that person, are you? You're something else."
"A predator," Tribute supplied.
"A predator who remembers being that man."
The vampire snorted and picked at the ice of the bartop with his thumbnail some more. He'd worn a little groove, although it didn't melt where he touched it. "If you can call the person I remember being a man." He shook his head and cleared his throat. "So the One-eyed Jack's got you all looking for Angel too. Spreading his resources out a bit, I suppose. Look, I'm supposed to lead him to her--" The sharp-nailed hand splayed flat on the bar, as if he meant to stab between the fingers with a knife. A human's hand would have blanched in places and reddened in others, from the pressure. Tribute's stayed bland white, porcelain. "--I can lead you as well. After I get some business of my own out of the way."
The American leaned forward, clearing his throat. "Why are you helping Jack?"
"The likes of me?"
Vodka was making the Russian's head swim. He needed to eat. And not Russian Nachos. "Yes."
"Boy's got to live some place." The vampire's shoulders moved under the black leather coat, which draped in folds soft as cashmere. The dark blond hair drifted down into his eyes. "I like Las Vegas. I want to stay. I have to earn that from Jack."
"You're buying your way in."
Tribute showed the tips of his eyeteeth again as he stood. "Besides," he said, "I've met Los Angeles. One city like her is enough, don't you think?"
"Where are you going?" The Russian reached out to lay a hand on Tribute's wrist. The vampire suffered the touch; his flesh was cold, as stiff as wax.
"Hunting," Tribute said, one word full of potent venom. He stepped back, a sharply folded fifty-dollar bill appearing on the bar where he'd been sitting. "Drinks are on me. I'll catch you later, little spies; you don't want to come."
The coat didn't swirl as he glided toward the door and was gone. The Russian glanced at the American and waggled his eyebrows in a passable imitation of their superior. "Jackie's boyfriend?"
The American reached out, took the Russian's martini off the bar, and knocked the whole thing back in a gulp. "Times change," he said wryly, when his face unpuckered. "You think Tribute's told Jackie his partner's alive? Or do you think the Genius of Las Vegas is lying to us?"
"I think it's going to take a lot of sushi to fuel the thinking process," the Russian answered. "Do you suppose our money's any good here?"
The American smoothed Tribute's bill against the ice. "Better than his money would be there," he said, and tapped President Grant on the nose. "Come on," he said, steadying the Russian as the Russian pushed himself to his feet. "Let's see if we can get ourselves shot in a restaurant."
"Don't forget our guardian angels," the Russian answered, casting a mysterious glance skyward.
"I never forget them. I just prefer not to make them work too hard."
#
The Assassin and the lady sowing the dragon's heart. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
The assassin sat in a straight-back chair, polishing his shoes, while the genius of Las Vegas pressed his face into the pillow beside Angel's thigh and tugged ineffectually against the handcuff locking his right wrist to the bedframe. Angel stroked his hair; he turned further away.
"No." Flatly, with an edge that told the assassin that the Suicide King was closer to his right mind than he'd been in days. Consent had to be given, and so he was no longer under the influence of the narcotics and witchcraft Angel had been using to keep him pliant.
"Come on, baby," Angel said, as the assassin slipped his foot into a gleaming loafer. "You have to eat your soup."
"Or what? I'll starve to death?" He snorted and rolled onto his back, using the short chain to haul himself up against the headboard. He sat beside Angel, his thin shoulders squared and his jaw working. He leaned away from her and she curled toward him like a mother coaxing a nauseated child. "If you want me to eat somebody's heart, why don't you start with your own?"
The assassin stood, making sure his suitcoat hung flat over his pistol. He buttoned both buttons and smoothed his lapels with a flick of his thumbs, checking the look in the mirror. He'd picked up a bit of Las Vegas sun, bronzing his cheekbones. Angel lifted her head, careful to keep the mug of broth in her hand out of reach of the Suicide King. "What do you think you're doing? I need you here--"
"You're not going to get him to drink that tonight," the assassin said, finger-combing his hair. "We need bargaining power. Offer him his partner's life."
Stewart blanched.
The assassin blew Angel a kiss. "And in the meantime, love, I have people to kill."
She climbed off the bed and came across to him, leaving the mug on the dark wood desk beside an industrial-looking beige telephone. She lifted her chin and stared up at him, challenging; he kissed her for real this time, ignoring the Suicide King's snort of disgust. "Come home safe," she said, and laid a possessive hand on his upper arm. "I'd hate to have to find another partner with your qualifications."
"Never fear. And be careful of the poof while I'm gone, Angel." He winked. "You do look good enough to eat."
#
Tribute and his cross to bear. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Before I went to kill anybody, I took a walk through the Neon Boneyard. Las Vegas is a city without a history, but the history it doesn't have was piled up here, baking under the unforgiving sun. It wasn't the old Las Vegas, of course--not the Vegas I lived in--but it was an echoing ghost of it, acres of boot-marked hardpan and a hodgepodge of metal and glass radiating the heat of the day back into the desert night. Cooling plastic ticked; signs were piled by signs, big ones, medium-sized ones--some of them two or three times taller than me. Familiar names: Sam Boyd's, the Silver Slipper, Joe's Longhorn, all fenced around with green-laced chain link, like the damned things might spook and stampede. I stopped by Aladdin's silver lamp, which sat in a protective sort of bay formed by the curve of the Gold Nugget sign, and cocked my head back to look up at it. Funny how it looked so dated, thirty-odd years later. Quaint, that's the word I want.
Somebody moved in the darkness, the drifting night air bringing me the rankness of tobacco and cheap bourbon and unwashed man. A lot of bums slept in the Boneyard; it was safer than sleeping on the street. Until I got to town, that is.
I thought about it for a minute. It would be clean, easy. I could do what I had to do and get back on duty following those ridiculously charming escapees from the idiot box around.
All right, it wouldn't be clean.
And I was hungry, but I could still afford to be choosy--and some down on his luck drunk wasn't choosy enough for me. Especially not when Jesse frowned at me translucently from the shadows, disapproval plain in his expression though he was holding his tongue. Most people in Vegas are prey, it's true; the city's got teeth. But I wanted something that wouldn't keep me up days feeling guilty about it.
I slipped into the walkway between the Sassy Sallie's sign and the chain link, jumped over, and caught a cab downtown, looking for irony if I couldn't find evil. Jesse didn't follow, and I didn't blame him. I'd only get a lecture if he were there, anyway. There were a lot of people sleeping on the street, all right. I only had to spend a few minutes hanging around the courthouse and the bus station to get the feeling Vegas doesn't offer much in the way of safety nets. People slept rough on the grass or on park benches, or moved around looking for something to eat now that the heat of the day had pulled back a little. I killed five minutes watching happy couples being panhandled as they left the courthouse with their marriage licenses in their hands; the bureau's open 'till midnight weekdays and twenty-four hours on weekends. No blood test, no waiting, and all the papers on public record.
I could walk in there, pay a couple of dollars, and pull my own marriage license application, if I wanted it.
Yeah. Plenty to choose from, and easy pickings. Jackie kept his city clean of people like me. What he couldn't keep out were the people like people everywhere, because they made him as much as he watched them. And I comfort myself that there are worse predators in the night than me.
It's a lie, but I comfort myself.
There were still a couple of street preachers working the crowd. The true Las Vegas wedding experience; pick your minister out of the ones on the sidewalk shouting their wares, like hookers jostling on the corner. "Hey, mister," one of them said to me, as I wandered close, "do you want to get married tonight?"
God forgives us the sins of our mortal lifetimes, if we ask real nice. My religion doesn't talk much about the ones committed after you die. I turned around and looked him in the eye, and shrugged. "My fiancée's just run back to the hotel. You wanna come with me to get her?"
"Sure," he said, and fell into step. Tall black man, heavy set, his hair shaved close to the skull. We walked a few yards, and it was easy enough to grab a wrist and snake him into the shadows. They make it sound so pretty in the books. Tidy little puncture wounds, and orgasmic pleasure spiraling into death.
It isn't pretty. You wouldn't want to know. Still, plenty of blood in that one, and if I couldn't find a record producer, a man of God would do.
You figure they'll get home safely, right? And if they don't, it's their own damned fault.
I never could stand a hypocrite.
Fiction: Black is the Color by Elizabeth Bear
Black is the color of my true love's hair
His lips are like a rose so fair
The kindest face and the gentlest hands
I love the ground whereon he stands
#
Sunrise light glazed the oblong cobbles along the north bank of the River Clyde. The thump of music from a barge-turned nightclub had ended hours earlier. Only the river--winding between stark industrial buildings on the south bank and condominiums on the right--remained. The river, silence, and the morning chill.
And a white stallion's hunger.
He was not pure-white: rather a cobby piebald with a black face and a mostly-white body, more black spotting his legs, streaking his mane and tail and his heavy feathers. The red light scraped across the stones stained his coat also, turning blue eyes unearthly. His hooves were unshod, though old nail-holes could be seen around their fringes should one observe with care.
The stallion stood beneath a bridge so low that if he raised his head, he would strike it on stones--a human of average height could have laid hands on the arch--and he cropped small white flowers of hairy bitter cress from between the stones. Prehensile lips tugged the plants loose, his teeth grinding them to gritty pulp, roots and sand and all.
The picture of morning contentment, he was waiting for a girl.
Not one girl in particular. But not just any girl, either. She had to be a special girl, brave and clear-eyed. Thirteen or fifteen, innocently sociopathic, full of juice and life and solipsism. Wicked. Worthy.
That was the girl for him.
The Clyde had many moods, and the stallion in his time had waited through them all. He'd wait through more than rain and sun, dark and light, if need be. He was a predator, with a predator's patience. He'd wait a long while for the right one.
This morning, he did not have to. The cold black river silvered and then greened with sunrise, though the city slumbered on. And a girl came walking, alone, swinging her book bag, her heels clicking on the rectangular cobbles and her school skirt flaring around her knees.
It was early for school, though, and she didn't walk purposefully. She staggered as if with tiredness, and her high-collared cardigan was buttoned over her throat, her left arm hugged tight to her torso as if to keep in a little extra warmth, or as if her ribs hurt her.
The stallion had a way of going unseen, if he stood unmoving. The light fell around him, draped him like green branches or window curtains, and drew the eye past. But he wanted the girl to notice, and so out of the nowhere from which he drew his clothing and caparison, he shrugged on a saddle and bridle--old, creaking, oiled leather--permitted a bit of hairy cress to protrude between his lips, and struck an unshod hoof on stone.
Lightly, lightly. He did not care to crack the cobbles, or his foot. Just to raise a clatter, enough of a clatter to raise the girl's head.
She was a pretty girl. That was good; he liked pretty girls best. She had long straight ash-fair hair and a pointed chin, and as she turned toward him sunlight refracted through her irises for an instant so her eyes seemed to glow.
He whickered, low and hesitant, and she limped a half-step forward, her black nylon bag dragging on the dew-damp stones. "Hello," she said, when her eye fell on him. "You're a big one, aintcha?"
He made another sound, a breathy whuff, and mirrored her half-step. "Oh," she said, and let go the strap of her bag so it slumped against her ankle. She held out a hand, palm-up. "I'm sorry. I haven't an apple."
He minced another step, gravely, head bowed and neck tucked, reins dragging between his forelegs. Her narrow chest swelled as she drew in a breath and held it.
He paused, waiting for her to speak again. The trick was to make them think they were coaxing you.
"Come on, Boss," she said, and clicked her tongue. "What's your name, big fella? Did you lose your rider? Is that why you were hiding under the bridge? I know, it feels safer there--"
He tossed his head and stepped forward and then back. His hoof came down on the reins; he thought he even made it look accidental. And then the head-toss again--this time arrested by the tension on the reins--and the flattened jingle of bit swivels.
The girl's eyes widened. They were translucent, green, the color of the Clyde in a different mood with the sun high above it. "Shh," she said. "Shh, shh."
She moved more purposefully now, worried for him, but still cautiously and in increments, edging away from her book bag and talking low nonsense. He watched, ears forward and forelock fallen across his eyes, waiting for her touch.
She surprised him. She let him lip her palm, fingers flat, and then she touched his neck, low and away from his face, making his skin jump and shiver. Cautiously, she ran the hand along the crest of his neck, scratching under the heavy mane, and then slid her palm down his shoulder along the grain of the hair. She crouched, slowly, her hand still trailing down his leg, and grasped the fetlock just above the hoof. Burrs matted the dense coarse hair of his feathers and her hand wouldn't close around his ankle. But she tugged, and he lifted, freeing the reins.
She caught them in her left hand and pulled them clear, winding the worn leather around and around her palm as she stood. "Good boy," she said, as he settled his hoof again.
She scratched his cheek. He leaned into it. "I wish I had an apple."
She had something better, of course. The smell of her was maddening. He rested his chin on her shoulder and lipped her neck, and she scratched harder.
She tasted of salt and unwashed girl. He was right; she had been out all night, and still in yesterday's school clothes. She was his, all his, whenever he wanted her.
He could afford the joy of anticipation.
"Hey," she said. "That tickles." She pushed his muzzle away, strands of unbrushed hair sticking to his lips and nostrils. "You're pretty sweet for a stallion," she said. "And no shoes either." She looked down at his hooves. He clattered them on the stone, neck arched, inviting.
The saddle was right there, the stirrup a summons. She touched the cheekpiece of the bridle instead. "Aren't horses always supposed to know their way home?"
He snorted warm air softly across her cheek and brushed her with his whiskers. She smelled of blood, rich and tantalizing; perhaps she was on her menses. The bit made him froth at the corners of his mouth when he salivated.
"Yeah," she said. She cupped a hand over his eye, and he let her. "I know my way home too. And I don't want to go there either. I can't ride you in a skirt, Boss, and I don't know where to take you."
He wondered what she would do if he spoke, if he let himself slip into human form and gathered her in his arms. A calm girl, a brave girl, a sensible girl. One who knew a little about horses, maybe just from reading, maybe from trips out to the countryside.
He liked this one, her furry red smell and her voice with the hitch in it. He pressed his face into her palm and waited.
And she looked at him, sad and strange, and pulled her hand back and pressed it to her neck as if to keep her heart from rising up her throat. And then she looped the reins over the fence, turned away, scooped up her book bag by the strap, hauled back, cocked her arm, and pitched it spinning over the bright aluminum rail.
It fell with a splash and bobbed only once before it sank, recollected by ripples and then bubbles. "Right," she said. "I guess that's that, then, innit?"
She hadn't done much more with the reins than a gesture. Perhaps she half-hoped that when she turned back, he'd be gone. A wisp of dream, burned off with the morning mist rising from the river.
Stately, careful, the stallion stepped out of the shadow of the bridge. The sun was high enough to catch in her tawny hair and warm the crest of his neck now, and he paused in the light so that when she looked up, she would see him. But she stood at the rail, staring, and so he came to her, and breathed across her neck. She shuddered and turned back.
"So," she said, "where to now?"
He whickered again, tickling her ear with his whiskers. She leaned her cheek against his neck.
And then she turned, suddenly, tossed the reins over his head. She came under his neck and stepped crisply along his near side. He felt her hand on his shoulder, his mane. She grasped the pommel of the saddle and lifted one leg with complete immodesty, revealing a dab of crimson on her panties, her foot a testing weight in the stirrup. The scent of blood and iron dizzied him; he shook froth from his lips. And then she was on his back, knee socks and clunky black shoes, and he could hear her thighs sticking to the leather of the saddle as she settled herself. Living flesh on dead, adhering. She shifted her weight in the saddle, and he waited until she was seated, both feet in the stirrups.
"I know who you are," she said. "You don't fool me, pony." And then she patted him on the neck and said, "And I don't care."
He craned his neck, pulling against the off rein, and she moved her hand to give him that freedom. She leaned down to push his forelock out of his eye as it came within reach, making him shake his head and send it tumbling down again. She laughed and drummed her heels against his side. "Well then, run off with me, Kelpie."
He wondered when she'd known him. The eyes, perhaps: the eyes often gave him away. And those he could not change. Every Fae who transforms has some mark that stays with him in every shape, and the stallion's was china-blue irises.
He winked at her, and she crowed. "I knew it!"
"You're not frightened," he said, his voice unmuffled by the bit.
She straightened his mane again. He dropped his head and ambled forward. His unshod hooves thumped on stone rather than clattering.
She stretched her legs into the stirrups. She understood the basics, he thought, but her balance wasn't fluid. Knowledge without practice. "What have I to fear?"
"Death by drowning," he answered, and she didn't laugh. He hadn't thought she would; the sort of girl who laughed at literary jokes didn't tumble her books into the Clyde without a hesitation.
The walk became a trot, which she posted over awkwardly, wincing, and out of pity he began to canter. The river walk wasn't long, but he planned to take Bell's Bridge near the science center and bring her across the river, among the scrubby trees in the dawn-cold park.
Where they could find a little privacy.
The rising sun was at their backs, stretching their shadow long across the cobbles, and the river walk was all but deserted. One man, in a long coat and a hat, waved as they passed, and the girl waved back.
"You shouldn't canter that beast on cobbles," he called, but they were already past by the time the girl answered, "He's cantering me!"
Whatever her bravado, and though she clung gamely to the saddle, the stallion could smell her fear. A gallop, he thought, might lose her.
If he had never thrown a rider he didn't want thrown.
She'd abandoned the reins. They bounced against his neck, and her hands were fisted one in his mane and one on the pommel. She leaned forward, precariously, so he had to hitch his stride to throw her back into balance, and called into his ear, "Aren't you supposed to look like a wild horse off the moors? And yet here you are under saddle, careering along a tame riverside."
"Where the river goes harnessed," he said, "so go the river-spirits."
Through all the Isles, in these times.
Besides, she'd never stay on him if his back were bare, though he missed the grip of legs around his barrel, the drum of bare heels against his sides.
There had been another. He'd worn her soul for a time, chain and change, and lived in hunger while he'd done so. She had owned him--altered him--but he had won free at the last.
And though he had changed...a predator needs meat.
They cantered past brick condominiums, startling a red-clad woman who had been fishing in her bag, and came to the place where the riverwalk curved back to rejoin the road. Here there was construction on the north side of the street and--between the road and the river--trees and grass and ratty flowers amidst the litter on the south. They moved with the sparse early traffic but faster, threading around cars he didn't dare jump for fear of losing the girl.
They passed between a white hotel and a round restaurant, under the shadow of an enormous crane and past the auditorium called the Armadillo for architecture like a sectioned shell. And then they were on the bank of the river again, and running now, the girl laughing in his ear as the bridge came into sight, with its center suspension spire and its walkways covered with arches like a seagull's wings.
The bridge was named for a whisky sponsorship, and the stallion thought it a fine irony. "Duck," he said, and lowered his own head so the girl could lean forward along his neck.
And so they passed across the bridge, and she stayed with him, while supports stippled her face with moving light and the arch blurred by above. His hooves a hollow thunder on the span. The river gave back a moving echo.
They burst out under the streaky sky again. The clouds were torn and moving; there would by rain by dusk.
She laughed, and kept on laughing. She'd found the rhythm--a gallop is not so hard to ride--and their wind and his mane stung tears from her eyes.
On the off side lay the shining silver arcs of the science center, like half-moons reflecting the rising sun. The stallion veered away, across sand and then grass and soft earth where his hooves pressed crescents as if in answer.
And then the road, the hard jar up his forelegs, the girl shivering and urging him on. A trail they did not follow: instead, he took them among the winding band of trees.
There, he threw her, head down and rump high, and turned his body and turned his form at once and caught her as she was falling. His intervention knocked the scream right out of her, and she clung, breathless, against his chest. The scent of blood wreathed her, the scent of blood and the scent of woman.
His stomach rumbled.
She pressed closer into his arms, her eyelashes fluttering against the hollow over his collarbone. With blunt-nailed hands, he tipped her chin up and inspected her face, her mouth, the watery green of her eyes under hair tangled by their wild ride.
She winced. And when he touched the top button on her cardigan, she flinched.
"Run from me," he said. "Go on; I don't mind. I'll catch you."
Her lashes were dusted with gold. "There's no point in running. You never get away, and where's there to run to?" She laid her pale hands over his, the bitten nails and the torn, inflamed cuticles. She helped him unbutton her collar.
When the cardigan fell open, he saw the bruises on her throat. She swallowed under tender blue-veined skin, and he touched her softly. The hands that had made the bruises were smaller than his own, but most hands were.
"Did you want that?" he asked her.
She didn't answer, as such. She lowered her eyes, and shook her head.
"My dad called me a whore," she said. "He said I needn't come home again."
"Your father choked you?"
He was new. He was changed, like the changeless sea. It wasn't pity he felt, for he was pitiless.
But he recollected pity. He had carried it for a time, and though he'd laid it down since, the memory lingered.
The sea is also capricious.
"You were raped," he said.
"So? My dad told me he loved me. That makes what he did better? And you. You're going to drown me. What makes you so fucking superior, water-horse?"
He had no answer, so he sang--
I'll go down by Clyde and I'll mourn and weep
For satisfied I never can be.
I'll write him a letter, just a few short lines
And suffer death ten thousand times.
--and watched her eyebrows rise. And when he had finished, he cleared his throat and said, "You knew the cost when you came with me."
"I did," she said, fists on her hips. "And if I hadn't, you would have taken me anyway."
He dipped his head. It was true.
She sighed. "I don't have anywhere to go. It doesn't matter. Do you know what a sin-eater is?"
"I have been called one," he answered. "But I am not. I cannot absolve you."
"I don't need absolution," she said. "Will you put your sin on me?"
"I can't sin," he answered. He toed the earth nervously. "I haven't a soul."
She rolled her eyes, arms crossed, shaking her hair across her shoulders. "If you fuck me, will you say it's my fault?"
The stallion was as old as the sea; he'd loved and killed and diced with the kings of Faerie, and--for a while--he had carried a mortal woman's soul. He could not recollect a conversation that had befuddled him as much as this one.
"Of course it's not your fault," he said. "I'm a monster."
"Oh God!" She shook her head so hard it turned her body from the waist. Her hair was a tempest all around her, and he wanted to reach out and smooth it. "A monster who admits it. I can die happy now."
How he loved these bold young women, their flounces and their storms. He had to touch her hair, and so he did, stroking it smooth as best he could with callused hands. He held her face between his palms, and she let him.
"Did you think I'd be impressed by your stoicism? Did you think you would be different, that you could change me?"
"No," she said. "I know I'm not that special. I just wanted to ride."
"Run," he said. He let his hands fall. "Fight me. You might live."
"I don't like kissing," she said, and buttoned her cardigan down.
#
This time, no saddle. Her skin cool on his warm hide, naked as Godiva, but her hair hiding nothing. He ran, hard, exultant. If she wanted a ride, he would give one.
She rode better without the saddle. She left her blood upon white hide.
They galloped between parking lots and along the waterfront, people turning to stare. A man in a green hat; a woman in a flowered dress not warm enough for the morning. Someone snapped a photo; the stallion tossed his mane. They came up to the fence in a headlong plunge, and she called into his ear.
"It's not a new story, is it?"
"No," he called back. "It's as old as the sea."
He gathered himself and leaped the sunlit silver rail.
They splashed hard, his legs flailing, hers slipping along his sides though she clung with clenched fingers to his black-white, seaweedy mane.
She gasped in cold, clinging. "Your name. What's your name, Kelpie?"
"Uisgebaugh."
There is no point in keeping secrets from the dead. But her name, he asked not. And she did not offer.
Her fingers spasmed on his mane and stayed locked there, entangled, when he rolled and took her down.
Fiction: Coat by Joe R. Lansdale
When James saw the man in the streetlights, he hated him on sight because of the coat. It wasn't fashionable. If the man had been unfashionable in all other ways he could have ignored it, but no, this was a man who should have known better. He was a man with a good shirt and slacks and fine tie, and the best shoes available, and yet, he wore a coat out of style and certainly one that did not make for a proper appearance. It was an odd coat of undetermined color and absolutely no substance. It had all the grace of a car wreck. It flopped in the winter wind at the lapels like bat wings flexing, caught up in back and whipped backwards like the tail of a swallow.
There was no excuse for it really.
Sure, he saw plenty of unfashionable people, but this fellow must know better, having acquired the most fashionable and best clothes otherwise. It was not a matter of being uninformed, he was flaunting a disregard for the proper and the respectable, and was therefore insulting the very business James was a part of. Fashion design.
There was no use calling him on it, James was certain. A man like that knew how things ought to be. A man with his hair perfectly cut and perfectly combed, and perfectly dressed, except for that horrid coat.
Still, James found himself following the man, deeply bothered by it all. He was a man that understood fashion, and loved it, and believed it was more than an expression of self. That it was in fact, a kind of religion, and here was an insult to his religion.
The man moved out of the street lights and into a dark alley near a stairwell, and James knew this was a bad place to be walking, but if the man was dull enough to do so, and in that horrid coat, then he would be brave enough to do so and call him on the matter after all. He found he just couldn't let it rest.
James followed as the man took the dark stairs, and when the fellow was halfway down, James called out, "Sir, that is an awful coat. I don't mean to be rude, but really."
The man, nothing but a shadow on the stairs now, paused, looked back. "My coat?"
"Of course," James said. Do I have on a horrid coat? I think not, and nor should you, this is the finest and best of this year's fashion that I'm wearing. Perhaps last year, next year, it will be out of favor, but it is all the rage for now, and you, sir, have plenty of fine fashionable coats to pick from, though I, of course recommend my own brand of coat.."
"What?" said the man in the shadows.
"The coat," James said. "Your coat. It's hideous."
The man came up the stairs and stopped only a few feet from James, looking up at him. "You're kidding, right?"
"I think not. That is one hideous coat."
The man sighed. "I can't believe you're concerned about my coat."
"It's just...how shall we put it, an atrocity against fashion and against mankind."
"It was once fashionable."
"And, I'm quite sure that fig leaves over the testicles were once fashionable, but in our modern society, in our world, fashion is all, and it changes. Someone once thought the tie died tee-shirt and bell bottoms were fashionable, but, times change. Thank goodness."
"Look, not that it's any of your business, but my father was a tailor. He made this coat---"
"Well, it may have been something before electricity," James said, "but now, it's just crude."
"He made it for himself many years back, when he was a young man. He is dead now, gone, and though it's none of your business whatsoever, this is an heirloom. It may not look like much, it may look thin, but it's surprisingly warm, and very comfortable, very flexible. Happy?"
"Not at all. Look, you seem like a nice fellow. It's one thing for someone of...well, the lower classes to wear that coat, but for you to mix fashion like that, that dreadful coat over those fine clothes, it should be a hanging offense."
The man threw up his hands. "I've had enough of you. What business is it of yours?"
"I spend a large part of my time designing fashion, trying to make the world and those who live in it more attractive. Take what I'm wearing for example---"
"I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me," the man said. "I'm quite comfortable with my heirloom coat, and you, sir, are a weirdo who needs to go home and run his head under the shower until it clears, or, until you drown."
The man turned and began walking down the stairs. James felt himself heat up as if a coal had been dropped inside his body to nestle in the pit of his stomach. He let out a sound like a wounded animal and went charging down the stairway, slamming both hands into the man's back, sending him sailing down the steps to bounce on several, and to finally land hard and bloody in a heap at the bottom.
James stood startled, his hands still out in front of him, like a mime pretending to push at an invisible door.
"My God," James said aloud. He eased down the stairs and stood over the man, called out. "Hey, you okay?"
The man didn't move. The man didn't speak. The man didn't moan.
James bent down by the man's head and spoke again, asking if he was okay. Still no answer.
James looked left and right, over his shoulder and up the stairs. No one had seen him. He looked about. No crime cameras. It had all happened suddenly and in darkness. He hadn't meant for it to happen, it had merely been an angry response. Insulting fashion was not acceptable. And now, the man in the unfashionable coat lay dead at the bottom of the stairs.
Well, thought James, dressing like that, talking like that, and knowing better, he deserved to be dead.
James took a deep breath and rolled the man on his stomach and pulled the coat off of him, tucked it under his arm, started up the stairs.
He was looking for the first large trash can to deposit the coat into, but none presented itself. Carrying the ugly coat, even rolled up in a tight bundle, made James feel somewhat ill. The thing was absolutely without design, as unfashionable as a hat made from the mangy skins of dead street rats.
Finally, he saw a trashcan and was about to deposit it, but, there was a police officer. James paused, realized it would mean nothing to the officer to see him toss the coat, but then again, he felt very odd about the matter. Moments ago he had merely been willing to impart a bit of fashion wisdom to a man that should have known better, and in the end he had killed him. You might even call it murder, though that had not been his intent. The more James thought about it, the more he felt there had been something inside of him brewing all along, all having to do with that ugly coat and the man's blatant insult to fashion.
James passed the officer, still not able to toss the coat, wearing it under his arm like a cancerous tumor. He walked on, not spying another trashcan of correct size, unable to dump it. He thought of giving it to a homeless person. That would be all right. That would fit. No fashion loss there. But no homeless person presented himself, and frankly, he had come to hate the coat so much, that the idea he might give it away to someone and see it worn about the city, even on someone as unfashionable as a homeless drifter, was not appealing. And there was another factor; it would serve as a constant reminder of what he had done. Though, the more he thought about it, the more comfortable he felt with his actions. In fact, it was a kind of prize he had now, a souvenir of the event, a reminder of the moment when he had corrected a horrible wrong.
Sometimes, you just had to take the more direct and deadly route to repair things that were socially wrong, and that coat was wrong, wrong, wrong.
He made it all the way to his plush apartment with the coat, and decided he no longer wanted to toss it. His thoughts earlier were correct. This was an important reminder of a blow struck for the fashionable.
Inside his apartment he unfolded the coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Hideous indeed, and spotted in places with blood. He opened a bottle of wine and sat at his table with bread and cheese and ate, and watched the coat as if he thought it might suddenly leap up and run about the room. He discovered that what he had hated before about the coat, he still hated, but now the sight of it gave him pleasure with the memory of his deed, and the blood on it sweetened his thoughts.
His own father had worn a coat not too unlike that. It suddenly came to him, and the sweetness he had experienced soured somewhat. He thought of his father, the poor old bastard, working the fields and coming home covered in sod, the old coat stained with the dirt of the fields, the same dirt under the old man's fingernails. And his mother, and himself, they had never worn anything but rags. No fashion there. None at all.
But through hard work and part-time jobs, he had finished school and finished his studies at the University, and gone on to study fashion. He found he was quite good at design, and as he became known, and was able to distance himself from his past; he changed his past. He made up his former life, and it was a better one than the one he had actually experienced. Cut himself off from his father and mother and their little dirt farm, and when he heard that the both of them had died, and were buried not far from where his father had turned up the dirt to plant the potatoes and the like, well, he only felt a minor pang of regret. He dove deeper into his work, deeper into design, deeper into fashion, until he hardly remembered his old self at all.
Though that coat, that damnable coat had reminded him. That was it. That was the whole matter of the thing. He had been reminded of his own father, not a tailor, but a farmer, a man for whom fashion did not exist, a man of the earth, a man with dirt under his nails. And his mother, always tired, always frumpy, a face that makeup had not touched, a back that had never felt the softness of silk. He tried not to think of the shapeless clothing he had once worn. Or the coat his father had worn, not too unlike that ugly thing on the back of the chair, a coat perhaps made by the very tailor who had made this. Tailor, a man who could design such a wart on the art of fashion should call himself a butcher, not a tailor.
By the time he went to bed, James felt quite pleased with himself. A man divorced from his old life, a man who had struck a blow for grace and poise, and the wearing of better material.
He lay in bed for awhile, ran the incident over and over in his head, and finally he turned to a book, lay in bed with the reading light behind him, but the words did not form thoughts, they were merely bugs that danced on the page.
Finally, he put the book aside and turned off the light, slowly drifted into sleep.
Until the noise.
It echoed from somewhere distant, and then the echo grew and thundered, and he sat up, only to find that it was raining and that thunder was banging and lightning was jumping, and a very cool and pleasant wind was slipping through his open window, making the curtains flap like gossip tongues. He slipped out of bed and went to the window, stuck his head out of it and looked down at the dark and empty street. He felt rain on his neck. He pulled back inside, considered closing the window, but decided against it. It was too hot to have the window closed. He hoped that the rain would soon pass, and with it the flashing of lightning and the rolling of thunder.
On his way back to bed, just as he passed the chair over which the coat was draped, he felt himself brush against the sleeve of the coat. He jerked away from it as if it were a serpent that had tried to coil itself around his wrist.
Glancing at the coat, he was surprised to find that the sleeves were hanging loose, and in fact, nothing was touching him but the sleeve of his own pajama top. He had felt certain that out of the corner of his eye he had seen the coat move, and that what he had felt was not the fine softness of his personally designed pajamas, but the coarseness of the coat.
He climbed back in bed, lay with his head propped up on his pillows, and studied the coat in the flashes of the lightning. When the lightning lit things up, it was as if the coat moved, a kind of strobe effect.
"Of course," he said to himself. "That's it. That's what it was. An illusion. "
But that didn't keep him from thinking about the touch on his wrist. He pushed himself down into his covers, like a product being dropped into a bag, and tried to sleep, and did, for a while.
He awoke to a rough feeling on his body. It was as if he were wearing the coat. He rose up quickly, kicking back the covers, only to find that he was in his pajamas, and that the coat was still in its place; one of the sleeves however had been blown by the wind and now it lay in the seat of the chair as if resting an invisible hand in an invisible lap.
James pulled off his pajama top and tossed it on the floor. Tomorrow he would throw the thing away. It had somehow grown stiff, perhaps in the wash, starch or some such thing. Fine pajamas were never to have starch. Fine cloth of any kind was never to have starch. He would have to speak to the maid about how she did laundry.
Punching his pillows, propping one on top of the other, he put his back to the headboard, and watched the lighting in the window, listened to the rain and the thunder, and then the coat moved.
James jerked his head to the chair. The coat sleeve that had been lying in the seat of the chair had fallen off to the side again. The wind, most likely, but it made him think of the man he had killed, how it had looked on the man as he walked, how it had been caught up in the wind, how the lapels had flapped, how the length of it had blown back behind him. He thought too of the man's father, the poor tailor, working away to make himself a coat, and how he had proudly passed the horrible item onto his son, and then he thought of his own father, and his similar coat, and how it had been caked with dirt, and how the old man had had dirt beneath his nails, and then he thought of his worn-out mother, and how they had died, without him, out there on that god-forsaken property, and how they lay beneath that dirt, the grit of it seeping into their coffins and onto their ivory grins. He closed his eyes, saw the young man who had owned the coat falling down the stairs, remembered how he had stood on the steps, his hands out in front of him, frozen in position after the act.
The wind picked up and the sleeves of the coat were lifted and they flapped dramatically. James felt a cold chill wrap itself around him, and he knew it was not caused by the wind, and he knew then why he had pushed the man, and why he had taken the coat, because the coat had belonged to him; it was the sort of coat he had been born to wear. He had ran from such a thing all his life, but it was his burden, this coat, and it was his past, and it was his. The coat that should lie on his back, the sleeves that should hang on his arms.
The wind blew harder and the rain came in the window with it. The coat, perhaps caught on the wind, stirred, then seemed to leap off the chair, across the bed, and flapped around James, the sleeve of it catching about his neck.
James leaped from bed, screamed, ran wildly, tripped over a foot stool, clambered to his feet, slammed into a wall. The sleeve was tight around his neck, and the rest of the coat lay against his skin, and it was coarse, so coarse. It was his life, this coarse coat, and it wanted him in it, wanted him to claim what he deserved.
He charged into the chair at the foot of the bed, and stumbled over it, fell toward the window, hit it with tremendous force, went through head first, toward the street below, and then he was jerked upwards, his head snapping back, and then the rough, workingman's sleeve squeezed tight against his throat and stole his breath.
Next morning, bright and early, a homeless man discovered him and pointed up, alerted others. The police came, gave him a look see. The sleeve of the coat was wrapped tight about his neck, had practically tied itself, and the rest of it had caught on a nail in the window, and though the coat had torn severely, the sturdiness of the material maintained, leaving James to hang there in his pajama bottoms which he had soiled in death.
It was most unfashionable.
Fiction: Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind by Rachel Swirsky
The last word ever spoken by a human is said in a language derived from Hindi. The word is trasa. Roughly translated: thirst or desire.
#
The second-to-last human to die is a child who lives in the region that was once called the Blue Mountains of Australia. She has the strange light eyes that children are occasionally born with, the way they are sometimes born as triplets or with white hair or with another baby's empty body growing from their bellies. Her mother calls them water eyes, a sign that the child shares the changeable spirit of the ocean which can shift from calm to storm in the space of a breath.
On the last day of her life, the light-eyed child finds a pair of ancient skeletons exposed in the silt by the river near her camp. She pulls out the ribs with a sucking noise, loosing the foul stench of trapped gas. Pelvic bones lie in the mud below, tangled with metal things no one can make anymore. As she teases them free, the light-eyed child unearths rusted chains and hollow disks the diameter of her wrist.
The light-eyed child rinses the bones clean in the river. She runs her hand over the long femurs, marveling. People no longer grow so tall.
The light-eyed child sets the bones in a loose pile underneath a scribbly gum tree. The skulls preside on top, regarding her with hollow eyes. The light-eyed child kisses each in the center of its caved-in forehead.
Goodnight, Grandpa Burn, she says. Goodnight, Grandma Starve.
#
The last major art movement is invented near Lake Vättern in Sweden. With the help of enough processing power to calculate the trajectories of a beachful of sand over a millennium, the artist taps a feeder loop directly into her brain and uses it to shape a three-dimensional holographic image of her father. For the first time, human thought patterns take direct, physical form. Her father's projection repeats sequences of fragmented memories. His limbs trail into images of people and places he loved when he was alive; his hair winds into the tapestries he was famous for weaving; his face flickers cyclically from youth to gray. It's not my father, the artist explains. It's how I think of my father, his imago.
Within five years, her invention revolutionizes art. Artists show the world how they conceive of childbirth, fire, finches, walk bodies, urtists, religion, synthesis and death.
Within twenty years, the technology to create such work is destroyed. Art falls backward. Humanity falls farther.
#
The man who will survive to be the last human lives in the region once called Nepal. Amid the still-falling ash from a series of volcanic eruptions, he and his son dig their way free of a cave-in.
Ravens perched on branches overhanging the cave mouth observe their progress. When the son grows weak, the last man tries to scatter the birds by throwing stones. They flap a short distance into the naked trees and witness the boy's death from there, watching events unfold the way birds do: turning their heads to look first with one eye, then the other, to see which version of life is more appealing.
#
The last scientific discovery excites the neurons of an amateur stargazer. Even before the cataclysm, she is the last of an increasingly rarefied breed - air and light pollution have made ground telescopes useless, so she has to pay for satellite time to peer out in an era when almost all of humanity's technological eyes are aimed inward. One lonely night when all her mates and children are away, she trains her screen to watch the cloud bands on Jupiter's gaseous surface and glimpses a city-sized object hurtling toward the earth.
Oh, God, she says, an asteroid.
#
With near-earth space increasingly militarized, it's been years since government telescopes have been dedicated to anything but scrutinizing the actions of other nations. The scant handful of under-funded astronomers confirms that the object's path will bring it into contact with earth.
The astronomers agree: there's nothing to be done. A century of attrition has withered space programs. Early iterations of space-faring technology were cannibalized to fund defense and weapons aimed at earthly targets. Remaining resources are primitive and useless. The object is too close to fire missiles at or deflect or drag into the gravity well of the sun.
#
Wealthy global governments convene. If they can't stop the asteroid, they agree to let it hit. Calculations demonstrate it will impact near the southern tip of Chile. Industrialists working on technology for deep-sea exploration believe they can adapt their pressure shield mechanisms to protect a few major cities from the global fires, earthquakes and tidal waves that will result from impact. With nuclear, wind, and solar power operating at full capacity, there should be enough energy to protect key sections of Asia, Europe and North America. First world populations that live outside protected urban centers are herded in en masse, crowding like cattle into emergency shelters.
As for those who won't be included in the rescue plan, global leaders mumble about regrettable losses then do what they have always done: sacrifice the good of the many for the good of themselves.
#
The last act of malice lights in the eyes of a pathologist who works in a secure facility in a dome on an island in an untraveled sea. When it becomes clear their government has abandoned them, the other scientists drink and screw on the lab tables. He unlocks his deadliest specimens, flees the building to the rhythm of unheeded alarms, and looses genetically manipulated spores like fairy dust onto the wind.
#
The last heroes desert their homes in wealthy nations and travel south to stand with their impoverished brothers and sisters.
Like everyone else, they die.
#
By the time the cataclysm strikes, more words have been forgotten over the course of human history than remain known.
#
The city-sized object hits.
#
Wealthy northerners watch the event through cameras on surviving satellites. Milliseconds after impact, their screens go black as the asteroid's collision displaces earth and rock in a hundred mile radius. Radioactive waste illegally buried in poverty-stricken Puerto Natales flies into the air, joining the plume of dirt that whirls into the chaotic weather systems caused by impact. Soil sewn with radioactive dust distributes across the globe in a storm that blocks the sun for three months.
Human folly has made a bad natural occurrence into an untenable one. It is as if the planet has gone to global nuclear war. Toxic heavy metals rain into the surface water systems and poison the springs of civilization.
Pressure shields are helpless against nuclear fallout. For those not killed by the fiery rains of impact, dying lingers. Bones weaken; teeth fall out; skin loosens in long, slender strips like fruit peels.
Before she dies, the Swedish artist tries to redraw her father's imago on a flat sheet of pulped tree. Her shaking hand is raw and bleeding, but her lines fall true. The drawing fails anyway. She can't remember what her father looked like. She can only remember her art.
#
The last man's people survive by moving underground. Caves shelter them from fiery rains and pathogens and tidal waves. Underground, they have access to subterranean water sources that remain temporarily pure.
His people's luck lasts a century, until the geological instabilities set in motion by impact bubble up from the earth's molten heart. Sudden, violent tremors herald chains of volcanic eruptions that transform the caves into tombs.
The last man and his son dig their way free, but it takes so long that the already weak child grows weaker. He breathes dust and ash. Once, as they work to pry loose a stubborn boulder, a rain of debris showers down on the son. He seems fine when he gets up and shakes himself off, but who knows what injuries can afflict a malnourished boy?
#
The light-eyed child's people believe they escaped the fiery rains because the earth protects them. Unlike the mining-scarred, ecologically damaged area of Nepal where the last man's people live, the light-eyed child's people enjoy a paradise of native species and pristine cliffs. Even some kangaroos survive to provide the light-eyed child's people with food.
The light-eyed child's grandmother tells her the bones she finds sometimes are not the bones of people, but of devils. They made the cataclysm happen by hating and ignoring the earth, she says, Most of them died, but the ones who survived - Grandpa Burn and Grandma Starve, Grandpa Hate and Grandma Bullet - they chained us and hurt us and tried to take our land. We had to use their tools on them instead.
The light-eyed child's people initially triumphed over their enemies, but their luck ran out some four score years after the cataclysm. A species of bird which hadn't been seen since impact arrived during the annual migration, carrying the pathologist's bequest.
One illness killed the elderly. A second attacked the healthiest. A third killed one tenth of the population in a single night. The fourth wiped out the men.
No one tells the light-eyed child directly, but she hears talk of the plagues as our curse, sometimes brought by the earth spirits, sometimes by the ghosts of the demons. The light-eyed child asks her mother, who pauses while gathering roots to explain, Being favored by the spirits is both a blessing and a burden. They won't forgive us for acting in ignorance as the demons did. They haven't yet decided the punishment for our transgressions.
The light-eyed child's mother gets a strange, wistful look on her face and goes on. You're our last hope.
The light-eyed child's people have a legend that girls with water eyes can sometimes turn into boys. They need her to do so; that is what they mean when they say she is their last hope.
No one knows how to make it happen. Send the girl out on her own, her grandmother says, Boys like to be on their own. So every morning, the light-eyed child's mother sends her off to explore the remnants of the rainforest.
The light-eyed child thinks being a last hope is both a blessing and a burden. She enjoys being special. She hates the disappointment in everyone's eyes when she comes home every day, still a girl.
Sometimes she squats over the river, her eyes squeezed shut as if she's trying to shit because it's the best way she can imagine to force a penis out of her vagina. She clenches and grunts, clenches and grunts. Sometimes when her eyes get so tired she sees bright sparkles over the scribbly gums on the horizon, she feels her vaginal walls pinch together and she knows - just knows - that something has come out. But when she reaches down, she finds only soft, yielding flesh.
#
The last man cries over his son until he realizes his sobs are tearless. He stops.
The ravens won't leave them alone, so he throws more stones. He must watch the birds constantly or they try to pluck out his son's eyes.
His trousers are soiled, but he urinates at a marked spot near the cave mouth to maintain a semblance of civilization. He has nothing to defecate. When he gets too hungry, he sucks on stones.
In all the deprivation the last man has suffered in his life, he's never lacked for water. Even now as he starves, puddles pock the stony landscape. They taste brackish, but they keep him alive longer than he wants.
He gives up sleep, but dreams awake. He sees mirages on the horizon, machines his father told tales of: great silver birds with hearts like ticking clocks; blood-heated covers to keep him warm; android doctors with needle-covered palms injecting life back into his bony chest.
He remembers the first time he came to the surface as a boy, with his own father. His people's men folk had a tradition of sending males to the surface to prove they had the courage to tread across the lip of a dead world. All around the valley grew the red-stemmed ban mara daisies which choked out the trees until the hills blanched white as the clouds.
When I was young, they said the flowers showed the hills were dying, the last man's father said. They came from a far-away land over the sea and when they got here, they grew so thick and fierce that they killed all the plants that had been here already, the ones that had lived here forever.
Once, the last man and his father explored the mountains beyond the hills and found the remains of a fabric shop. Bolts of durable synthetic cloth tumbled across each other, like the discarded sheets of a giant. The last man and his father brought them home for the women to make clothes out of. They were greeted like heroes.
Before the eruptions, the last man never brought his son to the surface. He was a sickly baby, like all the newborns conceived in the past few years. Many of them died, but the last man prayed over his son every minute until he was a year old. His son's hair grew in scraggly patches across his scalp. When he ate, his gums bled into his food. Even after the boy had passed the most dangerous point, the last man refused to let him sleep alone, afraid he'd get lost in his dreams and forget to come home. The last man's wife told him she would leave him for another man if he didn't return to share her pallet. He let her.
The setting sun reflects pink off the upturned petals cloaking the hills. The last man regrets not taking his son up here before, sickly or not. He thinks his son would have liked to explore these hills, feel his bony feet slip in the mud. He would have run through the ruins and hollered at the vast, free sky. At least, he would have liked a length of the gray cloth the last man and his father found so many years ago: sewn with golden strands for the sun and red strands like the stems of the ban mara daisies.
#
Literacy fades years before the last man dies. The older generation of his people remember how to read, but they don't teach the young ones. Reading seems frivolous, indulgent, a luxury like brocade or peacock feathers or reminiscing about long summer evenings when men chewed betel nuts and women chattered while the lowering sun lengthened their shadows until an ordinary human presence had the heft of a god's.
#
Two generations before the light-eyed child was born, her grandmother would have screamed at Grandpa Burn and kicked his skull downstream. Her mother would have cried over Grandma Starve's aged bones, cursing the fact she would never live to acquire a stoop.
The light-eyed child places her hands over their hollow sockets and returns to playing.
#
The last lie is not a single lie but a group of lies, uttered by the last man's people and the light-eyed child's people, by children and elders, by men and women, by the stoic and the redeyed.
Don't worry, Mama, Grandpa, sir, honey, lover, child, heart-keeper, mine. You're going to get better. You're going to be all right.
#
The last man leaves his son awhile and climbs a formation of rocks on the other side of the cave mouth. The tallest one leans on a pair of others like an old man asking for support. Below, a thousand foot drop sinks into a ravine blanketed in daisies.
The last man selects a small gray stone and pitches it down. As it plummets, he tries to fit the idea of such distance into his head: how things so high can fall so far.
Before it hits, he's distracted by a rush of wind as a raven flies past him. He waves it away. It dives past the cave, headed for his son. The last man climbs down to chase it off and misses the moment when the rock hits the ground.
By the time the last man reaches his son, the boy's left eye is gone. The thread of his intestines trails across the stony ground.
He remembers sitting with his son, then a five year old, coaxing him to eat yak meat and lichen. The little boy turned away, fanning his hands in front of his face.
A little more, just a little more. Come on, the last man said. It hurt the boy to chew; it hurt him to swallow; it hurt him to have food in his stomach.
A few steps away, the last man's wife stood, staring, the glint of her reddened eyes bright in the darkness. The next day she'd leave him for the fat man who lived near the cave mouth, the one with who had another wife already. She didn't need to vocalize; the words were written in the taut line of her mouth: Why squander time on the dying when we'll reach death's door soon enough ourselves?
Truthfully, the last man had heard the ravens fly toward his son as soon as he climbed the rocks. He'd known what the birds would do. But it wasn't until he threw the stone that his mind had the sense to distract him from trying to confront mortality while the wind of falling rushed around his own ears, too.
#
The last man is tone deaf and the light-eyed child doesn't like to sing because it reminds her that her voice is piping and high when it should be resonant and bass, so the last music mankind makes is subtle and strange. It's the last man grunting in answer to the raven's sporadic caws; it's the light-eyed child splashing in the river to the beat of her heart; it's the last man's fingers drumming on his son's hollow belly.
#
The light-eyed child's people don't live long enough to suffer from their lack of men. The third wave disease, the one that killed a tenth of them in a night, reawakens in its surviving hosts after its long period of incubation and strangles the entire population by dawn.
The dusk before, as the last man prepares to throw a stone down a cliff, the light-eyed child runs back to camp to find her mother. The sky dims. Pale stars emerge. The two of them stroll to a spring to fetch clean water with which to cook the evening meal of kangaroo meat flavored with peppermint leaves.
#
The last word the light-eyed child's mother says before she starts to choke is whakahohoro: hurry.
#
The last man becomes grateful for things he should despise: the red-tinted sky, the stench of his son's decaying corpse, the coldness of his soiled trousers. His last hour stretches, but not in the way a bored afternoon expands across a child's landscape. His last hour is the petal of an orchid browning from the outside in. It's a cloud blowing across the sky puff by puff, until without ever moving as a single entity, it soars away into the blue expanse. It's a grain of sand, unnoticed until held up close - whoever would have known it was crimson? And smelled like salt? And shaped like a crescent moon?
#
The last piece of technology mankind invents is a bundle of lyrebird feathers and wallaby bones and blue lizard tongues wrapped in sugar glider fur which the light-eyed child's people believe a woman can use to draw sickness out of a loved one. It possesses no magic, but it serves a purpose: it busies hands and buoys hearts.
#
The light-eyed child lives a few hours longer than the rest of her people. She clutches her mother's hand through her breathless contortions, and when they're over, she cradles her mother's blue, arthritic fingers.
As she runs out of breath herself, she wonders if her skeleton will wear jewelry with spokes and chains like Grandpa Burn and Grandma Starve. She wonders who will dig up her bones.
#
The puddles of rainwater could sustain the last man a few days yet, but he stops drinking. He watches the ravens' reflections in the dirty water and repeats, "Trasa, trasa." Though his mouth is dry, it isn't thirst he's referring to.
#
Though the last man and the light-eyed child live on opposite sides of the globe, they die within hours of each other. It is one of those improbable vagaries of fate which become probable given enough time and opportunity, like calculus stirring simultaneously in the brains of Newton and Leibnitz, evolution in Darwin and Wallace, relativity in Einstein and Smoluchowski. The last two humans are simply the final pair to march hand in hand into an unexplored realm.
#
The last animal to see a living human is a raven. She watches the last man's final exhalation and waits a moment to be sure he won't rise and hurl another stone in her direction. His body sags. She paces her perch. All remains still.
She swoops.
Fiction: Make a Joyful Noise by Charles de Lint
Part I
Every one thinks we're sisters, but it's not as simple as that. If I let my thoughts drift far enough back into the long ago--the long long ago, before Raven stirred that old pot of his and poured out the stew of the world--we were there. The two of us. Separate, but so much the same that I suppose we could have been sisters. But neither of us remember parents, and don't you need them to be siblings? So what exactly our relationship is, I don't know. We've never known. We just are. Two little mysteries that remain unchanged while the world changes all around us.
But that doesn't stop everyone from thinking they know us. In the Kickaha tradition we're the tricksters of their crow story cycles, but we're not really tricksters. We don't play tricks. Unless our trick is to look like we'd play tricks, and then we don't.
Before the Kickaha, the cousins had stories about us, too, though they were only gossip. Cousins don't buy into mythic archetypes because we all know how easy it is to have one attached to your name. Just ask Raven. Or Cody.
But gossip, stories, anecdotes...everybody seems to have something to pass on when it comes to us.
These days it's people like Christy Riddell that tell the stories. He puts us in his books--the way his mentor Professor Dapple used to do, except Christy's books are actually popular. I suppose we don't mind so much. It's kind of fun to be in a story that anyone can read. But if we have to have a Riddell brother in our lives, we'd much prefer it to be Geordie. There's nothing wrong with Christy. It's just that he's always been a bit stiff. Geordie's the one who knows how to have fun and that's why we get along with him so well, because we certainly like to have fun.
But we're not only about mad gallivanting and cartwheels and sugar.
And we're not some single entity, either.
That's another thing that people get wrong. They see the two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the time they don't even recognize us when they meet us on our own. Apart, we're just like anybody else, except we live in trees and can change into birds. But when you put the two of us together, everything changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It's like our being near each other causes a sudden chemical imbalance in our systems and it's almost impossible to be anything but silly.
We don't particularly mind being that way, but it does make people think they know just who and what and why we are, and they're wrong. Well, they're not wrong when the two of us are together. They're just wrong for who we are when we're on our own.
And then there are the people who only see us as who they want us to be, rather than who we really are--though that happens to everybody, I suppose. We all carry around other people's expectations of who we are, and sometimes we end up growing into those expectations.
\*
It was a spring day, late in the season, so the oaks were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens blooming with colour and scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today was no exception. The sun shone in a gloriously blue sky and we were all out taking in the weather. Zia and I lounged on the roof of the coach house behind the Rookery, black-winged cousins perched in the trees all around us, and up on the roof of the Rookery, we could see Lucius's girlfriend Chlöe standing on the peak, staring off into the distance. That meant that Lucius was deep in his books again. Whenever he got lost in their pages, Chlöe came up on the roof and did her wind-vane impression. She was very good at it.
"What are you looking at?" we asked her one day.
It took her a moment to focus on us and our question.
"I'm watching a wren build a nest," she finally said.
"Where?" Zia asked, standing on her tip toes and trying to see.
"There," Chlöe said and pointed, "in that hedge on the edge of Dartmoor."
Neither of us were ever particularly good with geography, but even we knew that at least half a continent and an ocean lay between us and Dartmoor.
"Um, right," I said.
Other times she said she was watching ice melt in Greenland. Or bees swarming a new queen above a clover field somewhere in Florida. Or a tawny frogmouth sleeping in an Australian rainforest.
After awhile we stopped asking. And we certainly didn't fly over and ask her what she was looking at today. We were too busy lounging--which is harder to do on a sloped roof than you might think--until Zia suddenly sat up.
"I," she announced, "have an astonishingly good idea."
I'd just gotten my lounging position down to an absolute perfection of casualness, so I only lifted a questioning eyebrow.
"We should open a store," she said.
"Selling what?"
"That's just it. It will be a store where people bring us things and we put them in the store."
"And when it gets all filled up?"
She grinned. "Then we open another. We just keeping doing it until we have an empire of stores, all across the country."
"We don't have the money to buy anything," I said.
She nodded. "That's why they'd have to just give us the stuff. We'll be like a thrift shop, except we wouldn't sell anything we got."
"That seems greedy. What do we need with things?"
"We can give everything away once we've established our empire. It's just for fun."
"It seems more like a lot of work."
She sighed and shook her head. "You are so veryvery lazy."
"That's because today is a day especially made for being lazy."
"No, today's a day for building an empire of stores and if you won't help, I'll do it myself."
"I'll help later."
She nodded. "When all the hard work will probably be done."
"That's the risk I'll have to take."
She stuck her tongue out at me, then shifted to bird shape and a black crow went winging off above the oaks that line Stanton Street. I laid my head on the shingles again and went back to my very successful lounging.
I was so good at it that, eventually, I fell asleep.
\*
When I woke, it was dark. Chlöe was still standing on the peak of the Rookery, and the trees around me were now filled with sleeping black birds. Above, the sky held a wealth of stars, only slightly dimmed by the city's pollution. I looked for Zia. She wasn't back yet so I slid to bottom of the roof and then dropped the remaining distance to the dew-damp lawn. Cousins stirred in the trees at the soft thump of my descent on the grass, but went back to sleep when they saw it was only me.
I left the grounds of the Rookery and walked along Stanton Street, heading for downtown, where I supposed I'd find Zia. I wondered if she'd actually had any success getting her silly plan off the ground, or if she'd gotten distracted after leaving me and was now up to who knew what sort of mischief.
I could understand her getting distracted--it's such an easy thing to have happen. For instance, there were so many interesting houses and apartments on either side of the street as I continued to walk through Lower Crowsea. It was late enough that most of them were dark, but here and there I found lit windows. They were like paintings in an enormous art gallery, each offering small and incomplete views into their owner's lives.
Zia and I like to visit in people's house when they're sleeping. We slip in and walk through the empty rooms, helping ourselves to sweets or fruit, if they're the sort of people to leave them out in small welcoming bowls or baskets. There might as well be a sign that says, "Help yourself."
But we really don't take much else when we go inside. A bauble here, some unwanted trinket there. Mostly we just wander from room to room, looking, looking, looking. There are whole stories in the placement of vases and knickknacks, in what pictures and paintings have been hung, where and in what order. So we admire the stories on the walls and windowsills, the shelves and mantles. Or we sit at a desk, a dining room table, or on the sofa, leafing through a scrapbook, a school yearbook, a magazine that's important to whoever's home this is.
We're curious, yes, but not really all that snoopy, for all that it might seem the exact opposite. We're only chasing the ghosts and echoes of lives that we could never have.
So as I continued past Stanton Street, I forgot that I was looking for Zia. My gaze went up the side of the apartment building that rose tall above me and I chose a unit at random. Moments later I was inside, taking in the old lady smells: pot pourri, dust and medicine. I stood quietly for a moment, then began to explore.
\*
"Maddy?" an old woman's voice called from a room down the hall.
It was close enough to my name to make me sit up in surprise. I put down the scrapbook I'd been looking at and walked down the short hall, past the bathroom, until I was standing in the doorway of a bedroom.
"Is that you, Maddy?" the old woman in the bed asked.
She was sitting up, peering at me with eyes that obviously couldn't see much, if anything.
I didn't have to ask her who Maddy was. I'd seen the clippings from the newspaper, pasted into the scrapbook. She'd been the athletic daughter, winning prize after prize for swimming and gymnastics and music. The scrapbook was about half full. The early pages held articles clipped from community and city newspapers, illustrated with pictures of a happy child growing into a happy young woman over the years, always holding trophies, smiling at the camera.
She wasn't in the last picture. That photo was of a car, crumpled up against the side of an apartment building, under a headline that read "Drunk Driver Kills Redding High Student." The date on the clipping was over thirty years old.
"Come sit with Mama," the old lady said.
I crossed the room and sat crosslegged on the bed. When she reached out her hand, I let her take mine. I closed my fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.
"I've missed you so much," she said.
She went on, but I soon stopped listening. It was much more interesting to look at her because, even though she was sitting up and talking, her eyes open as though she was awake, I realized that she was actually still asleep.
Humans can do this.
They can talk in their sleep. They can go walking right out of their houses, sometimes. They can do all sorts of things and never remember it in the morning.
Zia and I once spent days watching a woman who was convinced she had fairies in her house, cleaning everything up after she'd gone to bed. Except she was the one who got up in her sleep and tidied and cleaned before slipping back under the covers. To show her appreciation to the fairies, she left a saucer of cream on the back steps--that the local cats certainly appreciated--along with biscuits or cookies or pieces of cake. We ate those on the nights we came by, but we didn't help her with her cleaning. That would make us bad fairies, I suppose, except for the fact that we weren't fairies at all.
After awhile the old woman holding my hand stopped talking and laid back down again. I let go of her hand and tucked it under the covers.
It was a funny room that she slept in. It was full of memories, but none of them were new, or very happy. They made the room feel musty and empty, even though she used it every day. It made me wonder why people hung on to memories if they just made them sad.
I leaned over and kissed her brow, then got off the bed.
When I came back to the living room, there was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the sofa where I'd been looking through the old lady's scrapbook earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and legs, with features that seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he grew into them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.
Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto the coffee table and sat crosslegged in front of him.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He seemed surprised that I could see him, but made a quick recovery.
"Nobody important," he said. "I'm just the other child."
"The other..."
"Oh, don't worry. You didn't miss anything. I'm the one that's not in the scrapbooks."
There didn't seem much I could add to that, so I simply said, "I don't usually talk to ghosts."
"Why not?"
I shrugged. "You're not usually substantial enough, for one thing."
"That's true. Normally, people can't even see me, never mind talk to me."
"And for another," I went on, "you're usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any fun."
He didn't argue the point.
"Well, I know why I'm here," he said, "haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing here?"
"I like visiting in other people's houses. I like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they were mine."
I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.
"So you were brother and sister?" I asked.
He nodded.
"Does she ever come back here?"
He laughed, but without any mirth. "Are you kidding? She hated this place. Why do you think she joined any school club and sports team that would have her? She'd do anything to get out of the house. Mother kept her on such a tight leash that she couldn't fart without first asking for permission."
"But you're here."
"Like I said, I died here. In my own room. I got bit by a bee that came in through the window. No one knew I was allergic. My throat swelled up and I asphyxiated before I could try to get any help."
"It sounds horrible."
"It was. They came back from one of Madeline's games and found me sprawled dead on the floor in my bedroom. It did warrant a small notice in the paper--I guess it was a slow news day--but that clipping never made it into a scrapbook."
"And now you're here..."
"Until she finally notices me," he finished for me.
"Why did she ignore you?" I asked. "When you were alive, I mean."
"I don't know. Madeline said it's because I looked too much like our dad. We were in grade school when he walked out on her, leaving her with a mess of debts and the two of us. I guess her way of getting over it was to ignore me and focus on Madeline, who took after her own side of the family."
"Humans are so complicated," I said.
"Which you're not."
"Oh, I'm very complicated."
"I meant human."
"What makes you say that?" I asked.
He kept count on his fingers. "One, you can see me, which most people can't. Two, you can talk to me, which most people really can't. Three, you're sitting there all calm and composed, when most people--most human people--would be flipping out."
I shrugged. "Does it matter what I am?"
"Not really."
He looked down the hall as though he could see through the walls to where his mother lay sleeping. The mother who'd ignored him when he was alive and now that he was dead, still ignored him. Her mind might be filled with old memories, but none of them were of him.
"Can you help me?" he asked.
"Help you with what?"
"With...you know. Getting her to remember me."
"Why is it so important?"
"How can I die and go on if no one remembers that I was ever alive?"
"Lots of people don't remember me," I said, "and it doesn't bother me."
He chuckled, but without any humour. "Yeah, like that's possible."
"No, it really doesn't."
"I meant that anybody would forget meeting you."
"You'd be surprised."
He held my gaze for a long moment, then shrugged.
"So will you help me?"
I nodded. "I can try. Maybe it's not so much that your mother should remember you more, but that she should remember your sister less. The way it is, there's no room inside her for anything else."
"But you'll try?"
Against my better judgment, I found myself nodding.
He did a slow fade and I was left alone in the living room. I sat for awhile longer, looking at the place where he'd been sitting, then got down from the coffee table and walked back into the hall. There were two closed doors and two open ones. I knew one led into the old lady's bedroom, the other into a bathroom. I went to the first closed door. It opened into a room that was like stepping inside a cake, all frosty pinks and whites, full of dolls and pennants and trophies. Madeline's room. Closing its door, I continued down the hall and opened the other one.
Both rooms had the feel of empty places where no one lived. But while Madeline's room was bright and clean--the bed neatly made, the shelves dusted, the trophies shined--the boy's room looked as though the door had been closed on the day he died and no one had opened it until I had just this moment.
The bedding lay half-on, half-off the box spring, pooling on the floor. There were posters off baseball players and World War II planes on the wall. Decades of dust covered every surface, clustering around the model cars and plastic statues of movie monsters on the book shelves and window sill. More planes hung from the ceiling, held in flight by fishing lines.
Unlike the daughter, he truly was forgotten.
I walked to the desk where a half-finished model lay covered in dust. Books were stacked on the far corner with a school notebook on top. I cleared the dust with a finger and read the handwritten name on the "Property of" line:
Donald Quinn.
I thought of bees and drunk drivers, of being remembered and forgotten. I knew enough about humans to know that you couldn't change their minds. You couldn't make them remember if they didn't want to.
Why had I said I'd help him?
Among the cousins, a promise was sacred. Now I was committed to an impossible task.
I closed the door to the boy's room and left the apartment.
The night air felt cool and fresh on my skin and the sporadic sound of traffic was welcome after the unhappy stillness of the apartment. I looked up at its dark windows, then changed my shape. Crow wings took me back to the Rookery on Stanton Street.
\*
I think Raven likes us better when we visit him on our own. The way we explode with foolishness whenever Zia and I are together wears him down--you can see the exasperation in his eyes. He's so serious, that it's fun to get him going. But I also like meeting with him one-on-one. The best thing is he never asks where Zia is. He treats us as individuals.
"Lucius," I said the next morning. "Can a person die from a bee sting?"
I'd come into his library in the Rookery to find him crouched on his knees, peering at the titles of books on a lower shelf. He looked up at my voice, then stood, moving with a dancer's grace that always surprises people who've made assumptions based on his enormous bulk. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight streaming in through the window behind him.
"What sort of a person?" he asked. "Cousin or human?"
"What's the difference?"
He shrugged. "Humans can die of pretty much anything."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, take tobacco. The smoke builds up tar in their lungs and the next thing you know, they're dead."
"Cousins smoke. Just look at Joe, or Whiskey Jack."
"It's not the same for us."
"Well, what about the Kickaha? They smoke."
He nodded. "But so long as they keep to ceremonial use, it doesn't kill them. It only hurts them when they smoke for no reason at all, rather than to respect the sacred directions."
"And bee stings?"
"If you're allergic--and humans can be allergic to pretty much anything--then, yes. It can kill them. Why do you ask?"
I shrugged. "I met a boy who died of a bee sting."
"A dead boy," Lucius said slowly, as though waiting for a punchline.
"I meant to say a ghost."
"Ah. Of course."
"He's not very happy."
Lucius nodded. "Ghosts rarely are." He paused a moment, then added, "You didn't offer to help him, did you?"
He didn't wait for my reply. I suppose he could already see it in my face.
"Oh, Maida," he said. "Humans can be hard enough to satisfy, but ghosts are almost impossible."
"I thought they just needed closure," I said.
"Closure for the living and the dead can be two very different things. Does he want revenge on the bee? Because unless it was a cousin, it would be long dead."
"No, he just wants to be remembered."
Lucius gave a slow shake of his head. "You could be bound to this promise forever."
"I know," I said.
But it was too late now.
Part II
After leaving the Rookery, I flew up into a tree--not one of the old oaks on the property, but one further down the street where I could get a little privacy as I tried to figure out what to do next. Like most corbae, I think better on a roost or in the air. I knew just trying to talk to Donald's mother wouldn't be enough. At some point, I'd still have to, but first I thought I'd try to find out more about what exactly had happened to her children.
That made me cheer up a little because I realized it would be like having a case and looking into the background of it, the way a detective would. I'd be like a private eye in one of those old movies the Aunts liked to watch, late at night when everybody else was asleep except for Zia and me. And probably Lucius.
I decided to start with the deaths and work my way back from them.
There was no point in trying to find the bee. As Lucius had said, unless it was a cousin, it would be long dead by now, and it didn't make sense that it would be a cousin. I could look into it, I supposed, but first I'd try to find the driver of the car that had truck Madeline. A bee wouldn't even be alive after thirty years, anyway. But a human might.
\*
Most people know there are two worlds, the one Raven made and the otherworld, where dreams and spirits live. But there's another world that separates the two: the between. Thin as a veil in some places, as wide as the widest sea in others. When you know the way, it's easy to slip from one to another and that's what I do when I find myself standing in front of the locked door of Michael Clark's house. It's how Zia and I always get into places.
Slip into the between, take a step, then slip right back into Raven's world. It's as though you passed right through the door, except what you really did was take another, slightly more roundabout route.
I didn't like it in Clark's house when I got there that evening. There was an air of...unpleasantness about the place. I don't mean that it smelled bad, though there was a faint smell of mustiness and old body odour in the air. It was more that this was a place where not a lot of happiness had ever lived. Because places hold onto strong emotions just the way people do. The man who doesn't forgive? The house he lives in doesn't either. The house full of happy, laughing children? You can feel its smile envelop you when you step through the door.
Clark's name had been in that last clipping in the old lady's scrapbook. When I looked it up in the telephone book, I found three listings for Michael Clark. The first two belonged to people much too young to be the man I was looking for, but this house...I knew as soon as I slipped inside that I was in the right place.
The front hall was messy with a few months' worth of flyers and old newspapers piled up against the walls, the kitchen garbage overflowing with take-out food containers and pizza boxes, the sink full of dirty mugs and other dishes. But there weren't any finished liquor bottles, or beer cases full of empties.
I found Clark sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching the TV with the sound off. Just as the rest of the place, this room also a mess. Coming into it was like stepping onto a beach where the tide had left behind a busy debris of more food containers, newspapers, magazines, dirty clothes. A solitary, long-dead plant stood withered and dry in its pot on the windowsill.
Clark looked up when I came in and didn't even seem surprised to see me. That happens almost as often as it doesn't. Zia and I can walk into someone's kitchen while they're having breakfast and all they do is take down a couple of more bowls from the cupboard and push the cereal box over to us. Or they'll simply move over a little to give us room on the sofa they're sitting on.
In Clark's case, he might have thought that I was another one of those personal demons he was obviously wrestling with on a regular basis.
I didn't bother with any small talk.
"It's not like they made it out to be," the man said when I asked him about the night his car had struck Madeline. "I didn't try to kill her. And I wasn't drunk. I'd had a few beers, but I wasn't drunk. She just stepped out from behind a van, right in front of my car. She didn't even look. It was like she wanted to die."
"I've heard people do that," I said. "It seems so odd."
"I suppose. But there are times I can understand all too well. I lost everything because of that night. My business. My family. And that girl lost her life. I took her life."
There was more of that. A lot more.
When I realized I wasn't learning anything here except how to get depressed, I left him, still talking, only to himself. I looked up at the night sky, then took wing and headed for the scene of the accident that Michael Clark kept so fresh in his mind.
Between my ghost boy's mother and Michael Clark, I was beginning to see that the dead weren't the only ones haunted by the past.
\*
The place where Madeline had died didn't look much different from any other part of the inner city. It had been so long since the accident, how could there be any sign that it had ever happened? But I thought, if her brother's ghost was still haunting the bedroom where he'd died, then perhaps she hadn't gone on yet either.
I walked along the sidewalk and down an alleyway, calling. "Hello, hello! Hello, hello!"
I did it, over and over again, until a man wrenched open one of the windows overlooking the alley. I looked up into his angry features, though with the light of the window behind him, he was more just a shadow face.
"It's three o-clock in the morning!" he yelled. "Are you going to shut up, or do I have to come down there and shut you up?"
"You'll have to come down," I called back, "because I can't stop."
"Why the hell not?"
"I need to find a dead girl. Have you seen her?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake."
His head disappeared back into the apartment and he slammed the window shut. I went back to calling for Madeline until I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, warm with success, but it was only the grumpy man from the window. He stood in the mouth of the alley, peering down its length to where I stood.
He was older than I'd thought when I'd seen him earlier--late fifties, early sixties--and though he carried more weight than he probably should, he seemed fit. If nothing else, he smelled good, which meant he at least ate well. I hate the smell of people who only eat fast food. All that grease from the deep-frying just seems to ooze out of their pores.
"What's this about a dead girl?" he asked.
I pointed to the street behind him. "She got hit by a drunk driver just out there."
"You're not answering my question."
"I just want to talk to her," I told him. "To see how she feels."
"You just said she was dead. I don't think she's feeling much of anything anymore."
"Okay. How her ghost feels."
He studied me for a long moment, then that thing happened that's always happening around Zia and me: he just took me at my word.
"I don't remember anybody dying around here," he said. "At least not recently."
"It was thirty years ago."
"Thirty years ago..."
I could see his mind turning inward, rolling back the years. He gave me a slow nod.
"I do remember now," he said. "I haven't thought about it in a long time." He turned from me and looked out at the street. "This was a good neighbourhood, and it still is, but it was different back then. We didn't know about things so much. People drank and drove because they didn't know any better. A policeman might pull you over, but then if it looked like you could drive, he'd give you a warning and tell you to be careful getting home."
He nodded and his gaze came back to me. "I remember seeing the guy that killed that poor girl. He didn't seem that drunk, but he was sure shook up bad."
"But you didn't see the accident itself?"
He shook his head. "We heard it--my Emily and me. She's gone now."
"Where did she go?"
"I mean she's dead. The cancer took her. Lung cancer. See that's another of those things. Emily never smoked, but she worked for thirty years in a diner. It was all that secondhand smoke that killed her. But we didn't know about secondhand smoke back then."
I didn't know quite what to say, so I didn't say anything. I don't think he even noticed.
"Now they're putting hormones in our food," he said, "and putting God knows what kind of animal genes into our corn and tomatoes and all. Who knows what that'll mean for us, ten, twenty years down the road?"
"Something bad?" I tried.
"Well, it won't be good," he said. "It never is." He looked down the alley behind me. "Are you going to keep yelling for this ghost to come talk to you?"
"I guess not. I don't think she's here anymore."
"Good," he said. "I may not work anymore, but I still like to get my sleep." He started to turn, then added, "Good luck with whatever it is you're trying to do."
And then he did leave and walked down the street.
I watched him step into the doorway of his apartment, listened to the door hiss shut behind him. A car went by on the street. I went back into the alley and looked around, but I didn't call out because I knew now that nobody was going to hear me. Nobody dead, anyway.
I felt useless as I started back to the mouth of the alley. This had been a stupid idea and I still had to help the dead boy, but I didn't know how, or where to begin. I felt like I didn't know anything.
"What are you doing?" someone asked.
I looked up to see Zia sitting on the metal fire escape above me.
"I'm investigating."
"Whatever for?"
I shrugged. "It's like I'm a detective."
"More like you're nosy."
I couldn't help but smile, because it was true. But it wasn't a big smile, and it didn't last long.
"That, too," I said.
"Can I help?"
I thought of how that could go, of how quickly we'd dissolve into silliness and then forget what it was we were supposed to be doing.
"I'll be veryvery useful," she said as though reading my mind. "You'll be in charge and I'll be your girl Thursday."
"I think it's Girl Friday."
"I don't think so. Today's Thursday. Tomorrow I can be Girl Friday."
I gave her another shrug. "It doesn't matter. It turns out I'm a terrible detective."
She slid down the banister and plonked herself on the bottom step.
"Tell me about it," she said.
"It started out when I went looking for you and your store, but then I got distracted..."
\*
"And now I feel like I'm forgetting what it's like to be happy," I said, finishing up. "It's like that stupid ghost boy stole all my happiness away, and now, ever since I talked to him, all I meet are unhappy people with very good reasons to be unhappy, and that makes me wonder, how could I ever have been happy? And what is being happy, anyway?"
Zia gave a glum nod. "I think it might be catching, because now I'm feeling the same way."
"You see? That's just what I mean. Why is it so easy to spread sadness and so hard to spread happiness?"
"I guess," Zia said, "because there's so much more sadness."
"Or maybe," I said, "it's that there's so much of it that nobody can do anything about."
"But we can do something about this, can't we?"
"What could we possibly do?
"Make the mother remember."
I shook my head. "Humans are very good at not remembering," I said. "It might be impossible for her to remember him now. She might not even remember him when she's dead herself and her whole life goes by in front of her eyes."
"Supposedly."
"Well, yes. If you're going to get precise, nobody knows if that's what really happens. But if it did, she probably wouldn't remember."
"And you can't just kill her to find out," Zia said.
"Of course not." I sighed. "So what am I going to do? I promised Donald I'd help him, but there's nothing I can do."
"I have an idea," Zia said, a mischievous gleam in her eye.
"This is serious--" I began, but she laid a finger across my lips.
"I know. So we're going to be serious. But we're also going to make her remember."
"How?"
Zia grinned. "That's easy."
She stood up and slapped a hand against her chest.
"I," she announced, "am going to be a ghost."
I had a bad feeling, but nevertheless, I let her lead me back to the apartment that Donald's mother was haunting as much as he was, and she wasn't even dead.
\*
Zia practiced making spooky noises the whole way back to the ghost boy's apartment, which really didn't inspire any confidence in me, but once we were outside the building, she turned serious again.
"Is she alone in the apartment?" she asked me.
"There's the ghost boy."
"I know. But is there anybody in there to look after her? You made it sound like she'd need help to take care of herself."
"I don't know," I said. "There was no one else there last night. I suppose somebody could come by during the day."
"Well, let's go see."
We flew up to the fire escape outside her kitchen window, lost our wings and feathers, and then stepped into the between. A moment later we were standing inside the kitchen. I could only sense the old woman's presence--at least she was the only presence I could sense that was alive.
"Oh, Ghost Boy," Zia called in a loud whisper. "Come out, come out, wherever you are. If you come out, I have a nice little..." She gave me a poke in the shoulder. "What do ghosts like?"
"How should I know?"
She nodded, then called out again. "I have a nice little piece of ghost cake for you, if you'll just come out now."
Donald materialized in the kitchen by walking through a wall. He pointed a finger at Zia.
"Who's she?" he asked.
Zia looked at me.
"You didn't say he was so rude," she said before turning back to Donald. "I'm right here, you know. You could ask me."
"You look like sisters."
"And yet, we're not."
He ignored her, continuing to talk to me. "Is she here to help?"
"There, he's doing it again," Zia said.
"This is Zia," I said. "And Zia, this is Donald."
"I prefer Ghost Boy," she said.
"Well, it's not my name."
"She's here to help," I said.
"Really? So far, all she's been is rude and making promises she can't keep."
Zia bristled at that. "What sort of promises can't I keep?"
He shrugged. "For starters, I'm here, but where's my cake?"
They held each other's gaze for a long moment, and it was hard to tell which one of them was more annoyed with the other. Then Zia's cheek twitched, and Donald's lips started to curve upward, and they were both laughing. Of course that set me off and soon all three of us were giggling and snickering, Zia and I with our hands over our mouths so that we wouldn't wake Ghost Boy's mother.
Donald was the first to recover, but his serious features only set us off again.
"Okay," he said. "It wasn't that funny. So why are you still laughing?"
"Because we can," Zia told him.
"Because we can-can!" I added.
Then Zia and I put our arms around each other's waist and began to prance about the kitchen like Moulin Rouge can-can dancers, kicking our legs up high in unison. It was funny until my toe caught the edge of the table, which jolted a mug full of spoons, knocking it over and sending silverware clattering all over the floor.
Zia and I stopped dead and we all three cocked our heads.
Sure enough, a querulous cry came from down the hall.
"Who's out there?" the old woman called. "Is there somebody out there?"
That was followed a moment later by the sound of her getting out of her bed and slowly shuffling down the hall towards us. Long moments later, she was in the doorway and the overhead light came on, a bright yellowy glare that sent the shadows scurrying.
Zia and I had stepped into the between, where we could see without being seen, but Donald stayed where he was, leaning against the kitchen counter, his arms folded across his chest. He was frowning when his mother came into the kitchen, the frown deepening when it became apparent that she wasn't able to see him.
We all watched as the old woman fussed about, trying to gather up the spoons that, with her poor eyesight, she couldn't really see. When she was done, there were still errant spoons--under the table, in front of the fridge--but she put the mug back on the table, gave the kitchen a last puzzled look, then switched off the overhead light and went back to her bedroom.
Zia and I stepped out of the between, back into the kitchen. Our sudden appearance startled Donald, which was kind of funny, seeing how he was the ghost and ghosts usually did the startling. But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to set us all off again--or at least it would be enough to set Zia and me off. I could feel that chemical imbalance spilling through me because she was so near--a sudden giddy need to turn sense into nonsense for the sheer fun of it--but I reminded myself why I was here. How if I didn't fulfill my promise, I'd be beholden to a ghost for the rest of my days, and if there's one thing that cousins can't abide, it's the unpaid debt, the unfulfilled promise. That's like flying with a long chain dangling from your foot.
"How did you do that?" Donald asked.
Zia gave him a puzzled look. "Do what?"
"Disappear, then just reappear out of nowhere."
"We didn't disappear," she told him. "We were just in the between."
I thought he was going to ask her to explain that, but he changed the subject to what was obviously more often on his mind than it wasn't.
"Did you see?" he asked us. "She was standing right in front of me and she didn't even notice me. Dead or alive, she's never paid any attention to me."
"Well, you are a ghost," Zia said.
I nodded. "And humans can't usually see ghosts."
"A mother should be able to see her own son," he said, "whether he's a ghost or not."
"The world is full of shoulds," Zia said, "but that doesn't make them happen."
It took him a moment to work through that. When he did, he gave a slow nod.
"Here's another should," he said. "I should never have gotten my hopes up that anyone would help me."
"We didn't say we wouldn't or that we couldn't," Zia said.
I nodded. "I made you a promise."
"And cousins don't break promises," Zia added. "It's all we have for coin and what would it be worth if our word had no value?"
"So you're cousins," he said.
He didn't mean it the way we did. He was thinking of familial ties, while for us it was just an easy way to differentiate humans from people like us whose genetic roots went back to the first days in the long ago, people who weren't bound to the one shape the way regular humans and animals are.
Instead of explaining, I just nodded.
"Show me your sister's room," Zia said.
Donald led us down the hall to Madeline's bedroom. He walked through the closed door, but I stopped to open it before Zia and I followed him inside.
"It's very girly," Zia said as she took in the all the lace and dolls and the bright frothy colours. Then she pointed to the pennants and trophies. "But sporty, too."
"Not to mention clean," Donald said. "You should see my room. Mother closed the door the day I died and it hasn't been opened since."
"I've been in there," I said.
"But Maddy's room," he went on as though I hadn't spoken. "Mother makes sure the cleaning lady sees to it every week--before she tackles any other room in the apartment."
"Why do you think that is?" Zia asked.
"Because so far as my mother was concerned, the sun and moon rose and set on my sister Maddy."
"But why did she think that?"
"I don't know."
"You told me something the last time I was here," I said. "Something about how maybe you reminded her too much of your father..."
"Who abandoned us," he finished. "That's just something Maddy thought."
Zia nodded. "Well, let's find out. Did your sister call you Donald?"
"What?"
"Your sister. What did she call you?"
"Donnie."
"Okay, good. That's all I needed."
"Hey, wait!" Donald said as she pulled back the covers and got into the bed.
Zia pretended he hadn't spoken.
"You two should hide," she said.
"But--"
"We don't want your mother to see anybody but me."
"Like she could see me."
That was true. But the mother could see me.
I didn't know what Zia was up to, but I went over to the closet and opened the door, pulling it almost closed it again so that I was standing in the dark in a press of dresses and skirts and tops with just a crack to peer through. Donald let out a long theatrical sigh, but after a moment he joined me.
"Mama, mama!" Zia cried from the bed, her voice the high and frightened sound of a young girl waking from a bad dream.
Faster than she'd come into the kitchen earlier, the mother appeared in the doorway and crossed the room to the bed. She hesitated beside it, staring down at where Zia was sitting up with her arms held out for comfort. I could see the confusion in the old woman's half-blind gaze, but all it took was for Zia to call "Mama" one more time and a mother's instinct took over. She sat on the edge of the bed, taking Zia in her arms.
"I...I was so scared, Mama," Zia said. "I dreamed I was dead."
The old woman stiffened. I saw a shiver run from her shoulders, all the way down her arms and back. Then she pressed her face into Zia's hair.
"Oh, Maddy, Maddy," she said, her voice a bare whisper. "I wish it was a dream."
Zia pulled back from her, but took hold of her hands.
"I am dead, Mama," she said. "Aren't I?"
The old woman nodded.
"But then why am I here?" Zia asked. "What keeps me here?"
"M-maybe I...I just can't let you go..."
"But you don't keep Donnie here. Why did you let him go and not me?'
"Oh, Maddy, sweetheart. Don't talk about him."
"I don't understand. Why not? He's my brother. I loved him. Didn't you love him?"
The old woman looked down at her lap.
"Mama?" Zia asked.
The old woman finally lifted her head.
"I...I think I loved him too much," she said.
The ghost boy had no physical presence, standing beside me, here in the closet, but I could feel his sudden tension as though he was flesh and blood--a prickling flood of interest and shock and pure confusion.
"I still don't understand," Zia said.
The old woman was quiet for so long I didn't think she was going to explain. But she finally looked away from Zia, across the room, her gaze seeing into the past rather than what lay in front of her.
"Donnie was a good boy," she said. "Too good for this world, I guess, because he was taken from it while he was still so young. I knew he'd grow up to make me proud--at least I thought I did. My eyesight's bad now, sweetheart, but I think I was blinder back then, because I never saw that he wouldn't get the chance to grow up at all."
Her gaze returned to Zia before Zia could speak.
"But you," the old woman said. "Oh, I could see trouble in you. You were too much like your father. Left to your own devices, I could see you turning into a little hellion. That you could be as bad as he was, if you were given half a chance. So I kept you busy--too busy to get into trouble, I thought--but I didn't do any better of a job raising you than I did him.
"You were both taken so young and I can't help but feel that the blame for that lay with me."
She fell silent, but I knew Zia wasn't going to let it go, even though we had what we needed.
The ghost boy's mother did remember him.
She had loved him.
I'd fulfilled my part of the bargain and I wanted to tell Zia to stop. I almost pushed open the closet door. I'd already lifted my hand and laid my palm against the wood paneling, but Donald stopped me before I could actually give it a push.
"I need to hear this," he said. "I...I just really do."
I let my hand fall back to my side.
"But why don't you ever talk about Donnie?" Zia asked. "Why is his room closed up and forgotten and mine's like I just stepped out for a soda?"
"When I let him die," the old woman said, after another long moment of silence, "all by himself, swelled up and choking from that bee sting..." She shook her head. "I was so ashamed. There's not a day goes by that I don't think about it...about him...but I keep it locked away inside. It's my terrible secret. Better to let the world not know that I ever had a son, than that I let him die the way he did."
"Except you didn't kill him."
"No. But I did neglect him. If I'd been here, instead of driving you to some piano class or gym meet or whatever it was that day, he'd still be alive."
"So it's my fault..."
"Oh no, honey. Don't even think such a thing. I was the one who made all the wrong choices. I was the one who thought he didn't need attention, but that you did. Except I was wrong about that, too. Look what happened to Donnie. And look how you turned out before...before..."
"I died."
She nodded. "You were a good girl. You were the best daughter a mother could have had. I was so proud of you, of all you'd achieved."
"And my room..."
"I keep it and your memory alive because it's the only thing left in this world that can give me any pride. It's the light that burns into the darkness and lets me forget my shame. Not always. Not for long. But even the few moments I can steal free of my shame are a blessed respite."
She fell silent again, head bowed, unable to look at what she thought was the ghost of her daughter.
Zia turned and glanced at where I was peering at her from the crack I'd made with the closet door. I knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. It was never hard. All I had to do was imagine I was in her shoes, and consider what I would say or do or think.
I turned to Donald.
"Is there anything you want to tell your mother?" I whispered.
He gave me a slow nod.
"Then just tell Zia and she'll pass it on to your mother."
He gave me another nod, but he still didn't speak.
"Donald?" I said.
"I don't know what to say. I mean, there's a million things I could say, but none of them seem to matter anymore. She's beating herself up way more than any hurt I could have wished upon her."
I reached out a comforting hand, but of course I couldn't touch him. Still, he understood the gesture. I think he even appreciated it.
"And I don't even wish it on her anymore," he added. "But then...while I feel bad about what she's going through, at the same time, I still feel hurt for the way she ignored me."
I opened the door a little more, enough to catch Zia's eye. She inclined her head to show that she understood.
"I've talked to Donnie," Zia said. "In the, you know. The hereafter. Before he went on."
The old woman lifted her head and looked Zia in the eye.
"You...you have?"
Zia nodded. "He understands, but he really wishes you'd celebrate his life the way you do mine. It...hurts him to think that you never think of him."
"Oh, god, there's not a day goes by that I don't think of him."
"He knows that now."
Zia gaze went back to me and I made a continuing motion with my hand.
"And he wants," she went on, then caught herself. "He wanted you to know that he'll always love you. That he never held you to blame for what happened to him."
The old woman put her arms around Zia.
"Oh, my boy," she said. "My poor, poor boy."
"He wants you to be happy," Zia said. "We both do."
The woman shook her head against Zia's shoulder.
"I don't even know the meaning of the word anymore," she said.
"Will you at least try?"
The old woman sat up and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her housecoat.
"How does one even begin?" she said.
"Well, sometimes, if you pretend you're happy, you can trick yourself into at least feeling better."
"I don't think I could do that."
"Try by celebrating our lives," Zia said. "Remember both your children with love and joy. There'll always be sadness, but try to remember that it wasn't always that way."
"No," the old woman said slowly. "You're right. It wasn't. I don't know if you can even remember, but we were once a happy family. But then Ted left and I had to go back to work, and you children...you were robbed of the life you should have had."
"It happens," Zia said--a touch too matter-of-factly for the ghost of a dead girl, I thought, but the old woman didn't appear to notice.
"It's time for me to go, Mama," Zia added. "Will you let me go?"
"Can't you stay just a little longer?"
"No," Zia said. "Let me walk you back to your bed."
She got up and the two of them left the room, the old woman leaning on Zia.
"I'm going to wake up in the morning," I heard the old woman say from the hall, "and this will all have just been a dream."
"Not if you don't want it to," Zia told her. "You've got a strong will. Look how long you kept me from moving on. You can remember this--everything we've talked about--for what it really was. And if you try hard, you can be happy again..."
\*
Donald and I waited in the bedroom until Zia returned.
"Is she asleep?" I asked.
Zia nodded. "I think all of this exhausted her." She turned to Donald. "So how do you feel now?"
"I feel strange," he said. "Like there's something tugging at me...trying to pull me away."
"That's because it's time for you to move on," I told him.
"I guess."
"You're remembered now," Zia said. "That's what was holding you back before."
He gave a slow nod. "Listening to her...it didn't make me feel a whole lot better. I mean, I understand now, but..."
"Life's not very tidy," Zia said, "so I suppose there's no reason for death to be any different."
"I..."
He was harder to hear. I gave him a careful study and realized he'd grown much more insubstantial.
"It's hard to hold on," he said. "To stay here."
"Then don't," Zia told him.
I nodded. "Just let go."
"But I'm...scared."
Zia and I looked at each other.
"We were here at the beginning of things," she said, turning back to him, "before Raven pulled the world out of that old pot of his. We've been in the great beyond that lies on the other side of the long ago. It's..."
She looked at me.
"It's very peaceful there," I finished for her.
"I don't want to go to Hell," he said. "What if I go to Hell?"
His voice was very faint now and I could hardly make him out in the gloom of the room.
"You won't go to Hell," I said.
I didn't know if there was a Heaven or a Hell or what lay on the other side of living. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But there was no reason to tell him that. He wanted certainty.
"Hell's for bad people," I told him, "and you're just a poor kid who got stung by a bee."
I saw the fading remnants of his mouth moving, but I couldn't make out the words. And then he was gone.
I looked at Zia.
"I don't feel any better," I said. "Did we help him?"
"I don't know. We must have. We did what he wanted."
"I suppose."
"And he's gone on now."
She linked her arm in mine and walked me into the between.
"I had this idea for a store," she said.
"I know. Where you don't sell anything. Instead people just bring you stuff."
She nodded. "It was a pretty dumb idea."
"It wasn't that bad. I've had worse."
"I know you have."
We stepped out of the between onto the fire escape outside the apartment. I looked across the city. Dawn was still a long way off, but everywhere I could see the lights of the city, the headlights of cars moving between the tall canyons of the buildings.
"I think we need to go somewhere and make a big happy noise," Zia said. "We have to go mad and dance and sing and do cartwheels along the telephone wires like we're famous trapeze artists."
"Because..?"
"Because it's better than feeling sad."
So we did.
And later we returned to the Rookery and woke up all the cousins until every blackbird in every tree was part of our loud croaking and raspy chorus. I saw Lucius open the window of his library and look out. When he saw Zia and I, leading the cacophony from our high perch in one of the old oak trees in the backyard, he just shook his head and closed the window again.
But not before I saw him smile to himself.
\*
I went back to the old woman's apartment a few weeks later to see if the ghost boy was really gone. I meant to go sooner, but something distracting always seemed to come up before I could actually get going.
Zia might tell me about a hoard of Mardi Gras beads she'd found in a dumpster and then off we'd have to go to collect them all, bringing them back to the Rookery where we festooned the trees with them until Lucius finally asked us to take them down, his voice polite, but firm, the way it always got when he felt we'd gone the step too far.
Or Chlöe might call us into the house because she'd made us each a sugar pie, big fat pies with much more filling than crust, because we liked the filling the best. We didn't even need the crust, except then it would just be pudding, which we also liked, but it wasn't pie, now was it?
Once we had to go into the far away to help our friend Jilly, because we promised we would if she ever called us. So when she did, we went to her. That promise had never been like a chain dangling from our feet when we flew, but it still felt good to be done with it.
But finally I remembered the ghost boy and managed to not get distracted before I could make my way to his mother's apartment. When I got there, they were both gone, the old woman and her dead son. Instead, there was a young man I didn't recognize sitting in the kitchen when I stepped out of the between. He was in the middle of spooning ice cream into a bowl.
"Do you want some?" he asked.
He was one of those people who didn't seem the least bit surprised to find me appearing out of thin air in the middle of his kitchen. Tomorrow morning, he probably wouldn't even remember I'd been here.
"What flavour is it?" I asked.
"Chocolate swirl with bits of Oreo cookies mixed in."
"I'd love some," I told him and got myself a bowl from the cupboard.
He filled my bowl with a generous helping and we both spent a few moments enjoying the ice cream. I looked down the hall as I ate and saw all the cardboard boxes. My gaze went back to the young man's face.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"Nels."
He didn't ask me my name, but I didn't mind.
"This is a good invention," I said holding up a spoonful of ice cream. "Chocolate and ice cream and cookies all mixed up in the same package."
"It's not new. They've had it for ages."
"But it's still good."
"Mmm."
"So what happened to the old woman who lived here?" I asked.
"I didn't know her," he told me. "The realtor brought me by a couple of days ago and I liked the place, so I rented it. I'm pretty sure he said she'd passed away."
So much for her being happy. But maybe there was something else on the other side of living. Maybe she and her ghost boy and her daughter were all together again and she was happy.
It was a better ending to the story than others I could imagine.
"So," I asked Nels, "are you happy?"
He paused with a spoonful of ice cream half way to his mouth. "What?"
"Do you have any ghosts?"
"Everybody's got ghosts."
"Really?"
He nodded. "I suppose one of the measures of how you live your life is how well you make your peace with them."
My bowl was empty, but I didn't fill it up again. I stood up from the table.
"Do you want some help unpacking?" I asked.
"Nah. I'm good. Are you off?'
"You know me," I said, although of course he didn't. "Places to go, people to meet. Things to do."
He smiled. "Well, don't be a stranger. Or at least not any stranger than you already are."
I laughed.
"You're a funny man, Nels," I said.
And then I stepped away into the between. I stood there for a few moments, watching him.
He got up from the table, returned the ice cream to the freezer and washed out the bowls and utensils we'd used. When he was done, he walked into the hall and picked up a box which he took into the living room, out of my sight.
I could tell that he'd already forgotten me.
"Goodbye, Nels," I said, though he couldn't hear me. "Goodbye, Ghost Boy. Goodbye, old lady." I knew they couldn't hear me, either.
Then I stepped from the between, out onto the fire escape. I unfolded black wings and flew back to the Rookery, singing loudly all the way.
At least I thought of it as singing.
As I got near Stanton Street, a man waiting for his dog to relieve itself looked up to see me go by.
"Goddamned crows," he said.
He took a plastic bag out of his pocket and deftly bagged his dog's poop.
I sang louder, a laughing arpeggio of croaking notes.
Being happy was better than not, I decided. And it was certainly better than scooping up dog poop. If I was ever to write a story the way that Christy did, it would be very short. And I'd only have the one story because after it, I wouldn't need any more.
It would go like this:
Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after. The end.
That's a much better sort of story than the messy ones that make up our lives. At least that's what I think.
But I wouldn't want to live in that story, because that would be too boring. I'd rather be caught up in the clutter of living, flying high above the streets and houses, making a joyful noise.
Fiction: Stone Shoes by C.S.E. Cooney
Jack Yap was his Marm's good boy, maple-syrup mouth, toffee-tongue, such sweetness, wasn't he? His Marm's pride was Jack Yap, so Marm told her neighbors--so she told him every day.
"Jackie, love," she said into his muteness, "such a laddie, such a cuddlewump! Always smiling, aren't you? Always helping your poor old Marm around the house."
Jack Yap's duties, which he did each day with seeming cheerfulness, were to bake the bread in the morning, bring his Marm her tea, unchain his brother Pudding from his bed and then take him to the outhouse.
Once Pudding did his sprinkle-and-splat, Jack Yap would guide him back to the hen yard in front of their cottage, where their Marm waited, and together, they would help Pudding on with his stone shoes.
This always took some doing.
"Them's your special boots, Pudding dear," said Marm when Pudding balked. Pudding always balked. He didn't like the stone shoes. He sweated when he saw them, and made squeaking noises. "See how special? Made of crystal they are, diamond boots. Real seven-leaguers, like them giants of old!"
Now, Jack Yap knew, and so did Pudding, those boots were not diamond, or crystal, but hard gray granite, boots hewn of boulders by Marm's mason friend from down the road. Still, Jack Yap kept his mouth shut, kept his teeth closed tight. Many years ago, he used to talk like lightning, like hummingbirds darting, like hares hopping, earning him his second name "Yap." He even used to talk back to Marm--especially where Pudding and the stone shoes were concerned--until she sewed his mouth shut one morning with goat gut and a darning needle, and left the stitches in for three whole days, and ever since then, Jack Yap didn't talk much around Marm.
So Jack Yap helped his brother Pudding into his stone shoes, smiling encouragement when Pudding made a pout, whispering words like, "Think of giants, Pudding Man! Now you get to be a giant!"
Marm called her eldest son Pudding, "on account his head was soft," and it suited him, with his flat, blank face, blob of nose, tulip lips and eyes as round and red-brown as pennies. He was only fifteen and already balding, but what he lacked in wispy blond curls, he made up for in height. Pudding was taller than the lintels of the cottage, and still growing. He was wide, too--not fat, merely the solidity of one who has spent his boyhood wearing shoes of stone.
They were, his Marm always said, for his own protection. He was such a lummox he couldn't be trusted to leave the yard. Them stone shoes'd keep a hippo put.
Unlike Pudding, Jack Yap was as tall at twelve as he had been at nine (which wasn't very), had plenty of hair, fox-fur colored, thatched like the roof over their loft and almost as full of vermin. His eyes were sharp and narrow and very long--and glinted more red than brown. Because of the scars on his mouth, he always seemed to be smiling.
He smiled that morning when Marm told him, "Jackie, pet, my wee wooly rufus, your old Marm has errands to run today. So you keep to the hen yard and watch your brother close so he don't step on the eggs. Ta, now! Ta, Pudding, my little spongy brains!"
And with that, she kissed Jack Yap first on one smiling cheek then the other, and patted one of Pudding's long-muscled thighs. Like her second son, she was small, and couldn't reach Pudding's head, or even his shoulder. After making the requisite half-hearted croonings, Marm set off to see her friend the mason, whose company she preferred infinitely to that of her sons.
Soon as she was gone, Jack Yap turned to his brother.
"Come on, Puds. Let's go creature-killing."
Pudding grinned. He had never lost his baby teeth; so there they were, like tiny seed pearls in his vast, wet, pink flower mouth.
Grabbing up a walking stick, Jack Yap planted the butte and vaulted, hurling himself through the air to the top of the chicken coop. Within the fragile wire cage, the fowl trembled and clucked. Jack Yap stood tall with ease and grace, and from the coop climbed atop his brother's shoulders, settling there.
"Now," said Jack Yap, firm of voice, "who's the strong one, Puds?"
Pudding craned his neck and grinned and made a damp murr sound.
"Who's the brave one, Puds?
Murrrrrr.
"Who walks like an earthquake, even wearing his stony stone shoes?"
MURRRRR!
"Yeah!" cried Jack Yap, lifting his stick and pointing to the hills beyond their cottage, their vegetable garden, their outhouse and their chicken coop. "Yeah, King Pudding, walk on! Two feet of stone and a heart of oak! There's creatures in the hills need killing, howlers and skinchangers, and you and me is the boys to do it, says I!"
Murrrring and chuckling, Pudding lifted his massive right leg, encased in its boot-shaped boulder, all the muscles in his body straining, rippling, but moving, moving, first one foot then the other, as he set out, with his brother on his shoulders, for the hills where the creatures were hiding.
And the great egg hunt was on...
#
Now, the hills were stiff with woods, and the woods were grisly-bear brown as the hair on a witch's left breast. But there were bald spots, too, where the white skull of the hills showed through. In these places of stone, the same gray granite as Pudding's boots, where the village mason made his quarries, in these places the hill creatures laid their eggs.
Jack Yap liked eggs.
He didn't like them to eat. No, sir. Ever since he was his Marm's little pink-cheeks, her wee swaddle-me-down, he refused to eat eggs, poached or scrambled, soft or hard. Nor yolks nor whites did he allow to pass his mouth, even after his mouth had been sewn shut and opened again after no food or drink three days later, and eggs were what his Marm offered.
"Them's good for you, Jackie-lad," she said. "All good things come from eggs."
But Jack Yap merely bared his teeth at her, rawly through his wounds, and she took his look for a smile.
"Never mind, nettle-rump," she told him. "Have a gruel then. Plenty of sawdust in that sack over there. Boil it yourself. Tonight your Marm's making eggs or nothing."
So Jack Yap, practically transparent with starvation, bleeding at the mouth, made his own gruel and drank it down.
No, he did not like eggs to eat, did Jack Yap. But oh! The feel of them, smooth and warm and brown, or cool and white as porcelain. How the quail laid them mottled and the robin laid them blue. The pure, bright owl egg. The egg of cormorant so coral-rough against the skin. And how the eggs of heron and egret were like the children of the moon.
And didn't Jack Yap love to hold them, carefully, his naked palm a cradle, and him barely breathing? Didn't he love, slowly, so deliberately, to squeeze his thin, strong fingers, 'til they cut like wires through the shell and shattered it? Or--if the eggs were too large, dark as lapis, green as jade, he would shake them like a baby shakes his rattle, like a shaman shakes his bag of bones, then dash them to the ground.
This always made Pudding laugh and laugh.
"You like that Pudding?" asked Jack Yap.
"Murr!" said Pudding, nodding his great, wispy head. The vigor of the gesture almost sent Jack Yap flying off his brother's shoulders.
"Let's sing the egg song!" said Jack Yap.
And Pudding laughed, his tiny pearl teeth glinting. What he did then passed for singing in his own head, but was really more of a forlorn baying that echoed hill to hill and sent small things scurrying for burrow and nest.
"That's the way to do it, Puds," said Jack Yap absently. His long eyes scanned for the glimmer and glitter of eggs. Best of all the eggs in the hills, Jack Yap loved to hunt and break the skinchangers' eggs.
These eggs were rare. Jack Yap had found three of them in as many years. In that time, he'd broken two hundred bird eggs and trampled countless nests of tortoise and crocodile. He'd set fire to a dozen threads of faerie egg, which were like glass beads strung on spider webs. Each tiny egg was a different hue; each chimed like a silver bell. Thirteen dragon eggs he'd soaked in acid, until they were brittle and discolored and gave off the odor of six days dead. Forty banshee eggs he'd pierced with a steel pin and drained, leaving the shells--black as the mouth of midnight--empty.
In those hills, even the creatures that seemed to be mammals would lay eggs. A unicorn, for example, is not a lion, goat, white mare or rhinoceros; it is a magical thing, and the egg it lays is golden and furred in spines.
But of all these eggs, Jack Yap yearned for the skinchanger's egg. And when he found one that day with Pudding, he rejoiced.
"There it is, Puds," he whispered. "Oh, isn't it a beaut? Put me down."
The egg, nestled between two boulders, was unnaturally large, even for its type. Perhaps the others he had rooted out had been young eggs, still expanding. This one required both his slender hands to hold it. He gazed deeply into the shell, and it was like peering into a mirror, then a pool of clear water, then a faceted crystal. At the heart of the crystal was a shadow, a flame. Then the flame was gone, whisked out. Perhaps it never had been. Perhaps Jack Yap was imagining things again; his Marm always called him a chaff-for-brains dreamer. Now the shell was opaque as pearl, now iridescent as opal and giving off a heat like an open forge. It began sweating beads of perfumed oil: jasmine, honeysuckle, lavender, rose, citrus. Jack Yap sniffed and sniffed, and never could sniff the same smell twice.
"See it glimmering?" Jack Yap asked his brother. Pudding, who didn't care for eggs unless they were dripping down his boots, stared up at the sky. The expression on his face was unreadable, perhaps vacant. Pudding could look at the sun for hours and not blink. He cast a shadow as long as an oak tree. Jack Yap stepped into the Pudding-cut shade, and the egg in his hands blazed.
And he saw inside.
He saw inside the skinchanger's egg.
A shadow, a flame, a dark heart beating.
It shifted, it melted, it took a new shape.
A fish, a snake, a bird, a child.
A child. A human child. A girl child, sleeping in a pool of her own black hair, her skin of bright red gold. She blinked sleepily and seemed, to Jack Yap, to see right into him. One eye of ebony, one of fire. Black lips sucking on a flaming thumb, round limbs bundled to her belly, although a restless fist or foot sometimes jabbed out, distending the oval egg, making it jump and pulse.
Like holding a thunderstorm, thought Jack Yap. Like holding lightning before it is born.
And inside him, all his urge to shake the egg had died. If he knew how, he would have wept right then. He might have learned to cry at last, at that very moment, in those very hills, might have opened up and bawled like the lonesomest hound all for the beauty of that little changeling asleep in her egg. So he might have done--if, that is, the egg's skinchanger mother hadn't come along right then, stalking on tiger's legs, with the tail of a scorpion, the head of a buffalo, and the eyes of a madwoman.
The skinchanger saw Jack Yap. She saw her egg. She threw back her head and yowled. Tiger, buffalo, madwoman all went into that yowl, and if Jack Yap had been a different sort of boy, he would have dropped the egg and set off running.
But Jack Yap, being his mother's son, merely tucked the egg under his arm and stepped back, beside his brother Pudding.
"Stomp," he said. "Stomp it dead."
And Pudding did.
#
Later, as Pudding was rinsing the blood off his stone shoes in the stream, Jack Yap sighed.
"What's she need, you think?" he asked. "I mean, she wasn't in a nest or anything, just sitting out there between boulders. Does she need cold then? Fresh air? Rock? At home, we'll keep her in one of your boots, Puds. That should do it. And then when she hatches, what'll we feed her? Skinchangers're nasty devils." He caressed the egg, fond and proud. The scars on his mouth pulled lividly at his smile. "Blood-drinkers, soul-suckers, eaters of road-kill and seducers of men: that's how she'll grow, the pretty wee lady. Ain't enough folk around these parts to slake her. Have to take her to the city, won't we? And what'll Marm say, I wonder?" Jack Yap snickered to himself. "'Course, we could always feed her Marm first."
For the first time since Jack Yap had started babbling, Pudding glanced up from his streambed and grinned. It could have been the sunset that night, but his tiny teeth looked a little red, like he'd been chewing on soft strawberries. Jack Yap clucked, in close mockery of horror.
"Puds, you great stomach! You didn't?"
Pudding murred.
"That skinchanger you stomped probably had the walking rabies. And you went and et her raw, didn't you? I swear, Puds, do I have to watch you every minute?"
Pudding licked his lips. Jack Yap's shoulders, sharp as garden shears, shook with silent laughter. Jack Yap never laughed out loud.
"Still hungry, eh?" he asked. "Well, no wonders there. That skinchanger was naught but bones and a few scraps of magic. I've a bear trap in my own belly, truth be told. Look at the sky! We orter be gettin' home-side anyway. Eggs for you and gruel for me, King Pudding. Ah, 'tis the high life we lead."
Nevertheless, he tucked the egg amiably enough under his shirt (the bulge of it making him look either a very pregnant boy or one with an advanced tumor), turned his long nose for home, and taking his brother by the huge, soft hand, led him out of the hills again. The ground trembled where they walked.
#
Marm was ever so, ever so pleased to see them.
She was standing in the doorway. She had a birch switch in one hand and a rusty old chain slung over one shoulder. She had her fists on her hips and her hair in a knot, where it blazed like ragged sugar maples in October. She was smiling.
"Knew I'd catch you out this day or that," she said, "if I left you to your wiles. Oh, Jackie lad." She raised her switch. Jack Yap turned his back, hunching to protect the egg. "Waltz into the hills, do you?" THWACK! "Encourage your poor brother!" THWACK! "Abandon my poor chickens!" THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! "And for what, Jackie? To defy me? Why must you defy me? I do well enough by you. I keep you in leggings and gruel!"
It was just cold enough, and Jack Yap just thin enough, that the skin of his back broke easily under her onslaught and began to bleed through his shirt. He tucked his chin and gritted his teeth, even as his ravaged mouth curled into its customary smile. Pudding, uneasy, sank to a crouch and started mewling. Jack Yap unscrewed his scowl for a half second to give him a little wink.
"Easy, Puds!" he gasped. "Just a tickle."
Marm stopped switching him.
"Get your brother out of those shoes," she said, her voice so brittle it was like to snap. "Much good they do him now. Then go to bed. No supper for you, my naughty lads! I ought instead to feed your eyes to my chickens!"
She flounced her fancy skirts (fancier by far, anyway, than a lady with a dilapidated cottage, two growing sons, a chicken coop, an outhouse and a vegetable garden ought to be wearing) and moved to make her regal exit of the yard. But a secret glimmering from the corner of her eye stayed her. What she saw, alas, alack-the-day, was the skinchanger's egg being slipped from Jack Yap's shirt into the bucket of Pudding's great stone boot.
"Jackie boy," she said sweetly.
Jack Yap froze, blood ribbons unwinding down his back.
"What is that, lad? What pretty pebble did you find out there, my precious son, my second-born, my tasty own Jack?"
Jack Yap's lips folded together so tightly the seams of his scars closed, and Marm might never have cut the goat-gut stitches she had sewn for all the sound he made. Marm smiled at him and shrugged.
"Well. My sight's not what it used to see, there's that," she said. "Pudding, love. Come up to bed. Your Marmy-Marm'll give you buttered toast and jam and snuggle you in tight."
The chain on her shoulder clanked, but Pudding was vastly and enormously and humongously hungry, so he heaved himself to his feet and trotted inside the cottage after her. His wispy yellow hair was set briefly aglow by the backlight in the cottage as he ducked his head to enter.
Jack Yap's slender body twitched. His jaw hardened to honed edges. He gazed towards the dark hills and thought of running, just him and his egg. Escape. But the next moment he heard Pudding singing the egg song softly to himself, in words only Jack could understand, and Jack just barely, and as much as he longed to let the wilderness devour all sign of him, Jack Yap lingered. The egg glimmered in its stone cradle like faerie treasure, and Jack Yap could not help but peer inside. With a shuddering flash, the shell vitrified, and like clearest glass or crystal showed (as through a window), the infant within, asleep, scaled and tailed and horned in dragon-form, snoring thin blue flames. Then the shell grew white as bone again.
"Well, I'll think far on it, my Tam," he told the little changeling girl. "Dream soft and worry not. Jack's brain is a-muttering tonight."
But Marm's shadow fell over Jack Yap and the boot. Inside that darkness, the egg blazed up like the birth of a rainbow.
"Very pretty, Jackie," said his Marm.
And she hit him over the head with the coal scuttle.
#
Jack Yap bleared awake to the sound of the cottage falling down around his ears.
With not quite his normal nimbleness, but with considerable presence of mind for one who had been brained, he dragged himself to the far side of the chicken coop and took cover. There was a terrible groaning of beams bending, stone cracking, chains snapping, wattle pulling free from daub and patches of thatch thumping to the floor. In the midst of it all was a sound Jack Yap knew well, though he'd never heard it quite at that decibel before.
"MURRRRRRR!"
Jack Yap began to laugh.
Pudding, it seemed, did not like being chained to his bed much past that special morning time reserved for his sprinkle and splat out there in the chicken yard. And since Marm was gone and Jack Yap had been dead--or as near to dead as the coalscuttle could render him--to the world, it fell to Pudding to leave his prison bed by whatever means he could. No matter what walls stood in his way.
#
There was a man at market who knew the price of eggs. That did not mean he was not a lie and cheat and miserable old beggar; in fact, he had once tried to sell Jack Yap five beans in exchange for Marm's brown cow. Jack Yap had kicked the old man in his wooden leg repeatedly until he offered good coin, and after that they had gone on as tolerable friends. Jack Yap and Pudding went to him first, for so would Marm have done with the skinchanger's egg.
"Ah! It is the crafty young fellow with the spicular feet!" exclaimed the old man. "In answer to your question--yes, indeed, young master, yes indeed! At dawn today there was a matronly woman graced my booth, whose vulpine locks and butcher's grin indicated a close consanguineous relationship with your diminutive and lethal lordship. What relation she bore to that huge monster yonder is any man's guess, for surely such a tiny body as hers would have split in twain bringing that bulk into the world."
The old man's white-whiskery nod indicated Pudding, who was shambling about the marketplace, accepting free bread and mead from vendors too terrified to let him come under their stalls.
"Old man," Jack Yap leaned into the counter on the sharps of his elbows, "you talk like a twat, toothless though you are, but I like you, so I won't kick you dead just yet. Did Marm have my egg on her?"
The old man scratched his chin. The sound of it was like chicken claws on wire mesh, and dried skin fell in fine snowflakes to his grizzled chest.
"That she did, that she did," he admitted. "Your admirable progenitress and the virile young man with her, whose mammoth musculature connoted daily labor in some geologic field, such as the quarries of our craggy wilderness, had with them an ovoid object most rare and costly, the monetary worth of which your lady mother most fervently desired me to evaluate."
"What did you tell her?" Jack Yap grabbed the old man by his ratty collar and shook him the same way he had shaken a thousand eggs dead. He shook him until he could hear the old man's dry old brains rattling around in his head, until the old heartbeat stuttered and clacked like a sack full of bones and the web-work of his skin turned gray and blue.
"Gold!" choked the old man. "That egg's worth gold and jewels and gems and half the king's realm, plus his son's hand in marriage and his daughter's first born child!"
Jack Yap released him. Not gently. The old man collapsed where he stood and died not half a day later, but by then Jack Yap and his brother were far from that place.
"PUDDING!" he roared. "Pudding man! I need you!"
Pudding, as has been noted, had great big legs that had not as yet come to the end of their growing. He swiped a fourth loaf of black bread and a flagon full of mead and meandered back towards the origin of his brother's urgent voice. His stone-clamped feet wanted but a step or three to overtake Jack, who had bounded out of the old man's stall in search of him. Jack Yap glared up at Pudding with red fire in his long, cruel eyes and his scarred, cunning mouth began to smile. Pudding recognized this particular smile as a creature-killing smile. He began to chortle and chuckle wetly with pleasure. Jack Yap took him by the hand.
"Put me on your shoulders, Puds! There's a few folks down this road want stomping, and I know just the two young boys to do it, says I."
#
Marm and the mason sat on the mason's large mattress and stared at the egg. The changeling babe had been taunting them all morning with brief glimpses of her beauty--now a black colt, now a firebird, now a pearl of a girl--but for hours since lunch the egg had prove impenetrable. Nor the heat of the hearth nor the freeze of the cellar could make glass of the stone. Neither flat-bladed chisel nor tooth chisel broke the shell, nor hammer and tongs, nor did dashing it against the wall prove method of entrance. Marm and the mason were quite flummoxed.
"It won't be worth much if it keeps looking like a lump!" Marm cried. "The old man said a changeling slave girl would sell to a higher bid than the king's own daughter--and the princess is half witch herself!"
The mason gave the skinchanger's egg another mighty blow of his hammer. The egg rocked a little but did not so much as dent.
"How to hatch it? How to hatch it?" Marm pondered. "Shouldn't have struck my little Jackie down, now should I? He knows all about them hill creatures like he knows his alphabet. Always a bright boy, my baby bantam, my daffy little bullybum." She shrugged philosophically and regarded the egg.
"Never mind the hammer, lovey," she told the mason. "Thought of gold has my thighs so tingled, I'll need a roll or I won't catch three winks tonight. Put that great bowling ball beneath the bed. Perhaps our bouncing'll give it a crack, eh?"
The mason grunted in his usual way and tossed the egg aside. Marm chucked her dress and the mason grabbed her breasts and they set to a nice rough tumble on the hay tick.
Marm and the mason were just getting on in the usual way (the usual way going something like this: "Oh, no! Oh, yes! Oh, God! Oh, gold! It's gold! It's gold we'll get, it's aaaaauuuggghhh!!!") when Jack Yap climbed through the mason's low square-cut window. He quietly went to the door of the cottage and unlatched it for Pudding, who stooped inside as though velvet shod, for all his boots were stone.
The brothers stood over the wheezing mattress, looking down at the sweat-soaked clowns upon it: one brother so tall his head near brushed the roof, the other so small he had to crane to get perspective on the heaving things. Pudding had his boots. Jack Yap had an iron poker he had pillaged from the ruins of their cottage.
"Me first," Jack Yap breathed, and he brought the poker down. The sound it made was something like "THWACK!" but with a bit more juice and crack in it.
After a moment or two, Pudding joined in the fun.
#
The hay tick was a blood-sodden mess when the brothers were through, and Jack Yap was feeling just the slightest smidge of tired. His head still ached something fierce from the coalscuttle, and the red fire that had fueled his eyes and the killing machine of his skinny, poker-bearing arm had all but banked its devil flames. He fished the egg out from under all the mess and cradled it close to his thin chest.
"Hush now," he crooned to it. "Jack Yap's come back to fetch you, Tam my child. And Uncle Pudding too."
The skinchanger's egg pulsed and flashed in Jack Yap's arms. Though it was warm and sticky, positively writhing in blood, the egg was brighter than ever and seemed almost to be chiming.
Pudding began humming the egg song, perhaps supposing a soothing sound was in order. He was eating parts of what used to be the mason's muscular arm, for stomping things always made him marvelous hungry.
And then the egg began to rock.
The skinchanger's egg began to rock.
It rocked and chimed and rang like faerie bells, and then it began to flame and flare and flicker. It grew warm in Jack Yap's hands, then scalding hot, then cold as ice, and then the shell began to splinter. It splintered, shivered, and exploded, and where each shard of burst shell fell, it turned into diamond and pearl and silver. Pudding, who liked shiny bits, murred excitedly and bent to pick up the pieces. In this way, he missed the birth entirely, and missed the precise moment Jack Yap met his changeling child. It was probably better for all three of them that he did, for Pudding had been Jack's only darling for so long that it might have been a blow to find himself supplanted in a heartbeat. Or--and this was more likely, as brains are brains and Pudding's weren't much--the portentous event might have meant the merest nothing to Pudding. Few things did.
The skinchanger, in human shape, was a full-formed woman, but so small she curled in Jack's arms like a cat. Her hair was longer than her body, which was so supple and slippery Jack had to use all his wiles to keep hold of her. She was the color of pitch and of flame, and sometimes of lightning, and then she would shiver and chime and change. That night Jack Yap held in his arms a baby lynx, an ostrich chick, an elephant calf and a fawn, a pink weasel baby, a black colt, and a white lamb. He sang lullabies to all of them, with his Marm's corpse and the mason's looking dully on.
Pudding fell asleep to the sound of lullabies and skinchanging, his sweet, lax, flower mouth brown-stained all around with blood.
"Sleep, my Tam," Jack Yap soothed the changeling. She was now a chimpanzee, clinging to his neck, now a python wrapped about him playfully. "Sleep and Jack Yap will guard you. And tomorrow, me and you and Uncle Pudding too, why, we have some traveling to do."
Fiction: Unrequited Love by Gene Wolfe
"Two loves I have, of comfort and despair."
---Shakespeare
You have no reason to listen to me, but may sigh and turn the page and be none the worse for it. Yet I have every reason to speak out. If this public confession of my innocent guilt lifts my spirits to the slightest degree, it will be well worth the loss of your esteem. You see, I am one who had done wrong while seeking to do good. There are millions like me in that, and most acknowledge no smallest trace of guilt.
"My intentions were good!"
Soon, one hopes, a great, blood-colored hand whose fingers are tipped with claws will close about them and drag them down to Hell.
So it may drag me; and mine were good, though I scorn to offer that in my defense. It is results that matter in this world and in every other. My good intentions brought innocent hearts pain that will not end. Each night, once, twice, sometimes three times in a night, I rise and dress and go out to see if they are there.
They are not, but would be if they could---poor simple little beings whose torment I began. Do you understand?
Of course not.
How could you? I will explain everything in order, starting with Roberta.
#
Roberta belonged to the Robinsons, the couple who have the house one door west of mine. I first saw her one May morning walking to school, with her own little laptop in a shiny new bag, the picture of beauty, innocence (there is that word again) and blooming health. She was a 'bot, of course. Either the Robinsons could not have a child of their own, or were unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a real child. I could not---I do not---blame them in the least. But I wondered, because I have never had much to do with such 'bots, about her schooling.
So it was that I struck up a conversation with her one day when I happened to be walking in the same direction. I asked the inevitable, utterly banal question: "Do you like school?"
And Roberta answered, "Oh, yes! It's fun."
"Really? What's your class studying?"
"Oh, you know. The names of the letters and how each one sounds. The color wheel and watercolors. Arithmetic. Stranger danger."
"I'm no stranger," I told her.
"Of course you aren't. You live next door."
"Exactly. And I'm not about to ask you to go anywhere with me or do anything, though I do enjoy talking to you."
"That's good!" She smiled.
"For me, at least. What do you get if you mix black and white?"
"Grey if you mean paint. Brown if you mean people."
"I meant paint. Blue and yellow?"
"Green."
"What's the square root of two hundred and fifty-six?"
"Sixteen." She looked around at me with a charming little grin. "Only that's not fair. It's not first-grade work."
"Exactly. You must know everything the rest of your class---"
"No, there are three of us."
"Is there to learn. So how can it be fun for you?"
"Oh, it's lots of fun!"
"Is it really? What part do you like best."
"Tutoring. That's where one of us takes a boy or girl who isn't doing very well and tries to help him. Or her." For a moment she looked serious and a little sad. "It's nearly always a boy, because there are five boys and two girls besides us. Only what I like best is when it's a girl like me. Sometimes I know I've really, truly helped. Helped her and helped Mrs. Morse, too. I like that a lot."
We had nearly reached the elementary school, so I said, "Well, I hope you get a girl today."
She said, "So do I! I hope I get Julianne!" and ran into the school.
Not too long after that I met Julianne, and here I intruded. If I bore no guilt until now (though I think I did) I certainly bore it in that.
I saw her shuffle sadly past our house on her way the Robinson's, a small girl with a pinched face and long black braids. I saw her, too, on her way back home, and could not resist. I went out and walked more or less with her, trying to look as though I were enjoying the sunshine, and contrived to strike up a conversation. "Do you play with Roberta?"
"Sure." It was mumbled; I shall not mention the mumbling in the future. Everything Julianne said was mumbled.
"It must be fun."
A sad nod. "She's my best friend."
"Do you have many friends?"
She shook her head.
"I'm know I can't play with you the way another girl would, but I'm Roberta's neighbor and I'd like to be your friend, too." I introduced myself.
"I'm Julianne."
I had been fairly certain of that already.
She sighed. "My father's a cook. We're supposed to say chef. But he is. That's why I'm Julianne. He fixes salads, mostly."
I said, "A good chef is a treasure among men."
"Mom says the money's pretty good."
"No doubt the salads are, too."
"So I'm going to get another friend." The small, pinched face seemed to brighten somewhat. "I'm going to get a puppy. Roberta's going to have a puppy and I told Mom and Dad, so I'm getting one, too."
"'Beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of Man, without his vices.' Lord Byron said that. I believe his dog was a Newfoundland. Do you know what breed you'll be getting, Julianne?"
"A robot. Roberta's going to get a border terrier, though." For a moment it almost seemed that Julianne smiled. "They can play with each other while we do."
It left me speechless. Or if I spoke, I do not recall what it was I said or why I said it.
Perhaps I turned at some corner or other, or perhaps Julianne reached her home and went inside. I do not recall that either. I only know that I walked on, alone, filled with a tragic anger. Our gently curving streets offended me. Our neatly finished green lawns, more than half of them of artificial grass, offended me still more. I hated every house I saw; their fresh paint and absurd mixture of styles were more than sufficient to account for any amount of hatred.
Yet I had another, better, reason. I hated then because there was scarcely one that housed two children, and that most housed none.
Like my own.
My kind had built a paradise, of which I was a part. A paradise for machines, in which the human race, though welcome, could not and did not thrive. In and around the filthy huts of the medieval peasants, children ran and shouted, laughed and wept, and no doubt received sturdy buffets when they made too much noise. There the family sang around a table we would scorn. There grandmothers recounted wild tales before the fire, tales full of bold boys who made good and honest country maidens who tricked evil dwarves like me.
Tales that were full of life because the children were, and full of death, too, because each child had to learn that death is life's shadow.
Here---But I have gone on too long already.
#
A week passed before I spoke to either girl again. As often as I could I watched them out my windows or from my deck. Sometimes they waved to me, and when they did I took care to smile and wave in return.
For the most part they did not.
Roberta remained the perfection of childhood beauty. Julianne seemed always her sad, pinched self. This though once I heard her laugh, a sound every bit as unnatural as her playmate.
The promised puppies appeared, Roberta's first. It was small and wigglesome, brownish, reddish, and blackish. Both girls embraced and kissed it, Julianne shyly and Roberta often.
Julianne received hers a week or two later. It was larger and seemed to be a caricature of a Dalmatian, white with over-regular black spots and too-large eyes. Perhaps I can best characterize it as resistibly cute, though both girls appeared to adore it. Roberta's puppy played with it as he might have played with a ball or any other inanimate object. I doubt that he knew it was a counterfeit of his own species.
Watching them, I meditated upon a plan. It is because of that plan and its result that I am writing this.
First I seized an opportunity to speak to the girls together. Roberta's puppy had penetrated the hedge that separates the Robinson's back yard from our own. Both girls screamed, jumped up and down, and did little else. I quieted them, assured them that I would capture their small fugitive, and did so by tempting him with scraps of meat.
He was a charming little creature when I held him at last, innocent as are the young of almost every animal, and friendly as are the young of a very few.
I carried him back to the waiting girls, cautioned them against permitting him to escape again (fruitless cautions, as you shall read), and broached my plan. "Have you two ever thought of trading puppies for a few days? A friend and I did it (this was a lie) when I was a boy. He took mine for a week---maybe it was two, I can't remember for sure---and I took his. We both had a lot of fun. We learned something, too."
Roberta asked, "Do you think our parents would let us?"
"I don't see why not, and certainly there could be no harm in asking."
She turned to Julianne. "Do you think you could give up Robber for a week if I gave you Rover?"
Hesitantly, Julianne nodded.
So it came to pass, even as I had planned. Julianne, the human girl, went home with Rover, the flesh-and-blood dog. Roberta, the blond robot girl, remained at home with Robber, the black-and-white robot dog.
I thought it a great improvement, and would fearlessly have predicted that both dogs had found new homes.
In which I was wholly wrong. A few days later, I met Julianne, and she had Robber once more. I petted him, and he wagged his tail and licked my hand.
"He's a nice dog," Julianne said unnecessarily. "He won't bite."
I said, "I didn't imagine he would, but I'm surprised you didn't keep Rover longer."
"I didn't want to. I like Robber better."
"I see. Can you tell me why?"
She shrugged and turned away. "He don't mess the carpet."
After that I spoke with Roberta, and for once I did not contrive some supposedly accidental encounter. She was playing with Rover in her back yard, and I simply went to the hedge and told her I wanted to speak to her. After all my pretense, it was a great relief.
"I'm going to pry, Roberta. I'm going to ask you about things that are none of my business. I hope you'll answer."
She nodded.
"But if you don't, I'll understand. You and Julianne were supposed to exchange dogs for week, weren't you?"
"Yes. Yes, we were."
"But it ended after what? Three days?"
"Two." Roberta would not meet my eyes.
"Was it you who called it off? Or Julianne?"
"It was both of us." I must have looked doubtful, because she added, "It really was. We were talking at recess, and we both started crying. I---I don't know why she didn't like Rover."
She seemed about to cry again. I kept my voice as soft as I could. "That doesn't matter."
"Robber thinks he's a real dog." The words held a world of agony.
"Does he?"
"Yes! He's---he's a thing, but he thinks he's a real dog." She turned away and ran into her house.
Glancing out my picture window a few days after that, I saw Dan and Tamara Robinson---and Roberta, too---roaming the neighborhood with flashlights. I went out and asked how I might help, and they explained that Rover was lost.
"Or missing," I said.
I am not a brilliant man and this was not a brilliant idea, simply what proved to be a useful one. You see, I recalled the sentimental dog stories I had heard or read over the years. Lassie coming home, Grayfriars Bobby, and all the rest. I got Julianne's address from Roberta, drove over there, and found Rover lying quietly by the side of the house, half hidden by shrubbery, under a window that I would guess was that of Julianne's bedroom.
God forgive me! I picked him up and carried him home.
#
That should be the end of my story, and I wish it were. Julianne and her mother came to the Robinsons' the next day to get Robber, whom Roberta had found waiting for her when she left for school. During the weeks that followed, I saw him there twice, his dotted white coat plainly visible as he waited on the Robinsons' porch.
Twice, as I said. I have never seen him again. Julianne says they keep him chained up.
Interview: Patrick Rothfuss By Alethea Kontis
The first time I saw Patrick Rothfuss, he appeared on my desk, cloaked all in black, with one of the largest post-it notes I've ever seen plastered to him. The novella-length sticky was handwritten from the publisher rep specifically to me, gushing about how this new guy was the greatest thing since sliced bread and would I pleasepleaseplease read The Name of the Wind and let them know what I thought?
It's not the first time a publisher has fawned over an author, but it is rare for a publisher to fawn over an SF/F author. I read the note again and said aloud the same thing I said when I picked up one of the TWO different versions of Patrick's fabulous debut hardcover release:
Whippersnapper.
I decided I'd like to know a bit more about the wunderkind that is Patrick Rothfuss, so I invited him to meet me at a virtual café with the express purpose of discussing Life, The Universe, and Redheads. He ordered a white chocolate mocha with a shot of blackberry and a cinnamon bun. I ordered an iced vanilla chai and a d20.
Alethea Kontis: Did you ever play D&D?
Patrick Rothfuss: Ah hell. My secret shame. Here's the deal. I'll answer this question if everyone who hasn't role-played skips to the next question. Alright?
These days when I roll play, I use Hero system. D&D will always have a special place in my heart, but the mechanics of Hero are much cleaner. They allow a lot more flexibility in character creation, and more versatility in the flavor of the game you want to run. You want to play an X-men game? Hero will let you do that. Want cyberpunk? Steampunk? Star Wars? High fantasy? A young arcanist seeking his fortune in the Four Corners? It's all good in Hero.
Over the years I've used the Hero system to field test elements of my world before I wrote them into the book. Someday I hope to do a Hero-system sourcebook for my world. Since I've already run a decade's worth of games in my world, I already have the mechanics worked out. I think that would be a blast....
Check out their website if you're curious.
AK: What character did you play?
PR: For the most part, I played wizards. I will even admit to playing a wild mage whose name was, in fact, Kvothe. But the similarity stops there. You can bet your ass that at no point in this series will Kvothe start running around casting Nahal's Reckless Dweomer.
AK: What was your opinion on thieves? (I was always a thief. Being a magic user took too much friggin' time choosing spells.)
PR: I never played a thief. Which is kinda odd, as Kvothe actually is as much a thief as he is a Wizard. Not that he fits very well into the D&D paradigm at all...
That's one of the main failings of D & D in my opinion. The character creation process is not just limited, but rather unrealistic. Why can't a Wizard learn how to pick a lock? Why can't a thief learn some Hapkido? Things are better now in the newer editions, but they still aren't really fluid enough to create the sort of character I really want to play. They can't really create a character like Kvothe. That's one of the main reasons I'm in love with hero system. It's easy to make Kvothe there. It's easy to make any character.
AK: What do you suppose is the literary world's fascination with redheads?
PR: I don't think it's just the literary world. All throughout history redheads have always been larger than life. Gilgamesh. Alexander the Great, Ghengis Kahn. Napoleon, all redheads. Even Jesus was rumored to have red hair, the deep color of wine.
In Germanic and Egyptian cultures, redheads were rumored to have magic abilities, and occasionally, killed because of it. In ancient Greece redheads were thought to become vampires after they died.
Almost every culture has some bizarre belief about redheads, but no matter what the specific detail, it's usually tied to magic, power, charisma, and usually darker things as well.
Sound like anyone you know?
AK: Are you afraid of spiders?
PR: Not for the most part. Not the spiders we get up here in Wisconsin, anyway.
I went down to Florida for a wedding once and while I was visiting the Weeki Wachee Mermaids, I saw a spider as big as my spread hand hanging out in a web between two trees. I swear this thing would have been big enough to kill and eat a kitten.
That's part of the reason I like Wisconsin. Five months of badass winter every year does a lot to keep the bugs in their place.
AK: How's your memory?
PR: It's crap. Pure crap. Especially for names. I can't remember anyone's name. I remember the person, but not what I'm supposed to call them.
AK: What's the strangest thing that's ever happened to you?
PR: Hmmm... I live kind of a strange life. You want to narrow it down for me? Care to ask about a particular subset of strangeness?
AK: Okay, strangest thing profile: Where's the strangest place you've ever slept?
PR: I can't tell the story that would answer this honestly. The statute of limitations hasn't expired yet. Ask me again in about... 19 months.
AK: The strangest thing you've learned as an author?
PR: Female Hyenas have a penis. They give birth through it.
AK: The strangest thing you've signed in a book?
PR: I actually wrote a blog about that. You can read it here.
AK: The strangest question you've ever been asked?
PR: Normally people write in and ask pretty reasonable questions. When's book two coming out? Will you sign my copy if I send it to you? Will you read my manuscript? I answer those so often I should really put up an FAQ.
But there are a handful of... different questions mixed in. So far the oddest one was from a girl who was coming to a family reunion in Wisconsin. She... ah hell. Maybe I'll just let you see it.
so i know you are all "famous author" guy who is nominated for a Quill award, which is awesome, but you live in WI too and that is the subject here. I am at a family reunion right now staying in a cabin with like..20 family members 5 minutes outside of Oxford. So i kept seeing signs for Steven's Point and i couldn't figure out how i knew that name. then my uncle is talking about how "if you got about 20 minutes (leave room for embellishment) that way it is flat as can be." anyway then i figured it out and decided to message you.
do u know of any sporting goods stores near here to get a soccer ball? i know that there is a wal mart supercenter in portage but we had to go there yesterday and i have this issue with going to wal mart too much, as do most people. anyway, i was going out on a limb. i doubt you play many sports, dont be offended
Yeah. Witness a little moment of my surreal life.
AK: Hah! Okay, how about the strangest thing you've ever done to inspire yourself to write?
PR: Heh. Another question best answered by the blog I wrote on the subject. I don't know if this counts at the strangest, but it's certainly the most recent...http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/blog/2007/07/science.html
AK: Was it a conscious decision to make the chapters so short?
In general, I just let them be whatever length they needed to be.
But it was a conscious decision to avoid being long-winded. Yes, I know, my book is over 650 pages. But you'll notice that very little of that is the classic boggy description and narration that so many fantasy novels get mired in. God bless granddaddy Tolkien, but that's one piece of his style that I wish people would stop emulating. Yes. The grass lush and inviting. We get it. Move on.
AK: Your book is available in two different covers. Which is your favorite? What is your favorite cover of another author's book?
PR: Hmmm. It's hard for me to really pick one as a favorite, as I like them both for different reasons.
In terms of selling the book, this book tends to be double or nothing. People tend to love this cover, or hate it. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Also, I've always worried that it gives the wrong impression of the book. It looks vaguely romancy, and if people read my book looking for a classic fantasy romance, they're not going to get it.
You've got to admit though. This Kvothe is pretty hot. Also, the artist, Donato, did an incredible job with the detail work. Look at the pegbox of the lute and Kvothe's hands. They're gorgeous. I can barely draw a stick-figure, so someone with his amount of talent is effectively a magician to me.
This one people refer to as "the Gargoyle cover" or "the angry stone man cover." It's a safer cover, by which I mean it doesn't really turn anyone off. No 16 year old boy is going to shy away from it out of fear that someone will tease him for reading it in public.
Other plusses include the fact that it's atmospheric, mysterious, and in keeping with the title of the book. It's also a little more mainstream looking, so people who don't ordinarily go in for fantasy might be willing to give it a try.
It also, quite by coincidence, looks more than a little bit like me.
AK: Which science fascinates you most?
PR: I don't think I could pick a favorite. I really dug chemistry in high school. And physics. But whenever I end up getting into something new I find it really interesting. I remember when I had to take Astronomy 101 as a GDR in college. I was pissed, of course, and I considered it a waste of my time.
But that only lasted for about 20 minutes. As soon as I was in the class I couldn't help be fascinated. Pretty much everything is interesting once you get into it.
AK: What kind of a student were you in school?
PR: It depends. If you're talking about completing homework and living up to my potential, then I was probably a bad student. But I was interested and polite, and I liked my teachers. I just wasn't really motivated to impress anyone.
I had mad scientist tendencies back in high school. Once in Physics we had to create a rube Goldberg machine machine. We were supposed to build a contraption using five or six simple machines. Mine had thirty eight.
Needless to say, it was a disaster on a grand scale. When it failed for the third time in class I flew into a rage and destroyed it. Apparently the physics teacher still shows the videotape of that to his incoming students.
AK: Trip "rolls sevens" --- do you have a special knack for anything?
(Besides writing, of course...)
PR: Oh boy. The things I'm good at I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about in polite company.
Let me think.... Oh. I have preternatural bargaining skills. I can sell anything to anyone.
I have also been told on several occasions by several different people that I am the best kisser in the world.
AK: So, did you not get the memo about never starting your story in a bar?
PR: Oh please, that's my most minor offense. If you're going to take a dig at me, make it a good one. C'mon, I know you have it in you.
AK: What's next for you? And will it feature a bar and/or a redhead?
PR: Are you making me an offer?
AK: After the kissing comment, I just might. But answer this first: if you could be any superhero, who would you be?
PR: Hmmm..... Emma Frost? Sexy. Super tough. Mind control. Possibly evil....
Yeah. I think I'm going to go with Emma.
Don't read too much into that.
Review: Race for the Rocket by Anne KG Murphy
His Majesty's Dragon--Naomi Novik--Del Rey
Glasshouse--Charles Stross--Ace
Rainbows End--Vernor Vinge--Tor
Eifelheim--Michael Flynn--Tor
Blindsight--Peter Watts--Tor
Reviews by Anne KG Murphy
It's July, which means if you haven't voted for the Hugo awards (and you plan to) you should get a move on--the deadline is July 31. Even for those of us who are not members of this year's Worldcon (who vote on the Hugos), the list of nominees can make an interesting, if not always completely dependable, recommended reading list. This year's nominees for Best Novel include a dragonback romp by air and sea (His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik), an interesting contemplation of power and psychology in a time when people and things can be both duplicated and edited (Glasshouse, by Charles Stross), an adventurous exploration of personal and (potentially) international drama as a post-senility poet reawakens in the cyberenhanced world of his granddaughter's generation just in time to help save the planet from a viral do-gooder (Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge), and two very different alien contact stories: a high-minded moral, intellectual and social alternate history exploratory called Eifelheim by Michael Flynn; and a tension-filled battle between instinctive experience and cognitive analysis, the outer and inner space psychodrama that is Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
In His Majesty's Dragon, readers will find themselves sharing the frustrations and sometimes exhilarating successes of Temeraire and Captain Will Laurence, two like-minded souls who are thrown together when Temeraire hatches on the deck of Capt. Laurence's ship and accepts the harness from him, propelling the duty-bound Laurence out of His Majesty's Navy and into His Majesty's Aerial Corps. Laurence bucks up under his highly unusual career move, and finds that piloting and caring for his unique and rapidly growing dragon is rewarding in ways he never anticipated.
Temeraire is an inquisitive and thoughtful fellow, with the impetuousness, passion, and charming ignorance of youth. The mature and disciplined Laurence proves a perfect counterpoint to the young creature. With years of service to Britain under his belt, Laurence is dedicated to defending his country, but he will find his loyalties challenged when it comes to what is expected of himself and Temeraire.
Set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, Novik's trilogy (His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War) is alternate history at its most creative and detailed. What if (she asks) there be dragons? Rigged with ropes, guns and crew not unlike a naval ship, in Europe Novik's dragons serve in the military much as airplanes will serve later in history (though airplanes are perhaps less likely to be boarded mid-battle). The characters and relationships in His Majesty's Dragon are believable, the story is nicely scripted, and the sense of high-seas adventure has lead many to compare the series favorably to the work of Patrick O'Brian. Well-written and captivating whether describing battles in midair or political intrigue at ground level, this is an outstanding first effort and ought to win Novik the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer (it has already brought her the Locus Award for best first novel).
As we have come to expect from Charles Stross, Glasshouse is chock full of multiple what-ifs, but the ones that are key to the plot involve memory editing and nanotech assemblers that can manufacture nearly anything given time, mass, and the appropriate program (or original to copy). Such assemblers can be used as transportation gates, passing people from one place to another as information and reassembling them at the other end of the trip, but if those A-gates are corrupted or reprogrammed, people can be transformed in mid-transit. Glasshouse proposes a few interesting voluntary (and involuntary) mental and physical transformations people might experience, along with implications of the misuse of such technology.
The main character, Robin, has apparently voluntarily wiped most of his memories and is in rehabilitation, knowing little about himself other than that he is very good at dueling and other types of violence. An intriguing four-armed woman named Kay draws him into a role-playing experiment that is supposedly about investigating emergent social structures in a technologically backwards culture, but soon seems to have more sinister motives. In the process they give up their bodies and names, to be placed in body and gender assignments determined by the experimenters. Complexities of mind/body identity, social psychology, conformity and rebellion against cognitive dictatorship make this book heavier than a mere adventure. This is a good thing, but it may not be to everyone's taste; I found it distinctly slow in the middle, but it picked up my interest again toward the finish.
Rainbows End considers a similar sort of involuntary mental editing, only in the form of a virus that could leave people vulnerable to suggestion so strong it's more like compulsion--every marketing executive's wet dream, and apparently an active experiment of some unknown agent. There is a danger the viral technology could be made to work on everybody--if it does, who will control it, to what end? To find out, an international team of investigators hires an independent cybernaut whose white-rabbit online presence only hints at the power and whimsy of his talents. Circumstantially enmeshed in the situation is the Gu family: Robert Gu, an elder poet who has been cured of his Alzheimer's and given various youth-restoring treatments, his son and daughter-in-law, who both work in security, and his granddaughter Miri, a teenager who goes to school with a mix of peers that includes Robert and other rejuvenants who are being retrained to the modern world.
Situated mostly in southern California, Rainbows End is well-written and briskly paced. The technology it highlights is wearable VR delivered and controlled through contact lenses, wired clothing and neural interfaces; the primary theme is self-expression, with a secondary cautionary theme about uploaded knowledge programs and other ways being wired might open people to losing control of themselves. VR-enhanced reality is second nature to the young people in the book, who construct sophisticated multimedia compositions in school and overlay visual jokes for their peers, but Robert Gu and other elders must come to it slowly, initially through awkward interfaces that seem like interactive paper.
Sound like an unlikely background for international intrigue? Vinge keeps the action moving while he embroils the reader in the interpersonal issues between Robert and his remarkable family and friends, all affected and enabled by various technologies they use. Vinge is up there with the best of them in his seamless integration of imaginative technology with a compelling story. My only regret in the technical arena was how they typeset the person-to-person silent messaging--it was awkward and jarring; it looked like hypertext in a way that I didn't intuitively internalize like the naturalistic IM systems already in use. Generally, though, the enhanced cyberworld was well done. Particularly well drawn was a battle of competing alternate reality creators, fighting over the future of a University Library doomed to be digitized and shredded, Not Vinge's best work, but an excellent read.
Another excellent book, Michael Flynn's Eifelheim also takes place on Earth, but it speculates in both the near future and in an intriguing history. The time-split story features two communities of scholars and a deep mystery: what has happened to the village of Eifelheim?
Pastor Dietrich is the pastor at St Catherine's Church in Oberhochwald, a secluded village in the Black Forest. A scientific man with a haunted past, he once studied among such peers as William of Ochkam. His portion of the story starts in 1348, at Matins, the Commemoration of Sixtus II and his Companions. The countryside is electrified with a great and sudden power, followed by a loud noise and a fire. As the villagers recover from the fire with the help of Dietrich and his Minorite assistant Joachim, there are rumors of watching eyes and unnatural beings abroad in the woods. Dietrich sets out to investigate, trying in vain to assure his flock that something is not unnatural just because you have never seen it before.
At the "Now" end of the timeline, Sharon Nagy is a theoretical physicist trying to solve the geometries of Janatpur space. Her domestic partner Tom Schwoerin is a cliologist--a mathematical historian. He is working to figure out why there is no modern town in a place where the patterns of history would logically put one. His growing theory is that something happened there to scare people away. Some of his sources suggest demons. Frustrated by a scarcity of information, by chance Tom recruits the librarian Judy Cao to be his research assistant. She discovers that Eifelheim was a gloss for Oberhochwald, and the clues start to come together.
This book does something that is all too rare; it illustrates how scientists are influenced by the comments and other input of the people and events around them to come to conclusions they would never would have reached on their own. All of the scholars in this book stretch their minds over strange ideas, especially Dietrich, who takes into his community a most bizarre class of men. The Krenken are far from home, struggling to get back before they run out of food that can sustain them. Technologically superior to the men of this time, they need not fear the weapons of the local Lord's men, but the structure of their society may be threatened by the beliefs of the people to whom they reluctantly turn for shelter as winter arrives. The outer world also threatens to encroach; denunciation from the mother Church looms in the wake of spreading rumors of demons, and there is the approaching plague coming to further terrorize the populace. Their route home will ultimately be explained by Sharon's research, but for some will involve a change in their definition of Home.
I must give kudos to David G. Hartwell for producing the best edited book among the nominees. Eifelheim is the epitome of fine science fiction, based on exquisitely tantalizing physics, a fascinating alien physiognomy and associated culture, an insightful and well-researched grounding in history, a masterful use of language, and equally satisfying suppositions as to the possibilities inherent in man's reaction to the unknown.
I cannot say such laudatory things about Blindsight, though it obviously has its fans. Watts' conceit is that a small pseudoscientific, semi-militant expedition to make contact with an unknown artifact in deep space suspected to be the source of the first alien mission to blitz Earth with (unmanned drone) scouts of its own will be lead by a vampire--a member of a reincarnated race that is as predatory as legend would have it. Jukka Sarasti suffers from the Crucifix Glitch--a weakness to right angles common to all vampires-- that is kept in check with regular drug doses but isn't removed completely because it relates to one of the vampire's main strengths--an ability to see and think differently from humans. Not that the humans that round out his tiny crew think particularly normally.
Susan James, the linguistics expert, houses four personalities ("the Gang of Four") in her partitioned brain. Isaac Szpindel is a biologist, wired into his scientific apparati so deeply his nervous system twitches and his awareness is sometimes not focused in his body at all. Major Amanda Bates and whatever army of drones and other weapons she cares to generate onsite comprises their military arm. And the narrator of it all, Siri Keaton, is a Synthesist, an autistic savant who had half his brain removed and replaced with electronic prosthetics when he was a child. Supposedly he is there to observe and report, which he does with more melodrama than you would ever expect to hear coming out of a lobotomized person whose humanity is questioned by the people around him because of his aberrant lack of emotions and the way he maintains social function through conscious analysis of informational topology instead of instinct or empathy.
What most irritated me about this book, besides the unrelenting re-emphasis of the drama and fearfulness of both the alien constructs they encounter and the vampire they brought with them, was the fact that the technology they use is awkwardly yet continuously described. They are on a spaceship with its own artificial intelligence. They drink out of squeeze bulbs and walk around the hull or drift and catch themselves, or whatever. They don't just move and do their work, they interact with artifacts the reader is not allowed to absorb and assume. They use an online collaborative tool called ConSensus that is named nearly every time it is invoked. And they seem to have no idea what they're doing most of the time, even when they aren't experiencing electromagnetically-induced hallucinations.
I couldn't wait to finish this book and be done with it. It explores interesting questions about perception, consciousness, and sentience but its base assumptions on why life forms must inherently be in conflict and how they might (violently) investigate differences between them were as irritating as the social tensions of the crew and their ineffectiveness as a team. The ending was mainly satisfying in that it was over, though the final sentence was a nice summation of where the author was aiming; your mileage may vary, but Blindsight was not for me.
Reviews: THE SPACE OPERA RENAISSANCE and THE NEW SPACE OPERA: ALL NEW STORIES OF SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURE
THE SPACE OPERA RENAISSANCE
Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (Tor/944 pages/$39.95)
THE NEW SPACE OPERA: ALL NEW STORIES OF SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURE
Edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan (Eos/528 pages/$15.95, trade paper)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler
After the "Star Wars" movies hit neighborhood screens in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the subgenre of Space Opera---once considered all but dead---has flourished. Though practiced by well-respected writers within the genre, Space Opera never seemed to get as much respect as "hard" SF. Two recent anthologies not only celebrate Space Opera, they acknowledge its importance to the field of SF and fantasy and its reemergence as vital part of the new renaissance for the genre in literature (not to mention film and television)
The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (who brought us The Hard SF Renaissance as well as The Ascent of Wonder) is a huge, doorstop of a book that does a good job of tracking the development of the subgenre from the days E.E. "Doc" Smith (who wrote The Skylark of Space, but isn't included in this tome, darn it) to the more recent writings of Allen Steele, Catherine Asaro and Stephen Baxter. Another Space Opera pioneer---Jack Vance---also misses the role call in this roomy anthology. Although Smith and Vance are no-shows, the inclusion of Jack Williamson's "The Prince of Space" is a welcome sight. It's a story that virtually invented the idea of "space habitats" that rotate in order to simulate gravity. Knaves. thieves and pirates play a part in 1949's "The Enchantress of Venus" by Leigh Brackett (surely one of the most versatile writers to grace the field) as well as 2002's "Ring of Rats by R. Grarcia y Robertson---and both make for wild, adventurous reads. Although the early stories of Space Opera seem to have been given a bit of short shrift ("The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith, and a Robert Sheckley gem are included), the latter days of Space Opera's renaissance, from the late 1970s and on, are well-covered.
Stories by David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Charles Stross and Robert Reed are among the rich, well-written pickings. "The Shobies' Story" by Ursula K. LeGuin, which deals with a reality shift caused by a faster than light drive, works very well as a representative of the sort of thoughtful but well-paced fiction LeGuin (in novels like The Left hand of Darkness) was writing early on in her long career. A newer, and particular favorite of mine, is "Orphans of the Helix," a Locus Award-winning novella tied to the classic "Hyperion/Endymion" Space Opera quaternion by Dan Simmons. Set over 400 years after the events in the last of those four books, the story finds the crew of the starship Helix being awakened to investigate a distress signal. The ensuing adventure pits the characters (named after Japanese authors like Saigyo, Murasaki, etc.) against and out-of-control "harvester" ship running on auto pilot and threatening an entire civilization near a double star. Like the best of Simmons' space operas, this story uses just about everything but the kitchen sink to tell an entertaining and adventurous story. (With over 30 stories offered up, The Space Opera Renaissance is a great buy---a paperback will be published in July).
Oddly, "Muse of Fire," the contribution by Simmons in The New Space Opera---a collection of brand new, original works---which once again makes use of classic literature (in this case, Shakespeare) and starships, doesn't quite fire on all thrusters the way "Orphans" did. But as editor Dozois points out, Space Opera is many things to many readers and writers, so while Simmons' story isn't quite up to snuff, a good deal of the many other variations on the subgenre in this collection are. "Who's Afraid of Wolf 359" by Ken Macleod successfully fuses humor and cynicism into the mix. The story begins with the protagonist dumping his "smart clothes" in an effort to throw off pursuers---the garments dance about like something from a Tex Avery cartoon. Robert Silverberg mixes familiar tropes with new ideas and new twists in "The Emperor and the Maula," in which a woman from Earth finds herself at the center of a galaxy-spanning empire, pleading for her race's freedom. She's imprisoned, of course---and sentenced to death! But like Scheherazade, heroine Laylah Wallis proves resourceful, and while she spins her hypnotizing tale, author Silverberg slyly muses on the art of narrative structure, etc.
In "Dividing the Sustain," James Patrick Kelly postulates a future---and a race of people---who are happy to have rid themselves of emotion. But a smuggler aboard a starship enroute to one of their settlements truly shakes things up. And in "Maelstrom," Kage Baker makes good, humorous use of the same trope Simmons started from---a troupe of space-traveling actors---when thespians have to act out an Edgar Allen Poe story for some miners on Mars. Other highlights include pieces by Tony Daniel, Mary Rosenblum and, especially, Greg Egan.
Sure the Hartwell/Kramer anthology could've used more early Space Opera work (something by Alfred Bester, for example) and both anthologies could've used a piece by Elizabeth Bear (one of the fasted rising, new SF writers), but it's hard to complain about two anthologies that offer up such terrific stories by many of the finest writers in the field.

