by Crystalline Sphere Publishing
Crystalline Sphere Publishing - Science Fiction/Fantasy
Crystalline Sphere Publishing
crystallinesphere.com
Copyright (C)2004 by Crystalline Sphere Publishing
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment.
Publisher Crystalline Sphere Publishing
Editor David M. Switzer
Contributing Editor Michael Felczak
Cover Artist Britt Martin
Layout Designer David M. Switzer
Creative Consultants James Schellenberg & Robert P. Switzer
Challenging Destiny (ISSN 1206-6656), Number 18, July 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Crystalline Sphere Publishing. All rights reserved by the individual authors and illustrators. All correspondence: Challenging Destiny, R. R. #6 St. Marys, Ontario Canada N4X 1C8. Email: csp@golden.net. Web site: challengingdestiny.com.
Illustrations
Illustrations for this issue can be found on this web page:
home.golden.net/~csp/cd/previews/illus18.htm
How Do You Make Important Decisions? editorial by David M. Switzer
Interview with Karin Lowachee by James Schellenberg & David M. Switzer
The Man Who Mistook Himself for a Superhero by Karl El-Koura
Dead Man With a Stick by Greg Beatty
Frankenstein review by James Schellenberg
The Miller and the Old Hag by G. C. McRae
Early Adopters by L. Blunt Jackson
When I was in high school I participated in a program called Future Problem Solving, which enhanced my teamwork and problem solving skills. The program was designed as a competition—our four-person team competed against other teams of students at our level from other schools, most if not all from Canada and the US. I believe that many of the ideas used in that program are applicable in a broader context, which is why I'm bringing them to you here. In particular, the six-step process for solving a problem can be used to arrive at a good solution to any important problem.
The first thing we did was research a particular topic—for example, one year the topics were energy sources, young people and the law, nutrition, and employment. There's no way we were going to come up with a useful solution to a problem unless we knew a lot about that topic. These days there's so much information people talk about information overload. But you can't let that stop you from finding out about things that are important to you. Research skills are certainly valuable to anyone who wants to know in-depth information about any topic. Talk to a librarian—the ones I know are both friendly and helpful.
On the day of the competition we were given a “scenario,” a one-page description of a hypothetical situation in the future based on that topic. We had two hours to work through the six-step process—luckily in real life we usually have more time. Before launching into the steps the first thing we had to do was make sure we understood the situation. That might seem trivial but these days it seems like a lot of people make decisions without understanding the situation.
In two of the steps, brainstorming is used. You may be familiar with brainstorming, but here's a quick refresher. The goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible, because the more ideas you have the better the chance that you'll have a great idea. No evaluation of ideas is made at this stage—each idea is treated equally. Silly ideas are encouraged, because they could trigger more practical ideas. Ideas that combine or improve on previous ideas are also encouraged.
The first step is coming up with subproblems. We used brainstorming to get as many subproblems as we could think of. Once the brainstorming was done, we narrowed it down to the 20 best subproblems. We were encouraged to cite sources of our information. From a scenario about the elderly, here's an example of a subproblem: “Due to the smaller proportion of young, working people, there are fewer people in the work force to provide health care (e.g., doctors, nurses)."
The second step is identifying the underlying problem—the problem that, if solved, would solve many of the other problems. For example: “How might we provide services that would assure the psychological well-being of the elderly, without overburdening the tax payers?” The idea is to focus on one category of problem (e.g., social, legal, economic) since it's very difficult to solve all problems at once. A large problem is best solved by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable problems—just like a large computer program is best written by breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces.
The third step starts with another brainstorming process—this time coming up with as many solutions to the underlying problem as we could. Then once again we narrowed it down to the 20 best solutions. For example: “Schools will offer continuing education courses; some seniors can teach as well as learn. This will get them learning new things and encourage socializing."
You might be saying to yourself that this isn't rocket science so far. But the fourth step was a bit of an epiphany for me. How do you decide which solution is best? You rate all the solutions according to objective criteria. So the fourth step is developing five criteria for judging the solutions. For example: “Which solution would pertain to the highest number of seniors?” Or: “Which solution would produce the most psychological benefits?"
The fifth step is, for each of your five criteria, ranking the 10 most promising solutions in order from 1 (poorest) to 10 (best). For example, the “continuing education” solution might receive a score of 6 on the “highest number of seniors” criterion, whereas a “silver pages for phone books” solution might receive a score of 10. Then we added up the scores to determine which solution was best. What if the chosen solution doesn't seem like the best one? Then there's something wrong with the criteria, or there's something wrong with the ranking, or we're confusing the best solution with the favourite solution.
The sixth step is writing a description of the best solution. Who's going to do it, where, when, and why? For example: “Our best solution is to encourage people in the community and the elderly to begin self-help groups for seniors. This solution would create an opportunity for seniors suffering psychological strain to gain support, and get help with their problems. As well, the groups would encourage seniors to socialize thus eliminating feelings of isolation. Stemming from the groups would be friendships and growth together as a community. The group would most importantly allow individual seniors to discuss and solve their psychological problems. The groups would cost little to start and once running, they would be totally self-sufficient as meetings would take place in members’ homes. Thus it will not rely on any government money. Obstacles they encounter can be solved usually by a vote on what to do."
I won't explain how the whole contest was evaluated, but the best solution (i.e., the sixth step) was evaluated according to relevance, effectiveness, impact, and humaneness. Things that we should definitely be concerned about if we're solving an important problem.
At events where teams got together a seventh step was added: a five-minute presentation to persuade people that your solution is the best. The art of persuasion is important too—if you have a solution to a problem and you can't persuade people of its merits, you're not going to get very far.
For more information, the Future Problem Solving web site is at www.fpsp.org/.
Thanks to my fellow Future Problem Solving group members and our coach, Betty Mullin, who were at St. Marys DCVI.
Belated thanks for my last editorial to Professors John Beatty and Arnie Dyck at the University of Waterloo.
Dave Switzer recently read the novels Burndive by Karin Lowachee, which was brilliant; and The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, which was startlingly bad. He also reread The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which might be the funniest thing he's ever read. He recently saw the movies The Triplets of Belleville, which was stunning; Shadow of the Vampire, which was surprisingly boring; and The Birdcage, which was hilarious.
Cover artist Britt Martin, a Michigan resident, is known nationally for his fantasy artwork, innovative ink drawings and comic book colorings which are considered by many critics as eye-catching and very creative. Britt has been involved in the professional art world for more than six years. The individual who has most influenced Britt's work is art icon Frank Frazetta. He also admires the work of Alphonse Mucha, Leonardo Da Vinci and Monet. Look for Britt Martin's work on his web site at www.brittmartin.com. You can also e-mail Britt about his work at contact@brittmartin.com.
People doing the best they can often get it wrong, and all you can do afterward is try to ameliorate the damage and avoid the same mistakes in the future. Good people aren't good because they never cause harm to others. They're good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have.
—Orson Scott Card, Preface to Rebekah
Galvezton, Texian Republic, May 10th, 1961
Algernon Black-Smith glanced back at the hissing scream of a pressure relief valve to see a great steam ram out of control. Eighteen feet high, twelve feet wide, with burnished copper eagles in relief across the steel airstreamed prow, the vehicle smashed across the electro-guide barrier in the center of the street and rolled toward him with the inevitability of Manifest Destiny.
Scattering wogs like ninepins, Algernon dashed for an open door. He looked behind him as he ran to see the steering bogies of the steam ram twist toward him—someone was trying to kill him!—but the mechanism's momentum was too great. Spewing sparks off the cobbles of Mechanic Street, the ram toppled onto its right side as it swung toward him, accompanied by the screams of terrified pedestrians and the stench of burning brakes. Algernon stopped in the doorway, horrified yet fascinated, as the huge machine surrendered to Sir Isaac's immutable laws and rolled over the Galvezton foot traffic. Two Papist nuns were caught for a moment, their red faces shrieking within their white wimples, before the careening ram ground them to sludge between the cobbles.
The ram continued to roll, its back end describing an arc with a radius as long as the engine's forty or so feet. Horses, mules, men and women, all fell before the mighty wall of metal. White gas lamps lining the electro-way exploded as the sliding ram snapped their poles and gutted their plumbing. It came to rest, frame out, against the block of buildings in which Algernon sheltered. A cloud of damp, heavy dust settled over the entire scene.
Appalled at the carnage, and what was intended to be his starring role therein, Algernon reached up to touch the fresnel lens of the steam ram's vast headlamp, a cyclopean orb vacant of reason.
The warm glass stung his fingertips, bringing Algernon back to himself. Simple prudence and good tradecraft alike dictated a swift retreat from a ruptured boiler of that size. As Algernon pushed his way through screaming wogs toward the back of a ragged, stinking little chop house, he wondered which of his friends or enemies wanted to kill him in such a messy, public way. Behind him, escaping steam screeched in a steadily rising wail.
“Mr. Black-Smith, the Consul-General will see you now.” The butler, an Iberian almost as well comported as an honest Englishman, bowed. The man smelled of barley water.
Algernon followed him along marble-tiled halls to a large set of doors, gilded with an inlaid hagiography of precious gems. Her Imperial Majesty's Consulate-General in Galvezton was located in the Bishop's Palace, that worthy having been summarily invited some years earlier by the Royal Marines to remove himself to other quarters. The business was a continuing minor scandal in Mexico City and Rome, but the dignity of the British Empire had been at stake, Galvezton being the largest port in the eastern Americas. It apparently pleased the current Consul-General to retain much of the Papist décor of the place. The hushed quiet and elaborate artwork was a startling contrast to the chaos of yesterday's events.
The butler swung open one door and announced Algernon. “Mr. Algernon Black-Smith, British subject, a gentleman, bachelor of arts of Balliol College, Oxford, master of laws of the Sorbonne, in Her Imperial Majesty's service without portfolio, paying a courtesy call."
“Eh,” grunted the Consul-General. “Come in."
Algernon stepped into the office. The sun glowed through tall stained glass windows in all the colors Spanish art could produce. The thick walls of the Bishop's Palace showed in the depth of the window wells. The room had that strangely gentle scent of paper rot that one seemed to find only in old mansions.
The Consul-General, Lord Quinnipiac, was a rough-featured man with blue marbled eyes set in a classically aristocratic horsey face. The man had every advantage of breeding and position Algernon so painfully lacked, and so Algernon regarded Quinnipiac with an automatic resentment.
Quinnipiac sat at a scarred worktable, a small mechanism spread before him in pieces. “Ironman,” the Consul-General said, renewing his examination of the pieces on the tabletop. Algernon hated that nickname with a passion, but it had followed him from Public School through university and into the Queen's service.
“Sir, the world is broad and wide.” It was the opening line of the most ordinary secret recognition phrase used by his branch of Her Imperial Majesty's service.
“One should have stout men by one's side,” replied Lord Quinnipiac. That was the most common response. He looked back up from his mechanology project with a toothy smile. “Welcome to my humble abode here in the cloaca of the Texian Republic."
“Sir.” Algernon stood at respectful attention. He was newly assigned to Galvezton as Facilitator-in-place for the Confidential Office. The Consul-General was not within Algernon's chain of command, but in every other way that counted, the man stood above Algernon in Her Imperial Majesty's service, and probably always would. If nothing else, he had a claim on Algernon's time and attention by virtue of his office.
Lord Quinnipiac waved the valve cap of a hydraulic pressure line at a copy of the Galvezton Daily News resting on one end of his worktable. “Some damned fool destroyed a valuable steam ram downtown yesterday. Fennian scum, I'll wager, stirring up trouble for the old sod once again. No respect for property. Fecking white wogs, those Irish."
“What sort of ram?” asked Algernon, avoiding the Irish Question. What was Lord Quinnipiac telling him, summoning him to the Bishop's Palace just to bring this up? In Algernon's imagination burnished copper eagles screamed with the sound of escaping steam.
Lord Quinnipiac put down the pressure line and picked up the newspaper, shaking it out to study the article. “Ah. No great loss. Colonial make. Olds-Edison Carg-O-Master VI, it would seem.” He laughed. “Our Texian friends never seem to tire of buying inferior mechanology for political reasons. If I ruled only three hundred sea miles from the homeport of the French Caribbean Fleet, I would damned well ensure I had the best British manufacture in every essential application."
Algernon wanted to leave the subject of the steam ram, but his attempted murder had the fascination of an old bruise. Why the deuce was Quinnipiac going on about it? “How was the engine destroyed? Surely not by happenstance."
Without referring to the paper, Quinnipiac looked Algernon in the eye. “The ram jumped the electro-guide, rolled over and slid across Mechanic Street. Shoved up against a building, then the main boiler blew."
He does know, thought Algernon. He had something to do with it, somehow. But why? “Anyone hurt?"
“No sign of the engineer. Some wogs died, but no one of significance."
So we are pretending it wasn't about me. “I presume the newspaper gives a cause for this accident."
The Consul-General's marbled blue eyes peered out of his long, wind-reddened face as he studied Algernon. “No, Mr. Black-Smith, it offers no explanation. Do you have a theory?"
“No, sir.” He didn't dare express his personal interest in the problem. Let Quinnipiac think him a fool.
“Very well then.” Lord Quinnipiac shrugged, tossing the paper to the floor. “As it happens, I would like you to go to San Antonio de Bexar."
San Antonio de Bexar was the capital of the Texian Republic and seat of the Roman Catholic Church in the Americas. An uneasy relationship at best, Algernon knew. And perfectly well staffed with his colleagues from the Confidential Office. “Sir?"
“The Arch-Bishop and the Mexican throne have conspired to steal certain of Her Imperial Majesty's privy secrets. They have concealed it in Texian territory in hopes of throwing us off the scent. This is being handled through my office for reasons of, ah ... confidentiality.” Quinnipiac actually winked at him.
Algernon nodded slowly. The Consul-General was playing an odd game, verbal orders outside the chain of command, no briefing books, no bona fides from Algernon's own superiors in the Confidential Office. This stank of high politics.
Quinnipiac continued. “The problems in Boston and London have been dealt with, and we are looking into diplomatic leaks in Her Imperial Majesty's High Commission in San Antonio de Bexar, but I need someone trustworthy to recover what he can of the documentation."
“I see,” said Algernon, who didn't. The steam ram's “accident” had to be connected with this affair. The Consul-General didn't have the right to order Algernon on this wild goose chase, but the other man certainly had the right to ask him to pursue it. And it would give Algernon a chance to find out why he'd been so publicly attacked. “Very well, sir, I shall depart forthwith."
“Excellent. I will send a pneumat-o-graph informing your superiors that you have graciously taken the assignment at my request. You may draw whatever funds you require from my bursar."
The Consul-General returned his attention to the project on the table. Algernon watched him slide cylinders and valves together for a few moments before speaking again. “Sir?"
Lord Quinnipiac looked up, annoyance flashing in his marbled eyes. “You have your orders."
“What have they stolen? For what am I looking?"
“That's an Official Secret, my boy. Afraid I can't tell you. But you'll know it when you see it. There can't be too many of Her Imperial Majesty's Crown Privy Report binders laying about in San Antonio de Bexar."
“Thank you, sir.” Algernon bowed, turned to leave. As he approached the double doors, there was a sharp crackle from behind him, then a whoosh as something whined past his shoulder to shatter against the upper panel of the left hand door. Chips of wood and shards of gem inlay burst into the air. Algernon shielded his eyes with a forearm, then turned back to the Consul-General.
Lord Quinnipiac held the smallest pistol Algernon had ever seen, the hydraulic pressure line clipped to the butt of its grip. The room now reeked of machine oil. “Watch yourself, boy.” The Consul-General's expression was flat, devoid of the humor in his voice. “Texas is a dangerous place."
The express train from Galvezton to San Antonio de Bexar passed without stopping through a few small towns, some Anglo-Texian, some Mexican wog, some native wog. Mostly it passed through countless miles of Texas coastal swamp that eventually transitioned to blackland prairie. To Algernon's eye, the landscape had merely exchanged one sullen, grassy aspect for another.
The Texians had not yet constructed the latest generation of ordinator-controlled pneumatic-vacuum underground railroads that were now common in Europe, so the express only went about eighty miles per hour on surface rails. A zeppelin would have been far more comfortable, but the schedule was inconvenient. Algernon used the hours in his private compartment to wonder who had tried to kill him, and what role Quinnipiac might have played. By God, thought Algernon, nobody would play him the patsy.
It had to be someone connected with the missing Crown Privy Report binder in San Antonio de Bexar. Even if Quinnipiac wasn't playing him straight, it was unlikely the Consul-General would have arranged such a public death. In any case, Quinnipiac certainly knew all about the steam ram “accident.” Algernon wondered how accidental Quinnipiac's hydraulic pistol discharge had been. A warning, certainly, not an attempt on his life.
Algernon would never be free of highborn idiots like Quinnipiac interfering with his career. Algernon was the first and only son of a bourgeois family in Baltimore, that self-contradictory capital-in-exile of British Papism. His parents’ aspirations had sent him to Public School in New England and on to Oxford, while sending them—eventually—to the poorhouse, much to his great disgrace. Algernon would never live down his middle birth no matter how far he moved upward along the fringes of power.
And move up he had. His first mission as one of Her Imperial Majesty's Confidential Office Facilitators had been a virtual death sentence, but Algernon had succeeded against long odds. On his own in the protectorate Buddhist Kingdom of Mongolia he had recovered the Crown of the Bogd Khan from Chinese-backed Kazakh insurgents and single-handedly negotiated the capitulation of Urga to the besieging Royal Marines.
That early and spectacular success had only led him to equally daunting assignments, first in Russian Aleskaya, then in German East Africa, until some higher-up in the Confidential Office realized he was doing too well too early in his career for one of his undistinguished birth. Since the fall of ‘59, Algernon had been shunted aside from serious work, relegated to messaging diplomatic bags via steam packet or zeppelin to obscure ports such as Windhoek, Goa and Vancouver. Being sent to Galvezton as Facilitator-in-place had, relatively speaking, seemed a plum job.
However shaky its legitimacy, this new assignment to San Antonio de Bexar would enable Algernon to create a success that could not be ignored. He could put paid to his anonymous enemy and count coup against the nobly-titled twits who ran his life.
Smiling, Algernon leaned his head against the window glass to feel the vibration of the train in the bones of his skull. The endless South Texas prairie outside his window offered no further counsel.
San Antonio de Bexar, Texian Republic, May 13th, 1961
The Texian capital straddled the San Antonio River. On the north bank stretched the vast complex of the Alamo, old ramified adobe parapets surrounded by soaring glass edifices. The Alamo complex held both the seat of Papist authority in the Western Hemisphere as well as the government of the secular Republic, an uneasy mixed use. The south bank was the secular city, great merchant banks and insurance companies, their twenty-storey granite skytowers connected by a Swiss funicular, the very latest in transportation mechanology. The Mexican High Commission dominated the south bank, facing off the Alamo with a frighteningly-misplaced gothic architecture in an echo of old conflicts, complete with an heroic statue of Santa Anna cast from the bronze of captured Texian cannons. Connecting pneumatic and funicular lines raveled all the buildings, as they did in many frontier cities. London at least had the grace to conceal hers beneath the street, thought Algernon.
Passing through the city center, the Galvezton Express rolled into the enclosed Estación de Alamo with a scream of brakes and shrieking steam. Algernon disembarked into the close, musky air of the platform, amid wogs shouting at one another in Spanish, French, Indio tongues and some few in English. Texian, Mexican and Church couriers stood by the sealed cars at the back of the train, dashing away one after another with their black-and-red confidential bags. Nowhere amid the chaos did Algernon see anyone from Her Imperial Majesty's government. Unsurprising, if Lord Quinnipiac truly feared leaks in the High Commission here. The Consul-General would scarcely have notified anyone of Algernon's arrival. The implication was clear—Algernon should not try to contact the local facilitator from the Confidential Office, not until he had learned more.
Which was fine. Algernon had always preferred to work on his own, without close supervision. Furthermore, in this case, he had a personal concern—finding his would-be murderer—that was better kept to himself.
He stood on the platform, considering his next move. Algernon had never been to San Antonio de Bexar. After a moment's thought Algernon tipped a waiting wog to take his steamer trunk to the Menger Hotel, just east of the Alamo complex. Valise in hand, he set out to find his counterparts in the Texian government.
“I need to speak to Mr. Browning, please."
Algernon faced a female secretary seated at a large desk beneath a Texian seal with the added motto “Cave Custodem.” The otherwise-empty antechamber smelled of dust and furniture oil. The outer door had proclaimed this the “Bureau of Antiquities". “Antiquities” was the not-very-secret code name the Texians used for their external intelligence service. Every Texian High Commission in the world had an antiquities attaché. Doors to each side of the desk were labeled “Exports” and “Imports."
“¿Como?"
God help me, thought Algernon, it was a white wog. He could have sworn the woman was European.
“Señor Browning, por favor.” His Spanish didn't go very far.
The woman shook her head.
“Really?” Algernon set his valise on her desk, opened the snaps. The female wog watched with interest.
There were good reasons women were generally not considered employable within the Empire, Algernon fumed. With the exception of Her Imperial Majesty, of course. Asking for Mr. Browning was supposed to gain admittance to the offices of friendly intelligence services, assuming one knew how to find them. Leaving again was another matter entirely.
Algernon removed a miniature daguerreograph from his bag. It was of the latest mechanology from the Lucas Works in England, quite small at perhaps six inches long with a narrow barrel. Holding the pistol grip, he sighted the daguerreograph at the secretary.
“¡No!” she yelled, diving under the desk.
The daguerreograph clicked as it impressed a daguerreotype of her empty chair. Algernon pulled out the plate and quickly inserted another. He aimed it at the seal this time, centering on the star in the middle.
A door hidden in the paneled wall behind the desk opened. “Come in, Mr. Black-Smith,” said a tall, dapper man with broad shoulders. Algernon was quite startled to see Istvan Szagy. Szagy was from a cadet branch of an important Austro-Hungarian noble family. He had been a year ahead of Algernon at Choate, and prefect in his house, as well as a role model for Algernon—between canings, buggeries and other assorted Public School torments. Algernon vaguely recalled that Szagy had planned to go into the import-export business. Szagy's English was, as always, flawless. “Mr. Browning will see you now."
Algernon impressed a daguerreotype of Istvan Szagy in the doorway before he lowered the miniature daguerreograph and followed him through.
“Was it necessary to threaten to shoot Carmella?"
“Was it necessary to have a wog at the front door who can't speak a Christian tongue?"
Istvan sat at a small desk topped with files, binders and a film reader. “Spanish is a Christian tongue, Algernon. I should make an effort not to forget that if I were spending time here."
Algernon studied Istvan Szagy. Ten years out of Choate Szagy still had his upperclassman's body, slim-waisted and pale. The familiar shock of blond hair showed no gray yet, but there were lines around the man's verdigris eyes. “What are you doing in Texian service, Istvan?"
“Roughly the same thing you are doing in Her Imperial Majesty's, I imagine.” Istvan's smile was tight-lipped. “And what brings you to the lovely San Antonio de Bexar?"
They were deep within the bowels of the Alamo, in a windowless office chilly from the thick inner walls of the fortress. Algernon was acutely aware that if he never walked out of the Bureau of Antiquities the world would be no wiser. “I've an errand to run for Lord Quinnipiac."
There. He had established his high-level sponsorship. A flimsy form of insurance, but stronger than none.
“One of Mr. Browning's errands?"
“Yes.” Algernon paused, then added, “As well as a little business of my own."
“Interesting. Well, you'd hardly start roaching on the Republic by walking in here first. And I can scarcely imagine you stirring up trouble for us on your own account."
“No. Assuming it wasn't you that stirred up trouble for me in the first place."
In the strained silence that followed, Algernon scanned Istvan's desk. It was the desk of a man tasked with too many objectives, overflowing with maps, messages and files, with rings of tea stains across entire archaeologies of paper. The initials “I.S.” appeared on so many of them that it obviously wasn't an office borrowed just to interview him. Furthermore, a bottle of Istvan's favorite brandy, well remembered by Algernon from their Public School days, rested on a sideboy.
“The Texian Republic has had no interest in you ... up to now,” Szagy finally said. “In the meantime, kindly stop reading my correspondence or I shall be forced to have you shot."
“Why don't you use an ordinator?” Algernon looked up to meet his host's eyes with a small smile. It was like being back at Choate all over again—the camaraderie, the threats. “All this filing, all this reading."
“Don't like having the damned things around. Besides, something that costly is beyond the scope of our legislative appropriation. Her Imperial Majesty may have all the money in the Bank of England, but us Texians live and die by cotton, cattle and crude oil. Most of which we sell to you."
“Perhaps I can help.” Algernon knew that two Mark VII Lovelace units were gathering dust in the cellars of the Bishop's Palace in Galvezton, having been replaced by newer devices straight out of the boffin works at Bletchley Park.
“And why would you do that?"
“The Mexican Throne has something belonging to Her Imperial Majesty. Lord Quinnipiac believes it to be concealed here in San Antonio de Bexar. Quid pro quo."
“And what would that ‘something’ be?"
“A Privy Report binder."
“Lord Quinnipiac wouldn't tell you what was in it, eh?” Istvan laughed. He pulled a sheet of type-impressed foolscap from under a smashed Krupp machine pistol cast in bronze. “Got a pneu directly from H.I.M.'s Consulate-General in Galvezton a few hours before you came. I decided to hold it back from my superiors to see what might turn up. You, in this case."
Istvan handed the pneumat-o-graph to Algernon, who read the hand transcription from a presumably cryptogrammed original.
::: HIM-CG-GALVZ TO REPTEX-ANTIQ-SADBXR ::: STOP : ALGERNON BLACK-SMITH A-K-A IRONMAN IN TRANS TO SADBXR : STOP : ARMED-DANGEROUS : STOP : APPREHEND IN STRICTEST SECRECY HOLD FOR H-I-M GOVT : STOP : ALL REQUIRED FORCE AUTHIZED : STOP : REPLY ONLY THIS OFC : STOP ::: LORD QUINN : HIM-CG-GALVZ :::
“Ridiculous,” said Algernon. “I am not armed.” His chest felt cold and tight. Clearly, it was Quinnipiac who had tried to have him killed. Why? Was the binder real, or some other plot afoot? “I see,” he muttered.
“No you don't, unless you're a damn sight smarter than I am, which I know from Choate that you aren't.” Istvan smiled, broader now, and produced a derringer from his desk drawer. “Oh, and, by the way, I place you under arrest in the name of the Republic of Texas."
Algernon carefully laid both hands flat on the front edge of Istvan's desk. “Very well. Now what?"
“Now we go for a short walk."
Algernon had taken more than a few people for “short walks” in his career. He knew what that usually meant. Algernon could smell the sudden, sharp odor of his own fear.
The Swiss-built funicular car lurched away from the Dillardo's building, home to the largest group of shops in the Republic. Algernon sat gripping his valise, staring out at the skytowers. The car was roughly the shape of a bullet, windowed all around with glass except for the automated mechanology enclosed within the roof-spine. It hung from cables strung in tandem with the pneumatic lines that drove the car. Despite the modernity of the design, the interior had the familiar public transit smell of old shoes and hydraulic fluid.
Istvan had cleared the car by the simple expedient of showing a fare inspector's badge. Now they were alone high above the ground, lurching from tower to tower on the long haul from Dillardo's to the Zoological Gardens east of the city. The derringer was no longer in evidence. Algernon wondered if Istvan planned to drop him onto the railroad tracks as they crossed.
“Even our best sound recorders do not work well up here,” said Istvan. “That was a treasonous statement I just made, by the way."
This was it, then. Algernon imagined the plunge from the funicular car, the scream he would be unable to bottle in, the wind whipping across his ears like the slaps of his childhood governess. “So what are we doing here?"
“Speaking in the most secrecy I can manage on the spur of the moment.” Istvan smiled, his natural bully's smile Algernon remembered so well from Choate. “Far away from unfriendly ears both Texian and Papist in that damned Alamo rat palace. There's a question I want to ask in privacy. Consider this, Ironman: why would Lord Quinnipiac send a pneu directly to the Bureau of Antiquities and not go through H.I.M.'s High Commission here in San Antonio de Bexar? Especially a pneu as sensitive as what appears to be a termination order for one of Her Imperial's more successful field agents?"
“Because the bastard wants to kill me!” Algernon shouted, pounding his fist against the glass wall of the car. This would be a stupid way to die, at Istvan's hands. He whirled, stalking down the length of the car, his frustration having finally gotten the better of him. “And I don't even know why. Quinnipiac told me he suspects corruption here, complicity in the matter of the missing Privy Report. But someone tried to kill me in Galvezton two days ago. Quinnipiac made it clear he knew all about it before sending me on this snipe hunt. A steam ram jumped the electro-guides and nearly ran me down."
“No harm done, eh?” asked Istvan. “Maybe a few wogs got squashed?"
Leaning against two of the iron ribs of the car, Algernon stared down at a landscape of cottonwoods and pecans as the funicular lurched closer to the zoological gardens. It could have been him ground to paste between the cobbles, like the screaming nuns. But it hadn't been. “No, no harm, I suppose."
“No harm. They're just wogs,” said Istvan. “That's why I work here. Wogs are people too. Texas is a far cry from Budapest, London or Boston, but wogs are people here. Her Imperial Majesty has them snuffed out like candles at the first inconvenience. Suddenly, you're Quinnipiac's candle. How does it feel to be a white wog, Ironman?"
The car lurched past another cable tower. Algernon began whispering to the glass. “I've used a Thompson gun to force askaris forward against German armor in Tanganyika. In 1955, I threw Kazakh women over the walls of Urga. I once drove an entire Inupiat village to overrun Russian artillery. We do what we must, Istvan, to maintain order in the world, and the supremacy of the British Crown. You may be right about the wogs, but regardless of that I have my sworn duty.” He stopped, gathering his words. Duty, thought Algernon. Duty, even in the face of attack by his superiors. Was this what he continued to struggle for? An early death for someone else's political convenience?
Algernon turned away from the window to face Istvan again. “I don't understand something. Lord Quinnipiac could have had me killed in Galvezton without difficulty. Why send me to you?"
Istvan nodded, as if he had been following the same line of thought. “I have reason to believe the stolen Privy Report is real, not a cover story. Perhaps he wants your death to contribute to whatever is momentous about that document. You would make excellent cover for a plot—a man of proven ability and ambition, resentfully believing he'd been denied advancement due to his station of birth."
“I have been denied advancement. I will overcome that handicap in time. That's the price I pay for being an Englishman.” He smiled toothsomely at Istvan. “There is no finer fate on God's earth. Now, let me ask you a treasonous question of my own. Do you know what is in the report?"
“With luck, we both will soon.” Istvan stood and opened the door of the funicular to the ringing of a safety bell. “We exit here."
They were still high above the ground.
Algernon was not afraid of falling, in the usual sense. He swam for sport, and had jumped from some stern cliffs while on seaside holidays. Istvan, though, had grabbed Algernon's arms and simply shoved him from the car, valise and all. As Algernon fell, he was pleased to realize he was not screaming. He was surprised to see Istvan leave the car to fall above him, pacing Algernon in his descent.
Istvan called out to Algernon, but his words were lost in the wind. Somehow, Istvan looked less alarmed than Algernon felt. Algernon twisted his body to see a quarry lake approaching very rapidly. He released his valise and tucked into a dive just before striking the water.
It was like being beaten with hammers. The flat slap of the water tore at every joint in his body even as he cleaved the surface. Algernon twisted, arcing out of his sharp drop to avoid what was doubtless a rocky bottom. His lungs felt collapsed by the impact, and all he could see was a murky green. Algernon had no idea where the surface was. His head ached from the impact with the water and he could not find his balance. His nose stung with the itch of water forced into his sinuses.
Algernon began to kick, just to establish direction and get himself out of the cloud of bubbles that had followed him into the water. He still couldn't tell where the surface was. His lungs stung while his mouth threatened to swell open and breathe in the entire lake. Red flashes of panic overwhelmed his murky vision of the world.
Something grabbed his ankle. Algernon tried to scream, caught himself in time, and kicked with his free foot. He was being pulled down, pulled under. His red flashes were going to black. Algernon knew he was about to drown as a hand caught his collar and pulled him to the surface.
“Good God, man!” Treading water, Istvan shook Algernon's collar. “You lettered in aquatics at Choate. Keep your head next time!"
Algernon coughed, then spat, choking on lake water and gratitude. Following Istvan's lead, he swam toward one of the bounding cliffs.
They shook off the worst of the lake water inside a pocket cave at the waterline of one of the quarry walls. Somehow Istvan had also saved Algernon's valise, though it was soaked. His papers were certainly ruined. Perhaps the daguerreograph could be salvaged.
“What was the purpose of that?” Algernon asked. The plunge and his subsequent soaking had driven the temper right out of him, restoring Algernon to his rightful analytical perspective.
Istvan took off one shoe, dumping water and sludge. “I don't do it very often, for reasons that should be clear. Not to mention it would eventually be noticed. But you have disappeared."
“From whom? Certainly not you."
“Mexicans. Papists. British. Perhaps even elements of my own government.” Istvan took off his other shoe. “Whoever wants you dead. I fear what may happen if the Republic is implicated in this growing British scandal."
“You're going to a lot of trouble for me."
“I'm going to a lot of trouble for Texas. That it benefits a fellow Choate alum and a British gentleman is mere lagniappe."
“Thank you, nonetheless."
“Think nothing of it."
They rose, Algernon now holding his dripping valise. Istvan led him to the back of the cave where he opened a hidden door. A narrow corridor lit by a few white gas lamps trailed into a dim distance.
The Bureau of Antiquities had a large complex in the cave system just east of San Antonio de Bexar. Algernon was impressed at the effort to which the colonials had gone, although it was more understandable with European nobility such as Istvan on their staff.
As they walked along, Istvan explained that the cave complex had its own electrical dynamos and hydraulic pumps. Water was drawn from the quarry lake, while fuel and hydraulic pressure were brought in from city mains. What surprised Algernon was the degree and sophistication of the miniaturized mechanology all around him.
“Look,” said Istvan, leading them to an equipment room. He handed Algernon a sealed wooden box about the size of a loaf of bread. “It's a self-contained Stirling engine. It drives an electromagnetic emitter. A man could carry this inside a common valise or dispatch case and report his whereabouts and activities by wireless, from a distance of perhaps several hundred yards. This will bring our tradecraft into the twentieth century!"
“I've never see the like,” said Algernon.
“Of course not.” Istvan's smile was tight again. “It was designed and built by wog boffins on staff here."
“Wog boffins.” Algernon shook his head. What was the world coming to?
“And here...” Istvan picked up a pistol about the size of the one Lord Quinnipiac had fired at Algernon, but lacking a hose clipped to the butt of the grip. “We've been working on miniature high-pressure vessels for steam efficiency. That's produced some side benefits.” He chambered a round. “Super-compressed air. Not as efficient as ordinary gunpowder, but portable, unlike hydraulics, and much quieter. Perfectly fine for short work and doesn't show up to gunpowder-sniffing dogs."
Istvan fired the gun into the wooden cladding at the far wall of the underground room. There was a sharp thump as the splinters flew, but no echoing report whatsoever.
“I suppose you've got ordinators down here too,” said Algernon.
Istvan smiled his big smile again. “L'Argent Internationale, the best Paris will export. Two metric tons of fine-tuned Continental mechanology."
Algernon thought again of the Lovelaces stored down in Galvezton. They were a fraction of the capability of the Texians’ froggie L.A.I., but at a fraction of the size and cost as well. Her Imperial Majesty's ordinator boffins, whom the yobs called “stackers,” were combining small, cheap units to do the work of a bigloom like Istvan's L.A.I. “I thought you didn't have the budget for ordinators."
“In the office, on the congressional budget, no. Down here, on the President's privy budget, it's a different tale entirely. Furthermore, no prying eyes and ears here except our own.” Istvan laid the gas pistol back down on the table. “Enough. I believe I've made my point."
“The Texian Bureau of Antiquities is the equal of anything I've seen outside of England,” admitted Algernon, though it pained him to say it. And I am safe here, he thought.
Coward.
They left the equipment room.
In the briefing room where their walk ended, Algernon found his steamer trunk atop a conference table. The gaslights were wicked up to a brightness that rendered the brasswork on his trunk difficult to look at. The room was hot and close despite being enclosed in damp stone. A small, dark wog in a passable imitation of a Savile Row suit stood behind the trunk.
“Mr. Black-Smith,” said Istvan, “allow me to present Señor Browning of the Imperial Mexican Security Directorate."
“Call me Oswaldo,” said Señor Browning in a perfect Boston accent. He nodded his head slightly at Algernon. “Harvard, sir. Forgive me if I do not mention the year."
Istvan had gone on to Harvard as well. The old boy network would explain this unlikely cooperation between rivals. Almost as unlikely as Istvan's cooperation with him.
“My trunk,” said Algernon. “How did it get here?"
“Señor Browning and I often cooperate on matters of mutual interest,” replied Istvan. “He received a tip about your property and had it diverted by his agents in the railway baggage service."
Thus keeping Istvan's hands clean, Algernon thought. Istvan really was keeping a low profile on this affair.
“Would you care to open it?” asked Oswaldo. “Slowly, please."
Algernon found the keys inside his soaked valise. He inspected the trunk carefully. His hand-signs were missing—the small hairs he routinely trapped in the hinges, the aligning scratches on the brightwork where the locking tongue folded up. Algernon checked along the bottom edge for a small nick the trunk had acquired from shrapnel in Russian Aleskaya. The scars on his thigh twinged in sympathy at the thought, while the trunk's brass binding was smooth.
“This is not my trunk, gentlemen,” he said. “An excellent copy, but not mine."
Istvan folded his arms and leaned against the doorway. “Are you sure? It appears to have your tag on it, and the appropriate shipping labels."
“Wouldn't you know your own?” Algernon asked. “However, I will open it.” He inserted the key and turned it slowly. The lock clicked open, then the locking tongue popped out. Algernon flipped up the clasps. “Ready?"
Istvan and Oswaldo nodded.
He raised the lid. Inside was the small tray he used, with his shaving kit, shoe kit, and various personal possessions. Algernon inspected the tray with care. It appeared to be the tray from his original trunk. He lifted it out to reveal folded clothes.
After fully unpacking the trunk and laying the contents out on the conference table, Algernon did a quick inventory. “Curious. I am missing a pair of wool suit pants, two shirts and an excellent pair of bespoke shoes."
“The trunk,” said Oswaldo. “May I?"
Algernon looked at Istvan, who shrugged.
Oswaldo began to examine the trunk with painstaking care. He patted the lid, the sides, the bottom, then shifted the trunk in place so it rested on its back. “Do you routinely have a false bottom on your trunk, Mister Black-Smith?"
“No."
“You do now. Perhaps that is why some of your clothing is missing.” Oswaldo produced a bowie knife, at which Istvan seemed startled. “¿Con su permiso?” he asked, then immediately began to cut at the lining.
A Crown Privy Report binder tumbled out of the bottom of Algernon's trunk, the gold-tooled ‘E.R.’ plainly visible on the red leather cover.
Oswaldo smiled. “Someone is quite the humorist. Your Lord Quinnipiac, I assume."
As Algernon stared horrified at this evidence of his apparent treason, Istvan picked up the binder and opened it.
“It's blank,” the Texian agent said. He riffed through. “All the pages are blank."
The three of them sat for hours in the same briefing room, having long since exhausted small talk as their tea cooled. The trunk and all its contents had been removed for forensic analysis, while another Texian team worked on the Crown Privy Report binder itself. Istvan had refused to leave until they verified more details about the book. Oswaldo Browning remained as well, for the same reasons. The scent of the quarry lake intensified as Algernon's legs chafed in his damp trousers. Answers, he thought. We are approaching some answers.
Gröning, the lead forensic analyst, finally came in with a set of onionskin charts rolled up beneath his arms. The analyst was a classic Junker Prussian—riding boots, tight uniform jacket, arrogant expression. His rumpled white lab coat did little to soften his demeanor.
“Here is what we have found,” Gröning said, a Mitteleuropan accent harsh on his voice. He set the charts on the table. “Nothing in the trunk, nothing on the trunk, nothing in or on the clothes. The book, however, his pages are odd."
“How?” Algernon asked as all eyes in the room turned toward him.
“He consists of two hundred and fifty six pages of high-rag paper. This is a very fine grade of handmade paper, as one might expect for use by the Queen. However, the grain of the pages varies. Some are cut and bound long grain, some cross grain, and a few at odd angles. This is very unusual, largely for esthetic reasons, but also printing and manufacturing inefficiencies. Further, each page has differing and somewhat random watermarks covering an unusually large area of the paper."
“What does that mean?” asked Istvan.
“We have no idea.” Gröning patted the charts. “Here is a detail showing the grain orientation on each page. I have also included diagrams of the watermarks on the first ten pages."
After Gröning left, the three of them pored over the analyst's diagrams. “Could the differing grain be a cryptogram?” asked Algernon. He was a field man, this was boffin work, but someone had placed his life at stake against this mystery.
Quinnipiac, no doubt.
Oswaldo shook his head. “No. There are only two hundred fifty six examples of perhaps six distinct paper types—long grain, short grain and several angled grain variations. It would be dramatically inefficient to have produced this entire book for such small a cryptogrammatic base. Not enough information could be embedded."
The chart copies of the binder page watermarks were no more revealing. They were a collection of erratic squiggles that wandered across the pages. On any given page they had an apparent baseline, but the baselines varied their angle on each of the first ten pages.
“Look,” said Algernon. “Some of them have distinct boundaries. Page seven, for example. You could lay a straight edge across here and none of the squiggles would extend past it."
The copies of the watermarks were on the same onionskin as the charts of the book layout. Oswaldo tore page seven off, about the size of a calling card, and held it up to the light. “Here,” he said handing it to Algernon, “see what you make of it."
Algernon held it up to the light, turned it back and forth. The squiggles looked familiar. He picked up the chart with the other pages, and laid the squiggles over each page one by one, holding the combined papers up to the bright gaslights.
“Aha...” Algernon tore out page one, a long grain page, and held it up to the light against page four, the next long grain page. He twisted them together. “If you take two succeeding pages with the same grain and align the watermarks along their respective baselines instead of the page's baseline, you get ... Greek. There is a message, written in the Greek alphabet, broken up in the watermarks.” He peered at the words. “I can't make sense of it, but this is a hasty hand copy. If we did this same thing to the original pages, we'd get the Greek letters copied down correctly."
“Thank you, Algernon,” said Istvan. “I have a perfectly competent cryptogrammatics section. I'll pull them onto this."
Once the Greek letters were deciphered, they turned out to be in cryptogrammatic groups that corresponded to a standard Imperial British series. Algernon spent his time in the Texian caverns bothering the cryptogrammarians at their work and playing with what toys the Texians would allow him to touch in the equipment rooms, always shadowed by one of several large, sulking minders. His minders were wogs of various sorts, a none-too-subtle message from Istvan that Algernon couldn't quite bring himself to resent. He disliked the forced inaction, but consoled himself with the thought that they were making progress in the mystery of the binder and, therefore, the attempt on his life.
Istvan came back three days later, finding Algernon at lunch in the refectory. He dismissed Algernon's current minder. Algernon knew something had happened with the binders—there was excitement in the caves that morning, whispered conversations that broke off at his approach—but he had no idea what it meant yet.
“They've cracked it,” said Istvan, sitting down across the table.
Algernon picked at some stewed beef tips that smelled much better than they looked. That the Texians could crack an Imperial code was not actually good news, but he was still glad to learn something. “What have the boffins found?"
“Engineering data, apparently."
“Engineering data?"
Istvan had a lab report in his hand. He offered it to Algernon. “Here, what do you make of this?"
Algernon looked at the report, flipping through the pages. “It appears to be an abstract describing the theory and practice of finely-wrought mechanology, smaller than the eye can see. Miniature steam engines, other machines using fluidic and mechanic principles, that might perform work in microscale. My God...” He put the report down. This was the sort of thing people were killed for, without a second thought. “How did this ever leave London?"
“And wind up in a colonial town like San Antonio de Bexar?” Istvan had his tight smile again. “We were hoping you might know."
“I didn't bring it!"
“One of our theories is that you and Lord Quinnipiac set us up to crack the secret of the book for you, along with the codes, so you could exploit the information to your own mutual ends. As traitors to the Crown, presumably. I don't happen to believe that, but the President favors the idea."
“The President?"
“We could go to war with the British Empire over your little red book, Algernon. This is the greatest invention since the steam engine, perhaps since gunpowder. Why would Lord Quinnipiac have set you up with it?"
“He couldn't have wanted me to break the cryptogram,” said Algernon. “Especially not with your help, begging your pardon. That doesn't make sense. My guess is that he had previously misappropriated the Crown Privy Report binder and wanted it to come back in his hands legitimately."
“If we had picked you up as asked and returned you, he could have ‘discovered’ it in your trunk,” Istvan pointed out. “Dead or alive."
Algernon's chest felt cold and tight again. “What have you said to him about me?"
“That we're holding you pending an internal investigation."
“True enough.” Algernon shook his head. “Miniaturized mechanology. Think of the implications for our tradecraft."
“Medicine,” replied Istvan promptly. “Ordinational science. Communications. All of it. The betterment of the human condition."
“Whoever owns this will own the world,” whispered Algernon. Right now, that was Istvan.
“Who do you suppose it was that did the original research?"
Algernon considered that. “Last year there was a firebombing at a research consortium in Geneva. They were said to be building long-range rockets. It's no great secret that the Confidential Office has committed attacks like that before—preventative scientific intelligence."
“So some of your lads may have destroyed the lab where this miniature mechanology was being developed."
Algernon nodded, drumming his fingers on the lab binder. “Otherwise, why wouldn't they already be out with this? If it already exists, it couldn't be hidden for long. These notes are only summary of a well-researched mechanology. Enough to reproduce the basic work, but the supporting detail is certainly not all here. Good God, the patents alone would fill shelves."
“So you believe Lord Quinnipiac wants this for his own?"
Algernon thought back to the small hydraulic pistol in the Consul-General's hand, and the fascination with mechanology that hobby bespoke. “Yes. It has to be him. No one else could have arranged everything that has happened. He set up the steam ram accident in Galvezton—had it been successful, he could have ‘discovered’ the binder in my personal effects, and returned it with no one the wiser as to whether he had already copied the research.
“Two accidents in succession would have been too obvious, so he sent me off to you on a wild goose chase. If I had somehow succeeded in recovering the book on my own, he would have gotten it back from me. If I failed, he would have gotten the book from you, simply from your efforts to avoid an international incident. My arrest as a traitor, or even my death, would have caused little comment in Boston or London. Then, set up his own boffin works and...” Algernon trailed off. What if Quinnipiac had already set up his works? “It must have seemed failure-proof to him."
What if I set up my own works?
“I will try to convince our President of your version of the story. In the meantime, think of a way you and I can deal with Lord Quinnipiac without creating a casus belli between our nations."
San Luis Pass, Texian Republic, May 17th, 1961
The zeppelin RTS Mirabeau Lamar cruised eastward from San Antonio de Bexar toward Galvezton. Algernon looked down at the scrubby South Texas landscape, an echo of his train trip the previous week.
They were using the Presidential zeppelin, a top-of-the-line luxury cruiser from Zeppelin Werk GmbH in Greater Germany, and it was appointed accordingly. Texian cedar paneled the walls, giving the cabins inside the gondola a frontier look, along with a gentle tang dissonant with the high-mechanology transport. Puma and wolf skin rugs dominated the lounge, topped by huge chairs made from cattle and deer horns. The galley seemed capable of producing only inedible fried foods or a terrifying chili. The entire airship stank of refried beans, a food for which Algernon had never cared.
He longed for a good boiled English dinner.
Istvan was dressed as a papist cleric, pretending to be on the staff of the Papal Nuncio to the Texian Republic. Lord Quinnipiac expected to meet them at San Luis Pass, the channel on the southwestern end of Galvezton Island. A lighthouse sat on the lonely windswept point, marking this distant entrance to Galvezton Bay. Istvan had sent pneus explaining the Nuncio's alleged offer to broker the handoff of the English traitor.
Algernon smiled. He would have vengeance on Quinnipiac for his assaults, and put paid to the problem of the stolen Privy Report at the same time.
As the open water of Galvezton Bay began to slide past below the belly of the zeppelin, Istvan patted Algernon on the shoulder. “We are almost here."
“And you believe that Lord Quinnipiac will allow himself to be separated from his Royal Marines?"
“We must try,” said Istvan. “His greed will work for us."
Algernon watched the red brick lighthouse come into view. San Luis Pass was a narrow neck of water between two sand spits. The lighthouse stood on the Galvezton Island side of the pass, presiding over little more than chopping waves and wheeling gulls. Algernon spotted a roseate spoonbill following the surf line, pink plumage visible against the greenish white roil of the Gulf of Mexico.
At the base of the lighthouse a sand-wheeled steam ram was parked, puffing desultory smoke from its stacks. It had two sand-wheeled cars hitched behind it, and a squad of Royal Marines was deployed around it in their green battledress. Lord Quinnipiac has come expecting a fight, thought Algernon. We shall give it to him, but not what he planned for.
The zeppelin came about to beat against the sea breeze toward the lighthouse. Algernon heard the great engines straining. Shouted commands accompanied the release of the field mooring line from its nose cowling. The marines on the ground below scrambled to retrieve the line, then worked to secure it to the bulk of the steam ram. The zeppelin's captain kept the engines running at open throttle to fight the wind and keep strain off the mooring line.
“There's Quinnipiac,” said Istvan, pointing to a figure in black tails that climbed out of the second car. “I'll go wave him up."
The captain drove the zeppelin, shuddering in the wind, downward toward the lighthouse until their altitude was perhaps a hundred feet. Algernon could hear Istvan at the hatch, shouting. He could no longer see the Royal Marines or Lord Quinnipiac directly below him. The zeppelin bobbed in the wind. The chuffing click of a winch below decks was surely the crew winding Lord Quinnipiac up in a bosun's chair.
“So...” Lord Quinnipiac paced the deck, heedless of the animal skins beneath his feet. “Mr. Black-Smith, you are being returned to us."
Istvan kept his head down, hands folded. Algernon noticed Istvan was working his rosary. Keeping his own hands behind his back as if bound, Algernon said nothing.
Lord Quinnipiac addressed Istvan. “I understand Her Imperial Majesty's, ah, item, is being returned with the traitor?"
Istvan nodded, opening the door behind him and stepping backward. Algernon shifted his hands behind his back, making sure his finger was on the trigger.
Istvan walked back in the room with the Crown Privy Report binder. As he moved to hand it to Lord Quinnipiac, Istvan slipped and dropped the binder on the floor between them.
“Gods, man, have a care,” said Quinnipiac as he knelt to pick up the red leather book. Istvan bent from the waist to reach down and grabbed the book at the same time. Algernon brought the miniature daguerreograph up from behind his back and pressed a daguerreotype of Lord Quinnipiac, kneeling in front of a Papist official in full regalia, transferring control of a Crown Privy Report binder.
At the sound of the daguerreograph's click, Quinnipiac looked up at Algernon. “Damn your eyes!” the Consul-General swore as he dropped the book again to lunge for Algernon. Istvan tackled him from behind in best Choate rugby fashion.
Algernon kicked Quinnipiac in the side of the head in order to accelerate their discussion. He got down on the floor and stared into Quinnipiac's marbled blue eyes. “Listen, sir. We've got a daguerreotype of you kneeling to a Papist with Crown secrets in your hand. I'll make sure that image is never released if you'll drop this business about me stealing the Crown Privy Report binder. I'll courier it to the Viceroy in Boston, give you the credit for recovery, and we'll all look good.
“Or you can try to ruin me while I succeed in ruining you.” He and Istvan were banking on Quinnipiac's self-interest.
Quinnipiac strained against Istvan's hold on him. “And let you have what's in that thing? Are you mad?"
“The damned thing is a blank book and you know it,” snapped Algernon, hoping the Consul-General would take that bait in the distraction of the moment. “I'll never know why you made such a fuss, but by God sir you shan't murder me for empty pages."
Quinnipiac suddenly relaxed, a small smile stealing across his face before he began to chuckle. “Well, lad, you know just looking at one of those books is treason, to which you've now admitted."
With an immense sense of relief, Algernon removed the plate from the daguerreograph. He placed it in the inside pocket of his morning coat. “You have admitted the same, sir. We can both fall or prosper on your word here."
“The game is done, then.” Quinnipiac glared up at Istvan. “Let me up, man. You're no more a Papist than I am."
“Benedice te,” said Istvan, pulling Quinnipiac to his feet with an armlock.
Algernon retreated to the galley to avoid further tempting the Consul-General as Istvan continued to whisper quiet threats. Honor had been satisfied, and the problem of the binder solved, with his skin still whole. Algernon knew he should be pleased.
“Naturally you have a copy of everything,” said Algernon later.
Istvan smiled his broad smile. “Naturally I can't tell you that."
“They'll know the book's been tampered with."
Istvan shrugged. “You recovered it, you're a hero. We've sent official commendations for you via pneu to the High Commissioner in San Antonio de Bexar and to your Viceroy in Boston. That should cause some confusion if Quinnipiac gets snarky clever in his reporting."
What if Quinnipiac has a secret boffin works already set up, Algernon wanted to ask, working on this miniature mechanology. He didn't dare say that—he knew Istvan had the same thought, Istvan knew Algernon did, but if they kept silent about it, they could part friends.
Algernon watched the Texas countryside fall away. The zeppelin headed for Nouveau Orleans, capital of French America. He would report to the Consulate-General there, fairly safe from Quinnipiac's interference, and be sent on to Boston, and maybe even London, as a hero.
“We could keep it for ourselves,” he whispered. Set up our own works.
“No,” said Istvan. “Duty to the Crown, old friend. If you ran off empire-building with that stuff, you'd just be another white wog."
Algernon patted the red leather book. “Then it's a damned good thing God made me an Englishman."
Istvan made the sign of the cross. “Benedice te,” he said.
I will be back, Algernon thought, hunting Quinnipiac's secrets, and maybe Istvan's as well. I will be back. “Thank you, Istvan. I may need your blessings."
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, US with his family and their books. In 2004 his fiction appears in numerous markets including Asimov's, Leviathan 4 and Realms of Fantasy. His collection Greetings From Lake Wu is a Locus Recommended book for 2003. Jay can be reached via his Web site at www.jlake.com/.
CD: Could you tell us about your experience with the Warner First Novel Contest?
KL: A friend of mine forwarded me the information when I was working on Warchild—I was maybe half way through. He said, “This might be something that you want to submit to.” I'd known about the first contest and I'd known that Nalo Hopkinson won the first one. So I said, “OK.” And I worked to finish the book for that deadline, which was good. I submitted it and then I tried to forget about it. They asked for the rest of the manuscript, and I was hearing through the grapevine at conventions that it was moving up the ladder. It was down to the last 15, last 10, last 5, and then when I was working up north I got a call from Betsy Mitchell about it being considered as a winner. A month later I found out that I won. The contest was cool because you don't have to wait as long as you normally do when you submit to publishers, because it was in a fixed amount of time that they said they'd get back to you along the way. I had to submit by the end of June and by December I knew that I'd won. So my novel wasn't sitting somewhere at a publisher for a year or more, which is the norm.
CD: What prompted you to start writing Warchild?
KL: I was working on a fantasy, a completely different type of novel. It stalled around page one hundred and something. The idea for Warchild had been one that was kicking around in my head for a long time, and these characters. I thought the book would be from a completely different point of view, actually, not Jos's. I literally woke up one morning with the second person point of view in my head, from his point of view. When I shelved the fantasy and started working on SF I thought I was going to tell a completely different type of story. I was trying to plot this other story, and I realized that the story actually started with this character in this situation. To tell what I wanted to tell had to start with him, and maybe he was working at the back of my brain because I woke up with the first line of the book. Then I sat down one day and out came the first nine pages or so. And then from that I just kept going with it, because I wanted to find out what his experience was. And developed the idea through the character.
CD: Are there any authors you'd say are influences on your writing?
KL: Yes. No surprise, C. J. Cherryh. Mainly because in my formative years when I started to take writing seriously in the sense that I thought I want to publish—it became something I wanted to do as opposed to something I was just doing. I started reading her books in high school, and Cyteen was one of the first books of hers that I read—and that book just so blew me away. The way that she handled everything, the politics and the characters and the science. I started devouring her books—of course, she has many, many books.
When I discovered Maureen McHugh, she really influenced me. In the point of view—the way that she treats point of view and character. The way that she distills character, and her worlds, and the way that she distills language to evoke character. China Mountain Zhang—I read that and read that book because I was so blown away by it. Her other works too. When I was developing my head space as a writer those two were definitely there. Some fantasy writers as well that I love like Guy Kay, Katherine Kerr, Tad Williams, writers like that.
There are books that I remember that turned my head, in the sense that they set me in a different perspective, getting me into more of a writerly mind. Cyteen was one, China Mountain Zhang was another, and Tigana. At the point in my life that I was as a person and as a writer, those books picked me up by the scruff of the neck and I sat up. Little epiphanies went off—this is what they're doing with voice, this is what they're doing with story, this is what they're doing writing a single book epic. In a literature of lots of sequels, Tigana really blew me away because it was this encapsulated story that was so rich.
When I was younger it was The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. If any book put it in my mind that I would want to do this as a career it was that one. It was in grade 5 or 6 that I read that book. I loved the characters, I loved the story. It's a social commentary. These characters from the wrong side of the tracks—it's all about family and loyalty and friendship. At the time it was considered gritty—she was writing about gangs and that kind of thing. The Narnia Chronicles, Watership Down. You can track my growth as a writer through those books.
CD: Your first two books seem to deal with stories of war and their effect on young people. Was that the way you wanted things to go, or the story that you found yourself telling?
KL: A little bit of both, they kind of informed each other. When I found that I was telling the story about this boy I wanted to be true to the story, true to the character in the sense that I didn't want to flinch from the realities. I started doing research and reading about what young people go through who are in these situations. And finding a real passion to want to show that, and not to gloss it over and just have him triumphant or to have him be this soldier. I wanted to write a military novel about a broken character—he stays broken. The flashpoint of his life, where the book starts, the thing that changes his life—how he reacts and everything he experiences after that is influenced by this moment in time. He never casts it off.
Everyone writes books for different reasons. For me, it's the psychoanalysis of the character. For me then to stay true to that, I don't want to show that he just gets over it by the end of the book. The books are almost like a prologue and when the reader's done—from the feedback I get from readers—they then write the rest of it. The book takes the character up to the point of change, and instead of showing how he reacts to this world and other people after that point of change it stops at that point. The point of change is not one thing, his coming to realize his place—it's a slow incremental process. I really wanted it to be something that builds, and the character doesn't even realize himself that he's changing. Because we don't, really, until years down the road. Since I'm dealing with youth from 8 to 17 he doesn't realize he's going through these changes, he doesn't realize how he's being affected. He's still just doing his thing. From the psychological point of view I got very passionate about that. I want to depict characters who react to things in a realistic way, like how we would. So if something traumatic happens in their life they don't just get over it. It's something that they live with. Sometimes they think of it more than others. They have to work through it, but they'll probably never completely work through it. I hope that at the end of the books you get the sense that they'll be able to cope with it better but they're not necessarily triumphant over it. I don't want to write those kinds of stories. Also to deal with more of the subtleties of pressures like that, of a war.
In the second book the character was on the outside of that. I very purposely took the point of view of someone who's completely not like Jos. I wanted to do somebody who is more like us, in the sense that their only relationship to the war is through the media. It's something that happens to other people, and you have a sense of upset about it because you realize it's upsetting, but at the same time you have no real connection to it because you're not in it. So his trauma is a bit more subtle, and also I was dealing with a depressed character. I read a lot of reviews where they say he's a brat, and it's true that he is, but I very consciously had that as a facade because he is a depressed person and the way that he interacts with the world is as a depressed person. If you are a depressed person, a lot of his reactions make a lot of sense—his head space makes a lot of sense in that context.
I access my books through the psychological, and I really wanted to examine that and not have easy answers because people psychologically aren't easy—to have them work through their problems within their own sphere. It's easy for us on the outside to say that certain people need to react a certain way when they're in situations. I wanted to have it that these kids don't always react the way that they should, because they don't have the mechanism to be that objective—but then how many of us do?
There's a little bit more in the world stage now about child soldiers. When I was dealing with Warchild back in 1999-2001 it didn't seem to be such an issue. You couldn't find a lot of media coverage, but now it's coming out on a regular basis about these child soldiers in Africa or the child exploitation and slave trade. Just in this past year alone I've seen at least two news exposés, one on CNN and one on a Canadian news program, that went into the child exploitation rings. I started to realize that this is something I really want to discuss in my work, I'm not tired of it. The disenfranchisement of children and the exploitation of children—their voice isn't really represented in this genre. You get other voices represented very strongly or beginning to get represented strongly, but I don't see a whole lot from the child's point of view and the child experience. To have it be more than just a coming-of-age novel—that's a broad term. I'm shooting for the moon and I might not quite be getting there. But that's what I want to do, really examine what happens when you put children in these situations because it is going on right now.
One thing I found when I was doing the research was that nothing I was writing about was as horrific as what's actually going on. The stuff that's actually going on is 10 times more horrific—I am touching on it, I hope. Especially with the third novel, it delves into it a lot more than the first two—the exploitation of the children. So much of our society can be judged on how we treat our children, I think. When I'm talking about a future society that I'm setting up and a war between races, how these larger powers treat the children or affect the children is my way of accessing that future society. Instead of talking about the politicians, generals, and admirals affecting the society I want to look at the children who are at the bottom, so to speak, or the ones being acted upon. Through their experience, cast an eye on what I'm saying about the social aspect of the worlds.
CD: Your books are futuristic space opera, which maybe comes with expectations of a heroic character. How do you balance what you want to do in your story with the generic expectations of how those kind of stories go?
KL: I hope that I upturn them a little bit. People might pick up the book because of the way it's marketed or whatever, expecting it to be a straight adventure story. I've had feedback from readers since Warchild and that's what it is—readers that don't necessarily read genre but they picked it up for whatever reason. And they read it and they're surprised because they went in expecting it to be a straight Star Wars-y kind of thing and they come out of it really harrowed. They find it upsetting. It's not like I set out with that as a goal but I did want to be true to the character. Everything else is trapping. I have that sense of wonder for different worlds, different societies, but I basically just use it as a framework to talk about these other things. It comes back to the character—for me, it's the character that's important, and that's how I balance it. If people go into it with certain expectations that's their prerogative. I can't write to those people—I write the story that I want to write. My books can be clumped into space opera but because they're so specific in the character's head I think they're a little bit different from that.
CD: In the first two books both of the main characters are boys. Are you interrogating masculinity in SF?
KL: Interrogating masculinity in SF, I like that. I didn't have any insidious intention. My characters just come. I tend to just enjoy writing from a male point of view, maybe because I'm not male and for me it's interesting to explore. On the other hand, writing a male point of view that is that broken—when I became more conscious of it, this is not a character that I see often, especially in the military SF genre. I guess in the back of my mind I wanted to overturn some of that. You read about victimized women, and there are great stories about victimized women. But when it comes to victimized men and treating it in a real way, it's almost like they're a voice just in common day—not in genre fiction. It's horrible enough for a woman and I think that it's different for a boy to go through that. The macho ideas of what to emote and what not to emote, I wanted to examine that too. Other people are writing about women in these positions and saying things with women in these societies. I wanted to write about guys in these societies, but in a way that I don't see a lot of in the trappings of space opera, in the trappings of military SF. I wanted to plop down boys that are unlike that typical model, that struggle with all of these things—that don't overcome, necessarily. I was very conscious with the second book when I was writing Jos through Ryan's eyes that he didn't come off as all together now—everything is fine now that his book's done. I didn't want that at all. Ryan is able to pinpoint that this is a kid that has some issues. Ryan himself has issues, but not in a typical way. I think he's a very atypical character just because he is so listless. He has no purpose for a lot of the book. He doesn't think he has any purpose. I wanted to take male characters and put them in positions you don't necessarily see in that genre.
CD: What kind of responses have you gotten?
KL: Overall pretty positive, from men and women. From the feedback I've gotten from emails and talking to people at conventions it seems to be an even representation that men and women respond to the characters really well. There's the occasional guy who will say that there's too much emotion, but I think that just points to what they were expecting when they picked the book up. A lot of it has to do with the reader's expectations. A lot of the men find it difficult to read some passages. There seems to be some ambiguity—I have a couple of responses where there's ambiguity about what exactly went on. The majority of people really get what I was trying to do, people really understand the character. I set myself up with Ryan because I knew that he would not be easily likeable. Jos, the majority of people took to him right away—how can you not, it's a child in a perilous situation. I consciously went away from that with the second book and took an adolescent who is very prickly, and to warm up to him takes a much longer time. I wanted to challenge people when they read that—to challenge their perceptions of how you would interact with somebody like that, whether you dismiss him out of hand or you try and get in his head. Whether I'm successful or not is up to what people think, to a certain extent.
CD: Have you written short stories as well as novels?
KL: I wrote one that sold to one of Nalo Hopkinson's anthologies called So Long Been Dreaming, and that came out in May from Arsenal Pulp Press. That was the first short story I'd written in a very long time. It's hard for me to switch gears. When I'm in a novel I'm in a novel. I think I'm a natural novel writer, I'm not a natural short story writer. For me, writing a short story is a challenge because I tend to want to explore really deeply, to really get into things. Because I take a psychological approach to my books, I want 500 pages to explore that psyche, and you obviously cannot in short stories. I do want to write more short stories, just because I don't want to cut myself off from anything when it comes to writing. I want to try everything and test myself in all these different ways. It was a really good challenge for me to write it and then see if it was good enough to actually sell somewhere.
CD: Would one of the ways you would challenge yourself be writing in a different genre than SF?
KL: Yes, like I said, before Warchild I was working on a fantasy. I don't want to limit myself that way at all. Of course, there are realities when you build a career—you can't just run off after three SF novels and write a western. You'd be killing yourself. There are practicalities which I completely understand. It's just a matter of writing what story when. And what story will bite me enough that I want to spend the next year of my life working on it—that has a lot to do with it too. I certainly don't want to be pigeonholed—there's such a danger in that as an artist. In any kind of art, to do the same thing over and over again, except in a different guise—I really don't want to do that. I get readers who say, “Will you write another book from Jos's point of view?” I don't know—I certainly didn't plan to. I very specifically knew from the beginning with his book that was it for now. I didn't want to recycle the same story except in a different guise. I wanted the challenge of, when I wrote Ryan, for him to be Ryan and not Jos in a different situation. Even within the genre I don't want to recycle the same thing and dress it up differently. I want to push against the borders of my own creativity. I don't see how I could possibly do that if I was just writing the same types of books. I think I would get very restless because I don't read just space opera. My influences come from all over and I want to be able to express that in different ways.
CD: Do you have plans to go back to the fantasy?
KL: Definitely. I think I've grown so much as a writer since that point that I'll probably do something vastly different to it. The core ideas I really like and I want to expand on it. The tools I've kind of learned—still learning, obviously—from writing these books hopefully will apply to that when I go back to it. Thinking in terms of career, it has to be done at the right time.
CD: How do you go about creating an alien race?
KL: Well, I've only done it once. I admit that that's not my forte. I'm not a studied anthropologist or anything like that. My interest in it was that I wanted to make a cool species. There's still that aspect of it—you want to make something that's interesting. I very specifically wanted them to be just human enough that you can relate. But their very humanness—what you perceive as humanness—is what's the most disconcerting. The stuff that's not human contrasted with the perceived humanity is what makes them very disconcerting. It would be almost easier to relate to them if they were a complete Other in the sense that the didn't have a humanish form or a humanish shape or lived in houses. I wanted to just make them just human enough to be that strange.
There's that one scene when Ryan glimpses the aliens and wigs out. We all would like to say because we grew up on Star Trek that if we met something that was actually Other we would be fine with it and wouldn't have some sort of crisis in our head. But from Ryan's point of view he had a little bit of a wig out because in his head he's saying, “These aren't animals that grew up on Earth. Even when I played with dogs on Earth and they're completely different from humans there's still that recognition from generations of growing up around each other—there's that recognition between the animal and human.” He was wigging out because here's this thing that looks kind of human but it's not a guy in a costume, it's not an animated character, it's an actual being who has absolutely no relation to him because it's from a completely different world. That's what freaks him out—this thing having no relation to him in any shape, way, or form. You can find a bonding connection with a dolphin that people do, maybe because there's some commonality in our geography.
Jos had kind of a connection but not really. I wanted to make an alien that they were alien in thought, that you don't necessarily understand them at all. Jos has very little interaction with them and Ryan has virtually none. I didn't want to explain them, I didn't want them to be wholly explainable—identifiable maybe in certain aspects but not explainable. So you don't understand why they're doing things. None of these characters would. I would have to write from Niko's point of view to get a better understanding of that.
CD: You taught adult education in Nunavut. Could you tell us about that experience, and has that experience influenced your writing at all?
KL: I went up to this other culture, where there were commonalities to Southern culture but there were also vast differences. Being surrounded by a different language, by physically a different environment, was really fascinating for me. I absolutely loved it. It really was the most outstanding experience of my life. I think every Canadian should go and see the Arctic, that takes up so much of the country. It's an outstanding place to see and to be encompassed by. It's so completely different from what we're doing down here. Just the environment alone. And then when you get into the culture, such a fascinating culture, and the people are fantastic to interact with. It was a real joy and eye-opening experience. You go up there to “teach” but I was the one soaking everything up, like a sponge. Just the snow—it sounds so typical, but blizzards up there are blizzards—and the wind. And being 5 minutes out of town, from my point of view you have no recognizable features—they thought it was funny. We would go out on the land and looking around and I would say, “I almost expect to see telephone poles.” When you go here and drive across the country you will still see telephone poles or something. It's very rare that you would go somewhere and not see any man-made features. You go up there and 5 minutes out of town—the land is very undulating so you lose the horizon of the town very quickly. All of a sudden you're surrounded by nothing but land as far as the eye can see. And sky. That really does something to your perspective. The feelings that that evoked, being in this other place. I have a huge respect for it—you respect the land and respect your vulnerability in that environment, because it's not your natural environment.
It was almost like reverse research. I did the edits for Warchild when I was up there. When I went through the edits I was trying to access those feelings I was having and infuse them somehow in what Jos was experiencing being in this environment that was so completely different from what he grew up in, which was a shipborn culture, a very enclosed culture. And then he's on this planet—for a whole month he didn't leave his room or that house. Because it would have been a little bit overwhelming for him. There are some scenes that got edited out, like when he went down to the beach and things like that—the Easter eggs of the book. There are some scenes that I wanted to show he's very much out of his element.
CD: You alluded to the fact that the first section of Warchild is in the second person. It's a bit unusual.
KL: It just came out that way. It wasn't until after that everyone was telling me, “That's so difficult to do. Not a lot of people do it successfully. There's Bright Lights, Big City and then nothing else.” Ignorance is a wonderful thing sometimes. You don't get bogged down with what you can and can't do. I try to retain that now—I'm not going to be concerned with what's been done and what hasn't been done, and what are rules and what aren't rules. It's good to know the “rules” so you're conscious of it when you break them. They should be broken, to some extent. The voice came to me in that voice. It wasn't until later I realized it was a natural voice to do because it's a distancing voice. It's the voice people take when they are recounting trauma. They distance themselves through the use of the “you,” the second person. I never intended the entire book to be that way. I knew very early on when it was stop—it would stop at the end of that experience with Falcone, and then it would switch to the “I.” That first part was his recounting, his distancing. It's specifically not specific about what happened. He flat out denies it in the book when he's asked by Azarcon what happened. I trust the reader to be astute enough to know that the first person is the most unreliable point of view.
People should not read first person like they're reading third. And a writer should not write first person like they're writing third. It shouldn't be a matter of substituting “I” for “he.” If you're taking the “I” point of view, you're in that character's head—or you should be. Which means that you take up all of their prejudices, their inconsistencies, their jaundiced view of things and infuse that into the story and challenge the reader to parse what is it that they're saying, if it's true or not. Are they seeing things as clearly as you can see them? Somehow try to tell the story on two levels—if the reader understands the macro while they're being filtered through the micro point of view. That was a fun challenge. That's why I'm fascinated by the first person—it challenges the reader and the writer to do that, tell a macro story through a very micro point of view.
CD: You've just finished your third book. Can you tell us about that one?
KL: It's called Cagebird. It's from Yuri's point of view—Yuri shows up at the end of Burndive, and he's talked about in Burndive. It's basically his experience. The pitchy way of saying it is it's from the bad guy's point of view. He's a pirate—he's the pirate after Falcone, who everybody hates, who's the driving force behind a lot of Jos's trauma, who Ryan hears about who had this huge influence on his father. I wanted to write the point of view of the kid who was the most influenced by him because he bought into it for 12 years—so he is the person that all the other characters view as the bad guy. It was very harrowing to write. Not for the mechanics, but for the content.
CD: If you could write the novel you've always wanted to write what would it be?
KL: That's the one that I'm always writing. The one that I just finished, that's almost the novel that I wrote the first two to prepare to write. I very much wanted to write the first two and wanted to say those things and explore those characters. But the third one—it's almost the culmination of the other two. This was the story that I really needed to write after the first two, because of the point of view of this person who bought into everything that the first two books were saying was bad, was horrible. To turn all of that on its head. How do you relate to somebody who's in that situation? I drew a lot of influence from those boy soldiers in Africa who were forced to commit atrocities. How do you judge them? Do you judge them? Obviously they murdered people but it was at gunpoint. How much of that is their responsibility? Even the ones that grow up in it and buy into the propaganda of these warlords, how much are they responsible?
CD: When you've finished a novel, do you find yourself satisfied with it?
KL: Never after the first draft. I'm satisfied with the two novels that are in print right now. It wasn't always so—I certainly didn't want the novel that I submitted to the contest to go to print. I knew it wouldn't. I knew that it needed work. With Burndive it took a lot of warming up to. It was such a completely different type of story. Warchild takes place over eight years and Burndive's three months. It's as opposite a book to write as can be from the character down to the structure and the timeframe. It's very distilled. It was very difficult to write.
CD: What do you think of the current state of SF?
KL: I certainly haven't read all of it. Funnily enough when I'm writing it I don't tend to read it, for whatever reason. I find authors that I love and then I stick to them—they tend not to disappoint book after book. I tend to read for influence, so for the last book I was reading a lot about refugees, and journals from children, and newspaper articles and articles online about child exploitation and children in war. I wasn't really reading fiction in that stage. As for the current state of SF, it seems fine to me—I still find books that I like, there are amazing writers out there producing amazing books. So I'm not worried.
CD: How much time do you spend on your web site, or other ways of promoting your work?
KL: I'm going to be rehauling my web site before the third book comes out, just because I get tired of it. The look of it, and also the content. People find me through the web site—that contact with the readers is important. What's really cool about having the web site is you have that contact with your readers, whereas ordinarily you wouldn't unless you go to conventions or book signings. I have people who email me from all over the world. I have one from Okanawa, a military guy who found my book. I have a reader in Malaysia, readers from France, all over. They find me through the web site, and they email and tell me their thoughts. And Israel—Warchild was translated for an Israeli publisher. So I'm getting comments from people in Israel, which is interesting. The web site asks for feedback and interaction. The message board is a lot of fun—they get to romp and play and do silly things. And I participate in it, because—why not? I've had readers who submitted artwork from the books. That's really cool—they're so moved that they want to produce something else creatively and show it to me. I do that—I completely do that with other people's work. Before I started doing my own work, I would want to draw pictures or build images of characters in these other worlds.
I have a thing that I call the “street team"—they go out and they move my books around on the shelves, and they hand my books off to their friends—it's a great network of readers that I'm going to be organizing a little bit more. Really just for fun. Musicians use this—it's de rigueur in the music world that you have people who are passionate about your work and so they want to share it. That's part of promotion. It's not anything that I hit over people's heads to do—they do it anyway. Readers are very much like that—I'm a reader and if I find a great book like that I tell all my friends.
You can find Karin's web site at www.karinlowachee.com/.
Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it—a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.
—Jane Goodall, Reason For Hope
The man in the green-and-yellow costume opened his eyes slowly, first one and then the other. He wasn't dead. He looked down at his chest, then felt around with his fingers as if he didn't believe his eyes. There was no blood, no gunshot wound. And yet he'd been shot; the young ruffian who had pulled the trigger was still standing there, beneath the broken streetlight. He was still holding the gun that had spit out a bullet just moments ago.
Was he crazy?
The look on the kid's face told him he wasn't.
He took a step forward. The kid pulled the trigger again.
There was a small pinch at his chest, as if a needle had been jabbed there—but just that, just a small pinch. He took another step.
The kid pulled the trigger again, then dropped his gun and ran. Walking over to the discarded gun, the man in the green-and-yellow costume picked it up and crushed it in his right hand, as effortlessly as he might crumple a piece of paper.
He looked around; the pretty lady was gone. He felt a pang of anger at that. True, he had told her to flee; but she could have hid somewhere safe and come out to thank him when the coast was clear.
He put the thought out of his mind. Superheroes didn't save people for thank-yous. Superheroes saved people because it was the right thing to do.
Beneath his mask, he was smiling widely.
So he was a superhero! He'd suspected as much, when he'd woken up in the alley behind the Chinese restaurant. He couldn't remember his name, or how he had gotten there, but there was a mirror tossed out in the dumpster and his eyes were working fine.
And what he saw when he looked in the mirror was a golden face staring back at him. There were holes for his eyes, nose and mouth, and two wing-like extensions to cover his ears.
He wore a green-and-yellow costume made from the same strong-but-flexible material as the mask. His chest was huge, as if he'd been pumping weights since his days in the cradle. Whoever he was, he wasn't someone to be messed with.
As he stared at his impressive reflection in that greasy mirror, he suddenly heard the lady's scream and dashed off toward the sound without a moment's thought for his own safety. He found the young ruffian holding the screaming lady with one hand, and a gun in the other. He felt nervous, but his voice was like thunder.
“Unhand her, ruffian!” he said, and even he was taken aback by the sound of his voice.
Startled, the kid let her go. She fell to the ground but didn't try to get away. If anything, she seemed paralyzed by fear.
“Leave!” he said to her, and the loudness of his voice must have rung a bell in her head. She pushed herself away from the kid, then got to her feet and stumbled off until she disappeared in the darkness.
The kid pointed the gun at him.
“Big mistake, clown,” the kid said, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet came at him and he felt a sharp jab at his chest, just above his heart. But he didn't die.
It was later that night that a police cruiser pulled up alongside of him as he patrolled the streets. The cop driving the car had his window pulled down, so the Defender of the Innocent and Helpless—he had not yet come up with a better name for himself, something that rolled off the tongue a bit better, even though he had already given it a lot of thought—said in his booming voice, “No assistance required, Officer."
He kept walking, but the cop car didn't pull off.
“What's your name, friend?” the cop asked. He and his partner were still rolling beside him in the patrol car as he walked briskly, his head swinging side-to-side, scanning for signs of criminal activity.
“I haven't quite decided, Officer,” he said, boomingly. Then he stopped suddenly and turned to face them. “Say, what do you think my name should be?"
The cops exchanged looks.
“Okay, fella,” the partner said. The car had stopped rolling and he opened his door and stepped out. “Why don't we take a ride downtown?” He started walking toward him, slowly.
The Defender shook his head hesitantly and took some steps backwards. This happened a lot—superheroes were frequently frustrated in their efforts to help people by normal cops. He'd tried to be friendly with them—he'd even asked for their help in choosing a name—but obviously these guys were not about to break with the traditional cop-superhero relationship.
The first cop was out and walking toward him too. Both had their hands on their side-arms. He didn't want to hurt them and he didn't want to cause a scene. Turning around quickly, he broke into a run. They were following him—he knew that without having to look over his shoulder. But he only heard one pair of pounding footsteps in pursuit; the other cop might have gotten back in the car, to try to cut the Defender off up ahead.
That was the case. The car pulled out of a side-alley and came to a stop, blocking his way. A look over his shoulder showed the other cop following on foot, if a little far back.
The Defender kept running; he knew—somehow he knew—that he could jump over the car. But when he approached the car and jumped—he kept going up. He had pushed on the ground with too much force. He looked back at the ground to see the cops below. He zoomed in on their faces and saw that they were staring up at him with amazement and awe.
He kept floating upward for a few more moments, then, with a twist of his hips, he began to fly forward, his eyes zoomed in on the moonlit city below.
The Defender was on the prowl; criminals and ill-minded ruffians beware.
The woman who walked through the precinct doors was astonishingly beautiful. She had rosy-red lips, blue eyes, and hair the colour of a detective's shield. She wore a smart business suit and strode purposefully to his desk.
“Have there been any reports of a man running around in a green-and-yellow costume?” she said in a sweet but no-nonsense voice. “He may have been flying around in the air,” she added helpfully.
Under different circumstances, Officer Petrowski would've written her off as a nut-job and had some fun with her. But the report from the cops on the graveyard shift had already made the rounds.
“Someone fitting that description may have been sighted, yes,” he said cautiously.
“Under what circumstances? Around which area?” she said, her voice full of excitement and anxiety. Petrowski wondered if the costumed guy were her boyfriend. How could he compete with a guy who could fly?
“How about you answer my questions first?” he said. “Who is this guy? Why's he running around in his underwear? What exactly is the nature of the relationship between the two of you?” He snuck in the last one, hoping it sounded professional.
“His name is Matthew Peber,” she said as if she half-expected Petrowski to recognize the name.
But the sarge approached his desk before Petrowski could give the name any serious thought. Petrowski explained who the lady was and who she was inquiring about, even though he knew the sarge would take her away. Indeed, the sarge asked the pretty lady into his office, promising to fill her in on the situation if she'd just answer a few questions.
Petrowski watched her go with a longing look.
“So he can fly, so what?” he muttered to himself.
Landing wasn't particularly easy. The slight pain he could deal with; it was the stumbling that was embarrassing. Superheroes didn't stumble, at least none that he could think of; he didn't want to be the first.
The Defender was practicing in the dark, empty parking lot of a grocery store. He'd fly to the roof of the store then run to the edge and jump off. He could land without stumbling if he paused just above the ground; but he couldn't do it in one smooth motion.
It was daylight by the time he gave up, too tired to go on any longer. Besides, the manager of the store had pulled into the lot and unlocked the front doors and he probably wouldn't appreciate anyone jumping off his roof during normal working hours.
Where could he go to rest? He thought about other superheroes, where they slept when they needed to rest. Spider-Man had Peter Parker's place to crash in, Superman had Clark Kent's and Batman had Bruce Wayne's mansion. Did the Defender have an alter ego? He couldn't remember. It wouldn't do to sleep on the street like some homeless person; that wasn't becoming a superhero. Maybe he could go to a motel? But he didn't have any money to pay for a room.
Perhaps he could drop by the local police station and ask for a salary. But that wasn't right; superheroes weren't supposed to be on the police-force payroll. Besides, after the exchange with the two officers the night before, he probably wasn't very popular with the cops right now. No, he needed to find a place to borrow money from. He was good for it—a guy like him certainly had marketable talents. Between the flying and the invulnerability to bullets, a ring-leader would pay through the roof to have him work with his troupe. And if he couldn't find a circus in flying distance, he could perform on the street.
The thought of performing made him smile. People's eyes fixed on you as you danced and sung, the very center of their attention—there was something so very appealing about that. If he took up street performing, though, he'd need a hat—a big hat.
As he walked the downtown streets, he realized that though he needed to borrow money, realistically no one would give it to him. He could steal it by breaking into a bank, but superheroes had bad PR as it was; he didn't want to make it worse.
He had the sudden urge to take off and fly, but he pushed the urge aside. He had to walk, to make his presence known, to let honest citizens know that they need not walk in fear anymore and to send a message to dishonest citizens that they better straighten up and straighten out.
Already he was making a difference. People were looking at him. Some elbowed their friends in the ribs and pointed at him. Whenever that happened, he waved in friendly greeting: he didn't want to be one of those aloof superheroes, but a friendly neighbourhood superhero. Honest citizens had to know that they had nothing to worry about when it came to him.
Despite his fatigue, he kept walking, trying to think of a solution to his present predicament. Then it hit him—he didn't have to sleep on the street at all! Had he forgotten that he could fly? He could camp out on the roof of some high-rise.
But a well-timed rumbling from his stomach reminded him that sleep wasn't the only thing he needed. He realized now that he should have spent the night earning money somehow instead of practicing his landings.
He walked into a corner store. A bag of chips and a chocolate bar would tide him over for a while. He was thinking that he could do some favour for the storekeeper in return; mop up the floors or get something off some high shelf. But it was his lucky day: the store was being robbed!
“Hands up, fool,” the robber said, turning his gun to point at the Defender. He wore a ski mask, but his voice was obviously that of a young man, probably still in his teens. He was swaying a little and the hand that held the gun was unsteady; it was weaving all over the Defender's upper body and face.
The storekeeper was behind the cash register, on an elevation, standing with his hands straight up, almost touching the ceiling. He had a terrified expression on his face. The Defender shot him a reassuring glance, but it didn't seem to register.
“Hand over the gun, please,” the Defender said, his voice like thunder. He held out his right hand with the palm up, realizing too late that he probably shouldn't have said please. “Now,” he added roughly.
The Defender stepped forward and the kid stumbled backwards. There was a square wooden platform behind him, supporting a pyramid of cans of tomato soup. The kid tripped over the edge of the platform and fell into the pyramid. Cans bounced off of his ski-masked head; he dropped his gun and brought up his hands to protect his head.
The Defender walked over and picked up the discarded gun. Absent-mindedly, he twisted the barrel and bent it back onto itself. The would-be thief started to get up, so the Defender punched him across the face and knocked him out.
“You saved my life,” the storekeeper said, coming around and grabbing the Defender's hand and shaking it vigorously. “Thank you!"
“Don't mention it, citizen,” the Defender said, his voice so loud that it made the storekeeper flinch. Trying to speak a little more softly, he added, “But perhaps there is a slight reward in it for me?"
A look of cynical understanding swept over the storekeeper's face. He smiled unhappily and said, “Well, I don't have all that much money."
“Actually,” the Defender said, “I was thinking more along the lines of a bag of chips and a chocolate bar, maybe?"
The storekeeper stared at the Defender.
“Okay,” he said finally, his voice wary. “Help yourself."
The Defender quickly picked out a small bag of all-dressed chips and a peanut-centered chocolate bar. Although he felt embarrassed, he tried to remember that he had earned the food.
“Also a coke?” the Defender said, looking at the fridge at the back.
“Yeah, okay,” the storekeeper said, still sounding wary.
A few blocks from the store, the Defender sat down on the sidewalk and opened his bag of chips. He'd had the chocolate bar on the way over.
As he ate, he realized that something was bothering him. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it had to do with what had just happened at the store.
Was it that he had taken the food? But he'd earned that food and besides, he had been hungry. In fact, he'd made a promise to himself that as soon as he had enough money, he'd return to the store and pay back the storekeeper. He was thinking that maybe he should go to the store now and give the man an IOU, when he spotted the police car coming up the street.
There was someone in the back—perhaps the kid who had tried to rob the store.
“Hi there,” one of the cops said, as the car pulled up beside him.
“Hello,” the Defender said.
“Would you come to the station with us?” the cop asked, trying to make the request sound casual. “We need you to make a statement about what happened back there at the store."
The Defender knew they were lying. They didn't need his statement. He finished his drink slowly, then crumbled up the empty bag of chips.
“Where's the nearest recycling bin?” he asked.
The cop opened the door and stepped out.
“Here,” he said, reaching out his hand, “I'll take care of that for you."
“That's very kind,” the Defender said, trying to keep his voice neutral. Was it a trick? Would the cop try to grab his arm? He didn't want to take the chance—he wasn't concerned for himself, but for the cop. If the police wanted to hate and ostracize him, that was fine. But he wasn't about to give them any reasons—like a cop with a broken arm—to do so.
He took off before the cop had a chance to make a move. He felt a stab in his leg and almost fell out of the sky. They had shot at him. Non-vitally, but still—they had shot at him. Cops were definitely something to avoid in the future.
But he couldn't stay mad for long. Flying had that effect on him. Effortlessly, he rolled in the air, turning one way and then the other. Turning over once more, he put his hands on the back of his head and allowed himself to glide, watching some strangely shaped snow-white clouds for a while. Closing his eyes, he drifted off and was asleep before another minute had passed.
“So he's an actor?” the Mayor asked.
They were in a large boardroom on the fifth floor of city hall. The large wooden table seated twenty comfortably, but extra chairs had been brought in and, Ann estimated, at least forty people were seated around the table. There were at least that many more standing up or leaning against the walls of the room. Sam Miertman sat to her right; to her direct left was the wheezing and coughing Chief of Police. She felt herself leaning away from him, toward Sam. The Chief wore a short-sleeved shirt, and his fat, hairy arm, practically dripping with sweat, brushed up against her every time he shifted in his seat. She repressed a shudder.
“He's not an actor,” Sam said. “He's Tom Cruise before Risky Business, Mel Gibson before Mad Max, Brad Pitt before Thelma and Louise."
There were blank stares all around.
“He's the next big thing!” Sam said, exasperation in his voice. These people didn't seem to get out to the movies. It was depressing on a professional level if nothing else.
From beside her, the Chief of Police said, “And you were shooting this movie when this Peber escaped?"
“He didn't escape,” Ann said, making no effort to hide the irritation in her voice. “There was an explosion—an accident—and Matt was flung off set."
The Chief of Police ignored her and pointed a fat, accusing finger at Sam, “This Peber is running around like some lunatic vigilante. This city won't tolerate this kind of behaviour, star or no star."
He threw his weight against the back of the chair, which looked like it might give in, and smiled with satisfaction.
The Mayor interrupted Sam's response. Probably for the best, Ann thought.
“What I can't understand,” he said, “is how he can run like a cheetah and fly like an eagle, if all this was for a movie?"
Sam looked at Ann. How did one explain the movie business to a politician? How could they explain that they had been given a huge budget to shoot I, Superhero but that they ended up using most of the CG effects from Sam's unfinished and unreleased movie, Hero By Day?
“We got a lot of money to make this movie,” Sam began. “We poured most of it into designing and building the suit. This team of inventors that we hired—DreamMachines, they come with my full and unreserved recommendation—are a bunch of overachieving geniuses. You give them enough money, they can build anything."
He paused, then looked around the table.
“You see,” he continued, a little embarrassed, “we needed to get rid of that money, because ... because—"
“Because you had to use up the entire budget,” the Mayor finished for him, off-handedly, as if he had just provided someone with a word that was on the tip of their tongue. “Or next time around you'd be screwed."
“Yeah,” Sam said, sudden relief flooding his face. “Exactly."
The Mayor shrugged. “I've worked in the government for twenty years,” he said, by way of explanation. “So what can we do?"
“The blast from the explosion,” Ann began. Eighty eyes turned to look at her. She took a drink from her glass of water and continued, “The blast from the explosion must have caused Matt some sort of temporary insanity, in which he thinks he really is a superhero. He doesn't mean any harm at all."
Beside her, the Chief of Police made a hmph sound.
“I say we take him down,” he said, his intertwined hands resting on his belly. “He doesn't want to play nice, fine. But we won't sit around while he flies in our skies and makes a menace of himself. We have a duty to protect the citizens of this city. We won't sit around and tolerate his mob-like extortionist schemes."
“It was a bag of chips and a coke,” Ann said fiercely, turning disgusted eyes on the Chief. “Give me a break."
He looked at her with his satisfied smile and said, “Sure, yesterday it's a bag of chips, a chocolate bar, and a coke.” He emphasized her omission, looking around the table to make sure everyone had caught her slip and his correction of it. “But what will it be tomorrow, or the day after? We can't allow him to run around this city unfettered, above the law, immune to rules and regulations."
The Mayor said, “The Chief is right about that. We must stop him."
There were suggestions from around the table, some more violent than others. The Fire Marshal wanted to use water from high-pressure hoses to force Matt out of the sky and pin him down. The Chief of Police wanted to try some new gluey foam they were developing for the force; it would entangle Matt, and the harder he struggled against it, the tighter it would constrict around him, like a Chinese finger trap. Some guy named Bordan—Ann didn't catch his title—wanted to set up a trap, with a damsel in distress and a net that would drop from the ceiling.
Sam cleared his throat. People kept talking, making suggestion after suggestion, criticizing other people's suggestions and defending their own. Sam cleared his throat a little louder; no one paid him any attention. He cleared his throat once more; someone beside him stopped talking for a second, but then continued.
The Mayor raised his right hand slightly; the room was immediately silent.
“Go ahead, Mr. Miertman,” the Mayor said quietly.
“You should know that we have another suit,” Sam said. “For the arch-nemesis, Zortran. It's custom built around the actor, though, and he's not here—his first scene isn't scheduled for weeks yet—so we'd have to fly him in from California."
There was a short pause before the volcanic explosion of suggestions, criticisms, and defences erupted once more. It was as if Sam had never spoken at all.
“What do you think?” Sam said, turning to Ann.
“I'm worried, Sam,” she said, her voice low enough that only Sam could hear her. “The longer he's out there, the greater the chance he might do something that'll get him more than a slap on the wrist. And we can't shoot him down or set a trap for him—if he feels his life is threatened, he might do something that'll land him in jail for the rest of his life."
“So you think we should go with Zortran?"
“I think that's best. If Skeet can lure Matt away from the city; if we can get the suit off and bring him back to his trailer and surround him with familiar things; if I could just talk to him for a little—"
Ann stopped talking, recognizing the look in Sam's eyes. He had reached a decision.
Sam rose slowly from his seat. The clatter of voices continued without a pause and he was completely ignored. Sam looked around the room at the different people. Ann could almost hear him thinking, I am a director. I directed four thousand extras in the most daring war-scene in movie-making history. I got Jerry Pintosh to cry on camera—twice.
Explosively, he brought his fist down hard against the table. Everyone and everything—the glasses and pitchers of water, the notebooks and pens, the people in their chairs—seemed to jump.
“Thank you,” Sam said, using his directorial voice. “Nothing would please me more than to sit here and listen to more of your inane chatter, but if it's all right with you—just this once, for a lark—I'd like to actually do something to resolve this situation before it's too late."
He had been looking around the room at all the faces with their jaws dropped. Now he turned to the Mayor and didn't look away, as if the rest of the room had disappeared.
“Here's what I suggest we do,” he said. “We fly in Bronson Skeet from California. He lures Matt Peber away from the city and, when it's sufficiently safe, he overpowers our Don Quixote and forces him out of his suit."
Sam was describing things as if they were scenes in a movie. Ann almost expected him to bring in an artist and have storyboards drawn up. But what if it didn't happen as planned? They couldn't simply reshoot—this was real life, with real-life consequences. What if something happened to Matt? What if he were hurt?
Sam was still talking. At the end of his speech, he said, pointing a finger at the Mayor, “What we'd need from you is to make sure the city is empty of people at the time this goes down. We'd need you to tell everyone to stay in their homes—to not even stick their heads outside the window. If Matt decides to duke it out in the streets—hopefully he won't, but who knows how far his madness will run?—we don't want any innocent bystanders in the way."
Looking at the media representatives around the room—who had been given silent observer passes into the boardroom—the Mayor said, “I think that can be arranged."
Outside the room, Sam turned to Ann and asked her, “Do you think Skeet will go for it?"
Ann called Skeet on her cellphone. After she had explained the situation and said what she wanted from him, Skeet was silent for a moment.
“Dangerous work, huh?” Skeet said, finally.
“Yes."
“Potentially life-threatening."
“Yes."
“Something could happen to Matt and I'd go to jail for it."
Ann flinched at that but tried to keep her voice level. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not."
“How much will I get paid?"
Ann said a number.
“I'll be there on the next flight out,” Skeet said, hanging up the phone.
“Oh, thank you!” the mother of the young baby he had just saved said to him, her voice full of joy and relief.
“You're quite welcome, citizen,” the Defender said, trying to keep his voice from sounding too harsh. “But please remember that steep hills and baby rollers just don't mix. I may not be around next time."
“Oh, yes, certainly,” the mother said, in between kisses of her baby's forehead. “I'll keep a much tighter hold from now on! No more talking on the phone and rolling the baby, I promise!"
The Defender smiled with satisfaction and, with a parting nod to mother and baby, flew away.
As he floated above the river on the city's edge, the Defender finally realized what it was about the thwarted robbery at the store that bothered him so much.
Soon, he realized, there would be no more burglaries, no more murders—no more criminal activity whatsoever. Who would commit a crime knowing the Defender might be watching? Who would act in an uncitizenly fashion when they might face the fury of his mighty arm?
And though that was good news—the end of crime—a part of him couldn't help but feel a little sad at the prospect. Because where would he fit in such a world? If no one needed defending, no one would need the Defender. He'd be useless, forgotten. Like a good therapist, he was slowly putting himself out of work.
But that was foolish, wasn't it? Just now, he had saved a small, cuddly baby from certain death. Earlier that day, he had helped an old woman carry her groceries fourteen blocks and up three flights of stairs. On his way down from that very building, he had stopped two teenagers from fighting and given them a stern lecture about alternate, non-violent means of resolving conflict. His suggestion that next time they had a disagreement they should discuss it over a game of chess seemed to go over really well.
And besides, there was always the circus.
That night, he watched two ruffians from the roof of the building in whose mooncast shadow they were hiding. They had stumbled out of the bar across the street and had spent the last ten minutes discussing their plans for mugging someone.
The street was deserted, so the Defender wondered if the two drunks would tire of waiting and go away. But suddenly there was the click-click of high heels on pavement, click-clicks that were getting louder as the lady got closer.
The ruffians whispered to one another, but with his enhanced hearing the Defender heard every word. They were no longer thinking about robbery.
He flew down and landed a bit awkwardly just in front of them. He hoped the darkness sufficiently cloaked his less-than-graceful descent.
“Hello, ruffians,” he greeted, his voice booming. “Why are you standing in these shadows? You wouldn't be planning ill-will to honest citizens, would you?"
He hoped they caught the sarcasm in his voice.
“What we's planning to do, it's to kick your ass,” the one on the right said.
The Defender listened for a moment—the high heels clicked towards them, towards them, towards them, paused, then clicked away quickly.
He turned his attention back to the ruffians.
“Ruffians,” he said, trying to speak sense to them. “You do not want to fight me. You—"
They were on the ground, both of them. One had a bleeding nose that he was clutching like he was afraid it might fall off and the other looked unconscious.
They had moved on him so fast, and he'd just reacted. Obviously he was very well trained in the martial arts, perhaps karate. It was instinct that had taken over when they rushed him. He was sorry they were hurt, but it was their fault and hopefully they would learn a lesson from this experience.
Picking them up and carefully slinging one over each shoulder, he flew them to the nearest hospital and dropped them in front of its doors. Their weight opened the automatic sliding doors and kept them open.
In the air again—flying always put him in a thoughtful mood—he wondered if there were others like him. Were there people in other cities in the world, endowed with special, super-human abilities as he was? Because if there were, he should try contacting them. He might even try setting up a Superhero's Conference. It would be interesting, for example, to hear how other superheroes dealt with the police. There was a lot they could teach one another, best practices and lessons learned they could share, anecdotes that only other superheroes could understand and relate to.
But then the thought struck him, running shivers up and down his spine—who's to say that these other superhumans would use their powers for good and not evil? If these super-villains existed—if men and women had the power that he had but not his moral code—it was his duty to seek them out and put a stop to their maniacal plans to take over the world.
He might very well be the only person on earth who had the slightest chance to stop them.
The thief lifted the old lady's purse with expert swiftness. There were no wasted moves in his actions and not a second of wasted time. The street was incredibly desolate for this time of day—there was hardly anyone in sight, besides the old lady and the man with her purse. The ruffian ran down the empty sidewalk, taking his time as there didn't seem anyone around to listen to the old lady's feeble cries for help.
“That purse is really not you,” the Defender said. “And it certainly doesn't go with what you're wearing."
The ruffian turned to look behind him but saw no one there. The Defender, flying above him, reached out with a finger and tapped him on the shoulder.
“I'm up here,” he said.
Trying to look up at the voice that was harassing him, the ruffian tripped over his own feet and fell headfirst toward the pavement. The Defender reached out to catch him before his head hit the ground, but he was distracted by the sudden appearance of a costumed figure.
Perhaps noticing his distraction, the ruffian tried to make a getaway. Absent-mindedly and without taking his eyes off the new figure, the Defender reached out and grabbed the thief by his collar.
“Why don't you pick on someone your own size?” the new figure said, his voice as booming and intimidating as the Defender's. He wore a red jumpsuit, lined with blue strips and sprinkled with black “z"s.
“Give me just one second,” the Defender said, holding up a finger. Turning to the ruffian, he said, “I'll be watching you!"
He flew the purse back to its owner, who—embarrassingly—showed her gratitude with repeated and frequent kisses. He struggled to get away from her grasping arms, assuring her that he was just doing his duty as a superhero. Finally free, he returned to the mysterious costumed figure. On the flight over, he wiped at his mask with both hands, to remove any embarrassing lipstick-stains that might have been left there. He landed awkwardly in an out-of-the-view side-alley.
Walking towards the costumed stranger, he stuck out his hand in friendly greeting and said, “I knew there must be others!"
“I am Zortran!” the man said. “And I am here to destroy you, Alpha!"
The Defender looked over one shoulder and then the other. But he was the only person on the street.
“You have me mixed up with somebody else, Mr. Zortran,” the Defender said, finally. “Do you require my assistance in locating this Alpha?"
He wanted to be helpful. He had ambitions of becoming the President of the Association of Superheroes and every vote counted.
After a slight, awkward pause, Zortran said, “You cannot fool me, Alpha! I am here to destroy you and destroy you I will!"
The Defender nodded his head slowly. If Zortran wished to persist in this mad, violent fantasy, maybe a few knocks about the head would teach him not to walk around and threaten other superheroes’ lives. Besides, Zortran seemed to speak only in exclamation marks, which was annoying.
Now nose-to-nose with the masked figure, the Defender said, “If you value your life, turn around and never return to this city. If your life is as valueless as it seems, you may strike first."
He took a single step backwards and held his hands at his sides, waiting.
“Not here!” Zortran said. “Follow me!"
Zortran launched into the air, and the Defender launched after him.
It became clear that they were flying away from the city, but why? Was he being led into a trap? Had a band of sinister supervillains joined forces and plotted the destruction of the mighty and fearsome Defender of the Innocent and Helpless? Was he being led to his own destruction?
It was foolish to go on without more information.
“Hey, Zortran,” the Defender called. “Where are we going?"
Zortran flew on without a single look backwards.
Shrugging, the Defender spiralled down and landed. He wasn't going to allow himself to be lead into some trap. Zortran kept flying, seemingly unaware that the Defender was no longer following.
He was in a deserted park—everything was deserted, it seemed—when Zortran found him later that day. The Defender had been on a park bench, catching up on some sleep, when he was awakened by that annoying, booming voice.
“I've found you at last, Alpha!” Zortran said.
The Defender got up slowly and rubbed his eyes.
“Hi, Zortran,” he said sleepily.
“You are a coward, Alpha! Your belly is well-coloured!"
The Defender got up, fully awake. With slow, deliberate steps, he walked up to Zortran and said, his words as slow as his steps had been, “Tell me again. Tell me I'm a coward."
“To call you a coward would be an insult to cowards everywhere! But of all the superheroes I've ever fought, you are the cowardliest of the bunch! You give superheroing a bad na—"
His punch had hit Zortran clean across the jaw and sent him reeling. A follow-up punch dropped Zortran right into the grassy ground. The Defender stood over him and victoriously placed a foot on the villain's belly.
“You were saying?” he said happily, but suddenly Zortran grabbed his foot and twisted.
Sent crashing to the ground, the Defender tried to roll over and get up. But Zortran was still holding his ankle and his grip was firm, seemingly unbreakable. Zortran grabbed the Defender by the other ankle and began spinning the Defender around his body—once, twice, three times. Then he let him go.
The Defender hit a tree and toppled it over. His shoulder screamed with pain and seemed to have dislocated. But Zortran was already on him, before he even had a chance to move. Lifting him up over his head, the villain flew up a few feet into the air and threw him against the ground.
Although he was winded, the Defender forced himself to his feet—and fell right back down. His ankle was broken.
“Had enough?” Zortran said, coming into view.
With all his might, the Defender swung his elbow at Zortran's right knee and smiled with satisfaction as the villain fell to the ground. He punched Zortran across the face, then jumped on him and held him pinned to the ground, his hands squeezing the villain's red-masked neck.
“Have you?” he said. Dislocated shoulder or not, broken ankle or not—he was good and Zortran was evil. He had a moral obligation to win this fight.
But Zortran had amazing flexibility—he kicked up his left leg and hit the Defender right in the back of the head. Shaken, the Defender loosened his grip on Zortran's neck and that was all the encouragement Zortran needed. Seemingly in one movement, he rolled the Defender over and wrapped his own hands around the Defender's neck.
Zortran was squeezing with all his might.
“I can't—I—can't—breathe,” he said, gasping. Was this the end of the Defender of the Innocent and Helpless?
But, amazingly, Zortran loosened his grip.
The Defender kneed him in the groin. He pulled himself up, then, hopping on his left foot, he flew away. He needed time to rest and recoup his energy.
But Zortran wouldn't let him get away. The Defender felt his broken ankle grabbed from behind and screamed out in pain. In the air, Zortran flung him around himself once again—once, twice, three times—and the Defender was sent flying against a brick building.
He tried to twist in the air, but the brick wall came at him too quickly. He hit it head first, then he felt darkness closing in.
“Matt?"
His eyes slowly came open. His vision was swimming but he recognized the beauty at its center.
“Ann,” he said, his throat so dry it hurt to speak. “Hi."
She seemed very happy that he recognized her.
“Do you remember what happened, Matt?” she asked, concern in her voice.
He tried to nod but couldn't—he was in a neck brace.
“Yes,” he said. “I think so."
He was in a hospital bed, select body parts wrapped in casts. Flowers and cards filled the small, private room.
“How much do you remember?” she asked.
He was Matt Peber, actor. They had been filming on location for a scene in his latest project when an explosion sent him flying; he landed in a large dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant. When he awoke, he found himself in a costume and believed he was a superhero. A few days later, he had his encounter with Zortran, played by Bronson Skeet. He remembered everything.
“Thank God,” Ann said. “We were afraid there might be permanent memory loss or brain damage."
She kissed him on the cheek and he winced in pain.
“I don't know what I would have done if you woke up thinking you were still Alpha,” she said. “That was my biggest fear."
“Why?” he asked, trying to prop himself up but failing. “I was helping people."
Ann had a sad look on her face.
“No, you weren't,” she said. “You were just making a fool of yourself."
“I was helping people,” Matt said stubbornly.
Ann shook her head. Did she think he was still crazy? He didn't want her to think that. But he had helped people, hadn't he? That old lady, and the careless mother? And those kids he'd given the talking-to? The storekeeper and the screaming lady held up at gunpoint?
“Are we still shooting the movie?” he asked, trying to change the topic.
Ann shrugged. “Not sure,” she said. Was it his imagination or was she suddenly cold? “Maybe later; right now we're on indefinite hiatus."
“Where's the costume?” he asked, trying to make the question sound innocent.
Her eyes narrowed.
“In storage, with the rest of the props, of course,” she said, definitely displeased. Then, almost to herself, she added, “I was afraid of this."
Matt reached out his good arm and ran his fingers through her hair.
“Don't be cold,” he said. “Please."
Her face softened and she planted another painful kiss on his cheek.
“Please tell me you don't think you're a superhero,” she said.
“I don't think I'm a superhero,” he answered reasonably. “I just think that I might be able to help people, if I were given the chance. That's all."
Ann got up.
“We'll talk about it later,” she said and left him all alone in the room. It didn't escape his notice that she hadn't kissed him good-bye.
Forget Ann, he told himself. He was surrounded by cards and flowers and candy from other people, people who cared about him. He gathered up the cards he could reach and read through them. Most told him not to feel embarrassed about what happened. It wasn't his fault. It was all in his past, anyway, and worrying about past embarrassments, even when they were played out so publicly, was a waste of energy.
He pushed the cards off his bed.
He picked up the remote control and turned on the television. He surfed through the channels absent-mindedly—until he saw his name. There was a panel discussion on him. One of the panellists thought the whole thing had been some kind of advance promotion for the film. All the panellists agreed that, whatever it was, the idea of some guy running around in his underwear, trying to help people, was just hilarious. “I wish I'd been there to see it,” one of them said and they all laughed. On another channel, an anchorman related the story with a smirk, shaking his head as if he could hardly believe it himself. The anchorman reminded his viewers that it takes all kinds of people to make up this world of ours.
Matt had a lot of time to think, in the days he spent recovering in that lonely hospital room. He had been a fool, hadn't he? He really hadn't helped anyone—except to a good laugh at his expense.
Was he finished as an actor? Could anyone take him seriously again? Or was he forever a laughing stock, the crazy freak who for a short time thought he was a superhero?
It didn't matter. The only thing he could do was to put the whole experience behind him. The public had a short memory and they'd soon forget all about it. Soon, newscasts and editorials would stop ridiculing him. Soon, comedians would take their shots at someone else.
He didn't want to make the movie anymore. It would only serve as a constant reminder of his foolishness, his moment of temporary insanity played out so publicly. He wanted to put the Defender—or Alpha or whatever he was called—as far behind him as possible.
He couldn't wait to tell Ann the good news.
Author of more than thirty published stories and articles, Karl El-Koura lives in Greely, Ontario. In addition to Super Good Looks and Super Modesty, Karl wishes he had other super powers. He can be reached at karl@elkoura.ca. This is Karl's second appearance in Challenging Destiny—his story “The Truth About Edward and Wormwood” appeared in Number 11.
“Choose."
He reached into the woven bag the priest held in his right hand. He opened his fist, revealing a white stone.
The priest nodded. “Choose,” he said again, offering the bag in his right hand. The man who had until this morning been called Miche reached in, rustled around a bit, and pulled out another white stone. This one had six little marks on it, side by side //////. The priest nodded again.
Eventually, seven of the men from Skyserpent people stood around the fire, a pebble in each fist. The remaining men turned away, returning to the tasks they had known their entire lives of gathering food and protecting the people. The women turned away, some stoic, others weeping and tugging at their long braids. When only the seven dead men were left beside the flames, the priest explained what the marks meant. He moved a branch as he spoke, burning away their roots in the world.
/ got the magic. He would leave with the first moon.
// got the prayers. He'd leave in another moon.
/// got the bow, bound and blessed, //// the sword, and ///// the knives, and they would leave in turn, each time the moon was full.
////// got...
“A stick?"
His people were not long on irony, especially elders like the one who stood before him now, holding a smoothed piece of ironwood that reached from the ground to his eyes.
“A stick,” the old man agreed.
////// had known he was going to die as soon as he got the first pebble. He didn't object to dying. He would know people in the afterworld. His sister was there, and so was the sister of the third man chosen. The third dead man. That's what the ceremony was for. To mark them as dead men walking in the world. But he had hoped he could make a difference before he died. “Why not all at once?” he asked, taking the stick and poking one end in the ground. “Wouldn't we have a better chance against the sorcerer all together?"
The old man shook his head and picked up another stick from the dust at his feet. He held it about waist high, one hand palm up and the other palm down. He flipped it back and forth smoothly, turning his hands over as he did so. His weight shifted slightly side to side. It looked like this was all the answer he was ever going to get. ////// lifted his stick and flipped it the same way. On the first turn he smacked himself in the forehead. The old man didn't say anything. He just waited for ////// to pick up the stick and start over. After a few fumbles, and one time throwing the stick down to bruise the top of his foot, ////// eventually got the stick to flip from side to side.
When he did, the old man spoke. “We know that we are a poor people. When the hunt is bad, or the woman don't find many plants, we all go hungry. We have few gifts, and we do not have enough strength, even all together, to hope to beat the sorcerer with strength. Instead, we must put our faith in the gods, and hope that they move the few gifts we offer in their service precisely, like the stars in their paths that tell what the gods will. We pray to be precise tools for their hands. The gods chose you, you and the other six, to travel the length of the land, and perhaps to free it from the heavy hand of magic. My job is to shape you into a weapon that can move that far and still strike a precise blow when it arrives. Because I too am only a tool of the gods. We shape for fire, for faith, and for synchronicity."
By this point //////'s shoulders were burning, and his hands were starting to slip on the stick. He had the rhythm down, of shift and throw with the bottom hand, releasing it, release the top hand and turn it so it slides up the stick to where it needed to catch it, sink the weight and re-press with the original bottom hand, now on top. But he didn't know what it was for.
Eventually, though, ////// started to feel like the gods had some idea about what they were doing. He had never been the fastest man, or the one first to attack, like / and //, but he had always been the most methodical, the one who would repeat things until he got them right, long after everyone else had given up. Even when he didn't understand. In this case it looked like it was going to take a long time. As soon as he could flip the stick from side to side, the old man started him swinging it through a great arc at the level of his knees, then his waist, then his face. When the arcs smoothed out, he was switched to thrusting the stick out to the side, like he was trying to stop a blow coming at him. High and low, attack and defense, //////'s world reduced to moving the stick perfectly, with just the right angle, timing, and power. ////// was bad when he started. He got better.
Usually, ////// just swung his stick, but sometimes he asked questions. Sometimes the old man would hit him with a stick, always faster than ////// could dodge. He was slowed by the fact that he was never sure if he should dodge, or if this was the answer. But sometimes the old man answered. Sometimes he even answered the questions he'd been asked.
“Why do we have to fight back? Or why do we have to fight back now? Because the sorcerers have gotten greedy. They have always demanded tribute, always always, but now they ask for sacrifice. And not one girl, but one with each moon. Don't you want the man who killed your sister to suffer?” the old man said, swinging his stick at //////'s shins. //////, caught up in the question, skipped over the stick without thinking.
////// thought of the small, dark-featured man who had come north with a message baked into clay, and how he had looked balefully at the people while the priest broke the message and read it, only to announce that they would now sacrifice people. Sisters and uncles began to vanish at the dark of the moon, one at a time. Yes, he did want to kill that man, and his master, but was a man still a man if all the blood of the earth ran through him? If he could do what the sorcerers were said to be able to do? And more importantly, could he be killed by a man using a stick?
Days later, he asked another question that got him a direct answer rather than a bruise. “Yes, I can tell you why I was not chosen, since I can already use this stupid stick better than you. What do you see on that far hill, the reddish one?"
////// looked.
“I did not tell you to let the stick rest."
Returning the stick to its slow arc from high overhead to directly in front of him, moving it in a great, excruciating slice, ////// said, “Uncle, I cannot tell what you want me to look at. I see the tree that has never given fruit since the last time the sorcerers were angry. I see the dusty spot where the watch stood three years ago, when the people across the plain attacked us, but I don't—"
“Do you know what I see? I see a blur. A tall blur. Some short blurs. When I was your age, I could see a tree, and bushes, and the fruit that grew on them both, but men change with time, like the earth."
For six moons they practiced. ////// changed, from the man he had been, with a wife-to-be and a place in the hunt, to the man the gods had chosen. A dead man with a stick. He had not known how great his ties were to his people, how they bound him to them morning to night and head to foot until the day of the festival to honor the sky, that brings the fall rains. ////// had left his stick beside the straw pallet where he had slept and risen, thinking of drinking and dancing, already moving in tune with the flutes and drums his people played. The weight of a stick across his middle and a stern face that shook side to side had stopped him. That's when he felt the weight of the god's choice.
He realized it again when he left, six moons after. It was not yet dawn; it was not yet fall, but he was leaving, alone. All the others who had been chosen were long gone, except the one after him, who would fight the sorcerer with hands and feet if ////// failed. He had seen some of the men leave. He knew that if the first, whose gift was magic, had won, he might have come back by now. Even if he wasn't back, the sorcerer's grip on the land, which blocked streams and closed wells, so that the only water the Skyserpent people had came from the skies as a gift from their god, would have loosened. ////// left knowing that those who went before him had failed, or simply died along the way. He left carrying a stick in his hand, bags of water and food over his shoulders, and rough directions on how to find the sorcerer's trail in his head. He left, feeling the hand of the gods upon him heavier than any of his tools, which in truth felt very light indeed.
But as ////// walked, down valleys and up again, he did not see any further sign of the sorcerer's hand everywhere upon the land. This left him alone for many days with his faith and his stick. Doubt gave him anger, and added fire to his daily practice against his enemy. Sometimes he swung his ironwood staff against the great tusks of the boar-faced villain that was the sorcerer. Sometimes he ground the last of its skeleton into the dirt that sustained it. It bothered him sometimes that no one could tell him what such an evil creature looked like. All they said was, you will know him by his actions. And there weren't any actions.
When he reached the northern end of the trail that the sorcerer decreed must run the length of the land, it looked like just another game trail, with dirt pounded bare by animals’ feet. He wouldn't have known it at all had it not ended at the base of a glittering outcropping of mica twice his size. ////// hesitated before stepping on the trail, afraid because of what he had been told, dubious because of what he had not seen. When he did step on, nothing was different. Did the sorcerer own the whole land? ////// didn't have any answers, just a stick and a mission, so he walked on.
////// had almost no food left on the day that he rounded the bend in the trail and saw the unnatural shape looming in front of him. It was bent and dark. One limb seemed to melt and drip into the next. He raised his staff and advanced, hoping the shape would resolve into something he could recognize. It was nothing he knew. What was it? When it didn't move, ////// put all of his training to work, swinging a whistling blow from high overhead to smash into its ungainly shape.
It felt good to channel his anger at having lost his life with his people, and to have an enemy he could see! The blow smashed down. ////// was showered with fragments. The hard fragments tore at his skin, leaving him cut all up and down his body. The soft ones blended and splattered against him. He touched one wet glob, and brought it to his nose. It wasn't blood. He flicked it with his tongue. It was a berry, of a sort they didn't have up north. He picked up one of the harder fragments. It was a shard of hardened clay, like the water jugs his people traded for.
////// shook his head. How could a man be sick enough to cover a living bush with mud and leave it to die? Even more than people, plants needed to see the sky, and know that the gods were there shining down on them.
////// methodically smashed the entire twisted bush. As he did, a heady aroma rose, pulling a growl from his stomach. He licked the berries he freed. It was his first full meal in days. As he smashed and ate, ////// remembered how he had dug for roots along the trail and found nothing except strangely resistant earth of a uniform brown. That too must have been a twist of the sorcerer. Finally the bush was free and he was full, doubly satisfied by wresting a meal from the sorcerer's perversion.
After that, as he walked further south, he realized that things like the bush were part of what the elders had meant. They were right; his doubt was wrong. More and more frequently, as he walked into the growing cold, he found these dark, gnarled shapes beside the path; sometimes he could look beyond and see where all of the forests he could see had been swallowed up by the earth. Tree after tree, bush after bush had been swallowed by mud that swarmed up their trunks to grip them. Always it was the fruit trees, as if the sorcerer meant to starve the entire land. ////// saw some that had been sliced open. One was a larger fruit tree, with juicy globes as big as his fist. Eventually he realized that the smooth cuts came from a sword. Was this a good sign, telling him that //// had made it that far?
////// had fallen into a routine of walking, practicing, and smashing the sorcerer's work without penalty or worry. At the next bend in the trail, he saw a particularly large shape. He gathered himself and jumped, hoping to smash the bush free with one full-body swing of his staff and feed both ego and stomach.
His staff rebounded with a dull “thunk” that resonated back through the wood and into his hands. Cursing the sorcerer, ////// tucked his staff under one arm and rubbed his hands quickly, hoping to get the buzzing out of them.
He was still rubbing his hands when he heard a heavy shifting in front of him. ////// looked up. “Serpent father...” he whispered. It was half a prayer, half a curse.
What ////// had thought was another bush wrapped in mud was straightening into a man-shaped figure, well, mostly man-shaped, half again his size. Where a man was well defined, this thing was smooth, a face like the bottom of a pond. And where a man was smooth, the thing was gnarled, its limbs marked by uneven lumps and swirls. Its five limbs, ////// realized. Or did you count one arm as two if it split at the elbow? He would have to ask a priest. If he lived.
If. The thing hadn't done anything yet. It just loomed there. ////// measured the reach of its arms as he had the reach of his teacher's staff, then tried to walk past, his stick held at the ready.
At his first step, the thing stepped into his path and pointed its forked left arm back the way he had come. ////// stepped back a pace. His way was blocked. Could he go through the woods, and join the path again later? Would he be allowed to move in any direction except backwards? ////// thought. Could he even go back? He was dead to his people, the name Miche surrendered for the next baby to be born, as he had gotten it from his grandfather Miche when he had fallen in the feuds with the sea people.
////// shifted his weight from side to side as he thought. Then he saw it. The hilt of a sword stuck out from behind one of the knee gnarls of the clayman. ////// knew that sword. It had left his people two moons before he did in the hand of a man who had been one of his own. Shame swept over him. //// had not turned around. //// had attacked, and //// had died.
////// swung his stick at the forked arm that was lifted to drive him away. His stick hit in the center of the cleft with a dull thunk. When the clayman reached for the stick with both twisted hands, ////// stepped in to use the cleft as a pivot. He drove the other end of his stick into the clayman's chest, thrusting with the strength and precision drilled into him by six moons of practice, then pulling the stick out.
The clayman stepped towards him, an indentation in the cleft and a deep pockmark in its chest. ////// sidestepped and drove his stick at where an ankle would be on a man. The clayman overbalanced and fell face down on the trail.
////// hesitated for a breath, then jumped over the tangled mass to run down the hill. It was one breath too long. A grip tightened around //////'s ankle. It felt like he had caught it between two rocks. He looked back. The thing hardly looked like a man anymore, with limbs twisting around to reach up at him from the ground. The back of its head now bent in like a bowl. Though it had no eyes, ////// could feel its attention on him.
////// beat at the arm hold him, thanking the skyserpent for the strength of its ironwood tree as his stick held for one, two, three blows. The last impact, right at the bend of the thing's arm, sent his stick bouncing back at him. It caught ////// in the nose, which began to bleed.
Huge red drops fell on the clay arm holding him. ////// shook his head to clear his vision, and swung again at the arm. When he hit, he overbalanced and fell on his right side. His stick had swung completely through the arm, sending mud to splatter in all directions. He could see the shape beyond him, creeping towards him, but he could also see the arm, still wrapped around his leg, one end wet with his crimson blood.
////// got up and ran down the trail, quickly out-distancing the claymonster. The weight of its arm on his left ankle made his left hip ache. As he was sure he was away, ////// stopped to pry at the crude hand.
Nothing moved, nothing changed. Baffled, ////// took one of the bags from his shoulder and took three measured swallows of water. Then he squinted at the clay arm, and carefully poured a little water on it.
Nothing changed. It held his ankle like a rock. Sighing, ////// brushed what was left of the water from the arm and started to clean the blood from his face with it. When he had gotten as much blood off as possible, he leaned back to rest, and tumbled over as the arm shifted beneath him.
He jumped to his feet, ready to run, then realized the arm wasn't attacking him. It had just given way. ////// walked away from the arm anyway, looking back once to see its dark and misshapen form pointing at him, squat fingers tipped with his own blood.
////// traveled for three more days. He walked easily, but felt that he really was a dead man, and the land around him began to reflect that. The trail was too smooth, and slid along a trough that no animal or herd could have made. It seemed like he was running along the trail like water, being poured along, in a trough of clay that came halfway up his body.
////// found himself turning from side to side as he walked; he wanted to keep the stick between himself and the unnatural smoothness of the trail walls. They looked too much like the inside of a deer's stomach. When ////// slept, as far from the trail as he could get, he dreamt of the trail closing on him, mud covering him like a berry. He dreamt of the next dead man finding him guarding the trail as a claymonster. Before he slept at night, ////// combed through the dirt, moving the rocks to one side. He never got them all; any rock that he slept on seemed to be trying to sneak into his body. He often shook himself awake, or realized he was already throwing a rock away as he woke up.
////// sacrificed part of his food bag to carry a sharp rock. He took to cutting himself every morning, so fresh blood was always at hand. When he practiced with his stick, he blocked with his stick in ways that his uncle had taught him not to, so that the receiving portion of the stick was knocked back by the incoming force into his nose. So it would bleed. When it bled, he wiped the blood on his stick. The cured ironwood, which had started a shiny purple, became muddy and dark. The tears that came with the pain he just wiped away. After a while, the tears stopped coming.
The longer he walked, the deeper the trail. The longer he walked, the more it seemed like he really was dead, and that all he'd been allowed to take into the afterworld was a stick. And fear. The longer he walked, the stranger it seemed that he met no one. No humans, no animals. The entire land was being squeezed into silence by the sorcerer's hand, so the sorcerer could suck out the sweetness. The longer he stayed on the trail, the more it seemed a great slice through the land, like those he cut into his forearm each morning.
Then one day, ////// heard the blessed and terrifying sound of feet behind him on the trail. He turned and waited.
Moving lightly, almost skipping, came the figure of Joshu, or he who had been Joshu. He was /////// now. Half again as tall as //////, he had left a full moon later, after training to fight with hands and feet, but had caught him on the trail.
////// turned to meet Joshu. It was hard to think of him as dead; he looked so alive, so happy! “Joshu,” he called.
“Miche.” Maybe since they were both dead, they could be alive to one another? From that point on, it was like death was fractured, and he was Miche again, or at least the ghost of Miche.
“It is good to see you. You've moved quickly."
“I'm glad you've made it this far,” was all Joshu answered. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest. He wasn't smiling.
“What's wrong?” Miche asked.
“You are. I am the last warrior, the last weapon. The gods wouldn't have chosen seven if we didn't need seven. It will be my glory to kill the sorcerer. Perhaps it will be after you weaken him. Perhaps it will be while he is distracted by roasting you on a spit."
“Does he do that?"
“I do not know. I only know that you have been too slow, and now everything may go astray.
“So ... what would you have me do?” This was not an idle question. Miche knew his mind was strong, but not swift. One answer was enough for him, and he did not fight if he did not have to.
Joshu rocked on his heels slightly, as if over-balancing. He sliced at the air with one calloused hand.
“You must go first. You must go faster. We will make this alignment in time a second weapon, like a fist that follows quickly after a slower foot.” Joshu's feet and hands flicked through the air, illustrating his words.
Miche nodded, and turned to walk on. Then he turned back. “How did you pass the claymonster?"
Joshu sneered. “You must be slow. It was slow. I danced, I jumped, and I left it pointing back at our home. Where I will return as the hero who killed the sorcerer."
Miche wanted to say that he didn't care who killed the sorcerer, but he wasn't sure that was true. He wanted to have died for something. He wanted the hand he had left in the trail to point towards his victory, not be just a clumsy sculpture. So he just turned and walked on in silence, quickly becoming accustomed to the agile sound of Joshu behind him, walking and skipping, not talking and not concerned. Joshu was an uneven shield for his back. Miche did not trust him. He still made camp as if he were alone; he still checked the dirt; he still bled.
One day, late in the afternoon, Miche heard a distant howling before him. It rose and fell at the very edge of hearing, and it never stopped. He stood still until Joshu caught him a second time.
“What is it?"
“Do you hear that?"
Joshu licked his lips at the sound of the howling. “At last,” he said. “At last we will fight the sorcerer. Those must be the spirits of those he has killed, trapped far from home and wailing in despair. You go first."
Miche was less sure that the howling was a good sign, but he walked on. The trail now reached almost up to his shoulders. There would be no easy way out, at least not for him. Perhaps Joshu was agile enough to sprint up the walls. Miche would walk straight into the mouth of the howling.
And he did, one methodical poke of the stick into the earth after another. The trail deepened sharply, its walls now above his head. Rather than being smooth, its lips curved and puckered, like waves, as if the earth had been wiped into a storm, then frozen.
As he walked through this great tear in the earth, which snaked and twisted so that Miche was almost blind as to what came ahead, he felt lost. He could hear light steps behind him, always steady, and howling in front of him, always growing louder. The rest of the world was brown. The dried blood on his skin and staff. The walls of the trail. Miche looked up. The only thing left that wasn't brown was the winding trail of the sky. Miche stood still. If he looked up, it was like he was walking along the body of a snake, perhaps following the track of the Skyserpent himself.
Miche frowned. He didn't like that image. Not because he was afraid of being in the belly of the great snake; he'd been there since he took the white pebble. But if this were the serpent himself, then all of these waves shouldn't be here. They made it look like the serpent was molting.
Miche sliced his forearm and wet his stick. He raised his staff high over head and began to swing it from side to side, cleaning off the lip of the trail as he went.
And he smiled. With smoothness came silence, at least nearby. The curves and waves of the trail lip had been shaping the wind, bringing howls where there was no pain at all. Miche smashed another just to be sure, then bloodied his stick to have another swing.
“So you've found the secret of my front gate,” a voice said.
Miche brought his head and staff down, to face forward. In front of him stood a small man with a large nose and intense eyes. He was dressed better than Miche, with garments that were dyed two colors and not torn, but the clothes were not extravagant, nothing so grand as the robes the priests had worn on the day he left. And the priests would never have let mud dry on their hands the way this stranger did.
At the sight of that mud Miche began to flip his staff back and forth between his hands, lifting a moving barrier between them. He did not realize this made him feel safer, but he did not speak until the stick was moving steadily. Then he asked, “Why do this? Why make the earth howl with your evil?"
“And what is it that makes me evil?"
Miche had a stick, and a mission. He didn't have answers, and didn't expect to have to supply them before he fought. He spat on the ground. “You wrap the plants in your dark rock. You set monsters to guard the path, scaring the people so that I saw no one the entire time I walked here, you—"
“Ah, that worked, did it?” The sorcerer gave a little smile at that. “I wasn't sure it would. The trail is so obvious that I was afraid—"
“You laugh at the idea that you scared people away?” Should he attack? The sorcerer hadn't moved.
“Why not? It's easier than fighting, and, like the howling gates that you rudely broke, it usually keeps people who come to kill me from coming any further. Most of them are coming out of fear, and if I give them more fear, they go back. You must be coming to kill me for another reason."
It wasn't really a question, but the words hit Miche like his teacher's stick to the pit of his stomach. He was afraid. He had doubted since he took up the stick. Why did he go on, why did he fight?
From behind him, Miche heard “Why do you talk to him?” Then Joshu was past, moving like a leopard as he raced towards the sorcerer. The sorcerer blinked at this sudden attack, but didn't seem all that concerned. Instead, he slapped his hands together, then slapped them, left and right, against the walls of the trail.
Joshu was at a full run by the time he reached the sorcerer, and launched himself into the air for a powerful kick. It landed, but not on the sorcerer. Instead, heavy shapes extruded themselves from the walls, becoming something like a bear, and something like a dog. Joshu's kick struck the still forming claybear in the head and squashed it backwards in silent abomination.
He pulled his foot out and launched a number of strikes against the claybear's midsection, whirling to kick the dogthing back against the side of the trail where it had emerged.
From beyond the battle, Miche heard, “And you wonder why I try to scare people away."
The claybear's head had reformed, and it swung a squarish paw that slapped Joshu backward. Miche stilled his stick's continual back and forth long enough to slice another crisscrossing cut into the flesh of his forearm, then shouted, “Here!"
Joshu's eyes flicked back at him. “Sacrifice, now?"
He launched himself back at the dog, kicking it sideways once, twice, and then mashing it against the bear's leg so that the two gummed together into an almost immobile mass. Miche allowed himself to hope, but when he looked towards the sorcerer, he saw that he had retreated much further down the trail, leaving bloody handprints along the way. Each place he had slapped bulged and writhed, tumors that birthed unnatural creatures.
Joshu slipped past the dog/bear mass and danced forward, hoping to reach the sorcerer before his creations could flipper free of the tunnel walls. He almost made it. He kicked the sorcerer loose from one wall with his right foot, then spun and caught his tunic with the fingers of his extended right hand. He lifted his left hand to thrust a killing blow into the sorcerer's neck, only to find his arm wrapped in both of the dark, slender arms of what looked like a woman crafted by a blind man.
Joshu twisted and turned, but he couldn't free his arm. He didn't release the sorcerer, but couldn't get any closer. Then he disappeared beneath a pile of the sorcerer's clay servants until only a hand was visible, still holding a torn scrap of the sorcerer's tunic.
Miche said a brief prayer for Joshu. He had wanted to fight the sorcerer, and he had turned down the best help Miche knew how to give, and then it was over in half a dozen strikes and a pile of mud.
And the sorcerer was still alive, slipping around the mudpile to come towards him. He looked very tired. “Your friend had too much pride to be afraid. And now he is dead. Will you learn from his death, and return to your people and tell them that Ketzel the sorcerer only wants to be left in peace?"
Questions swirled in Miche. Was it pride alone that had driven Joshu? The sorcerer wanted peace? And had a name? Could he go back? And had he made a terrible mistake, destroying the timing decreed by the gods, by letting Joshu attack before him? Was he still //////?
He might have spoken to the sorcerer, might have listened to his ridiculous claims, but then Miche saw something. At the mention of Joshu, Miche's eyes had flicked to the pile that marked his grave. As it hardened Miche saw that he knew the face of the clay maiden that had stayed Joshu's hand. It was his sister Michexa, and though her face was clay, it was sad.
“You raise up the dead against us?"
Casually, as if discussing the best way to peel bark, Ketzel said, “Well, yes. It is easier. You see, nothing that is taken into the earth is lost. It can always be reborn, though sometimes distorted or—ugh."
The whirling end of Miche's stick had clipped the top of the sorcerer's head; he pivoted the other end so that it quickly thrust into the sorcerer's belly. Ketzel collapsed onto the trail floor, vomiting.
“You killed Joshu. You killed my sister, and used her to kill Joshu? You swallow bushes and people and you speak of peace?"
Miche stepped forward, raising his staff to smash it into the back of the sorcerer's head, but even sick the sorcerer was not defenseless. The places he had rested his palms on the trail floor were sprouting limbs that reached out to soften Miche's strike so it was no longer a killing blow.
Miche bloodied his staff and attacked the still forming creatures. At his wet touch they disintegrated, pouring back into the trail with a sound between a sigh and a cry.
By that time the sorcerer had crawled on, each moist handprint an unholy seed. Miche grimaced as he saw a frog lurch its way out of the ground to come at him, followed by a duck, still trying to fly, then by something that never congealed enough for Miche to recognize it. We pray for the spirits of the dead animals when we hunt, he thought, so that they may pass easily into the spirit world, and sleep easily when they are there. Are our prayers useless?
Though he doubted, his stick never stopped moving, picking the dark duck from mid-hop, coming down on the frog's head, and hitting the unnamable thing once on the backswing, then using his momentum to carry it against the trail wall. It stuck there, glued by the impact and Miche's blood.
He surged forward far enough to smash the sorcerer's foot as the man crawled away, then lost his stick as he was hit from the side with a moist, heavy tackle from a man-shaped thing. Miche cried out as the thing forced the air from his lungs.
He slapped his bloody hands to the sides of its head. It dissolved into pile of loose clay that pinned him to the trail floor. He wiggled back and forth, trying to free his legs before the next creature could reach him (and before, a dark voice whispered, he had to fight someone he had known). Four steps away, the sorcerer lay clutching his leg, temporarily distracted from creating more servants.
Through gritted teeth, the sorcerer said, “For a fool, you are brave. I'll give you that."
Miche kept pushing at the clay.
“Do you know what will happen if you kill me?"
“Yes! The land will finally be free."
“That's right. It will be free.” The sorcerer said. “Who would want that?"
“What?” Miche was so surprised that he stopped freeing himself for a breath.
“You heard me. Who would want the land to be free? When animals are free, what do they do? They run, and escape the needs of men."
“What do men do when they are free, unbound by the needs and words of their people? They take, food, women, gold. They hurt, they kill. They become wild."
Miche shoved at the remains of the magicked clay and stood up. His entire body was stained by the battle.
“You are mad, sorcerer,” he said. “Twisting the earth has twisted your brain."
“Am I? Let me ask another question, and see if you can block this one as easily. Who benefits if the land is freed?"
“The people. They would—"
“If I am killed, I mean."
Words formed on Miche's lips. The priests of the Skyserpent, he almost said. They would have vanquished the greatest, most evil sorcerer in the land, and no one would be around to oppose their rule. Shaking his head, he brushed at the remnants of the clay on his tunic and walked over to get his stick.
The sorcerer pressed his advantage. “And do you know why these people, and the animals, even, serve me in clay after their death? They choose to. They know that if they do not, the land would rise up and shake like a beast of burden, scattering their tribes like—"
“No!” Miche had been tracked by doubts the entire time he walked here. He would not let the sorcerer twist his victory this way.
He set the stick in motion, swinging it round, and round, then down. It smashed down into the sorcerer's leg, the one he'd already damaged.
The sorcerer winced, but kept his eyes on Miche's. Miche spun the stick again, between himself and the sorcerer, then brought it down on the sorcerer's other leg.
Miche watched pain drive the sorcerer's fingers deep into the trail floor. The land rocked and bucked in response, but Miche bent his knees and kept his feet. He stayed on the attack, going for the sorcerer despite the new creatures he knew were reaching for him.
He struck, and felt the sorcerer's ribs give way. A bubble of blood formed on the sorcerer's lips. Wasn't he man enough to try to get away? It sickened Miche to kill a man like this. Like a sacrifice. Miche stiffened his spine, and struck again.
Before it landed, Miche knew it was the killing blow. His stick smashed into the side of the sorcerer's neck. It crunched. Miche felt several hands close around his ankles, and others wrap around his upper legs.
The land had jolted when the sorcerer was hurt. When he was killed, it went wild. Miche's people usually hunted the small animals that hid in the grass, but once, by accident, they had cornered a puma. Eight men had attacked it, and Miche had grabbed its back to slow it down while a spear was thrust into it. Before the puma died, it convulsed, and threw him once, twice. As it did, it felt like every point where he could touch was alive and fighting him independently.
The earth felt like that now. A rumbling crash filled his ears, and dust rose to blind Miche. His feet felt like they were being hit from underneath, from the side, from on top. Miche coughed, and drove his stick into the ground. It was hard to breathe.
When the dust cleared, Miche could see why. The place where he stood, beside the body of sorcerer, had been at the bottom of the trough that was the trail. Now that section of the land was at the top of a high mountain. There was barely enough space for Miche to stand beside the body, and he had a furtive suspicion that if it were not for the hands of the sorcerer's creations, he would have fallen to break upon the exposed rock below despite the strength of his stick.
Miche stood, anchored in this new high place in the land. He looked down in all directions, craning his neck against the tension of the gripping hands. He could see the trail, once straight and hollow. Naked, it zigged and zagged like a broken spine. In the distance he could see a bend in the trail, where the sorcerer's creature had stood. It looked like a fire had started there; he could see the branches he had thought were empty of life twitching as the animals fled.
He looked north, but could neither see his home nor the trail to it, which vanished amidst the rubble.
He looked down at the body of the sorcerer, then away. He swallowed. His mouth was dry with dust. He spat, but the dust clung to him.
Miche looked at his legs, held in place by the hands and paws of the earth. He found a piece of rock and cut himself one more time, then dissolved them with a sigh.
He was free to go. He stood for a moment, a dead man with a stick, beside the evil sorcerer he had killed, high above the land he had freed.
Miche shook his head and took his first step from the top of the mountain. The way down was steep; he would need his stick to keep his balance. He was dead now. He knew that for sure, but he was still haunted by what the sorcerer had said.
The dead man with the stick came down from the mountain alone, sure of nothing and looking for truth. It would be a long walk home.
Greg Beatty attended Clarion West in the summer of 2000. He's had a number of short stories accepted since then, and this year his main project is writing children's picture books. (For more information on his writing, visit home.earthlink.net/~gbeatty/.) When he's not at his computer, he enjoys cooking, practicing martial arts, and having complex interpersonal relationships.
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, Penguin Classics, 1992, 261 pp. (originally published in 1818)
Frankenstein, one of the key texts in modern literature, was written by Mary Shelley in 1818 when she was only 21. She had already experienced quite an amazing range of events in her life, and she survived quite a few more after Frankenstein. Shelley was born in 1797 to two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died within a few days of childbirth, and William Godwin, who raised her. Shelley received a much more extensive education than other young girls in that time period. She chose to elope with Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of 17—two years later, Percy's first wife committed suicide, and the elopers were married. Only one of her four children survived, and Percy himself drowned in 1822. The next thirty years of her life were comparatively uneventful, and they were productive ones for her, although her later writings never achieved the same fame as Frankenstein which was composed in that most turbulent time of her life. She died in 1851.
Frankenstein was published anonymously, and the author was only later revealed to be Shelley. She wrote a new introduction (included in this Penguin Classics edition) for the 1831 edition, at which point she incorporated a number of changes. She also took the chance to answer a question she had apparently received quite often: how such a young girl could write about such horrible things. Her answer describes her literary sources, as well as a disturbing dream that was the kernel of inspiration for the story. Shelley borrowed quite freely from the sources she was familiar with—there are large echoes of Paradise Lost (one of the three books the Monster reads in the course of the story) and Shakespeare, and the sequence of the Monster's “adopted” family and the Arabian lover in middle of the book seems lifted straight from one of the side stories in Don Quixote. Shelley brilliantly synthesized ideas of the time, and brought the sting of satire to bear on the modern idea of the scientist.
Frankenstein begins with a framing story. An explorer named Robert Walton has left the north coast of Russia and is on his way into the Arctic Ocean; Walton is writing letters to his sister in London and tells her how one day he saw a monstrous figure fleeing across the ice. A few days later, Walton rescues Victor Frankenstein from hypothermia and starvation. Frankenstein tells Walton the events that form the core of the novel, his creation of the Monster, and Walton relates them to his sister in epistolary form.
Victor Frankenstein's story is divided into three volumes. Volume 1 is the story of Frankenstein's childhood in Geneva, and his studies at a university in Germany that led to the creation of the monster. He thinks he can create wonderful new life, but at his first glance at his creation, Frankenstein turns away in horror. He subsequently becomes quite ill. He is called back to Geneva two years later by a letter from his father that has tragic news: his younger brother William has been murdered. Frankenstein is convinced that his monster committed the crime, but a piece of evidence has been planted with Justine, the family maid. When Justine is executed, Frankenstein feels like he has two deaths on his head.
Volume 2 is mainly the monster's story; Frankenstein meets him on a glacier near Geneva, and the monster tells his creator about his brief life. Everywhere he turned, he was met with disgust or open enmity. He was hiding out in the woods when he found a family he could safely observe, help secretly, and learn language and culture from while eavesdropping. In a heartrending scene, the monster reveals himself to the blind father of the family, only to be violently spurned when the rest of the family returns. Frankenstein finds out that his suspicions about William's fate were correct, and the monster threatens further violence on Frankenstein's family if a certain request of his is not fulfilled. He wants a bride, similar in nature to himself, simply because every normal human has rejected him.
Volume 3 is about the consequences of Frankenstein's refusal of this request. Frankenstein attempts to make the bride once, but destroys the result. He flees across northern Scotland and Ireland, only to face more death, and back in Geneva, a final round of murder and death. Every professional and filial attachment is either denied him or destroyed, and he blames it all on his creation. The monster tauntingly leads him on a long chase that ends up in the Arctic Ocean. Once Frankenstein is done his story, the book has a brief coda narrated by Walton.
Why has this book's fame persisted so long in our culture? Shelley's Frankenstein is a strong psychological drama, the pitiless tale of the destruction of one man. The book has longer passages of philosophy and reflection than modern horror readers are accustomed to, but the body count is certainly still quite high. The book has a major disappointment to audiences conditioned by all the movie versions to expect a hugely spectacular creation-of-the-monster scene: Frankenstein doesn't describe it to Walton for fear that Walton will write it down and let other people figure out the process. A copout, but a reasonable one by the book's internal logic. Interestingly, Shelley's story has been played as horror in most adaptations but it's also a sound argument to call it science fiction. What should we do with our expanding scientific powers? How do we make decisions on life or death matters once that is within our hands? As much as Frankenstein is a cliché when it's applied to new scientific advances, the kneejerk warning of doom, it's also as if Shelley's book has never been applied at all. Cautionary tales by their nature can hardly ever be intense or sweeping enough. Does Frankenstein deserve his cruel fate? Shelley seems to punish the man for two sins, hubris and lack of pity. Frankenstein creates life and then turns away from it. Perhaps it's as simple as the fact that he doesn't learn from his mistakes despite his brilliance.
This leads me directly to my next point. Another reason for the book's enduring fame is the strength of the characters. Frankenstein is a complex and fascinating man, a scholarly prodigy, and noteworthy to his biology professors even though he has grown up reading alchemy textbooks. He ruins his life with overwork in the two years it takes to create the monster, then runs from the consequences, all the while living with crushing despair. He's hardly the mad scientist of the movie adaptations; his fit of mad science is followed mostly by remorse and the accumulation of fatal consequences. Frankenstein is quite glib, and doesn't learn from his own philosophizing, another of the book's ironies; at one point, he says: “A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule” (54). Even more interesting than Frankenstein himself is the character of the monster. We encounter his horrible deeds before he gets a chance to tell his own story, but when he does, the book subtly changes, tearing our sympathies between the two main characters. The monster becomes aware of the world, learns to read, and acts out of crippling loneliness—all this is related in stunning details. Shelley has a knack for demonstrating complex states of mind through a character's actions, even though the prose may be a bit thick for the modern reader. Shelley skimps on the other characters in the book, such as Walton or the one female character, Elizabeth.
Frankenstein is well worth reading, and it's much different than the popular conception of the story. This is not surprising, considering the way it has wended its way through popular culture for almost two centuries. The story has been picked over by horror and science fiction writers and scriptwriters ever since (for example, the last speech of the monster—"'But soon,’ he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt'” (215)—is quite similar to the famous “Tears in Rain” speech in Blade Runner, another lament by a created being), and there have been a multitude of movie adaptations and sequels, even computer games. The majority of them are simply awful, but one or two points of interest crop up.
Frankenstein, written by John L. Balderston from the theatrical adaptation by Peggy Webling of the novel by Mary Shelley, directed by James Whale, 1931, 70 min.
Whale's Frankenstein is generally regarded as one of the greatest monster movies ever made, and the movie's image of Frankenstein's monster has become an icon of cinema (even though subsequent adaptations mistakenly call the famous monster by the name of its creator). Most of what passes for horror onscreen nowadays has conditioned fans to expect blood and gore and guts, and a shock a minute. Frankenstein lacks all those things, and generally has a slow pace and a focus on characters. The most shocking thing about the movie was, apparently, that Henry Frankenstein cries out, just after creating the monster, “Now I know what it is like to be God!” This line was censored at the time, but has been restored on DVD (also censored and subsequently restored was the scene where the monster accidentally murders a little girl). The tender sensibilities of an audience of the past are easy to mock, and certainly seem quaint by today's standards; horror movies no longer have a tuxedoed narrator introduce the movie and warn the audience to brace themselves (of course, our own sensibilities will be ripe for parody soon enough). While audiences won't swoon from shock watching this movie nowadays, it has held up remarkably well, especially when watched in conjunction with Whale's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. Both movies clock in at around 70 minutes, so the combined run time is not much more than the terrible Kenneth Branagh version.
Frankenstein had a tortuous genesis (some of the extras on the recent DVD go into further detail about the whys and wherefores of the credits), and takes a few elements from Mary Shelley's book and discards the rest. Some of these plot points would show up in Whale's sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, but the pattern of extremely loose adaptation was already set and would be followed throughout all of the versions to follow. In this movie, Henry Frankenstein is an obsessed scientist holed up in a remote castle, busy stitching together body parts that he and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz have robbed from graves. He intends to animate this corpse and create new life. His fiancée and father are understandably concerned, but he carries on regardless. After an astonishing creation scene, his work is a success, but Fritz seems bent on tormenting the creature. The creature kills Fritz and escapes. The creature has one brief experience with happiness, but it is soon being chased by the villagers and their infamous flaming torches. Cue the burning windmill and the apparent destruction of the monster.
Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein set the template, fortunately or unfortunately, for a whole parade of mad scientists who would follow his example and run amuck in B-movies for decades to come. The complexity of his character is cut down considerably from the book, which is understandable for a movie of such a short running length. Clive's Frankenstein is not much capable of restraint or remorse, despite the ending (it's no surprise when he shows up in the sequel ready for more mad science). This ends up working in the movie's favour, however; Boris Karloff as the monster is the key to the proceedings, and Frankenstein himself is just plot business to get us to the good stuff.
Interestingly, Karloff's monster doesn't have that much screen time, which is why this movie is better watched in tandem with its sequel. The most famous scene in Frankenstein is probably the child drowning scene. After escaping from Frankenstein's castle, the creature meets and begins innocently playing with a young peasant girl, as they both throw flowers onto some nearby water and watch the petals float. The creature then proceeds to throw the girl into the water, not knowing that she will drown. As a synopsis of the creature's nature, either as ignorant and deserving of our pity or as outcast because of its brutish nature, the scene is a bit brief but what it lacks in length it makes up in impact.
As mentioned, this movie version keeps only a small amount of Shelley's book. Because the movie itself works, this is a small sin (unlike the case of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). One of the few moments that feels unnecessary is the origin of the monster's brain. Fritz is sent by Frankenstein to get a brain from a nearby institute; as a clumsy henchman, Fritz promptly drops the jar containing the brain Frankenstein wanted. He grabs the next available brain and the camera shows us “ABNORMAL” written on the jar in big letters. A criminal brain thus leads to a brutish monster. This puts less of the responsibility on Frankenstein for trespassing on what man is not meant to know or do and more on a mistake made by the incompetent help. It also undercuts the film's natural sympathy for the monster.
What does this movie mean? At one level, it could be considered as a vehicle to deliver scares to the audience. It succeeded at the time and has become iconic for that reason. But as modern horror movies can sometimes demonstrate, a series of bloody shocks can be instantly forgettable. This movie succeeds because it has some conceptual heft to it, as well as some adroitly handled ambiguity in its regard for its monster. The movie has taken on a life of its own due to the space it leaves for viewers to inscribe themselves and interpret the story. For example, much ink has also been expended on the ways in which James Whale may or may not have encoded his homosexuality in his films (see the excellent Gods and Monsters, a recent movie about Whale). Like the best art, this movie has stood the test of time.
Both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are available in new DVD editions with all scenes properly restored and plenty of extras for those who want to know more about the movies.
Bride of Frankenstein, written by William Hurlbut, directed by James Whale, 1935, 75 min.
If anything, Bride of Frankenstein has a better critical reputation than its predecessor, which happens seldom enough for a sequel to make this noteworthy. Is it a better movie? I see it as completing a sequence; it certainly answers a lot of the people who want to see sequences from the book. In particular, there is a segment during which the monster befriends a blind man that goes a long way towards humanizing the dreadful creature, recapturing some of the ambiguity of the book. And of the returning cast, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster is the key talent, from the opening scene as he crawls out of the wreckage of the burning windmill to the closing sequences as the true pathos of his fate becomes clear.
This movie does suffer from a framing story with Mary Shelley and friends, as they talk about the tale of Frankenstein and his monster. It's only a slight distraction, since the movie has its heart in the right place; the focus is all on the creature and its creator, their tortured relationship, and what it might mean. Subsequent adaptations of Frankenstein that have tried to use a framing story have done much worse for it, especially Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which had enough other flaws and didn't need one more. The idea of Mary Shelley and her fictional creation was taken to a postmodern extreme with Brian Aldiss's Frankenstein Unbound, but once again, the framing story detracted from the core tale. Whale's duo of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, considered together, are probably the best adaptation, despite the looseness, of Shelley's book. I would add the proviso “so far,” but it's possible that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has killed the idea of further adaptations.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written by Steph Lady and Frank Darabont from the novel by Mary Shelley, directed by Kenneth Branagh, 1994, 120 min.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a horrible movie in two profound ways: its apparent claim to be faithful to the original book is complete claptrap, and it is a lousy movie in general. I have no problem with movie adaptations that stray from the source material; that's just a fact of life, and it can sometimes lead to a better movie. The two examples that come to mind are Ridley Scott's Blade Runner vs. Philip K. Dick's book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, which did drastic surgery on Shakespeare's famous play. The Hamlet reference is pertinent here, as we will see in a minute. Leaving aside the hypocrisy of calling this movie Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, how does the movie fare on its own? To put it bluntly, not well at all: the movie features Victor Frankenstein as an obsessed young scientist who wants to create life and regrets it later, but it doesn't offer much else of interest.
The movie begins like the book, with a framing story in the Arctic Ocean. A ship captain is desperate to explore further to the north and his men are getting more and more mutinous. One day they spot a monster and a man pursuing him; the captain brings the man, Frankenstein, onboard. Frankenstein subsequently tells his tragic story. He grew up in a privileged family but was traumatized by the death of his mother. Later, he went off to university, where he learns/steals the procedure of creating life from an older professor. The grand creation scene takes place during a cholera epidemic and Frankenstein leaves the city before getting to know his monster. Two episodes from the book follow, as the monster befriends a blind man and Frankenstein's younger brother is murdered. After that, the movie goes completely off the rails, with an ending that includes Frankenstein's lover, Elizabeth, and some distinctly unpleasant plot business.
The framing story is taken from the book, as well as the murdered younger brother and the befriended blind man. Almost everything else has been changed. A few of those changes help make the narrative flow more smoothly, such as the cholera epidemic, which drives Frankenstein out of the city. In the book, this separation of the man and his creation was never fully explained, and in the movie, Frankenstein is overcome by a burst of revulsion and by the force of events. The movie also keeps most of the action in Geneva, which streamlines the overall tone of the story, while the book ventured all around Europe in scenes that were not always memorable. Most of the other changes don't matter, such as Frankenstein's mother dying young or the way Frankenstein learns the procedure from an older professor (neither of which happened in the book).
Two other major changes are understandable but totally wrongheaded. The creation-of sequences are suppressed by Frankenstein in the book, and Branagh and team clearly needed to outdo all previous attempts to fill in the blank. But the movie uses a strange combination of metal tanks, acupuncture, and amniotic fluid. The mind boggles, especially as this is followed by a scene with Frankenstein (shirtless) and his monster (nude) wrestling while covered with slime. I would call this pointlessly homoerotic, except that I think that such a description dignifies the bizarre, witless tone of the scene more than it deserves. The second wrongheaded sequence invented by the filmmakers is the entire ending. Shelley's book concludes, or rather winds down, with a protracted anticlimax, as Frankenstein gets more and more bogged down in despair. Philosophically appropriate, but cinematically dull. This movie version wants bigger and bolder melodrama, lurid twists and turns, and so forth, an assault on the senses that gives us no reason to care about what is happening.
Branagh's approach to the material in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, especially the ending, is keyed way too high. The movie is so over the top that it loses all control and coherency. Sometimes this tendency suits his movies, like the agreeably cheesy Dead Again. That movie seemed to have a tighter control of its material, while Branagh's four-hour Hamlet is an example of what could be considered his general failure to choose anything, just pile it all on. I liked Branagh's Hamlet but I didn't admire it in the way I did Olivier's much shorter, cannier version. Branagh's Frankenstein has little of tragedy about it, and less of sense. And a story like Frankenstein requires more control, not less. Pop culture (at least worthwhile bits of it that have lasted two centuries) always looks easy but it requires just as much a precise application of effect as any other form of art.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a shabby attempt to capitalize on some of the enduring interest in the famous story of a scientist and his creation. Branagh's version is at once too close to the original and not enough of its own conception. Fans of the book are rightly outraged by vast liberties from a movie that promises faithfulness; fans of quality movies of any kind are left with an unworkable hybrid that pleases no one. Stories of human responsibility and invention are probably needed more than ever as our scientific reach grows, but movie adaptations of Shelley's Frankenstein haven't answered that need for many years now.
In Search of Frankenstein, Radu Florescu, Robson, 1997, 287 pp.
Subtitled Exploring the Myths Behind Mary Shelley's Monster, Florescu's book is an odd mix of an academic tone and personal reminiscence. Florescu tells us some history, of Shelley and her life and the places she visited, but also of his own journeys retracing Shelley's treks. Later in the book, Florescu talks about nearly every monster movie ever made with Frankenstein in it, a discussion which might be completist but is not all that interesting.
When Mary and Percy Shelley eloped in 1814, they travelled all the way to Geneva and then back to England again by way of the Rhine. Florescu speculates that Shelley saw Castle Frankenstein (which is near Darmstadt) during this return trip. Two years later, the Shelleys went back to Switzerland, and Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the summer of 1816. Florescu also discusses Shelley's later life, especially some of the tragedies in the late 1810s. The book has maps of Shelley's journeys, a section of photographs in the middle, and extensive endnotes and appendices. The appendices list genealogies of the Shelleys and the real Frankenstein family, a filmography, and a bibliography. Overall, this is an interesting book for Frankenstein fans, but it could have used a little more polishing.
Young Frankenstein, written by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, directed by Mel Brooks, 1974, 105 min.
Mel Brooks made a loving and careful spoof of James Whale's original black and white movie with the ever-popular Young Frankenstein. Brooks's movie is also in black and white and he even used some of the sets of the 1932 version. This was by no means the first Frankenstein spoof and it didn't prove to be the last, but it still remains the best of the bunch.
Gene Wilder plays Frederick Frankenstein, grandson of Victor Frankenstein; he has always been embarrassed about his family name and demands that everyone pronounce it as Fronk-un-steen (which later infuriates Igor to the point where he demands to be called Eye-gor). He inherits the family castle, and ends up following in his grandfather's experiments. The monster that he creates is played by Peter Boyle, and a large part of the humour of the film comes from the fact that he is sometimes a monster and sometimes the only sane person onscreen. Brooks includes elements of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, as well as the later sequel Son of Frankenstein.
Frankenstein Unbound, Brian W. Aldiss, Random House, 1973, 212 pp.
Frankenstein Unbound, written by Francis X. Feeney and Roger Corman from the novel by Brian W. Aldiss, directed by Roger Corman, 1990, 90 min.
Frankenstein Unbound, a notable book by Brian Aldiss, takes a character from the 21st century named Joe Bodenland and sends him back to Switzerland in 1816; the method of time travel is uncontrollable instabilities in the universe called timeslips. The main character Joe immediately meets Victor Frankenstein, a fictional character, and arrives in Geneva just in time for a murder trial that is also from Mary Shelley's famous book. The situation gets more complicated when Joe travels to a nearby villa where the real Shelley is staying, along with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Joe decides to change the plot of Shelley's story, and from there the events diverge from both history and fiction.
This book has fascinating potential but it could have been a lot better. The presence of Shelley and company is at first promising, but is quickly relegated to a side incident that doesn't affect anything else in the book. The version of Victor Frankenstein's character here is far more reckless but his eventual fate less meaningful than in Shelley's book. And the reader is not left with any clear idea of what the book is about. The writing is serviceable but not glossy or intricate enough to support the book in the absence of other appealing elements such as story or character. The story itself seems propped up by several vivid images rather than any consistent theme. For example, Frankenstein's monster and the monster's new bride have a thrilling/horrifying mating dance near the end of the book, but what does it mean? It could be science amok, but the ending seems to undercut it and the same themes were portrayed just as profoundly in Frankenstein.
Meanwhile, the movie adaptation by Roger Corman was the famous B-movie maven's return to directing after 20 years of producing. But the movie version is much worse than the book, and it doesn't have the attraction of being laughably bad like some of Corman's other movies. Frankenstein Unbound suffers from some key miscasting and a lousy ending that confuses the Aldiss conclusion even further. A curiosity item only.
James Schellenberg lives and writes in Canada. He is sincerely hoping there won't be another Frankenstein movie adaptation unless it's really really good.
For me, the greatest strength of SF is its ability to challenge assumptions.
—Gordon Van Gelder, “Gordon Van Gelder: Playing With Protocols” in Locus (Apr 2004, Vol 52 No 4)
There was once a miller and his wife who had three sons. Day after day, the miller tried to get his sons to work in the mill with him. But try as he might, the boys wouldn't do a thing to help him. So the miller had to do everything himself.
The truth was, the boys were very talented and slaving over grain and flour all day was like torture to them. The youngest of the boys wanted to be a musician, the middle boy a painter and the eldest dreamt of one day building bridges and cathedrals.
Their father too had once had such dreams. He had wanted to be a sculptor. But then he married and soon had children to feed. So he had gritted his teeth and taken over the mill when his own father died.
Now one day, the miller decided enough was enough. The boys were now strong young men and were complaining daily that there wasn't enough to eat. If they didn't work, he decided, they wouldn't eat either. So he would sell the ox that turned his millstone, buy a larger stone and get his sons to turn it themselves.
But when his boys heard this idea, they were not very pleased with it and loudly said so. Back and forth they fought and argued while their mother crouched at the kitchen fire, asking the supper pot for the strength to keep quiet. But once they'd eaten and calmed themselves a bit, the boys tried to be reasonable and presented their own idea of what should be done.
“Father,” said the eldest son. “Do not buy this new millstone. Take the gold from selling the ox and let us become apprentices in our own trades."
“Who should turn the millstone then?” said the father, “Me alone?"
The son answered, “I have found a stream deep in the ground below the millhouse. I know of a way to use the rushing water to run the mill for you."
“What a foolish idea!” said the father. “And what will that teach you and your brothers? Nothing!"
“Father,” said second son. “We are all unhappy in this house. We three could become millers like you but it would cost us our dreams. Yet we cannot leave, for we have no means to support ourselves."
“Then you must grit your teeth and accept your fate,” said the miller. “For I will not change my mind."
Now the miller's wife was a quiet woman, who listened day in and day out to the griping and complaining of her husband and sons. She had no daughters and no one ever thought to help her fetch water from the river or take up a cloth to dry the plates. But she never complained and tried her best to solve everyone else's troubles. In all cases she listened carefully and always found a way to calm them. But this time, she could think of no solution. Night after night she lay awake with their voices ringing in her head. Surely, she thought, there must be way out of this.
Then the night before her husband was to take the ox to market she had an idea, though she didn't know if she had the courage to carry it out. When the miller was gone, she called her three sons to her.
“We are all miserable,” she said. “You boys, your father; and I can't stand to see any of you unhappy. I have a plan that could send you all off to your own trades. Now listen carefully."
When she was done, the two youngest boys laughed at the idea, but the eldest shook his head.
“What is it?” asked the mother. “You don't think it will work?"
“That's not it,” said the eldest. “If your plan works, we will be the happiest men in the whole country. If it doesn't we will be no better off than we are today."
“Then what is it?"
“Mother,” he said, “You have your dreams too. Why should we and our father get everything and you nothing? Didn't you always want to open a shop in the village to make fine hats and dresses?"
The mother considered for a moment. “My boys,” she said, “If I can make you and your father content, then I will be content. Don't concern yourselves with me. It is your father you must worry about."
On the highroad the following morning, the miller led his ox on the long trip to the village market. It was a hard thing he had to do, he knew. But he couldn't feed his grown sons without a larger millstone. Getting them to turn it themselves after he sold his ox was going to be difficult.
There weren't many people on the road this early in the day but the miller kept a sharp eye out for bandits. He passed a beggarman with a tattered blanket over his head limping along slowly with a crutch. The beggar asked him for a penny, but the miller had to tell him he had nothing in the world but the ox he was leading. A little farther on, he passed an old hag and then saw no one for a long while.
When he was no more than three or four miles from home the road turned into a dark wood. A few of his neighbours had been robbed here and the miller tightened his grip on the ox's rope and quickened his pace. But he was only a stone's throw into the wood when two men in masks jumped out. Though he put up a good fight, he made the mistake of keeping hold of the rope so as not to lose his ox and soon the men overpowered him. They hurried the ox away by its bridle and used the rope to tie him to a tree and it took a long time for him to get loose. By then there was no hope of catching the thieves.
What was he to do now? Without the ox to sell, he couldn't afford a new millstone. His sons would have to turn the old one day after day, and after all their work, there wouldn't be any more bread on the table for them. What kind of a father was he that he should treat his boys like this?
Broken in spirit, he made his way home, only to come upon the beggarman skipping down the road toward him. His limp was gone and so was the crutch he had been walking with.
“I'm cured! I'm cured!” the beggar was shouting. And off down the road he went, skipping like a child on the first day of spring.
A little closer to home, the miller found the old hag at the side of the road. She was dressed in rags, and her head and face were wrapped in a tattered old scarf. The beggarman's crutch lay on the ground beside her.
“Help a poor old woman and she will help you,” she croaked.
“What is it you need?” asked the miller.
“I can solve the troubles of any man or child,” said the old hag. “But it costs me dearly to do it. I've made a lame man walk again, and yet now I cannot walk myself. Carry me to the crossroads and I may help you in your troubles."
Despite seeing the skipping beggar with his own eyes, the miller thought the old woman was crazy, but he couldn't say no to someone in need. And so he carried her to the crossroads.
Suddenly the old woman jumped from his back and began dancing around in the road. “Thank you! Thank you! Your gift has healed me!"
The miller thought this was all very strange.
“I must repay your kindness,” said the old hag. “Come here and let me look at you."
When he came near, the old woman took hold of him by the scruff of the neck and looked up close at one of his eyes.
“I know just what you need,” she said. “Your trade is not your chosen one; but soon that will change."
Then she pushed his head over and looked into his other eye. “Ah, your children are lazy; but soon they will work without you asking."
Finally she looked at his worried brow and said, “You have had something stolen; but soon you will no longer need it."
Then she let go of his neck and stepped back. “To have these things, what feeds you must feed me. Now go. Your kindness has been repaid."
On his walk home, rubbing his neck, the miller didn't know what to think of the words of the crazy old woman. But if she was right, he would be the happiest man alive.
When he got in the door of the millhouse, the first thing he heard was the sound of his mill at work. He blinked and stood dumbly in the doorway. There were two grindstones in the millhouse now. His old one standing on end by the door and a new one at work, turning apparently by itself, without ox or man.
What was all this? He called for his wife and sons to come and see, but they did not appear. He looked everywhere to try and figure out how the new millstone was being made to turn, but found nothing.
In a panic, he rushed out and hurried far down the road to where the old hag was just entering the dark wood. “What have you done? How is my millstone turning?"
The old woman smiled and reached into a bag at her side. “Take these,” she said, and handed him a mallet and a stone-carving chisel.
“What are these for?"
The old woman squinted up at him and said, “Those are to get your sons out of the stone. You wanted them to turn it. Now they are turning it."
Horrified, the miller stared at the old hag in disbelief.
“If you choose,” she said, “you may let them grind your grain forever. That is what you wanted, isn't it? But if you want them back, you must find them in the stone and free them with those tools."
The miller searched for words. “But ... how do I bring them to life again?"
The old hag grinned and said, “This gift is to last seven years. I can solve the troubles of man or child, but it costs me dearly to do it. I have helped you to be fed. But now I cannot feed myself and will find no bread for these seven years. You must bring half the flour you grind every month and leave it at the crossroads for me. After seven years I will restore your sons to life, from whatever shape you have carved them."
With that, the old hag went off into the wood leaving the miller staring at the tools in his hands.
When he returned home, he waited and waited for his wife and sons to return. At last, just before dark, his wife appeared, her coat and hair in disarray.
“Our boys have been taken by a witch!” she said as soon as she was in the door. “I've been searching for them all day!"
The miller was in terrible distress and had no idea what to do. He told her the whole story of the hag and the ox and the millstone. She cried bitter tears for the loss of their sons, but said she didn't blame him for the bandits stealing the ox or for the old hag's trickery.
The next day, the miller took the new stone from the mill and laid it up on his big workbench. When he put the old grinding stone back on the mill, it didn't turn a bit.
“What am I to do?” he lamented.
Over the next several months, when his sons did not return, he came to believe the old hag and left half the grain he ground, by his own and his wife's sweat, at the crossroads. It took a long time for him to gather enough courage to even look at the carving tools. But his wife saw him poking with his knife at chunks of turnip at the supper table. Or he would sit outside after a long day's work whittling twigs or gouging shapes out of small blocks of wood. And she would smile to herself but say nothing.
After a year of practicing on wood he began bringing rocks home from the river and cutting crude faces into them. He had a natural talent for the work, but his heart sank whenever he thought of going near the millstone with a chisel.
Day in and day out he and his wife took turns pushing the old millstone around and around to grind the grain. Month in and month out he had no choice but to leave the old witch half of the flour they ground. His customers began asking about all the carvings he had laying about the yard and soon he had small commissions for stone steps and lintels. By the fourth year, he was asked to carve the saints for a new cathedral in a far city and with the money from that, he found he could spend less time on the mill work and more on his carving. But it wasn't until the end of the fourth year that he thought to put a chisel to the stone that stood in his millhouse.
After three sleepless nights he finally sat up in bed and told his wife what was troubling him.
She said nothing for a long while, thinking of the differences between a man's work and her own.
“Well,” she said at last. “Those boys were made once, and you didn't care for the job I did. Now it's your turn."
The next day the miller walked around the millstone a hundred times without touching it. Many weeks he had spent drawing lines in chalk on it where he would begin to cut. But staring at them now, though he could find no fault with them, he kept turning away and turning away. Finally he worked up his courage and stood to face the millstone.
And he began.
Many a long day and sleepless night the miller's tears wetted the hard stone. I have made a dozen saints, he kept thinking to himself, I should be able to do this. There were good days when a leg or arm would emerge from the millstone. But it was years since the miller had looked upon the faces of his sons. The work of carving their fair cheeks, their delicate ears and eyes took more pained hours of standing back and trying to recall than time spent removing chips of stone.
At last the day came when he was done all the carving, the smoothing and polishing. Three stone figures lay curled in a circle on his workbench. Perhaps, he thought, this was the best work any man had ever done. And when his wife came in to see his accomplishment, they wept in each other's arms for gladness.
Not long after, the miller's wife went off to the river for water and a knock came at the millhouse door. When the miller went to answer it, there stood the hag he had met on the highroad so many years before. She had grown fat on the miller's flour and patted her belly.
“Well, miller,” she croaked. “It was a fair trade, I must say."
Then she went to the mill, gathered her hands full of flour and began throwing it into the air all around the millhouse. When the cloud of dust settled, the stone figures were gone, and in their place were the miller's three sons.
With a wild cackle, the old hag was gone out the door never to be seen again.
The father stood staring at his sons for a long while, his eyes brimming with tears, not knowing what to say. Then when the boy's mother returned they hugged and kissed and cried over their reunion and their father, with a warm embrace, welcomed them home.
And so with a sculptor father that was earning a far better wage than any miller, the youngest son became a musician, the second son a painter and the eldest son learned the trade of a builder. Though the father told the story a thousand times to neighbours and customers and anyone else that would listen, his wife never told him what had really happened.
Years later she went down to the river one day and came across the three stone figures buried in the bank. The memories they called up brought tears to her eyes. She bent and began to uncover the face of one of them with her hands, smiling with pride at her husband's work and knowing that her sons were now happy in their new lives.
Just as she was about to bury the figures again she was startled by an old man who had come up behind her. She stood and saw he was dressed in rags and his face was covered. In a creaky voice, he said, “I must repay your kindness. I know just what you need. Your trade is not your chosen one..."
G. C. McRae has been writing fiction and poetry since he was knee high to a cliché. Born in Edmonton, he is one of the Founding Fathers of The Raving Poets (www.ravingpoets.com), is working on a second novel, recording a kid's poetry & music CD and is rapidly turning his opera-singing girlfriend into the MIDI-widow. “The Miller and the Old Hag” is one of a series of G.C.'s literary fairy tales, written to show that intricate or novel concepts are often best expressed in simple, familiar terms.
It was certainly not the first time Victor Hammond had fired me, but it was perhaps the most humiliating.
I was leaning over the edge of Melissa's cubicle, discussing algorithm optimization. Melissa had transferred into Hammond's group a few weeks before, under the unfortunate (for her) delusion that Hammond was a genius, and his team was a crack group of code jockeys second to none on the software side. We wrote and maintained replenishment software for a global conglomerate, and we were good. But it wasn't quite the programmer's paradise Melissa had been led to expect.
The firing went more or less like this:
“What the hell do I pay you bums for? Propping up the cubicle wall there? If I wanted to see kids making googly eyes at each other I'd have brought in my teenagers. Hey, Jimmy, you know what? Pack your stuff. It's probably sexual harassment. Did you ask him to spend the afternoon distracting you from work, Mel? Don't answer that. I don't want to know. You missed a check-in yesterday, Jimmy, and it's your code that has the new routing bug. You know what? You're done. I don't need this crap. I've got twenty thousand store managers wondering why they're getting toilet plungers instead of the new Bimbo doll. I'll bring someone up from the junior team, they certainly can't do any worse than you. Maybe this will teach everyone else a lesson."
Hammond's fierce blue gaze swept the range of cubicles. Tendons stood out all around his neck. His face was red, and his short curly hair seemed to bristle with electricity. When Hammond gets into that kind of frenzy there's not much you can do. It's like he's insane, which he probably is. The first time he fired me, I was practically in tears, but at least that was in the privacy of his office.
I'm the kind of guy who can never find the right words in this situation. “You can't fire me. I quit!—Yeah? Take this job and shove it!—Yeah? Well don't come begging me to return this time, because I'm going to fucking Disney Land.” Flickers of such retorts hovered beyond the periphery of my frozen brain.
What I really wanted to ask was if packing my stuff was really necessary, since he would just call me once I was on the highway and apologize.
I think he had fired everyone at least twice, except for Melissa, who was too new, and Manish who had once worked for Steve Jobs and in his gentle Hindu way intimidated even Victor Hammond.
Anyway, I packed my things.
I was nudging through traffic past some highway expansion along the Renton S-Curve when the comm panel on my wirecar lit up. I had been thumping the steering handles and telling the car I wouldn't go back. I could get a job anywhere. I'd get out of Seattle, maybe go to California, or back east. Hong Kong was buying up developers at outrageous salaries—maybe it was time to go abroad. I wouldn't answer the phone, I told myself.
It buzzed three times before I signaled the connection.
“Where are you going, James? Did you take me seriously? Come on, you know me better than that. Listen, I've got something fun for everyone this afternoon. Your bug can wait. Come on back in."
Hammond's lean face did not wear apology easily. But even through the flat-panel display, his charisma began to work. He grinned, a sharp flat line across his chiseled features. “Listen, Mel really stood up for you. I was wrong to fly off the handle like that. You know—this isn't public knowledge, but I'm going to take some anger management classes. It'll get better."
I drove on, not saying anything. It was another mile and a half until the next off-ramp, about ten minutes with only two lanes open. Melissa had stood up for me?
“Talk to me, James. You know, we've got a budget for three additional developers. I was thinking I can bump your salary up by five or ten K at least until we get some more people in, take the strain off. Hell, maybe it can be permanent."
I was still thinking about Melissa. I wondered what she had said.
“So, where are you? Stuck on 405? How soon can you get back in here?"
I sighed. “Probably about twenty minutes."
“Great, you won't believe what I have to show you."
I got back in time for lunch. Tom Brandt, a recent refugee from our little corner of engineering hell, joined Melissa, Manish and myself at an out of the way table in the company cafeteria. An exposed steel support beam gave us some semblance of privacy, and we had a nice view down onto Lake Washington.
Tom was haranguing Hammond's lunatic ways, trying to get me to join him in logistics. I was explaining my Hong Kong fantasy when Hammond showed up.
“It's here, boys.” He tossed a glossy brochure onto our table.
Melissa rolled her eyes and drew the brochure across the formica surface with two delicate fingers.
Hammond pulled a chair from a nearby table and joined us, oblivious to the quick game of tag conducted by met glances and quick smirks.
“Which It is it, Victor?” Manish asked. Only Manish could get away with the informality of using Hammond's first name.
“It's the Neural Interface Circuitry Extension. BioSoft announced it an hour ago on NetNet. I grabbed the data pack off the distribution. The white paper is for real. They're doing a public beta in San Jose next month."
The noise of the lunchtime cafeteria was like the burbling sound of a waterfall, a liquid dance of unintelligible voices. Melissa unfolded the brochure.
Tom, emboldened by the security of being in a different department now, said: “Isn't that the thing that killed all those monkeys?"
Hammond was in good spirits. “Ten years ago. This has already gone through twelve rounds of clinical trials using incarcerated volunteers and a couple of thousand Cambodians. The blind and deaf have been using variants for years. It's ready to go."
Hammond leaned over the table. “Boys, the human race is run. From here on out, natural selection takes a back-seat. Human engineering is taking the wheel."
Tom didn't try to hide the sneer. “Let me guess, Mr. Hammond. You dumped your life savings into BioSoft last week?"
With a victorious smile, Hammond pulled out another piece of cardstock. “I'm not complaining about my portfolio, but nope.” He snapped the folded glossy down like a gambler showing a full house. “I'm number seventy-one on the beta list."
For a moment there was only the general sound of conversation punctuated by the clatter of cutlery.
“You're what?” I said.
“That's right. I'm gonna get a graft. Ganglial enhancement, axon extension, dendritic renewal, digital interface."
Melissa placed the brochure gently on the table. “And, sir, you're paying for this?"
“Reduced rate for the first thousand, but that's not the point.” Victor Hammond looked around the table, finally picking up on our reaction.
“You know, boys, I thought you would be a little more enthusiastic about this. This is the manifest destiny of your chosen field. This...” He tapped his confirmation packet. “This is what it's all about."
“Fancy that, boys,” Tom said, “It wasn't enough you were working for a madman. Now he's going to be a cyborg as well."
As promised, no work was expected of anyone that afternoon. Tom took the story back down to logistics (as Hammond no doubt intended), but Melissa, Manish, and I, along with the four members of the junior team spent the afternoon listening to Hammond pontificate. Despite the glitch in the product routing software that was costing us forty thousand a day, Hammond had priorities, and the future of human engineering was more interesting than any bug. Had the team wanted to shut him up and get back to work, it would have been impossible.
“How do you know this thing won't be another tooth phone?” Manish asked. Manish Joshi was a rounded fellow, ten years older than Hammond. A bit lazy, by my standards, but he had once worked for NeXT. He had the old Silicon Valley glory-days aura.
“Tooth phone? That was doomed to fail. It was obvious to everyone. No one could understand a damn thing you said. But good question, Manish, because it highlights the genius of the NICE solution. Beauty of ganglial extension is no disruption to existing functionality!"
“Hear that, my friends? The man already sounds like a machine going in for a service upgrade."
Hammond rode on, unstoppable. “See, the beauty of this is, it doesn't matter if there is a better version next year. I can rip this one out and install a new one. It's not like the tooth phone where I would have lost a tooth in the deal. Removing this would be like amputating a sixth finger."
“Sounds lovely,” Melissa observed. “Maybe I'll get one."
“You should! Just look at it,” Hammond replied. In fact, it looked pretty innocuous: The only visible component of the subdermal datalink was a small green diode discretely hidden under the hair at the nape of the neck. “It has standards-compliant infra-red comm. I could use my existing assistant, but of course I'll upgrade. It comes with a Samshiba TriChrome 6000. Two gigabits."
He laughed maniacally. “Two gigabits straight to the cortex! Jesus this is gonna be good."
“Or else give a whole new meaning to the blue screen of death."
We all looked at Manish in horror.
“Don't worry Joshi, I get it,” Hammond said, punching him on the shoulder. To the rest of us: “Very old joke. You kids probably weren't even born yet."
Over the next few weeks we were subjected to an endless stream of marketing jargon. Embedded wetware logic slip, real-time low-amp crossover, virtual prosthetic motor control, blah blah blah. We got the routing bug fixed and then it was back to the usual over-promise, under-deliver, blame-the-engineers cycle with Hammond. But since he spent half his time in his office with the door closed working on the visualization exercises BioSoft had sent all the early adopters, and the other half at meetings making promises we could never keep, things were a little easier. He didn't fire me.
Manish won a thousand bucks in the infrastructure Diablo-7 tournament and Melissa applied for an opening in data mining. I didn't relish the thought of the senior team being reduced to just Manish and myself. There were supposed to be five of us. Plus, Melissa was cute in a sort of a feisty way.
A week before Hammond went off to San Jose, he showed around the Samshiba 6000. Even I had to admit it was a sleek little machine—thing weighed about an ounce, and came with the complete collection of human pre-copyright intellectual property onboard: books, movies, music, everything. If you wanted widescreen stereo vision you needed special glasses, but colors and resolution were incredible. Even without the glasses, the thing could pick up your eye movements from just about any angle—all totally customizable—so people who don't like talking to their digital assistants could still use standard sight-signalling to work. Or, you could slot it into any standard flat-panel and seamlessly supplement a full workstation.
With the neural interface, though, we would all be eating Hammond's bits, and we knew it. I wondered how long until the brain link was mandatory.
It was a Friday afternoon when Hammond left for his big transition to the post human world. He slipped his new Samshiba in his jacket pocket, straightened his tie, grinned that infectiously manic grin, and waved as he tore off down the hallway. “Take it easy, boys. Don't work too hard!” (Translation: I'll be checking on your progress daily, so you'd better work harder than usual.)
We were to expect him a week from Monday. All I could think about was a week without a manager in the office—hell, we might be able to catch up on some real work for once.
“You envy him, don't you,” Melissa accused. The team had voted to order pizzas, work until midnight, and then take the weekend off. Hammond would be under anaesthesia the whole time. For me it would be the first time I had taken two consecutive days off work in three months. My fourth since joining the team. But who's counting.
I took the time to chew my slice of mushroom thoughtfully. “I suppose so. You know what I think of these man-machine interface experiments, Melissa, but eventually it's going to happen. Maybe this really is the beginning of something new. It would be exciting to be in at the ground floor."
Manish was thumbing a wristpad chording board. He looked up, his brown eyes magnified by antique glasses. “I have friends in India who have tried Hammond's interface. I know a fellow at Bangalore who did a lot of the visual adaption software. They don't think it's ready yet."
“I assume you didn't tell Hammond?” Melissa asked.
Manish shrugged. “Why should I? He'll do what he wants. I am content to let him be my canary."
“Canary?” I asked.
Manish rolled his eyes. “An old reference. Mining. You know humans used to take minerals out of the ground back in the bad old days before remote guidance bores, right?"
Hammond was gone for two weeks, not one, and it was a bittersweet time. On the one hand, without Hammond harassing us and subjecting us to constant meetings about pie-in-the-sky projects, the work went smoothly. On the other, Melissa's transfer to data mining had been approved, pending Hammond's sign-off. I tried to talk her out of it.
“Why don't you transfer out?” she asked. “Come to data mining with me."
“You want me to?” I asked hesitantly. It seemed like a rather intimate question, and I wasn't sure how she might take it.
I couldn't decipher her look. Perhaps it was mere pity, but it might have been something more. She didn't answer the question.
“I just think you should get away from Hammond. The man is a psychopath."
“He is,” I agreed. “But there's good work here. Data mining? It's pretty far from the heart of the business. I like to work on something important. I know there are some interesting problems of scaleability and there's the opportunity for researching new algorithms, but... data mining. No, if I leave, I'll leave the company."
“Well, that would be a loss to the company,” she said.
“You care about the company?” I waved at the fluorescent lighting, the featureless plasterboard.
She cocked her head cryptically, but didn't answer. The moment passed.
Hammond was gone, but not entirely out of touch. At the end of the first week we got this text message from him:
TO: My Team
FROM: Victor Hammond, VP Replenishment Tech.
SUBJECT: im writing you from my BRIAN!
it rockks. but recovery slower than i thought. will be an extra week. the synaesthetic feedback is finaly kickking in. i can feel mail messages come in, it's like a tickkle on the back of my hands. the alarm is hard to describe—it's likke a smell. don't kknow why the kk doubles up sometimes, but you know—hah there it didn't. anyway, it's mindblowing. you should all consder it!
I'll confess, it was my idea. I thought about the tickle on the back of the hand, and it gave me an idea for what I originally thought would be a mild little practical joke, firmly in the programmers’ tradition.
Sitting around our little conference room on the Monday night beginning that second week, boxes of mushroom and pepperoni gaping on the table, I mentioned the possibility of hacking Hammond's brain.
“I mean, I know the digital/neural barrier is massively secure, but what about a denial of service? What if we set up a script to hammer him with text messages so fast his neural input will be ringing constantly?"
“He'd just turn it off,” said Tom, who had joined us that evening, logistics only being one floor down. “What you want is something that will make him think it's busted. Keep him out of the office."
We got talking about the possibilities, and then we started digging a little deeper.
Tom called up the white paper. Melissa brought down the patent applications. I ran searches for related papers in neurology and man-machine-interface conferences. Manish called his friend at Bangalore. By morning we had a broad, if sketchy, understanding of the technology.
Hammond was actually getting a second generation installation, or third generation if you included early enhancements for the blind, the deaf, and those with so-called “smart prosthetics.” The first non-medical digital/neural interfaces were too primitive to appeal to someone like Hammond—these involved wiring some simple excitatory inputs into existing neural pathways. The digital assistant was wired straight into the arm, and could send only basic hot-cold responses for various sensory locations on the hands and arm. Your pinky suddenly feels hot? It's time for your meeting with the director of marketing. Two pinpricks on the back of your hand? Priority message in your inbox. That kind of thing. This was a digital/neural interface of a sort, but it was more like a telegraph system than a modern network. It was also unidirectional. You could use a sort of muscular morse code to “talk” to your assistant, but it required actually twitching your fingers, and the digital pickup was unreliable.
All of that, plus the fact that you had some pretty ugly wires running into your forearm. Obviously, a non-starter.
Hammond's installation looked a lot better, at least on paper. The dream of gigabit networking straight to the brain was vaporware—but theoretically possible.
New neurons were grown into the brainstem, providing totally new inputs to the cerebellum and basal ganglia. These were specially designed neurons adapted from the fastest brains on earth: squid. With enough new neurons, the right glial support structure, and an extremely rapid potassium-recovery phase, yes, you could get a hell of a lot of information traveling into, and out of, the brain. However, an adult brain is not equipped to add a whole new sensory organ, and this obstacle dramatically limited practical implementation of genuine networking.
Turned out, Hammond would be getting only a small boost over the previous generation, and it would require considerable training to introduce this new i/o port to his brain.
Manish and his buddies in India reported that a significant number of people never got beyond the morse-code stage of integration.
Hammond's extended vacation was due to this very training. Knowing him, of course, he would work on it twenty hours a day, and be a showpiece for the technology by the time he returned. In fact, we were counting on it.
The drawback to any new hardware is software support. Back at the dawn of the information age, this was realized and embodied in the meme of the killer app. People wouldn't buy a new computer just because it was cool. Hammond might, but the common consumer wouldn't throw money away without some compelling reason. It could be a game, it could be some application that suddenly became universally indispensable. BioSoft was still looking for the killer app to sell NICE to the masses, and they were doing it in the traditional ways: they courted embedded systems developers, they hired gorgeous women to staff their glitzy presentation booths at conventions, and most importantly, they published their application programmer interface.
Tom made a few jokes about possible new meanings for the term “killer app,” but we shut him up. We were looking for a good practical joke, and our natural engineer's curiosity was engaged.
Given that the neural implant would have orders of magnitude more bandwidth than the underlying neural system was prepared for, it was a no brainer for them to include hard encryption to the loop. A digital assistant and the implant would be configured to ensure that interception of the signals would be useless without a truly monstrous key. Quantum computing being eternally twenty years away, the encryption was effectively uncrackable.
If that was all there was to it, our efforts would have been in vain. Regardless of what you see in movies, breaking contemporary encryption systems is practically impossible, and this one was top of the line.
However, since survival of the NICE system required the emergence of some critical application, the marketing materials all advertised the system as “extensible to communication with any standard IR device.” There were pictures of happy customers mentally flipping the channels on their television, controlling lights in the house, triggering their morning coffee pot while still snoozing in bed.
Well, there had to be some way to register your compatible new device without having it factory-equipped with a personal encryption key. The developer documentation NICE published was not clear on the subject, and Manish's friends didn't know about the digital side.
Melissa came up with the breakthrough. While I peered over the cubicle wall, she called up an independent developer in Atlanta—the fellow was active in various NICE developer forums, and also had an open source background. With a little bit of flirting and some outrageous lying, Melissa persuaded the guy to send us the protocols used for registration of new IR devices, as well as all the undocumented APIs he had found.
On Saturday morning I bought a sampling of universal remotes, and brought them in to the office. Melissa had an infra-red test suite up on her panel.
I coded an interface, while Melissa tried to figure out which remote we could reprogram without ripping them apart and soldering in a replacement board. She also put together a software emulator to test the output of the remote against the theoretical interface we had received from Atlanta.
In the afternoon, we traded jobs: two of the remotes could be remotely upgraded, and I set about getting my interface on board while Melissa wrote a couple dozen functions for triggering basic components of the neural interface.
We couldn't test it until Hammond returned, of course, but we were both running on adrenaline.
“I can't believe it's this easy,” Melissa said as we took the elevator down. I had a sack of useless remotes in one hand; the reprogrammed one was in her filing cabinet.
“It does seem like an incredible security hole,” I answered. “It wouldn't have been that hard to set up a little DMZ in the brain-stem interface that would hold registration requests until the user approved them."
“That's why I never use a version 1.0 of anything,” Melissa said. “Version ones rarely even qualify as a beta product. I just hope they haven't closed the hole already. We don't know how old that guy's data was."
It was a typical June sunset: even at nine thirty in the evening, the last rays of the sun lingered on Mt. Rainier, illuminating the glaciers with a delicate rose glow. I walked Melissa to her car, and she stood for a moment with the door open.
“It was fun, today,” I said.
“I hope you'll think about data mining,” she answered.
There was an awkward moment. If it had been a movie, I would have kissed her; but I wasn't sure if we were on the same wavelength. My brain sort of spun on the consequences of an unwelcome kiss.
“Well, see you Monday,” she said, at last.
“Right, Monday!"
We all admired Hammond's little green LED.
“You get the k-k-kinks worked out of your thought typing?” I asked.
Hammond was grinning like a madman. “Good one, Jimmy. Not quite, I've got other things to focus on. It's working, though. It's working. It's just a matter of time before we're all using ‘em, I'll tell you."
Then he winced. “Ack,” he grunted, and his fingers twitched.
Melissa winked at me, barely suppressing her grin.
“Are you all right, sir?” Manish asked, all innocence.
Hammond glanced uneasily at his hand. “Yeah, funny nerve pinch or something. So, anyway, show me the progress. Did McDermott get on your case while I was out?"
“Not at all,” Melissa said, and slipped me the remote.
At lunch, Melissa gave it to Tom. A couple of the functions didn't seem to respond. The message alert was the one that caused some sort of twitch in his hand—not what it was supposed to do, but we weren't complaining. We had covertly tested all the functions, figuring out which signals he responded to and which weren't getting through. Hammond was eating with some of the other engineering VPs, wolfing his food down as usual. He was doing most of the talking, presumably retelling the details of his new toy.
“We've already over-used the comm alerts,” Melissa said. “Why don't you hit him with some of the calendar functions."
“What I really want is to reboot the bastard,” Tom said.
“Fortunately, that is not a function you have access to,” Manish replied. “I must say I fear the consequences of this prank."
Tom took aim as covertly as he could, and fingered a sequence.
We all pretended to be concentrating on our food, but we didn't see any change. Hammond was talking, of course. Waving his hands expressively, talking a mile a minute. Then he stuttered and pulled out his PDA. Frowning he dropped it back and continued.
“Well, that's not much fun,” said Tom.
Melissa took the remote back from him. “Party pooper. It'll be fun when he goes in for repairs."
“I thought you were transferring out anyway,” Tom said.
After lunch, Hammond was in his office, on the phone, door closed. When he came out, his wore the kind of glower that each of us dreaded. But for once, it was not meant for us. “I've gotta leave early,” he said. “I want to see that feedback fix rolled out tonight. I'll be monitoring from home."
Once he was on the elevator, it was high fives all around. Even the junior team looked relieved.
“But don't you think he'll catch on that it only happens at work?” I asked.
“He can't prove anything,” Melissa said.
“If he has security track our network activity he might. Or if he finds the remote."
Melissa cocked her head. “You are scared of him, aren't you James?"
I crossed my arms and frowned. “It was fun planning it, but didn't you see his face? I don't look forward to being fired again."
Melissa shook her head and turned away.
Three days later, Melissa had gotten a few of the more obscure functions working. It was I, however, Hammond summoned to his office.
The door closed with a snick. Hammond's office was all for show. A dozen shelves crowded with toys intended to give the impression of an impulsive, fun-loving guy, a man of eclectic enthusiasms. He had a wallscreen development platform across from his toys. Five years ago he might have done a little development, but any code he had put in the system was long deprecated. He used it to watch the progress of his teams. He had a window overlooking the lake, and the Olympics beyond Seattle when the clouds weren't in the way. It was small for an executive office, but for all his bluster, Hammond was still a minor executive.
“Take a seat, James."
I pulled a metal-frame chair out from below the shelves of toys. I lifted a stack of papers onto the small table and sat.
“You know why you're here, of course."
“No, sir."
“You are the best on the team, and I wouldn't want to lose you. You may have a bright future ahead of you, yet."
“Um, thank you, sir."
“That is, if I don't have you arrested. Here, read this."
Hammond put a giant size text message up on the wall screen. I read, and felt the world constricting around me.
TO: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Seattle Division
FROM: Victor Hammond vhammond@...
REF: Case #27-003954572
Dear Officer Walker,
Thank you for your help. Please review the attached documentation provided by our security team with reference to the complaint I lodged with your office on Tuesday. I have additional physical evidence that I would like to register with your office. Obviously, what you do with this evidence is up to your discretion, however I consider James Evans a threat to flee the country, and include his home address for your convenience. As I write this message, he is still working in a cubicle ten meters away from my office...
“Got the idea? Good, now read this one."
TO: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Seattle Division
FROM: Victor Hammond vhammond@...
REF: Case #27-003954572
Dear Officer Walker,
Thank you for all your assistance, but it appears you are correct. The phenomena I experienced did turn out to be the result of a technical glitch on the part of this new technology. I apologize for wasting your time.
Sincerely,
Victor Hammond
“So, James, which shall I send?"
“You really brought the FBI in for a little prank?"
“I'll accept that as a confession, Jimmy. But which shall I send?"
“Well, it was just a prank. I'd certainly hope you would send the latter."
“Of course you would. And that's what I would like to send them. I wouldn't want to see my new business partner sitting in jail, just over a little prank."
I blinked. “Your new business partner, sir?"
Hammond grinned, and bounced out of his chair. “Don't ‘sir’ me, Jimmy. You realize what we've got here, don't you?"
I clutched the seat of my chair.
Hammond waved at the wall screen and the text disappeared, replaced by a couple of layered images floating just off the wall. Above it, in luminous blue: “MindMeld Software, LLC—We're Thinking Peer to Peer."
The pictures were crude touch ups of stock photos—mental lightning bolts emanating from people's heads, light bulbs going on.
“You see where I'm going, James? Mind-to-mind direct communication between NICE clients is listed as an application ‘available soon.’ Move over, Jetsons, the telepaths are here to stay. Every mind is a network node, every NICE implant a router for the biggest thing since the Internet. But in truth, they aren't anywhere with it, yet. As you figured out, they don't even have basic security down on this thing.
“Limitless opportunity, James. You opened my eyes with your little prank. There is no end to the applications, even in the current form: because the digital assistant is in permanent comm with the IR port, we make a three-way loop: port, brain, agent. We can have all the usual PDA apps that now tie things together, but real-time, consciously-gated. All that's required is a protocol that regulates the registration of new devices associated with any particular IR port. When I figured out what you were up to, I went straight to BioSoft, of course. I figured they had a patch or something, but it turns out to have been a bit of a hole in their plan. Not too hard for them to lock it down in the next release, which you can imagine will be ready in a few days. But I cut a deal with them: you and I keep silent about the hole, and they will give us fifty million for a ten percent stake in MindMeld. All we need to do is publish a bulletproof protocol."
“Fifty million?"
“I know, I should have gone for a couple of hundred. But their cash is going to be nothing compared to the money we'll rake in licensing the protocol. Plus, we'll have the jump on peer to peer apps. I've already got a Mind-Match program in the works. Brain dating! Oh, this is gonna be huge, Jimmy. This is gonna rock. What do you think?"
I thought it over. “I find it hard to believe that BioSoft is ceding the territory."
“They don't care. They're up to their necks on the neural interface stuff. This thing sucks, to tell you the truth. No visual feed, half the operational circuits do strange stuff to my sense of smell. The sticky ‘k’ is the least of the output problems once you try to pick up speed. I've seen a preview of the next release though, and I think that's the one that's gonna hit big. No, if we come up with the killer app, it'll be fifty million well spent for them. Hell, they probably figure to buy us outright if we get it right. Of course, I figure we'll buy them. But that's the way it works."
“I guess it is, sir."
“No more ‘sir,’ James. Partners, right?"
I winced. The hell that had been this past year, the pressure, the surprise deadlines, the feature creep, how much worse would it be with just the two of us? I remembered documentaries of Jobs and Wozniak.
“Or it's the FBI, James. I can't afford to have you out there as a competitor. It's one or the other."
“They can't do anything,” I said. “I bet there aren't any laws covering any of this."
“I doubt you'd go to prison, but it would tie you up long enough for me to get the jump. I'm doing this James, with you or without you."
“So what are we talking, fifty-fifty?” I was figuring how to make myself unfireable.
“Well, I've got all the connections, here, so no. You would be a minority partner."
I took a breath, and summoned all my strength. “Listen, Victor, I wasn't in this alone. Melissa did at least half the work. Here's my deal: if she's in, then I am too. After the BioSoft stake, you get fifty percent, and Melissa and I each get twenty five. Deal?"
Hammond cocked his head at me, a blank far-away expression on his face. Thinking? No, messaging.
“She's on her way,” he said.
L. Blunt Jackson works on an almost innumerable host of projects in Seattle where he lives with Kristin, Islay, and Epicurus, some of whom are cats. In addition to writing, Blunt composes software (for www.irosf.com, www.quintamid.com, and others), paints, plays classical guitar, rides his bicycle in traffic, and plays both go and chess.
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