FSF - March2006



THE MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

Vol. 110, Issue 03 - March 2006 * 57th Year of Publication
* * * *



NOVELLAS
THE REVIVALIST by Albert E. Cowdrey
* * * *
NOVELETS
SHAMBHALA by Alex Irvine
* * * *
SHORT STORIES
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE PICKY PRINCESS by John Morressy
FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES by Trent Hergenrader
THE CAPACITY TO APPEAR MINDLESS by Mike Shultz
CZESKO by Ef Deal
INTOLERANCE by Robert Reed
* * * *
DEPARTMENTS
BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint
BOOKS by Robert K.J. Killheffer
FILMS: A LABOR OF LOVE--AND THUMBS by Kathi Maio
COMING ATTRACTIONS
CURIOSITIES by Gregory J. Koster
CARTOONS: Tom Swick, Joseph Farris, Danny Shanahan.
COVER: "PAINFUL UPGRADE" by Mark Evans
GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor
BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher
ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor
KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher
HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor
JOHN J. ADAMS, Assistant Editor
CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor
JOHN M. CAPPELLO, Newsstand Circulation
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258),
Volume 110, No. 3, Whole No. 648, March 2006. Published monthly except
for a combined October/November issue by Spilogale, Inc. at $3.99 per
copy. Annual subscription $44.89; $54.89 outside of the U.S.
Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box
3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ
07030. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional
mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2006 by
Spilogale, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Distributed by Curtis Circulation Co., 730 River Rd. New Milford, NJ
07646
General and Editorial Office: PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030
www.fsfmag.com




CONTENTS

Shambhala by
Alex Irvine
Books To Look For by Charles De
Lint
Books by Robert K.J. Killheffer

The True History of the Picky
Princess by John Morressy
The Revivalist by Albert E.
Cowdrey
From the Mouths of Babes by
Trent Hergenrader
Films by Kathi Maio
The Capacity to Appear Mindless
by Mike Shultz
Czesko by Ef Deal
Intolerance by Robert Reed
Coming Attractions
Fantasy&ScienceFiction
MARKET PLACE
Curiosities
* * * *


Talk to veteran sf readers and you're likely to get a good
discussion (perhaps debate is a better word here) going on the subject
of favorite stories written to accompany an already existing cover
illustration. Roger Zelazny's "The Man Who Loved the
Faoli" often comes
up, as does Alfred Bester's "5,271,009," and more
recently, Harlan
Ellison's "Susan" or one of the other stories written
to accompany
Jacek Yerka's art in Mindfields.
Alex Irvine says that when he saw "Painful
Upgrade" by Mark
Evans (this month's cover illustration), it "sparked a little
kernel of
a story that had been rattling around for a while." We think
you'll
like the results.




Shambhala by Alex Irvine

somewhere on earth

A technician named Avogadro Pierre, monitoring
dataflows in a certain part of the Virt, looks up from his takeout
noodles and says, "Uh oh."

somewhere in the virt

Shannon's foot hurts. It shouldn't, because she
doesn't want it to and this isn't one of the PU spaces where you settle
in advance on a list of permissible pains and inconveniences. She's in
her house, in her space. The rugs are hers, the coffee brewing in the
kitchen is Yirgacheffe. Out the window she can see Shambhala at the
base of the mountains, and on the breeze she can smell her ocean.
Everything feels exactly as it should, except for her foot, and the
only explanation she can come up with is that she's been ported into a
PU space and then maybe--but why would she do this?--had
the record
erased.

Just to make sure, she says, "Virt."

An Avirtar wafts into being and wags its tail.
Usually she likes it when they look like dogs, but she changes this one
into her Aunt Sara, because at this moment what Shannon is after is
reliability.

"Virt," she says. "Am I in one of
the PU spaces?"

"Sweetie, have you registered a list of permissible
Personal Unpleasantnesses?" Aunt Sara asks. Remnant dog hairs
cling to
her sandals.

Shannon shakes her head.

"Then how could you be in a PU space?"

"Virt," Shannon says. "Just answer
the question. Am
I in a PU space?"

"Nope," Aunt Sara says. "Wait. Let
me check."

There is a pause.

"Nope," Aunt Sara says. "Wait. Let
me check."

There is a pause.

"Nope," Aunt Sara says. "Wait. Let
me check."

somewhere on earth

What with all the status lights going yellow in what
the Virtizens like to call the Great Brain of Meatspace (but don't ask
him how he knows, because he'd lose his job if anyone knew he was
communicating with the Virt), Mike Chancey is reminded of the birth of
his son Abraham, who was premature and got jaundice so bad that for a
while he looked kind of like a sweet potato. Abe Chancey is now a grown
man--well, sort of. Man might not be the right word, since Abe
woke up
one morning a couple of years ago, decided he'd had enough gastric
reflux and erectile dysfunction, and did what had already at that point
become known as the Virt Squirt. The yellow lights take on an
accusatory cast; Mike imagines that Abe has somehow jaundiced the Virt,
turned it against him. The yellow lights glow with filial resentment.

There are tipping points, Mike Chancey thinks. There
is the invisible point beyond which your son no longer loves you. There
is the point beyond which you can't say with a straight face that you
enjoy being alive. There is the point beyond which all of the wars and
disasters and creeping entropy of addled ecosystems mean that as a
civilization you're moving backward instead of forward. It doesn't
happen all at once, not like flipping a switch; but you can look back
when you're on the downhill slide, and you can see when it happened.
Fate grants you that moment of knowledge and introspection on your way
down.

On the Brain Board, red starts to replace the yellow.

Then the power goes out.

somewhere in the virt

Arthritis? Plantar fasciitis? Bunions? All of these
terms come to Shannon like random vocabulary from a language she hasn't
spoken in decades. Limping on her sore foot, she starts asking around.
In the Grounds for Excommunication coffeeshop, everyone complains of
strange pains and inexplicable emotional disturbances. They look at her
expectantly, and she admits her foot pain. This seems to satisfy them.
All of a sudden one of them says, "I think I need to take a
walk," and
out he goes into the sunlight. When someone in the coffeeshop crowd
notes that he's not casting a shadow, a murmur passes through them.
What's going on here?

She goes outside to check, and sure enough, she's
not casting a shadow either. But she's not transparent. Uh oh, she
thinks. Errors have propagated before, but the Virt has always been
resilient enough to layer over them before Virtizens know they
exist--especially the natives, who aren't as quick to pick up on
little
quirks. Now several of the personae goggling at the missing shadows are
natives, which is ominous. As is the fact of the missing shadows all by
itself. A little shiver prickles Shannon's spine. Did she port over to
a PU space and have the decision wiped? Only an Avirtar would know, and
they're not very communicative at the moment.

The conclusion that presents itself is troubles in
meatspace. Not supposed to happen, she thinks; the Virt is
self-sustaining, the redundancies and robustness of Shambhala
relentlessly trumpeted. That was why she decided to make the move,
because people she trusted told her it was safe.

How much time has passed in the world? she
wonders--and starts to call up the information, but then decides
she
doesn't want to know, even if the Virt is able to tell her.

Around her, she notices that people are starting to
flow in a single direction, and the sight makes her feel like she ought
to go that way too. Before she does, though, she thinks it might be a
good idea to check in on things down there in the physical world. She
walks in the opposite direction.

somewhere on earth

Mike Chancey is looking over his shoulder as he
welds together the newest security shells he's built around his
clandestine channel. Invincible, according to his phalanx of
Nerds-in-excelsis, but recent events have made him mistrustful. He runs
checks, realizes that he doesn't know enough about the nuts and bolts
of his own system to interpret the results, and goes ahead.

"Abe," he says. "I don't know if
you're listening,
but there are problems here. It would help if you could let me know
what you're seeing."

He waits, but his son does not answer. Mike is
looking at losing his job for sure if his security isn't quite as
bulletproof as he thinks it is, but while there may be good reasons for
preventing any but essential communications between the Virt and the
world, those reasons aren't good enough right now.

"Abe," he says. "Talk to me."

But Abe isn't talking, and it isn't smart to keep
this channel open for very long. Mike walks the corridors of the office
building he privately thinks of as the Brainpan, looking for Gautam,
his Nerd-in-Chief. Gautam is in his office, head down on his desk, arms
crossed over his head as if he's expecting an airstrike. "Gautam," Mike
says. "Give it to me straight."

"It's too horrible," Gautam says.

"It's only going to get worse if you don't tell me."

Gautam looks up at Mike with the empty light of
existential crisis in his eyes. "I kept it going," he
says, "but the
only way I could do it was to slow time waaay down in there. At least I
think I did. Mike, I can't...." He buries his face again and
speaks
into his desktop.

Mike's heart goes out to him. Gautam has the worst
case of Squirt Envy anybody in the Brainpan has ever seen, but he also
suffers the misfortune of being a rare genius in exactly the right job
for both his rarity and his genius. This is a misfortune because Gautam
was brought up with a sense of obligation to his fellow human beings,
which means that while he wants the Squirt more than anything in the
world, he also believes that he owes it to humanity to sacrifice this
desire in order to keep the Virt running for everyone else. So. It's a
sad case. But right now Mike needs the optimally functional Gautam, not
the despairing Gautam, so he says, "Gautam. Goddammit. What is
going
on?"

"They're ... it's all figurative,
Mike,"
Gautam says without picking up his head. "The disruptions
triggered
some kind of self-defense reaction. The Virt couldn't run all of its
ABCs in every case, so it went for, like, approximations, and then it
jumped from there to some weird kind of emergent metaphorical
shorthand. It's crazy. I don't get it. And whenever I try to pop
diagnostics in there, I get personae coming out talking like William
Blake or Rumi or somebody. All this visionary crap." A sound
like a sob
comes up from the desktop. "I just had a conversation with a
persona
who thought he was the prophet Elijah."

That can't be good, Mike thinks. "What did
it say?"

"I think it was quoting from some Sufi text, I don't
know, I lost track." Gautam looks up suddenly, as if a problem
has
occurred to him. He likes problems if the first step toward a solution
is apparent. "You know what," he says. "I
specced out something like
this a long time ago."

"Is that right," Mike says.

"Yeah," Gautam says, and is suddenly glum
again. "I
was trying out an idea about using figuration, you know, to give
Virtizens a common background, baseline cultural literacy, trying to
code not just the facts but, you know, modes of thinking."
Realizing
that he's about to run beyond the boundaries of Mike's understanding,
he reels himself back in. "But when I ran the sims, once that
started
to happen, this kind of death spiral occurs. The figuration gets more
and more abstruse, more cognitive distance between vehicle and tenor,
you know? Then nobody knows what anyone else is talking about."

Mike has understood every individual word, but he is
not at all certain that he's followed the train of Gautam's thought.
"Ah," he says.

"So it's weird," Gautam says. "You
start out trying
to give everyone a similar sort of cultural or ontological syntax, and
the code pivots back on itself and everyone is in their own idios
kosmos, totally cut off. No koinos kosmos."

"Gautam," Mike says. "I don't know
any Hindi."

"I don't either," Gautam says. "Picked that up in a
book somewhere, you know? And anyway, asshole, it's Greek. But it means
that when each of the personae starts to customize itself, it branches
off so much and with such big leaps that pretty soon they're all so far
away from each other that they can't communicate anymore."

"And that's happening now?" Mike is thinking
of Abe.

"No, I don't think so. But it's going to."

somewhere in the virt

All of the Avirtars have gone crazy. Most of the dog
ones are chasing their tails. Shannon can't even look at Aunt Sara, who
has followed her all the way from her house, panting, "Let me
check,"
with the pensive and disturbingly canine expression of a distracted
idiot. Shannon goes looking for a newsstand, but they're all gone but
one that erupts in a flood of letters that run away down the street at
her approach. Left behind, by itself on the counter, is a broadsheet
newspaper, alone on a low table and irregularly haloed by smeared and
bloody handprints. She picks it up and from the texture guesses that
today's edition of Meatspace News was printed from pretty good
tenderloin.

The pages are blank.

And her foot is killing her, and something is wrong
with her eyes, chimerical sparkles in her peripheral vision. The air is
full of strange smells. She remembers reading, back when she was in
college, that these sensations are often precursors to a stroke or
epileptic seizure, neither of which would have been on any PU list she
might have come up with. Epilepsy in Shambhala? A stroke?

"That's it," Shannon says. "I want
out."

The Avirtars fall over into a collective faint. Now
I've done it, Shannon thinks, and goes to the library, looking for the
Squirt everyone calls Charon.

somewhere on earth

A Virt full of Squirts imprisoned in their own
mutually incomprehensible languages. Probably, Mike Chancey thinks,
it's some kind of karmic payback, since Shambhala is the cold-blooded
capitalist shadow of a grand utopian ideal. Immortality! A life free of
worldly pains and disappointments! Girls girls girls! Boys boys boys!
The power of a million supercomputers, all in your head, and all
forever! Except when it came time to get the thing off the ground, once
it was possible every so often to render a working software
approximation of a human mind, the dreamers ran afoul of the
bean-counters. There was insurance to consider in the event of a failed
Squirt; there was the question of market limitations, given the price
of scanning and upload; there were legal questions about the status of
Squirts, or posthumans, or personae, or virtual people, or whatever it
was you were supposed to call them.

Thus Shambhala, the brainchild of an ALS-stricken
devotee of Tibetan Buddhism turned real-estate tycoon whose fondest
wish in life had been that Boulder, Colorado, could somehow be
transplanted to the mid-California coast. He had the billion to get it
started, and there were more than enough people with immense disposable
income and equally immense disgust with their physical bodies to get it
started (and thanks to Alvin Kuntz, they quickly added a number of
other, ahem, quirky personalities). Someone even paid to scan and
Squirt Ted Williams's frozen brain, giving Shambhala its first real
celebrity, although the consensus was that the strokes made Williams a
substandard raconteur. If it wasn't the limitless Virt imagined by
futurists and visionaries at the turn of the century, well, the market
would fix that soon enough as long as the technological infrastructure
kept up its lightning evolution.

Some caveat there, Mike Chancey is thinking as he
walks to a board meeting at which the sole agenda item is: red and
yellow lights on the Brain Board, causes and remedies of. He could
answer both questions in about ninety seconds--causes,
widespread
collapse of energy infrastructure and reluctance of bandwidth
outsources to continue to be bandwidth outsources; remedies, dramatic
downscaling including elimination of native personae and all spaces
except the immediate environs of Shambhala--but if the meeting
lasts
less than three hours he'll devote his life to God.

The consensus around the table is that things are
actually pretty good, power troubles notwithstanding and regional wars
notwithstanding and general uncertainty regarding the viability of
post-industrial civilization notwithstanding. No one has any interest
in welcoming a flood of evacuees from the Virt, in addition to which
the technological obstacles are formidable. Trouble is, the question of
whether Squirts are human has been tied up in the courts for five years
now, and simply pulling the plug on the whole thing would cause
intolerable legal exposure (although a voice from Finance pipes up that
settling claims might be roughly equivalent in cost to the bandwidth
upgrades proposed by the Nerds-in-excelsis; he is ordered to work the
numbers again and report back). There is talk of building brains from
pre-Squirt records, but it is objected that this will result in the
loss of whatever personality changes occurred during a given subject's
time in the Virt, and that loss is considered undesirable. There is
talk of isolating a personality in a corner of the Virt, trapping it if
you will, which has unsavory connotations but would only cause
short-term trauma in the interest of long-term viability should a
transfer--a rebodification--be successful.

Discussion ensues. The Virt, it is decided, will
survive the current troubles. At least sort of. People with loved ones
who have done the Squirt, however, are getting agitated, and since the
cost of the Squirt is orders of magnitude higher than the annual income
of the average citizen of planet Earth, this agitation is prominent and
must be addressed. A proposal is advanced: Might it be useful in a
public-relations sense to provide an outlet for the discontent that
will doubtless accompany the current disruptions? Perhaps in the form
of a lottery...?

Dissenters argue that those uploaded signed
contracts acknowledging the irreversible nature of the transfer. This
dissent is acknowledged, but there is the delicate matter of the Kuntz
operation. Gag orders signed on the original settlements five years
before contain out clauses that might be activated if a reverse Squirt
were to be performed. The opinion of Legal will be sought. Marketing
pipes up: Given the circumstances, wouldn't it be better to bend the
letter of the agreements, out clauses or no out clauses, if public
perceptions can thereby be massaged in the desired fashion? Then if
they have to pull the plug--Finance, you're running those
numbers again,
right?--they can spin the lottery as a dramatic rescue.

This argument carries the day. Now the problem is
that to do what they're thinking about doing, they need Alvin Kuntz. No
one in the room relishes the prospect of working with him again, not
after the way he almost took them all down before.

Mike Chancey sits silently through the proceedings.
He's not surprised, except by the idea of the lottery, which is so
profoundly stupid that only a vice-president of marketing could have
conceived of it.

somewhere in the virt

Some kind of signal has gone out. Virtizens leave
what they are doing and start walking, flowing in puzzled tributaries
that empty into a few broad rivers of personae exiting Shambhala. They
go in different directions, but with the appearance of purpose, as if
they are being separated. It is raining tree frogs whose tiny bodies
splash into fist-sized pixels when they hit the ground. Music is
playing everywhere, and great curving snakes of lightning ripple
through the mountains. Various parts of Shambhala appear not to exist.
They're like blind spots; Shannon feels like she's seeing something
there but can't focus on it and when she tries the old trick of looking
just next to the place, it doesn't work because she doesn't really have
eyeballs. But wait, it should work because she's supposed to feel like
she has eyeballs, isn't she? She's way past unease now, well on the way
to panic, but it's an anaesthetized kind of panic, yowling away in the
back of her mind while her body walks calmly along a leafy side street.
Sunshine dapples the sidewalk except where it's covered in frog pixels.
Shannon's bones feel oddly magnetized, but she has no impulse to limp
along with any of the main streams of exodus. Neither does she have any
particular desire to know where they're going, or where they think
they're going, or whether they have any idea where they're going. Her
mind wanders, but her feet stay on the path to the library, where she
has heard Charon hangs out.

If he exists. One of the things about the Virt is
that things don't always exist, and if they do, it's not always a
permanent situation. There's no commitment to permanence here,
especially on the part of the native personae. They flitter in and out
of existence like convection shadows in clear water. Charon is alleged
to be a native, but one who has access to meatspace, which would make
him remarkable if not unique; one of the clauses in the contract all of
the Squirts signed, back when they had flesh-and-blood hands, enjoins
them to avoid contact with the physical world. Meatspace News
is a one-way channel, and if it's cut out, then something has gone
genuinely kaput. Maybe Charon will know what, and
maybe--Shannon's
grasping at straws here, but straws are what she has right
now--he will
be able to help. If he is what the whispered consensus says he is,
which is an illicit conduit to meatspace. There are various theories
about why such a thing is allowed to exist in light of the no-contact
clause in all Squirt contracts, but no one knows for sure. If she is
lucky, Shannon thinks, she might find out.

On the keystone over the library's front door is the
inscription Oh time thy pyramids. It wasn't there the last time
Shannon visited the library, and when she enters the building she finds
that interior is dramatically different as well. Usually an Avirtar is
already waiting at the desk, but today the library is full of
translucent blind men groping among shelves of books that reach up
higher than she can see. At the far end of the room, she sees a door,
and is walking toward it before she's consciously decided to do so.

somewhere on earth

The sound of an approaching outboard motor distracts
Alvin Kuntz from the enjoyment of his daily cigarette. He pinches the
coal off the cigarette, saving half of it for later, and goes around to
the front of his house, which faces the beach on an island that was
erased from world maps shortly after World War II. He calls it Alvinia,
and considers that in view of all he's done for human civilization,
he's earned the distinction of naming a lump of South Pacific sand and
coral after himself. The Kuntz Virtual Rehabilitation Clinic helped
create the Virt, pioneered the brain-scanning and personality-modeling
work that led to the Virt, and incubated innumerable advances in
nanobiology after the Virt's establishment. That, Alvin reasons, is
more than enough to excuse a little hubris, even though you won't find
his name on any research papers or in any of the standard histories and
even though he can't set foot on the North American or European
continents because of certain indiscretions on the part of people who
should have known better.

The downside of occupying an uncharted island is
that Alvin's only company is robots of his own design, so it is with
great anticipation that Alvin rounds the corner of his house to see
what visitors the day has brought, and it's with great dismay that he
notices the various official insignia bedecking the boat and the
sleeves and hats of its crew. Were he a younger man, he would run even
though the island is less than a mile across at its widest, and only
slightly longer. He stays where he is because by the time the flight
impulse winds its way down centenarian nerves to his feet, the boat is
already beached and one of its crew knee-deep in the surf calling
Alvin's name.

"Get off my beach!" he shouts. "There's no
extradition treaties in Alvinia!"

"We're not here to extradite anyone, Mr.
Kuntz," the
wet-legged sailor says. "All we need to know is where you're
keeping
the bodies."

"What bodies?"

"Mr. Kuntz," sighs the sailor, "I
said we weren't
here to extradite anyone. I didn't say I wouldn't hogtie you and throw
you in the boat. How about we sit down in some shade and have us a
little chat?"

somewhere in the virt

"All I can see anymore is the color yellow,"
a voice
over Shannon's shoulder says. She looks and sees that one of the
translucent blind men has followed her through the door. His breath is
peppery, his voice liquid and reassuring.

She looks around. Books books books. A single door.
If she didn't know better, she would think she hasn't moved. "Do you
know where I can find Charon?"

The Avirtar--or persona, she's not
sure--waves
vaguely. "Around," he says. "He's not yellow, I
can tell you that."

Shannon wants to gamble and ask if Charon can get
her out. Even if she's just piped back into a network where
meatspace--the world--is visible again. Anything but
this. Her misgivings
get the better of her, though.

"Through this door?" she asks, pointing at
the only
door she can see.

"Eventually," comes the reply. "Or
maybe not."

somewhere on earth

Alvin is getting tired of the interrogation. If
Shambhala Virtual, or whatever they're calling themselves now, wanted
to know what was going on, he's thinking, they should have come
themselves instead of sending whichever variety of manicured goon he's
currently dealing with. "The thing is," he says, "even if I knew where
the specimens were, they're not just empty jars you can pour a
personality into. Even if you could find the right person to put back
into his original body, I don't think that would work. The neural
pathways wouldn't fit anymore. They especially wouldn't fit if you
wanted to put someone else in there."

"So you're saying we can't use their existing
brains," said the sailor.

"Well, not if you want them to be exactly like they
are in the Virt," Alvin agreed. "But who's going to
know? Will they?"

"I don't know. Will they?"

"Interesting question," Alvin says. "We never did
figure that out."

The sailor looks at one of his crew, a dark-skinned
Asian woman in a floppy hat. "Quick take on the liability
issues?"

"How quick?" she says. "There's
still no settled law
on whether they're people."

"Just get a sense, okay?"

She puts on an eyeglass display and starts working a
palmtop.

"Tell you what," Alvin says. "You
wouldn't have this
problem if you used them." He jerks a thumb over his
shoulder
at the house.

"Who's them?"

Clearly this is going to take a while. Alvin lights
his half-cigarette. "Soon as I'm done with this, come on in the
house.
I'll show you."

"Okay," the sailor says, and stands a short
distance
away. "You know, I was serious when I said I wasn't here to
arrest you.
But that doesn't mean I don't think I should."

"Alvinia's a free country," Alvin said. "You're
welcome to your opinion."

"Uh huh. Why'd you do it? I mean, apart from being a
soulless mad-scientist wacko?"

Alvin chuckles. "That was mostly it. But
also...."
He trails off. This is the part he can't explain to them, or shouldn't,
anyway, because it makes him seem even more pathological than most
people already think he is. But the plain truth--the real reason
why he
did it, and why he intends to do it again if he gets a
chance--is that
the world becomes a nicer place in direct correlation to how many of
the moonpie idiots afraid of experiencing it are subtracted via the
Squirt.

"Never mind," he says. "Come on
inside and meet the
help."

somewhere in the virt

Every room just opens into another, all full of
books and all populated with deranged Avirtars impersonating writers.
Currently Shannon is in a scene out of a Renaissance pastoral: sheep,
gentle hillsides, bumpkin shepherds composing poems. There are three of
them, two throwing verses back and forth and the third tapping time on
his knee. "Methinks I hear when I do hear sweet music,"
one of the
Avirtars says, and the second picks it up: "The dreadful cries
of
murdered men in forests."

"Ain't everyone who can write a double rhyming
sestina," adds the third, and barks. "Now that's order."

Shannon doesn't know what a sestina is. The third
Avirtar senses this, and explains. She's a little shocked by its sudden
coherence, and starts to ask about Charon while she's got a lucid
Avirtar to work with, but a fourth Avirtar manifests and steps in the
way. It's wearing an old noir-movie getup, trench coat and top hat and
lip-stuck cigarette.

"You know Philip Sidney, kid?" it asks.

"It's Marlowe," Shannon says. "I
read that book.
Everyone knows it's Philip Marlowe."

"Is you is, or is you ain't my Strephon?"
asks the
second Avirtar. Then all four of them vanish, and she is no closer to
Charon.

somewhere on earth

The next morning, a memo goes out, sketching the
challenges of the situation. Mike Chancey is still shaking his head
over yesterday's meeting. "A lottery?" he says
incredulously. "What
about the rest of them?"

What about Abe?

He's back in his office, attended by
Nerd-in-excelsis Avogadro Pierre. "You're pushing your luck
here, you
want my opinion," says Pierre, and sneezes.

"And now they're dealing with Alvin Kuntz again.
Could this get any more cynical?"

"Who's Alvin Kuntz?" Pierre wants to know.

"He's the guy who Squirted a bunch of patients at
his VR clinic and then warehoused the bodies for nano
experiments."
Pierre is staring pop-eyed at him. "You didn't hear about it?"

"He what?"

"I'm serious. I think he did nearly fifty of them
before anyone caught on. Now he's hiding out on an island somewhere.
Working on robotics, I think."

"Jesus," Pierre says, and sneezes again.

"Had a flu shot, Pierre?" Mike asks.

"Ahh," Pierre says.

"Your funeral. Just don't die before I get in touch
with Abe."

Pierre's waving his hands and shaking his head
before Mike finishes the sentence. "No no no no no, la la la la
la, I
don't hear you--"

"Jesus, shut up." Mike has everything in
place. He
starts the creeper, of Pierre's design, that will raise Abe. It creeps.
Pierre drops his three-monkeys attitude and watches, a proud craftsman.
The channel opens.

"Abe, you there?" Mike says. He listens. "Tell me
about it ... no shit. Okay, we're doing what we can ... they're what?
Who's looking for you?"

He looks up at Pierre. "Meatspace News
is
down."

Pierre shrugs.

"Did you do that?" Mike says.

"La la la," Pierre says, but he's pointing
over his
shoulder, in what Mike belatedly figures out is the direction of the
boardroom. Mike wishes a lingering death on all of the board members.

"Kid," says Mike, "we've got bad
trouble down here.
And it's not getting any better. You need to get out while there's
still the bandwidth to do it."

He pauses.

"Abe," he says. "Please."

He pauses.

"Is that right?" he says, and cracks a thin
smile. "I'm the Meatspace News now?"

Pierre's laughing.

somewhere in the virt

She is through the door and into a small,
old-fashioned kitchen with a window that looks out onto sooty brick
picked out by a shaft of falling light. The air is thick with cigarette
smoke. An old man--this is enough to make him stand out, since
very few
Virtizens, native or Squirt, choose the appearance of old
age--leans on
a grimy kitchen counter. Also unlike the vast majority of Virtizens, he
is wearing eyeglasses. On the back of his T-shirt, Shannon reads the
name HENRY.

"Hey, baby," he says, and drinks from a
bottle on
the counter.

"Excuse me?" She doesn't think she's ever
been
called baby, at least not since she was one.

"I said hey, is all."

"Well, hey what?"

"Hey, you one of the ones leaving?"

Shannon nods. "Yes."

Henry shakes his head. "Lots of 'em think
they're leaving," he says. "Not a single one knows
where he's going."

"I know," Shannon says, which if not a lie
is
inarguably optimistic. How is she supposed to get out of this kitchen?
There's only the window.

"That right? You know?" Henry finishes his
cigarette
and lights another. "Now what you want to do that for anyway?
Zero-one
silicon switch, zero-one quantum foam bubbling up into prokaryote
paramecium parakeet philosopher, what difference does it make?"
Shannon
has spotted a fire escape, and she climbs over the kitchen sink and
squeezes through the window. Behind her, she can hear Henry still
talking. "Baby, stay here, hey, baby...."

somewhere on earth

Two soldiers are watching oil platforms burn. "Man,
check it out in UV," one of them says. The other flicks his
goggles and
takes in the high-spectrum show. He likes the infrared better. They're
both tweaking a little, and when bullets start to pock the wall around
them they bound like rabbits around the corner and sit giggling until
they hear the whistle and impact of automated ground-flash response
shells torching the back side of the hill.

"Believe I'll peek out and see if the peasants got
their barbecue yet," the infrared partisan says.

"Let me know how it turns out," says his
UV-inclined
comrade, but the planned peek never occurs because at that moment an
oil terminal along the waterfront goes up in a blast that they find
quite diverting in their spectra of choice.

somewhere in the virt

And maybe it's true that on the zero-one level it's
all the same, and maybe it's true that after doing the Squirt, that's
the level Shannon should be thinking about, but she isn't. When the
Virt is coming down around your ears, Planck-length semantics are the
last thing on your mind. Out Henry's window is a fire escape that goes
down into an abyss, and now that she's clinging to it she can see that
the airshaft is hexagonal in cross section, and that narrow walkways
encircle its interior every ten feet or so, forming what looks like a
cast-iron ribcage as far as she can see up or down.

Down, she thinks, and then is uncertain. What if
it's up? She takes a quarter from her pocket and flips it, thinking
that on tails she'll go down, but she misses the quarter on its
downward arc and it pings through the iron grate between her feet and
goes on pinging for several floors before ricocheting around on a
platform and coming to rest.

She's in a mood for omens. Okay, she thinks, and
begins to descend.

somewhere on earth

"I think it worked," Gautam says. "They don't know
what the hell they're doing, but the ones who won the lottery, all of a
sudden they all took off like Don Quixote. Problem is that the rest of
them, not the natives but the Squirts, also took off, you know? But
like in random directions. There are subspaces ramifying in there
faster than I can catalog them. This isn't sustainable, Mike. What are
you going to do with them?"

"Looks like we're going to drop them back into
bodies," Mike says.

Gautam looks ill. "How ... bleah. Back into
the
meat. Hope you have a budget line for therapy expenses," he
says.

somewhere in the virt

The quarter lies in front of a door that opens onto
a cracking blacktop road. There is honeysuckle in the air, and the
smells of oil and aftershave hitching a ride on evaporating sweat. An
ancient car sits at the side of the road, black and dusty, one of its
rear tires flat. Standing next to the hood, a young man with blisters
on his face and bloody fluid leaking from behind his sunglasses is
preaching.

"Where you come from is gone," he shouts. "Where you
thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good
unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be?
No place."

She's looking around for walls of books, or fire
escapes, or anything but this stretch of sun-baked asphalt that fades
away into the hazy distance. Should I be looking for water? she
wonders. I'm not going to find a ferry out here. The crowd, all
translucent men who can only see the color yellow, shuffles its feet.
Then one of them steps out, shedding his shape. He's like one of those
blind spots back outside--if that's the right word--in
Shambhala. Shannon
can't quite see him.

She can hear him, though, when he says, "Keep going.
Keep it up."

"Charon?" she asks.

He's gone. The not-quite-blind men all look at her,
then look back to the preacher, who is pouring broken glass out of his
shoes. Then she's moving again, down the road, past the crowd of men,
who as she passes them momentarily flicker into the shape of Aunt Sara.
When they reassume their shapes, she can see a stairway in the
distance, rising from the shimmer where the road meets the horizon.

somewhere on earth

The truth, if anyone around the table is interested
in the truth, is that the situation is getting dire. Meatside relatives
of Squirts are screaming bloody murder, literally. The courts are still
wrangling over the legal status of Squirts, and while it's all up in
the air Legal is hip-deep in court filings and injunctions.
Shareholders are antsy enough to talk about a board shakeup. Things are
far from optimal. They'll get on top of it, sure, because innovating
and solving problems is what Shambhala Virtual does. Right now,
however? This moment under discussion? Right now they don't have the
resources they need for the Virt--"divert to the Virt,"
someone says in
passing, and they laugh harder than it deserves--because
everyone from
the Chinese to the Indians to the Saudis to the French to the Americans
is busy putting out political and environmental and military brushfires
of every description. The little misadventure down in Venezuela, the
earthquake-breached dams in China and the Pacific Northwest, the
refugee problem in Bangladesh ... instead of a gleaming posthuman
future, the board of Shambhala Virtual find themselves, at least
temporarily, sole proprietors of a monstrously expensive and utterly
irrelevant luxury commodity. If only they could get all the goddamn
Bangladeshis to do the Squirt, one of them jokes, they'd have one
problem out of the way. Especially if they then pulled the plug.

But back to the task. There's a PR crisis to be
massaged. Even if they have to pull the plug--which according to
Finance
might be workable if they strategize the settlements
correctly--they at
least need to get the lottery winners out. One of them opens a link to
see whether Alvin Kuntz has come around.

somewhere in the virt

The stairs go on forever, it seems. Shannon is
exhausted by the time she reaches the top, and frightened because she
shouldn't be exhausted. She's never going to get out of the library,
she's never going to find Charon, she's never going to talk to someone
in meatspace and figure out what has happened. She sits on the top
stair, ready to give up, and has the clear realization that she has in
that moment understood despair.

Someone is talking behind her. "As is he who
dreaming sees, and after the dream the passion remains imprinted, and
the rest returns not to the mind, such am I."

She doesn't look up. "What now?"

"For my vision almost wholly departs, which the
sweetness that was born of it yet distills within my heart."

"Okay," Shannon sighs. She stands up. "Get to the
point."

When she turns around, she is in a small stone
chamber not unlike parts of the game-immersion spaces (although she
shudders to think what this Virtquake, or whatever it is, has done to
them and the personae in them; rampaging aliens and balrogs are all she
needs right now). Set into the opposite wall is a low stone gate,
slightly open. On the other side of it she glimpses a path that winds
up the flanks of a mountain, the top of which is lost in a gentle
obscuring radiance. Between her and the gate, a weary man with eyes
that might have been transplanted from the preaching kook on the dirt
road is speaking: "...through my sight, which was growing
strong in me
as I looked, one sole appearance, as I myself changed, was altering
itself to me."

"Change," Shannon repeats. "Okay,
change. Keep
talking."

The man falls silent.

"I mean it. Keep talking," she says. "I've come this
far."

"My mind was smitten by a flash in which its wish
came," the man says, and a blaze of light from the top of the
mountain
floods the room, blinding her. When Shannon looks back, the old man is
gone, and sitting in his place she sees a compact, dark-haired man
wearing a worn suit. A smile plays about the corners of his mouth.

"What's so funny?" she asks.

"No one else could ever be admitted here, since this
gate was made only for you," he says, and begins to bleed from
invisible wounds. "I am now going to shut it."

By the end of this pronouncement, he is unable to
contain himself. He bursts into shrieks of laughter as she pushes past
him and rocks the gate on its hinges. It holds fast, and he laughs
harder.

somewhere on earth

"I'm telling you, it won't work," Alvin says
for the
hundredth time.

"No, you haven't told me," comes the voice
over the
phone. Alvin has refused a video feed. He'd rather look out over the
ocean and devote only one of his senses to whichever bureaucrat is
going to harangue him this time.

"Then you could look it up. The neural pathways in
all of my specimens are already set. Do you know how to rewire them? I
don't, and that means that probably nobody else does either."

"Is there a way to make them think that they've come
back down?" the voice asks.

"Could be," Alvin says. "That's not
my field. What
you're talking about is just another Virt, only, what, smaller. Go make
one. You've got a building full of engineers and geniuses probably
looking for a chance to get it right this time."

"Mr. Kuntz," the voice says. "This
will all be much
smoother if you can refrain from acerbic comments."

"My acerbic comments are hardly the worst of your
problems, bud," Alvin says. "Your problem is that
you've promised
something you can't deliver. Way I see it, you can either brush up your
resum or you can just use the goddamn robots like I already told you."

somewhere in the virt

Smoke and laughter roll out when Shannon opens the
next door. It's cooler here, which gets her hopes up that maybe she's
nearing water. "This ideal moment when man," someone is
saying, "in the
grips of a particular emotion, is suddenly seized by this something stronger
than himself which projects him, in self-defense, into immortality."

She shuts the door, then opens it again. The way
must be there. "And who are you supposed to be?" she
asks.

"A key," the man says. He is wearing a high
collar
and tie, and waving a bottle of something green and alluring. She
smells licorice. "Capable of opening indefinitely that box of
many
bottoms called man, a key that dissuades him from turning back, for
reasons of self-preservation, when in the darkness he bumps into doors,
locked from the outside...."

And she is already through the door past him, and
deeper into the library.

somewhere on earth

"You're going to what?" Mike says.

"What can we do? Kuntz says the bodies won't do the
trick. Understand, Mike. We've got to make a gesture here."

"I'm not going to be a party to this," Mike
says. "We can fix the problem. Gautam is on it. He'll get it done."

"Gautam is losing his mind, Mike. You're going to
walk into his office one of these days, maybe today, and find that he's
done the Squirt from his desktop just so he can be there for the end.
Guys like him, the true believers, this is all about the apocalypse."

This possibility has in fact occurred to Mike.
"Whereas for us it's about what?" he says to himself,
but he's
overheard.

"This is the wrong time to get sentimental, my
friend. Don't ask questions when you already know the answers. Look,
the robots are actually a pretty good solution. The evacuees will be
out of the Virt, but they'll also still be out of the meat, which is
what they wanted in the first place, right?"

Mike hears himself say, "Right."

"Right."

"So how many Squirts won this lottery?"

"We sent six."

Out of about thirteen thousand who have done the
Squirt. And the millions of native personae who may or may not be
people, depending on who you ask. Six. Mike doesn't have to ask. He
knows they're going to pull the plug. You get a kind of sixth sense for
betrayal and deviousness when you spend time around these people.

"One of them," Mike says, "is going
to be Abe."

"Excuse me?"

"I said that my son is going to be one of them.
That's my price. You want to keep Alvin under the rug, and you want me
to pretend I don't know that you've already decided to pull the plug,
you get Abe out of there."

"Mike, Abe is about the happiest Squirt there's ever
been. Plus we need him up there. Your conversations are helpful to our
marketing people."

Thanks a lot, Pierre, Mike thinks. "Burn me
if it
makes you feel better," he says. "But Abe comes out."

"Okay, if that's what you want, but that's not a
very nice thing to do to your kid, is it?"

"Fuck you," Mike Chancey says, and goes to
tell
Avogadro Pierre that he needs to look for a new line of work.

somewhere in the virt

She is certain this must be the last. The room is
bare and dark. The smell of old hay tickles her nose, and the scene
resolves itself into a stable. Tack and farm implements hang from nails
on the walls. Somewhere water drips. The man in front of her puts down
a pad of paper and offers a sad smile. "You are not thinking of
finitude," he says. "You are contemplating an
apotheosis in which a
temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and
aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard."

"I am?" Shannon says. "Let me pass.
Please, let me
pass."

"You will not even be dead," he goes on, and
is
talking over her as she shoves into him, pushing him back against the
far wall, where the two doors are marked 0 and 1. He vanishes between
them, and she hears his voice: "...until someday in very
disgust he
risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that
under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it
only when he has realized that even the despair or remorse or
bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman...."

Shannon leans against the wall between 0 and 1, and
it gives way.

somewhere on earth

"Good news," Avogadro Pierre says when Mike
gets
back to the Brain. "We've got all six of them down their blind
alleys.
At least I think we do."

"There needs to be a seventh," Mike says. "Find Abe."

"We were told six," Pierre says.

"The board says seven now, and one of them is Abe."

"If you say so," Pierre says, "but
Abe makes himself
awful hard to find sometimes."

"That's why you're part of the Praetorian Nerds,
Pierre. Get it done."

somewhere in the virt

Between zero and one, Shannon is laughing. It feels
like years since she's laughed. "Roll dice? After all this, dice?"

"We're down in the quantum," the Dark
Diceman says. "It's all probability here."

No arguing that, Shannon thinks. She cups her hands
and the dice drop onto her palms, one, two. She rolls them without
looking.

"Lucky seven," the Dark Diceman says. "Okay, good
enough. Follow your nose."

And she smells water, feels the breath of it on her
face. Shannon walks into the darkness. She closes her eyes when she
can't see anymore.

somewhere on earth

"More good news," Pierre says. "I
got Abe."

Mike nods. He wants to be happy, he wants to feel
guilty, he wants to feel anything but what he does right now, which is
selfish and abused and complicit in something horrible. "Thanks,
Pierre," he says. "By the way, the board knew about Abe
the whole time,
I guess."

"No kidding," Pierre says.

"Yeah. I figure we're both about to walk the plank."

"Huh." Pierre thinks for a while. "Gautam's going to
kill himself when they pull the plug."

"You might be right about that."

"Damn right I'm right about that." Pierre
thinks a
little more. "So, listen. You know where to find this Alvin
Kuntz guy?"

"Come on, Pierre."

"No, I mean it. Gautam kills himself, I'm going to
feel guilty for the rest of my life. Gautam goes off to an island
somewhere and engineers his own, what, apotheosis, that's good for me."

Pierre has a point, Mike thinks. "Huh. All
right."
He has to look all through his desk drawers for a pen. When he finds
one, he writes a latitude and longitude on the back of a Chinese menu.
"You should go too," he says as he hands the menu to
Pierre. "I doubt
there's going to be much work around here for a little while."

Pierre is laughing. "Dope," he says. "You think I
really got this for Gautam?"

And despite himself, Mike is laughing too.

somewhere in the virt

I'm going to have corpuscles, Shannon thinks.
Alveoli. Phalanges. Or at least I won't be here anymore. Half-full,
half-empty. She finds herself mimicking Henry. Silicon, quantum foam,
what's the difference? If you have to ask, I can't explain.

How long have I been away?

Her next footstep splashes. She opens her eyes and
sees a boat rocking in black shallows, five Squirts already aboard. A
rope runs from its bow to the bootsole of the Dark Diceman.

"Oh," Shannon says.

"Fare?" the Dark Diceman says.

She realizes she still has the dice in her hand, and
gives them back. She sees the Diceman looking over her shoulder, and
turns to see another Squirt walking with his eyes closed in their
direction. He's crying, his muscles are twitching like he's having a
seizure, but he's walking. "No no no no no no," he's
saying.

"And two for him," the Diceman says.

"I have to pay for him?" Shannon says. "He doesn't
even want to go."

"He got you here."

"That's Charon?"

"That's him."

"No no no no no," the Squirt weeps.

Shannon searches her pockets. "That's all I
have."

But Charon's tears are falling like silver; suddenly
there are coins everywhere, falling out of the infinite black around
them. They ping and patter on the stones, plink in the water. The
Diceman laughs the way you laugh when you've been made the butt of a
pretty good joke.

"Okay," he says. "Good thing nobody
else is seeing
all this. The boat would never hold them all."

He steps aside. So does Shannon, because Charon is
walking like a condemned man into the flat-bottomed boat. When he is
seated on the front bench, Shannon steps aboard.

somewhere on earth

"Shannon DeWalt?"

It's been a long time since anyone used her last
name. Eyes still closed, Shannon realizes she's heard a voice.
Vibrations in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere have collided with the
bones of her inner ear. I have a body, she thinks. It's a wondrous,
impossible thought. She is exalted by it, feels her heartbeat quicken
and a smile break across her face. Alveoli, corpuscles, phalanges!
She inhales, feels the oxygen filling her lungs, raises her arms over
her head and feels the muscles stretch. Her nose registers the smells
of cut flowers, some kind of lubricating oil, antiseptic, a faint hint
of deodorant. I made it, she thinks.

She opens her eyes. The ceiling is white. Indirect
light suffuses the room. She sees her hands, polished and shining.

[Back to
Table of Contents]




Books To Look For by Charles De Lint

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman, William
Morrow, 2005, $26.95.

I've finally figured out what it is that makes me
enjoy Neil Gaiman's books as much as I do--and oddly enough,
it's
something that usually annoys me in the writing of other authors.

Gaiman writes from an omnipresent point of view.

While it seems like we're inside the
characters'
heads, we're not really. In Gaiman's books we're being told what
they're thinking and feeling by this friendly authorial voice, rather
than learning about it from the characters' points of view. It
doesn't
matter how dark the material might be, there's always this half-smile
in that narrator's voice of his.

In a lesser writer's hands, this might make you
think that he's amused by the characters and their actions, or perhaps
by us readers, for involving ourselves as thoroughly as we do in their
lives. But with Gaiman, I've come to realize, it's a genuine
affection--for both his characters and his readers. No matter
how awful
the situations are that he puts his characters into, it's still obvious
that he cares for them. And as for his readers, if there's a joke
involved, it's usually a long and complicated one--more often
silly, or
simply odd, rather than funny--and he's letting us in on it.

This voice is a part of all of his
writing--fiction
and nonfiction--and how much you care for his work depends, I
suppose,
on whether or not you like that voice.

But having figured this out, now I finally
understand why some of my friends won't read him after trying a book or
two. They don't like that voice. But I like it just fine and it's in
particularly good form in this new novel, with its catchy tag-line:
"God is dead. Meet the kids."

Mind you, that tag-line is a bit of a fudge, because
while there is a dead god, it's not the one you immediately think of
when you read that line--or at least the one you would think of
if
you've been brought up in Western society.

The god in question is the African trickster Anansi,
whom we previously met in American Gods, and he dies the way
he'd have wanted to: after a night of drinking and dancing and karaoke,
collapsing across a beautiful blonde with his face pressed into her
cleavage.

This is terribly embarrassing for Fat Charlie Nancy.
But then everything about his father has always been embarrassing for
Fat Charlie, starting with the nickname his father gave him that he
can't seem to shake even years after he lost the weight.

Then he discovers that he has a brother he never
knew he had, and that brother proves to be even more troublesome than
his trickster father--mostly because he inherited all of their
father's
magical abilities and amoral tendencies.

Things get even more complicated, of course, but
there's really no point in my outlining the plot for you, although
there is a plot, and a good one. Gaiman's not a lazy writer; all the
good stuff's here: plot, characters, good, sometimes inspired, prose.
It's just that one doesn't really read Gaiman for things like plot and
characters and prose.

You see, we're back to that voice. That charming
voice that allows us to accept the implausible, smile at the funny
bits, or shiver when the villains seem to get the upper hand. And in
the end, when we lift our gazes from the book, we feel uplifted and
more ready to face reality because Gaiman has shown us how to find all
the interesting bits in the world around us that otherwise we might
simply continue to take for granted.

If you haven't tried his work yet, this might be a
good place to start. If you already appreciate what he does ... well,
enjoy this new novel. It might be the best one yet.

The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King, Hard
Case Crime, 2005, $5.99.

At this point in the proceedings, Stephen King
doesn't need reviewers to tout his work. He's a brand name, and
interested readers are going to pick up a new book no matter if the
reviews are good, bad, or indifferent. Which isn't to say that his
readers don't have discerning tastes. They just know what they like and
King has proved to be a writer who consistently delivers.

All that said, I think this new novel's worth a
mention here, if only to set a matter or two straight.

Hard Case Crime is a fairly new publisher with a
mission statement to bring readers "the best in hard-boiled
crime
fiction, from lost pulp classics to new work by today's most powerful
writers, all in handsome and affordable paperback editions."
Sort of a
Gold Medal line for contemporary times.

I say, kudos to them. And when this title by King
was announced I was looking forward to see what he'd do with the genre.

Well, the bad news is that The Colorado Kid
isn't hard-boiled, doesn't really have a crime, and the puzzle that
forms the narrative thread to pull us from start to finish doesn't ever
get resolved.

The good news is that this short book is one of
King's best works to date--more Dolores Claiborne or The
Green Mile than The Maltese Falcon. It's an in-depth
character study and a love letter to the Maine coast, a small story
with a big heart that transcends genre. Anyone who thinks King didn't
deserve his National Book Award should be forced to read this just to
see that he's not all about the scares and gross-outs.

But I'm still curious as to who the woman on the
cover of the book is supposed to be.

And I would like to read that hard-boiled crime
novel this was supposed to be.

The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill
Watterson, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005, $150.

It's expensive (although I've seen it listed for as
low as $94.50 at some on-line sites). And it's massive: three large,
heavy hardcover books in a slipcase. But the weight comes from the high
quality paper that, combined with a gorgeous printing job, make this
one of the best reprint collections of newspaper strips I've seen to
date.

The Complete Calvin & Hobbes collects
everything from the ten short years of the strip's existence, together
with a new, meaty forward by Watterson and all the extras bits that
showed up in the previous trade paperback collections.

Why do you need it?

Well, you don't. But you do need to read Calvin
& Hobbes, whether in this new fancy edition, or in one of the
previously published ones. Through the mouthpieces of six-year-old
Calvin (a hyperactive, self-absorbed fireball with an overactive
imagination) and his best friend Hobbes (a plush toy that only Calvin
and the readers see as a "real" tiger), the reclusive
Watterson
compressed ongoing snapshots of the world at large into a daily
newspaper strip that was tender, smart, critical, and always funny.

And so perfectly drawn. Strip after strip is an
utter delight, the linework and color (on the Sunday strips) remaining,
to this day, among the finest examples of artistic expression in this
medium.

No matter what age we are, we can see ourselves, our
fancies and our struggles and our foibles, in the actions of these two
characters.

And did I mention it was funny?

Everybody needs one or two Calvin & Hobbes
collections in their home, but if you have the spare cash, why not
splurge on this edition and have them all?

Couldn't be more highly recommended.

How Loathsome, by Tristan Crane & Ted
Naiufeh, NBM Comics Lit, 2005, $13.95.

What people who dismiss comic books and narrative
art don't realize is that this form of storytelling isn't all about
superheroes running around in their long underwear (or skimpy
underwear, when it comes to the women). It hasn't been for a long time.

Flashy comic books are still here, with many of them
making the jump to the big screen, but walk into any comic book shop,
or the graphic art section of a good bookstore, and you'll find, in
amongst the splashy covers of the superhero titles, every kind of story
you might imagine--and some you didn't.

Such as How Loathsome, a fascinating
exploration of the fluid nature of gender and the underground world of
addiction. Tristan Crane's narrative moves from contemporary San
Francisco, through fairy tales and folk tales, to paint a complex but
illuminating study of flawed but very real and sympathetic characters.
Combined with the art of Ted Naiufeh (who would be a shoo-in for a
graphic novel version of Holly Black's Valiant), it's a
mesmerizing glimpse into a world that will be unfamiliar to
many--which
makes it all the more important a book.

People fear what they don't understand. Books such
as this do much to tear away false impressions and show us that under
our behavioral masks and our extremes of taste and expression, we all
have more in common than we might otherwise think we do.

Recommended, for adult readers.

Material to be considered for review in this column
should be sent to Charles de Lint, P.O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K1G 3V2.

[Back to
Table of Contents]




Books by Robert K.J. Killheffer

The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold,
Eos, 2005, $24.95.

Mlusine, by Sarah Monette, Ace, 2005,
$24.95.

Firethorn, by Sarah Micklem, Bantam
Spectra, 2005, $14.

In the summer of 1972, Ursula K. Le Guin gave a talk
to the Science Fiction Writers Workshop at the University of Washington
on the the writing of fantasy fiction. Published as a chapbook a year
later, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" became a landmark
critical essay,
one of the pieces that made Le Guin's reputation as a critic of the
field as well as one of its most admired practitioners, and it remains
a touchstone for writers of fantasy today.

At least it should remain a touchstone,
because in its 5,000-odd words it contains some of the most percipient
advice and analysis ever offered. Le Guin argues for the central
importance of style in fantasy, a style that creates a sense of
otherworldliness, a clear departure from the familiar everyday world.
"The point about Elfland," she says, using her
shorthand for any
imagined fantasy world, "is that you are not at home there.
It's not
Poughkeepsie. It's different." It's not enough to rely on
trappings--dragons, wizards, magical amulets, and so on. An
inappropriate style clashes with those elements and bleeds them of
their potential power.

When she speaks of style, Le Guin does not mean just
the language, the flavor of the prose, though of course that's a big
part of it. Style encompasses all the devices writers choose for their
tellings, from point of view to selection of detail to the rhythms of
dialogue and even the choice of which events to dramatize, which to
leave "off-stage," and in what order. "The
style," she says, "is
the book.... If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis
of the plot."

Style in this sense is the vital heart of any work
of literature, but it's even more crucial in fantasy (and science
fiction), because here the world of the text has no existence beyond
it--the fantasy writer has no "comfortable matrix of the
commonplace" to
fall back on, to let her reader fill in the blanks, "to
disguise flaws
and failures of creation." Without the proper style, fantasy is
(to
paraphrase Le Guin once more) like a visit to Yosemite in a fully
loaded RV, with television and cell phone, DVD player and running-water
hookup. It's not the real thing.

Le Guin's essay appeared more than thirty years ago
and the field of fantasy has grown and changed immensely in that time.
But the passage of years has, if anything, made Le Guin's critique all
the more urgent, for those years have seen the progressive
domestication of fantasy, the breeding of a whole industry of risk-free
weekend tours of the Elfland theme park, located just a mile off Exit
12 on the Poughkeepsie Turnpike. It's time to dust off Le Guin's
yardstick and seek out fantasies that measure up, that open doorways
into genuinely strange and different places, that employ a style
suitable to the task at hand.

The Hallowed Hunt is the third in Lois
McMaster Bujold's "Chalion" series which, unlike most
of today's
fantasy series, consists of novels set in the same world but not
otherwise closely linked. Each volume stands alone and complete in
itself, and that's something to recommend them right off. Bujold begins
her world-building with the standard template--political and
cultural
structures drawn mainly from medieval European models--but she
avoids
the tired dark-force-threatens-the-world plot in favor of a story
steeped in political intrigue.

Bujold grabs our attention at once with a dramatic
scenario layered with complications. Lady Ijada dy Castos, a minor
noblewoman, has killed Prince Boleso kin Stagthorne, second in line to
the Hallowed Kingship of the Weald. She claims he was attempting to
rape her, and, worse, that he did so as part of a forbidden act of old
Wealding ritual magic. Lord Ingrey kin Wolfcliff, young and not
especially high-ranking himself, comes to Boleso's castle to fetch the
body back for funeral, and Ijada for trial. Meanwhile the current King
nears death, and the Weald's powerful clans weave a thicket of politics
around the royal seat at Easthome, all of which could play a part in
determining Ijada's fate.

Ingrey soons learns through experience that he's a
pawn in these games, with a secret sorcerous compulsion to murder Ijada
whenever his guard drops. Ingrey also carries an animal spirit, a wolf
bound to him by the same sort of magic Boleso had attempted. Only by
special dispensation from the Temple divines has Ingrey escaped
execution for his contaminated state--and that exemption might
be
withdrawn at any time. As he guides Ijada back to Easthome, he learns
that she also bears a spirit--a leopard, set upon her by
Boleso's
abortive spell. So she faces two sorts of jeopardy, should the divines
discover her condition, and all of this is further complicated by the
attraction that draws Ingrey and Ijada together during their journey.

Bujold rose to fame as a science fiction writer,
with her tremendously popular, multiple Hugo Award-winning Miles
Vorkosigan series and the standalone novel Falling Free (1988),
which won her the Nebula Award. (The previous "Chalion"
novel, Paladin
of Souls [2003], netted Bujold another Hugo and another Nebula.)
There are precious few writers who have demonstrated the ability to
handle science fiction and fantasy with equal facility, so it may be no
surprise that Bujold's hand is not always steady on the tiller. Some of
the trouble in The Hallowed Hunt is structural--the
first third,
covering the trip to Easthome, often feels desultory and unfocused,
despite the inherent drama of Lady Ijada's predicament, and as events
unfold in Easthome, that predicament falls further into the background
as the real center of the plot becomes clear. But this lack would have
been less noticeable were Bujold's style more evocative and engrossing.

Bujold's stylistic weaknesses show most clearly in
dialogue and in names. Too often she lets her characters slip into
awkwardly mannered speech, like something out of a justly forgotten
Edwardian play: "Oh, but look at you--here, you
must sit down
... I still remember how you and that dreadfully priggish divine used
to argue theology over the meal trestles." Sometimes they speak
in the
stiff unlikely tones of the narrators of documentaries: "Angry,
foolish
men, an imprudent ride out to attempt reason at a time when tempers
were running too high ... I had only seen the lovely side of the marsh
country, and the kindness of its people. But they were only people
after all." (This is one character speaking to another, not
Bujold's
own narration.) Sometimes they sound uncomfortably like folks in our
own world: "I have to throw up now." And now and then
there's a
painfully Poughkeepsian clash in Bujold's narrative voice as well:
"...an enemy of great and secret power was going to be
seriously upset
when they both arrived at Easthome alive." Yeah, I'd hate to
see a
great and secret power when it's seriously upset.

But it's Bujold's character names that present the
most pervasive style problems in The Hallowed Hunt. Le Guin
doesn't discuss names in particular in "From Elfland to
Poughkeepsie,"
but for my money names are one of the most important elements in
establishing a fantasy tone. They are a window into the culture and the
language(s) of the fantasy world, which are otherwise often obscured by
the need to render the narrative itself in English. It's not enough to
devise merely pronounceable names, though that's usually a good idea.
What matters most is that the names reflect the culture(s) of the
imagined world, with internal consistency and interrelationships.

Bujold does a good job with place
names--towns like
Red Dike, Oxmeade, and Easthome are rooted in clear descriptive
origins. The clan names follow a similar pattern, drawn from the
natural world: Stagthorne, Wolfcliff, Badgerbank, Horseriver. But when
it comes to first names, Bujold abandons any apparent pattern. We have
Ijada, whose father was Chalionese and thus could bear an odd name with
reason, but we also have Ingrey who serves the Sealmaster Hetwar, the
divines Hallana and Lewko, Symark and Wencel and Gesca and Ulkra, and
the three princes Byza, Biast, and Boleso. No apparent rhyme or reason,
and it undermines the unified vision Bujold had built of the Weald
through the clan and place names.

The Hallowed Hunt has some promising
elements--the intriguing Temple religion, multi-layered
intrigue, and
some engaging supporting characters, such as the Viking-styled island
prince Jokol and his pet ice bear Fafa. It's competently executed, the
work of a practiced professional. It's not bad. But its stylistic
shortcomings illustrate Le Guin's point only too well. Without a
coherent vision of a unique Elfland, shaping prose and dialogue, names
and other details, The Hallowed Hunt never draws us all the way
in, never transports us out of awareness of the everyday, never removes
us from the comforts of home.

A glance at the first couple of pages of Sarah
Monette's first novel, Mlusine, might give the impression that
she's violating Le Guin's dicta in the most brazen fashion. Monette
spins her tale out of two alternating first-person narratives, and the
opening strand comes from Mildmay, known as "the Fox,"
a cat burglar in
the eponymous wizard-ruled city, with the manners and perspective of
the lower classes. His voice sounds something like that of a
stool-pigeon in a 1940s crime movie: "The annemer promised to
be the
hocus's servant and do what they said and no backchat, neither.... And
then there was a spell to stick it in place and make sure, you know,
that nobody tried to back out after it was too late."

It's hard to get much further from your traditional
fantasy tone. As I read these lines, an instinctive resistance rose up
in me--what the heck is she doing, mingling fantasy phrases like "Four
Great Septads ago" with slangy colloquialisms like "scared shitless"
and "way better connected"? I felt the way I had when I first
saw the
trailers for the Heath Ledger movie A Knight's Tale, in
which jousts take place to the music of Queen and Bachman-Turner
Overdrive. No way could this work.

But then on a lark I actually saw the whole film,
and I was shocked to find that it did indeed work. Somehow the tonal
miscegenation didn't come off as sloppy or lazy or ignorant or
pandering, as I had expected. In fact, the rock soundtrack and the
interplay of pseudo-antiquated and contemporary colloquial dialogue
actually formed something new, different, and genuine. The dissonant
elements helped to free the material from the self-conscious
weightiness (or simple drudging dullness) that often drags historical
dramas down (see--or better, just read about--Troy
and Kingdom
of Heaven), and in doing so brought out elements of the medieval
mood that rarely find a place on the screen--the boisterous
humor, the
carnival atmosphere of a tourney, the skepticism of the peasantry
behind the backs of their betters. The movie didn't work despite the
injection of "inappropriate" elements; it worked
because of them.

Much the same can be said for Mlusine.
Mildmay's voice has an inner coherence and natural rhythm that make it
quickly infectious and convincing. The contrast with the voice of the
other narrator, Felix Harrowgate, only adds to its effectiveness. Felix
is a court wizard, hobnobbing with the city's upper crust, until his
old master and mentor Malkar Gennadion uses him for a spell to sabotage
the city's font of magical protection, the Virtu. The sorcery leaves
Felix stripped of his position, imprisoned, and plagued by a creeping
madness that eventually sees him committed to the horrific Hospice of
St. Crellifer, a place as wretched as any madhouse Victorian England
had to offer. Felix speaks in a self-consciously more formal style,
free of Mildmay's slang. "I had been about to say 'okay,'" he realizes
at one point, "that ubiquitous piece of Lower City idiom that
Malkar
had beaten out of me before I was fifteen."

These two complementary voices provide an excellent
foundation of color and detail for Monette's imagined world. Mildmay's
narrative in particular, coming as it does from outside the circles of
power on which most fantasy novels focus, lends a dimension of
immediacy and tactility with its street-level observations and imagery.
"The Winter Fever--it always shows up in Mlusine along
with the rains
... and it was working its way through the Lower City with a butcher's
knife and a nasty snigger," Mildmay tells us. And later, "...you could
put the Yehergod militia in a string shopping bag and still have room
for two heads of cabbage and a parsnip."

Monette uses every device at her disposal to scatter
this sort of color and detail through her pages. The city of Mlusine
comes vividly to life through an alchemy of names, built of French,
English, Latin, and Monette's own invention. The months of Pluvise,
Vendmiaire, Messidor, Prairial; the neighborhoods of Pharaohlight,
Spicewell, Engmond's Tor; Rue Celadon, the Road of Ivory, the Plaza
del'Archimago, Persimmony Street. A cemetery called the Boneprince. The
ancient tunnels beneath the city, called the Arcane from their full
name, Les Catacombes des Arcanes. The names conjure images, moods, even
sounds and smells. And this profligate cityscape is populated by
characters--some met, some merely mentioned--with names
equally
evocative: Porphyria Levant, Estella Velvet, Brother Orphelin, Cerberus
Cresset, Mavortian von Heber. It's a pleasure just to roll them around
in the mind, or even speak them aloud, to savor their cadences and the
personalities they suggest.

Atop all this, Monette tosses us tantalizing bits of
historical and cultural detail, blended so seamlessly into the
narrative that we can only wish we knew more about the world they hint
at. "The hotel they chose was called the Chimera Among the
Roses," says
Felix, "a defiantly royalist sentiment that had probably gotten
someone
nearly hanged 150 years ago." It's a tease--we learn no
more about
Mlusine's past history of royalist strife. Mildmay overhears his two
companions speaking in a language they don't know he understands, and
he concludes, "they were half-brothers or stepbrothers or
something.
Norvenan don't distinguish so as you can tell." With a
seemingly
inexhaustible supply of such tidbits to chew on, Mlusine bids for a
place alongside such classic fantasy cities as Gormenghast, Lankhmar,
and Viriconium.

Mlusine is far from perfect. Sometimes
Monette's ear for names fails her--the "Kekropian
Empire," for instance,
clangs like a trashcan lid amidst the rest of the nomenclature, and
"St. Grandin Swamp" doesn't have the ring of the other
regions in and
around the city. Mildmay's sardonic asides (and his continuing
invocation of the god/saint Kethe) become tiresome after a while, as
does Felix's self-pity. But one of the benefits of such a convincing
and engaging world is that complaints of this sort come to seem
footnotes, unimportant in the larger scheme. We'll forgive a lot for a
real trip to Elfland.

Monette leaves a dozen subplots hanging and as many
major questions unanswered--fodder for future volumes, I'm
sure--but
there's enough closure to the main plotline (Felix's madness and the
mystery that binds him and Mildmay) to provide a satisfactory finish. Mlusine
is that most rara of aves, the first volume of a
fantasy saga that genuinely left me wanting more.

I missed Firethorn, Sarah Micklem's
remarkably accomplished debut novel, when it came out in hardcover in
2004. Its appearance in trade paperback gave me another chance to try
it, and I'm very glad I did. Firethorn is raw, relentless, and
emotionally searing in a way that's very unusual in fantasy, and it
features one of the most meticulously imagined traditional fantasy
settings I've encountered in years. It's another object lesson in the
importance of style to the successful writing of fantasy fiction.

The girl called Luck (for her red hair) came to her
village a foundling, but true to her name, she had the good fortune to
be chosen as handmaid to the old Dame of the manor, who treated her
kindly and taught her like a mother. But her mistress's death brings
the Dame's nephew Sire Pava and his wife to rule instead, and the
change upends Luck's world. Harsh treatment by Pava's steward and abuse
by his ill-tempered bride chafe badly enough, but when Pava takes an
interest in her--and, undeterred by her resistance, rapes
her--Luck flees
to the wilderness of the Kingswood, where she lives "like a
beast ...
without fire or iron or the taste of meat," surviving as best
she can
on what she can gather. At one point, desperate and despairing, she
eats the berries of the firethorn tree, knowing them for poison but
beyond caring. She suffers a feverish collapse, but lives, and
believing she's been spared by the gods, she takes the name of the tree
as her own: Firethorn.

She returns to the village after a year in the
forest, but her time in exile hasn't softened her resistance to the
life the village offers. "The world had its order and I my
place in it,
but I could not whittle myself small enough to fit." So when
she
catches the eye of the high-placed Sire Galan, passing through to
gather Pava and his men for the King's war on the kingdom of Incus
across the sea, she agrees to accompany him as his "sheath"--a role
that
at best amounts to that of concubine, and at worst to whoredom, as many
warriors share their sheaths around with their men. Galan, however,
seems to have a more genuine interest in her--indeed, his
determination
to keep her sparks conflict between him and his lord, the First of his
clan of Crux, who considers Galan's infatuation a foolish distraction,
and also with his own men, most of all his "armiger" or
second, Sire
Rodela, whose resentment simmers and boils over as the army camps in
the Marchfield, waiting for the proper time and omens to sail.

Micklem studiously avoids any hint of contemporary
flavor in Firethorn's voice (she narrates in first person), without
falling back on stiff mannerism or archaism. Vibrant and earthy,
passionate and sometimes poetic, Firethorn's voice is steeped in the
worldview of her culture, and her narrative teems with vivid images.
"The clans had come to these barren hills and planted a forest
of tents
leafed with gaudy canvas and leather and blooming with banners. The men
were pent up so close in this false forest that they crawled upon each
other like wasps." Firethorn's rustic knowledge of foraging and
herb
lore adds convincing depth and texture: "There was better food
all
around us in the woods and beside the road," she notes on the
ride
toward the Marchfield. "I found some tiny wild pears and put
them in a
sack I made by tying knots in Na's old dress. There were walnuts, too
... and mouse ears for greens, gone to seed but good enough for stewing
with a bit of bacon." This is a world in which people cook and
eat and
clean, and go hungry and walk barefoot and sew their own clothes.

It's also a world in which social class and gender
entirely determine each person's lot in life. The nobility, Sire Pava
and Sire Galan and the First of Crux, are the Blood, descended from the
gods and born to power. Everyone else is "mudfolk,"
made of the same
stuff but without that ennobling admixture of divinity. Of course, a
variety of factors complicate matters: Some families are higher than
others; some lead and others follow; the servant of a cataphract
commands more authority than that of an armiger. But by far the most
significant determinant of status outside of the mud-Blood divide is
gender. At every level, men outrank women. And Firethorn belongs to the
lowest category of all: unmarried mudborn female.

Firethorn is the story of its narrator's
struggle to negotiate her rigidly stratified world without
relinquishing her identity or her dignity. At times, it's reminiscent
of a slave narrative, so intensely and unflinchingly does Micklem
depict the plight of a person convinced of her own worth and rights
trapped in a society that accords her little or none. Brought before
the First after Sire Rodela, in his bitter fury, has attacked her and
cut a bloody strip from her pubic patch, Firethorn wonders, "If
Sire
Rodela had treated a horse as he'd treated me, would they have brought
it to the tent for show? Perhaps they meant to parade me up and down so
they could calculate my worth against the damage done and set the fine
Sire Rodela must pay. I guessed they'd rate me far below a warhorse and
maybe somewhat above a palfrey."

Yet Micklem never lets her sharp critique wander
into diatribe--as in the slave narratives that it recalls, the
ambiguity
and complexity of the human drama serve to underline the cruelty and
injustice on display. Some masters (such as Firethorn's original Dame)
are kinder than others. The powerless find a good deal of pleasure and
delight despite their hard lives. At times they even collude in their
own degradation. And the forces of inculturation weigh heavily on
everyone, master and servant alike, making it difficult even for the
most compassionate to question the ways of the world. Galan genuinely
appears to love Firethorn. "I thought a tumble or two would
suffice,"
he confesses, perplexed by his own feelings. "But the more I
had, the
more I wanted.... I asked myself why I should be so content to lie
beside you while you slept.... what appetite grows the more it is fed,
and finds no surfeit?" But his love--his very capacity
for it--is
circumscribed by the habits and expectations he's absorbed since birth.
He struggles to understand Firethorn and her rebelliousness; the
stubborn self-respect that attracts him leaves him often baffled as
well. At one point he whips her along with the rest of his servants for
their disobedience--but, when she's put to a trial by ordeal in
order to
test the truthfulness of her accusations against Rodela, Galan
impulsively joins her in the war dog pen, and shares her peril as a
true lover would, though it further strains his relations with the
First of his clan.

Firethorn is a powerful meditation on the
evils bred in a society so firmly defined by distinctions of class and
gender--a society like most of those in human history, and
indeed
unfortunately still resonant with the one we live in today. But it
could not have achieved such power without the foundation laid by
Micklem's mastery of style: the voice of her narrator, the thousand
minute details of her world, the richly conceived mythology of the
clans, the discipline of her prose, which all together produce an
entirely credible, fully engrossing otherworld. It seems strange to
call it an Elfland, since the world of Firethorn features so
little of magic, and nothing at all like an elf. But an Elfland, in Le
Guin's terms, it surely is--an invented place with all the
coherence and
consistency of the reality we know. Firethorn proves that
fantasy, done right, can address the most vital issues as effectively
as any other form of literature. Even better, perhaps, for as Le Guin
tells us, "when fantasy is the real thing, nothing, after all,
is
realer."

[Back to
Table of Contents]




The True History of the Picky Princess
by John Morressy

Copyright 2006 by John Morressy. All rights
reserved.

According to the lessons of the Trojan War, we
should be wary of Greeks bearing gifts. A recent birthday card cleverly
updated that warning to tell your editor to beware of geeks bearing
gifts. But nobody ever said anything about fairies...

* * * *

A handsome king and his beautiful queen had one
child, a daughter, whom they resolved to cherish and protect and
indulge as their greatest treasure.

Following ancient custom, they invited the good
fairies of the kingdom to her christening. They did this not merely to
safeguard themselves and the child against a breach of etiquette and
the unpleasant consequences thereof, but also in the confidence that
good fairies could be counted upon to bestow desirable gifts.

Theirs was a small kingdom. Only three fairies
resided within its boundaries. They were sisters, very talented, and
reputed to be generous toward newborn children, especially those of the
better sort.

The fairies arrived separately and greeted one
another cordially, but with no display of sisterly warmth. There was,
in fact, a definite coolness in their relations, for they were highly
competitive, and each believed that her area of specialization was
insufficiently respected by her sisters. All three were touchy about
what they considered the petty jealousy of the other two.

Delighted by the presence of the three sisters, the
king and queen were oblivious to the frosty atmosphere. Had they been
more observant, they might have had second thoughts about the
invitation. But kings and queens have a way of seeing what they wish to
see, rather than what is occurring before their eyes. Their attention
was focused on gifts, not the givers.

Custom, and in some places, law, dictates that all
good fairies be beautiful, dress in splendid gowns of moonbeams and
gossamer, and have mellifluous and endearing names. The sisters
observed the first two precepts to the letter: they were stunning
beauties, impeccably groomed and magnificently attired. But they had no
fondness for the kind of names popular among the fairies. "Titania" and
"Gloriana" were tolerable, but only just; "Tinker Bell" they considered
insufferably winsome, and "Puck" downright silly. They
had chosen names
they judged more suited to their station.

When the welcoming ceremonies were complete, and
they were standing over the crib of little princess Infatuata, the
oldest sister, Splendora, said, "I shall bestow on this child
the gift
of a lifetime of breathtaking loveliness. To the end of her days, no
woman will ever surpass her in beauty." She turned to her
sisters and
with a benign smile said, "And what comparable gifts do you
propose for
this dear child?"

Scintillata, the second sister, gave her a cool
glance. "Beauty is a pleasant acquisition, Splendora dear, but
one must
be constantly aware of it if she is fully to savor it. Therefore, to
make up for your oversight I will give the little darling the gift of
unshakable self-esteem."

The two then turned to the youngest sister,
Exquisitina, and favored her with smug looks. "Your gift, dear
sister?"
said Splendora, and "Think carefully," said Scintillata.

"Unlike some people I know, it is my custom always
to do so," said Exquisitina. "It is advisable for a
princess to be
beautiful, and sensible for her to be aware of her beauty, but it would
be foolish indeed to waste a lifetime of beauty on the
undiscriminating. I therefore give the child the gift of pickiness. She
will never be satisfied with anything but the absolute best, especially
in her choice of a consort."

The king and queen were delighted. They felt that
they could not have asked for more. They lavished gifts upon the three
good fairies, who accepted them graciously and departed on their
separate ways.

Within six months, for reasons that were never made
completely clear, the sisters had a terrible falling out. Words were
spoken that made reconciliation impossible. They moved to lands far
distant from one another, and were heard of no more.

The king and queen did not care. In truth, they were
relieved. The fairies had done all that was expected of them, and had
they remained in the kingdom and seen their gifts come to fruition in
the Princess Infatuata, there was no telling what airs they might have
assumed.

For Princess Infatuata grew up to be an
extraordinarily beautiful young lady. She exhibited excellent taste in
every choice she made, and her parents, being a king and queen with a
royal treasury at their disposal, were able and willing to indulge her
most exacting demands. She was so lovely that the people did not
grumble at the frequent levies placed upon them in order to fulfill her
whims. They took pride in knowing that their little kingdom was home to
the loveliest princess in the world.

Infatuata, her parents, and their kingdom got along
very happily through the years of her childhood and adolescence. As
long as the little princess appeared in public now and then and the
people had a good look at her, they were content. All things
considered, the kingdom was a happy place.

When Infatuata reached the age of sixteen, the king
and queen decided that it was time to begin planning her marriage. It
went without saying that Princess Infatuata would settle for no
ordinary husband. Only the finest, boldest, bravest, handsomest of men
could aspire to her hand, and he must be nobly born, wealthy beyond
imagining, and renowned for his great deeds and splendid character
before he could be considered a worthy suitor. He must also be besotted
with love for the princess; but that, everyone knew, would follow
inevitably from a single glimpse of her.

The king and queen sat down with their wisest
councilors to draw up a list of eligible princes. Applying the most
stringent criteria, and always subject to Infatuata's veto, they came
up with forty-three finalists. Messengers were then sent forth to
deliver the invitations to a solemn ceremony at which the princess
would be presented and the competition for her hand would be declared
officially open.

After the usual delays and complications due to
weather, traveling conditions, difficulties of communication, wars, and
mistaken addresses, the eligible princes at last assembled in the
palace on Princess Infatuata's seventeenth birthday. In the courtyard,
steeds pranced and golden armor glittered. Within the great hall,
resonant voices crossed and recrossed in brilliant, witty conversation.
Eyes sparkled and teeth gleamed in the light of nine thousand candles
and three thousand and eleven torches. The magnificence and splendor of
the scene were unparalleled.

"We have brought together the best and the
brightest, the boldest and noblest, the truest and the bravest, and
also the handsomest, richest, and most powerful young men in the
world," said the king, looking down on the assembled princes
with
Infatuata at his side. "What think you of them, my precious
jewel?"

"Passable, Daddy," she said. "Just
barely passable."

"I agree, dear, but this is the pick of the lot. I
don't believe we'll find any better," said the queen.

The princess sighed. "I suppose not."

"And you do have to get married."

Sighing more deeply, Infatuata said, "I
suppose so."

"I have thought long and deeply about the selection
process," said the king. "We must set your suitors a
task to perform as
proof of their devotion. A bold feat to accomplish, a quest to go on,
something like that."

"The usual thing is to make them go out and slay
horrible monsters!" said the princess, clapping her hands in
delight. "Let's do that."

"The only horrible monsters I know of are those
dragons up in the mountains, and not one of these lads is a match for
the smallest of them."

"Then they're certainly not good enough for me."

"No one is, my priceless treasure," said the
queen,
hugging her daughter. "But we must be practical. You've got to
marry
someone, and if the best available all get themselves eaten, there
won't be anyone worthwhile left."

"A sensible observation," said the king.
They all
pondered for a time, and then he asked, "How about making them
solve
three riddles?"

Infatuata looked at him in alarm. "I don't
want a
husband who's too clever."

"That's no problem. Eliminate the ones who solve the
riddles, and pick from among the others."

"I don't want to marry a dolt, either."

"She has a point there," said the queen. "Riddles
won't do."

Once again they were all silent for a time. The
princess sighed once again and said, "I suppose I absolutely
must
marry."

"Yes, my dear. Otherwise our line will die out. And
I don't believe you'll ever have a better selection."

Infatuata stamped her perfectly shaped, dainty
little foot and said, "Then I'll set them a task. But it won't
be an
easy one."

"Why should it be, my pet? You are the most
desirable princess in the world, and a man ought to be willing to face
horrifying dangers and excruciating hardships to win your
favor," said
her father, patting her cheek.

"I'll make them get me things. I'll require that
they bring me back Medusa's comb, a cloak made of phoenix feathers,
slippers of chimera's hide, and a drinking vessel made from the horn of
a unicorn."

"Good. That's all useful stuff. But don't make it so
easy."

They thought for a time, then Princess Infatuata
burst into a merry laugh. "And they must swear to accomplish
all this
in twenty-four hours, or never to look at another woman in all their
lives!"

"Oh, very good! What a wise little daughter you are,
my paragon!" said the queen. "Do you think it might be
a good idea to
demand that those who fail forfeit all their worldly goods to you, as
well?"

"Of course. In fact, I'll just require that the
failures go off and hang themselves."

"An excellent idea, my sweet child, but
impractical," said the king. "It might create hard
feelings on the part
of our neighbors. Let us do as your mother suggests."

With a careless gesture, Infatuata said, "Whatever
you like, Daddy. I really don't care."

He took her arm, chuckling all the while, immensely
pleased with his daughter's good sense. "Come, let us descend
and
announce our conditions."

As they passed through the crowd of handsome
eligible young princes, a murmur of appreciation followed their
progress. Whispered superlatives and sighs of longing were heard on all
sides. Gorgeously gowned and heartbreakingly beautiful, Princess
Infatuata strode through the crowd with her head high, eyes fixed
straight before her, favoring no prince with so much as a glance.

The king ascended to his throne and raised his hand
for silence. The princes gathered around, elbowing one another like
commoners to obtain an unobstructed view. Following the king's brief
welcoming speech, his herald read off the conditions for seeking the
princess's hand. A profound silence followed, and lasted for an
uncomfortably long time.

It was broken by the Prince of the Windswept Isles,
who stepped forward and said, "I assume that these conditions
are
negotiable."

"Certainly not," said the king.

"You'll have to extend the time limit. I'll need at
least a year to get those things," said the Prince of the Dark
Valley.

"More like five," an unidentified prince
shouted
from the crowd. Others called out in support.

"Out of the question," said the king. "For anyone
who truly loves my daughter, one day is too long to be away from the
radiance of her presence."

The Prince of the Pebbly Shore said, "That
part
about forfeiting all our possessions has to go, Your Majesty. The
princess is a lovely lady, no question about that, but I have
obligations at home. I'm willing to risk a certain sum, not everything
I own."

"Your objections attest to the shallowness of your
affections," said the king, rising. "All who have
spoken have revealed
themselves unworthy of my daughter's hand. They may depart. The rest
may remain and await further details."

An angry murmur arose from the assembly. A few of
the princes laughed in unpleasant or scornful ways and started for the
door. Others followed, though not without parting sighs and longing
looks backward at the princess. The king and queen sensed that the mood
was getting ugly, and slipped away with the princess, who seemed
totally unconcerned.

Amid the resulting clamor and angry cries, the
Prince of the Seven Sapphire Lakes climbed on a chair and announced,
"My fellow princes, I have two sisters of marriageable age. I
admit
that their beauty does not equal that of the Princess Infatuata, but
the same is true of every woman on Earth. That said, I give you my word
that they are extremely comely, clever, and more than usually
sweet-tempered, and the man who seeks their hand need not involve
himself in a lot of crazy stunts, or ruin his life if he fails in his
quest. What say you?"

His words were received with loud cries of
approbation. A second prince made a similar announcement regarding his
own sister, and a third spoke of his cousin, a princess in a
neighboring kingdom who was stunning to behold, an excellent lutenist,
a delight to converse with, and well schooled in the law, as well as
having amiable and generous parents who could be counted on to treat a
son-in-law with proper courtesy.

Caught up in a wave of enthusiasm, the princes were
able to resist the undeniable attraction of Princess Infatuata, and the
hall quickly emptied.

The king and queen were shocked at this display of
callous selfishness on the part of young men of reputed good birth and
upbringing. The princess merely smiled her dazzling smile and said,
"Good riddance to them."

Word of the incident spread, and two years passed
before another suitor visited the castle. The princess did not deign
even to receive him. Broken-hearted, he climbed the highest tower of
the royal palace and flung himself down, cracking the paving stones of
the princess's favorite walk.

His inconsiderate behavior only made the situation
worse. Two more years passed without a single prince appearing or a
single inquiry about Princess Infatuata. Her parents grew concerned.
Though they adored their daughter, they did not delude themselves about
her ability to govern a kingdom alone. Her beauty was incomparable, but
her statecraft was decidedly deficient.

"My dearest child, you are now twenty-one,"
her
mother said to Infatuata on her birthday. "It's time that you
found a
heroic warrior with good administrative skills and settled down."

"Such men as you describe are invariably plain and
dull and much the worse for wear," said the princess. "I will accept
only a man of surpassing good looks who is prepared to devote his life
to my happiness."

"Such a man might make a satisfactory husband, but
he would make a very poor king. In fact, as I reflect on it, he would
not be much of a husband, either. He would be constantly underfoot."

"It's no use, Mother. I was born to enjoy the very
best of everything, and I intend to fulfill my destiny," said
the
Princess.

The king and queen were desperate. They no longer
had any influence over the princess. Though her beauty would remain
undiminished, Infatuata was getting on in years with no prospect of
finding a suitable husband. Expert help was needed.

For some time, the suspicion had been growing in the
minds of the king and queen that calling in the good fairies had been a
mistake. But what magic had brought about, they told themselves, magic
might correct.

The departure of the three good fairies had left a
vacancy in the kingdom. It had been filled, in a fashion, only after
nine years, when a good fairy retired to a cottage in the forest not
far from the castle. Her arrival caused little stir, and practically no
interest in her professional services. After nine years, the people had
become accustomed to getting along without the assistance of good
fairies, and seldom gave them a thought.

This was just what the good fairy had hoped for when
she chose the kingdom. But she soon grew bored. Being a practical soul,
she decided to pursue a new interest. She opened a bakery, which proved
to be an instant success. As a neighborly gesture, she learned the
birthday of every child in the kingdom, and to each child, on the
appropriate date, she gave a special cookie. The ingredients were
secret, but the results were spectacular: the child was healthy, happy,
and well-behaved right up to his or her next birthday.

By the time the king and queen sought her aid, the
fairy had become known as "Aunt Betty, The Cookie
Lady," and her bakery
was famous throughout the land. So esteemed was her pastry that almost
everyone in the kingdom had forgotten that she was actually a good
fairy. She was a great baker, and that was enough for them.

Betty Ann was as beautiful and ageless as all good
fairies, but her taste was for subdued colors and subtle effects. Her
apparel did not twinkle, nor did it sparkle. It did not even glimmer.
It was attractive, but understated. Much of the time she wore an apron,
and in place of the obligatory wand she employed a slender breadstick.

The king and queen had been aware of her presence in
their kingdom, but it took a long time for them to reach the necessary
stage of desperation to invite her to the palace. They did so in the
most polite and flattering terms.

She turned down the invitation with equal politeness
and flattery, explaining that she had given up good fairying long ago
and wished only to concentrate on her baking. Along with her reply she
sent a dozen of her most delicious cupcakes. The queen, close to
despair, visited her cottage to appeal to her in person.

"Just this once," she said. "A quick
visit. It would
make my daughter so happy." She could not force herself to
reveal the
true problem.

"I might be a disappointment, Your Majesty,"
said
the good fairy. "I can do wonders with cookies, but
magic...." She made
a wavering gesture with her hand, and shook her head slowly. "I've
fallen out of practice."

"Just come to the palace. We ask no more,"
said the
queen.

The good fairy wanted to be a good neighbor. She was
also a savvy businesswoman, and was curious to see the picky princess
of whom she had heard so much, and so she agreed to come to the palace
the very next day.

When the king and queen presented her to Princess
Infatuata, the princess was not impressed. In fact, she was downright
rude. "I do not wish to meet this person. The company of anyone
who
calls herself 'Aunt Betty, The Cookie Lady' is certain
to be tedious,"
she said.

The queen hurried to her side and whispered, "My
precious, she is a good fairy."

"I find that difficult to believe. A good fairy
would never choose such an unsuitable name. And just look at her
outfit."

"I consider Betty Ann a very satisfactory
name,"
said the fairy.

"Then you should be ashamed of yourself. And your
appearance! You're wearing an apron in the royal presence."

"It is my custom to wear an apron."

"A good fairy should twinkle and gleam like
starlight and moonbeams."

"I have never twinkled and gleamed, and I don't
intend to. Go around twinkling and you never have a minute's privacy."

Curiosity overcame the princess's petulance. "Why
would anyone want privacy? The whole purpose of life is to be
surrounded by admirers."

The fairy was getting fed up with this treatment.
With an exaggerated searching look around the chamber in which the four
of them were seated, she said, "It is? And where are they?"

Before Infatuata could think of a crushing response,
the queen said, "That's exactly the problem," and went
on to give their
visitor a brief and surprisingly truthful account of the situation.

Of course, the good fairy had taken care to learn
the facts beforehand. She knew them within minutes of the queen's
departure from her cottage bearing renewed hope and another dozen
cupcakes. With a wise and comforting smile, she said, "What you
need is
a cookie, my dear princess. I've baked one especially for you,"
and
drew from her reticule a packet wrapped in pink paper and tied with an
elaborate bow. She opened it to reveal a vanilla raisin cookie
sprinkled with sugar.

"Ugh," said Infatuata.

"Ugh? Did you say 'Ugh,' my dear
child?"

"I did."

"And what, precisely, was the meaning of this 'Ugh'?"

"You offered me a plain and common cookie. The
commonplace has no part in my life. I am accustomed only to the best.
My usual sweet is Charlotte Malakoff aux Framboises. The berries are
picked under my father's direct supervision by the most attractive
members of the court."

"Very discerning of you, my dear princess. But this
is no common cookie. It is the solution to all your problems."

"Problems are for ordinary people. I do not have
problems, I create them," said Princess Infatuata.

"How fortunate for you. But in view of your
exquisite taste, I find your reaction surprising. This is an
exceptional cookie, a wondrous cookie, a unique cookie. It is, in fact,
the perfect cookie."

"It is?" said Infatuata, her interest piqued.

"Could I offer the Princess Infatuata anything less?"

The princess could not dispute the point. "Of course
not. Perhaps I will take just a nibble," she said.

She took the cookie in a delicate hand. She broke
off a tiny bit and placed it daintily on her tongue. After the first
tentative bite, she gave a little cry of delight and gobbled down the
entire cookie. "That was delicious!" she cried. "In fact, were it not
for my duty to retain my perfect figure, I might be tempted
to...."
Here she paused for a great yawn. "How strange," she
murmured. "My
beauty sleep is not due for another twenty-six minutes, yet I feel an
overwhelming drowsiness. You will excuse me."

The princess swept from the room in her customary
manner. The queen turned to the good fairy and said, "What can
be done
for her?"

"It's been done."

"Already?" said the king, looking impressed.
He was
not accustomed to such efficiency.

"That was a magic cookie. Your daughter will sleep
until those ridiculous gifts wear off."

"Wonderful! Oh, thank you, thank you," said
the
queen, tearful with joy. To her husband, she said, "We'd better
start
drawing up a list of princes right away."

"There's no rush," said the good fairy. "She'll be
asleep for at least a hundred years."

"A hundred years!?" cried the king.

"Give or take a decade. She was overloaded with
fairy gifts. Too many for the poor child to handle. I can't understand
how responsible fairies could place such a strain on a baby, but that
lot you had to the christening ... those three couldn't even choose
sensible names for themselves. I hope they've found another line of
work."

"Our beautiful Infatuata ... sleeping for a hundred
years ... whatever shall we do?" sobbed the queen.

"Keep her comfortable, and dust her off every week
or so. The magic will take care of everything else," said the
good
fairy, and with a wave of her breadstick, she vanished.

This all took place many centuries ago, and nothing
further is known of Infatuata, her parents, or their kingdom from that
day on. As far as anyone knows, Aunt Betty, The Cookie Lady, did
nothing more in the magic line. She ran a successful bakery business
for many years, and expanded into all the neighboring kingdoms. It
exists to this day as a tiny part of a major international petroleum,
pharmaceutical, telecommunication, and cookie conglomerate.

It is safe to assume that the princess awoke one
morning as lovely as ever and very well rested, and once she had been
brought up to date, married a suitable prince and settled down
cheerfully to a comfortable life in a palace with all modern
conveniences. She may even have lived happily ever after. People
sometimes do.

[Back to
Table of Contents]




The Revivalist by Albert E. Cowdrey

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Big Easy, our
favorite chronicler of weird New Orleans was safely ensconced in a
rented home in Mississippi. The ensuing weeks without regular access to
mail or to telephone service gave him a lot of time to work, so we can
promise you that we'll have more of Mr. Cowdrey's magic in the months
ahead. Of this story, however, it must be noted that it was finished
well before Katrinia was even a tropical storm and its setting is north
of New Orelans. (Not that we think either of these points detract from
it--we just want to set the record straight.)

* * * *

I remember the ambulance careening toward the
hospital, siren howling and braying by turns ... enormous young men
flashing lights into my eyes, running needles into my flaccid veins ...
the controlled chaos of the emergency room.

I remember a resident in green scrubs demanding,
"Where'd you dig him up?" One of the EMTs mumbled a
reply, and the
doctor shouted, "In a graveyard??"

I remember the beeping machines, the needles, the
IVs. A slick tube sliding down my throat, the warm feel of liquid
nourishment beginning to fill my shrunken stomach.

I remember being born to a second life.

After resting for a while in the ICU, I wound up in
a rather comfortable locked ward, wearing blue pajamas that lacked a
drawstring--I suppose to discourage suicide.

Other men similarly attired filled the ward; some
were masturbating, some playing chess, some conversing with invisible
comrades, some watching a futuristic marvel often predicted in
newsreels of the Thirties and Forties: television! and in technicolor!

By this time I was thinking coherently and able to
say to myself: this is where I am; but when am I?

A fat man working an Evening Sun crossword
puzzle kindly loaned me a section of his newspaper, and as I stared at
the date--September 30, 1999--I felt the ward begin to
whirl around my
head, and had to sit down quickly.

Just then an orderly appeared, pushing a cart filled
with little paper cups that he handed out, one to each patient.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Something to make you sleep."

I fell into such a fit of laughter that they had to
put me into restraints. Another needle pricked my arm and I passed out,
shouting, "Call me Rip! Call me Rip!"

Of course I meant Van Winkle.

* * * *

My strange sleep habits first appeared an hundred
years ago, when I was young.

Oh, once awakened I was sprightly enough, exploding
with all the random energies of boyhood. But when I slept, my breathing
became so slow as to make Mama fear that it might cease for good. And
come the dawn, I clung to unconsciousness like a remora to its favorite
shark. Even when consciousness returned, I spent anything from a few
minutes to half an hour in a most unpleasant state--hearing
everything
that went on around me (including Dad, shouting, "Up! You lazy
devil,
up!") yet unable to move even an eyelid.

Nowadays scientists call this sleep paralysis. Dad
had more vigorous names for it. He was a thick-bodied red-faced man,
known to the servants (who were constantly being hired and fired) as
Mr. Bang. He seemed to pole-vault out of bed, wide awake from the
termination of his last snore, ready to swallow breakfast at a gulp and
rush off to his brewery to catch any tardy employees and fire them on
the spot.

Before departing he would shake me into a
zombie-like state, a kind of stupefaction. After spooning in breakfast
half-consciously, I'd set out for school, only to fall asleep on the
trolley car, miss my stop and arrive late to class. Inevitably, my
grades were poor. Whenever Dad wasn't blaming me for the problem, he
blamed Mama.

He recalled that her brothers were sluggards and
lie-abeds, and accused her of infecting his own vigorous stock with the
"germ of laziness." This despite the fact that Mama
herself was a hard
and submissive worker--as she had to be, under such a taskmaster.

Dad had some hope that the onset of puberty would
change me. But I seemed reluctant to mature. Long after my
friends'
voices had broken (and their faces had broken out) I retained a smooth,
childish visage and a distressingly high voice. The hint of effeminacy
was the last straw, as far as Dad was concerned; in the fall of 1910 he
sent me as a boarding pupil to Lynwood Academy in rural Pennsylvania,
whose principal had the reputation of knowing what to do with
unsatisfactory boys.

The academy was a single stark brick building in a
neat Quaker quilt of cornfields, meadows, and paddocks filled with
drowsy horned cattle, whose peaceful lives I soon came to envy. I slept
in the dormitory ell, and at dawn, when my roommates had failed to
rouse me--when the bullies had dragged me to the floor and
poured cold
water on me in vain--Dr. Lynwood was sent for.

No writer but Poe could convey the awful fear I
felt, lying immobilized and hearing the principal's thundering
footsteps approach, accompanied by a soft whistling sound as he took
practice swings with a two-foot, brass-bound ruler. My pajamas did not
afford me the slightest protection from the sudden, explosive shocks of
pain on my thighs and buttocks as Dr. Lynwood, in his own inimitable
way, roused me from slumber.

During the Easter vacation my mother happened to see
me trouserless in the bathroom, and grew alarmed over the multicolored
bruises decorating my southern exposure. So she took me to our family
doctor--a man as inept as he was kindly, and as kindly as he was
inept--and explained my troubles at school.

"My young friend," said the doctor, beaming
upon me, "you are merely going through a phase. What can be more
natural
than
for a youth to sleep long and deeply? I've known other adolescents to
sleep for ten, twelve, or even fourteen hours at a stretch. Their
bodily energies are being poured into growth--"

He hesitated, viewing my puny form, and corrected
himself--"or else are attempting to make up for lost time."

At Mama's request he wrote a letter declaring that
my sleeping habits were healthy, natural, and in no way blameworthy. On
my return to the academy I presented Dr. Lynwood this note, along with
my mother's addendum forbidding him to beat me out of slumber ever
again.

And indeed he never did. Instead, he expelled me
from school.

* * * *

"You are a great disappointment to me," said
Dad on
a Friday evening in April 1911, when I returned home from Lynwood
Academy, carrying my battered suitcase.

He was drinking brandy, and the volatile almost
incandescent smell of that noble drink has ever afterward been a
reminder of humiliation and defeat. In his resonant baritone, he read
me Dr. Lynwood's letter, his normally red face going scarlet, crimson,
fuchsia, and magenta in turn:

* * * *

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you, Mr.
Fogarty, that your son Edward is utterly incapable of completing the
requirements of a certificate from Lynwood Academy.

I blame this sad outcome upon your lady wife
and her medical adviser. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I feel that
continuing my original course of severe chastisement might well have
altered the perverse disposition that causes Edward to take refuge from
Life and Duty in the dark womb of Nescience.

I would like to offer you some gleam of hope
for your son's future, but cannot in conscience do so. Even as a common
soldier--the lowliest of all human callings--he would be
shot for
sleeping on sentry-duty.

* * * *

"Well," Dad went on, after a moment of grim
silence, "I suppose it's obvious that you cannot possibly remain in
this
house,
for I refuse to support you in your vicious and depraved indolence. You
needn't go tonight--that would be excessively harsh--but
don't bother to
unpack, for as God is my witness, you will leave in the morning."

My voice had finally broken, but I still tended to
squeak under stress. "How am I supposed to live?" I
shrilled, causing
Dad to look upon me with even deeper disgust than before.

"That is your problem. You are seventeen years of
age, and have received as much of an education as you are fitted to
absorb. People have made their way in the world with less. Good-night."

Mama rustled up some dinner and brought it to my
bedroom, since Dad refused to look at me while he was eating. Sitting
beside me on the child's cot that had always been my bed, she pressed
into my hand a small roll of bills saved from her housekeeping
allowance. Both of us were weeping, yet even at this most poignant
moment of my young life I felt a profound urge to seek my usual refuge
in sleep.

Next morning I awoke stiff and cold. Every instinct
bade me remain unconscious, for I faced the life that lay ahead of
me--as an outcast and a wanderer--with terror and
revulsion. Yet face it
I must, for I knew that if I failed to go, Dad would boot me into the
street whether I was awake or asleep.

Slowly, painfully, I opened my eyes and began to
move limbs that felt as if they had rusted in place. Creaking to my
feet at last, I dashed cold water on my face, dressed, put a few extra
clothes into my suitcase and left the house quietly--longing
only (as
Dr. Lynwood had expressed it) to return to the dark womb of Nescience.

* * * *

I had lived all my life in Burgville, Maryland, a
small city or overgrown town on Chesapeake Bay that later disappeared
into the sprawl of its great neighbor, Baltimore.

I remember its red-brick rowhouses, a Siamese tribe
marching shoulder to shoulder, up hill and down dale; the coal-smoke
brooding over its snowy slate roofs during winter time; and the
breathless midsummer heat in its narrow stony streets, where clouds of
flies hovered over the horse-droppings.

To these scenes, the march of progress had added the
blue smoke and explosive farting of motor-cars. Charming gaslights had
given way to garish Edison bulbs, ambling horse-cars to electric
trolleys. That Saturday morning I waited on a misty sun-shot corner for
one of the latter, not knowing which line I should take--nor did
it seem
to matter, since I did not know where I was going.

When a car clanged up, I paid my nickel and found a
seat. The line ran into the bustling center of town, and I gazed
miserably at the hurrying people, all of whom had someplace to go and
something to do once they got there.

At one point the trolley stopped in front of a
building I remembered visiting years before with my grammar-school
class. It was called the Museum of Nature and Science, and a fat little
man with a huge bald head was engaged in posting a sign on the door. I
caught a brief glimpse of its message; then the trolley clanged on,
while the words slowly registered in my clouded mind.

Abruptly I snatched at the bell-cord, jumped off at
the next stop, and hurried back, suitcase banging at my legs. For the
sign had said Watchman Wanted, Nights and Holidays.

So began my first experience in earning a living.
The museum's director, Morris Holmes, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., closely
questioned me as to my reason for seeking work. On the spur of the
moment I told him that I was an orphan--which was exactly how I
felt--obliged to work while completing my education.

This story at once raised me above the seedy level
of the watchman profession. Dr. Holmes still had doubts about my age,
but I assured him that my eighteenth birthday was fast approaching.

"I should have thought you fourteen at
most," he
said. "I cannot possibly pay a mere child more than a dollar
and a half
for each day or night of work."

I told him that figure would admirably meet my
needs, and he agreed to try me out. I was to report for work that
evening at seven sharp; under the Blue Laws then in force, nothing but
churches and hospitals could remain open on Sunday, and so I would be
in charge until the new week began.

Delighted at having gained employment so quickly, I
ate a hearty fifteen-cent breakfast at a greasy spoon, and afterward
found a boarding house displaying a to let sign and rented a small,
stuffy bedroom for four dollars a week, the price to include dinner
each day.

I put my gear into my room, which smelt of mothballs
and varnish, then lunched on a huge sandwich and set out to examine my
new neighborhood. I was strolling randomly, feeling comfortable in gut
and mind, when all at once I began to taste something that was not
greenish aged beef, German mustard, or limp shredded lettuce.

Halting so suddenly that a lady walking behind ran
into me, I realized that I was tasting freedom: that I was really free
for the first time. I began to walk faster and faster, until people
turned to stare at me. I frisked, I ran, I fairly galloped uphill and
down. I rushed into Memorial Park, a weedy site with a bronze statue of
U. S. Grant on horseback, where I sprang upon a grove of juvenile plane
trees, swinging from branch to branch and giving vent to war-whoops.

When at last my energy was spent, I threw myself
down on the grass and panted, happy as a terrier after frenzied play.
Even today--ninety-three years later--I can still smell
the crushed green
grass stems, still feel the gentle play of sunlight and dancing
leaf-shadows upon my face.

Nobody will beat me! I thought over and
over. Never again!

In my lifetime, Dad accidentally did me three great
favors. He begot me; he threw me out of the house; and ... but I'll
come to his third favor in a moment.

* * * *

I returned to my room, laid my few clothes in a
musty dresser whose drawers were lined with wax paper, and at five
o'clock, when a brazen gong sounded, joined the landlady--a
stout,
fiercely corseted woman named Grunion--and her eight other
guests in the
gloomy dining room.

At first I merely stuffed my face, hardly noticing
my housemates save as a collection of suits and dresses resembling
clothing-store dummies. They were passing cracked serving dishes heaped
with potatoes and cabbage, and conversing (or at any rate talking) in
loud voices.

"Pickles, please." "The weather is
surprisingly warm
for this time of year." "Potatoes?" "Our army's efforts to civilize the
Filipinos seem to be bearing fruit at last." "President
Taft is quite
amazingly fat, is he not?" "Mustard, please."

"Excuse me."

A young lady seated across the table was addressing
me. Tightly wound plaits of reddish hair topped a small pointed face
vaguely reminiscent of a white mouse, minus the fur and whiskers.

"Yes?"

"I wonder if I might trouble you for the chow-chow."

I passed her a saucer of this loathsome relish, and
we introduced ourselves. Her name was Myra Means, and she taught
Deportment, Reading, Composition, Bicycling, Field Hockey, and Music
Appreciation at a local young ladies' seminary.

"That seems a great deal to teach," I
suggested.

She sighed like one already disappointed by life.
"Since my pupils are interested only in boys, scandal, and the
latest
fashions from Paris, it hardly seems to matter whether they learn their
lessons or not. And you, Mr. Fogarty: What is your profession?"

Since the working-my-way-through-school story had
succeeded once, I hauled it out again.

"Actually, I'm planning to enter college in the fall
term, so I spend all day reading up on subjects where I know I'm weak.
I work in the museum at night."

I saw at once that she was favorably impressed. "You
work both day and night!" she exclaimed. "Surely that
leaves you no
time for sleep?"

At this I choked on my food, and the gentleman
sitting next to me had to pound me on the back. Once my throat cleared,
I chatted with Myra through the rest of the meal, parting from her with
reluctance only when I was due at the museum.

Thus all unknowing did I meet for the first time the
Dominatrix of my life--she who would save it, enrich it, and in
time
almost end it. Only a Delphic Oracle could have foretold such an
outcome, and (oracles being what they are) would probably have foretold
it only in riddles.

* * * *

On the way to work I revisited the greasy spoon,
purchased another sandwich to tide me over Sunday, and presented myself
to Dr. Holmes on the dot of seven.

After locking up, I spent half an hour wandering
through my new domain, turning lights on and off as I went. In the
Great Hall of Life I viewed the skeleton of a Megatherium and a
dramatic group with a stuffed lion attacking a moth-eaten dromedary.
Other exhibits included pickled snakes in bottles, moths impaled on
pins, an array of dried turtle shells, and--Dr. Holmes's only
truly
unique exhibit--the very last Passenger Pigeon on Earth, with a
card
thanking the hunter who had shot it, for presenting the museum with
this interesting rarity.

The Great Hall of Progress included some elderly
steam engines, newer internal-combustion engines, pictures of the
Wright Brothers' aeroplane, a static-electricity device that
gave me a
wicked shock when I spun a wheel, and a primitive adding-machine called
a comptometer. The prize exhibit was a Maxim gun, with a tag explaining
how this wonderful invention enabled a few soldiers of the Civilized
World to introduce whole native tribes en masse to the benefits of
Christianity and Science.

All of this I found tremendously interesting and
exciting. Free from the tyrannies of home and school, I seemed to stand
upon the threshold both of a new life--and a new era. How
wonderful, I
thought, is Progress! Life marches on, from the Megatherium to the
aeroplane--from teeth and claws to Maxim guns. What new marvels
would I
live to see?

Wearied by my exciting day, I stretched out on a
bench in the Great Hall of Life, and--after a few confused
dreams of
great things to come--sank into the sweetest sleep I'd ever
known.

I was awakened by the sound of rattling wheels and
the horn of a motor-car in the street outside. Morning light fell upon
my closed eyelids; when at last I was able to open them, I saw sunlight
pouring in through a clerestory above the Great Hall.

At first I couldn't imagine where I was; I felt
stiff as a poker. Then sight of the stuffed lion brought memory
flooding back. Slowly life was restored to my limbs and I became able
to rise, even to run in place a few steps to get my blood pumping
again. Someplace a clock with Westminster chimes struck eight.

I found the Gentlemen's, washed my face and hands,
and retrieved my hero sandwich, which seemed unusually sodden and
unappetizing. But I ate it anyway, for my appetite was ravenous. I was
strolling through the museum, making a perfunctory inspection, when
loud knocking began at the front door. I opened it to find Dr. Holmes
outside.

"Ah, Edward," he said. "I seem to
have misplaced my
key. Glad to find you awake and alert. I trust everything went well
over Sunday?"

Without waiting for an answer he bustled past me in
the direction of his office. For the first time I took in the volume of
traffic, the clanging trolleys, the crush of horse-drawn vehicles, the
tooting motor-cars with their goggled drivers, the blue-helmeted
policeman at the corner raising his baton. A less Sabbath-like scene I
never saw.

A paperboy wearing a checked cap and knee-pants was
yelling the news of the day--the Kaiser was at it again,
threatening war
over something or other--and I paid three cents for a paper, for
no
reason but to view the date.

Yes, it was Monday.

I turned back into the museum in a daze. I assisted
Dr. Holmes to open, received $4.50 for two nights and a day of labor,
then bade him farewell until the evening.

Walking in the direction of my boarding house, I
brooded about my astonishing weekend sleep of some forty hours. Surely
this could not be normal! Was I really infected with the germ of
laziness, and without Dad or Dr. Lynwood to awaken me, would I sleep
longer and longer until I died?

Turning abruptly on my heel, I set off in a
different direction, headed for Burgville's brand-new Carnegie Free
Library--determined not to rest, until I found out the truth
about my
strange condition.

* * * *

Upon the portico of a limestone Acropolis, chiseled
letters announced Mr. Carnegie's intention of making knowledge
available "to All Persons, However Lowly and Useless They May
Be." That
was encouraging; the philanthropist seemed to be speaking directly to
me.

Inside, card catalogues gleaming with new varnish
stood against one wall. A translucent lady presiding at an elevated
desk left her eyrie long enough to show me how to use them, and for the
first time in my life I settled down for serious brainwork upon a topic
that deeply interested me.

A search under the heading Sleep revealed
one book on Sleeping Sickness. But it turned out to be about
tropical diseases. An information card advised See also Catalepsy;
Coma; Dementia Praecox; Hibernation; Trance. I filled out more call
slips, sent them down to the stacks--and what a strange
conglomeration
of books the clanking dumbwaiter returned!

How many forms sleep takes! How mysterious it is,
and how little understood, though we all spend at least a third of our
lives in it! In a kind of drunkenness, I sent for new books even before
I had plumbed the old, flipping pages and scanning for a glimpse of my
own condition--which I found at last in a small, quaint treatise
called Hibernative
States.

I must confess that precisely what it said has long
since grown dim in my mind. Not only because so much time has passed,
but because I subsequently read so many other books on the same subject.

Yet I must have learned some elementary things about
the lengthy naps taken by an improbable bestiary of fish, snakes,
frogs, dormice, and bears; about the suppression of their bodily
functions; about their radically slowed heart-rate and breathing; about
their ability to retain urine without suffering uremic poisoning; about
their plummeting body temperatures--in the case of one snoozing
rodent,
to twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit!--which, for reasons unknown,
did not
result in injury or death.

With growing excitement, I learned that some species
experience a similar state for a shorter time: for example, the
hummingbird sinks into a kind of trance at night, which is fortunate,
since its metabolism is so rapid that it would otherwise starve to
death before dawn!

So, I reflected, an animal may lie entranced for a
night, or a month, or a season. Some sleep much longer. Certain fish
and toads that live in desert regions hibernate for long years, until
the erratic rainfall returns and summons them back to life. Strange
stories, never entirely verified, suggested that some cold-blooded
creatures may have survived for centuries, after being walled up by
accident or mischance!

It was at this point in my reading--sitting
there in
the quiet of the Carnegie library, with the translucent lady hovering
at her desk--that I experienced sudden enlightenment. If I
hadn't been
struck dumb, I might have shouted, "Eureka!" or (a word just
then coming into use) "Bingo!!"

At last I knew the name of my condition. It was not
a disease, and still less a sin. It was a natural occurrence, like the
change of seasons or the phases of the moon. How it had come about, I
did not know; I could only accept the fact that I was the world's
first, and perhaps only, Hibernating Man.

* * * *

On my way to work that night, I paused at a hardware
store, where for one dollar I purchased a brass alarm clock that I was
assured would "wake the dead." In the museum, I set the
clock for six,
wound the springs tight, and lay down to sleep with my mind in a tumult
over all I had lately seen, discovered, and thought.

I played with pleasant fancies of drowsy chipmunks
and weary hamsters; of dormice wearing little nightshirts; of hedgehogs
curled in spiny slumber. Then I plunged--for the first time
diving,
rather than sinking--into the depths, until wakened by my
shrilling
alarm, with all the customary agonies which now I bore uncomplaining,
since I felt I understood their cause.

As usual, I repaired to the Gentlemen's to relieve
myself, wash my face, and slick down my hair. Yet this morning was
different. Gazing at the image of the fresh-faced youth in the clouded
mirror above the wash-basin, I began to have an extraordinary feeling
that I knew something I had not known last night. A bell was ringing
once again, only this time inside my head!

Why is my upper lip nude? I asked myself. Why am I
so small for my age, though both my parents are of normal size? Why do
I let adults bully me, when I am of an age that resists authority, with
its fists if necessary?

I thought also of intimate things that had caused me
untold shame--for example, the fact that my face was not the
only part
of me that had too long remained hairless, exposing me to cruel jests
in changing-rooms at gymnasiums and swimming-baths. I thought of dirty
jokes told by my schoolmates that passed completely over my head, and
of the busy (and to me incomprehensible) creaking of bunks after
lights-out at Lynwood Academy.

When my new idea came, it came full-formed. If all
my bodily processes slowed radically when I slept, might I be aging
less rapidly than other people? What if I was younger than my years,
not from some freak of retarded development, but simply because I had
not--physiologically speaking--lived as long as my
contemporaries? People
spoke of Time as if it were common to all; but what if each of us has
an internal clock whose pace is unique?

I thought of those walled-in frogs, snoozing away
the centuries, and I began to wonder whether--if only I slept
long
enough--I might outlive my generation by many years!

This thought so astounded me that I could barely
mumble a good-morning to Dr. Holmes when he arrived. After receiving
one large dollar bill and five dimes for my night's work, I
hastened--indeed, I ran--to the library and again plunged
into the card
catalogue. Now I was searching for the literature of prophecy.

It proved easy to find, for writers in those days
were vying with one another to describe the glories they thought would
fill the Twentieth Century. From the likes of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells,
and G. B. Shaw, I learned that the future promised the final and total
conquest of disease--the replacement of our corrupt and rotten
economic
system by a beneficent socialism--the Earth ruled by a
Parliament of
Mankind--and universal peace established, with freedom and
justice for
all!

Verne and Wells even predicted that men would one
day walk upon the Moon--and I, Edward Fogarty, if only I slept
long
enough, might live to see all these things accomplished!

Late that afternoon (I was still raptly reading) a
disturbance caused me to look up in annoyance. Miss Means had walked
in, leading a parade of ginghamed gigglers. The party spent a great
deal of time at the desk, being lectured to by the translucent lady on
the resources of the library--a subject that did not appear to
interest
the girls very much. I began to fear that Miss Means might leave
without noticing me, and rose to my feet and waved at her the instant
she turned in my direction.

This produced a great reaction in the girls, who
stopped giggling and stared at me as if I were unclothed. But Miss
Means was up to the situation; she frowned at first, as if I were a
"masher" who had accosted her on the street: then she
bestowed upon me
a benign but impersonal smile, like the one seen on statues of the
Blessed Virgin.

"Ah, Mr. Fogarty," she said, approaching and
extending her hand in a businesslike way. "I did not recognize
you at
first. Girls, this is Mr. Edward Fogarty, a distant cousin of mine who
is readying himself to enter college this fall. All of you might well
imitate his scholarship and determination to succeed."

I observed that as soon as I was transformed into a
relative and--worse yet--a moral model, the girls lost
all interest in
me, and the whole party soon left the library. That evening at supper,
Myra apologized for her white lie.

"You have no idea," she sighed, "how
foolish my
girls are, and what a tale they would have made of our
acquaintanceship, had I not said what I did."

"I thought you handled everything
beautifully," I
assured her.

"I am so glad you feel that way. I was afraid you
might think I had gone to the library expressly to see you, though
nothing was further from my thoughts."

I assured her that nothing was further from mine
than suspecting her of wanting to see me. By such small and harmless
lies are relationships cemented, and in time lives changed forever. For
now I felt assured that Miss Means found me interesting, which made me
all the more interested in her, and soon a fragile romance began to
unfold its first small leaves.

* * * *

In the beginning, it was utterly
innocent--considering my physical immaturity, it could hardly
have been
anything more.

On Saturday mornings we drank soda-water at a local
fountain--laughing when the bubbles tickled our
noses--ate ice cream from
a hand-cranked freezer, and listened to a brass band playing noisy
Offenbach and noisier Sousa in the park.

As our acquaintance ripened, we became what a later
generation would have called "an item." Neighbors
smiled to see us
together; I bought for one dollar a straw skimmer, and when I tipped it
to passing ladies, with my own lady on my arm, began to feel as if I
might one day become a man after all. And indeed--as summer
ripened into
a long golden fall, fall slumped into winter, and winter flowered into
spring--I found myself changing, and sensuality beginning to
intrude
upon our lives.

As if summoned forth by Myra's presence, a fine
stubble appeared on my upper lip, and I began shaving it carefully
every day in hopes of stimulating its growth. Silken body hair sprouted
like fresh grass on a barren landscape. A certain part of my anatomy
woke from long hibernation and began to display erratic but surprising
vigor.

At night, before sinking into the dark waters of
Nescience, I began having vivid dreams in which Myra and I did some
remarkable things. I was even more shy and formal with her after such
dreams, lest she suspect the basic foulness of my nature. And
yet--and
yet. A fire had come into our relationship. New-wakened lust mingled
with my dreams of the future to create a heady brew.

For I continued to refine my hopes of long life. If
I was to experience the wonders of the glorious Future, clearly I had
to find a way to sleep even longer than I was already doing. An image
danced before my mind of a human life unlike any other. Like the wise
bruin, I would hibernate for, say, six months out of the year and live
a more or less normal life for the rest. By disciplining my gift, I
hoped to live 120 or even 150 years--barring
accidents--while observing
the interesting changes which must occur in that long time.

I would marry often and leave a vast progeny by a
succession of beautiful consorts, whom I would compassionately pension
off when they grew too old to satisfy my ever-young desires. In the
end, by virtue of my rich and unique experience, I planned to write a
book that would supersede all Bibles and Korans, revealing the course
of human destiny and insuring my fame forever!

Such was my modest plan. It was in this complex of
heated dreams and rosy-hued prophetic visions that I began to think
about marrying Myra, and making her my first consort.

Why not? I felt at last physically ready for the
husband's role. I was under the usual delusion that two can live as
cheaply as one. Myra had her small salary to contribute; I had my
profession as a night-watchman; together we could surely afford a room
with a double bed. What more, I asked myself, did we need?

But when I tremblingly broached the topic, Myra
informed me that we could not even discuss it until I had finished
college, obtained a permanent position, and had one thousand dollars in
the bank. This was my first encounter with the tough-minded realism of
which she would later give so many--ultimately such
deadly--proofs.

My only consolation was that she hinted her
willingness to wait for me. That was good of her, considering that the
proposed wait struck me as an eternity, or possibly two eternities. Who
could have imagined that Dad, of all people, would suddenly open the
way to the fulfillment of all my desires?

* * * *

Despite all the advantages I'd gained by being
thrown out of the house, I loathed Dad, for I understood perfectly that
he wished me no good, and that my new-found happiness had come about
entirely by accident.

On the other hand, I loved Mama, and kept in touch
with her during all the time I lived at Mrs. Grunion's. Like all
thriving communities of that period, Burgville boasted a telephone
exchange. Although the charge of a nickel seemed high to me (was a
phone call really worth one-third of a breakfast, or one-half of a
schooner of beer?), I called Mama from the library at least twice a
week during the day, when Dad was unlikely to be home.

About ten o'clock upon a Tuesday morning in May
1912, I cranked the gadget vigorously and, when the operator answered,
said in a loud penetrating voice, "Five-nine-one,
please." At the other
end came the usual click, followed by the sound of weeping.

"Mama, what's wrong?"

"Edward, you must be strong. This morning your
father read in the Sunpaper that Samuel Gompers is demanding
the eight-hour day for workers. He began ranting about Communism,
turned a quite extraordinary color, and pitched over dead upon the
breakfast table! The doctors say he died of an apoplectic stroke.
Please, please come at once."

Well, I will not pretend that I grieved very long.
When, a few days later, I saw Dad's corpse--Mama had employed an
embalmer who applied one deft touch of rouge to his cheeks, so that he
looked much more natural than in life--I experienced a painful
confusion
of feelings. I suppose you cannot help loving your father, even if you
hate him; I certainly did both, and turned away from the coffin, where
it rested upon trestles in our parlor, with a shudder of revulsion that
ended, strangely enough, in tears.

On the morrow, I supported Mama through the tedium
of a church funeral followed by Dad's interment in a pompous mausoleum
with marble crypts and an iron gate, where generations of Fogartys were
stored up to await the Resurrection. And from that time to this, I
never willingly thought about the man again.

At home after the funeral, Mama and I anxiously
discussed our future, whose lineaments we thought we saw only too
clearly. She assumed that Dad in some way had embargoed his money, so
that instead of squeezing a few dollars from him every week, she would
have to beg from a skinflint banker. I expected to be disinherited, and
if Mama was right, I could not expect even an allowance from her.

It was only a week later--after talking to
Dad's
lawyer, searching his bank-box, and going through his desk--that
we came
to realize the truth. Dad had left no will at all! For all his noisy
forcefulness of manner, he had been afraid to confront his own
mortality. Thus Mama, as his spouse, and I as his only child became
co-heirs to the brewery and everything else he possessed--the
whole
amounting in value to one hundred fifty-three thousand, two hundred
sixteen dollars and ninety-one cents. In those times, a small fortune!

The court appointed Mama trustee until I arrived at
the magic age of twenty-one. She installed Dad's long-suffering foreman
as manager, where he gave every satisfaction, and the
brewery--now
running more efficiently, since workers were not being fired and new
ones hired every day--was soon yielding us a handsome income of
five
thousand a year.

Suddenly the way to the shining Future seemed to lie
wide open. I renewed my offer of marriage to Myra, pointing out to her
that even though I had not gone to college, I now had considerably more
than one thousand dollars. Confidently I awaited her passionate Yes,
and was amazed to receive instead a cool and rather distant Maybe.

I was put on probation, and Myra, in firm
schoolmistress fashion, devoted the next half-year to housebreaking me.
Her mantra (as we would say today) was, "Edward, I have needs
too,
which you must learn to respect."

And learn I did. Even today, in my dreams I hear her
voice saying bossily, "Edward, gentlemen walk on the
outside,
so that if a motor-car jumps the curb, it will hit them first."
Again I
go shopping with her on a school holiday. Dear God, the exquisite
boredom of it! The impossibility of saying anything she would agree
with!

"What do you think of this color, Edward?"

"Beautiful!"

"Do you think so? I don't like it at all."

In dreams I taste again my first kiss (really!),
stolen in Memorial Park, with General Grant and his bronze horse
looking on. I submerge again into our first serious embrace, at the
door of the museum as I was going in to work, and hear her firm voice
saying, "No more, Edward--that is enough!"

While all this training went on, I lay alone during
the day, sweating at every pore as I thought of Myra's demure bed less
than fifty feet away--both bed and occupant, of course,
eternally beyond
my reach. Oh, the nights of hibernation! The days of hopeless lust!

In desperation I began reading the Agony Column of
the local paper, marking and then scratching out such items as
"Christian Lady desires to find Honorable Gentleman as escort
to the
Presbyterian Church on Sabbaths"--a come-on that remains in my
memory as
the most depressing I've ever read. I might have fallen prey to the
"Mature Gentlewoman of Independent Means" who desired
to "meet a
younger Gentleman, in whom she might take a Maternal
Interest"--had not
Myra, at long last, accepted me.

A frenzy of preparations began that I still look
back upon with horror and dismay. Well, well, it was all long
ago--and
thank heaven, time does dull the memory of suffering. Suffice it to say
that we were wed at last. Dr. Holmes acted as my best man, presenting
the fang of a saber-toothed tiger as his wedding gift. Mama, who had
accepted the match with deepest reluctance, wept steadily throughout
the entire ceremony. Had I known what lay in store, I would have wept
with her.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Edward Fogarty honeymooned in
St. Michael's on the Eastern Shore. And it was there, in an upstairs
room of a pleasant old wooden hotel--with the salt smell of the
Chesapeake blowing in an open window and a bowl of potpourri exhaling
on the mantelpiece--that I revealed to Myra that she had married
the
world's only Hibernating Man.

Somehow I had never found an opportunity to convey
this information before, and she took it very badly.

* * * *

"What exactly do you mean by that?" she
asked in
what I had already identified as her "dangerous" voice.

At the time we were snuggled deep beneath the quilts
on a peaceable Sunday morning. Feeling infinitely comfortable beside
her scented body, which was emitting a delicious warmth, I drowsily
began to explain.

"Have you not," I asked, "noticed
how deeply I
sleep, and how hard it is to awaken me?"

Well, of course she had. I had just learned that
last night she'd spoken to me for nearly three hours about the happy
prospects she foresaw for our union, provided I could overcome the
defects of my character and learn to appreciate her needs, before
noticing that I was totally unconscious: moreover, that I could not be
roused so that she could upbraid me.

Briefly and not very clearly, I explained to her the
nature of hibernation and what it would mean for our life together.
Suddenly it was as if I were back at home, with a cleverer version of
Dad in charge. Myra grilled me with an intensity and degree of dark
suspicion that would have done honor to Teddy Roosevelt when he was
cleaning graft out of the New York City Police Department.

"Surely," she exclaimed, "you must
have tried to
cure this perverse disposition!"

With some heat I pointed out that hibernating was
neither perverse nor was it a disposition; that it was a natural
process practiced by everything from bears to dormice; that my nature
was what it was, and that my great ambition in life was to sleep more,
not less, in order to live for centuries.

At this, she rose up in bed with lightning darting
out of her eyes. "Have I married a man, or a dormouse? How
could you
have concealed all this from me until now, when it is too late for me
to sever all connection with a person given to abnormal habits and mad
ambitions?"

That day she spent approximately seven hours working
me over with what I discovered to be a very rough tongue. Admittedly,
she had some powerful arguments. I had unwittingly deceived
her, on the childish assumption that she would adopt my view whenever I
chose to reveal it to her.

By the end of that uncomfortable day--the day
when
our honeymoon came to an abrupt end, almost before it
started--I'd begun
dimly to comprehend that a wife might not necessarily enjoy life with a
husband who spent half the year snoring, in order to outlive her by
three or four generations and enjoy the caresses of other women after
she was gone.

Somehow, this had never occurred to me.

The upshot was that we separated at once, Myra
returning to Mrs. Grunion's, while I went home to Mama. Pointing out
that she had foreseen trouble, Mama laid the whole blame of the
break-up on Myra, excoriating her as cruel and unfeeling, and comparing
her behavior (rather unfairly) to the way Dad and Dr. Lynwood had
abused me in times gone by.

As for me, I wanted to sleep long--if
possible, never
to awaken. I wrote to Dr. Holmes, resigning my position with the
museum, and then went back to my old room, only to discover that I no
longer fit on the little cot where I used to sleep. Fortunately we had
a guest room, though to my recollection no guest had ever used it.
Here, in a bed as virginal as I had been, I lay down, begging Mama to
let me sleep as long as nature permitted.

My last thought before passing out was a bit of
wisdom from Lord Francis Bacon: "A married man is older by ten
years
the first day."

"You underestimate, my lord," I muttered,
and fell
asleep.

I slept for something over seventy hours. As I later
learned, Mama was deeply concerned, and called the same old family doc
who had misdiagnosed me so long ago. He examined me as I slept and
declared me to be in perfect health, even though my pulse was 43 and
rectal temperature 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

"My watch must be slow," he told her,
shaking his
honest old ticker, "and I need a new thermometer. Fortunately I
never
trust gadgets. One has only to look at Edward to see he's in perfect
health, with no fever at all. Why, I've seldom felt a brow as cool as
his."

Thus encouraged, Mama let me sleep on, though not
without checking on me a dozen times a day. And when I woke at
last--ravenous as usual--she fed me an enormous meal,
watching me eat
with such pleasure and delight that she might have been the one
feasting, instead of I.

In the following weeks I carefully explained my
condition to her, using the example of her brothers to make everything
clear. She saw at once the resemblance between my behavior and theirs;
she might have done so earlier, except that Dad made her so angry by
saying her family was infected with the germ of laziness. With him
gone, she was ready to acknowledge me a revised and updated version of
the Sleepy-Time Boys with whom she had grown up.

"Why, Edward," she said, "I do
believe you are far
more my son than your father's!"

"Thank God for that!" I replied.

Cared for and encouraged by one woman, I tried to
make peace with another. I wrote my wife long letters; I pleaded for
forgiveness, but did not really expect to receive it. I waited every
day for some lawyer's missive announcing a divorce action, but none
came. Once I got up courage enough to approach the boardinghouse, but
was driven off by Mrs. Grunion in such ferocious style that I never
dared to return. I hung about the school where Myra taught, hoping to
speak to her. But the only result was to have a policeman threaten to
arrest me as a masher if he saw me in the neighborhood again.

In despair I had recourse to the veiled seductions
of the Agony Columns, and even drew up an item of my own that began,
"Young Gentleman, independently wealthy, desires...."

But what did I desire? I desired Myra.

One morning--I had just devoured a huge
breakfast
after a sleep of eighty-six hours duration--I was passing
through the
downstairs hall when the telephone rang. I picked it off the wall
automatically and heard Myra's voice say briskly, "Edward, I
must see
you."

I burst into tears, and her voice softened. "My
dear," she said, "I can see that you too have suffered."

"Wh-when can I see you?" I blubbered.

"Today," she replied, gladdening my heart. "The fact
is, Edward, that as a married woman I have been asked to resign my post
at the young ladies' seminary--and as a divorce, I would
be even less
acceptable to the teaching profession. My marriage to you was a tragic
mistake, yet I have made my bed and see now that I must lie in it. If
you agree henceforth to respect my needs, I will do my best to
accommodate your strange and (I am bound to say) somewhat repellent
nature."

There was less ardor in Myra's terms than I would
have hoped for. Her speech sounded less like a reunion of lovebirds
than a treaty of peace between two small hostile nations which had
grown temporarily weary of war. Yet I wanted my wife back, and hastily
subscribed my name to the pact.

That afternoon Myra arrived with her trunk, and the
guest room became a bridal chamber.

* * * *

Vast is the panoply of human experience over the
ages, comprehending every shade of glory and horror, of tragedy,
comedy, and tragicomedy. But I don't believe that any of our species
ever found themselves in quite our family's situation--a mnage
trois
consisting of two women and a Hibernating Man.

At any rate, when Myra and Mama again approached
each other, rather like two prizefighters touching gloves before a
match, all three of us understood the basic situation. Bound as we were
by blood and marriage, we must all abide beneath one roof and depend
for our livelihood upon Fogarty's Finest Foam, as the product of the
brewery was called.

There were compensations. That night my wife and I
made up our quarrel so ardently that all the bad times seemed erased in
an instant. I fell asleep in her arms and she in mine, but she must
have pulled loose at some point, for I slept for three days and nights.

When I awoke at last, I found that my keepers had
conferred together and decided our future course of existence. The
basic verdict was this: Mama and Myra would care for me during my
periods of hibernation if, in return, I performed all the duties of the
man of the house while awake.

This was a long way from the future I'd imagined for
myself, but the ladies clearly had the upper hand. Somehow I'd never
grasped the fact that a life spent snoozing meant a life of permanent
dependency on whoever agreed to watch over me.

Well, I knew it now, and so went to work in the
brewery, spending a week rolling barrels, a month studying the
processes of fermentation, and another month shuffling endless papers.
I then took a week off and slept for one hundred and fifty-six hours
straight.

Feeling well rested after my long snooze, I entered
the head office where our manager undertook to complete my education in
the brewery business. Until he retired I worked as his assistant, while
Myra became our secretary and soon was handling all our correspondence
with breathtaking efficiency. From time to time I took a few days off
for sleep, and my energy upon awaking gradually reconciled my wife to
these episodes.

"After all," she told Mama, "if I
had married a
sailor, I would see even less of him, and would have to worry about the
wives he might be keeping in foreign ports."

"My dear girl," replied Mama from the depth
of her
own experience, "one should count an unconscious husband as a
blessing."

As the years passed, my talent for Nescience grew.
By 1913 I could sleep for nine days; by 1914, for two solid weeks; in
mid-1916 I slept for a month, and woke to find that in my absence, Myra
had managed the business with a competence that I ascribed to her
skilled imitation of my own methods. For by now our manager had
retired, and I was both a man and a businessman.

I had also become a reformer, seeking to improve the
Future where I expected to spend so much of my life. I joined the
Baltimore Eugenics Club, which sought to benefit the human species by
persuading (or if necessary, compelling) the unfit not to breed. Like
many people of my generation, I thought this a fine idea, having no
notion of what it would lead to in the end.

I also joined the Universal Peace Society, which
aimed to promote disarmament by proving to world leaders that armies
and navies were expensive and unproductive. With a third popular reform
group--the Anti-Saloon League, whose answer to human betterment
was
prohibiting the sale of spirituous liquors--of course I had
nothing to
do whatever.

All of this seems quaint and far-away now. For in
1914--disregarding all the wise thoughts of the Universal Peace
Society--Europe's leaders embarked on the ambitious goal of
destroying
civilization. As America began to drift toward war, I became a staunch
Wilsonian Democrat, committed to neutrality. I had no desire whatever
to be killed, for of what use would be my talent for long life if it
(and I) were cut off at the knees by a Boche machine-gun?

So I supported Mr. Wilson, in the firm conviction
that he would (as his reelection campaign slogan put it) Keep Us Out of
War, a conviction that lasted until he took us into it. In the spring
of 1917, Congress, with a great war-whoop, voted accordingly, and the
military draft went into operation.

That summer I received a notice requiring me to
present myself for physical examination in the Baltimore Armory. Myra
and I discussed the situation anxiously. At the age of twenty-three and
in perfect health, I was obviously a candidate for doughboy status. Yet
I remembered only too well Dr. Lynwood's long-ago words: the military
services are notoriously unsympathetic to sleeping soldiers. Might I
end my career by being, after all, shot for snoozing on sentry duty?

Though troubled in conscience by draft-dodging, I
argued that if flat feet or color-blindness could keep a man out of the
Army, why not hibernation? Instead of going to Baltimore, I put on my
nightshirt and went to bed. Myra then contacted the draft board and
informed them that a sudden cataleptic attack had left me unable to
present myself as required, much less to serve in the military.

The board promptly sent a doctor of their own
choosing, a brusque, no-nonsense sort accustomed to seeing through the
clumsy devices of evaders and slackers. Myra led him to our bedroom,
where he proceeded to make the usual tests. When he was done, he sat
down and wiped his brow; Myra told me later that his eyes were fairly
starting from his head.

"Pulse twenty-five," he muttered over and
over, "temperature sixty-one. Pulse twenty-five. Temperature
sixty-one."

"I take it," said she dryly, "that
you will certify
Edward to be incapable of military service."

"Military service!" he exclaimed. "My dear young
lady, I will gladly certify him for the mortuary if you so desire, for
he will surely be going there within the hour."

In all, I slept for twenty months, with three or
four periods of wakefulness devoted mainly to ingestion, digestion, and
excretion. During these episodes everything seemed to be quite normal,
and so I was stunned when I woke early in 1919 to find Myra sobbing
noisily beside my bed.

"My God!" I exclaimed, when at last able to
speak. "We have lost the war, and all because I failed in my duty!"

"No, Edward, we have won," she assured me
between
sobs. "But oh my dear, something awful has occurred!"

"Mama!" I cried, sitting up in
bed--no easy job,
considering how far I had sunk into the mattress. "Mama has
died, and I
was not here to comfort her last hours!"

"Your mother is perfectly well, though increasingly
domineering and dictatorial about the house. No, Edward, something even
worse than defeat and death has visited our household. It concerns the
brewery--"

"Lord, I should not have left a woman in control for
so long!" I mourned. "Only men are fit for commerce,
and you have let
the business go to smash while I was snoring!"

"Finest Foam has never been more successful, or more
productive, than in your absence," she answered tartly. "Indeed, our
success only compounds the tragedy! For Congress has passed a
Prohibition amendment, and the states have ratified. Oh, Edward! When
the brewery is shut down, how shall we live?"

* * * *

There were times when I almost regretted missing
World War I, the great struggle that ended fifteen million lives and
cracked the foundations of civilization. If history stages such a
spectacular show, surely sleeping through it smacks of ingratitude?

But if I did not fight at the battle of
Chteau-Thierry, I certainly did struggle in the toils of Prohibition.
In 1920 the brewery was closed by federal agents, and the job of
purveying alcohol to the American people was taken away from honest
publicans and placed in the eager hands of the underworld.

To our surprise (for had not the whole business been
made illegal?), Mama and I were able to sell the building, beer-making
equipment, and our last batch of Finest Foam for a handsome price to a
gentleman of Sicilian extraction. With the proceeds we bought
gilt-edged bonds, securing a stable if modest income, and retired from
the busy world of commerce.

For me the word "retirement" had a
literal meaning.
Like many Americans of the time, I was suffering from a vast sense of
disillusionment. The Future was proving to be a rougher business than I
had expected. My hopes of Universal Peace had been dashed, while
Progress seemed to consist largely of great leaps forward in the use of
submarines, aerial warfare, and poison gas. I had not yet heard of
Hitler, but a vague sense of uneasiness about some of the Eugenics
Club's projects for eliminating inferior races caused me to resign.
Meantime the Anti-Saloon League had abolished the only way I knew of
making a living.

Feeling depressed and entirely useless, I went back
to bed in 1921, little guessing what I would find when I awoke. Two
years later my fluttering eyelids opened at last to discover, parading
herself before the mirror in our bedroom, my wife--but ah! how
changed!

During my downtime Myra had bobbed her hair, clad
her legs in sheer silk, and donned a dress that at first I took to be a
particularly immodest undergarment. And she was smoking a
cigarette!!

"Myra!" I exclaimed, as soon as I was able. "Put
that out at once! Do you wish to be mistaken for an inhabitant of a
brothel?"

Gaily she laughed, and skillfully blew a smoke-ring.
"The penalty of being unconscious so much, Edward, is that you
have no
idea what is happening in the world. True, at thirty I am a bit old for
a flapper. But I am not too old to enjoy life."

"I absolutely forbid you to enjoy life!"

"You may think you are your father, but you will
soon learn that I am not your mother," she said, approaching
the bed
and deliberately blowing smoke into my face.

"I have needs too, and I am resolved to satisfy them
myself, since you cannot or will not. I've bought myself a gramophone
and a collection of jazz records. I've taken to visiting speakeasies
and nightclubs where I drink and dance with men who, unlike you, are
fully conscious. Last month I was ready to become a bootlegger's
Boopsie, when to my annoyance he was dynamited by a business rival. But
there are other bootleggers in the world, and some of them are quite
charming."

Once I became mobile, I anxiously consulted my
mother about the astounding change in Myra--only to learn that
the
change was not as sudden as I had thought.

"In years past, while my innocent boy was
sleeping,"
Mama said darkly, "more things have gone on than you can
imagine. I did
not tell you earlier, hoping to spare you the shock and praying that
Myra would mend her ways. Were you aware that during the war she joined
a Liberty Bond drive and sold kisses to absolute strangers for one
dollar each?"

"Good God!"

"I could hardly believe it of someone who taught
Deportment at a young ladies' seminary. Edward, I am drifting
rapidly
into the sere and withered leaf; I have begun to think of death, and
wonder whether God will be so unkind as to reunite me with your father
in the next world. I don't think I could bear it if, facing such
unhappiness myself, I left you miserable as well."

"What shall I do, Mama?"

"Give up for now your practice of sleeping for
months or years at a time. No doubt it keeps you young, as I have often
noticed; there is a bloom and freshness in your cheeks that only
prolonged unconsciousness of the real world can put there. Yet, if you
are to save your marriage, you must be present in every sense of the
term, both to comfort your wife with your caresses and to guide her
erring footsteps when she threatens to go astray."

"Mama, you are wiser than Dorothy Dix," I
declared,
meaning a newspaper columnist whose specialty was advising people about
their most intimate problems. "I will take over the duties of
the man
of the house, and be a true husband to the bitch I married."

A series of confrontations ensued between husband
and wife which, even now, I hesitate to remember. But of marriage it
may be said that, while its quarrels are as frequent and nasty as those
of the Balkans, its methods of peacemaking are far more delightful.

In the end, Myra and I compromised: she allowed me
to sleep for two or three days continuously each week, and in return I
smeared Slickum on my hair and squired her every weekend to the
sparkling fleshpots of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and--on special
occasions--even New York.

We had a few embarrassing moments, for while she
looked her years, I looked more like eighteen, and terms like "gigolo"
and "cradle robber" were sometimes heard, even from
bartenders and
bouncers. We adopted cosmetic solutions to the problem: Myra endeavored
to make herself look younger, while I tried to look older, and we
succeeded well enough to fool the mobsters, flappers, and
raccoon-coated swells with whom we tangoed and downed bathtub gin.

Unfortunately, as practicing Man of the House, I
also took control of the family finances. As the jazzy new tempo of
life quickened my heartbeat, I began to believe in the Future
again--though quite a different one. Instead of seeking
universal peace
and human betterment, now I wanted to become rich.

I began to feel that our investments were
excessively old-ladyish and yielded far too little return. Everyone in
the clubs and speakeasies, as well as all the oracles who spoke from
the financial pages and the radio, agreed that the day had arrived when
every American not only could be rich, but ought to be. Then why were
we struggling along, unable to afford a twelve-cylinder Duesenberg and
a chauffeur to drive it?

I began to invest in stocks recommended by Myra's
and my favorite boon companions, and we were handsomely rewarded for
our boldness when the market soared to ever dizzier heights. I also
invested in Florida real estate, having been assured by the boomer who
sold it to me that the Everglades, where the land was located, would
soon be drained. I hoped so, for I very much wanted to visit the new
metropolis of Miami, feel the gentle zephyrs ever playing over its
sugar-white sands (as one brochure put it) and view the rich, fertile
land of our future estate as soon as it could be seen directly, rather
than through the hull of a glass-bottomed boat.

For a time everything went well. I flatter myself
that our increase in wealth (we were worth five hundred thousand
dollars by 1928) helped to make Mama's last years more comfortable than
they would otherwise have been. Despite occasional twinges about the
heart, which she attributed to indigestion, she seemed the very picture
of health on the morning of July 28, 1929, when our French maid entered
her bedroom with a breakfast tray, and found her dead. Wisely and
peacefully, Mama had departed life in her sleep--but that was
not how I
saw things then. For at the hour when her death occurred, Myra and I
had been drinking at a Baltimore speakeasy called The Bookstore, and
enjoying H. L. Mencken's impromptu piano-playing.

I was left with a surfeit of guilt none the less
severe for being irrational. Perhaps I was the ultimate Mama's Boy, but
I had lost my best and oldest friend; I blamed myself for not being
with her at her passing, and was inconsolable.

Knowing she would not want to lie in Dad's vicinity,
I bought her a plot of her own at the other end of town, and a red
granite headstone carven with forget-me-nots. As she was being laid to
rest, I wept so loudly as to cause much annoyance to the clergyman, who
could not make himself heard, and embarrassment to Myra, who ordered me
sotto voce to "act like a man, if you cannot be one."

Once the funeral was over, I sought my usual escape
in sleep. I informed Myra that our prosperity was now secure; that our
wealth could not help but grow exponentially; that she was provided
with every luxury; that I was going to bed, and she was forbidden to
wake me until nature did so.

"You mean," she replied caustically, "that you have
reverted to form as an immature, puling coward in flight from reality.
As usual, you think only of your own needs, and not of mine. Very well,
Edward--but remember this: while you are snoring, I shall not be
growing
a new cherry!"

Undoubtedly my once demure bride had become
coarsened by the company we kept during the Jazz Age. Shocked beyond
words, I put on my nightshirt at once, and retired to Mama's room.

Well, I need not say yet again that history is full
of surprises. I conked out believing that the only problem I should
face on waking was continuing grief and guilt. For her part, Myra
thought the life of the Twenties would go on indefinitely, and (as she
confessed later) hardly bothered to listen for my first snore before
she set out to find a gigolo of the sort likely to be attracted to a
well-to-do lady still on the bright side of forty.

How different things looked, when at last I awoke on
a blustery day in what a wall calendar averred was March 1931! The
house was cold, I was starving, and when I glanced through a window
while dressing, I observed discouraged-looking men in cloth caps
clustered at a nearby corner, holding up hand-lettered signs that said
will work for food. What was going on?

Our maid had vanished; the house was empty.
Downstairs, the icebox contained only a slab of rat-trap cheese and a
loaf of stalish bread, both of which I devoured. I turned on the
radio--a sort of Gothic cathedral in wood--and after
listening to a new
ballad I was unfamiliar with ("Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?") I heard
President Hoover's voice predicting an end to the current state of
economic distress "as soon as confidence can be restored."

Then the lock on the front door clicked, and Myra
came in. She wore a mauve velvet cloche hat that I recognized, and a
somewhat bedraggled mink stole that I had given her. Indeed, I
recognized every single garment she had on! Was that possible? Had she
bought nothing new in two whole years?

Catching sight of me, she rushed into my arms and
began to pour out her tale of woe. It was then that I learned the
truth: we owned nothing but Mama's house (as I still thought of it) and
the money in Myra's purse and my wallet.

Our broker had sold out our stocks for lack of
margin shortly before defenestrating himself from the forty-second
floor of his building. Our Florida estate had been reclaimed by a bank
which had itself failed, and the First National Bank of Burgville had
collapsed, taking our savings account with it.

"Nothing is left," Myra wailed, "except this house
and our knowledge of the brewer's art, which we dare not use for fear
of the Feds. Oh my dear, what are we to do?"

* * * *

For once I entirely forgot about the Future: the
needs of the Present were far too demanding. Past quarrels no longer
seemed to mean much, either. As if we had never fought, Myra and I put
our heads together to figure out a means of survival.

Fortunately I had some dollars in my other pants, so
that we were able to stock the icebox, and even to buy a chunk of ice.
Then we instituted a search of the house for any forgotten bits of
cash, and after some hours had a great stroke of luck. In examining
Mama's mattress, I found that the saving habits acquired under Dad's
regime had continued into old age. She had almost a thousand dollars
tucked away, and a careful examination of chairs and furniture in her
bedroom yielded another two-fifty-eight-fifty.

"Good heavens!" Myra exclaimed. "Had
you not been
sleeping there, I would have given all her things to the Salvation
Army! Oh, the saintly woman! How much we owe her!"

Yet Mama's money could not last forever, and our
lives became a series of shifts. Remembering Mrs. Grunion's
establishment, we began renting rooms to traveling salesmen, which
brought in enough to keep food on the table. We pawned every pawnable
item we did not absolutely need, and Myra became expert in buying the
cheapest cuts of meat, and potatoes whose rotten spots could be cut out
before boiling.

In searching the house yet again, I came across Dr.
Holmes's Saber-Tooth Tiger fang, which gave me a thought. I took it
down to the Museum of Science and History, introduced myself to Dr.
Holmes's son, who now ran that establishment, and presented it to him
for his collection.

While he was still in the weakened condition
produced by gratitude, I asked dulcetly if he might be in need of a
night-watchman. At first he hemmed and hawed. But when I pressed him
with sob stories about a sick wife, and tales of the warm friendship
between our fathers (I could hardly expect him to believe that I myself
had been employed by the museum twenty years before) he gradually
yielded.

"In view of the times," said young Dr.
Holmes--who,
except for having brown hair, and much of it, was a rotund carbon-copy
of his sire--"I cannot pay much; but I trust that you will not
decline
two dollars for each night or day worked, for I can offer no more."

Thus, in a mere two decades my pay as a watchman had
advanced by fifty cents a day. Surely H. G. Wells would have seen in
that fact a small yet telling proof of the inevitability of Progress!
And if that sounds cynical--well, so be it: by that time, I had
a lot to
be cynical about.

How strange it felt that night to stretch out upon
my old bench--to see the white bones of the Megatherium
glistening
palely in the darkness--to be reunited with my old friends the
lion and
the dromedary, both considerably more moth-eaten than in times past.

In wandering the halls next evening, I found that
the passenger pigeon, by getting itself devoured by mice, had
demonstrated anew its species' strange lust for extinction. In
the
Great Hall of Progress, a water-cooled machine gun had taken the place
of the Maxim, hinting that humanity was advancing in its own peculiar
manner--or perhaps preparing to go the way of the pigeon.
Shaking my
head, I thought of the visions of the Future that had filled my head.
Where was Peace, with some nations already arming for another war?
Where was Prosperity, amid universal poverty? At least, I told myself,
I was now free of illusions--I was a realist, cold, strong,
cynical, and
ready to confront the harshness of Fate!

"My head is bloody but unbowed!" I shouted,
waking
echoes throughout the Museum.

Then I rolled up my coat, placed it under my head
for a pillow, wound up my alarm clock, and plunged gratefully back into
that Nescience from which I had so unwisely awakened.

Through my paltry job and the miserable rents we
obtained from the salesmen, Myra and I survived until 1933 when the
Noble Experiment of Prohibition came to an unlamented end. Then we
mortgaged our house, bought new brewing equipment, installed it in an
abandoned warehouse and began to teach ourselves once again the art of
brewmanship.

Our first batches of Fogarty's Finest Foam were
quite dreadful, but people were so desperate to escape the harsh
realities of the Depression that they would have drunk animal urine,
only provided it was alcoholic. Indeed, when I began peddling our
product, the bartender of a Greenmount Avenue saloon unwisely took a
mouthful, spat it out and roared, "Take dis, and put it back
inna
hawse where ya got it!"

"You can have it at half price," I said
hastily.

"Okay, gimme twenny cases," he replied.

I resigned again from the museum, and in the course
of three years or so Myra and I rebuilt a thriving business. We cleared
the mortgage, ousted our boarders, and began to enjoy the comfortable
life of those fortunate enough to have money in a Depression.

Everything was so cheap--and by now Myra was
so
skilled at making it even cheaper! For a few dollars she hired skilled
carpenters and painters to redo our dilapidated dwelling, and a
talented gardener put the grounds in order for nothing but a week's
supply of roast beef sandwiches.

Yet the hard years had forever marked my wife. In
the process of pinching pennies and tormenting dimes, Myra had so
toughened that scarcely a fleck of the girl I had wed remained, except
for the temper and rough tongue.

She had become a hard-eyed harridan, her hair
graying and her lips ever compressed into a thin line. Crow's-feet
appeared around her eyes, and a long groove descended from each nostril
to the corners of her unsmiling mouth. She ruthlessly broke a feeble
attempt by our workers to strike, and she ruled me, the house, and the
brewery with an iron hand.

Her politics surged rightward. She loathed Hitler as
a troublemaker but admired Mussolini, remarking on several occasions
that we needed him in Washington in place of That Man in the White
House.

"Let us not forget, my dear, that FDR ended
Prohibition," I protested feebly.

"I suppose if you searched, you could find that the
Devil himself has done one good deed." She then launched into a
denunciation of New Deal policies so bitter that I was happy to take
refuge in bed and sleep another year or two. But before I dropped off,
she had one last thing to say, and said it.

"Someday," she declared presciently, "That Man will
connive us into another war, the next time those wretched Europeans
decide to blow things up."

As usually happens, it was the realist, Myra, who
saw the future most clearly. In 1940, with war already raging on
several continents, Congress voted a new draft. I was forty-six and too
old for active service--only I didn't look too old; I looked as
if I
were still in my twenties, which in a sense I was. I knew that medical
tests would show that I had the physiology of a young man, exposing me
to charges of fraud and draft evasion.

Once again I sought refuge in sleep.
Myra--now
assuming the character of my mother--visited the draft board to
explain
that her son was a terminal case following an attack of encephalitis,
which had left me in a profound coma. Again a doctor was dispatched,
and finding no detectable heartbeat or respiration, and my body
temperature at 33 degrees, he made out a death certificate that caused
Selective Service to drop me forever from its rolls. When I awoke in
1942 and saw this document for the first time, I was overcome by a most
extraordinary emotion. How many people have ever had the experience of
being simultaneously alive and dead? To be here and yet not here; to
coexist in Time and in Eternity; to be able to prove one's nonexistence
through an official document, in a world where only official documents
can prove one's existence anyway!

How marvelous! I thought--entirely
missing
the hidden danger lurking in that bland official form.

* * * *

I slept through most of the emergency.

But from time to time I woke, and after having a
bath and eating a few disgusting wartime meals ("What's this?" "Spam."
"What is Spam?" "Watch out! If you insist on
knowing, I may tell
you!"), I was left with idle time on my hands.

I had to keep out of sight, so that no War
Department spies or FBI men could spot a corpse out for a stroll, and
devoted my awake time to studying the course of the war. As I caught up
on the newspapers, listened to the exciting news the radio brought from
the battlefronts, and absorbed the messages of wartime prophets, I
found my ancient idealism rekindling.

Yes, it had taken longer than I'd expected, and
millions had had to die, but at last it seemed the glorious Future
might be coming to birth. I listened to Winston Churchill promise that
once the Nozzies were destroyed the world would move "into the
broad,
sunlit uplands." I didn't know exactly what that meant, and
maybe
Winnie didn't either, but it sounded like a journey I wanted to make.
Why does war always bring garish hopes of better times to come? Surely
it must be the suffering. People think: if we endure all this, better
times must lie ahead! In logic I think this is called the
Pathetic Fallacy--or if not, it should be. Yet during a war,
logic is
buried even quicker than mercy, decency, and truth.

Touched anew by the flame of prophecy, I asked Myra
to buy me some writing materials at the drugstore the next time she
went to obtain hair dye and cosmetics. She brought me a Blue Horse
notebook, and I began making notes for a Great Book I planned to write
in my spare time. The notebook lies at my hand as I write this
memoir--its foolscap pages brittle and yellow--its covers
cracked and
peeling--its iconic horse eyeing me with a gentle and quizzical
gaze.

The greatest of wars signals the end of all
wars, I began. For several embarrassing pages I went on about the
coming triumph of the Four Freedoms, the reborn League of Nations that
would suppress any act of aggression almost before it started, and the
enduring friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union that
would guarantee world peace for centuries to come!

Even in 1944, I must have found this stuff tiresome.
For suddenly--on page three--the dithyramb is interrupted
by the
underlined words, What am I to do about Myra?

How well I remember asking myself that question. And
how well I remember making the mistake of answering it in writing. My
wife was not only dictatorial, she had gotten long in the tooth. With
my desire for her waning, if not dead, I wanted to divorce her as soon
as the war was over, pension her off in decent fashion, and find myself
a young wife, precisely as I had imagined doing a generation earlier.

Oh, I expected Myra to be unreasonable about it. For
years I had watched her jealousy increase with every gray hair that
sprouted on her head, until the mere attentions of a waitress to me at
a nightspot produced a torrent of denunciation when we reached home. I
understood that she deeply resented, even as she desired, my youthful
body, which she could not but contrast with her own--at fifty,
sagging,
spotty and graying--whatever dyes and oils and creams she might
apply to
it.

But the gap between us was wider than mere
appearance. I didn't only look in my late twenties: I had all the
needs, passions, and cravings of a twenty-something, as well as the
fecklessness and naivet that had dogged me throughout life. So far from
being the cynic I imagined, I still believed that ultimately everything
would come out more or less as I wanted it to.

Myra--I learned to my sorrow--had no
such delusion.
She was far too intelligent not to realize that the future I had
forecast so long ago during our honeymoon in St. Michael's, was now
fast approaching reality. She could not hold me for long, but she could
at least make sure that no other woman took her place.

I provoked the disaster myself by jotting into the
notebook a draft letter I planned to insert in a local Agony Column
after ditching Myra. In those days, one could not advertise for "a hot
dwarf to chill with" and similar exotic comforts, such as I see
in the
papers today. No, my proposed advertisement--I'm looking at it
as I
write--said only Prosperous Gentleman, recently divorced,
seeks
honorable union with attractive and warm-hearted Young Lady.

Feeling the urge to sleep another year or two, I
rolled the notebook into a cylinder and locked it into a strongbox with
a few other items which I foolishly imagined to be exclusively my
own--a
locket containing Mama's picture, the first dollar I had ever earned,
and a bit of mild pornography that helped me take care of my own needs
when Myra was not in the mood for sex.

Yet while I was unconscious, she could obtain the
key, learn my pitiful secrets, and decide in leisure what to do about
them--and about me.

* * * *

I've always liked organ music. One of our few
luxuries during Dad's unlamented reign was a pump organ in the parlor,
where Mama, at the end of her long hard day, was permitted to soothe
her master (and enchant her son) by playing tunes she had learned in
her youth.

I used to think that if upon my deathbed I heard an
organ playing "The Lost Chord" or "Lavender's
Blue" or "Reuben, Reuben"
or "The Vale of Tralee" or "Love's Old Sweet
Song," I'd know I had
arrived in Heaven--or if not, in some perfectly agreeable corner
of
Hell. As an adult I went to recitals at Baltimore Cathedral, or drove
down snaky and traffic-throttled Route 1 to Washington to hear Bach and
Buxtehude played in one of the churches along Sixteenth Street. With
this background, I was not at first disturbed when, waking from the
last installment of my wartime snooze early in 1946, I heard the muted
notes of an organ playing Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."

I lay there in the familiar state of sleep
paralysis, unable to move a muscle, and for once not inclined to do so.
How familiar it all was--how many times I'd experienced
it--how sure I
felt that in time life would return to my ice-cold limbs!

A soft light bathed my closed eyelids. The sweet
attar of flowers touched my nostrils. Deep down and seemingly far away,
I could hear the infinitely slow pulsing of my heart, the tempo of its
syncopated rhythm gradually, oh so gradually increasing, ka ...
thump, ka ... thump, ka ... thumpathumpa.

But as feeling slowly returned, a sense of unease
began to come with it. The bed where I lay was strangely narrow. The
mattress, though soft, was very thin with something hard as a board
under it. The pillow was also thin, and I was tasting something like a
very dry cracker in my mouth. Strangest of all, when my eyes at last
were ready to open, they were unable to do so--something glued
the lids
down.

I realized that I was wearing a suit--in bed,
a
suit?--only it was but half a suit. Up top I was well attired,
with the
edge of a starched collar pinching my neck and the knot of a necktie
lodged against my Adam's apple. My hands lay folded over the buttons of
a double-breasted jacket. Yet below the waist I was wearing only
drawers, while my legs and feet were entirely bare. Meantime the music
had stopped. A mooing, clergymanish sort of voice began to speak of my
excellent qualities--of my abiding Christian faith (which was
news to
me)--of my deep love for my mother and my wife (which was at
least half
true)--of the pity of my being struck down well short of the
Biblical
threescore and ten. But such was the will of God, and unsearchable were
His counsels, His ways past finding out. Amen.

At this point my mind awoke fully. Unfortunately, my
body remained immobile. I strained to speak but could not; to move a
limb, a hand, a finger, but could not. My spirit hurled itself vainly
against the dull, unresponsive walls of flesh like an animal in a trap.

For an instant I felt a flicker of
hope--someone bent
over me. I recognized the perfume--it was Myra, wearing a dab of
her
favorite scent, called My Sin. She was weeping; her tears struck my
cheeks; she thrust something under my pillow and whispered, "Good-bye,
my dearest. If only you had understood my needs, and loved me as I love
you, things would never have come to this."

She pressed her lips against my unresponsive ones.
And then, ultimate horror! The light faded from my eyelids and a heavy
lid closed above me. I fainted in sheer terror.

How long I was "out" I do not know.
Maybe hours.
When I woke, the coffin rested unmoving, so the burial had been
accomplished, no doubt in that same pompous mausoleum where Dad and a
dozen former Fogartys had been laid before me. My body was now mobile,
for all the good it did me. I peeled the wax from my eyelids, and
removed from my mouth a piece of cardboard meant to hold my lower jaw
in place.

Then I strained at the coffin lid; I might as well
have tried to lift a mountain. And even if I escaped the box, I would
still be sealed in a marble crypt. I ceased to struggle, fearing to use
up whatever air remained, and tried to think what could have brought me
to this desperate pass.

My hands restlessly moved about, as if searching for
an answer, and found under the pillow (still rolled into a cylinder)
the Blue Horse notebook--Myra's accusation; Myra's farewell.

Far too late, I realized the hidden danger in that
death certificate. Besides her, no one on Earth knew my secret. While I
was in deep hibernation, any undertaker would take me for a
corpse--and
since a doctor had certified me dead, I could be buried. All that Myra
had needed to do was erase the date of death, and enter the date she
selected for my demise.

So this was my glorious Future! Though I'd lived for
fifty years, I'd been conscious for considerably less than half of
that. How brief had been the time when I was truly alive--and
now I had
to die!

I lay still, struggling to quell the panic that
could only hasten my doom. And as I did, a cold and thoroughly adult
determination took form. Whatever happened, I resolved not to perish
gasping and clawing at the silk-clad roof just above my face. Somehow,
somehow I would survive, and bring justice to my murderess!

I began taking breaths as shallow and widely spaced
as possible. Little by little I felt my heartbeat begin to slow, cold
again to invade my limbs. How many times I had fled from reality into
sleep--and here I was, finding refuge from the most terrible
trouble I
ever faced by plunging deep, deep into the little death of hibernation.

* * * *

I came to in a kind of twilight, without the least
idea where I was, feeling vaguely that a vast quantity of time had been
erased.

I was desperately hungry. When--after the
usual long,
slow process of awakening--my eyes fluttered open at last, I was
baffled
to see close above me a dim ceiling, from which white strips hung down,
moving in a vagrant current of air.

I heard also a grinding sound coming from someplace
nearby, and a chorus of shrill squeaks. Something plucked at my left
shoulder, tearing cloth, and the dusty smell of rotted fabric filled my
narrow space. I moved convulsively--another chorus of squeaks
followed,
and a rapid scrabble of claws--and I was left alone. The
graveyard rats
were unused to corpses that moved.

Still confused, filled with a horror of I did not
know exactly what, I struck out with both elbows against the sides of
the coffin--and the left side, where the rats had been gnawing,
split!

In place of the dim trickle of light seeping through
the rat-hole, a kind of pale dawn now filled the box. With it came
memory--of Myra's crime, of my burial, of everything I had
undergone--and
I struck again and again at my prison. Myra had been as frugal in
buying my coffin as in everything else, and the cheap wood weakened by
dry-rot and gnawed by rodents crumbled under my blows. Soon I was able
to crawl out--into what looked like the Day of Resurrection!

In chilly autumn sunlight I was lying on the ground
beside my broken coffin. After the frenzied effort to escape, my
muscles twitched and quivered like the legs of new-dead frogs. Before
me stood the family mausoleum, with fogarty inscribed over the door.
The iron gate had disappeared. The marble crypts had been broken open
and their contents removed, by what unspeakable power I could not
imagine.

Nearby, a large bag of some transparent material
bulged with femurs, ribs, ulnas, and staring skulls. All around me I
saw other violated graves lying open to the elements. Were the
preachers right after all? Had the Trump of Doom sounded?

Then a strange-looking orange machine came chugging
and clicking into view, followed by a truck of more familiar design. As
I watched, the forklift scooped up a tarnished bronze casket and
deposited it in the back of the larger vehicle, upon a pile of other
caskets. Hastily I retrieved my notebook--I think with a
confused idea
of using it as evidence against my murderess--and crept behind
the
Fogarty tomb. The clothing I wore was not only inadequate, it was
falling apart with every movement I made; disintegrating, turning to
lint and powder. Naked save for dust and shreds of tattered cloth, I
huddled in a spot of sunlight, clutching my notebook and shivering.

I stared for a long time uncomprehending at a big
colorful sign affixed to stanchions nearby. This Area Being Cleared
for I-95 Expansion, it explained. All Human Remains Will Be
Reverently Reinterred.

I whispered, "But you will not reinter me."

Then I heard a sound and turned. An enormous Negro
man in workman's attire was staring at me. He tipped back his helmet,
which seemed to be made of celluloid, or maybe that miracle substance
called plastic.

"What the hell you doin' here?" he
demanded. "Where
the hell you come from? Why the hell you runnin' round bare-ass
in a
condemned graveyard, anyways?"

Every question was cogent, yet I could answer none
of them. I could only whisper, "I'm cold. I'm hungry."

He approached, bent down, picked me up like a child,
and carried me back to the truck. There, he and the other workmen
wrapped me in odds and ends of their own clothing, poured hot coffee
into me, and called--on a telephone without wires!--for
a
curious-looking square vehicle with the word AMBULANCE spelled backward
across the hood. Why, I wondered as it drove me away, backward?

* * * *

And so I came to Maryland General Hospital, the ER,
the ICU, and the locked ward.

I have absolutely no complaint about my
incarceration; the hospital saved my life, and gave me time to get my
bearings. Through the hospital library I was able to catch up on the
events that had taken place during my epic snooze--the wars,
revolutions, and massacres, the scientific discoveries and adventures
in space, and the vast accumulation of trivia that had filled the last
five-and-some-odd decades.

All this was dumped randomly into my head, like odds
and ends of nutriment thrown into a hobo's cookpot--large events
and
small equally hard to comprehend. Could it be that movie stars now
routinely appeared in films stark naked? That H-bombs gave our
notoriously unpredictable species the power to destroy all life on
Earth? That those great pals of World War II, Russia and the USA, had
almost liquidated each other in something called the Cold War? That men
had left footprints on the moon? That Negroes could vote, even in
Mississippi? That homosexuals were demanding to be treated like human
beings?

Wow! I thought. You never know.

Despite all the good that Maryland General did me,
soon I was anxious to leave it. The air in the ward was none too
savory, the company none too stimulating. And as for the
food--well, the
microwave was new to me: in past times only a really bad cook could
produce meals that were simultaneously frozen and overcooked. Now,
owing to the ceaseless march of progress, anybody could do it in a few
seconds.

Hoping for release, I developed a useful amnesia
about precisely what personal problems had brought me into the
graveyard near naked and starving. Otherwise I exerted myself to appear
sane. Since I was clearly no danger to myself or anybody else, I might
have been discharged except for the old, old problem that had shaped my
whole life. My sleep habits fascinated the "shrinks"
(as everybody
called them), and they kept delaying my release in order to study me.

Hospitals love to awaken people at ungodly hours,
but in me they met their match. The doctors speculated wildly about my
condition--was this catatonia? Narcolepsy? Catalepsy? Some
other,
unknown lepsy? I feared to reveal the truth, for they might take my
claim to be a Hibernating Man as a sign of lunacy, and keep me locked
up indefinitely.

Finally a sympathetic young resident asked me if I
would like to volunteer for tests at the Johns Hopkins Sleep Study
Laboratory. Hardly had the words escaped him when I cried out, "YES!"

Next morning, the notebook--my only
possession--was
solemnly returned to me. Apparently nobody had bothered to read it. I
received clothing collected for indigents by some charitable
association, and an ambulance took me to Hopkins. There I learned with
amazement that I could earn a modest stipend merely by going to bed
with wires glued to various parts of my anatomy!

Eagerly I signed the necessary papers, and retired
to a quiet cubicle to do what I had always done best. Soon I became the
star of the laboratory.

Sophisticated tests revealed that in deep sleep my
body effortlessly recycles urea, accounting both for the fact that I
don't die of uremic poisoning and that I am able to synthesize new
proteins continuously, thus maintaining muscle mass. Like wintering
bears, I go through periodic contractions that revive the muscle tone
lost in sleep. And I perform chemical manipulations with glucose and
lipids that filled the staff with admiration.

How did this curious mutation come about? The
researchers think that I am the end-product of an evolution possibly
centuries in the making. The critical genes dwell on the X chromosome,
so perhaps they are transmitted by the female, but only become
activated in the male--an insight that explains so much about
Mama, her
brothers, and myself that I accepted it at once.

Of course I said nothing about how long I'd
lived--there is a limit to what even scientists can be made to
believe.
Yet how much I owe those earnest, humorless people in their white lab
coats! At long last I felt I understood the central mystery of my
being, and at last--in the phrase now so
popular--achieved closure on the
traumas of my early life.

Filled with new and sober self-confidence, I signed
myself out of Hopkins, while agreeing to return for further tests. It
was time to try my wings. I hit the street with a few dollars in my
pocket and no clear idea how I was to survive. As in my far-off youth,
I needed to make my living--but now I had an additional aim: to
seek
justice from the woman who had tried to murder me, if I was not too
late.

* * * *

On a warm May day, an intern dropped me off in the
middle of town. For hours I stood at the corner of Charles and
Baltimore Streets, leaning against a post and gawking.

One thing became clear at once: the pace of life had
picked up. People rushed by like the flickering figures in a Charlie
Chaplin comedy--heading where, and to do what, I couldn't
imagine.

Their attire dismayed me. Young people in particular
looked ghastly, wearing outfits that seemed to have been blown on them
by a passing tornado. I did not see one single woman who was properly
dressed--not one. Here they were, displaying themselves in
public with
no gloves, no hats, no veils, no nylons, no makeup worthy of the name!

The flashiest sported haircuts like mini-haystacks,
for which I later learned they paid enormous sums to establishments
with names like Hair We Go Again. What had happened to the feathery
short bobs of the twenties and thirties, the shimmering long ones of
wartime?

And the gentlemen! On a warm day like this one,
where were the white linen suits, the two-toned shoes, the straw
skimmers? Had the Destroying Angel wiped out every stitch of seersucker
on the planet? And the Panama hats, had they all been blown away by the
winds of change?

The traffic was fearsome. The little cars were
certainly sleeker than the flivvers of yore, but the big ones were
gross and boxy abominations. Where had all the Duesenbergs gone? Where
were the Hispano-Suizas, the Packards, the Lincoln Zephyrs, the
tonneaus with stiff uniformed chauffeurs up front and tiny old ladies
perched in the rear like stuffed birds?

In place of Elegance, there was Inflation. A Sunpaper
cost me more than a meal had during the Depression, while a meal cost
more than a hero of World War II earned in a month. President Roosevelt
himself would have been delighted to take home every day what a fleabag
hotel charged me for a room with one dirty window and a vista of an
airshaft!

Clearly, I had to make money, and quick. Of course I
turned to the ancient and noble science of beermaking. Fogarty's Finest
Foam had vanished from the phone book. But microbreweries had seized an
important niche in the market by the perhaps unfair expedient of making
a superior product. In my first shot at seeking employment, I got a job
with the Edgar Allan Poe Beer Company, whose brew patriotic
Baltimoreans swill by the pint, gallon, and cubic meter at Orioles and
Ravens games.

Brewing had changed greatly in fifty years, but
fortunately the Poe company followed current retro fashion by proudly
doing everything the old way. I knew a great deal about doing things
the old way, and my skills quickly raised me to the post of Assistant
Braumeister, with good prospects for promotion to the highest technical
post when the incumbent retires.

With my livelihood secured, I began to seek another
kind of closure. I visited Mama's grave, shed a tear, cut the weeds and
planted a rose. Then I embarked upon a darker quest.

At the Pratt Free Library on Mulberry Street, a
black lady ruling the desk introduced me to the Internet. Through it I
began hunting Myra. Though my mind was filled with thoughts of
vengeance, I steeled myself for disappointment: in all likelihood, she
had long since died.

Well, I can only say that my life has been a series
of surprises. The black lady helped me to enter Google, I tapped in
FOGARTY, MYRA MEANS--and behold! what a rush of information!

Clippings told of Myra the businesswoman, extracting
fifteen million dollars from a suds conglomerate when she sold out
Fogarty's Finest Foam; Myra the politician, organizing the harridan
vote for Richard Nixon; Myra the philanthropist, setting up a
foundation to promote right-wing causes; Myra the minor celebrity,
visiting the White House at the age of ninety to meet Ronald Reagan,
and remarking of the seventy-five-year-old president, "I always
did
like 'em young!"

That's true. She did. I remember.The most
interesting item was only a few months old: a clipping from a Nell
Gwynn County weekly, headlined Oldest County Resident Feted at
Nursing Home. Myra was still alive and
kicking--vigorously--at the
age of 107. "County Executive John Mudd Mumford presented the
ancient
lady a Key to the County, whereupon she demanded, 'Who let this
hamhock
in, anyway?'"

Yes, whoever or whatever Google was, it had the
right Myra Fogarty. The following Saturday, I set out to find her.

* * * *

A county phone book gave me the address of the
nursing home, and I traveled there by bus through endless suburbs where
Burgville, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Washington had all merged into one
formless whole.

At the end I found an anonymous building of poured
stone, festive with blooming impatiens on the outside and eye-watering
with the scent of disinfectant within. To a coolly feminine young blond
minding the desk I explained that I was Myra's grandson, and presented
a newly purchased ID to prove it. I said that a long estrangement
within the family had separated me from Grandma, but now I wished to
feast my eyes upon this ancient limb of my family tree.

"No other relative has ever visited her,"
said the
blond, and would have put on a look of deepest suspicion, had his
curiously masklike face been capable of expression.

"I think I should tell you, sir," he went
on, "that
all Mrs. Fogarty's wealth has been signed over to AFLAAF, the America
First, Last and Always Foundation, which pays her expenses here."

"I am totally uninterested in her money," I
assured
him.

He gave me a yeah-right glance, pointed at the
elevator, and said, like a guide to the Inferno, "Level nine."

In this Hell you went up instead of down. I stepped
from the elevator into as depressing a sight as I've ever seen. About
thirty ancients, bundled into wheelchairs, were watching a television
without a picture. Only multicolored snow, and the paralyzingly loud
soundtrack of a hip-hop program called "Phat City."

Behind a counter, a nurse wearing earphones and a
Walkman was performing the complex medical procedure known as
"paperwork." I had to tap her arm to get her attention;
she removed the
earphones and shouted, "YOU THE TV GUY?"

I explained myself in a roar, and she pointed me
down a liver-colored hallway between doorways with opaque plastic
curtains. At the very last of these, I pushed aside the curtain and
entered.

A heart monitor was beeping. Something like the
fossil of a large ancient bird lay on its side in the bed, covered with
a blue paper sheet. Myra's head was almost hairless. I drew near,
reached out and touched my wife's dry, papery face.

Her eyes opened. One was a frozen blue puddle, but
the other focused on me. Her gums moved: perhaps she was trying to ask
who let this hamhock in.

"I am Edward, your husband," I intoned in a
sepulchral voice. "I have come for you, Myra."

The eye stared wildly; then, like its glassy
companion, rolled up so that only two half moons of yellowish white
remained visible. The heart monitor hesitated for a moment, then
emitted a thin batlike shriek.

At the nursing station, a warning light was blinking
unheeded. As I entered the elevator, the nurse shouted, "SO
HOW'S YA
GRAMMAW?"

"HIBERNATING!" I shouted back.

"SHE'S A PISTOL, THAT OLD BROAD!" howled the
nurse
as the elevator doors were closing. Had I been in charge of
arrangements, those words would have been inscribed on Myra's tombstone.

* * * *

Since then--little by little, with much
twisting and
turning--I've accommodated myself to my new world. After all,
it's
neither worse nor better than all my other worlds. Only different.

Nowadays I rent a small condo on Baltimore's Inner
Harbor. On weekends I like to enjoy a long, slow breakfast while gazing
over the water toward the brightening East.

Have I lost my old urge to emulate the snoring
dormouse? No, I have not. My friends the doctors supplied me with
wakeup pills, but after experiencing some rather frightening side
effects, I stopped taking them. Then two modern inventions--the
clock-radio and rock'n'roll--solved my old problem. In my
thickly
insulated bedroom I set the radio every night to a heavy-metal station,
the alarm to 5:00 a.m. Never yet have I been late to work, nor waked to
find myself in another century, nor in the grave.

At first I adopted this expedient merely in order to
keep my job. But there's more to my new lifestyle than that.

On this quiet Saturday, the pleasure
craft--masts
gently swaying--lie moored along the quays in a pearly mist just
touched
by the sun. Gulls soar, dip, and cry out in harsh voices. The low
murmur of traffic is the sound of the city's heart awakening.

There's something about the transparency of morning
light that gives cool perspectives upon life and death. Maybe I would
have matured sooner if I hadn't slept through all those dawnings.

Nothing about the Twentieth Century worked out as I
foresaw. Never will I write the Great Book I once planned. Never will I
reveal the secrets of human destiny, because I'll never know them. If
anybody asks me to predict the Future--no one has--I can
reply only, "It
won't be what you expect."

Prophets, I've found, are generally without honor.
And for very good reason, too.

Looking back, I'm inclined to think that
hibernation, though proper for bears, toads, etc., is not a desirable
mutation for a human being. It becomes too easily a refuge
from--as Dr.
Lynwood put it--Life and Duty.

It's true that I snoozed my way through a series of
wars that might have killed me. But I also slept through humanity's
moments of joy and triumph. I took no part in the great struggles of
the century, against fascism in its many forms, against racism and
tyranny and ignorance and delusion.

I did not share the adventure of the
moon-landing--as
all the waking world did, at least vicariously--and by avoiding
so much
I remained a good bit of a fool, and only narrowly escaped a horrible
death. What I want now is what I've never had: an ordinary life in the
present. Henceforth, my business is with the here and now.

After pouring my third coffee, I unfold a Washington
paper that I subscribe to solely for its thick Personals section.

My eye flits down the array of longing ladies. "DWF
ISO hairy-chested Capricorn, 25-40, with whom to prance and gambol in
the free, fresh wind." Well, I hope she finds her goat, but he
won't be
me. Nor am I drawn to the Amazons who dress in vinyl, nor the nymphs
who relish water-sports.

And then I read: "WWF, full figure, 2 grown
children, an old-fashioned girl who loves organ music, ISO a gentle,
caring WM with whom to enjoy fully the ripe autumn of life."

A scenario flickers before my mind ... an ample,
motherly sort of woman ... a first meeting at a Georgetown bistro, to
show her I'm not an axe murderer ... then perhaps a three-way date with
Bach at the National Cathedral. If we get along, a night at some plush
hostelry in the Capital ... a decision to live together as modern
people do, with or without matrimony ... a small, quiet home in some
spot convenient to both Baltimore and Washington--say Olde
Burgville,
whose refurbished Victorian townhouses are again fashionable....

After all, I'm only an hundred and eight years old.
Don't I have needs, too?

[Back to
Table of Contents]




From the Mouths of Babes by Trent
Hergenrader

Trent Hergenrader lives with his wife in
Madison, Wisconsin. An avid soccer fan, he worked for the US Soccer
Federation and has published articles about soccer in Play On! and
elsewhere. Since attending the Clarion workshop in 2004, he has sold
short stories to Cicada and to an anthology of stories for
victims of Hurricane Katrina, but it looks as though his first story to
see print will be this affecting little tale of father and son.

* * * *

"Dad, did you know there's a man spying on
us?"
Daniel asked, not looking up from the small collection of Tinker Toys
scattered on the motel's brown shag carpet.

Dr. Russell peered over the edge of yesterday's Montreal
Gazette. Still fully dressed in his customary tweed suit, he
reclined on the double bed, withhis shoes angled off the side so as not
to soil the already discolored comforter any further. "What do
you
mean, son?"

"Across the street," Daniel said. He pointed
to the
window, or least where the window ought to have been. It was taped over
with black garbage bags. "There's a man in the tree who watches
us."

Russell bit on the mouthpiece of his unlit pipe. The
hotel didn't allow smoking but having something in his mouth prevented
him from gnawing on what little remained of his fingernails. "Don't be
silly. The branches are dead and no one should climb it. It can't hold
the weight of a little boy. It certainly can't hold the weight of a
man."

"No, not in the branches--in the tree.
The
trunk itself. He looks out the hole in the trunk. He must have dug
underneath and come up inside it."

"Don't make me send you to bed early, young
man,"
Russell said limply. He slid his legs from the bed as if to prove the
point but he had little faith the ruse would work. Daniel had precious
little to keep him occupied. The television only had two
channels--one
scrolled vertically no matter how the antennae was adjusted and the
other showed nothing but indistinct flickering shapes moving around the
snowy picture tube--and Russell hadn't brought any suitable
reading
material for the boy, just some lab notes and a few texts full of small
print but lacking in interesting photos. Without the stimulus of toys
Daniel would have nothing to do except talk, and talking inevitably led
to asking questions. Russell was in no mood to answer questions this
evening. He considered switching off the lights and trying to coax the
boy into believing they were tired enough to sleep, but such a gesture
would simply condemn them to hours of fidgeting and tossing. That would
keep the boy awake and then the questions were sure to come, only this
time under the cover of darkness. No, better to keep him preoccupied,
playing quietly on the floor. Perhaps he could end this bit of
foolishness with a gentle reprimand. "Being spied on is a
serious
invasion of privacy. It's nothing to joke about."

"I'm not joking," Daniel said, fitting a
wooden
spool on the end of a green stick. "I'm telling the truth. You
should try it sometime."

Russell felt a prickling sensation across his scalp
as he broke into a sweat. "Damn it, Daniel. Now you've upset
me." He
half-folded, half-crumpled his paper and tossed it on the nightstand
and opened the drawer. He removed the vinyl-covered Gideon Bible and
thumped it ominously against his palm.

Daniel's face drooped in disappointment. "Dad, this
is no time for spankings or sermons. It's time for the truth. You go
first. How old am I?" He spoke with a weary tolerance Russell
recognized well, a tone he had heard often in his own voice the few
times he had been exposed to children.

"You're six years old."

"Fine. I'll go first, then. I broke the
window on purpose."

"You what? Daniel, are you not well? Please tell me
what you're feeling." Russell's head began to throb. Dr.
Spock's
Baby and Child Care lay somewhere at the bottom of his duffel bag
but he couldn't go digging for it now. Besides, Dr. Spock had never
studied a child like Daniel. The boy didn't fit the same mold as other
children.

"The window," Daniel said patiently,
pointing again
to the plastic bags billowing inward with the breeze. "I broke
it on
purpose."

"Why would you do something like that?"
Russell felt
a sharp pang in his stomach and envisioned an ulcer exploding like a
geyser. He felt he might be ill. He unbuttoned his collar and set his
pipe on the nightstand. "That nearly got us expelled from this
motel,
and I'm still responsible for the repairs. Why would you do such a
thing?" A thought occurred to him and he took a deep breath.
Russell
fumbled for the note pad and pen in the drawer. When he spoke again,
his voice had changed timbre; softer, more pleasant, he hoped. "Are you
angry about something?" He scribbled through the motel's garish
logo to
get the ink flowing.

"I broke it because of the man in the tree. He has a
machine. I saw him testing it on the room next to ours. He points it at
a window and the machine decodes the glass's vibrations. He can tell
what they're saying. So I threw my baseball through our window so he
couldn't do that."

"Nonsense," Russell said weakly. "We're talking
about you now, Daniel. This is very important. What's going through
your head?" He poised the pen.

Daniel sighed. Wordlessly, he lifted the flimsy
chain of Tinker Toys onto the bed. Most boys would have built things--houses,
trucks, maybe a space ship--with the various pieces, Russell
supposed,
but Daniel hadn't. The boy's creation was an odd, abstract model, long
and lanky like a caterpillar or snake. Daniel held his hands around it
as though it was a house of cards that might blow over and, when he was
satisfied it wasn't going to fall apart, he sat back on his heels.

"What do you have there?" Russell asked,
hoping the
toy could serve as some surrogate Rorschach.

"A scientist should know," Daniel said
irritably. "That's my dinner."

"What do you mean? You already had dinner. Enough
games, Daniel, my head hurts and I--"

"What did I eat?" Daniel interrupted.

"I don't remember." He tried to remember the
meal
they'd had just a few hours ago at the dingy diner connected to the
motel. He tried looking at the construction with a boy's imagination,
or with what he perceived a boy of six's imagination might be, but he
soon shook his head in defeat. He had no idea.

Daniel waited patiently, his gaze unflinching.
Russell shook his head with finality and was going to speak when an
image sprung to mind and, in that second, Russell understood
everything. There was no use denying it any longer. Just like so many
times in the lab, he'd been overthinking the problem; the answer now
appeared so obvious he was shocked he didn't recognize it sooner.
Perhaps it was because he didn't want to recognize it sooner. He put
the pen down and pinched the bridge of his nose.

Daniel spoke first. "It's a molecular model
of a
complex carbohydrate, similar to the spaghetti I had for dinner. I
could also map out the pasta sauce, meatballs, and other ingredients,
but I think I've made my point."

"Yes, Daniel, you have," he said in a low
voice.

"So ... how old am I?"

"Two years, nine months, three weeks, four
days," he
glanced at the clock, "and just over eleven hours old."
Russell paused. "Daniel, answer me this. What's the square root of nine
hundred
sixty-one?"

"Thirty-one," Daniel responded immediately.

"And the approximate area of ... let's say Bahrain?"

"Two hundred sixty-two square miles." The
boy
answered as though he'd been asked his favorite flavor of ice cream.

A moment of silence separated them.

"Pick up your things. We should go," the
doctor said
as he pulled a red spool off the model. His hands paused. Would the boy
even have any use for toys anymore? He tossed the spool next to
the container on the floor. Daniel could decide.

"Because of the man in the tree?"

"Yes, because of the man in the tree. Let's
go,"
Russell said. He dashed to the bathroom counter and swept their
toiletries into the wastebasket, then removed the plastic liner. He
twisted the top and threw it in the unzipped canvas bag lying on the
floor. Daniel watched as Russell worked his hands and paced the
L-shaped corridor between the bed and the wall. Russell snatched his
pipe and a half-eaten roll of antacids from the nightstand and
hurriedly dropped them in the bag.

"If we go now, they'll probably kill us."

Russell's hand froze as it reached for the car keys
on top of the television set. An icy bead of sweat trickled down his
side. "What did you say?"

"If we rush out of here, they'll know something is
wrong and they'll kill us. Or just you, probably."

Russell left the keys on the television and faced
Daniel. "May I ask you another question?"

"Of course, Dad," he said cheerily.

"Should we kill the man in the tree across the
street before we go?"

Daniel paused. "No, I don't think so. First,
we
don't have any instrument to kill him. Second, he's most likely been
trained for combat and could fend off an attack from a scientist and a
child. Third, we couldn't sneak up on him while we're under
surveillance and besides, approaching him would signal that we're aware
of his presence and he would call in backup. I can't see us succeeding
in an attempt to kill him so it's pointless to ponder whether his
theoretical death would help our theoretical escape."

"You didn't mention the moral consequences of our
actions, Daniel," the doctor said gently. Or did that even
matter now?

"Are you suggesting that Piaget's theory of
children's moral development is--"

"No, Daniel, I'm not suggesting anything,"
Russell
cut him off. Theoretical escape. Russell felt his chest
tighten. "One more question, quickly if you would."

"Certainly."

"When did you learn these things? When did you first
become aware that you knew these things?"

"A few hours ago," he said. "Around
four-thirty. It
just came on, like a television. Like when you first turn it on, the
tube is dark for a few seconds and you can just hear voices, but a
second later the picture snaps into view and everything becomes clear.
It was like that."

"Why didn't you say something earlier if you've been
like this all day?"

"They were listening, of course. I was throwing my
baseball up in the air and catching it. Then I felt funny for a moment,
and that's when I realized I could calculate the trajectory of each
throw. Then I noticed the man was in the tree. It took a few minutes
but I finally understood what he was doing. So, as naturally as I
could, I threw the ball through our room's window. You talked to the
manager immediately afterward and then we went for an early dinner
while he taped up the window. And you remember the trucker in the
diner, the fat one with the orange beard? He was one of them."

Russell blinked. The trucker had fallen into the
booth adjoining theirs with a heavy thud, causing him to spill
his coffee into its saucer.

"So was the woman with the blue eye shadow snapping
her bubblegum and the beatnik in the green beret at the counter. They
were all part of the team. In fact, I think only the waitress and the
short-order cook weren't. They were so conspicuous I thought
you suspected something but you just didn't want to scare me. Didn't
you notice me giggling?"

"Yes, but I thought...." I thought you
were just
being a normal little boy, he thought. "Quickly now,
Daniel, how
much do you know? We haven't much time."

"Well, I'm guessing there's some device embedded in
the frontal lobe of my cerebral cortex. I say that because I don't have
any enhanced motor skills."

"That's correct. I can sketch out the unit's basic
functions later. Continue, please," Russell said.

"I'm assuming there's been some sort of
informational download or perhaps a preloaded memory cache wired to my
brain, since none of this knowledge is experiential. Before I even know
I have a question, I seem to have an answer for it. It's like having a
library frontloaded inside my head."

"It's much more than a library, Daniel. How much do
you remember of your childhood?"

"I have no memories of a mother-figure," he
said
flatly. "I remember the lab but my memories cut in and out. I
remember
you. You were always there. You were always nice to me. I remember
being wrapped in a blanket one night and being placed in a car. The
wool blanket felt rough against my face. That next morning you drove us
across the border. You swore at the long customs lines."

"Yes," Russell said. "That was four
days ago."

Russell pondered what to do next; a part of him
wished he had an implant to help him decide. The plastic over
the window rustled. A fly pinged incessantly inside the light fixture.

"They thought the device didn't work?"
Daniel asked.

"They thought the device didn't work,"
Russell
echoed.

"They were probably going to dispose of me then,
right? Start over from scratch?" He spoke without emotion.

Russell could find no words. He could only shake his
head.

"It's okay, Dad, I know it wasn't you. I appreciate
what you did. Besides, I understand that failed experiments need to be
destroyed. They can be dangerous. I'm sure you broke a few dozen
protocols sneaking me out of there. I don't understand why you did it."

Tears blurred Russell's vision and it took a moment
before he could master his voice. "Because I cared for you very
much,
Daniel. And I believed you would be a success. You have no idea how
long I fought for you and I knew we were close, and the thought of them
taking my boy away was too much to bear. I felt the implant might yet
function if we gave it time, but then I began to fear what would happen
if it did suddenly work. I didn't want them using you like some vile
tool. So we fled and not a moment too soon, apparently. I never dreamed
they'd find us so soon. But for what it's worth, I think you're wrong,
Daniel. If they catch us they'll be upset, but they won't murder me for
what I've done."

"Oh, they wouldn't," Daniel said with a
sudden look
of surprise. "But they're not the ones with the man in the
tree. These
are Russians."

Russell nearly swallowed his tongue. "Russians? What
are you talking about?"

The boy shrugged. "They're Russians. Their
accents,
their mannerisms and body language are all quite distinct. They're
Russians. What more can I say?"

"This is impossible. We've got to get out of
here."
Russell grabbed the duffel bag, inspected the contents, and threw it on
the bed. He surveyed the room shaking his head.

"Dad, wait...."

"Forget packing, we'll just be off...."

"Dad, wait...."

Russell hurried to the phone and put the receiver to
his ear. "I'll call the lab and tell them what's happening.
They can
contact the appropriate government agencies...."

"You're wasting your time," Daniel said, and
something hard in his voice made Russell stop, his finger poised over
the rotary dial. "They've probably tapped the phone by now and
besides,
that's an international call. They'll never let it go through."

"To the manager's office, then. We'll call the
police."

"They'll just cut the phone lines and kill him, too."

"Out the bathroom window." Russell could
hardly
recognize the frantic, high-pitched voice as his own. His heartbeat
drummed in his ears.

Daniel shook his head. "Someone's bound to
be back
there. They wanted to be absolutely sure they had the right man. That's
why they were all at the diner. I'm guessing they've been discussing
contingency plans before executing. They should be here any minute."

Russell slammed the receiver into the cradle hard
enough to make the bell ring. "Damn it, damn it,
Daniel," he shrieked. "Why didn't you tell me sooner? Why didn't you
give us a chance
to
escape?"

"Because," he said, jutting out a quivering
bottom
lip. "It wasn't going to do any good. They had us. I didn't
want anyone
else getting hurt." A tear streaked down his chubby cheek. "And I
wanted to spend as much time with you as I could. I love you, Dad. I'm
going to miss you."

Russell swooned and put a sweaty hand on the wall to
balance himself. His face felt numb.

Daniel's head turned at the sharp rap on the door
but Dr. Russell's eyes stayed fixed on the boy.

[Back to
Table of Contents]




Films by Kathi Maio

A LABOR OF LOVE--AND THUMBS

You don't have to be a Luddite to distrust
technology as the ultimate tool for all human endeavor. Computers make
the running of the most elaborate scientific sequences a practical
reality (completing the most complex computations while the scientist
is still young enough to figure out what they mean). And they do a
bang-up job of balancing a checkbook, too.

But as for the art and craft of animated filmmaking,
the jury--at least the one I'm sitting on--is still out.
Over the years
of doing this column, I've marveled, like everyone else, at how far CGI
has come, and how well it can now be integrated into live-action films.
Although I had my issues with the LOTR trilogy, I was duly impressed by
the character of Gollum. The performance-capture (aka motion capture,
or mo-cap) of the acting of Andy Serkis, and its translation into a
deformed digital character that seemed even more developed than Frodo
or Aragorn, was a wonder.

I felt the same way about the impressive performance
of Alan Tudyk as the enigmatic Sonny in the otherwise negligible I,
Robot. However, is it a good thing that the CGI robot was
so much more interesting and believable than the (largely) human
protagonist played by Will Smith? I think not. It somehow made the many
shortcomings of the film seem even more apparent.

And when more than one significant mo-cap
performance is put in a film, it seems to create even more
possibilities for failure. Movies like last year's Polar Express
showed that populating an entire film with mo-cap characters produces a
movie that's downright creepy. (And not in a good way.)

On the other hand, movies like Shrek 1 and 2
and last year's The Incredibles give me new hope for
out-and-out computer animation. Cartoons created by talented artists
and writers using computer technology can work--and work
beautifully.
But that doesn't mean I'm ready to abandon the old ways.

There is something about hand-crafted art that lends
it a special enchantment. Would Hayao Miyazaki's brilliant work have
the same warmth and wonder if it came entirely from cyberspace?
Luckily, we will likely never know, since the brilliant Mr. Miyazaki
seems intent on making a last stand as a master of hand-drawn cell
animation. (Although even he has acknowledged, somewhat
philosophically, that his is "a dying craft.")

Much as I hate to disagree with such a great sensei
of animated art, I hope that he is wrong about hand-drawn animation
dying. And I would hope that many of the traditional crafts of
animation will somehow live long and prosper in the twenty-first
century. If you'd asked me whether I was hopeful on that score a few
months ago, I probably would have said no. But today I am in a much
cheerier frame of mind. At least about one form of traditional
animation, known as stop-motion.

Born in the earliest days of film, stop-motion model
animation came of age in the hands of artist Willis O'Brien (The
Lost World, 1925; King Kong, 1933) who helped train the
mid-twentieth-century master, Ray Harryhausen (The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms, 1953; Jason and the Argonauts, 1963). But
that was then, and this is now.

Since the sixties, stop-motion work has been more a
matter of nostalgia than anything else. Baby boomers and their kids and
grandkids enjoy rewatching the Rankin/Bass TV classic, Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). But pulling an old cartoon out of
mothballs every holiday season doesn't really foster the continuation
of an art.

However, there are two men who grew up watching
Harryhausen and Rankin/Bass who were interested in keeping stop-motion
alive. And both of them, bless their hearts, released films through
major studios in the early autumn of this past year.

Tim Burton, that master of the offbeat and comically
macabre, is one of them. Burton, who was trained as an animator, is, of
course, much better known for live-action filmmaking. Nevertheless,
with the help of director Henry Selick, writers Michael McDowell and
Caroline Thompson, composer Danny Elfman, and scores and scores of
technicians, artisans, and actors, he did create a lovely little film
called The Nightmare Before Christmas back in 1993.

Although the film did only adequate box office when
it was first released, it is a case study in the glories of film
aftermarket. While I am not privy to the financial breakdowns, I am
absolutely certain that the film's big money and lasting influence, as
well as an insured backing for Burton's next stop-mo feature came from
sales of videos and an elaborate line of tchotchkes, figurines, and
memorabilia that continue to do very well with the geek-goth crowd to
this very day.

Whatever works.

Tim Burton's name is above the title--nay, is
part
of the title--but he had little to do with the day-to-day
creation of Tim
Burton's Corpse Bride. Although credited as co-director, as well as
the co-creator (along with noted animation artist, Carlos Grangel) of
the movie's characters, Burton was actually working on his Charlie
remake during much of the film's lengthy production. While Burton was
immersed in a vat of chocolate, another team lead by director Mike
Johnson did the extremely labor-intensive work on creating the feature.

And what a feature it is! Gruesome, yet romantic, it
is Dickens by way of Edward Gorey--with song and dance. In
short,
despite Burton's lack of daily involvement, Corpse Bride is
very much a Tim Burton film in both tone and content. That means that
very young children may not know what to make of this morbid "cartoon,"
but adult animation fans and geek-goth audiences worldwide will enjoy
themselves immensely.

The film opens as two sets of selfish parents, one
aristocratic and penniless, the other nouveau riche merchants
(fishmongers, no less), arrange the marriage of their two pallid
offspring. Victor Van Dort (voiced by Burton's male muse, Johnny Depp)
is a shy, natural scientist. He dreads his role as sacrificial groom
until he meets his prospective bride, the gentle and waifish Victoria
Everglot (Emily Watson).

It looks like an arranged marriage that just might
work out. But poor stressed Victor keeps flubbing his vows, and when he
runs off to the nearby spooky-ooky woods to practice them under the
stern glances of a murder of crows, he ends up pledging his troth to a
young woman, the title cadaverous bride, who lies buried in a shallow
grave before him.

Boy meets Ghoul and is immediately whisked to an
underworld that is both more colorful and more lively than the gray and
repressed land of the living above. Death really doesn't look so bad.
Not on Emily, the corpse bride (Burton's own bride, Helena Bonham
Carter), anyway. With her lively personality and blue-hued beauty, it
is clear that death becomes her. (And what's not to love about
detachable limbs and a Peter Lorre-ish pet maggot who pops out of her
eye for a bit of commentary?) Emily's Blithe Spirit makes the ensuing
love triangle a more difficult choice than you'd think.

Corpse Bride is a bit less operatic than Nightmare
Before Christmas, but frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman
still contributes several songs that serve the plot well, even if they
aren't particularly memorable numbers.

All in all, Corpse Bride's story is both
involving and amusing. However, those looking for traditional cartoon
slapstick and hijinks should look elsewhere (like a few paragraphs
further in this column.) The ending, too, is far from the wacky upbeat
finales we have come to expect from most American studio animated
features. The conclusion here is sweetly elegiac, and quite moving.

But it is the look of the film that most impresses.
Burton's many collaborators have made significant strides in
stop-motion animation. Some digital enhancements were utilized, but in
most instances the film was still hand-crafted through painstaking
frame-by-frame puppet animation. It's just that new silicon skins make
the figures used seem even more eerily lifelike. And a more modern
internal joint and gear works have made facial expressions all the more
subtle and body movements more fluid. Production designer Alex McDowell
and associates also deserve kudos for the film's thirty-five highly
atmospheric settings.

A stop-mo movie this beautiful to look at would be
worth watching no matter what it had to say. But the fact that the film
tells an engaging story that delves into Tim Burton's favorite themes
makes it all the more meaningful. Like Beetlejuice back in
1988, Corpse Bride tells us that the Dead R Us, and that's
nothing to fret about. Furthermore, misfits (needless to say, the most
interesting folks around) can eventually find sustenance, even
happiness, when they find one another.

Two odd blokes who make a formidable and endearing
team can also be found in the film work of Nick Park. Many years ago,
while a student at Britain's National Film and Television School, young
Mr. Park molded a bald and big-toothed gent named Wallace (always
voiced with folksy English charm by Peter Sallis) and teamed him with a
long-suffering (and much brighter) hound named Gromit. The two
mismatched housemates have appeared in several short films over the
last sixteen years--two of which, "The Wrong
Trousers" and "A Close
Shave" won Oscars as best animated shorts.

When Park, one of the leading lights of the Aardman
animation studio, joined forces with DreamWorks in LaLaLand, he was
initially reluctant to commit his beloved Wallace and Gromit to the
Hollywood feature treatment. So Park's first feature was Chicken Run
(2000), a brilliant homage to The Great Escape featuring the
brave and resourceful inmates of a stalag-like chicken coop.

Now, finally, we have a Wallace and Gromit feature.
And it was worth the wait. In its own way, Wallace & Gromit:
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is also a homage to old movies. In
this case, old Universal creature features, as well as schlocky British
horror. Park has said that his is the first vegetarian Hammer Horror
flick. For the filmmaker's monster is a giant bunny who lays waste to
village gardens right before the Giant Vegetable Competition at the
estate of the animal- and veggie-loving Lady Tottington (like the
Corpse Bride, voiced to perfection by Helena Bonham Carter).

On the bunny trail, hoping to guard all "veg," large
and small, is the intrepid Wallace and faithful Gromit. They now run a
humane pest control business called Anti-Pesto, and they suck up all
errant rabbits with their Bun-Vac 6000, another of Wallace's zany
inventions. The Bun-Vac works quite well, without harming a single
little fluffy. Wallace's new brainwashing device is much less
successful, and leads to the complications of the plot.

Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a traditional
cartoon, full of puns and pratfalls, fever-pitched chases, and
generally goofy goings-on. It is also gloriously traditional in terms
of its stop-mo production values.

Although Park, co-director Steve Box, and their
extensive crew, like Corpse Bride's creators, make judicious
and very limited use of computerized CGI, there is a purposeful
low-tech and roughly hand-hewn look to this delightful film. Park has
called this slightly lumpy and uneven look "thumby,"
and you really get
a sense of fingers working Plasticine as you watch Curse of the
Were-Rabbit. The craft isn't hidden or smoothed away here. Yet,
surprisingly perhaps, the exposed technique makes the movie even more
magical.

Like Burton, Nick Park also has ongoing themes in
his films. And many of the filmmaker's repeating motifs are designed to
encourage humans to show animals a little compassion and respect. These
ideas are most obviously expressed in Park's Academy Award-winning
rumination on zoo confinement, Creature Comforts (1989), as
well as the aforementioned Chicken Run. But the themes are also
ever-present in the relationship between Wallace and his silent and
wise canine companion. And in Were-Rabbit, there is the added
conflict between the humane Anti-Pesto team and the blood-thirsty
villain of the piece, a slimy, aristocratic hunter named Victor
Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), who wants nothing better than to blast
the bunnies to kingdom come.

Compassion isn't a value most cartoons can boast.
It's nice to see it openly expressed in the works of Nick Park. And
it's even more satisfying to see the imprint of his thumb in the side
of Wallace's bald pate.

When it comes to animation, the old ways are still
very fine ways. It does my heart good to see that two well-respected
filmmakers are keeping a proud tradition flourishing.

[Back to
Table of Contents]




The Capacity to Appear Mindless by
Mike Shultz

Mike Shultz's previous stories for us include
"Refried Clichs" and "Old as Books."
For this new one, he has drawn
upon his own experiences as a high school teacher, but he assures us
that he has only broken a student's arm a few times and he has never
eaten a student teacher. That's his story and he's sticking to it.

* * * *

Boarsnout Spinesnapper was having a devil of a time
getting the twenty little goblins in his third period math class to
understand their nine times-tables. Well, seventeen goblins and three
humans, he corrected himself. Something he hadn't gotten used to since
the war ended and integration began. He took a deep breath and looked
out over the room full of shouting, clawing students, all eager to
answer his last question. If the next goblin didn't get it, Boar swore
he'd eat him for lunch.

The yellow-haired human boy, Suhz-Eat (or however it
was pronounced--human names were impossible tongue-twisters)
raised his
hand. Boar supposed it was some human method of wanting to be called
upon, but he decided against letting him try. Humans were terrible at
math, and his principal had made a point of telling the teachers to
treat humans with respect. Boar didn't want to embarrass the poor boy.

"Pigface?" Boar said, calling on his
favorite
student, a clever young goblinette with dung-beads dangling from her
ear hairs.

"Mr. Spinesnapper, could you repeat the question?"

He approached and grabbed her by the ear, shouting
into it. "What is eight times nine?"

"Thanks," she said, smiling up at him. She
had
requested that he yell in her ears, and she always liked when he
remembered. Boar didn't mind--anything to make a goblin feel
special.
That was why he taught.

"Well, then? Eight times nine."

"Eighty-nine!" Pigface shouted.

The room erupted into chaos, some students cheering
for her, others realizing she was wrong and swatting her forcefully.

"Nope," Boar said. He was getting upset.
Trouble
computing eight times three, he'd understand--goblins of
this
age were notoriously dimwitted with their three times-tables. But nines
were easy.

Stab Farpisser in the front row pounded on his desk,
shouting, but Boar couldn't hear him over the noise.

"Yes, Stab? You have to scream it."
Something he
should have known by now. A class troublemaker, Stab never followed the
rules.

The other kids saw the exchange, though, and quieted
down. They liked Stab and wanted to hear what wisecrack he might come
out with.

Stab stared at Boar with one bulbous yellow eye,
keeping his other two on his classmates to see their reaction.

"When are we ever going to use this stuff, Mr.
Spinesnapper?"

"Yeah! Anyway!" another goblin called. Then
they all
joined in.

"This stuff is fewmets!"

"Can't we learn torture instead?"

"Yeah, teach us about thumbscrews! Something we'll
actually use!"

Boar was about to praise them for their fine
independent thinking when he noticed the human boy's face. Little
Suhz-Eat looked petrified.

"Suhz-Eat, is everything okay?"

Suhz-Eat froze in his seat, his puny hands grasping
the edges of his desk. He nodded vigorously.

"And my name is Suzette," he said in a
trembling
voice.

"Oh, sorry. I was going by the spelling on my class
roster. Do you know the answer?"

Suzette paused and then shook his head. Boar heard a
few snickers around the room, and someone shouted "Dumb
human."
Unfortunately, Boar didn't see who. His principal said something at the
last faculty meeting about goblins bullying humans. Boar wasn't going
to tolerate that kind of garbage in his classroom.

"Maybe I need to explain it in a way that you can
relate to," Boar told the class. He had a plan: If he could get
Suzette
to give the right answer, they'd try harder. If a human could do it,
they'd realize that they should be able to, as well.

"Suppose you just won a battle, and you're taking
spoils," he said, looking especially at Suzette. "What
are you going to
do?"

Nearly everyone clamored to give the answer; to his
disappointment, Suzette wasn't among them. And it was such an easy
question.

"Eat their fingers," Pigface said. "Especially if
they were human."

Everyone laughed. Boar, like every goblin, loved
human fingers. Unfortunately, they'd been hard to get ever since the
treaty.

"Yes. But how many fingers will you eat from each
human?"

"Nine!" Stab called.

"Why?"

"Because you always leave a middle finger on one
hand for good luck," Pigface chimed in.

"Exactly. So suppose you eat the fingers of eight
humans. How many fingers in all would that--"

That's when the sound started. Boar stopped
mid-sentence. Green warty heads turned this way and that, seeking the
source.

"All right," Boar said, trying not to sound
alarmed. "Who's crying?"

No one answered. Boar's worry grew, knowing that
crying indicated mental disability or severe emotional problems.

"Tell me right now, or I'll break all your arms!"

"Mr. Spinesnapper," Stab said, "it's
Suzette. The
human."

Boar looked. Suzette sank down into his seat and hid
his face with a scroll, but sure enough, tears were streaming down his
cheeks. In fact, all three humans in the room looked ready to bawl. It
didn't make sense.

"Suzette?" Boar said, rushing over to him.

"Hey! Not fair!" Pigface said. "He
gets all the
attention just because he's crying? I bet he's faking it!"

Boar stopped long enough to bite off a piece of
Pigface's ear as he passed her desk. That would teach her. Pigface
humpfed and fingered the wound.

Oddly, Suzette looked horrified at Boar's mild
discipline.

"What's wrong?" Boar said, reaching him and
kneeling
at his side. "Are you feeling sick?"

Suzette looked at him with both of his wide,
frightened eyes. Maybe that's why they were constantly so scared, Boar
thought. Goblins always kept an eye or two askance to watch out for
danger. Humans only had two eyes, and they seemed to be stuck always
looking at the same thing. That would have to make them a little jumpy,
endlessly worrying about something sneaking up on them.

"Listen," Boar whispered. "I know it
was a hard
question. How about I give you the answer?"

Boar leaned over and whispered "seventy-two" in his
ear. Suzette squeaked in fright, but Boar didn't know what was so scary
about seventy-two. He returned to the front of the room.

"Well, Suzette, what's eight times nine?"

All eyes were on him.

"Seventy-two," he mumbled, lips quivering.

"Yes! Great thinking!"

"Mr. Spinesnapper told him," someone
whispered.

For a moment, there was silence. Then, Pigface burst
out crying. Soon, the whole class was sobbing hysterically. Boar went
up and down the rows, breaking arms and boxing ears. He bit off
Pigface's ear again; it had regenerated already, and she needed
correction. All of this was her fault.

But by the time he got them to stop, the gong rang.
They all abruptly stopped crying and ran out of the room, headed to
their next class.

* * * *

The elf-mail delivery came at the end of the day,
when Boar was getting ready to go home. He patted the elf on its head
and sent it on its way before reading it.

* * * *

EMERGENCY FACULTY MEETING. FOR FACULTY.

AFTER SCHOOL. DUE TO EMERGENCY.

IF YOU DID NOT READ THIS MESSAGE.

READ IT AGAIN.

* * * *

Boar sighed. Another mind-numbing meeting. He was so
exhausted.

On the way to the Faculty Room, he bumped into
Singbad Sharptusk, the biology teacher. She smelled like cat scat,
probably from some experiment she was doing with her classes. Boar
loved the smell, but he didn't love the way Singbad was always trying
to mate with him. She rubbed up against him as they walked.

"Hey, Boar, hear about today's scandal?"

"No, what?"

"Some teacher scared a human kid half to death.
Gonna be some body parts flying at the meeting today. Mr. Thunderballs
is seriously pissed."

Boar felt his throat constrict. It couldn't have
been him, could it? Thunderballs would eat him alive.

"Didn't hear about that," Boar managed.

"Yeah, you know this diversity and respect
crap,"
Singbad said, rolling her eyes. "But most of us are smart
enough to
play along. I wonder what moron did it?"

"I wonder, too." Boar also wondered if it
was too
late to flee the building. The thing was, he actually believed in
diversity and respect. Yes, humans were a little slow, and smelled
something awful. He didn't really understand them. But deep down
inside, he knew they were goblins just like him. He hated the way
Singbad mocked the idea of treating them equally. Boar wanted to
confront her about it, but they arrived at the Faculty Room before he
found the courage. It was hard to argue with prejudiced people, and a
little scary--they'd turn on you in the snapping of a kitten's
neck.

The room was nearly full. As the last few teachers
filed in and sat, Principal Thunderballs took the podium. Everyone fell
silent.

"Today," Thunderballs began, "a
member of our very
own staff treated one of our students with insuffusable indignity."

Gasps arose from the assembled teachers.

"Rip his arms off!" the history teacher
called.

"Boil him alive!"

"Tear his spine out!"

That one hit too close to the mark. Boar slumped
down into his chair, wondering if this was how Suzette felt in his
class.

"How many times have I told you, this is a new
era?"
Thunderballs continued. "Humans are a part of goblin society,
now, like
it or not."

"It was a human?"

"That's terrible!"

But not every goblin liked humans.

"A human? Who cares?" someone called out.

"Who said that?" Thunderballs bellowed.

"Him." Someone pushed forward a young goblin
with
orange hair and bright red eyes. Boar didn't know him.

Singbad leaned over. "Student
teacher," she
whispered.

"It wasn't me," the student teacher said,
suddenly
afraid.

Mr. Thunderballs strode into the crowd. Teachers
snatched back their chairs, clearing a path for him.

"I didn't say it!"

At the last second, the student teacher turned and
ran. But Thunderballs hadn't won his position by being slow and weak.
He snatched the student teacher by the hair and lifted him off the
ground, his feet kicking wildly.

"This is what happens to the next teacher who
indignifies a human!" Thunderballs cried.

With a smooth, easy motion, he tore the student
teacher's arms off and tossed them to the crowd.

The room erupted into chaos as teachers scrambled
for the morsels. His legs came next, and then the rest of him. His
liver landed between Boar and Singbad, and Boar half-heartedly wrestled
her for it, eventually letting her take it all. She quickly gulped it
down.

"What's wrong?" Singbad whispered as the
room came
back to order. "Indigestion?"

"Something like that," Boar said.

Thunderballs returned to the podium.

"Here's our action plan. Because of this one person,
this one bigoted goblin among us, we're going to spend the next six
hours in a special seminar: 'Goblins and Humans, Chained in
Love.'"

Moans and complaints filled the room.

"Enough!" Thunderballs shouted. "Remember, if it
weren't for this one monster among us--" Thunderballs
swept his gaze
around the room, locking his middle eye momentarily and menacingly on
Boar. "--Then you could be home by now, eating dirt from
between your
spouse's toes. But you'll have to save that pleasure for tomorrow
night."

Boar almost didn't hear him. He clutched his
shoulders tight to his body, picturing the poor student teacher. If his
colleagues found out it was his fault, he'd be their next after-school
snack.

Thunderballs announced a short break to clean up the
mess from the student teacher. After the break, and a minor brawl
between the secretary and the wrestling coach, the seminar began.
Thunderballs divided them into "action groups" and gave
them
skull-holders filled with scrolls, instructing everyone to read them.

Singbad, by rosy bad luck, was in Boar's group.

"Listen to this one," she said. "It
says only point
zero one percent of all humans can read. And one hundred and three
percent come from households below the median income level."

"Um-hmm," Boar replied. He was making a show
of
reading the scrolls, in case Thunderballs saw him, but he couldn't
concentrate.

Had he really scared Suzette? Boar was willing to
accept responsibility; the problem was, he couldn't figure out what
he'd done wrong. Maybe he needed this seminar, after all. He looked up
at the podium, hoping to see Thunderballs. Their principal wasn't the
brightest goblin around, but he dealt with the community far more than
Boar did. Surely he possessed some wisdom about humans that he could
pass along.

But Thunderballs wasn't there.

A strong, warty hand fell on Boar's shoulder, nearly
knocking him out of his seat.

"Looking for me?"

Boar quickly got to his feet and turned, looking up.
Thunderballs was easily two feet taller.

"No, sir." He had to stand his ground or
risk being
eaten.

"So, Spinesnapper. How many B-PAOT's do you have?"

Boar didn't like where this was going.

"Three."

"Takes five to be tenurized, right?"

Boar nodded. He always tried his best, but Bailing
the Principal's Ass Out of Trouble was difficult. It meant passing a
kid when his parents complained, even if the kid learned nothing. Or
not busting a kid for selling giggleweed if her father was on the
school board.

"That student teacher wasn't tenurized
either,"
Thunderballs said.

Boar gulped, getting the point. If Thunderballs
tried to tear apart a tenured teacher, the Union would jump him, and
they would have a free-for-all. The building would be sacked, and
Thunderballs would find his head on a spit, turning slowly over a fire
in the faculty lounge. But until Boar earned two more B-PAOT's, he was
fair game.

"I see that you understand." Thunderballs
poked him
in the chest with a clawed finger, drawing blood. "You'd better
pay
really good attention to this seminar. I'm going to be watching you,
and expecting improvements in your classroom."

With that, Thunderballs strode calmly to the podium.
Boar hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath. He released it and
fell into his chair.

"What was all that about?" Singbad said.

"Shhh," Boar replied. "Pay
attention." He pointed to
the front.

"Let us begin," Thunderballs said. "You know what
High Goblin Command Ordinance Eleven is. Say it for me."

"No Goblin Left With a Mind," they said in
unison.

"Yes. Our government wants mindless goblins capable
only of regurgitizing memorized information. On the surface, that's
what we must seem to produce. But we still value real teaching around
here, don't we?"

"Absolutely!" someone called.

"Right. We must help our students think
independently while giving them the capacity to appear mindless. You
can't survive in today's world without the ability to turn off your
brain. But we're going to sneak some independent thinking into the
curriculum, and that means breaking away from old prejudices. We'll
start with a discussion on false stereotypes about humans. Any ideas
out there?"

"They treat their females like second-class
citizens," Singbad called out, her tone scornful.

"Well, that one's true. I'm looking for false ones
here."

"They're all stupid," someone else said.

"Excellent!" Thunderballs said. "But
let's phrase
these in a more dignifying way: 'It's not true that they're all
stupid.' A recent study showed that at least one human in a
thousand is
intelligent. Anyone else?"

"They aren't all clumsy."

"Or ugly."

"Right!" Thunderballs said.

"They don't all taste good."

"Exactly!" Thunderballs said. "I
remember one time
when I was sucking marrow from a human thighbone after a battle,
and...." He trailed off. "Well, you understand. We all
need to be on
guard against these insidulous thoughts. Now, I have an activity
planned. It's called the Chain of Love, and was the inspiration for the
title of this seminar."

He reached down beneath the podium and retrieved a
stack of miniature scrolls.

"This is going to make you all more
diversity-minded. You'll each get a scroll with an objective written on
it. For example..." He opened a scroll. "'Find someone
who knows why
humans eat weeds.' If you get this scroll, you must find a
fellow
teacher who knows the answer and join hands. And someone will find you,
as long as you can answer their question, and you'll join hands, and
eventually we'll have the Chain of Love. Miss Burngossip, please
distribute the scrolls."

Miss Burngossip, Thunderball's voluptuous secretary,
handed them out, and soon everyone was milling around the noisy room,
searching for answers.

Boar's table got their scrolls last. With no small
trepidation, he opened his.

* * * *

FIND SOMEONE.

WHO HAS SEEN.

A HUMAN'S BELLY BUTTON.

* * * *

Boar nearly choked. Surely Thunderballs gave this
one to him intentionally, just to see him fail. He'd seen zillions of
goblin bellybuttons, but humans wore "clothing," and
their belly
buttons were always covered. In fact, they'd been warned that the
humans were sensitive about their clothes, and Thunderballs instituted
a school rule that neither students nor teachers were allowed to tear
them off.

Dejected, Boar nonetheless called out, "Anyone seen
a human belly button? Belly button, anyone? Belly button?"

Most of the chain was already formed when Boar, to
his delight, found Ms. Spittletongue, a phys. ed. teacher who once
accidentally spied a human's navel during a game of Head Smashers. This
Chain of Love wasn't so bad after all! Now, if only someone asked him a
question he knew the answer to....

"Hey, Boar, should've tried you from the
beginning,"
Singbad said, hurrying up to him with her scroll in hand. "No
one else
can do this one. Can you correctly pronounce and spell two human names?"

Boar perked up. "Yes! I just learned a new
one
today!"

Suddenly, he realized that everyone was looking at
him. This was the last gap in the chain. Mr. Thunderballs watched with
a wicked gleam in his eyes.

The pressure was on, but Boar was confident. He'd
show Thunderballs exactly how good a teacher he was.

"Suzette," he said, spelling it out. "A friendly
little human boy in my class. And John. Rhymes with pond, if pond
didn't have a 'D.'"

"Spell it," Thunderballs said.

"J-O-H-N."

The room erupted in laughter.

"Sorry, Spinesnapper," Thunderballs said. "Any idiot
knows there's no 'H.'"

"Yes, there is. You know how humans spell things in
such weird--"

Gasps.

"A stereotype!"

"He's prejudiced!"

"He's the one!"

Boar's head dropped. They'd discovered him. He
glanced at Singbad, but even she averted two of her eyes in
embarrassment.

"Yes, esteemed faculty," Thunderballs
announced. "The culprit has revealed himself. Today in class, he
humilyized a
human."

"Boar, you didn't!"

"Let's eat him!"

"Just a minute," Thunderballs said. "We ate a math
teacher last week, and he's still regrowing in the vat. I'm going to
give Mr. Spinesnapper another chance."

He looked directly at Boar.

"Tomorrow, I'll observe his third-period class. If
he hasn't eliminated all prejudice by the end of the period, and see to
it that every goblin in the room wants to be Suzette's best
friend..."
Thunderballs grinned rows of sharp teeth. "We feast on
Spinesnapper."

As the meeting dismissed, Boar slunk quietly out the
back. This was it, then. His career, not to mention his life, was over.
He could convince a few of his students to be nicer to Suzette. But all
of them? And little monsters like Stab?

Impossible. He might as well spread pixie-jam on
himself so they'd eat him quickly and get it over with.

Well, at least he could visit Suzette's parents and
apologize, maybe even offer to help him with his homework. Perhaps
they'd put in a good word with Thunderballs.

Otherwise, he was goblin grub.

* * * *

Halfway through third period the next morning, Boar
was sweating flagons.

It started terribly. Mr. Thunderballs came in and
addressed the class, telling them how horribly they and their teacher
had treated Suzette. Boar immediately saw the speech's effects: His
students glared resentfully at Suzette for getting them in trouble.
Even Suzette reacted with visible annoyance--he saw their glares
and
knew what caused them. That quick, all the good Boar had accomplished
the night before by visiting the boy's home unraveled.

He had managed to clear up the trouble from
yesterday with them, though. Apparently, the example about eating human
fingers frightened Suzette. And upon reflection, that made sense.
Humans didn't regenerate. On his walk home, Boar chastised himself
repeatedly for being so dense. Humans were more complex than he'd
thought.

Well, he'd stayed up all last night preparing, and
it was time to unleash his master plan. Thankfully, his class was
sympathetic to his plight, trying to help him look good in front of the
principal. Students, as always, turned against the highest authority
figure in the room. But sometimes his students' version of
"help"
wasn't in line with his own.

"Class, we're going to play a game," he told
them.

They cheered wildly. Stab pounded so hard on his
desk that it cracked, and his next blow broke it in half. In the back
of the room, Thunderballs shook his head and wrote something on his
scroll.

"It's called 'Chain of Love.' What
happens is I give
you a little scroll...."

They loved it, even the humans. But just as the
chain neared completion and Thunderballs was looking pleasantly
surprised, Boar heard hushed whispers cutting through the general din.
Hurrying over, he saw a knot of students around Suzette.

He was crying.

If Thunderballs saw Suzette's tears, Boar was dead
meat.

"We just wanted to see his belly button,"
Pigface
said.

Boar kept one eye on Thunderballs and studied
Pigface closely with the other two. Mischief capered in her innocent
expression. Was she jealous of all the attention Suzette was getting?

Boar pushed into the throng. If they remained where
they were, standing in the way, Thunderballs wouldn't see Suzette. Now
to get him to stop crying.

"Suzette, what happened?"

"He tried to take my clothes off."

"Who?"

"Him!" He pointed at Pigface.

"Pigface is a girl," Stab said.

"Hush, Stab. Listen, Suzette. These guys didn't grow
up with clothes. They didn't know that you never take them off. But
they do now, right?"

Boar glared at them. They all nodded, except for
Pigface.

"That's stupid," she said.

Boar reached out and grabbed her dung-dangled ear.

"Maybe you didn't hear me," he said.

But the chastised goblins were returning to the
game, and Suzette was still sniffling. Thunderballs would see her.

Thinking quick, he turned to Stab.

"Stab, I need your help."

"Me?" he said, dumbstruck but pleased. "Anything."

Boar hoped he wasn't making a gigantic mistake. "Go
out in the hall and run back and forth, shouting. Then bang on the door
and scream 'Thunderballs rots!' or something."

"Why would you want me to...." He cast a
stealthy
eye at Thunderballs, who was scribbling in his scroll. "Oh, I
get it.
Sure thing, Mr. Spinesnapper."

Boar stepped in front of Suzette as Stab left the
room. A moment later, the class heard his screams.

The door nearly came in on its hinges.

"Thunderballs drinks milk for breakfast!"
Stab
shouted from the hall. "Thunderballs drinks milk!"

Then his footsteps crashed away down the hall.

Thunderballs was furious.

"Was that your student?" he said.

"I don't know," Boar replied. "You'd
better catch
him, sir. I would, but I'm running a class here, trying to teach
diversity."

His eyes narrowed. "I'll be back,"
he said, storming
out.

Quickly, Boar turned to Suzette.

"It's going to be all right," he said. "Do you
remember what we talked about last night?"

He nodded.

"Well, it's just like I said. Goblins respect
toughness. Next time Pigface does something you don't like, poke one of
her eyes out."

His brow crinkled in consternation. "But
that's
horrible!"

"Not really. Goblins regenerate. She'll grow it back
in no time."

"But then she'll eat my fingers. She told me so
yesterday after class." Suzette wiped a lingering tear from his
cheek.

"No. She'll think you're cool for standing up to
her. Now, I've had enough of this Chain of Love. Why don't you get back
to your seat?"

By the time Thunderballs returned, a battered Stab
in hand, Boar was passing out math scrolls. Stab grinned and gave Boar
a conspiratorial wink as he sat down.

"Mr. Thunderballs, a copy for you, too, so you can
follow along," Boar said. Principals liked things like that.

"Okay, Stab, why don't you do number one for us."

"Nine times eight is seventy-two," he said. "I
remember that from yesterday."

"Don't we all." Boar continued asking
questions,
giving the humans as many chances as the goblins. Now for the rest of
his master plan. He'd drilled Suzette on her times tables the previous
night.

"Suzette, how about the next one?"

He looked down at the scroll in his hand and gulped.

"You gave him the hardest one," Stab said,
sounding
surprised.

And indeed it was. Nineteen times three. Why hadn't
he scratched that one off? Not only did it involve a two-digit number;
it also involved the dreaded threes, and they hadn't practiced those.

At the back of the room, Thunderballs grinned. Boar
couldn't skip the question. If only he hadn't given him a copy!

"If you need time to--" Boar started
to say.

"Fifty-seven!" Suzette said.

"Correct!" Boar shouted, ecstatic.

"Whoa," Stab said. "He's smart."

"Oh, yeah?" Pigface said. "How'd you
know the
answer, human? Did Mr. Spinesnapper whisper it in your ear?"

"No." He met Pigface's three-eyed glare. "I just
pictured how many it would be if I poked out the eyes of every goblin
in this room."

For a moment, the room was silent. Then Stab stood
up and said, "Suzette, you are the coolest goblin I
know!" He threw
back his head and laughed like a wild hyena.

"Let's try it!" Gurgle Nosepicker shouted.

"Yeah! Poke out someone's eyes!"

"Okay, okay!" Boar said. "Just one
person, though,
to illustrate the idea."

"Me! Me!"

"No, me!"

Boar pointed at Stab. "You're up. But you
must
promise to listen carefully to the rest of the lesson until your eyes
heal, and don't puke on your scroll when they first start to grow back
and you get dizzy."

"I promise!"

"Okay," Boar said. "Who wants to do
the poking?
Suzette, would you like to do the honors?"

Suzette's face whitened and he shook his head. "No
thanks, Mr. Spinesnapper. But Pigface could do it if she wants."

"Really?" Pigface said to Suzette. "You don't mind?"

"No. Please. You do it."

Pigface smiled. "You know, human, you're not
so bad
after all." She went over to Stab and tackled him to the floor,
gouging
at his face with her claws. The class converged on the flailing bodies.

Boar met Thunderballs's gaze across the room. It
seemed to say, "You're off the hook--this time."
Then he stalked out.

When the eye-poking was done and the class returned
to their seats, Stab raised his hand. Boar was impressed that he'd
picked up the human gesture from Suzette.

"Mr. Spinesnapper," Stab said, "does
this mean
you're not in trouble anymore? With us liking humans better and all?"

"I hope so. Now, let's get back to math."

He was about to continue when Pigface's hand shot up.

"Yes, Pigface?"

"One more question." She glanced at Suzette,
grinning. "Does this mean we can eat his fingers?"

[Back to
Table of Contents]




Czesko by Ef Deal

Ef Deal was the first person to get a library
card at the age of five from the Audubon Public Library. A few decades
later, she says "I am now a teacher, preacher, youth minister,
writer,
poet, and musician, and I have serious gourmet chef game." With
self-effacing humor, she notes that "I'm currently almost
published by
most major editors," but in fact her short fiction has appeared
previously in The Fortean Bureau, Flashshots, and elsewhere.
She gratefully acknowledges the help of her fellow writers in a
nameless workshop in the Philadelphia environs.

* * * *

When a guy like Czesko says he wants to get
baptized, you know it's going to be a weird night.

What, you get religion? I says. Never mind, he says,
just find me a priest and meet me at the bar. So I meet him here, right
over there in that booth. I sit down and look at him, and I swear half
his face is gone. Blown off or something. And it's like nobody realizes
it, just me. The bartender, he's wiping a glass. People talking, people
drinking. Nobody sees him, but there he is. Jeez, Czesko, I says, what
happened to your face? Never mind that, he says. You find me a priest?
Czesko, I says, are you dead? Czesko says, maybe.

Maybe nothin'. I can see what's left of him is kind
of blue but white, like it's blue under his skin, and that's dead all
right. Just like Nicky Two-Foot that night we--well, never mind
that.
Czesko, I says, you get whacked? He don't answer. He says, where's the
priest? I gotta get baptized right away. Me, what do I know. I'm
thinking it mighta been a good idea to get baptized before you die, but
then here's Czesko and he's dead but he ain't, you know, dead
dead. No no, he says, baptism works after you're dead too. I read it.
First or Second Contusions or one of them. Me, I don't know no Bible
and I ain't gonna argue with no corpse, and you know Czesko, so I tell
him I'll take him to a priest.

No, you can't do that, he says. I can't go to no
church. What are you talking, I says. How the hell you gonna get
baptized if you can't go to no church? They can baptize you anywhere,
he says, and I gotta be baptized here. Czesko, I says, this ain't no
place for no priest. But no, he wants a priest, so I get on the phone.
Call up St. Aloysius, tell 'em I need a priest for a baptism.
Now get
this, the priest at St. Al's says he don't do baptisms. He does
christenings. I says what's the difference, and he tells me you gotta
be Catholic to get christened by a priest. Czesko says he don't give a
damn and get his ass--'scuse my French--over here to the
bar with some
holy water. The priest hangs up on me.

Czesko, I says, c'mon, let's go down the street,
they got a Methodist church down there. Maybe the Methodist priest'll
do a baptism. You ain't listening, he tells me, I can't leave this
place unless I get baptized. And you know, with Czesko being dead and
his face half gone, that kind of makes sense a little, like ghosts who
never leave where they kick it. See, you're smiling so you know what
I'm saying. I says, okay, so I'll go see if the Methodist priest will
come to the bar. No no, Czesko says, you can't leave now, you gotta
call him and get him here. Why can't I leave, I ask him, I ain't the
one got whacked. Trust me, he says, you can't leave. I says screw that
and I walk out the door, only I don't. I mean, I go through the door
but I end up back in here. I feel like an ice pick just cut into me,
all cold and stabbing. Czesko, he just shakes his head like I'm stupid
or something.

What the hell you get me into, Czesko, I says.

Czesko sits back in the corner and looks at me,
which freaks me out a little since he only got one eye now. He says,
you ever do any muling? But I don't mule, see, 'cause I don't
wanna get
into no drug wars. Them people are nuts. Yeah, Czesko says, but I
hooked up with worse than nuts, dealing worse than the usual shit. Says
he met this guy who knew a guy outta the old country. That's like
Poland maybe, or Albania, or someplace over there. Maybe Lusitania.
Okay, don't believe me, but I'm telling you what Czesko says. And they
said they needed a mule and Czesko, he needs the money so he says he'd
do it. So he makes the pickup, only Czesko gets greedy, right, and he
figures he'll take a little snort for himself. Only it don't taste
right, and it don't do nothing. He figures he got some bad shit, but he
don't care if he gets paid the same. He gets to the airport and the
plane takes off, and you know, you get up in the air like that, your
ears start fogging up, so Czesko tries to yawn to pop his ears, and
that's when he realizes he ain't breathing.

I says, jeez, Czesko, how can you be not breathing
and not be dead? But I told you it was a weird night, didn't I?

Now Czesko's a cold kinda guy, you know. When
we--I
mean he. When he whacked Nicky--hell, when he whacked Nicky's
dog--Czesko
just plugs 'em, we dump 'em, and next minute he's
eating a cheesesteak
Whiz with, just like that. So when he finds out he ain't breathing, he
don't get upset or nothing. He goes into the men's room, breaks the
mirror, and slices his wrist. I ain't kidding. Sure enough, he ain't
bleeding. I swear, he showed me his arm, sliced open, just this black
kinda tar. Now I'da been nuts, but Czesko, he's just really pissed. He
gets this idea that maybe he's hooked up with something weird, you
think? And now he's gotta tell them guys he jacked a hit of whatever it
is done this. And maybe they know what's going on and maybe they can
put him back, or else he gotta stay dead. But then he thinks about it
and figures there's maybe advantages to being dead, like you can't get
whacked any more dead than dead. You can do a guy and even if he's
shooting back, you ain't gonna die again.

So he lands and he's gonna meet his contact but by
now he's this dead color, and people are looking at him. So he calls
the guy and says meet him here, 'cause here, nobody really
looks at
you. He takes the booth so's he can hide better, but he don't order
nothing 'cause he got all that shit in him and he thinks maybe
if the
bags get wet, if he drinks something, 'cause it ain't the usual
carry,
it might, you know, really do some permanent damage. Now you're
smiling, so I know you're thinking like me, it don't get more permanent
than dead. Well, guess what.

The guy comes in. He's like a suit, real money. And
he's carrying this dog, one of them little poofy dogs except Czesko
sees the dog's got three heads. No lie. Three heads. Two of them's
asleep. Anyways, long story short, the guy takes one look at Czesko and
knows what he done, so the dog bites his head off. Part of it, anyway,
'cause like I said two heads was asleep. Czesko pukes up the
rest of
what he's muling, but the guy says he ain't paying on account of what
Czesko done. Czesko figures that ain't fair so he pulls a gun and
shoots the guy. Except the bullet disappears and now the guy's pissed
so he says something like, "You have stolen that which makes
life to
continue. You wished perhaps to prolong your time? Your wish is
granted, to your eternal damnation!"

I know, it don't sound like no curse, "your
wish is
granted," but you see what I mean, eternal damnation and all.
And
Czesko points to the clock and I see it's stopped at 10:03, which is
what the time was at the time. I check my watch. It says 11:28, which
is what it was when I come into the bar, only now it ain't moving. I
says, Czesko, the clock stopped. There's people in this bar. Don't
these people know what's going on? The bartender, he's still wiping
that glass. The people, they're just talking and drinking, but you
know, they still got the same drinks. And Czesko figures because they
ain't involved, they don't even realize what's going on, they're just
stuck here in a limbo, but he figures him and me know better so we get
to move around a bit and get to think up a way out of this.

So Czesko figures this guy must be into some kinda
black magic, some sorcery maybe, and he needs a baptism so this guy's
curse is wiped out. God and the church and all that. I says, okay okay,
I get it. It's like we're all cursed, the whole bar is cursed, so
unless we can get somebody to come in and lift the curse off Czesko,
nobody can go out, and maybe holy water and a baptism will do the
trick. Yeah, that's it, Czesko says. So I make the call.

The Methodist don't wanna come to no bar, but I tell
him it's an emergency. I tell him a guy's soul is at stake. You know, I
give him a story, a guy in a bar, wants to be baptized in the bar, like
that way he won't go to bars no more. And he buys it. So this Methodist
pastor--they don't call them 'Father' when
they're Methodists--he shows
up about a half-hour later, maybe. I don't know 'cause time was
stopped.

Now, this pastor takes a long look at Czesko, a long
look like, what is this. And you can see him kind of fall down, his
legs going out from under him. I catch him and stuff him in the booth,
and him just staring at Czesko and not saying nothing. Listen, I says,
you gotta baptize him and save him. Otherwise, I'm gonna put a hole in
your head, and I ain't sure that'll kill you, if you get what I'm
saying. And it takes a minute before the pastor can even say something,
but he says okay and he takes out a little bottle of holy water and a
big clam shell and he pours the water in the clam shell and he takes
out a little tiny bottle of oil. Then he starts in with this ritual.

Do you remunerate the power of Satan, and let Jesus
tone down your sins, and do you show contraction for your sins and will
you hold up the church, and all this stuff he says. Czesko says yeah
yeah. Then the priest dips his hand in the water and he ain't sure
whether to pour it on Czesko's head since there's this big hole there,
but he finally figures he'll sprinkle it over Czesko's face.

Shit, says Czesko, 'cause where the water
drips, his
face starts melting. Okay, not melting exactly, maybe burning. Like
with acid, which I kind of guessed was gonna happen but I didn't wanna
say nothing in case I was wrong. But I wasn't. It was pretty
disgusting, these holes in his face, you know, and that with half his
head gone anyway. And the Methodist lets out a howl, you know, like
James Brown except not so much soul as wetting himself, and tries to
scram out of the booth, and I let him go because sure enough, he runs
out the door and he's right back here, and that's when he fainted.

Shit, says Czesko again. We're gonna need a Baptist.

And I know what he means. We gotta dunk his whole
body like they do in that pool. I says, but Czesko, how we gonna dunk
you, and he says, you get the priest, I'll get the pool. So I call
around and finally find a Baptist priest--they call them pastors
too--and
he agrees to come to the bar, and he comes and he takes one look at
Czesko and starts shouting.

Out, demon, he yells, and get thee behind Satan, and
I cast thee out, and shit like that. I finally smack him upside the
head and tell him sit down and shut up. Listen, I says, this here's a
damned soul and if you don't baptize him, we're all damned, you got it?

Meanwhile Czesko kicks over the refrigerator and
dumps it on the floor. We look around. Bartender wiping the glass,
people talking, drinking. Nobody notices. He fills the fridge up with
fizz using pitchers from the bar because the hose from the bar don't
squirt that far. Then he stands next to it. C'mon, let's get to it, he
says. But the Baptist priest says he ain't gonna baptize a demon. I put
a gun on him, and he says he don't care, praise God, he's ready to die
for Jesus. So I tell him, look at the clock, but he don't get it. So I
say, okay, pal, you go ahead and leave. And he does but he don't, you
know, just like the Methodist, so it finally dawns on him. He finally
figures out he's stuck baptizing Czesko whether he likes it or not.

So there's this refrigerator pool full of seltzer
water, and Czesko standing next to it, and this Baptist pastor guy. He
starts in pretty much like the Methodist, you know, and it comes to it,
and Czesko steps into the pool. Then he starts yelling and cussing. I
mean he's mad as hell. And he jumps out again and falls right over
'cause, damn, he's got no feet. Knees down, just melting away
to the
bone.

And what's weird is still nobody notices. Clock
stopped and all.

I pick up Czesko, like a baby. He's got tears now,
real tears. Put me in, buddy, he says. He looks me dead in the eye, no
pun, I swear it, and I realize he knows what's what and he means it. I
say, Czesko, buddy, I can't do it. Luvva God, he says, put me in, let's
end it. I look at the pastor, he looks at me, he looks at Czesko, and
he gives me the nod. Name o' the Father, he says, Son and Holy
Ghost,
he says. Do it.

So I step into the refrigerator and I lower Czesko
in. Slow. Face first. The water starts bubbling. Not just fizzing, like
seltzer, and not hot, just bubbling. Hissing, like. Steam rising.
Czesko's face is gone. The rest of him sinks down. Water's bubbling all
over like one of them Jacuzzis at the gym. Steam all over. Can't see
nothing. I feel him slip outta my arms. Czesko, I yell, Czesko, where
are you, buddy? Water's boiling like mad, huge clouds of steam. I lose
my balance and fall outta the refrigerator right on my ass, pardon my
French. Whack my head on the bar going down. Takes me a second to see
straight, and when I get up again, what the hell you think?

Czesko's bones is sitting up in the empty fridge. He
looks up at me and says, shit.

The Baptist guy, he's sitting on a booth seat there,
his head between his knees kinda moaning, oh God, oh God, oh God. Jeez,
Czesko, I says, only one thing left I can think of. Czesko says, go for
it. So I take his hand and snap it off and throw it in the big blender.
The Kitchen-Aid one, not that little one they make margaritas in. I put
it on pulverize, and the blender fills up with bone powder.

Damn, Czesko says, that's brilliant! Do the other
one! So I dump the powder into a Ziploc from under the bar and bone by
bone I pull Czesko apart. Hip bone connected to the groin bone and all
that. Piece at a time, into the blender, into the Ziplocs. Some I gotta
run through the ice chipper first 'cause they're too big, but I
get it
all in. Last is his head.

Look, he says, this magic. It's in my bones. You
gotta be careful with this shit so you don't end up dead like me. Can't
let nobody get hold of it. No problem, I says. I'll dump it, you know,
like ashes. Someplace nice. Czesko gives me a smile. I mean, I know
them skulls always look like they're smiling, but I know Czesko, and he
says, smiling, you're the best friend I got. And 'scuse me if I
gotta
wipe my eyes, but damn it, that was Czesko, you know, and it breaks me
up I had to do him like that. He says, I hope to God for your sake this
does it. I says, me too.

Then into the blender he goes. But before I put my
finger on the button, I figure if this works, the bar's gonna go back
to normal, see, and folks are going to wonder about this fridge on its
side and all the stuff on the floor. So I put it all back to rights
first. Czesko says, that was pretty smart. And I say, thanks, Czesko.
Then I hit the button.

Right away I feel it. The clock starts moving again.
There's that feeling again, that cold ice pick stabbing. The Methodist
wakes up, takes one look around, grabs the Baptist, and runs like hell
out the door, and guess what. He don't come back. I done it. I broke
the curse. Me and Czesko. I dump what's left of Czesko's head into the
last Zip-loc. I pack the whole bunch of him into my coat pockets and I
plan to bury him, you know, like spreading the ashes except it's not
ashes so much as white powder that may or may not make a guy dead, but
not dead dead. In fact, I was just on my way out to dump him
when you came busting in.

So before you go dipping your finger in there, I
swear to you, detective, these ten bags is Czesko.

[Back to
Table of Contents]




Intolerance by Robert Reed

Sometimes we'll assemble an issue of
F&SF with a particular theme in mind, and sometimes a theme
will find us. This month it seems like most of the stories have some
consideration of parent-child relationships to them--perhaps
none more
so than Robert Reed's closer for the issue.

* * * *

"Hey, I'm speaking to you. Yes, you, my friend. Are
those mammoth ears attached to some kind of neural network? Can you
comprehend simple slow diction? I wish to be released on this
approaching corner. Pull over, yes, thank you. And will you help me
with these damned straps? Mechanical strength is not my strength, as
you can plainly see."

The cab driver is a stocky fellow, sweating rivers
despite the chill of the vehicle's air conditioning. He turns to stare
at his only passenger, jaw locked and his fleshy cheeks coloring. But
he says nothing. He forces himself to remain silent, one broad hand
reaching warily for the straps' latch.

"You've grown weary of my company," the
passenger
observes. "You want me gone. You want me out of your life.
Well, I will
abide in your heartfelt wishes. Never again will our paths cross, my
friend. Until I rule the world, of course, and then I will personally
crush the likes of you."

The hand jumps back.

"The likes of me?" the driver whispers. Then
louder,
he asks, "What the hell do you know about me?"

"You judge," says the shrill little voice. "Despite
a lifetime of red meat and cheap beer, you have survived into your
early fifties. The gold band on your finger promises a wife, but the
absence of prominent digitals implies that she isn't cherished. Nor are
there any bright-faced children worthy of a father's pride. Judging by
the name filling up your license, you are Serbian. A genuine doormat
race. The trace of an accent tells me you came to this country as a
teenage boy, probably during your homeland's last civil insurrection.
And judging by the little talismans scattered across your dashboard,
you belong to some kind of fossilized Christian faith. Which makes you
both extremely superstitious and mindlessly conservative ... two very
nasty qualities for our modern world, I believe...!"

The driver squelches a curse.

The passenger laughs. "Does my little rant
bother
you? It is a problem, I can tell. That grunting, sweaty, swollen, and
outmoded body of yours conveys volumes. Your animal wishes are obvious.
Right now, this moment, you are picturing my frail body tossed beneath
the next beer truck, crushed and dead. Is that what you wish, sir?
There is no point lying here, or in diluting the truth."

A thumb strikes the latch and the restraining belts
fly off. Then the curbside door opens, and the driver asks, "What the
hell kind of creature are you?"

"A creature of ideas," the passenger
exclaims with a
toothy smile.

"Get out."

"I am doing just that. As fast as I can."

"Out!"

"But before I go ... let me tell you something true,
my dear friend. We know exactly how the universe began, and when and
how it shall end. Humans taught themselves these great lessons. The
gods never helped us. And for each of us--for the universe and
for
humans alike--what lies between birth and death is an
unrelenting tedium
spiced with the occasional sweet novelty."

The driver mutters under his breath, and the taxi
door slams shut.

"My pack," the passenger cries out. "Or are you a
thief?"

A window drops, and out tumbles a small transparent
backpack. Then with a choked voice, the driver screams, "Monster," as
he pulls away from the curb, wringing all of the speed from his
vehicle's fuel cells, leaving behind a whiff of perfumed moisture that
lingers in the bright sunny air.

The monster stands alone on the sidewalk, laughing
quietly. Less than a meter tall and not quite eighteen kilos, he wears
blue running shoes adorned with daisies and white socks with frills and
a stained Pooh shirt and dark blue shorts that bulge with the diaper.
His skin is pale and smooth. His knees bow out a little bit. He seems
to be thirty or thirty-two months old, except in the face. The brown
eyes are busy and smart, while the tiny mouth wears a perpetual smirk,
as if the world around him is both humorous and contemptible, in equal
measures.

Inside his backpack are supplies for his day: a
folded reader and an old-fashioned cell phone, several spare diapers
and wipes, snacks on edible plates, a press-wrapped change of clothes,
and a police-grade taser. His electronic money is tucked inside his
current diaper--the first place a thief would look, but he has
already
peed enough to fend off those with weak wills.

The monster--he goes by Cabe--slips on
the pack's
plastic straps and sets off, walking north with a determined gait. The
pack rattles softly. The daisies on his shoes flash random colors with
each step. Other pedestrians take note. Those few who recognize him
pretend not to notice. But others see a child, and they can't help but
smile at his cuteness, instinct leading the way while the brain
sluggishly notes the little details that are wrong. Then instinct fades
into a clumsy puzzlement, and sometimes, intrigue. People are generally
idiots, but they are not entirely uninformed. What this creature
represents is new and will remain new and fresh for some time. But in
another ten years, or twenty at the most, the costs will tumble, and
all but the very poorest of these drudges will be able to choose from a
menu at least as wondrous as the one within reach of these stubby
little fingers.

The block ends with a red light and a collection of
placid, sheep-like office workers. They speak to headsets, or they
don't speak at all. He pushes between their legs, reaching the curb
before the light changes. Conversations die away. Faces stare down at
the top of his head. Then a phone sings the big crescendo from
Beethoven's Ninth, and with a loud clear voice, he says, "Shit."

The eyes around him grow huge.

He slips off the backpack and yanks out his
Benny-the-Robot phone, looking at the incoming number before flipping
it open. "What?" he snaps.

"Where are you?" a voice asks. A woman's
voice.

"Nowhere," he replies.

"I was wondering if you were free," the
voice
continues.

"Barely free. And it takes all of my considerable
talent to remain this way."

She says, "Lunch, darling?"

"No."

"My treat."

"It wouldn't be mine," he snarls.

Silence is wrapped in a sharp pain. Then she says,
"Cabe--"

And he disconnects, instructing his phone not to
accept another call from that number. The traffic light has turned
green. But most of the pedestrians remain on the curb, confused but
exceptionally curious.

"None of your business," he growls.

Faces tilt up now, and everyone crosses in a rush.

Cabe sits on the curb, stuffing the phone back where
it belongs, preparing to wait through another red light. But the
traffic is light. An empty bus and a pair of old hybrids roll past, and
he steps out early.

Dominating the next corner is the city's main
library--a grim concrete building with tall windows on the
ground floor,
allowing passersby to stare in at the derelicts and mental patients who
keep the chairs filled. Outside stands one of the resident librarians.
A nervous man with a strong union and dreams of a pension, he is
smoking, probably enjoying one of the new therapeutic cigarettes made
from biogenetic tobaccos. Red eyes see the tiny figure approaching. The
man takes a couple of puffs, bracing himself for whatever happens next.
What sort of cutting insult will be thrown his way? Or worse, will the
creature ask for help in some ridiculous research project? But Cabe
surprises the librarian, waving once in his general direction before
turning, little legs carrying him toward the west.

Beside the library stands an even older
building--an
ensemble of brick and mortar that currently serves as the downtown
YWCA. Cabe usually approaches from a different direction; passing by
the main entrance has its risks. But the only soul paying attention is
an old man sitting on one of the concrete stairs. The monster gives him
a little nod, and the man smiles and says, "Good day,"
while waving one
of his bony hands.

Around the corner waits a world of mayhem and shrill
nonsense syllables, clumsy running and random tantrums.

A three-meter fence surrounds the playground, but
that overstates the security measures. From the shade of a stunted crab
apple tree, Cabe examines the assorted faces, spotting one that he
doesn't know and that will probably serve his purpose.

"Ugh!" a boy shouts at him, brown fingers
wrapped in
the chain link.

"Ugh yourself," Cabe mocks.

A girl joins ugh-boy, older by a year and far more
verbal. She regards the newcomer with a deep suspicion. Grabbing her
companion with a protective arm, she shouts at Cabe, "Go away."

Ugh-boy squirms in her grip.

"Hello, Lilly," Cabe purrs. "And how
are you on this
very sweet day?"

"You're bad," she tells him.

"Indeed," he agrees.

The ugh-boy pulls free of his protector, and then
losing interest in the drama, wanders off to toss rocks at an inviting
square of pavement.

"Go away," Lilly repeats.

"But I shall not, my dear."

The girl sighs.

"Who are you?" a new voice calls out.

Behind Lilly is a woman. She is nineteen or twenty,
by appearance, and she has a pretty enough face, legs that couldn't be
any longer, and a young and nervous little voice. She is new, probably
no more than a week or two on the job. And she is exactly the kind of
person busy parents wish to have watching their offspring--a
nurturing,
nervous girl who will rush to the aid of any lost bunny.

"Hello?" she says to the bunny standing on
the far
side of the fence.

Cabe changes his expression.

She kneels, smiling tentatively. "What's
your name?"

He says, "Cabe," with a delicate
sniffle.

"Cabe?"

He nods, pushing out his lower lip.

"Are you in our toddler class, Cabe?" And
when he
doesn't answer, she asks, "Did you wander out here on your own?"

He pretends as if those words are too complicated. A
baffled look fills his pale round face.

"Where are your parents, Cabe?"

Now the tears come, bubbling from deep inside.

"Oh, dear," the woman whimpers.

But Lilly is made of sterner stuff. She stares at
Cabe, her tiny jaw set, eyes like little guns shooting at him.

"Mommy," Cabe sputters.

"Oh, honey."

"Where's my ... mommy...?"

A tall gate waits just a few steps away. It takes
just a moment for the young woman to use her passkey and rush outside,
and with every instinct on overdrive, she kneels and scoops up the boy
in her arms, squeezing to reassure and to make absolutely certain that
he won't slip away from her caring grasp.

Again and again, Cabe says, "Mommy,"
while he pushes
his crying face into her chest.

"Where is your mommy?" she asks.

"Gone."

"Gone where, darling?"

"Gone, gone!"

The words have an impact, visceral and disarming.
She leans into his body and starts to weep for herself. Others notice
their little show. Lilly has never stopped staring at Cabe, mouthing
the word "Bad" from time to time. But the approaching
adults are the
ones who will stop the fun. So with a final low sob, Cabe says, "I'm
hungry," and moves his mouth to the right.

Like most of the daycare staff, the young woman is
dressed for comfort and ease of motion. She's wearing a loose-fitting,
relatively low-cut shirt. It is the simplest trick in the world to
reach down, yanking on the shirt and bra in one motion, exposing a
breast. Then he takes the pink nipple as if he has never been so
famished, and he sucks with urgency. But it isn't until he uses his
tongue and mutters the words, "Yes," and then, "Sweet," that the woman
finally appreciates what is happening here.

* * * *

"Next time, we will press charges."

The Y director accompanies him down the concrete
steps. She is furious, but only to a point. Both know this is a game.
Law enforcement won't gladly arrest him. No prosecuting attorney wants
to see Cabe sitting in the courtroom. He can field a team of powerful
lawyers, and his gifts of persuasion are the stuff of legend, whether
used on a hardened judge or a hapless jury. Besides, case law and the
statutes are changing daily, and it is a giant question as to how he
can be charged.

"Get out of here!" the director warns.

He laughs at her and blows a kiss.

"So what'd you do wrong?"

The old man is speaking to him. He was sitting on a
high step when Cabe walked past the entrance, and now he's sitting on
the lowest step.

With a quiet laugh, Cabe says, "I did
nothing of
significance."

"The lady seems to hold a different opinion."

"And boys are entitled to a little fun."

"Well, nothing wrong with that logic," the
old man
concedes.

Cabe sits on a higher step, keeping their eyes at
the same level.

With the first glance, the man appears frail.
Feeble. He has thin white hair, long but combed, and the speckled skin
of an unreformed sunbather. His clothes are worn and a little too large
for his wiry frame, hanging on him as if illness or time has eroded
away a much larger body. But his frailty doesn't extend deeper than his
skin. He winks at the person sitting near him, a bright smile framed by
a handsome, surprisingly boyish face. His breathing is slow and
comfortable. Judging by his bare arms, his muscle tone is that of a
hardened athlete. And his voice has strength and clarity, particularly
when he asks his companion, "So how old are you, really?"

Cabe just smiles.

"The original rejuvenators came on the market what?
Ten years ago? But they take you back only a few years, and then only
if you're past fifty or so." The man nods, considering the
possibilities. "Of course the second-generation bunch is
better. But
even the Novartis package has that ugly habit of goosing the wrong
genes and giving you cancer, or shutting down essential genes, leaving
you dead."

With perfect white teeth, he grins. "No,
you're
using the third-generation stuff. Probably the BioBorn package, since
it's the oldest and the best."

"But the third-generations haven't been approved for
the marketplace," Cabe mentions.

"What does that mean?" the old man asks. "That word
'marketplace'? If a product is real, and if you know where to
look for
it, then for enough money, it is very much in your reach."

Cabe throws a tiny hand into the air, making a
grabbing motion.

"But now how old are you? That's the question of the
moment." The man winks and sits back, eyes narrowing as he
says, "Reversion of the body is an accelerated process. Ten times
faster than
normal growth, give or take. And since you seem to be what now? Two and
a half? And since the third-generation rejuvenators started leaking out
a couple years back ... my first inclination is to guess that you're in
your early twenties...."

"Your first inclination?" Cabe coaxes.

"But that's not particularly sensible, now is
it?" A
low laugh. "What grown male is going to let himself shrivel up?
I mean
in all the important departments. Plus that assumes you went on the
rejuvenators the first day they poked their heads out of the lab, which
doesn't seem likely. And even then, if you started in your twenties,
you couldn't have been at this particular age for more than the last
few weeks. Which you haven't been. From what I see, you're pretty
comfortable inside your current skin."

"What can you see?"

A brighter laugh erupts. "You're a smart
kid,
regardless of your years."

Cabe cannot disagree.

"So I'm thinking ... and I have some experience in
this business, I'll warn you ... I'm thinking that when you were six or
eight or ten years old, your parents started buying neurological
enhancements. Pfizer has a neural growth package they sell to
handicapped kids and head-injury victims. Does some incredible things
with ordinary people, I've heard."

"Maybe I'm just smart on my own," the tiny
creature
offers.

"Yeah, but more than anything, you're
wealthy," the
old man counters. "First, last, and always, you've got a world
of
money. Rejuvenators, enhancements. These are pricey miracles. Which
makes me guess that there's a fat trust fund or two involved."

Cabe says nothing, watching his companion with fresh
caution.

"Neurological enhancements, and then you had
yourself declared a functioning adult. Legally speaking. And afterward
you joined an experimental program that you yourself funded, and you
began to undergo a comprehensive rejuvenation." He winked
before
asking, "Now that's the general order of things, isn't it?"

Cabe asks, "How old am I?"

"Eleven years, three months."

Brown eyes widen while the toddler's mouth pulls
into a little knot.

The man erupts into hard laughter, shaking his head
as he admits, "Oh, I already know who you are. Cabe McAllister.
Heir to
the brownie mix fortune. You were nine years old when you petitioned
for a provisional adult status, and except for two temporary reversions
to child-status--both to help defend against pending legal
charges--you
have lived as an adult for the last two years."

Cabe holds his breath for a moment. Then with a
tight slow voice, he announces, "I have a security system. With
a word,
I can have a platoon of security people standing on your chest,
probably inside five minutes."

It is a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit.

Yet the threat has little muscle. The old man shrugs
him off, asking, "What do you think? Just because you change
your
appearance, and then spend a fortune to keep your current face out of
the media ... do you really believe that the whole world isn't
eventually going to hear your story...?"

Cabe stands up.

"Don't go," the old man says. "Sit
down."

"This is a ridiculous game," Cabe complains. "You
knew who I was when I first walked past here."

"Well, I should damn well know who you are,"
is the
reply.

"What does that mean?"

The handsome elderly face grins at him, bright teeth
catching the sun as he says, "When we were five years old, we
went to
the same school. Remember the Academy at Greenhaven? Cabe McAllister
and Jonah Westercase. Brownie mix and concrete. Two little boys,
spoiled and wealthy, and during that long-ago year, we were the best of
friends."

They find a bar at the north end of the same block,
claiming a booth and drinking cold root beers while bringing each other
up to date. Cabe sits in a booster chair and lifts his mug with both
hands, explaining, "This is a great age. The best. I get to do
what I
want, whenever I want. Most of the world doesn't know me from the
average little diaper-jockey, which I like. And I get to say anything.
People tolerate almost any shit from a toddler, even when they realize,
intellectually realize, that he isn't what he looks to be." He
smiles
for a moment. "And the expressions I see on those faces ...
well, it's
worth all the bullshit that comes with this little body."

"I can believe it," Jonah says.

The foamy mug is lifted, sipped, and dropped with a
hard thunk. "But what about you? What's your tale of body and
soul?"

A shrug of the shoulders. "Like you, I got
the
neurological enhancements when they came on the market. A million, two
million dollars' worth of work, and then I was almost nine,
reading at
a graduate school level, and I announced to my folks that I wanted to
be a legal adult, provisionally speaking--"

"They let you?" Cabe asks.

Jonah rolls his eyes. "When haven't we
gotten our
way?"

They laugh and sip their sweet dark drinks. But then
Cabe stares up at the bar, watching the drunks who can't take their
eyes off these odd interlopers.

"But why hurry the aging process?" he
finally asks.

"Why not?" Jonah grins. "At first, I
just wanted to
look and function like an adult. Which is easy enough, since the
rejuvenators aren't just rejuvenators ... working in either direction,
as they do. But what age is the best age? I mean, if we live in a world
where you can pick your body's maturity, why do convention and
commonsense imagine everyone is going to end up looking as if they're
thirty-five? In a hundred years, is everyone going to be the same damn
age? I don't think so. I think there's a lot to be said for other
stages of life. You're an example of that. And how about the elderly?
Not that the old farts are particularly wise people, of course. They
aren't. But our culture tells us to listen to our elders, and that's
what I wanted to be. An elder. I wanted to be able to make my little
pronouncements, and people who didn't know me would think, 'My
goodness, what a sharp old granddad he is.'"

Cabe sits back in the hard plastic seat, ready to
pose another question. But the phone rings inside his backpack, and he
pulls it out--

"Cute toy," Jonah declares.

And he runs a check on the caller's number. Then he
cuts the connection and slips the phone back between a pair of clean
diapers.

"Wrong number?" his friend inquires.

He says, "Probably." Then he stares
at the weathered
face, asking, "But how did you get so old so fast?"

"Easy enough," Jonah promises. "Inside, I'm in my
early twenties. Fit and clean and ready to start living. But the skin
and hair ... well, there's an old set of technologies, and maybe you've
heard of them...."

"Cosmetics?"

"Exactly."

Cabe laughs quietly, one hand fiddling with a tiny
pink ear.

"The hair is dyed, and the skin ... well, that's
more complicated. Every couple weeks or so, I have it damaged. UV light
and some nicely caustic chemicals give me this look." Then he
winks,
adding, "There's some ladies I know ... they say I look a lot
like my
old grandfather, and I fool around like him too...."

Cabe dips his head, not quite laughing.

"Your folks fought your adulthood. If I remember the
rumors right."

"My father contested my petition. My mother fought
him."

"Wait, that's right." Jonah squints for a
moment,
and then adds, "She supported your bid, didn't she? Now that I
think
about it."

"She wasn't critical to the process," says
Cabe.

"No?"

"We always get what we want," he reminds
Jonah. "Without either parent helping, I would have won the fight."

Jonah waits for a moment. Then he asks, "So
who
called just now?"

"Nobody."

"You could just let it ring," he suggests.

Silence.

"Or not carry a phone." The laugh is young
and a
little bit teasing. "There's about a thousand better ways to
handle
your communication needs."

Cabe regards him for a moment, and then speaking to
his root beer, he says, "Go blow yourself."

"If only I could," Jonah replies.

Then both of them are laughing, and for that
instant, in the gray light of a dusty old bar, they look and sound
rather like eleven-year-old boys, happily trading insults and giggles.

* * * *

"How did you find me?" Cabe finally asks.

"Maybe I just stumbled across you."

"Maybe," he allows, pushing the half-empty
mug into
the middle of the table. "But you were sitting on the precise
block
which I'd be strolling along. Which makes this seem like a carefully
planned event."

"I might make the effort to track you down ... an
old buddy of mine from the Greenhaven days...."

The brown eyes widen while the tiny face seems to
grow even smaller. Then after an uncomfortable pause, Cabe announces,
"I have something to do."

"Too much root beer?"

"Yes."

He climbs off the booster chair and then out of the
booth, dragging his pack by the strap. But he doesn't manage one step
before Jonah is beside him, remarking with a curious tone, "A
lot of
two-year-old bodies can hold it."

"Why diapers?"

"To complete the illusion, I'm guessing."

"No," Cabe says. Insists. "It's just
that a person
of my size can't navigate his way through your average public toilet."

"Sure. Of course."

The men's room has a stall and a grimy urinal, plus
a sink cleaned with every full moon. As the door closes behind them,
each looks at the other's face, negotiating the terms for this peculiar
moment.

"So do you lie down when you do it?" Jonah
inquires.

"No, I stand. And I do it by myself."

"Then I'll let you," his one-time classmate
replies,
vanishing inside the stall and locking its door.

With crisp, efficient motions, Cabe drops his shorts
and old diaper, the Velcro straps crackling as they come undone. He
retrieves his electronic money and slips on a fresh diaper and then
pulls another tool out of the backpack--the Chinese-made
taser--dressed
up to look like a tiny tube of ointment that he slips with his money
into the crack of his bottom. Finally he retrieves his little reader,
having just enough time to pose a few questions to a favorite search
engine.

The big toilet flushes with a roar.

Out comes Jonah, throwing a mysterious wink in
Cabe's direction. Then like a boy would, he runs cold water over a few
fingertips and wipes his hands dry with a single brown paper towel. "So
what's your mom think?" he asks, pressing the towel into the
tiniest
possible wad.

"Think about what?"

"This." Jonah points to the pack and his
tiny
companion. "I mean, she was all for you becoming an adult.
That's what
you told me. But then you went and did this business with your body."

"It's my business," says Cabe.

Jonah opens the restroom door for both of them. "Did
I say otherwise?"

"She was all right with it," Cabe reports.

"Yeah?"

"Yes," he says, the word sharp and final.
Then he
pauses for a moment, surveying the long bar. A narrow grin builds, and
setting out toward a couple of the barflies, he calls out, "Gentlemen."

The drunks are giant men wearing sharp beards and
dirty leather vests and several pounds of cheap jewelry; youthful fat
is spread thin over a wealth of youthful, steroid-laced muscle. Riding
on their bare arms is an assortment of vicious and obscene brands.
Until this moment, they looked sleepy and inert up on their high
stools. But it's as if cold water hits their faces, and they sit up
straight now, eyes bulging as they gawk at the swaggering little
creature.

"I have a wager with my friend here," Cabe
announces. "He claims you're out of work due to the vagaries of
the new
economics. Hard luck cases, and I should feel pity for you. While on
the other hand, I believe that you are just a pair of lazy idiots, and
you have consumed your adult lives pickling in whiskey and your own
well-deserved despair.

"Now which of us is right, sirs? Will you tell us?"

Jonah hangs back.

"Or don't you understand my question?" Cabe
persists. "Do you not comprehend English? Should I employ a
more
guttural tongue?"

One of the drunks manages a low curse.

More than anything, the men are confused, glancing
at Jonah while trying to take a better measure of the situation.

"Gentlemen," says the older voice. "I am sorry. Very
sorry. My grandson is a rude little boy, and I would like to apologize
for both of us."

The mood still teeters between resignation and
vengeance.

Then Jonah adds, "And please, let me buy you
your
next drinks. And those after that, too."

He throws a wad of bills between the giant men,
winning enough time for them to slip out the front door.

A wide smarmy grin fills Cabe's face.

Bending low, placing himself in front of his
companion's face, Jonah says, "You really are just an evil
crap. Even
when you were five years old, it showed. Evil and cruel, and god-awful
vicious. And you know what else? Back then, all I ever wanted was to
teach you a lesson, even for just half of the bull that you pulled on
me, mister."

* * * *

The grin dissolves.

Cabe starts to fiddle with his backpack, reaching
for the reader. But Jonah snatches the pack up, saying, "You're
tired.
It's heavy. Let me carry it for you."

"With a word--"

"You'll call in your security people. I know."

Cabe stares at the man looming over him, one hand
reaching back, fingers trying to find the taser.

"I know your story," Jonah rumbles.

Both hands drop. "What story?"

"My mom ran into your mom last week. In Alaska, at a
fund-raiser."

"What fund-raiser?"

"Bring back the Stellar Sea-cow, or something like
that." Jonah laughs in disgust. "Anyway, they hadn't
seen each other
for a few years. They used to be halfway friendly, back when we were
classmates. And my mom has a talent. Unlike some of us, she can make
people like her. Perfect strangers will confess and confide in her. So
when she asked, 'How's Cabe doing now?' ... Well,
that's all it took to
get the story flowing...."

The little body walks a few steps, pauses and then
walks again, following a slightly different path.

"Stop," Jonah commands.

"Why?"

"Just stand here. While I'm talking, stay put."

Again the boy reaches for his taser.

"Your mom did support your bid for adulthood. Yes.
But your father was right. You weren't ready, not in any sense. And it
wasn't just being a prick that got you in trouble, was it? Today a lot
of lawyers are able to afford enhancements to their own children, all
because of the ugly legal work necessary to keep you out of some
species of prison."

Cabe looks up and down the sidewalk. They are close
to the city library again. Directly behind him is a long alleyway
blocked at the far end by a delivery van. Just now, no one else is
close by--except for the librarian who has come out to enjoy
another
much-needed cigarette.

"Your poor mom," says Jonah. "She
decided that she'd
made a ton of mistakes, and it was just a matter of time before the
courts ganged up on her only child. There was one way left to protect
the world from her boy, from that little monster, and to protect her
little monster from the world.

"The legal grounds were shaky. But there was an
answer. Difficult and very expensive, but doable.

"Your mother found a judge and bribed him, and he
handed down his sentence, and that's when you had no choice but to
undergo the reversion therapy. This look of yours ... it wasn't your
choice at the beginning. What you are today ... it's just the point you
reached before you bought another judge who would suspend the process,
at least for these last few months...."

Cabe pulls out his taser and shouts the single code
word that will bring his security people.

Jonah shakes his head now. "Unless of course
I've
compromised the transmitter inside that new baby molar of yours...."

"Did you?" the boy mutters.

Then he thinks of another, more pressing question.
"Why did you come to see me today?"

"Why?" Jonah gives a big laugh and steps
closer. "In
theory, because my mother asked me to find you. To see if I could talk
some reason into your bullish head. Convince you to accept your
sentence and go marching off to prison. For everybody's good, and all
that crap."

Cabe steps toward the library, but Jonah blocks his
way.

"But what I decided to do ... I decided that it
would be better ... more fun, and more satisfying ... if I just gave
back a little of what you gave to me when we were kids. The way you
used to tease me. Or worse, those times you paid those older, poorer
kids to beat on me...."

Jonah says, "Everybody else in the world is
afraid
to smack a two-year-old turd. But I know what he is, and believe me, I
can do all the ass-whipping that I want--"

Cabe aims the taser and fires, pumping Jonah full of
a withering dose of electricity. The prematurely old body stiffens and
then drops hard to the pavement. Then Cabe turns and runs. He fully
expects footsteps to follow him. How much damage could that little
spark-box manage? But nobody comes up from behind, and the librarian is
stubbing out his butt and walking in his direction, his expression
puzzled, and then alarmed.

Cabe stops, turns.

Jonah is still facedown on the sidewalk

The boy returns, deciding to retrieve his backpack,
and that's when it occurs to him that something is very wrong, and
wrong in ways he never anticipated. The bony body isn't moving, not
even to breathe. Cabe has to reach under a motionless shoulder to
retrieve his bag. And then the librarian is kneeling beside him,
trembling hands examining the fresh corpse.

"Murderer," says the tobacco-roughened voice.

Cabe retrieves his phone, making the only call left
to him.

Into the waiting silence, he says, "Mother."

He has never felt so scared, not once in his life.
The world suddenly seems full of menacing giants, and he sputters,
"Mommy," as he collapses onto the pavement, too
breathless to speak
again or even cry.

* * * *

There will be light, where he is going. And there
will be windows of a narrow sort. Sterile bioelectronics will give him
a combination reader and display screen, and the doctors promise enough
coordination to use the tools within his reach, including making calls
to the world outside his prison cell. The procedure is exceptionally
rare, but nothing about it is impossible. Indeed, one of the attending
nurses jokes with him, claiming that nothing could be more natural, in
a backward way, than what is happening to him now.

The operating room is crowded and sterile, busy and
exceptionally quiet. Cabe sees taut white sheets and robotic limbs, and
for a moment, he finds his mother's face floating on a small pillow,
her eyes half-open and blind from the anesthesia. But his neck is too
weak to hold his head where he wants it to be. Then the nurse turns him
around, cuddling with him while machines and surgeons recheck the
placement of his new placenta. "Honey," she says, and
wipes at his
forehead and the area around his mouth. "You are so
darling," she tells
him. "I can't see why this is necessary ... you seem like such
a
dear...."

"This isn't at all necessary," he agrees.

Surprised by the clarity and strength of his voice,
the nurse blinks.

"This is a travesty," he growls. "A
vicious
injustice!" Then with a near-wail, he adds, "As soon as
I find a worthy
attorney, I promise, I will destroy all of you bastards!"

But the nurse ignores his fuss and fury. She even
manages to laugh at Cabe, winking when she says, "I saw your
parents
talking about this. How they made you finally agree to the procedure
... by fooling you like they did...."

The closest surgeon says the nurse's name, in
warning.

"What's that?" Cabe asks. "Fooled me
how?"

She glances at the surgeon, begging to say it.

"What do you mean, madam? Explain yourself!"

No one tells her to stop. So she looks down at Cabe,
explaining, "Your friend wasn't really your friend, you know.
Jonah was
just some actor hired and coached by your parents to play the role. And
you didn't kill him, even by accident. A neurotoxin dropped him into a
coma. He's somewhere in Europe, I guess ... wealthy now, and performing
Shakespeare in the park, or some such pleasure...."

Cabe stifles a scream.

But really, can he be surprised by any of this?

"Your parents wanted you to stop fighting the
court's judgment," the nurse confides. Then with a quiet and
impressed
voice, she adds, "They must love you very much. Particularly
your
mother, who must be some kind of saint for agreeing to this ... this
procedure...."

Again, he is lifted.

Mechanical hands carry him to the far end of the
table, and he is turned until the top of his head is pointing at his
unconscious mother. Cabe can't help but stare at her tanned legs and
what is between them, pulled open by hormones and clamps. And then he
is being carried closer to her ... and as they begin to shut down his
lungs, preparing him to be immersed in the ugly salty fluids, Cabe
cries out to everyone in earshot, "This is not done. Don't
think
otherwise, my fools!"

Even as the strong hands shove him into the wet
choking darkness, he tells them, "I still have means and a mind!

"You stupid clowns!

"I will escape this trap! You will see! You will
see!"

* * * *



Coming Attractions

Next month we'll take you to southern Africa with a
first-rate historical fantasy. In "iKlawa," newcomer
Donald Mead takes
us into the heart of Zulu territory to show how the tribes face the
oncoming British threat with courage and with magic. Don't miss this
one.

Also scheduled for April, we've got Daryl Gregory's
"Gardening at Night," a thoughtful science fiction
story about ... hmm,
how do you describe this one? It's about a team studying the
evolution of artificially intelligent critters, but that doesn't really
do the story justice. Just take our word for it: you'll like this one.

In the issues ahead, we'll also bring you new
stories by Terry Bisson, Matthew Hughes, Claudia O'Keefe, M. Rickert,
Steven Utley, and much more. Did we mention what a great belated gift F&SF
is for that person you missed in your holiday shopping? Just use the
reply card in this issue or log onto www.fsfmag.com and give a
gift that brings joy throughout the year.

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Curiosities

Wild Card, by Raymond Hawkey and Roger
Bingham (1974)

Wild Card begins with a terrorist nuclear
bomb exploding under the Lincoln Memorial. Good thing: it wakes the
President from his nightmare in which the meat on his mother's dinner
plate begins to bleed. After he reads the overnight digest of terrorist
attacks, he drives to Dulles Airport, discussing a solution to the
country's troubles with his Science Adviser. He rejects it as drastic
and ridiculous. Then the newest terrorist group tries to assassinate
him.

Welcome to the United States just after the Age of
Aquarius. Terrorists of all stripes have the nation panicked. The
President decides his Science Adviser's plan to a) build a fake
spaceship carrying b) faked aliens then c) crashing it into a
residential area of Los Angeles then d) bawling on television that the
monsters are coming, man your battle stations, followed by e) an
instantly unified country ready for war--is not ridiculous.

The rest of the novel works out this notion.
Frustratingly, it ends with only a hint of what might happen if
humanity thought a space invasion was imminent. It's as if the media
coverage on September 11th stopped after the second tower collapsed.

Today Wild Card interests readers for its
description of a frightened nation adopting harsh measures to defend
against enemies, many real, some not, none in plain view, but popping
up through the media and then vanishing. This won't happen here. But
what has happened to us is what makes Wild Card appealing.

--Gregory J. Koster