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Quanta - Jun, '92
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Volume IV Issue 2 June 1992 ISSN 1053-8496
+-----------------------+
|Quanta | Articles
|(ISSN 1053-8496) |
| | LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
|Volume IV, Issue 2 |
|June 1992 |
| | Serials
|Copyright © 1992 |
|by Daniel K. Appelquist| DR TOMORROW Marshall F. Gilula
| |
| |
| | THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
| |
| |
| |
| | Short Fiction
| |
| | HURRICANE Maurice Forrester
| |
| |
| | GEM OF THE UNIVERSE David Borcherding
| |
| |
| | NEW BEGINNINGS James E. McWhinney
| |
| |
| | JOHNNY APPLESEED Curtis Yarvin
| |
| |
| | Poetry
|Editor/Tech. Director |
| Daniel K. Appelquist| RADIATION GIRL David Drinnan
+-----------------------+
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Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hi everyone! Ok -- so this issue is a bit late. Do we see a trend developing
here? Well, let me just say that I still plan to put out five issues total
this year (the next one being in August) but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't
happen. The problem has simply been one of time: I don't have as much of it
as I used to. On that subject, I'd like to post a "job opening" in this
column. I'm looking for a competent assistant editor. This person would have
to be willing to devote LOTS of time and energy to Quanta, both in helping to
produce the magazine as it currently exists and in helping to expand Quanta in
some of the ways I outlined in column last issue. Also, I'm looking for
someone who thinks they're going to be around on the Net for a while (at least
2 years). I'm looking for someone with a writing background, preferably with
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mail. LaTeX experience is a plus, but I'm mainly looking for someone who's a
good EDITOR. So, if you're willing to donate some of your time to Quanta,
send me mail telling me a bit about yourself, and I'll try and get back to you
as soon as possible.
In other news, I've started a pilot program of offering Quanta on disk for
the price of $5 per issue, or $20 for a five issue subscription. So far I
have yet to advertise, but I'm planning to put an ad in one of the "big" SF
magazines. This ad will be paid for by reader contributions, so thanks a lot
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thing (kind of breaking new ground here, myself) please feel free to offer it.
Another novel way Quanta is now available is via Gopher. All back issues
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sites and explore what is fastly becoming a standard way to get information
out onto the Net. Gopher is only useful for people with direct Internet
access.
I'm still (and always) looking for submissions. I'm especially going to
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interested in new and/or experimental narratorial styles or content and
fiction that doesn't conform to genre molds. The "Dr Tomorrow" series is a
good example, the second chapter of which is published in this issue. Of
course, I'm also interested in traditional forms, such as hard science
fiction, or what have you. At any rate, I look forward to receiving your
submissions. Experience has taught me that there's a great deal of talent
lurking out there on the Net that only needs a bit of encouragement to come
out into the open.
Well, that's about it for me. Pretty much as soon as I release this issue
of Quanta, I'll be off to Aspen, Colorado for a much needed vacation. I'll be
back mid-July so farewell until then!
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
HURRICANE
by Maurice Forrester
Copyright © 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Ruiz stepped out of the hopper and sank to his ankles in mud. Rossenby
Station was a ruin. The storm had shattered the dome that sheltered the
weather station and had reduced the sophisticated monitoring equipment to
rubble. Dazed technicians were unloading supplies from the hopper while the
pilot shook his head in disbelief.
"I can't wait to get transferred off this damn planet," he shouted to Ruiz
over the rumble of the engines. "The storms won't ever let you alone."
Without a word, Ruiz slogged through the mud to the temporary shelter that
had been dropped in that morning. "Take yourself to some soft planet where
you can grow fat," he silently told the pilot. The storms made Williwaw what
it was. The planet demanded you be tough, and it demanded respect. It was no
place for the weak that crowded Earth. That was supposed to be why the planet
was run by a military government, but the military too had grown flabby. The
officer who ran the station was weak-- a bureaucrat masquerading as a
soldier--and could not control his staff. So a tough private citizen had to
be called in to pick up the pieces. Ruiz almost smiled at the irony.
Captain Samuel Wall was sitting on the floor surrounded by filthy boxes of
files. "Just a moment," he said without looking up. "It's a good thing I
insisted on keeping paper files. We lost everything on the computers."
"Captain Wall, I'm here about a meteorologist you lost."
The captain's head jerked up, and he scrambled to his feet. "Are you from
headquarters?" he asked, wiping his muddy hands on his slacks.
"Central Weather. We try to look after our own."
"Oh. I thought maybe the brass... I'm Sam Wall." The captain relaxed
and held out his hand.
"I'm Ruiz. I'll need to talk to you first, then your staff. I'll also
need a place to work and sleep. I'll be out of your hair as soon as
possible."
"Oh, it's no problem Mr. Ruiz. You can have full access to my files."
Wall swept his hand vaguely over the muddy boxes.
"Captain, I've got biographical data, psychological profiles, letters of
commendation, and letters of rebuke. I know more about Lon Manning than his
mother does. All I need from you and your people is some information on the
week before the storm hit and then I'll know where to find the little
bastard."
"You've got one hell of a chip on your shoulder, Mister. If Lon Manning
walked out into that storm, he's a corpse by now. And if by some miracle he
survived, I can handle him a lot better than you can. I've been handling him
for two years." Wall's fists were clenched, and his voice trembled.
"Do you know anything about Manning's life before he came to Williwaw?"
Ruiz asked calmly.
"He was from Earth..." Wall's voice trailed off.
"The man is a fucking genius. He's a first rate exometeorologist, and he
headed his own section at the Weather Bureau when he was 25. He even designed
some of this fancy equipment your storm smashed to pieces. And do you know
why he was working as your second in command in this second rate weather
station?" Ruiz only paused for a breath. "He's a quitter. He requested a
transfer off Earth when his kid got hit by lightening and died a couple of
years ago. Even left his wife there."
"I knew he'd had some problems, but... He still couldn't have survived
the storm. It was the worst we've ever seen."
"He's a cagey one alright. I figure he waited until the hurricane started
to die down and ducked out of the shelter. My report says your people didn't
notice when he left."
"But why? Where would he go?"
"Manning thought he was going to get put in charge of a planetwide office,
but he got stuck here because the psychological boys didn't trust his profile.
This is his way of getting even. But he's only got three choices. All I've
got to do is figure out if he went native up in the hills, is hiding out in
some farming village, or is headed for the spaceport to try to hustle a ride
back to Earth. And that's what you people are going to tell me."
Captain Wall licked his lips nervously. "I'll answer any questions I can."
"I'm sure you will, Captain, but now I think I'll start with your staff.
I'll be back to talk to you later." Ruiz turned on his heel and marched out
of the hut.
The hopper that had brought Ruiz in had left, but another one was dropping
off tents to be used as temporary housing, its jets stirring up clouds of dust
on the plateau. The sky was swirling with clouds of every color in the
spectrum, and the air was charged with oxygen. Ruiz breathed deep and looked
past the landing copter to the snow-capped mountains, then turned to look past
the cliffs to the choppy, blue-green ocean. There were only a few planets
among the hundreds that had been discovered that could support human life as
it was supported on Earth. No world had yet been discovered with intelligent
life, but scientists had originally thought Williwaw might finally prove the
exception because of the favorable ecosystem. Here on Williwaw, men could
breath the air, drink the water, and eat from the vegetation. Scientists were
disappointed when no higher animals were discovered, but the politicians were
pleased. With a dying Earth growing more crowded every day, new worlds were
needed to handle the overflow. The only obstacle was the storms.
For half of Williwaw's year, the storms swept north from the equator and
battered the coast of the narrow continent. The most sophisticated weather
equipment in existence had been brought to bear on the problem: satellites
tracked the storms, probes reported on wind speed before being ripped apart by
the storms, and exometeorologists and technicians manned weather stations all
along the coast to compile data. Still, the storm movements went unpredicted.
Storms headed out to sea suddenly reversed direction and headed to the coast.
Storms died and then revived for no apparent reason. During the other half of
the year the settlements were safe; then it was the turn of the unsettled
continent in the southern hemisphere to be battered by the storms.
But the storms did not concern Ruiz. He was a security chief at Central
Weather, and his only concern at that moment was to find the best
exometeorologist in the whole sector. After picking up his supplies from one
of the techs, Ruiz headed for the station's junior meteorologist. He
recognized Rebecca Smith-Jones from the picture in her file. She was a thin,
bony woman with a plain face and dark, straight hair. Ordinarily, Ruiz
wouldn't have looked at her twice, but here at this desolate weather station,
she looked almost attractive.
Rebecca was supervising the setting up of the tents. After introductions
were made, she took Ruiz to the far side of the station where she sat on some
rocks overlooking the sea. "I know what happened to Lon," she said.
"Go on."
"He used the hurricane as a cover for committing suicide. He wasn't a
happy man, you know."
"I know. But he doesn't fit the suicide profile."
"Oh, all sorts of people commit suicide. He used the storm to cover it up
so people wouldn't know. Lon and I were lovers. I got to know him quite
well. He was always moody, but after I broke off our relationship, he got
worse. He needed someone to care about him, and I turned him away. Really, I
blame myself."
"Why hasn't anyone found the body?"
"The storm could have ripped him to pieces. Or look at the sea. He could
be out there somewhere."
"How did the relationship end?"
Rebecca was standing up now. The wind was blowing through her long,
straight hair. "It just didn't work out. We weren't right for each other."
Ruiz stood up. "What was it he said about you? Too suffocating? Was that
it?" Rebecca's shoulders slumped, but she didn't answer. "He ended the
affair, and you're the one who thinks about suicide. But don't do it yet. I
may need to ask you some more questions"
"I loved him," Rebecca said as Ruiz walked away. "I would have done
anything for him. Anything!" Ruiz kept walking.
Manning's work area had been in the underground portion of the weather
station, just above the shelter where the station's staff had waited out the
storm. Unlike Manning's sleeping quarters, it had survived more or less
intact. On the floor, there were a couple of inches of water that seeped into
Ruiz's shoes. A bank of shorted out computers lined the wall to the right, a
long work bench filled the middle of the room, and boxes were piled to the
ceiling at the far end. A couple of temporary lights had been strung up over
the computers, but nothing else appeared to have been touched.
Ruiz headed for the work bench. It was piled with electronic equipment,
parts, and tools, some of it quite old. Underneath some parts from a
disassembled weather probe, Ruiz found a couple of pages of handwritten notes.
They looked like the start of a computer program, but the weather stations all
used intelligent, self-programming computers. There was a moan from behind
the boxes, and Ruiz quickly stuffed the pages into his pocket.
"Who's out there?" asked a slurred voice.
Ruiz walked to the back of the room where a thin, glassy- eyed workman was
huddled behind some empty crates. The man was dressed in dirty coveralls, and
he wore a transmitter in his ear. "You must be Eb," Ruiz sneered at the buzz
head. "This station must be home to all the rejects on Williwaw." Eb was the
station's maintenance man. According to Ruiz's files, he was a rehabilitated
buzz-head, but Ruiz had never put much faith in rehabilitation.
"Whuddya want?"
Ruiz yanked the plug out of Eb's ear. "You're the only one here who spent
much time with Lon Manning. What do you know about what happened to him?"
Eb rubbed his temples trying to bring back the high. "He walked out into
the storm. What else is there?"
"When?"
"I dunno. When the storm got quiet. When the whuddya call it was over the
station."
"The eye. Why?"
"I dunno. I gotta get to work."
"Why did he do it?"
"He said he knew something about the storms. Why don't you leave me
alone?"
Ruiz reached down and pulled Eb up by his collar. "You'll never work again
if you don't answer my questions. Why did Lon leave the shelter?"
"I said I dunno. Somethin' that would make him a big man. Can't I please
go now?"
"Anybody down here?" The voice came from the door to the work area.
Ruiz dropped the shaking maintenance man and stepped out from behind the
boxes. A technician was looking through the material on Lon's workbench.
"Oh, excuse me sir," he said. "I'm just looking for some cable for our
satellite link-up."
"I thought the monitors wouldn't be up for a few days," Ruiz said as he
walked towards the tech.
"We have to get it running sooner than we expected. It looks like that big
storm is headed back this way."
Ruiz left the work area and headed for his tent. Far out over the ocean
the sky had grown dark. The hoppers had all gone, and a salty wind was
blowing inland. Except for some technicians scurrying into the shelter
erected that morning, the camp looked deserted.
In the tent, Ruiz flipped on a light and pulled out the papers he had
lifted from Lon's workbench. They were notes for a computer program for the
drones sent out to monitor storms, but Ruiz lacked the background to determine
exactly what the program was supposed to accomplish. Copies of Lon's files at
the home office were included and Ruiz plugged them into his computer. He had
read them all before and remembered all that he had read, but having them in
front of him again helped focus his attention. Little went on at any of the
weather stations in Ruiz's jurisdiction that escaped his attention. All the
data pointed to one thing: Lon was a quitter. He wasn't suicidal, and that
reminded Ruiz that Rebecca's suicidal tendencies seemed to have gotten worse.
He would have to file a new report on her. Lon wasn't a buzzer; Eb was the
only addict at Rossenby. If he left the underground storm shelter when the
eye of the storm was over the station, he might have been able to get to
another shelter. But where would he go? To a cave nearby in the hills? He
didn't seem the type to go native but maybe he would if he broke under the
pressure of the planet.
Ruiz awoke to the sound of rain drumming on the tent. Eb was outside,
gathering up debris that had blown out of the destroyed dome, and he looked
suspiciously at Ruiz as the investigator approached.
"You went native a few years ago," Ruiz said.
"Yeah. For a while."
"Did you ever talk to Manning about it?"
"Yeah," Eb answered. "But Lon wouldn't have gone native."
"Why did you come back?"
Eb shrugged. "It didn't feel right. I felt like a parasite living where I
didn't belong." He pointed to the mountains that overlooked Rossenby.
Ruiz had never understood why some settlers went native. They left their
settlements and went up into the hills where they lived alone in crude huts.
If they were responsible, they could live like that for years. The few who
had been interviewed said they wanted to become part of the planet, but some,
like Eb, came back saying they didn't fit in. What was there to fit in to?
Ruiz left Eb and headed for the temporary command center. The crew was
silently huddled around a row of computer monitors. As Ruiz entered the
cluttered shelter, Captain Wall separated himself from his crew.
"Well," he said. "Now you'll get to see what you think Manning walked
into. The storm that hit us so hard moved one day out to sea, stalled, and
now its coming back."
"It is getting rough out there."
"This is nothing. We should really start to feel it in a few hours."
"Shouldn't we get in the shelter if that storm is coming back?"
Wall shrugged his shoulders. "We will if the storm passes over us. It
still might turn away."
"You people should be able to predict these storms," Ruiz said. "What have
you been doing?"
"Nobody can predict the storms. You know that." Wall started to walk
towards the computers. "Sometimes I think this whole damn planet is alive and
hates me."
Ruiz walked back to his tent to get his notes. The wind was at his back
and pushed him along. This storm seemed to exist solely to cover Manning's
tracks: it was here when Manning disappeared and it came back when Ruiz was
trying to track down Manning. Ruiz pulled his notes and his computer out of
the tent. As he turned back to the larger shelter, a gust of wind tore his
tent loose and it was whipped across the compound.
"I don't have time to talk." Back at the command center, Ruiz was trying
to talk to Rebecca, but she was monitoring the storm's progress.
"You don't have a choice. As soon as I track down Manning, I'll be out of
your hair."
"I've got a job to do, Mister. Go bother somebody else."
"It's okay, Rebecca," Captain Wall said. "The techs will let you know if
anything happens in the next few minutes."
"Thank you," Ruiz said sarcastically. He led Rebecca to the far corner of
the building and took out the papers he had found on Lon's workbench. "What
are these?"
Rebecca sighed and took her eyes away from the monitors. "Notes for a
computer program. Are these Lon's?" Ruiz didn't answer. "It looks like he
was reprogramming the probes."
"Why?"
"I don't know. We get those from Central all ready to fire off. It looks
like he wanted the probe to broadcast on a different frequency. Here's the
wavelength he wanted to use." Rebecca circled a figure.
"Why that frequency?"
"I don't know. It's one we never use on Williwaw. There's too much
natural interference. Sunspots or something."
Ruiz took the papers back. "Thanks," he said. "I'll be in Manning's work
area for awhile."
Little had been done to clean up the exometoerologist's workshop. Boxes
still filled the back of the room, and the workbench was still cluttered with
equipment. Next to the workbench was a locked cabinet that Ruiz had not
gotten to the first time he went through Manning's effects. It was a low-tech
padlock, and Ruiz quickly pried it off. Inside, along with some expensive
computer equipment, was an old fashioned radio.
Ruiz hooked up the radio and tuned it to the frequency Rebecca had circled.
There was a lot of static, but as he adjusted the antenna, a familiar pattern
could be heard above the rest: three long, three short, three long.
"Lon! You're back!" Eb came stumbling out from behind the boxes. He
staggered to a halt as he saw Ruiz. "Whuddya want this time?"
"Did Lon use this much?"
"Yeah, sometimes. Why?"
"That's an SOS signal. I think he's in some trouble. Where's the mike?"
"Ain't no mike. Lon used it to send those dots and dashes."
"Morse Code!" Ruiz exploded. "Nobody uses that anymore."
"He even made me learn it," Eb said proudly. "Said I might need it
sometime."
Ruiz grabbed Eb's arm. "Quick. Answer him. Find out where he is."
Eb fished a keypad out of the cabinet and plugged it into the radio.
Slowly, he tapped out a message then listened to the reply. Outside, the wind
was howling louder, and inside, the lights dimmed.
"I musta missed part of that," Eb said. "He's sayin' he's in the storm."
"What's he in? A boat or a plane?"
As Eb tapped out the question, the rest of the crew entered the room, their
clothing soaked with rain. "We'll have to go below," Captain Wall said to the
two men. "The storm's getting worse."
"He said it again," Eb said to Ruiz over the sound of the crew tramping
down to the lower level. "He said he is the storm."
Ruiz walked to the stairway and looked up at the ruined weather station.
The rain stung his face, as he watched the winds whip the debris across the
plateau. Rebecca and the techs pushed past him to get down to the shelter.
Captain Wall took his arm, but Ruiz shook him off. "The storms are alive," he
said to himself. "The whole damn planet's alive."
"Excuse me," Eb said as he stepped by, his voice clear and firm. "I'm
going with him. Lon promised he'd come back for me if he found a way. If he
found a way to live on this planet without feeling like a leech." Eb's voice
trailed off as he climbed the steps, and he whispered the last words.
Ruiz watched as Eb walked into the hurricane.
______________________________________________________________________________
Maurice Forrester lives in Syracuse with his wife, Lori, and three year old
son, John. He is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Syracuse
University where he is doing research on American religious Perfectionism and
antebellum reform.
[email protected]
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DR TOMORROW
Part 2 o 5
Marshall F. Gilula
Copyright © 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 2
Saturday
Transit City: Goodbye Gabriella, Hello Pearl E. Mae
"Heavy changes," thought Lyle as he woke from sleep with an unusually clear
head. He heard the phone ringing in the bathroom and was immediately alert
and awake. Lyle reached over in the bed for Gabriella. What a strange
sensation, because it was not the Gabriella he had known to the touch. This
was someone else. Or else she had unexpectedly lost thirty pounds in the
chest. Opening his eyes more widely in the darkened room, he saw Pearl E. Mae
lying in the bed next to him. Of course, it was such a natural feeling to see
her there, like his ancient wife in the bed with him. Almost like a deja vu,
but more a sense of real intimacy that must have occurred over many years
together. Truth was that Lyle had not even kissed her yet. Pearl E. Mae had
explained it to him yesterday as she went over some of the basic pastlife
information from 32,000 A.D. She discussed the stuff about past lives in such
a matter-of-fact way, Lyle got the idea that reincarnation was considered as
basic as religious training for children by 32,000 years into our future. The
phone rang a couple more times. Lyle got out of the bed, stepped over the
motionless, unsleeping forms, and made his way into the bathroom. Both dogs
were waiting for him in the bathroom, where they often hung out, especially
when there were other house guests. Lyle sat down and She-Ra began licking
his feet. Then he pushed the button on the speakerphone. He was really awake
when he heard Julian's voice on the line:
"Hey, mon, gotta come over there. We lost Gabriella, mon. They wasted
her, we lost her, mon!"
"Hey, get it together, Julian! You having a relapse or something?"
"No, mon... I'm coming over there." He sobbed briefly, and then clicked
off.
Less than five minutes later Julian appeared with glowing doober in hand.
He shoved it at me, and appeared tired and puzzled when I declined. As we
walked around through the apartment, past my new room mates who were all
getting up, Julian offered the doober to each of them in turn. Each of the
six other Eternals, of course, declined. Even with the robustness of my
Primitive lungs, something in my transplanted Eternal nature saw no sense in
putting smoke of any kind into my lungs. Julian shook his head, and continued
puffing away. The smoke bothered me in a strange new way. My megastepped
body now disliked the hemp smell, but tolerated it the same way I had learned
to tolerate the Los Angeles County smog much earlier in my life. Cigarette
smoke turned out to be even more unpleasant and less tolerable. I was
incredulous that less than two days ago I had been smoking a pack of Winstons.
"Mon, you gonna need this thing if you not be smokin' now... Suit thyself.
Gabriella be driving Liberty City dude's Mercedes on Grand Avenue around
Douglas Road and they blow her away. Looks like four dozen bullet holes in
the car. "
"Gabriella was hurt?"
"Mon, she was wasted. She be gone, mon. Gone."
"Dead gone?"
"Double dead wasted gone, mon. Whattsa matter your head? You don't
understand me?"
"Sorry, Julian... maybe I am beginning to understand you. I wish I didn't
understand, man. You say something happened to Gabriella while she was
driving whose Mercedes...?"
"I wish I knew, mon. She just had the richman's car and they wipe her out.
Bunch of rock stars. You know. Rock monsters. She's dead."
"Well, she left with Jim the photographer yesterday, and he drives an old
Dodge Van. Driving a Mercedes doesn't make any sense. You keep saying that
she's dead, and I keep having trouble groking the picture. Besides, I don't
want to think of her as dead. She didn't come home last night, but I figured
it was just like some other business deal went down. Not just for a john, but
sometimes she looks for other gigs like the modelling one you saw her have on
TV last week. If she gets involved in something intense, she just follows it
up. It doesn't mean that she was hookin' all the time!"
"Yeah, mon. I'm real sorry. Nothin' more to say. But, now that I think
about it, mon... You know, you look a little strange yourself. Your skin
always be white, now your skin be lookin' nearly orange. What kind of a drug
you been doin'? You firin' up?"
"Of course not. Would you believe that I haven't smoked even one cigarette
since yesterday? I ain't been doin' no drug, but there have been some heavy
duty electrical field zapping changes that I been going through. Can you
believe me?"
"I can believe anything nowadays. What kind of electricity you talking
about, mon?"
"You know about flying saucers and people from the future?"
"Don't be playin' with me mind, mon. Then you gonna tell me they shot you
with some ray and now you be the transformed Man of God in Babylon."
"Julian, you grasped it exactly. I should've known that my drum bro is
sensitive enough to be absolutely hip to the entire scene."
"Mon, we people of the double minority and the HIV, we be very hip and very
cool. Maybe your flying saucer has good medicine to poison the virus. But
Gabriella is gone. I see them take her body in. Me myself, I feel sick when
I see her and the condition she was in. But she be gone, mon. Gone."
"Yeah, Julian... Maybe it don't look that way to you, but I am major broken
up and upset inside about Gabriella. And I have been through a few minor
renovations in mind and body lately, so don't freak if I come off fried out.
I know this sounds totally bizzare, but would you believe, I also have a new
woman, already. Her name is Pearl E. Mae and she sings like a crystal
goddess. We ain't kissed or done it yet, but she and I are for sure plugged
into each other since yesterday. I wake up in the morning and she's in my
bed. Only she ain't sleeping, it looks like, because these Eternal folks from
the future don't need to sleep or eat, unless they want to for some special
reason. I don't know if I am a transformed Man of God in Babylon, but I'm an
Earth man transformed into what they call an Eternal. But I still sleep and
eat, probably more than the other six, because they've been Eternals for a
long time, not for only a day like me. I dig them, and we're going to make
some killer music. I really dig Pearl E. Mae, and she says that we were
hitched more than once in previous lifetimes. Come over here with me, man,
and check her out. Unless you're afraid of people with reddish-orange skin
instead of black or white."
Julian didn't say a single word, but he turned around with a dumfounded air
and followed me over to where Pearl E. Mae was sitting. Since I've known
Julian, he's never been at a loss for words. But he sure was this time. He
just kept staring at her face. When he started talking with Pearl E. Mae, he
immediately told her about how he'd figured for the longest time that maybe I
was a closet wacko. After hearing the latest story, he admitted, the only
question that remained for him was about his own sanity. But I could tell
from the way he was talking to Pearl E. Mae, that he was just as much in love
with her as I was.}
Hal Nicholson was happily tucked away behind a corner table at the
Homestead Air Force Base Officer's Club. The young nurse he was drinking with
seemed awed and intimidated by his major's insignias. After 24 hours of
involuntary quarantine, the crew had all been released. Since it was getting
on into evening again, everyone naturally gravitated to the clubs. Quarantine
had been perfunctorily lifted after the third decontamination team again found
no source of radiation leak. Hal was now quickly into his third beer and the
back of his head was beginning to have a pleasant and faintly numb feeling.
His bladder felt full too. Hal and Jim and most of the rest of the bomber's
crew were treated like celebrities. Jim Breedice had lucked into a plump R.N.
Captain who responded to her third screwdriver by getting up on the bar, shoes
and all, to demonstrate eye-catching legs and softly pulsatile talents for tap
dancing. Hal found himself looking longingly at Jim's friend's legs. Jim
found himself doing the same thing, but also looking long and hard in a
northerly direction as well. The plump Captain found herself wondering what
she was going to do with two men.
The nurse was just starting to really get into her dancing. David Rose's,
`The Stripper,' was on the jukebox and she was moving in perfect sync with the
music. Uniform buttons were coming undone when a two-striper burst into the
lounge and shouted,
"Hey, Major, Sir... Base security wants you down at operations!"
On the double and they meant it. After all the quarantine time, then they
notice it. Doesn't it figure. There was a heavy burn mark on the bottom of
reactor number two. No radiation to speak of. Just a severe burn mark.
"I'll be a son of a coke bottle," Hal said in amazement. "Sure looks like
some kind of an explosion, discharge, or something ! Not a single extra tick
on the Geiger counter?"
"No, Sir. She's as clean as when she was cherry. Sure can't understand
that."
"We did go through an electrical storm. Do you suppose that Mother Nature
could have emptied those reactors?"
"No way. Even Mother Nature is gonna get radioactivity outside of those
tanks."
Partly right and partly wrong. The I.S.I. technicians had very carefully
calculated the energy exchange, and had accounted for every bit of the
redirected nuclear energy because that is what the I.S.I. was all about.
Considering the Laws of Thermodynamics and The New General Laws of
Relativistic Energy, and paying extreme attention to very fine details were
constant concerns of the I.S.I. The overall negative entropy balance, just as
with the similar but smaller problems of pestilence, war, and famine,
threatened the fabric of the space-time continuum and the life matrix itself.
Our story also begins in the very, very far-distant future. We find
ourselves catapulted into a Mission Control setting at the outreaches of three
confluent galactic group vortices. There are thirty multi-display monitors in
three semicircular rows. Hairless beings in iridescent white-silver
I.S.I.-monogrammed uniforms appear virtually identical in the nearly
featureless detail of their faces and the uniformity of their physical
dimensions. Humanoid limbs operate keyboards and other control panels arrayed
before the monitors. Just after noticing how much all the operators resemble
each other, our attention is drawn by the sound track, in full Dolby stereo.
Loud cacophony provides the main stimulation to the viewer because the scene
is in muted light broken only by blinking of the monitors. Sound begins to
increase in amplitude. Rumbling, vibration, and screeching frequencies make
it seem like all Hell is literally breaking loose. Crunching noises continue,
and dust-like fragments begin to fall from the ceiling of the underground
control chamber. Members of the Intergalactic Security Intelligence briefly
make purposeless-seeming movements with their appendages, which terminate in
small hands bearing two fingers and a thumb. A close-up shot shows two of
these hands typing on a keyboard in nervous animation. Camera view cuts
contrast two of the featureless faces, looking at each other. Although there
is no trace of any mouth movement, the viewer can hear high-pitched yet calm
voices speaking to each other.
Garth: "Well, what of this new series of crises, sibling? The prime
leader's teachings have certainly predicted this disorganization. And can you
imagine the real problems are only yet to come, if there is much time left."
Barth: "Obviously, sibling . And being at the center of our numinous
asteroid will do nothing for any of the siblings nor will it help unless we
succeed with the LaPlace Transforms."
Garth: "I know, sibling. We know, don't we?"
The rumbling sounds get louder. Flashes of light appear out of nowhere and
coalesce in the air above the thirty I.S.I. technicians. A three-dimensional
image of the prime leader communicates in the same high-pitched, mellifluous
tones:
Alpha-One: "Time for our exercise, isn't it, siblings?"
A confluent series of vowel sounds fills the chamber, as all the beings
cease their activities at the monitors, fold their appendages, and stare
straight ahead. The high-pitched sound continues and becomes more intense.
Particles of dust appear to reverse their flight and leave the chamber through
the ceiling from the spots through which they originally fell. Soon, the
high-pitched sound is all that remains as the rumbling noises disappear. A
strong sense of balanced harmony and purpose pervades the chamber.
Alpha-One: "All right, siblings. Now let's get back to the LaPlace
Transforms. We are in a no-lose situation, because at this point, there is
nothing left to lose if we fail in our attempts. May the grace and the power
of The One be within us all."
The image of Alpha-One dissolves into the darkness and tripartite
appendages again begin to operate the numerous keyboards and control panels.
In addition to the three rows of ten monitors, there is a very large concave
screen at the front of the chamber. The screen is filled with multiple,
smaller screen-views which are linked together across the surface as a series
of interlocking windows. Barth and Garth continue their conversation.
Barth: "So why is it that we must focus on such a small and insignificant
planet from pre-Cataclysmic times? Our time studies repeatedly show us that
very long-range views are necessary before it is possible to assess the
ultimate effect of even an apparently insignificant and minor character in the
history of a given culture. I remember that the personal belongings of a
military hero named Custer from the same planet appeared millennia later in
the Vorgat galaxy. One of our adolescent time pirates from 29,000 A.D. was
using Custer's military belt buckle as the energizer in his
magneto-oscillatory drive because it was solid silver. That anachronistic
piece of silver truly wreaked havoc in a time frame when the `lower' precious
metals had been replaced by all synthetic metals of extremely high atomic
number. And after that, several frightfully destructive time-fabric rents
began setting off random anti-matter implosions that nearly disintegrated our
I.S.I. predecessors before the I.S.I. really became aware of what trans-time
warfare was all about. Many of us used to scan those early pre-Cataclysmic
solar systems as a part of our routine training maneuvers. Don't you recall
how many of us loved to scan the life span of Jesus of Nazareth over and over
again? The vibrations and the fields surrounding that primitive ritual of
crucifixion sent many of us back to the processors during our early
apprenticeship periods. I myself can still feel that stormy atmosphere
surrounding the entire planet when only one portion of the whole was
terminated."
Garth: "Remember, this solar system is only one of four possible loci for
an effective, direct intervention. Because of Local Group proximity, this
system is also ideal for our first transmission. The energy requirements are
lower so there will some margin for slight errors and practice effect
expenditures. Their system is only early nuclear and pre-Cataclysmic at that,
eh Sibling? With such an early culture, it is almost for certain that we will
succeed in this first projected matter-energy translation through one of many
time-fissures. Let us pray that we can carry it out in a manner that is truly
benign in an entropic sense. We are required to make at least three of the
four possibilities fully functional before Alpha-One's return."
Entropy imbalance is more or less the raison d'etre of the I.S.I. because
transtemporal distortions (including intratemporal ripoffs) make the process
of entropy accumulation qualitatively much more disorderly. When entropy
accumulates in orderly fashion the results are regular time dimensions and
ordinary time passages. However, when entropy accumulates by fits and starts
that are occasionally of very great magnitude compared to the baseline, the
results are disorderly accumulation and possible breakdown of the space-time
continuum itself and therefore disintegration of the life matrix.
Base security was still very uncomfortable with the apparent discrepancy
between two facts:
1. Two and one-half experimental nuclear power plants discharged from a
top-secret aircraft
2. Not even a trace of any surface radiation leaks or remnants of whatever it
was that happened to the XLN-662.
Discrepancies that were visible never got by in the security world without
lots and lots of explanations. So Hal was very grumpily sitting in the plain,
undesignated security chief's office with the usual cigar in his mouth, but
without the beers and without the female companionship. He and the Chief, also
a Major, argued with great intensity for a few minutes over yet another
question: What were they going to do about their Reportable Nuclear Accident
Report? Both decided to forget about it later over a beer at the Officer's
Club--at least, until after they'd had the beer. And Hal, of course, had
still not forgotten about the Captain. In fact, he was thinking of ways to
sidetrack Jim Breedice into duty with the base security chief so that he could
have the duty with the nurse Captain.
* * *
We have carefully studied the flow of your individual lifetime to select
the proper time frame for our initial transmission to you. Our calculations
indicate that the next six or seven day-units of your life will be absolutely
uneventful. You will have sufficient time to make preparations for the
transition. If, for some reason, you decide that involvement with us is not
to your individual liking, we will be able to observe this with our remote
monitoring system. You do not have to write it out or state the decision in
so many words. Merely experiencing and settling in on this opinion
consistently for a period of several hours will allow us to realize that we
must make another choice. Possibly even from another galactic system, and
another time nexus that is linkable with our matter-energy translation
technique. Above all, there must be a strong voluntary component on your
part, in order for us to cooperatively establish the necessary cellular
electromagnetic transtime bridge for altering universal entropy and
transtemporal dyssynchronisms.}
Introducing Julian to Pearl E. Mae and the other group members did not
remove the fact of Gabriella's death. Lyle, had he been like many other
people, might have reached for a drink of straight scotch or a couple of hits
off a joint after he really accepted the fact that Gabriella was dead. But did
she know that she was going to die? Was she aware of anything at the moment
of death? Or was everything all over in a couple of seconds? Gabriella was
fast, and a couple of seconds were enough for her with her street smarts to
pick up what was going down and avoid it if at all possible. Gabriella's
entire life, from some perspectives, had been a long series of hot spots and
difficult positions, one after another. Gabriella always survived the most
outrageous situations. And now she had been snuffed? Why could it not have
been a dream? It had not been a dream. If anything, that part of his life up
to this point with Gabriella suddenly seemed distant and faded off in the past
and dream-like when he compared it to the uncomfortable and embarrassing
sensation currently in his chest that was yearning for Pearl E. Mae. He
wanted to get into her britches like he'd been there a lot before. It did not
matter if she had a name out of the Old West, or that she could sing
country-western with a real twang. There was some solid-home comfort he could
feel for her in his bones. Yet he ached vaguely in the shock of Gabriella's
death. Lyle was getting a feeling of sadness and disorientation. He yearned
for the comfort of the love feeling he had with Pearl E. Mae and he grieved
for Gabriella even though their relationship had been brief. Lyle began to
feel pain, and to feel lost.
Without warning, a part of Lyle's mind suddenly gaped wide open. Then it
happened again. His body's mind began to calm itself through the breathing.
Like the day before, something felt involuntary but also very familiar, in the
same way that pressing the accelerator or the brake pedals might feel familiar
to a driver. The megastepped Lyle had some great built-in safety and
regeneration devices. While his body's breathing systems calmed him, his mind
sensed a calming issuing from the six other beings. His self-relaxation was
enhanced much more than tenfold, it seemed. When he closed his eyes and
prayed for strength and stability, the swift answer was the group synergism.
Like a small cloud of white light programmed for a healing mode, the effect of
the group was to make him feel very supported. The grief for Gabriella was
much less painful, and he had the distinct impression of having shared the
grief with others. Then he felt the light and had no thoughts whatsoever for
several minutes. The white light enveloped him and conveyed a soft,
pleasurable sensation to the central part of his chest. The light in the heart
expanded to further envelop him and gave him feelings of Divine protection.
In a psychic sense, there was an intense chasm of disjointed energies suddenly
settling down into a harmonious crystallization of unity. Unity with
something unlike anything Lyle could remember, even considering the massive
amount of reading he'd managed to sneak in for free while working as a clerk
in the book store. After awhile, the entire process of his occult growth had
become almost like something out of a comic book story of occult powers and
extrasensory abilities. Whatever he read about seemed to take shape in a
literal or figurative way before his very eyes during the days and weeks
following exposure to the concepts or spiritual practices such as those
described in Tibetan Yoga. He often wondered whether some part of this could
have been auto-suggestion or self-hypnosis, but it was unlikely. This was
something different. Very different!
Although Lyle's friends who came into the bookstore often told him that his
imagination was too active, Lyle didn't see it that way. Most of the
spiritual teachings he was interested in enough to read about felt almost
natural and intuitive on first reading. Books and essays that felt strange or
in any way incomprehensible he simply put down since there were so many more
books in the store left to sample. So much of the stuff had already changed
his outlook, at least compared to the highschool dropout guitar player reading
background he had when he first started the job at the Crystalline Book Shop.
The day's events were not that illogical an extension of what had been
going on the day before, however. Even with the profound inner sense of peace
and love, Lyle's head still buzzed -- 24 hours later -- from the thunderclap
rainstorm and the multichannel data of the six other group members that was
nearly inundating his nervous system. The presence of six other beings in his
life brought Lyle constantly back to the here-and-now in the same way that
musical groups had brought him back to ground after flying too high and too
long on a solo passage. Lyle Crawford was just one day past undergoing a
mega-evolutionary step toward becoming part of a unique man-machine synergism:
DR TOMORROW. The initial, sudden contact of the seven beings and their
mentalities was the main substance of the first of many MindLink/HeartLights
on the day before, and Lyle energetically set to work with the group by
starting out the day with another MindLink/HeartLight despite having the grief
of Gabriella's death sitting on his heart.
Julian was pretty cool about my not smoking, even though he continued to
reflexly pass the doober whenever he finished taking a hit. I was more
surprised that my tobacco habit was not speaking to me through my body. Ganja
was nothing to quit smoking, but tobacco withdrawal was a major overhaul.
Julian reminded me of my deceased ex-, Toos, and how she always maintained
that quitting heroine (which she had done twice successfully) was much easier
than quitting tobacco (which she had done only once successfully). Julian, my
man for Everything, was now a little freaked out at all that was unusual at my
house. He was hanging out with us when Su-Shan gave me the Eternal ring he
had brought for me into the past. Julian took a look at the ring and then
split. I noticed the ring right away after the megastepping because of the
highly unusual shape of the pewter-like silver structure. The Eternal Ring
was a tiny and powerful supercomputer from 32,000 A.D. with multimedia
functions and projection systems. Atop a double-spiral finger-ring, the small
silver pyramid sat inside a thin, corner-shaped silver shell. Along the top
outside border of the shell were the six control buttons. The small pyramid
possessed a frighteningly effective laser kineholographic projector, and the
silver shell's control panel contained two tiny microefficient stereo speakers
for very realistic sound and incredible stereo imaging. Many cuts above the
best screen projection systems I've seen in video stores, the Eternal Rings
can play back ultra high fidelity stereo video images in a three-dimensional
format. The Eternal Ring, of course, is also an auto-zeroing, voice activated
communicator and networking device. The ring possesses capabilities for
storing objects in virtual space on an indefinite basis while safeguarding the
stored objects with combination of voiceprint and digital analysis of radial
arterial pulse wave. Field-induction linking permits the linking up of all
our computer modules, but the rings have another type of synchronizing
function. Special synchronizing pulses laid down by each Eternal Ring let us
synchronize our bodies' physiological signals more efficiently, especially
when functioning in a multitracking environment. Pulse multitracking gives
all seven of us special potentials for relating to MIDI music and
troubleshooting problems with the MIDI wiring, interfaces, and circuitry. Of
course this sounds too heavy for me to save in my personal memory, so I just
put on the ring, and resumed preparing for MindLink/HeartLight A small part of
my mind worried about Julian, and whether or not it was O.K. for him to be
alone. I wished he could be in on our MindLink/HeartLight, and I wished for
him to feel some of the love and cohesiveness and HeartLight that we Eternals
were beginning to have as a group. Especially because of the HeartLight, I was
sure that the residual effect of being centered in the heart was something we
could pass on to Julian and any other human we felt close to.
This time, we are sitting around the pool. It is our second day together,
and the MindLink/HeartLight is almost as important as the first one we had the
day before because we learn about travelling together as a group. The first
MindLink/HeartLight demonstrated to us that we were already a group and could
function together in a heart-centered and creative way by producing the
musical thought form and composition that terminated with the bat signal. The
first MindLink/HeartLight gave proof of how unified we could become. This
second MindLink/HeartLight was powerfully facilitated by Quail, who helped us
to learn how to travel and work together as a group. She taught us to travel
together out of the body and to function as Eternals while out of the body.
Quail came to DR TOMORROW from perhaps the farthest away point in the
future. An inhabitant of the Light Dynasty Galaxy and the Twin Federations,
Quail was tall, very buxom, and capable of both instant invisibility and
physical plane space flight. She very rarely spoke with language, and yet was
one of the group's most powerful telepaths. Quail could play or emulate
nearly any musical instrument, and could also synthesize or emulate a wide
variety of esoteric clicks and other sounds. When singing, she was able to
alter her voice over a large range of octaves and had the capability of making
her voice sound like nearly any of the controls on any of the group's
synthesizers. Quail was also imbued with an ability both very ancient and
very futuristic: she could voluntarily split the frequencies of her voice so
that she sounded like several voices singing or chanting at the same time.
These abilities were somewhat ironic, because in her native habitat,
Quail's physical form resembled more that of an fish. The specific form that
Quail's native configuration resembled was that of the earthly Manta Ray.
Quail's home planet was mainly a series of liquid seas made up of
sulfur-silicon congeners. As a being originally possessing physical structure
based on geometry of the silicon atom, Quail was required to undergo extensive
matter transposition before being sent to carbon-based Earth of the past via
the thought-matter projection unit by the I.S.I. technicians. Quail's
humanoid identity, after karmic resettling, was that of a Tequesta Indian
Princess who had been a champion huntress. Just as Quail had been an
outstanding heroine of the Light Dynasty Galaxy, her humanoid alter ego had
been a female hero from an advanced Indian civilization that antedated the
Florida Seminoles by hundreds of years.
Quail found the human form quite interesting when she compared it with her
native life-form. When she and Morphosa swam together in the DR TOMORROW
pool, Quail's human form felt almost like a plastic costume or sheath. Quail
could easily remember the soaring underwater movements of her Light Dynasty
life-form and she really missed it at times. She found it a challenge to see
whether or not her human body could slide gracefully through the water, but a
bayonet-type of glide was all she could manage because the densities and
specific gravities were quite different. Quail once observed Earth athletes
performing a `dolphin kick' in a televised swimming race and it made her laugh
involuntarily. Morphosa and Quail felt a certain type of comradeship, because
both of them had the capacity for changing their molecular structure. But
when it would be necessary for DR TOMORROW to do any really fast physical
plane travelling, Quail was always the one who served as the bus driver.
During the MindLink/HeartLight on this Saturday, Quail served as designated
leader. The meditation began and there was an intense sensation of linking up
with each other, that could be most clearly felt in the breathing. After we
had been inked up for a little more than thirty minutes, Quail was able to
easily transport all seven of us in one common energy package to wherever we
wished to go. On this Art Festival Saturday, we ascended over the house and
went zooming over the Grove at tree-top level. Even though all seven of us
were out of body, there were sensations of the breeze and smells from the Art
Festival. Quail flew us over the city and out to South Beach. We had a
breathtaking view of the entire Miami Beach hotel and motel strips in all
their fluorescent afternoon glory. Then Quail shot us up in the direction of
outer space and quickly circumnavigated the entire planet from space, and
returned to the southeast Florida coast. We then returned to what Quail felt
was the strongest power spot in their neighborhood. Only a few miles away from
the DR TOMORROW house. Quail loved the trip out to the tip of Cape Florida,
where the ocean was blue-green during the day, and beautiful and usually
undisturbed late at night because the State Park Service closed up the roads
to the park just before sunset. She pointed out a section of houses half a
mile offshore in the water built up on stilts. We had flown over the houses
before returning to the Cape Florida ocean wall and sitting together there.
It did not matter that their physical bodies were back in meditative trance
around the pool. They sat together and contemplated the stilt houses which
Lyle identified as occasionally having extremely loud and rowdy parties.
At the sea wall by the ocean, Quail was able to teach the Eternals how to
use the large fluid medium as a means of communicating with all other large
bodies of fluid media everywhere. Although most of the group members other
than Lyle were familiar with the use of plants for telepathic communication,
both fluid wave and plant communication were definitely something new for
Lyle. Quail merely demonstrated to the Eternals that any large body of liquid
was able to absorb, resonate with, and emit an unlimited number of vibrations.
Earlier in the MindLink/HeartLight, members of DR TOMORROW learned about
telepathic fluid wave communication between Earth and Venus during the third
planet's ancient history. This form of communication was infinitely cheaper
than utilizing gross, physical plane electronic or quantal energy. The early
Venusian colonists communicated with the original Mind back on Venus by simply
living clearly and being in the vicinity of any large body of water. Despite
increasing contamination in all continents, the major oceans of Earth actually
served best for this purpose because their volumes most nearly approached the
relative volume of infinity, Quail taught. Whenever a fluid volume approached
that of an infinite conductor, the frequency of oscillations necessary for
relatively infinite long-distance propagation becomes minimized.
Since the large volume of Earth's oceans approached, for practical
purposes, infinity, nearly any of the oceans could be used for fluid wave
energy projection. Quail taught the other members of DR TOMORROW how to talk
to each other through the Atlantic Ocean. They learned how to bounce and beam
thoughts and sensations from the rolling waves along the surface of the ocean
and they also learned, while out of body, to bounce themselves from the depths
of the ocean floor in giant swirls and eddies of much larger and slowly
changing waves that were nearly invisible but of immense scope and size
compared to the waves that rolled along the top of the water's surface. Low
frequency and extra-low frequency signals and stimuli sometimes have the
greatest biologic impact. Slow oscillatory vibrations could also penetrate
the earth's crust beneath the ocean bed to emerge on the opposite side of the
planet. Quail also taught them the trick of using the ocean to focus the
energy propagations of radio and other wave-form and quantal communications.
To Lyle, this was all astounding. Many of his forays into the written word
had spoken of the Hierarchies, but his fellow Eternals seemed to put many of
the higher spiritual principles into direct practice. With his megastepped
mentality, Lyle grasped these techniques with amazing ease. He experienced no
difficulties in learning how to bounce vibrations off the ocean's surface, or
from the large slow eddies in the ocean's depths. He was also learning how to
use the large body of fluid to focus his own higher energies when necessary.
The Miami area had so many points of contact with bodies of water, that Lyle
found it easy to nearly always use the hydro-bouncing and focusing during all
of his meditations. Since the Eternals do not require food or drink on a
regular basis, it was difficult for Lyle to convince the other Eternals about
the seriousness of the water contamination and the drinking water shortages.
From their position many thousands of years in the future, the I.S.I.
technicians watched Lyle on their multi-coordinate monitors and gently smiled.
Lyle, despite his mega-evolutionary changes, was still very typical of
pre-Cataclysmic people. It was easier for Lyle to accept mega-evolutionary
changes initially just in terms of his physical being, and he still
comprehended mental and spiritual changes in higher energies as being
primarily physical manifestations. Lyle was able to understand and use the
idea of water being part of telepathy, but he had difficulty applying the
process itself. This was paradoxical considering the extensive telepathic
communication that goes on between musicians in a group while they are
playing. So even though Lyle was a sensitive, he was rather redneck about
considering the possibilities of either plant or electromagnetic field
consciousness. Technophobic or not, Lyle treated all equipment with respect.
He even talked to his computers. But when it came to having communication
with plants, he drew the line. That was just for Walt Disney characters.
The other members of DR TOMORROW had no such problems. Simple plants had
been used for thousands of years as rudimentary telepathic communicators
throughout most Galaxies. And the fluid medium, water of life, aqua vitae,
was the primeval source of all simple plants. On Earth and many other
planets, plants both originated from water and possess water as the vital and
the single most characteristic compositional substance. Telepathy involves
wave propagation or transmission. The members of DR TOMORROW all knew that
both speech and thinking were different forms of waves. Since a body of water
such as the ocean always has waves, to send the waves of communication through
water was very easily done by simply superimposing one set of waves
(telepathy) upon another set of waves (the fluid). Many galactic systems were
not based upon the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen combination, but always had some
form of a basic fluid medium. When the fluid happened to be a condensed form
of a gas such as methane or a silicon congener, the overriding relationship
between the liquid and the waves and the communication was still universal.
Although the DR TOMORROW pool was fairly small, Quail had been able to
demonstrate this Saturday that when the members would carry out their
MindLink/HeartLight around the pool, it was slightly easier to communicate
feelings and concepts by using the waves in the pool. Despite the fact that
the pool was so small, the Earth's rotation and gravity fields actually caused
very tiny waves even in such a small body of fluid as the swimming pool. Lyle
quickly realized that with continuing practice, the members of DR TOMORROW
could utilize the waves of airflow for communication.
Megastepped Lyle was still the most primitive member of DR TOMORROW. The
Primitive. The Primitive megastepped into Eternal status. The other
Eternals, because of I.S.I. translation and projection techniques, had some
say in their choice of physical vehicles and also physical plane
personalities. Despite enhancing of his own muscular development and
definition to a superior level from an earthly point of view, Lyle was still a
Primitive because of being firmly rooted to a nevertheless advanced physical
and emotional body. Long before his DR TOMORROW days, Lyle had already
learned how to temporarily transcend the physical body during meditation.
During the daily MindLink/HeartLight experiences, however, Lyle was astounded
to learn that even though all members became One in a sense, it was also
possible to trade and shift physical bodies as well as lower-plane
personalities. Since Lyle had been a musician prior to the electric
cataclysm, it was not so new to him to learn that this type of body-shifting
and personality-trading also resembled what was possible while playing music
together as a group.
During the the first musical session, later in the day, Lyle was also
fascinated by learning to listen to, without actually hearing, many other
trains of musical thought that seemed to be going on at the same time as the
physical plane music the group, DR TOMORROW, was playing. Many of these
trains of musical expression seemed to come in waves. During the first
MIDI-mediated rehearsal, Lyle felt himself inadvertently being carried away
and losing control over his guitar playing and his voice. Like what the
druggies used to call overamping. Only the common musical MindLink/HeartLight
of the other members was able to help Lyle keep his feet on the ground and
stay musically grounded with the bass and drum lines. Music rehearsals and
performances were just be a special form of the daily, vibration-forging
MindLink/HeartLight.
It was Lyle's idea that some common physical movements and exercises for
the group might be helpful. Despite the fact that disco was no longer trendy,
Su-Shan used several programmed disco beats and songs as a way of
experimenting with musical body movement patterns. However, most of the
compositions played during that first rehearsal belonged to two other types.
One style was a very subtle wave-like movement combined with minimalistic
techniques that resembled what Lyle had seen in Eastern musicians like sitar
and tabla players who were performing ecstasy music. The other main type of
composition emerging from the first DR TOMORROW session was more of a
neoclassical, hard rock beat. Lyle opined that it would be useful for the
music to focus on breathing sounds and breathing patterns, so the hard rock
beat began to feature whooshing air-like sounds that would randomly seem to
track the listeners own breathing. Aloysius, the computer, made an important
contribution here, even though his existence had not yet been officially
recognized. Suffice it to say that VDT graphics consisting of schematic
patterns reminded Su-Shan how simple it would be to add a white sound
generator. Su-Shan and Noman later added three of the white sound generators
and arranged them in a triangular configuration. The idea proved very
effective. Some of the air-like sounds, as well as the white sound patterns
were included in both the hard-rock music and in the disco-patterned music.
The changes and transitions were very fast and seemed natural. Lyle and
the Eternals were living together in the large, palm and cypress-shaded Art
Deco house off Tigertail in the Grove.
Despite being able to control ectoplasmic projections of mind-energy, Pearl
E. May had very little control of her own physical structure. Her dark hair
and Aegean china doll-like face belied the multi-colored Vesuvius of higher
plane energies she became whenever she transcended. One of the first official
acts Pearl E. May performed for DR TOMORROW the group was taking Lyle's blue
Indian bedspread material and parcelled it out so that there was enough to
make UniSex shirt-garments for all seven members of the group. From the time
when Pearl E. May began to work with the blue cloth, its shimmering qualities
seemed to increase and become more intense. Pearl E. May decided to
ectoplasmically shape the cloth into long Indian shirt-garments for each
member, and the shirt-garments seemed to begin independent and separate lives
of their own shortly after Pearl E. May's abilities molded them into
existence. For one thing, cloth became instantly fireproof and indestructible
as far as ordinary means were concerned. The garments also seemed to have a
Morphosa-like quality of variable density. When the Eternals were wearing
these garments on a hot and muggy day, the cloth appeared to become sleazy and
diaphanous. One the other hand, the blue Indian bedspread material became
very much like velvet during the rare nights that were chilly on the ocean.
In the tropical rain storms, the material took on a synthetic plastic-like
consistency and yet was able to allow the interchange of inside and outside
air. In nearly every one of the group images of DR TOMORROW, all seven
Eternals appeared in the blue Indian shirt-garments. In addition to having
and performing distinctively with Aloysius the computer, the Indian
shirt-garments actually became a trademark of the group. The shirts were
really a far cry from all the punk and glitter-rock used by many musical
groups and entertainers. However, since the shirts did have a
density-altering property, they also tended to diffract light of different
colors in a random way. And actually took on the appearance of colors other
than blue.
Of course, the shirts had a very special meaning for Lyle, because he was
able to understand some of the eerie feelings he had as a child when he first
received the gift from his mother. The Indian cloth was an interface between
Lyle, the past, and the future. The megastepping had not only changed his
physical vehicle, but empowered him with the ability to receive, understand,
and manage intense amounts of energy. Just as much as he had been or seemed
very dull and humdrum before, Lyle now was able to maintain a powerful level
of equanimity in the face of nearly overwhelming and massive overload on any
plane including the physical. Lyle now already experienced two of the
automatic calming incidents during which his body itself started and
maintained the process of slow deep abdominal breathing. During the first two
MindLink/HeartLights, Lyle, as a member of the common mind, met his father who
had died in India. On one of these occasions, a blustery arctic wind seemed
to convey all of them into the Himalayas, where the group, Lyle's father, and
two Tibetan monks had a great silent conversation. On other scattered
occasions that followed, Lyle directly reencountered the energies of his
father and learned that these energies gave him certain powers or abilities to
communicate with passed-on spirits. This again was difficult for Lyle to
really grasp. His Western background made it difficult for him to be able to
really believe in spirits. Gradually, however, and with the passing of days
and sufficient experiences with atypical kinds of energies, Lyle was able to
react to even the word, `spirits,' with less disdain and more of an
open-minded attitude.
With the exception of Su-Shan, each Eternal came to Miami with only the
robe, belt, pouch, and ring. In addition to the Eternal ring intended for
Lyle, Su-Shan, the drummer, also brought a large piece of highly compressed
carbon through the time transporter-translator. Diamonds, because of their
compressed carbon-lattice crystalline structure, caused the least amount of
entropic disturbance, and I.S.I. agents had very carefully and scrupulously
calculated out the energy required through the LaPlace transforms for the
whole diamond. Earthside, Su-Shan used an ordinary hammer and chisel to break
up the large hypercrystalline fragment. The many smaller pieces were quite
negotiable in the gold resale shops located far out west on Bird Road.
Understanding the entire electronic requirements of a musical group was the
most serious problem facing Lyle and his six friends because music technology
in this Primitive culture, while based on relatively simple programming
principles, was packaged in some very complex ways. Lyle's previous music
involved only a small but very heavy combo guitar amp and a few effects
pedals. Now it was necessary to set up for an entire group. Just a couple of
the tiny diamond fragments yielded a large ammount of dollars. Lyle managed to
buy the basic sound-production set-up equipment for the group's initial
musical efforts although the group members' appearance nearly caused a riot in
the music store. They selected amplifiers for the individual instruments, a
multichannel board along with a fairly standard PA system, and a portable DAT
recorder. Lyle also purchased an inexpensive Macintosh computer, voice and
patch editors, and some sequencing software. Then Lyle ran into a brick wall
trying to explain Primitive ideas about signal processing for both sound
production and sound recording. He himself barely understood Earth
electronics. So even though his mind had been megastepped, he still came up
with a blank when Su-Shan and Noman tried to initiate him into the mysteries
of field-induction linking and transmission. Field-induction linking was the
way that Al the computer system had managed to recruit all their different
computers into his microprocessor-based shenanigans. Some day,
field-induction linking would permit Eternals to link with each other by using
their rings. Field-induction linking was the mechanism by which each Eternal
could now access any or all of Al's different systems. Field-induction
linking was a problem for Su-Shan. Su-Shan not only understood it very well,
he was able to communicate the technical information very efficiently to Lyle
and the others, using both verbal and extrasensory techniques. Some Eternals
came from galaxies or times that did not use electronic transduction for
music, but instead used plasma flow transmission units or simple yet
sophisticated systems of built-in genetically engineered vibrating membranes
that produced the musical sounds directly while being colored by resonance
properties of the being's own structure. Lyle had always been a fair and
sometimes commercial guitar player, but the megastepped energy changes (like
the changes he experienced with his own muscular structure) placed within his
fingertips' grasp a startling knowledge of all stringed instruments. He now
viewed the electric guitar as a rather primitive precursor of Draconian
feeling-lutes. Lyle managed to adapt himself to the six-stringed Drac
instrument with startling speed. Piano and keyboards are stringed instruments
also, and Lyle began playing both guitar and keyboard during different parts
of a tune in the group's first rehearsals. What was even more impressive to
Lyle and other members of the group, however, was the speed with which they
navigated and understood modern electronic design and the currently available
products. Su-Shan, the percussion expert, was also a 30,000 A.D. expert in
nucleonics. It was difficult for him to make a transfer back to the archaic
physical plane electronic components such as LSI, VLSI, and bubble memories.
But he and Lyle quickly mastered the low-level difficulties of MIDI
implementation codes and the elementary programming involved in the patch
editors and sequencing software. With some of the tone generators and a
special rack-mounted interface for the black Cube computer, Lyle and Su-Shan
ran the main outputs of the stereo PA board into the DSP 56001 chip that was
set to sample the music at a rate of 48 KHz and meet the technical standards
for DAT quality recording.
After a blazing day of MindLink/HeartLight and music rehearsal, the group
broke up into two different directions. Noman, Su-Shan, Quail, Morphosa, and
Rico decided to go visit the Peacock Cafe across from Peacock Park. They
would pretend to eat while checking out the street scene.
Pearl E. Mae and I looked at each other and laughed. It did not matter
whether the other Eternals could read our minds or not. We changed our
clothing, got the dogs, and went out into the pool again. I have never known
any lady who had previously been an aquatic life form, so I never had any idea
of how fish do it, until now. At first, it felt like Pearl E. Mae had rubber
lips. She kept them semi-pursed as we kissed. I tried not to laugh, but she
picked up my mirth and looked at me with questioning eyes, that spoke of her
inner channel that grasped my humor with puzzlement. I kept pushing my lips
softly against hers. My fingers touched her orange-reddish face and her
eyelashes seemed to emit electrical sparks as my fingertips ran over them.
Talk about chemistry, this was going to be Electrocution City. The tip of
my tongue gently pried itself between her lips. She softly opened her mouth
and began to suck on the tip of my tongue. As we kissed, it seemed like the
rockets' red glare was going off in my throat and in my chest. Except that it
didn't feel like it was anything that belonged to me anymore. It felt like
the rockets' red glare going off in our throats and our chests. Chemistry City
within the context of Electrocution City. We were really melting into each
other. It didn't matter whether Pearl E. Mae had been a fish, or a cow, or an
octopus, and whether I had been a monkey or gorilla or whatever. Together,
the two of us were two globs of light blending synergistically. It didn't
matter that the blending was taking place from a base of the physical body.
It was tighter than MindLink/HeartLight and sweeter than HeartLight. An
unending collaborative series of dolphin kicks plunged both the depths and the
heights of aquatic consciousness with very efficient, high-amplitude eddies.}
It was a spectacular black and red and yellow sunset.
The old man's hair shone like platinum in the sunlight. Waves of light
appeared to cascade over his head and onto his shoulders. Although his face
was unfamiliar, there was an urgency and deceptive familiarity to his voice
that demanded careful attention. The words felt as though they were being
spoken underwater, without any clear sound dimension but a type of low
frequency pressure or pre-sound sensation. Within the same bubbles of pressure
were included images that were almost but not quite visual. After some minutes
of conversation, the actual words and images lost their bubble-like quality.
The power of transcerebral translation software and field-induction coupling
soon had Yo-Vah speaking colloquial Earth English.
"Welcome to transitions, transitions, and more transitions. I wonder why
none of you have asked any questions about why this I.S.I. project has been
codenamed `DR TOMORROW', what it means, why music is involved at all in the
project, or what the role is of harmony in a transtemporal entropic
intervention. No one has asked whether there is to be a doctor involved in
the project."
"Since it was my computer that started telling the story," Lyle offered.
"I'd like to ask how my name got involved with it, and how come the little
notebook computer also gave me a three-dimensional straight-ahead view of my
immediate future that was 100% accurate."
"I'm afraid you're still being a little Primitive and concrete, Lyle... The
information that came to you via the little computer was being issued to you
from a place where there is 100% accurate, as you would say, representation of
a person's immediate past, present, and future as well as past and future
lifetimes. Just the fact that one has access to information of this type
suggests the need to consciously function from more than just the physical
plane."
"O.K., I own up to being Primitive, Yo-Vah. But hit me with your best
shot. What does `DR TOMORROW' mean. Like, I noticed there wasn't any period
after the 'r' in 'Doctor.' Does that have anything to do with the name? Am I
the Doctor Tomorrow character?"
"Good guesses for a Primitive. Both the group and the project codename are
DR TOMORROW. The `DR' is an acronym for Direct Reclamation. And the letters
of `TOMORROW' abbreviate a complex mathematical algorithm that represents
critical elements of the timetransit process. Or, tomorrow equals future when
viewed from the correct perspective. Briefly, the project involves Direct
Reclamation of the Future as timetransit. The project seeks to re-direct
entropy-critical energies by means of culturally-valued music and artistic
science-fiction materials featuring time travel. Megastepping you into your
Eternal form and injecting the other Eternals was the first and most important
step in the project. Despite being a terminally Primitive planet, Earth has
the cultural seeds and elements which can evolve into help for the future.
Many of your own future lifetimes will be spent as famous physicians and
healers. These lifetimes will reflect upon your successful DR TOMORROW
project. Extensive data from these lifetimes has been projected into you at
the moment of megastepping. You will gradually realize some of these
otherlife abilities. You actually are a healer and a physician from the
future, but above all else you are a teacher. You will soon be able to
discover and use creative ways of teaching. The word in many systems for
healer often means teacher as well. Earth's Japanese culture, I believe, uses
the word, sensei, to mean both doctor and teacher. In nonPrimitive cultures
there is often a common educational and professional pathway for both teachers
and healers. The MindLink and HeartLight exercises will help you to integrate
otherlife information. Never forget that the HeartLight is always the way to
your Higher Mind. And Higher Mind, for both individuals and the group as
well, is the best platform from which to deal with otherlife information.
Noman can teach you much about otherlife abilities and how integrated and
realized beings can draw on otherlife abilities in a very balanced way.
Future events will demand that you have many skills of which you now have no
conscious recall. When the skill is needed, it will appear, especially if you
let it happen. For example, although you are now a musician, you will soon be
drawing extensively on your abilities as both a musician/composer and healer.
Remember -- `Both/And'? I believe you were discussing these words with
someone recently. The healing abilities will emerge if you allow them to do
so. Remember, it is DR TOMORROW as a thought form that is most important.
Please remember the thought form! When you begin to work more specifically on
the thought form, you will also find that part of your megastepping includes
extensive cultural and language knowledge from several of your main planetary
cultures. Since culture has been one of my abiding hobbies, I saw to it that
you will find within you fluency in Russian, Japanese, and Spanish languages.
The languages will help with the thought form, but also with having more of a
feeling for your planet. Remember also that from a galactic point of view, it
is of course Primitive and limited to only view the outcome of a single planet
in the Universe."
"O.K., I guess I did say to hit me with your best shot, and that was a
pretty good shot, Yo-Vah."
And Yo-Vah said unto Lyle, with almost stern admonishment:
"So now is the time when you must take up the cape of divine human and
assist the Guardians, the Eternals, and the I.S.I. with preserving the entropy
balance of the Universe. Why do you think your planetary subcultures all have
the common myth of the Super Man who has more than mortal abilities? Do you
remember the special properties that Superman's cape had? The Cape I give you
now is a real object, even though it is invisible and exists only in virtual
reality until evocation, it will project and amplify your abilities
considerably farther than what you observed with the being your media termed,
'the Man of Steel'."
"Good grief, Yo-vah! Do you mean to tell me that your computer analyses
included our animated comic book heroes as well?"
"Not only have we analyzed your comic book heroes and themes, but we have
also intensely catalogued and cross-referenced most of your science fiction
and fantasy literature as well. One of our members even wrote up a History of
the Universe as a comic book series and injected it into your cultures. There
are at least several Guardians who are specialists in your twentieth century
English science fiction. For a soon-to-be-extinct planet, your Primitive
culture has been the site of some very worthwhile cultural achievements,
especially in your science fiction. Bradbury and Asimov, we love too. But do
you think that either of them actually comes from your system? Another of your
later injected, `walk-in' writers, William Gibson, was my personal favorite
because of the amount of realism along the optimism-pessimism dimension that
you found in his writings. His `Matrix' into which software cowboys plunge by
the simple act of `jacking in' with electrodes is a virtual reality that
operates at different levels within itself. Gibson's heroes live in both a
physical reality and virtual reality simultaneously. Gibson's Matrix,
however, is just one of very many possible virtual realities. Far in the
future, we begin dealing with virtual virtual reality. This level is a
virtual representation of a virtual reality, as with a symbol of a symbol, or
the mathematical derivative of a derivative. In virtual virtual realities,
the mathematics become impossible, even when you are able to use complex
equations and multivariate imaginary functions. At this level, symbols become
even more powerful and can sometimes cause a bleed-over of effect from a
higher plane to a lower plane if the symbol is a very good one. Consider the
cross, and the labelled-as-miraculous cures that have been seen on your planet
associated with crosses and other religious objects. Occasionally, in the
course of a planet's or a culture's rise and fall, the most trivial objects,
or even objects of hatred and scorn, such as the cross in pre-Nazarene days,
can assume proportions of immense proportions. Your comic book heroes come
from somewhere similar, don't they? In your occult readings, you have become
familiar with Jung, as I can read from the infrared patterns of your mind. You
know about the Myth. Well, Doctor Tomorrow is one of the new Myths that we
believe you and your group can sell your planet. A myth of hope and positive
attitudes, backed by optimistic applications of technology borrowed from your
future. Firearms and weapons are merely the least optimistic applications of
technology because of the old-fashioned anachronisms of violence and
destructiveness that require and merit replacing. You will need to get the
new myths across to the entire planet, or else there will no sector 221 of
Your Local Group. Maybe even sooner than the 2105 A.D. date I gave you
before."
"...meaning that I will not be able to couch-potato it for the next forty
years."
"Meaning that it might be good for you to have some experience being a
couch potato, if you are going to know how to get across to millions of couch
potatoes who are presently helping to subvert the general equations of entropy
into the mire and sludge of general sloth and apathy."
"Aren't you being a bit overly dramatic?"
"Absolutely not! When you see billions of your Earth 'humans' with
addictions to drugs, sex, power, and food, this is not a trivial example of
what happens as the entropy equations begin to mire and sludge. It is just a
matter of very basic temporal mathematics for the I.S.I. technicians in your
future, but it would require unending time for me to be able to explain this
to you, even with your obviously megastepped mind and nervous system. Just
trust me, whether or not you have ever read or understood anything by your
planet's Buckminister Fuller. If you properly design or otherwise alter the
environment, in an all-inclusive sense, the beings within the environment will
surely change. So trust me. Believe me : if you can succeed in having a
harmonizing effect on the energy of the planet at this time, you will yourself
begin to observe individuals undergoing change for the better. And believe me
when I also say that harmonizing is one of the few transtemporal activities
known to not increase the randomness of the overall Entropy Equations. So
please, be my guest, and harmonize away. You have nothing to lose but your
anergy. That is, the anergy of your so-called Human Race. To many of our
Eternals, your planet has resembled more of a Human Crawl or a Human Drag, as
in dragging to heels to avoid becoming really Human and caring for each other
in ways that are entropy-efficient. Do you get my drift?"
"O.K. O.K. Are you going to give me some kind of superscientific device
which will add to the harmonizing of the entire planet, or the entire city, or
the entire neighborhood...."
"I'm glad to see that you've grasped the idea. It doesn't matter if you
are expressing it in the reverse, the same principles still apply. But we were
talking about using the experience of being a couch potato for positive rather
than negative ends. And your typical Primitive orientation towards material
objects still persists despite your megastepping courtesy of the I.S.I. The
superscientific device you referred to is the thought form of DR TOMORROW.
Not just the music, the group, the story, the media forms, but the thought
form. That's the way you have to approach it. Because you are seven
Eternals,... or... eight... or seven and one-half... is what I seem to be
receiving from your group's energy fields. You will have to explain that to
me later. Maybe it has to do with your computer system. Anyway, it is the
higher, thought form aspects of DR TOMORROW that are the most important. You
will realize it more fully when you have been able to more fully appreciate
your own megastepped mind. As you are probably now aware, a change of body is
infinitely easier than a change of mind. Primitives, especially, almost never
realize the degree to which their own individual minds define the boundaries
of their individual universes. Because of this limitation, Primitives, by
definition, never learn to use their minds as networking devices."
"Maybe I am a Primitive, or a megastepped Primitive, or whatever. Maybe I
don't know about networking, either. I always thought that networking was a
word that women's libbers used to mean a `good old girl' system like the `good
old boy' system that still rules the southern U.S. But even though I am a
Primitive, I do know that you are talking about a whole lot of heavy
philosophical stuff that most people don't want to be thinking about. Maybe I
don't want to be thinking about those things, either. Maybe I shouldn't be
thinking about those things -- that could be dangerous. Most people don't
want to be thinking about why nearly everyone's water supply is poisoned, or
why halfway clean water costs $25 a bottle all of a sudden. It's like Mother
Nature has turned against us, and is now charging us for generations of
uncontrolled littering."
"Lyle, you are getting off the subject. Mother Nature is a mythical figure
created for you by advertising agencies and salespeople, just like the ones
who dreamed up the mutant turtles and the animated transforming vehicles.
Primitives always need to have some type of divinity projected outside of
themselves, because it is difficult for Primitives to recognize or utilize
their inherent divinity."
______________________________________________________________________________
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD) #1054,
spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar, and a
couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a Mac IIsi
running MOTU's `Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part of a Ph.D.
Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR TOMORROW is a project
that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional wellness learning system.
Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube, several Macs, numerous
stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and
Bullet. `DR TOMORROW' and `Project Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two
scientific activities of Life Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588,
Miami, Florida 33133.
DR TOMORROW will be continued next issue.
[email protected]
______________________________________________________________________________
RADIATION GIRL
by David Drinnan
Copyright © 1992
She spends all her time in the tub now.
Sometimes I miss her.
I duck my head in through the door,
just a peek, to say hello.
She's always there.
After it happened, I'd stay with her.
In the hot, heavy armour of my protective suit.
Bring down the helmet, turn on the pump.
Sitting beside the tub watching her.
Her hand on my glove,
my eyes hidden behind silvered glass.
Watch the dull blue glow of her arms,
her legs, her body, safely under water.
Remember the feel of her arms, her legs,
her body, silken skin under my hands.
Our old friends don't mention her any more.
Not since it happened.
I see them when I walk the streets.
When I need to forget the sound of water
splashing gently against porcelain as she stirs.
When I need to forget, they forget for me.
And when I come back, the black suit hangs by the door.
______________________________________________________________________________
David Drinnan has been pursuing a lifestyle of travelling and writing for
several years, though he never quite catches it. After studying physics and
psychology in university, he found himself writing books about how to Call
Forward and Survive. At 28, he lives in Ottawa and has his own writing
business.
[email protected]
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
NEW BEGINNINGS
James E. McWhinney
Copyright © 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
The Red Dragon Inn is a good place to be if you need time to think. King
Roland's soldiers don't often venture very far into this part of the city,
even during daylight. Some of the people up in the Royal Quarter call this
area Jester's Quarter, but only when they're not here. There's nothing funny
down here. Nothing at all. That's what makes it a good place to be when you
need to think, and tonight I do.
For months, rumors have been filtering into town about an elfin wizard who
has been stirring up trouble in the Southern Forest. Three days ago, a
messenger from one of the outlying territories came to the city demanding an
audience with the King. This morning, the sound of hammers forging steel into
weapons could be heard at every smithy in Tradesman's Quarter. The
possibility of war is all too real. I'm thinking of going north, out the
city, maybe out of the Realm. It's not that I mind killing, it's just that I
prefer to do it on my own terms, alone, and for gold.
I'm leaning back in a chair, with my back against the wall and my feet on
the table in front of me. The people around me probably think that I'm
staring at my boots, drunk or lost in thought.
I am thinking, that's for sure, and in a way, I guess that I am staring at
my boots. That doesn't mean that I don't know what's going on around me.
Over at the bar, a short figure in a long cloak just slid a small pouch to
the barkeep The barkeep pocketed the pouch, nodded toward me, and turned away.
The stranger in the cloak is coming this way. I can see him right over the
tip of my boot. He'll probably think that these worn old boot have seen
better days. I disagree. When I was nineteen, I stole these boots from the
house of an assassin. They've served me much better than they did their
original owner.
When I think of the boots, I smile, but only for a second. smiling changes
the youthful look of my face. It shows a few of the wrinkles and scars that
I've collected over the last thirty some years. That will never do. In my
business, appearances are everything.
The stranger in the cloak is about five paces away. That's close enough.
"What?," I say in a flat monotone.
He's staring at me now, straining to make out my features. I know exactly
what he's seeing, just a dark figure leaning back in a chair. More of an
outline that anything else.
He takes a step closer, around the table, and to my right.
"I won't ask again stranger," I say, a hint of menace in my voice.
"A thousand pieces of gold to talk outside," he says.
"You don't have that kind of gold with you stranger." "Gems," he says, as
he pulls aside his cloak.
There's a pouch tied at his belt. It's bulging with something. Probably
gems considering that the barkeep hasn't killed him yet.
"What's to stop me from taking those stranger?" I ask.
He shrugs indifferently. "I suppose you could try." Time to teach this
fool a lesson.
Before he can move, I leap at him. The boots make it easy despite my
awkward position.
I slip a dagger out of my sleeve as I move. It's nearly at his throat when
something solid smashes into my groin. I vomit as I'm slammed back into my
chair.
When the nausea passes, I look up. The air in front of me is shimmering,
taking shape. The shape of...a man.
"Sorry I had to do it his way Thaldon," the shimmering figure purrs. "Go
with him."
I know the voice.
"Dangar?" I croak, as the apparition fades.
The cloaked stranger turns and walks away.
I scan the crowd as I follow him to he door on unsteady legs. No one seems
to have noticed what just happened. What in all the cursed god's names is
happening here? Dangar's been gone for well over ten years. Who's under that
cloak? Why hasn't anyone noticed any of this?
The cloaked figure leaves the tavern and keeps walking. He doesn't look
back. I follow. He goes a good fifty paces with me at his heels.
Abruptly, he turns and speaks, "I am Rendell, a follower of Dangar, Mage of
the Southern Forest. I have been sent to ask you to meet with the Mage on a
matter he thinks you will find interesting and profitable."
He opens his cloak and takes the pouch from his belt. I can hear the faint
tinkle of gems touching. Slowly, he tosses the pouch toward me.
In one smooth motion, I catch it and slip it into my tunic. catch it and
slip it into my tunic in one smooth motion.
"Another thousand if you follow me to the meeting place," Rendell says.
"Meeting place?"
"Two days ride south. Dangar is there."
"Gems first."
He tosses me another pouch. I bounce it in my hand. Judging by the way it
feels, I'm willing to bet that it's full of gems. I tuck it away with the
other.
"I've got two horses near the south gate," he says.
"Lead on," I reply.
We reach the south gate without incident. The horses are fresh and strong.
We mount in silence and leave the gate at a fast trot. The evening is still
young, the gate guards pay us little mind.
It's late when we reach a small grove some miles from the city. He
dismounts and says, "Let the horses graze, they won't stray far...."
I spread a blanket at the base of a large oak. I like to have a good,
solid thing like that at my back. I'll sleep well. I don't have to worry
about Rendell. I'll be on my feet, dagger in hand, at the snap of a single
twig, one of the benefits of training and experience.
"We leave at first light," he says, as lays down on his blanket.
I wake just before dawn and nudge Rendell with my boot.
"There's food in the packs on the horses," he says.
The horses are nearby. I get the food and we eat in silence. We're back
on the road quickly. We ride till late in the night, stopping only briefly to
rest and water the horses. There's little traffic on the road, and none but
us headed south.
Halfway through the next day, we leave the road and pick our way through
the woods. The going is slow. As the last light of day is fading, we top a
small rise. There is a camp just over the far side. Armed elves meet us as
we near the camp.
"The Mage will be with you soon," one of them says.
I scan the camp, taking stock, and count maybe ten elves, a dozen horses,
and a half dozen mules. A half dozen sacks lay beside the mules.
A tall thin figure is leaving the camp and moving towards us. I recognize
Dangar as he gets closer. Fifteen years have not changed his looks. Elfin
folk can live to be over a hundred.
"Thaldon my friend, it has been a long time," he says.
I nod. "It has."
"My apology for the incident at the Inn," he continues. Your reputation
marks you as a dangerous man. I didn't want you to kill Rendell."
"I wouldn't say dangerous," I reply, looking toward the guards and then
back at Dangar.
"Thaldon," he chuckles. "Modesty has never suited you. You're the best
assassin in the entire Realm. I know. I've heard the tales and talked to the
people. Even Daldes says that you're the best."
"Assassin?" I ask, again looking toward the guards and then back at Dangar.
"I've been called a lot of things but, never that."
"You worry needlessly my friend," he says. "They can't hear a word we say.
I've taken care of that."
I nod, standing so that I can see both Dangar and the guards. If they can
hear us, they don't show it.
"Daldes is a corpse," I say.
"Of course he is," Dangar replies. "You snuck past his guard, foiled not
one but three magical traps, slipped a poisoned dagger neatly into his chest,
and stole his boots. And that was over ten years ago. With the practice
you've had since then, you're almost unstoppable. That's the only reason the
assassin's guild hasn't killed you. They don't permit rogues like you to
operate outside their guidelines...unless they can't stop you. The rumors say
that you killed two of their men who tried."
I keep my face blank, concealing my surprise. "You're well informed. Am I
supposed to guess at your fortunes or will you tell me those too?"
"Ah... Thaldon. There is so much to tell, but I'll be brief. We must get
to the business at hand. When Goldsen lost the crown and our families fell
from grace, my family fled south. Elfin blood made us welcome, fortune made
me a mage. Ambition made me a leader. I've united all ten elfin settlements
in the Southern Forest. We're ready to expand. I want the Realm. I've never
forgotten what happened when dear Roland's father took the crown. He made me
an outcast. Now I'm ready to be a king."
"Where's my place in this?"
"You," he says, "are in need of a new beginning. I am here to give you
that chance. It's time you quit living in the slums and return to the life
you knew, we both knew, in our youth."
"Go on."
"Do you see the sacks by the mules?" he asks. They are full of gold. A
fortune by any standard. Enough for you to buy respectability and live as you
please, anywhere. The gold is yours if you kill Roland."
He holds my gaze, looking for a reaction.
"How much time do I have?" I ask.
"Three days, maybe a week. As we speak, Roland is meeting with his Lords
in the palace. He will ask for a renewal of their oaths of allegiance. Once
they swear loyalty, he will announce that the forces of the Realm will march
on the Southern Forest to quell the elfin insurrection. I want him dead
before his army marches."
He pauses. I review his words in my mind. Kill Roland...
"You see," he continues. "Roland and I are very much alike. He has under
his command, the united forces of the Lords of the Realm. I control the
combined forces of the elfin settlements. Roland has no rightful heir. When
he dies the Lords will battle for the power. They will form allegiances, the
strongest of which will put a king on the throne. If I should die, the elfin
coalition will dissolve."
A look of irritation crosses his face. He falls silent, running a hand
through his hair.
"Thaldon... You must understand, I am not a tyrant. I do not wish to
terrorize the subjects of the Realm, I wish to be their king. I want the
Realm and the Southern Forest to form a vast, powerful, united territory. For
this to happen, Roland must die."
I smile. "A fortune in gold is not easily passed up by one in my position
and profession."
Dangar nods. "I will leave here when you do. I will return in three days
time and remain for one week. When the deed is done, return here for your
gold."
"I'll need five thousand croats before I leave."
"Take a sack," he answers, nodding toward the mules.
"I'd prefer gems."
"Gems?" he questions.
"I do this my way, no questions."
Nodding, he turns away muttering as he rubs his temples.
One of the guards Jogs back toward the camp.
"He'll fetch them," Dangar says as he turns back toward me.
"When I return," I say, "I will not look as I do now. Do not be alarmed if
I look younger. Much younger. And please, keep the guards close to camp. I
don't want many people to see the man who killed the King."
"I'll wait with only two men," he smiles. "My magic will protect us while
we wait, and when it is time to leave this camp, only the two of us will ride
away."
The guard approaches. Dangar weaves a pattern in the air with his fingers.
"Thank You Ogden," he says, as the guard hands him a half full sack.
He hands me the sack. I open it to find four sizable pouches, all are full
of gems. I nod and close the sack.
"Fair enough. I ride at dawn, but for now, I rest."
He nods.
I walk to my horse, unpack the blanket and spread it on the ground.
"Rest well my friend," he says, walking back toward his camp.
I note that two elves are on guard duty before I let myself sleep.
I wake before the others. I pack and leave in silence. If I ride hard
through the night, I can reach the city by noon tomorrow.
After two hours on the main road, I overtake a small band of travelers.
They have an old wagon packed full of their belongings. As I pass, an older
man looks toward me and smiles a grim smile.
"Riding that fast, I'd have to say that your fleeing the elves too," he
calls out.
I reign in to keep pace with the wagon.
"The city seems like a safe place to be now eh?" I reply.
"I hope," he says. "They've got the lands bordering the forest. I've
never seen such butchery. My wife... in the wagon... they... " he stops as
sobs wrack his body. "I... I hope she lives," he sobs.
I drop back and in look in the wagon. The bed is black with dried blood.
The cloth wrapped figure lying there looks dead already. It has only one arm.
A slow trickle of blood seeps from bandages on the bloody stump.
I spur my horse into a gallop and pass the wagon without another word. War
is so ugly. Not at all like what I do. I don't torture and maim. When I
kill, I do it quickly and with honor. It is not random murder. Women and
children are not butchered. Men are not killed for sport. Dangar's wishes
may be good, but solders are difficult to work with. Things get sloppy.
People die.
The night passes quickly on the road. The horse is panting heavily. It
won't survive this trip, but I knew it wouldn't. A small sacrifice in the
name of time. It 1S important to reach the city quickly. Time is short. If
the price on Roland's head weren't so high, I'd demand more time to plan this.
Four more hours on the road and the horse is stumbling. It doesn't matter,
we're close now. I dismount and walk the horse into the woods beside the
road. I dispatch him quickly. With the sack of gems over my shoulder, I walk
the rest of the way to the city, arranging myself along the way. A little
dirt here and there, a few tears in the shirt and cloak, sad eyes, and hunched
back. I look old and tired by the time I reach the city. It is just past
noon.
In Merchants Quarter, I buy a new cloak and a bit to eat. Back in the
Commons, I go to Tenbro's Ale House.
The barkeep raises his eyebrows in question, when I come in.
"A tankard of ale?" he asks.
I shake my head. "Aardo."
He nods and walks off. I sit at the bar. A few minutes later, the barkeep
returns. A stout man with a big barrel chest follows him.
"Aardo," I smile.
He circles the bar and gives me a hug. Aardo is a good man. He runs a
brothel, but also lets friends looking for a quiet place use the rooms.
"A room," I whisper.
"Ah my friend," he bellows," as he straightens up. "It is good to see
you." He slips me a key as he clasps my hand.
"I must go, but I wanted to see you first," I say. "I'll be back tonight."
He laughs. "I'll be waiting my friend."
I leave the Ale House and circle to the rear. The boarding brothel isn't
far. There's a private entrance to every room in the building. I slip in
unnoticed. There's a lot that I need to find out, but sleep comes first. The
sack of gems serves as a pillow.
It's mid-evening by the time I wake. I empty the sack onto the bed and
spread the gems out evenly. With the sheet pulled up, they'll go unnoticed
unless someone sits on the bed. That won't happen here. I toss my old cloak
on the table to ward off any unexpected intruders. No one violates privacy at
Aardo's.
In Merchant's Quarter, I stop at the Cavalier Tavern, and take a small
table near the bar. I eat and I listen. Young aristocrats frequent this
place. They know no discretion. I almost chuckle thinking about it. I
wouldn't fit in with these people anymore, even if I wasn't an outlaw. Twenty
years in Common Quarter changes a man.
"I say he'll announce tomorrow," a tall fellow toting a long-sword screams
at the fat knight next to him.
"And just how would you know so much stable boy? I'm one of Lord
Tengrill's knights and I've heard no such rubbish."
"Well brave knight, not two hours ago, this groom just happens to have
brushed the King's horse and polished his leathers."
"I'll drink to the King," the knight replies.
Their words nearly choke me. I've got to move, now. I finish my meal
quickly and make haste to Common Quarter. In an ill lit and foul smelling
cellar, I find the man I need.
"A dagger Rexan," I say to the young dwarf. He's fifty years old, but
dwarves often live to two hundred. youngster, he's got connections.
"Fifteen hundred croats".
"Fifteen hundred? You must think I'm a fool."
"Fifteen hundred. I've got a cache that just came in from the south.
Elfin steel, blessed with farie fire. The best."
"From the south?"
He smiles a curious little smile. "Dwarven folk don't kin with the elves,
as you know, but the elves are coming and magic rides in their stead. The
elves are going sack this city when they defeat Roland. I'm leaving by weeks
end."
"Defeat? Roland has the strength of the Realm behind him. His forces
number in the tens of thousands."
He frowns and lowers his gaze to the floor.
"Roland will lose."
"Lose?"
"Cromwell hasn't come to the palace."
I stand quiet, shocked by the news. Cromwell holds the largest Barony in
the Realm. His forces nearly match those of the King. If Cromwell doesn't
march, the other Lords will balk. They'll ride home to protect their lands.
"That's not the worst," he says. "The southern mage bears a half moon on
the back of his left hand. He follows Togi, God of Black Arts."
I'm confused. "Black Arts?" I thought elven magic is pure, derived from
nature."
"Most is, but not all," he replies. "Those that follow Togi make
sacrifices for their power. In times of war, they collect the left arms of
their victims and burn them to gain Togi's blessing. When the mage comes, this
city'll be a blood bath."
An image of the woman in the wagon flashes in my mind. Dangar's words echo
in my head... You must understand. I am not a tyrant. He and I were friends,
but we were children then. Still, I have no reason to disbelieve him. I rode
off with seven thousand croats worth of his gems, but I know better than to
take chances.
"Rexan, I'll take two daggers."
His eyes gleam. "Three thousand croats."
Greedy little dwarf' Fifteen hundred for the pair."
"You rob me' Twenty five hundred."
"Two thousand."
He shrugs. "If I wasn't leaving town, I'd send you away empty handed
thief, but under these conditions, I'll sacrifice."
I hand over my two small gem pouches.
He pulls a pair of finely crafted daggers from under a nearby counter, and
holds them out, pommels facing me. When I take them, he points to a battered
helmet lying on a nearby table. "Test them on that," he says.
I flip the daggers around, so that the blades face me. They feel good.
Perfectly balanced. I throw them both at once. They strike the helmet side
by side and sink to their hilts.
I sigh. "Impressive steel."
"The best," he says.
Back in my room, I take the gems from he bed and put them back in the sack.
I review my plan. I'll make the hit in Royal Square. It's right out in the
open, but it's also very predictable. The Royal entourage always enters the
square in exactly the same way. All but two of the King's escorts ride to the
stage with him. While the speech is given, the two escorts not at the stage
wait about forty paces away in the street. The whole city understands. As
long as those guards stay in the street, the citizens leave enough space for
the King and his escort to leave the Square. This is done to aid the King
should he need a quick escape from the Square. It will provides the perfect
escape route for a bold assassin.
When the bed i5 clear of gems, I tuck a few into my tunic, take off my
boots and lie down. I've got a lot of things to do by noon tomorrow.
I wake early and put on the tattered cloak. It has four leather scabbards
sewn into it to conceal my daggers. I replace the two daggers hidden in the
left side of the cloak with the two I bought from Rexan. I prefer to throw
right handed, and don't want to waste time fumbling with the cloak should I
need the second dagger. I use light twine to tie one of the original daggers
to my left wrist. I cover it with the sleeve of my cloak. The twine will
snap easily enough if I need the dagger. It always has before. The other
dagger is used to pin the sack of gems to wall beside the door. Anyone
opening the door won't find the gems unless the come into the room and closes
the door. Not a very tricky hiding place, but it doesn't have to be. This is
Aardo's place. I shave and cut my hair. That and a few other tricks make me
look quite a bit younger.
When I leave the room, I go to Royal Square. I stroll through slowly,
pretending to watch the carpenters finish the stage. The first alley way in
Royal Quarter is only two hundred paces from the stage. Once I there, it's no
hard task to reach Common Quarter. Satisfied, I stop at nearby ale house for
a bit to eat. It's still early, but I eat quickly. The people will gather
for the announcement several hours before the arrival of the King.
When I reach the Square again, there are already many people waiting. I
take position about ten short paces from the stage, careful to keep near where
the clear lane will be formed.
I watch the crowd and wait. All is as it should be. I stay watchful but
relaxed. Two hours pass quickly as the Square fills. A fat man stops beside
me as the royal entourage enters the square. There isn't time or space to
work my way around him. I just have to deal with him when the time comes.
Things are going to happen quickly, 50 I don't want to attract any attention
right now.
Roland and his escort of Lords ride solemnly to the stage. Cromwell and
several others are missing. The King dismounts and takes the stage. His
Lords dismount and take their places beside him. A quiet comes over the crowd
as all eyes fix on Roland.
"My people," he begins. He says a word or two more, but I don't hear. I
scan the open lane. The escort has drawn up, facing away from the stage. All
is perfect. I draw and throw the first dagger in a single motion.
It takes Roland in the throat. His word disappear in a splash of crimson
as I smash my left forearm into the face of the fat man beside me. The weight
of the dagger breaks his Jaw. I I easily knock him to the ground as I rush
past.
The crowd is still as I charge into the open lane. I can feel my heart
pound as I race toward the mounted escort. I'm nearly there when a leg darts
out of the crowd and smashes into my shin. I roll as I fall and come up
running.
A few steps later, I feel a tug on the back of my cloak. I glance back to
see an angry man in pursuit. This has to stop. I tear the dagger from my
left wrist and flip it at my pursuer. It buries itself in his chest and he
falls to the ground.
The horseman is in front of my now. He's still facing away. I pull out
the second dagger from the left side of my cloak. With a leap, I'm on the
horse and plunging the dagger into the soldier. The fine elfin blade never
slows as it passes through his mail shirt and sinks into flesh. A strong kick
and the horse starts running.
As I turn into the first alley, I risk a look back. The other horseman is
far back, but charging my way. He's too late. I'll never be caught in these
streets. Quickly and easily, I make my way across the city. The guards never
stir as I saunter casually out of the south gate.
On the road south, I pass many people headed toward the city. There are
many stories about the elves. None of them are good.
Near dusk on the second day, I near Dangar's camp. I tether the horse a
short distance away and approach the camp slowly. Dangar is there with two
others and the mule train. I circle the camp to be sure that no others are
hidden nearby. When I'm satisfied, I step from cover and call to Dangar.
"I trust it is done," he says.
"It is done."
"Good."
He turns to his companions. "Pack the mules and saddle the horses."
We stand in silence and watch the men. As they finish up, Dangar motions
for me to follow, and moves behind the elves. He begins to mumble under under
his breath and raises his hands over his head. As the elves fall to the
ground, I see a red crescent etched on the back of Dangar's hand. My dagger
slips easily into his back. He dies quickly.
It has now been three months since I killed Roland. Cromwell sits on the
throne. The Kings soldiers still avoid some part of Common Quarter. The
elfin insurrection has fallen apart. The Red Dragon i5 still a good place to
be if you need time to think. I'm there now, sitting at my usual table in the
corner. Dangar was wrong when he said that I should return to the life I knew
in my youth. I has been too many years and too many things have changed.
"Thaldon," a gruff voice calls.
I look up with a grin as a balding older man approaches. "Yes, Yando?"
"What kind of proprietor are you? Ever since I sold you the Dragon all you
do is sit in that damn corner."
______________________________________________________________________________
James E. McWhinney is a Pennsylvania native, born in Pittsburgh PA in 1969.
As a youth, he was encouraged to pursue his talent for writing but instead, he
focused his attention on aviation, in an attempt to find a stable, well paying
career. He earned an Associates of Science Degree, as well as his pilot's
license, graduating with honors from the Community College of Allegheny
County. After that, he spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh, before
transferring to Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied Professional as
well as Creative Writing. At present, he is considering graduate study in
Creative Writing. Eventually, James hopes to earn a living as fiction
novelist.
[email protected]
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
GEM OF THE UNIVERSE
David Borcherding
Copyright © 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Woodstock Bach records his death fantasies is a small datpad he purchased en
route to Yati. The palmtop computer sorts them automatically into one of
three categories: Accidental Death, Murder, and Suicide. Accidental Death has
the most entries (205), but Murder is a close second (199). Suicide lags far
behind (45), and most of those are variations on a few themes.
The most recent entry is a Murder entry. He got the idea in
the cab on the way from the downport.
MURDER 199: The chiphead that shared my taxi decides I am worth
robbing. He breaks into my hotel room, and is halfway through my
things when I return from dinner. Using an implanted launch pistol,
he blows my heart out. I have enough time to write a last "I love
you, Larrine" on the carpet, in blood.}
He isn't really being fair in that one, and he knows it. The chiphead had
turned out to be a pretty nice guy, after he'd gotten to know him. A little
odd, but then, they all are.
His name was the first odd thing. No, his hair was the first odd thing.
It was a fluid, black mass dotted with microlights, a kind of model of the
universe. The tiny white illuminators were so strong that the effect stood
out even in full daylight. Woodstock couldn't help but stare, and soon
noticed that the chiphead was staring back.
"Like it?" he said, shaking his head and causing the lights to dance
wildly.
"Sorry."
"Sorry why? For noticing? Don't you think that's why I do it? I'd be
pretty dumb not to want people to notice."
Woodstock hadn't said anything. Chipheads are a dangerous lot. The
synapse-inhibitors, flatliners, and other drugs they do make them
unpredictable. Say the wrong thing, and they're just as likely to vape your
head as laugh. Woodstock hadn't wanted to die right then, not until he was
sure there was no hope left for him and Larrine.
"My name's Richard," the other said, extending a slim, pale hand. When
Woodstock took it, he was surprised by its warmth. It seemed to tingle with
energy, perhaps having something to do with the lights. Perhaps some sort of
weapon.
He dropped the hand as soon as he introduced himself, before this stranger
named Richard could up the voltage. Turning to look out the window, he told
himself he would not stare.
For the remainder of the ride, they said nothing more. Then, when the taxi
reached Woodstock's hotel, Richard spoke.
"Why are you here?"
Not "Thanks for letting me share the cab," or "Have a nice vacation," but
the question that had been on Woodstock's mind ever since he'd left his
homeworld, Galondin. And one for which he had no answer.
Remembering it, he sits on his bed and wonders what Richard had meant. Had
he known what Woodstock was thinking? As far as Woodstock knows, there are no
psionic implants available. He doesn't know much about cybertech, though.
Cybers are illegal on Galondin.
He pushes the thoughts aside and decides to go shopping. He skips the
hotel gift shop and opts for the bright lights and bright colors of the shops
on the street. They line the boulevard as far as he can see. Swahla's,
Honest Blodgett's, Nuclear Ned's Powerhouse Bar & Grill, Chingteh's Casino.
He starts his buying odyssey at Swahla's with a very bright Yatiin shirt.
On the back, a buxom dancing girl moves in the light. Next, he purchases a
holographic paperweight with Yati afloat inside and "Gem Of The Universe"
engraved in gold on a fauxwood base. He hums a requiem as he spends.
SUICIDE 46: After spending all my credit, I starve to death in the
streets of Yati, surrounded by bags on non-returnable souvenirs.
Unless I die of pneumonia first from sleeping in the rain.}
He puts on the shirt and places the paperweight in one of its wide pockets.
The weight stretches the shirt a bit, but it beats carrying around a bag all
day.
While buying some Yatiin scene tiffs for his wallscape back home, he asks
the clerk, a cute blond named whose nameplate says "Ayram," for the name of a
good restaurant.
"Sheabin's is good, and it's just around the corner," she says, smiling a
goddess' smile.
"Great. When do you get off?" It's reckless, but he's got nothing to
lose.
Ayram smiles again, but this time it's not so wide.
"Sorry, but I've already got two jealous husbands, and they've made it
quite clear that they don't want a third."
"I don't want to marry you," Woodstock says, "I just want to take you out
for dinner. Consider it a very generous tip for such efficient service."
"Here's your receipt, sir," she replies, holding out the slip. "Thanks for
the offer, but I really can't."
"No problem. You change your mind, just let me know, okay?"
She nods and smiles again, and Woodstock leaves. Out on the sidewalk, he
takes a deep breath of the warm, floral scented air. Overhead, the sun shines
in a cloudless cobalt sky.
So I failed, he thinks. So what. I'm here to have fun and I'm not going
to let it bother me.
He turns the corner, finds Sheabin's, and goes in.
Two hours later, he finds himself at the allumer table. He's convinced
that he's just had the best meal of his life. The Atlantan bluecrab legs were
split and heavily buttered, and the body stuffed and basted with a slightly
garlicky cream sauce. Fresh bread and an exotic salad filled what little
space the crab had left, and he'd washed it all down with an expensive red
wine called Brutezza.
He plans on spending the rest of the night gambling, making a big strike.
He needs more credit so he can spend more tomorrow. It's the only thing that
makes him feel better.
There are fourteen other players at the table, making it a full game. As
soon as one drops out, another quickly takes his or her place. It's not long
before the seat next to Woodstock opens up, and who should fill it but
Richard.
He's still wearing the outfit he had on in the cab, a black synthskin
jumper that matches his hair. His carry-on bag is over his shoulder, and the
only other piece of luggage he'd had in the taxi, an instrument case, is
missing. Woodstock wonders why he would leave one in his hotel room, and not
the other.
Richard comes to the table with a fair-sized stack of chips. Apparently,
his luck has been better than Woodstock's.
"How's the luck run here?" he asks as he sits down.
"Not bad, not good." Woodstock has fewer chips than when he started, but
this round seems to be going his way.
Anje, the waitress, comes around regularly with free drinks for all the
players. All except Richard, that is. Woodstock suspects that she's been
ordered not to serve him. He looks around and notices the pit boss staring at
Richard. An icy feeling stirs his gut.
Richard doesn't notice. While the rest of the table gets hammered on their
free booze, Richard stays sober and keeps winning. His chips pile up, while
everyone else's dwindle. Players begin to drop out faster.
What really gets to Woodstock is that the cyber doesn't even seem to care.
Sure, when things are going right, you tend not to get flustered. But there's
a unnatural calm about Richard, and Woodstock suspects he'd act the same even
if he'd just lost everything. It's as if it's the game that's important, the
fun, rather than the money.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave." The pit boss has
suddenly appeared at Richard's elbow, with two large bouncers flanking him.
"Why?" Woodstock says, jumping up from his seat. "What's the problem."
"Relax, Woodstock. It's okay. I was just finishing anyway."
"Yeah, I bet you were, chip," the pit boss says. His nameplate reads Mr.
Puppenase. "I bet you got a nice little program runnin' to beat this game,
huh."
"No, actually I don't."
"Save it. Look, your kind ain't illegal here, but it ain't welcome,
either. Now you can choose to leave on your own, or I can have Beni and Touch
here escort you out."
Richard smiles, as if he's sharing an inside joke with an old friend.
"You're absolutely right," he says, and collects his chips. Woodstock
collects his, too, and all five walk to the cashier's booth.
The cashier gives Woodstock his fifty credits, which he has her post to his
account. As she counts through Richard's chips, Woodstock counts with her.
His total is a hundred credits more than the money she hands to Richard. He
starts to say this, but his friend silences him with a look and a smile.
"Thank you," Richard says, taking the cash. He peels off a fifty credit
note and hands it back to her. "And this is for your trouble. Have a
pleasant evening."
He turns from the booth and heads for the door, leaving Mr. Puppenase,
Beni and Touch behind. Woodstock hurries after him.
MURDER 200: I am beaten to death by two huge bouncers named Beni and
Touch, because Richard has hacked them off. My only crime is that I
was with him.}
"They chizzed you, you know," Woodstock says, once they are outside. "You
should have got a hundred credits more."
"Depends on how you choose to look at it. I think I chizzed them."
"You mean you really did have a calc chip in?"
"NO!" Richard's angry tone takes Woodstock by surprise. When he
continues, he is calm again.
"How else can you choose to look at that situation, and say that I robbed
them? Think about it before you answer."
They walk along in silence, Richard taking in the night sky, Woodstock
staring at the ground in thought.
"You know," Richard says, "the body does funny things to help us think.
When we try to remember something, we look up and to the right. When we try
to create something new, like trying to think of a name for something, we look
up and to the left. And when we are deep in thought, we tend to look down."
"Well, I was deep in thought, until you interrupted me," Woodstock says,
casting an annoyed glance at his companion. "But what's your point?"
"My point is, everybody thinks in pre-established, age-old patterns. If
people look up instead of down when they are deep in thought, maybe they'll
find a new way of thinking about something. If they choose to think
differently, they will."
"Anyway," Woodstock shrugs, "I can't think of how you beat those guys,
unless you mean that you walked out with more than you walked in with."
"Exactly!"
"Richard, everyone does that! Yatiin casinos always let the players win,
so that they spend it all, and more, in the Yatiin gift shops and such. Yati
subsidizes the casinos for just that reason. You don't think they kicked you
out because you won too much, do you? No way! They kicked you out because
you're a -- "
Woodstock stops, catching himself before he actually says the words.
"I'm a what?"
"A, well, you know, a..."
"A what? A person?"
"No. A chiphead. Their term, not mine."
"You heard them say this?"
"No, but what did you think they meant by 'your kind'?"
"If you didn't hear them say it, it's your term."
"Richard, really, it's not."
"Doesn't matter," Richard says, his hair imitating the night sky, "because
I'm not one."
"That's a good way to approach it. Refuse the label. Fight the prejudice
by not being angered by it."
"No, Woodstock, you don't get it. I'm not cyberenhanced. There is no
silicon in this body." As if to prove his point, the lights float up out of
his hair and begin to dance in the air.
"What," Woodstock says after a moment, "are those things?"
"Just a miracle."
Woodstock stares at the dancing lights, then starts walking stiffly across
the street towards a bar called Tough N' Eddie's.
"I need a drink," he calls over his shoulder, but Richard is right behind
him.
Four hours later, they're in Jaeiou's Groundzero Lounge, having been kicked
out of three others. Everything in the bar is chrome, and red and orange
lights glare off all the surfaces. Each table is surrounded by a hush field,
and can be programmed for whichever kind of music the customers desire.
Woodstock and Richard have chosen nothing, so everything is silent. The only
outside noise that intrudes comes when the waitress enters the field to take
their order or bring them drinks.
Sitting in this haven of silence, they have talked about many things.
Woodstock has learned that Richard has just come from Onyx, and is a wandering
minstrel, a synthar player that plays when and where he gets the chance or the
inclination. He would play now, but his instrument has been stolen.
"I was trying to explain to the desk clerk that I really had made
reservations two weeks ago, and that they must have made an error. While I
wasn't looking, someone walked off with my synthar."
"Did you tell the police? Did you ask the clerk if he'd seen anything?"
"She, and no she hadn't. And the police weren't very helpful either."
Woodstock knows why. Everyone on Yati thinks, as he thought, that Richard
is a chiphead. In fact, Woodstock isn't sure what Richard is. After the
incident in the street, they never talked about it. He needed a few drinks
first, which he now has, and so he asks.
"What the hell are you, Richard?"
"I told you. A musician."
"You know what I mean."
"I'm just a person, just like you. Just like the pit boss and the cashier
and the desk clerk and the police. People, every one of us."
"Except you're the only one who has dancing lights in his hair." Woodstock
downs the last of his Nixx, and signals the waitress for another.
"I told you, it's just a miracle. No big deal."
"No big deal, huh. Just a miracle."
"You've got it! You really are a quick study, you know. Most people take
a few lifetimes to learn the commonality of miracles." He smiles his placid
smile again, the one that is starting to get on Woodstock's nerves. It's a
smile that seems to say "I have a secret, and I'll only share it with you if
you're nice to me."
"I've got it? I don't even know what the hell you're talking about!" He
realizes he is yelling, and grins sheepishly at the waitress who's just
entered the field to give him his drink.
"Look, Woodstock. Miracles are everyday things. Life is a miracle. This
table is a miracle."
"How is this table a miracle?" Woodstock examines the chromed fixture. It
isn't even an attractive design.
"Think about it. This table is made up of millions of molecules. Tiny
little things we can't even see, and yet they are holding up this glass." He
raises his glass, which has only water and a slice of Deluran candyfruit in
it, and then sets it back down with a loud clink. "What gives those little
things the strength to do that, hmm? Why doesn't the glass just sink right
through it, like it would if this table were made of water? As a matter of
fact, why doesn't it just pass right through it as if it were air? Air is
made up of molecules, too."
"I dunno." Everything Richard is saying makes sense to Woodstock, but he
writes it all off to the Nixx.
"Me either." He picks up the glass again, then drops it from about four
inches over the table. It passes right through.
Woodstock quickly looks under the table, amazed. What is even more amazing
is that the glass is just hovering in the air as firm as if it were sitting on
the table.
"For that matter," Richard says, looking under the table with Woodstock,
"Why does it pass through air? If a table molecules can hold it up, why can't
air molecules?" He grabs the glass and sets it back on the table. This time,
it stays.
"Once you start questioning the why of reality, you realize that nothing is
real."
"Oh fuck," is all that Woodstock says, and lets his head fall hard against
the very real table.
MURDER 201: Richard convinces me that I can pass through solid
matter, and tells me to step in front of a speeding gravcab to prove
it. I am so drunk, I believe I can. The gravcab reminds me that I
can't.
"What is that?" Richard leans across the table to look at the datpad.
"My death diary." He shoves it across, and his friend picks it up. After
reading a few entries, he shoves it back with a frown.
"Woodstock, why are you here?"
"You asked me that at the hotel."
"And you never answered."
"Ah, yes. Well, the short version is that I was dropped by a woman I
planned to spend the rest of my life with." He slugs down the rest of his
Nixx, and signals for yet another. He's beginning to think that Richard is
right about this whole reality thing. He feels like he is floating.
"So you came here to forget her, and fantasize about death."
"No way can I forget her. We're soulmates. We're meant to be together."
"No you're not." Richard smiles again, and Woodstock fights the urge to
break his teeth.
"How would you know? You don't even know her."
"If you two were soulmates, don't you think she would realize it too?
Since she doesn't, you aren't."
"Oh, I forgot. You know everything."
"When you get past your pain, you'll realize it's true."
The bartender enters the hush field, bearing Woodstock's drink. He sets it
down in front of Woodstock, but his eyes are locked on Richard.
"Don't you think it's about time you chummies hack out?" He's a big man,
and his stance and eyes are threatening.
"Dammit, I am tired of getting thrown out of bars. My friend here is a
human being, just like you and me. What the fuck is your problem?" Woodstock
manages to get to his feet, but he's having trouble staying there.
The bartender looks at him, then stares at Richard again.
"I don't count cyboys as being the same as you and me."
"You know what you are?" Woodstock starts. Before he can finish, Richard
stands and grabs his arm.
"We were just leaving. Sorry about the trouble."
"Trouble? You ain't seen trouble yet, pal," Woodstock shouts. The heavy
paperweight in his pocket is making it difficult for him to keep his balance.
"Come on, Woodstock." Richard pulls at his friend's arm.
"Better listen to your chum, cyberlover." The bartender takes a menacing
step towards them.
"Cyberlover? You overdeveloped, glandular freak. You wouldn't know a true
implant from a... a..."
"Come on, Woodstock."
"From your own, steroid-shrunken willy!" Woodstock grins broadly and looks
at Richard, proud that he is able to finish the insult in such a grand manner.
When he looks back, it's just in time to see the fist.
The next thing he knows, he's in the dark. At first, he thinks he's dead.
Then he feels the hand that is still on his shoulder.
"Richard?" He looks over, and sees the lights in his friend's hair. "Where
are we? Why does it smell so bad?"
"We're in the sewer below the bar." That answers both questions.
Woodstock looks down and sees nothing. He does, however, begin to feel the
slippery ooze soaking through his shoes and pants legs.
"How?"
"Well, it's the funniest thing. Remember our talk about molecules before?
Seems they decided not to hold us up at just the right time."
Woodstock starts chuckling and slowly builds into a full- scale guffaw.
Soon Richard joins in, and they laugh together until the sewer is filled with
their echoes.
He wakes up on the steps of The Night Fantastique, a local pleasure palace.
Someone is shaking him gently, telling him he has to leave. He sits up,
groggy but not hung over. Every detail of the previous night is clear in his
head. Every word spoken still echoes as if it's just been said.
He searches his pockets to make sure everything is still there. Next to
the paperweight, he finds a folded napkin.
It was a pleasure to spend the evening with you. I am sorry we did
not get the chance to finish our conversation, but the authorities
insist that I leave. I hope we got far enough along for you to
figure the rest out. I am sure we will meet again, if we choose to.
Until then, take care.
-R
Woodstock stares at it for a moment, then re-folds it and places it back in
his pocket. He hails a cab and takes it back to his hotel.
After a quick pass through the sonic shower, he packs and touches the comm
link.
"Front desk," says a polite, female voice.
"This is room 1342. I will be checking out immediately. Could you please
send someone up for my bags?"
"But Mr. Bach, you are still registered for five more days."
"And I imagine you'll credit my account for that, won't you?"
"If you choose."
"I do. Thank you." He touches the link again and silences it.
Sitting down at the room's data terminal, he brings up the hourly departure
schedule for the starport. There's a ship going back to Galondin, one heading
for Onyx, and a third heading for Etherea, one of the outermost planets of the
Imperium. He logs a ticket for Etherea as the porter arrives for his bags.
On the way to the starport, the gravcab passes Swahla's. Something in the
window catches Woodstock's eye, and he has the taxi stop.
"How much for the synthar in the window?" he asks the clerk. It is a man
this time, perhaps one of Ayram's jealous husbands.
"A fine instrument, sir. Not many -- "
"Look, I'm in a hurry. The meter's running on the cab there. How much?"
"Five hundred credits."
He crosses to the window, lifts the synthar and its case out of the
display.
"It's used. See, there's a custom's sticker still on the case." And sure
enough, it's the Onyx Customs Bureau. "I'll give you three hundred, that's
all. No dicking. Like I said, my meter's running."
The clerk nods, and Woodstock hands him his credit chip. He also gives him
the paperweight.
"What's this?" The clerk eyes it with suspicion.
"Gem of the Universe. I'm returning it. It's flawed."
______________________________________________________________________________
Dave Borcherding was born, raised and, regrettably, still lives in Cincinnati,
Ohio. He writes mainstream fiction and science fiction, and has a novel in
progress (PANGAEA). He is also a freelance writer for Writer's Digest Books.
[email protected]
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS
Chapter 10
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright © 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
"Well?"
Vlep crossed the front room again. The flat was still in chaos, furniture
and personal belongings scattered haphazardly, but he was sure it was not
because of the quarry. Sule stood in the doorway, sharp eyes transfixed upon
her servant as soft, blue rays of predawn light fell silently along her icy,
white mane. Vlep ignored her while she stood there contaminating the mental
space with frustration.
Frustration, definitely, and yet there was something underneath it, some
sort of satisfaction.
"Nothing?!"
He shook his head, "It is as I told you before."
"You ran us into a dead end, before."
Vlep turned, cautiously. Her patience was like a strip of rubber ready to
snap.
"Is it my fault that your quarry decided to go to the Runyaelin during the
ceremony of sacrifice? How am I supposed to trace him from such a place of
death?"
"No excuses, psyche. I need information now."
He shrugged. She understood very little about the second sight. Explaining
the difficulties would earn few favors. He decided to shovel out the few
answers he had rather than bank on her dwindling hope.
"I will be plain Sule. I don't think this mess was caused by the quarry."
"You said Harrison was here."
"He was. I am certain of it. But I don't believe he did this."
"Why didn't you tell me this before.
"I was not sure before," he lied. "Beside, would you have believed me?"
"Come here, Vlep... closer."
She smacked the sheepish grin off his face before he even noticed her hand
in motion. By the sting it left, he guessed that there would be blisters.
"When you have permission to think, I'll let you know. Until then you do as
you're told. Clear?"
"Ah, very," he replied, surprised that he hadn't seen it coming.
"Who is this person who is with Harrison?"
"I don't know. A man, I think."
"And he didn't follow Harrison to the Runyaelin?"
Vlep shook his head, "I'm not sure. I was keying on Harrison only."
"Get me answers," Sule commanded, stepping back from the doorway.
Vlep rubbed the side of his face, looking again around the flat.
"He was looking for something."
"Obviously. Did he find it?"
Vlep stepped into the hallway, crossing the threshold into the bedroom. The
impressions were mixed and strong as before.
"The girl Harrison was with... it is difficult to see past her."
Red twill hung silent in the still morning air. Somewhere up above, a bird
was singing.
"Try harder, Vlep."
He put his hand on the window sill. A mixture of anxiety upon anxiety,
fresh and unpolluted. Vlep crossed back to the front door, this time almost
running.
"What is it?"
Outside, the sidewalk lay empty except for the clutter of dead leaves and
the white, government car.
"What is it, Vlep?"
"He sees something, yet it isn't there."
"What does he see?"
He descended the steps, looking at the pavement directly in front of the
flat. From the corner of his eye, he could see an alley cat cross the sidewalk
and hide underneath the car, its two occupants oblivious to the intrusion, and
in the back of his mind he heard the whine of a chemical engine.
"Vlep!"
Vlep felt his arm extending to point down the street, "He was running from
something."
"Get in the car. You're going to take us where he went."
"No. I have to be on foot."
"Okay. Come people! Vlep's taking us for a walk."
Soft voices crossed within the fog like knotted strands of hair, pulling
taut and then snapping as they spiraled and blurred beyond recognition. The
lumpy terrain seemed familiar, but the wispy, white haze swirled his
recollection into a befuddled mass of disarranged static. Below, a small girl
with long, sandy hair and wide, hazel eyes stood screaming, her voice lost
within the vacant space between. Then the old city rose cautiously to its
feet, a museum of looming statues, gargantuan and hollow, all abandoned except
for the rush of tattered echoes, voices of bogeymen, or so he was told.
He'd occasionally see them, their skin drab and mottled. They kept a
distance, eyes webbed with curiosity, daring to look but not to touch as he
snapped images like a tourist at the zoo. Sometimes he pretended to be some
famous archeologist searching for relics of the past, sneaking home later to
bury his trophies before anyone should discovered his absence. The
bogey-people didn't seem to mind. They would sometimes even leave him gifts
which he would collect with a gravitic net and boil before handling.
They had only become angry once, and then they poured out enough anger to
sate the frustration of an entire lifetime. Mobs of them had stormed the Naval
Hospital, the one safe place in the old city or barrens as it became known.
The underground routes to the suburbs were caved-in, and the overland barriers
were laced with mines. After the battle, the hospital stood alone, the
buildings around it reduced to rubble by explosive detonations. Hours were
counted within by the number of corpses incinerated on the 40th floor.
Volunteers, they were called.
"Put on the slickersuit, or you'll be next," his father had warned. Mike
spent a week just learning how to secure the plastic helmet. Righty-tighty...
clip, tighten, tie... swivel, clip, tighten, tie, check. Or was it tighten,
clip? "My son, the space cadet." He accepted his father's recognition with a
sense of accomplishment, holding the memory with a youthful pride which
bordered on the pompous. A year would pass before he learned that the comment
wasn't meant as a compliment.
He cheeks wore a rosy hue that day, somewhat brighter than the burnt brown
of the doctor's whose thick, blue veins and patchy tufts of white hair blew
back and forth in the ventilating stink. Dirty beads of perspiration
glistened on his brows, flowing in trickles from the wrinkles between his
eyes, as he stacked small metallic cylinders into the small, silver box.
"Here boy," he offered in a soft but desperate voice. "Take this to your
mother. And watch yourself while you're out there. Lei got away; crafty,
little runt."
Outside, sunbeams bathed the asphalt in a bellowing heat, and the dust of
the dead fell about him like a summer shower, clogging the filter as he
unfastened the helmet and gulped for air. The buildings stood about him in
various states of disrepair, the tall communications tower rising like a lone
palm tree amidst a rocky and deserted beach. Memories of her running along the
flat, wet sands sparked to mind. She'd been crying. Her brother destroyed the
house she'd built for the small, white, kitten crabs. He couldn't remember
why.
Somewhere in the distance he heard her voice, sweat accumulating in his
eyebrows as he searched the hillside. She stood near the top beside the old
cathedral, its tall, stained-glass windows, once polished and beautiful before
people came and painted graffiti on the saints. Now, instead of reading from
scrolls, they played long violins and wore red and black headbands. The big
guy in the dome window no longer smiled, and his chalice and loaf were
replaced with a straight-backed snake and a bulging phallus.
They'd visited it several times. The few who attended sat in sparse
clusters, their moods somber and suspicious. She'd once gone wandering,
greeting people as they came in. His father grabbed her by the shoulder and
put her over his knee. Later she asked him why, but he wouldn't explain. He
just looked up at the dome, muttering something under his breath.
"Does Jesus sing, Daddy?"
"He snaps the sticks, sweetheart. Can you hear him?"
They never went back after that, but his mother told them stories about how
people used to pray there, especially after what had happened. He didn't
understand what she meant by praying, but it seemed like a serious business.
It had something to do with the guys in the windows. She often showed him her
favorite.
"Michael!?"
She started running down the hill, her bony legs quaking with each hop
until a moist patch suddenly gave way and she blundered into the thickets, her
legs falling away from underneath, hurtling her into the dense brush below. He
felt a cold lump of cotton form in his throat, stealing his voice. Then she
crawled out, tears streaming down her cheeks as patches of blood showed
through the knees of her white stockings.
"Mike, don't leave me. I'm afraid."
A shaft of stark red cascaded from the dome, its bright, pulsing heat
joining with the perspiration in his brows. Together, they splashed into his
eyes, blinding him within in a warm veil of brine. For a moment he was aware
only of the sun's broad cymbals clashing on his skull and of his pounding
heartbeat and the sprinting sound of his feet touching the ground and leaving
again in quick succession.
"Michael!"
The pounding grew louder, like a sledgehammer crushing a block of marble,
all the splinters shattering in all different directions, jumping out at
people, bodies imploding in a maelstrom of hydrogen and fire, and then the
blurry ground rising as he skidded and slid down the loamy slope, skipping
over brambles and thrush as large stones protruded from the path to strike
him. A dew-laden carpet of grass and twigs lay before his feet, the small,
crooked trees emerging sporadically from the dense brush as birds scattered
from their branches, the squashing noise of his sprint splashing dirty water
toward either side.
He'd dropped the metal box somewhere far behind and kept running until her
wails were only a thin whisper in the distance, the sound reverberating
against the walls of his conscience, a texture soft and familiar but which he
could never seem to reach.
"Namarie, nilimo, ve firnuvan hior."
And then it faded until it was too quiet to distinguish as more than random
noise.
"Mike..."
His whole body tingled, a fluttering sensation as though he were chopped
into pieces and frozen. He tried to move his fingers, yet his hands couldn't
find them, nor could his arms find his hands, and so forth, all the way to his
spirit, unshackled and floating free, ready to draw away with the gentle
barrens wind.
"Son of a bitch is giving up... five more cc's."
"C'mon Mike, pull out...."
A thin man stood over him, watching Mike as though he were some spectacle
at a freak show. Mike imagined the tall spokes jutting from his skull to be
the long fronds of a palm, it's stalk swaying in the coastal wind. Thin, brown
eyebrows danced like frolicking caterpillars, the soft eyes beneath shimmering
a placid blue.
"Did you hear me? Five more!"
"Got it...."
With the sudden jolt in pulse-rate, Mike's fingers gripped at the null
field for something to squeeze.
"Well... that worked...."
Johanes pulled back the syringe as the convulsions began, a rattling of
bones against flesh all suspended in air.
"Is he gonna make it?"
"Of course he will... although..."
"Although?"
"What's left when he gets back...." Spokes shrugged his shoulders
apathetically, "Unhook him."
Beneath a canopy of skull, thin fibers pulled taunt and disappeared, the
throbbing hum echoing into the silence of an invisible rhyme. Johanes quickly
cleaned the connections before replacing their caps, and Spokes bent over
Mike, checking the pupil reflex with a bright penlight.
"How ya feeling, Harrison?"
Mike felt the grid solidify as he involuntarily rotated toward the cheery
voice. His eyes overcompensated for the distance making the figured blur in
and out of focus, and he could hear a steady pounding in his head. Spokes
slapped him on the cheek and watched as the sensation tingled slowly across
the gatherer's face.
"Huh?"
"You need to talk to me, Harrison. How many fingers do I have up?"
"Uh... three."
"Excellent. You don't mind if I check out a few reflexes, do you?" A crisp
bolt of electricity arced from somewhere above, its touch like icy fire upon
his forehead. Mike winced at the shock.
"Good. Now, try saying something intelligent for us."
Mike paused, finally blurting out the first thing that came to mind: "Where
am I?"
Spokes beamed, apparently impressed.
"Tyberian compound. How much do you remember?"
Mike pictured Vilya sitting under the ventilation shaft, her dark hair
shuffling gently in the damp current. From the corner of his vision he could
barely discern the outline of her shadow amidst the yellow rays of sunshine
which scattered evenly through an open doorway and onto the cold cement floor.
All the while Spokes kept trying to make conversation, threatening to test a
few more reflexes if Mike didn't mumble a response every so often.
"You folding up on me, Harrison?"
Mike yanked his head to the side but the field re-solidified, closing him
within a tight bubble of gravitational force. Spokes, looking vaguely
apologetic, readjusted the controls as the field gently settled Mike to the
floor.
The shadow and a pair of legs crossed the chamber in synchronous step,
finally meeting like twin V's at a pair of quagga-hide loafers beside the
bio-monitor's tall, metallic frame. Mike watched his own pulse rate in the
electronic display for several seconds before he realized that it matched the
faint pounding noise in his head. A pair of electronic pinchers still wavered
carelessly in the gravitic null. The densest objects were always the last to
fall due to over-compensation on the part of the computer. Johanes snatched
them on their slow descent as he watched Spokes unplug the inertial modules.
Then he looked toward Mike, his sweaty face the color of a rotten egg.
"Anybody home in there?"
Mike considered the question carefully, but Johanes seemed impatient for a
response.
"What's the matter? Can't he understand?"
"Of course he understands; he's just a little whomped."
Spokes finished stowing the equipment and turned around, a white plastic
tube in one hand and a pair of silicon adapters in the other. He knelt down
beside Mike, cautiously extracting a thread of optifiber from the tube and
uncapping two of the jack's on Mike's skull.
"This is going to feel sorta funny, but we figure it's better to zap you
while you're still dead to the world."
Spokes worked both ends of the thread into the adapters, finally plugging
them into Mike's skull so that the optifiber seemed to emerge at one point and
sink back at another. Mike felt a tingling sensation within his joints which
spread along his skin as Spokes sat back to admire his handiwork. The tingling
slowly grew into a strange, blazing sort of itch, as though hundreds of
electrical spiders were crawling within his stomach, head, and limbs. Spokes
and Johanes held him down as the floor seemed to wrap itself around his body
in a vain attempt to extinguish the fire. Johanes was talking in a worried
tone, but Spokes kept shaking his head as if everything was normal.
Mike listened to the sound of the voices, finally accepting the burning
sensation which swept back and forth along his spine and through his legs like
the icy Aeluin on the gentle, sloping shores beside Erfalas. Then, it slowly
began to transform itself into a numbing, almost paralytic massage, the
tingling returning, and the entire series of sensations beginning anew and
repeating, over and over. After more iterations than he cared to count, Mike
noticed that the familiar hands which held him down during the burning periods
had mysteriously disappeared. He waited for awhile to see if they would
return, finally observing that the yellow rays were also gone, and the room
was bathed in dim blue and pink, most of it generated by the bio-monitor's
video display and small glowbeads scattered about the walls.
Reaching to his head almost instinctively, he carefully unscrewed the
adapters, allowing the sensations to leave him like a decent lover: sweaty,
sore and thirsty. A sluice-stick lay conscientiously beside him on the floor,
and he chewed it open and sucked out the syrupy contents while righting
himself into a sitting position. Something sharp bumped into his head, and he
crouched back down, squinting toward the ceiling. A flimsi-leaf seemed to
dangle in mid-air, "try me" scrawled across it in dim, glowing pink. Mike
tugged it free from two long black cords which hung from one of the many
ceiling cables, curling it and himself into a tight ball. The cold cement felt
strangely comforting, the wet, sticky sluice still coating his numb lips as he
watched the cords swing gently back and forth, beckoning in the dim light.
He reached toward them, propping himself up with one elbow as he tugged
himself back into a sitting position. Mike examined them, cautiously, the dim
pink light changing in intensity as the flimsi slowly stretched itself out.
The cords ended in adapters not unlike those he had recently unscrewed.
Shrugging, he screwed the new ones into where they seemed to fit. At first he
could just hear voices, but from the shadows around him, ghosts seemed to
emerge.
"Well look who's here."
"Hey, Harrison. How ya feeling?"
"Who is he?"
"Must be a novice. He doesn't seem to be very talkative."
Mike felt a sudden jolt of static like an electric slap across his senses.
"Hey, cut it out. He's my guest."
"Sorry."
"Hey Mike. That was pretty quick. You okay?"
"Spokes?" Mike gulped down, blinking his eyes to refocus. It didn't seem to
matter whether his eyes were open or closed. They were still there, all the
same.
"Yeah, it's me. Cecil's here too."
"Hi there, little one."
Cecil's image seemed to have yellow eyes, shining faintly through an acidic
smog like the sun on Tyber. Mike nodded, still contemplating whether or not to
tear the twin cords from his skull.
"You seem a little uneasy."
Mike shrugged, "I've having a weird day."
"I zapped him after we installed his output," Spokes explained.
"So soon?!" The yellow eyes flared brightly.
"Easy Cecil. Johanes said they were in a hurry."
The eyes dulled and tilted slightly.
"So how did you like the jitters, Michael?"
Mike frowned, "What's he talking about?"
"Technical stuff. In order to stick in the outputs, we have to go all the
way to the amygdala, and that means that we have to get close to the
hippocampus."
"The butcher speaks." It was a voice from the crowd.
"Shut-up; I didn't do him," Spokes retaliated.
"I'm lost," Mike confessed.
"Whenever you go that deep, anything can happen. The mind has a tendency to
flip-out sometimes. We talked about it before the operation."
"We did?"
"Yeah. You don't remember, but we did. That's another problem with getting
too close to the hippocampus. It tends to scramble short-term memory."
"The last thing I can remember it talking to Johanes."
"He brought you in this morning. We took you to the doc."
Yellow eyes seemed to dance in circles.
"The doc?"
"The butcher," Cecil interrupted. "I felt that I still owed you a favor."
"Some favor," Mike mumbled, except that his voice carried across the ether
loud and clear, much to the amusement of several electronic loiterers. Even
Spokes seemed to get a good snort out of it. Then he turned serious, as though
perfectly able to jump from one emotion to the other without crossing the
intervening space.
"It was time to join the club, Mike."
"Is that why you're helping me now? Because you wanted a new member for
your sick society?"
"No, actually I'm getting paid."
"Johanes?"
"Yep."
"So where's he been while I've been twitching on the floor all day?"
Mike heard a few more snorts, exact replicas of the earlier ones, except
this time some vague maniacal laughter seemed to hover in the distance, yellow
eyes swirling excitedly.
"You can stop talking with your mouth now, Harrison. Everybody can hear
you. Use your head. Just look at me and focus."
"Like this?!"
"Hey...."
"What were you doing to me today, Spokes?!"
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the funny feeling you said I'd have. Can you see how
much I'm laughing?!"
Mike felt an on-rush of static block the way between them. Cecil stopped
laughing and stared intently.
"What are you two fighting about?"
"He's pissed 'cause I zapped him," Spokes confided.
The yellow eyes nodded, knowingly.
"It had to happen eventually, old friend. Spokes let your mind get to know
itself. Auto-feedback was all it was. The pathways have to build-up mental
calluses, and you have to learn to deal with pain. Spokes here is surprised
you came out as quickly as you did. For many people, it takes much longer."
Mike straightened, "I don't understand."
"Johanes wants you to go into the dodec," Spokes interrupted. "If it tries
to nail you in any way, the only chance you're going to have is if you have
some resistance. You understand?"
"No."
"Well don't worry about it. It was for your own good."
"Where is Johanes, and where is the dodec?"
"He went back to the Arien Mansion. He took the dodec with him, Mike."
"Shit. Where are you?"
"At the Sintrivani."
"You mean you guys got done with me and just left me here to rot?"
Spokes sort of shook his head and nodded at the same time, "Johanes said
that ISIS has some psyche bloodhound sniffing your trail but hard. He went for
help to smear the scent, but neither of us are yearning to be around you right
now. Is that so hard to understand?"
"I've heard enough."
"Johanes said he'd be coming back for you, so don't go any..."
Mike unscrewed the cords from his jacks and watched the electric
apparitions evaporate into darkness as graciously as they had appeared.
Outside, a chilly breeze flapped across the streets, lifting loose dirt and
leaves into the sky and inducing the hairs on his bare chest to prickle and
tense in rows. With a fuzzy warm ambience enshrouding his senses, he ambled
along the side of the road, waving down a taxi before the main gates.
"Where to?"
The driver was middle-aged, his sparse, graying hair combed straight back,
eyes sunken and tired in the rear-view mirror. Mike dipped his hands into his
pockets, the emptiness sparking an image of Cecil's money in a pool of blood.
Sighing, he mumbled an apology and shuffled himself out of the car.
"Is okay. Where you want to go?"
"I'm broke."
"Get in."
The driver opened the front door to prove his sincerity, and Mike climbed
in, unsure whether to thank him or just do as he was told, and the driver
looked sympathetic.
"You know where you're going?"
"Erfalas."
Mike felt his back and shoulders affix themselves to the plastic seat
covers, a sticky noise resulting every time the car hit a bump in the road.
The driver either didn't notice, didn't mind, or was just being polite.
"So what the name of you?"
"Michael; my friends call me Mike. You?"
"Pateras; my friends call me Pat," he qualified with a smirk.
"Why the charity?"
"You look like you need it. You know the output of you bleeds?"
Mike reached to his skull, withdrawing a smear of pasty orange puss.
"Here, use this."
"A towel?"
"Hitch-hiker must never forget it."
Mike draped it over his head, catching the ullage as it tried to drip down
his neck. The rest began to dry into a sticky crust.
"The daughter of me was a chiphead. She tell me which is input and which is
output. That all I know."
"She was a chiphead? What is she now?"
The man half smiled, half winced. He dug out his wallet and extracted the
image plate. Mike leafed through those in memory, several of his little girl,
first as a baby and finally as a teenager with all the years in between. The
last one showed a bald kid in a hospital bed.
"They burn out head of her, you know. She not know which way was up."
Mike handed back the plate.
Erfalas was cold and windy, and the driver offered him the towel.
"What have I need of it? Is blood of you. You clean, yes?"
"Yeah. Thanks for the ride."
He stood, watching, as the tail-lights ebbed into the distance. The beach
was soft and sandy, and moonlight sparked along the watery horizon, however,
the hooks on the cliffs were no longer to be seen. Only rarely would one
emerge from the pounding waves, and then it would sparkle like a diamond
across the dim, lavender seaside.
Mike winced as the cold water stung his scalp and the bleeding renewed.
Though he couldn't smell any salt, the nerves around the wound told him that
some was there. He finally staggered out of the water, throwing the towel
around his body as he curled up between two tall rocks. The cold breeze
continued to blow airy waves of fine white dust over his still form. Sticking
to his skin, the tiny particles bonded together in the darkness and slowly
dried until he found himself wearing clothing made of sand that cracked and
flaked away when he shifted in half-slumber.
Faint violet rays warily peeked over the eastern horizon, glinting across
the smooth, narrow stretch of sand which teased the incoming waves. Beneath
the noise of water grasping toward shore, Mike heard the distant gurgle of a
chemical engine. At first, he thought it was the final illusory fragment of a
dream, but the sound grew steadily, until it resided at the top of the cliff
where Vilya had shown him the eyehooks and so splendidly demonstrated their
use. Several people were climbing out of a white, government car, each peering
toward the dim violet horizon. Half-buried by the sand, Mike watched them from
his shadowy lair between the two tall rocks. He tried to make out their
features in the faint, shifting light, but it was difficult even to count
them. Then he glimpsed the white mane, its owner allowing the breeze's gentle
tendrils to reshuffle her hair to its own liking, and for a silent moment his
eyes widened with fear.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos ([email protected]) just graduated from UCR with an MBA. In
between responding to employment advertisements and attending Job Fairs, he
DM's a hearty group of dormies and wonders how he's going to finish Harrison
off once and for all. Judging his protagionist's current situation, he may
not have to wonder for very long.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Johnny Appleseed
Curtis Yarvin
Copyright © 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
It's early morning when I hit the Tappan Zee. The alchemy of sunrise and water
turns the Hudson to gold, but the bridge is showing its years, rusty and
snaggletoothed. A few suspension cables have rotted through, cut low to sway
ominously in the wind, or high to hunch over and dangle trawling the shining
river, gilt v-wakes marking empty steel-bristled hooks thirty feet under,
hoping for a bite from... what? What would bite on such a lure? Perhaps the
old mills of Albany, dead forty years before the last collapse, have moldered
alive, metal husks slipping into the upper Hudson, revived and evolved by the
cold rapids until a new sort of salmon runs again to the sea: Jacquard-loom
gills, die-cast scales, firepump heart and bandsaw jaws. I'd like to meet one
someday, we could swap notes... ah, hell, I'm an old man. Forgive my
meanderings. Anyway the bridge looks sound enough, so I cross.
Someone has burned the tollbooths on the other side. Fried the fuckers in
their own juices. Always wanted to try that. An incurable pyromaniac and I
don't think I want to be cured, either. I pick my way through the blackened
steel bones. I'm getting a bit tired, but persuade myself to scramble up one
of the high granite hills on the far side. I stumble through groves of sumac,
dogwood, patches of poison ivy, starting to wonder if I'll make it to the top.
Falling asleep would be bad; I'm on the shady side of the mountain. Then all
of a sudden a steep earth bank, a clump of pines, a glimpse of blue sky, and
the summit. A patch of bare rocks. Beautiful. I stand on the highest rock
and gaze out over New Jersey, the rising sun in my eyes.
New Jersey. Butt of a million asphalt jokes. New Jersey. "What exit?"
New Jersey. "Lay-deez an' gentlemen, Da Toxic Sludge State." New Jersey.
"Why do all the trees in New York bend south? 'Cause New Jersey sucks." New
Jersey. "Where even the skunks wear gas masks."
But, seeing it now, I can taste the old spirit of the land, long flat
cattail marshes alive with turtles and blackbirds and muskrats, thick forests
of tulip and maple swaying skeletal in the winter wind and bursting out green
with the sweet spring breeze, these weary granite mountains, soft and round
with age, waiting patiently to see the holocaust through. So it was not so
long ago, and so it will be again. Soon.
The land is healing fast, now. Old smokestacks line the horizon, but more
than a few are crumbling, broken in half or festooned with clinging ivy. I
pull out binoculars and focus, morbidly, on the nearest factory. It looks like
a refinery. Alive, it was a monstrosity, a belching metal beast settled like
a queen ant to sprawl and spawn. Poison its food, poison its blood, poison
its dung. But, dead, it has a certain grandeur to it. Difficult to explain;
think perhaps of a young man, dissolute, cheeks reddened and belly padded with
beer, wispy blond hair and a smug grin and the smell of cheap aftershave. Not
a beautiful object, seen for what it is. Leave it out in the desert for a few
months, and like grape juice it undergoes an miraculous transformation,
becoming an intricate palace of ivory, a maze of clean spars and beams and
smooth hollow places lying jumbled on the hot dry sand. These relics of
Hoboken are the same.
It must be almost ten in the morning by now, and rationality reminds me I
won't make much progress tonight unless I charge up. Normally I find a nice
wide highway to bask on like a snake in the sun, but the bare mountaintop is
good enough. I spread out the solar blanket, plug in, and drift away on a
nice flat rock.
Late in the afternoon I hit the highway again. Walking, of course. You
can go a long way walking. Slap, thud, slap, thud, four miles an hour, forty
miles a day and my those miles do add up. Beats those old diesel-hounds any
day. You just can't appreciate a continent in a car; it's too small. The
water turns you around every few days. You get frustrated and settle down in
a concrete box and die. The Gypsies died out when they changed their
Conestogas for Winnebagos. They thought they could master the machine, but
the machine mastered them, and they ended up just another tribe of welfare
Indians on the wrong side of the tracks. But me? I'll be walking around for
quite a few years yet. Planning on seeing the Amazon and the Andes this
winter; maybe Europe next summer.
As the sun is setting I spot a column of smoke a few hundred yards off the
road. Worth investigating. A narrow overgrown path leads off the shoulder
through the trees. I take it. A few minutes of mud and brambles and I come
into a little dell in the bend of a stream. Tiny cottage on the hillside and
an old woman working a sun-dappled cornfield hardly the size of a healthy rug.
She sees me. Pauses a second in surprise, then yells with joy. "Young man!"
I think of the Holy Roman Empire.
She runs over and hits me with a fierce hug. "So they've done it then!
Wonderful." Her face is a cracked dark-brown mudpie, her eyes are burnt
charcoal, her body is short and squat, but she is beautiful. Hard not to be,
these days. Society used to let its old dry into machines - tv-watching
machines, gossip machines, bridge machines - but society is a thing of the
past. To be old and survive today you have to be tough as nails and sweet as
butter. She looks it. "Come inside and have a beer."
I decline the beer, obviously from a shrinking stash of ancient treasure,
but we go inside and talk for a while. She wants to know where I'm from. My
story: a research group at Yale kept on working for a while after the collapse
and found the cure. Now they have a little village going and they're sending
people out to see what's left. It's not a very good story but it's
believable. Though hardly uplifting. The world repopulated by roving tribes
of shiny-shoed silk-tied snotheaded Yalelies? I think I'll stick with the
apocalypse, thank you.
She seems happy enough with it, though, and tells me her story. Born in
'08, worked as a bank manager, married and widowed. When the bank closed she
found a good patch of soil, bought some seed corn, and gave what was left of
civilization its walking papers. Good instincts. We talk some more and she
offers to let me spend the night. (On the couch, smartass.) I'd normally
travel, but time is long and I don't see any reason not to accept.
After she's asleep I stop pretending to be and explore the place. Finding:
a small barn for a nonexistent goat. That cornfield, which doesn't look big
enough to support a full-grown chicken let alone a person. A root cellar with
a few forlorn cans of green beans heaped at the far end. A trash heap with
the rusting shells of what looks like enough cans to have filled the cellar.
I go back inside and watch her sleep. She's smiling faintly.
She's not going to make it through the winter. This is clear. And it
won't be a pretty death, not at all. A person should die happy.
The flickering red glow casts long shadows on the brambles. The path is
still muddy. The Indians had it right: destruction and resurrection are one
and the same. Ash is the finest fertilizer around.
In the morning I have a less pleasant experience. Hiking down the Garden
State, the sky grayish-blue but the trees still blocking the sun, I get
ambushed. The hollow sthick-thwock of a pump shotgun being cocked:
"Freeze, motherfucker, put your hands on your head and turn around slowly."
A crisp, spry old voice. Bet he heard that line on TV thirty years ago,
been practicing it ever since. I turn around, and a man steps out of the
woods. He's eighty-five if he's a day, but he's standing about twenty feet
away with a big 12-gauge, and looks like he knows how to use it.
An uncertain pause, then... "Ha! Mitsui eighty-four-C! Didn't know they
had any of those left anymore. Look, pig, I know exactly what you're riding
there and I know this gun will blow pieces of your nice little toy all over my
fucking cornfield, so don't try anythng funny, right? Okay. So who are you?
Who's riding that thing?"
"Nobody. I'm autonomous."
The geezer's hands make pumping movements with the shotgun. "What the
fuck, pig, you think I'm stupid? Huh? You trying to fuck with my head?
That's bullshit, I know it's bullshit and you know it's bullshit, and if you
give me any more bullshit I'll blow your brains out through your back. You on
extended recon? Got your recharge blanket?"
"Yes."
"Take it out - slowly - and toss it at my feet."
I spin the small bundle as I throw it at him, hard. The air catches the
crumpled sheet of silvery film and exploded it to float suspended between us
for a moment, blocking his view. The sudden beat of my feet on the pavement,
dart left spin and roll, a huge hollow boom, the impact of bodies, and he's on
the ground and I have his gun. There's a fist-sized hole in my blanket but
it'll still work. I point the gun at him.
"Shit," and he's crying, long racking sobs. "Ah, shit. Christ, I'm sorry,
I wouldn't have done it but the arthritis has been acting up something awful
lately, my joints freeze up and I can't tend the corn, I don't know if I'll
have enough to make it through the winter... but I used to be a cop, still
have an old Mitsui controller in the garage, and when I saw you, well, it was
like a fucking dream come true." He starts to cry again. "Please don't hurt
me, okay? I didn't mean no harm."
"Calm down, old man, why would I hurt you? Let's go sit down in the shade,
I'll tell you a story." I keep the gun pointed at him as we walk, and make
sure he sits down first.
Statistics teaches us to see the work of prophets as mere chance. Failure
was forgotten and success remembered, and so the diviners of old and the
pundits of my day earned my keep. Yet it often seems, looking backward, as
though they were even worse than that, as though a veil of confusion barred
them from the obvious course of history. Prophets had been predicting the
Apocalypse for millennia; it seems inconceivable that all of them could have
missed the mark. But so it goes.
When I was young, in the Eighties, we were told the world would end in
atomic Armageddon; I practiced my own version of the old duck-and-cover,
rolling and falling at the flash in my window to be safe under my bed before
the blast wave hit. In the Nineties, it was environmental catastrophe; if we
refused to mend our foolish ways, we would all boil, drown, freeze, or die of
cancer, depending on the latest study. I spent an abominably tedious summer
working in an inner-city recycling plant. The Zeros set us quivering in fear
of deadly bioengineered plagues, escaped from some latter-day Strangelove's
skunkworks lab or set loose by diabolical terrorists; we'd be merrily
strolling down the street and suddenly everyone would burst out in buboes and
cysts and cancers and die oozing loathsome fluids. I bought a designer gas
mask, a garish Hawaiian style festooned with parrots and flowers and mutant
fruit, and a little ring on the bottom to clip a tie on. Whether it would
have actually done any good is unlikely; anyway the things went out of fashion
in months. We trusted Fate and went on with our lives. The end of the world
had gotten a bit old.
When the apocalypse did finally come, there was nothing exciting about it.
I got a bad cold. A lot of sneezing and sniffling for a couple days. Pretty
much everyone came down with it. When we found out it was an engineered
sterility virus, that everyone on the planet was permanently infertile... I
don't know, it was so long ago and I don't really remember much from those
days. Nobody went crazy, anyway. We assumed the scientists would cure it
soon, and then we could all go on breeding, la di da.
The years went by and it didn't happen. After a while, people realized
that it wasn't going to, that the technical problems were intractable within
the lifetime of the current generation, but the truth's gradual advance gave
the situation a relaxed normalcy. There was nothing violent about it; nobody
was being killed in the streets, nobody was starving, even the criminals were
getting old and settling down. The fade of civilization was an occasional
human-interest story on TV.
Eventually the population grew too low to support a viable economy, and
civilization more or less collapsed. But it was a soft collapse; no riots and
barricades in the streets, just a load of old geezers dying as much from
malaise as starvation. The tough ones moved to the countryside and stayed
alive on small farms.
I was running a private bioengineering research facility, up in Vermont,
for Tony Petrovic. The man who'd made a billion in solar power and retired at
forty to become a full-time professional nutcase. He had us working on a
technique to transfer the human mind from the brain into a computer. Well,
what can I say? It was bullshit. Utterly impossible. But God, Petrovic
raved about it. You couldn't hold a conversation with the man without getting
a spew about mechanical resurrection and psychic transfiguration of the soul
and all that. He was paying good money, too. So I hired a few neuroengineers
and computer types and we more or less just fooled around all-expenses-paid.
No life for the ambitious, but it was fun enough.
Petrovic died in '51. We kept working on the transfer project. Because
he'd left a hefty endowment, because we'd made a few actual advances, but
mostly from sheer inertia; there was nothing else worth doing. After things
finally collapsed we turned our lawn into a cornfield and kept going; by this
time we'd actually started to make real progress. In '70 we broke through.
We had some old Mitsui remote-controlled androids, designed for undercover
police work, refitted with the last generation of Neimann neuroprocessors, and
a jury-rigged transfer scanner. We'd tested the latter on a dog, and it had
seemed to work, but you can't tell much from a barking android and nobody was
taking bets on it.
By then I was ninety and going senile. Did I want to be the first one
through, or did the younger scientists just draft me as a guinea pig? Hard to
say; maybe it was both. My memories of those days are cloudy. I remember the
sharp stink of anesthetic putting my to sleep under the scanner, hoping to
hell I wouldn't wake up there... and waking up in the android. Heaven. My
mind had needed dry-cleaning for forty years, and when I came back, the must
and the mothballs were washed away. A cold shower on the brain. I was alive.
The others wanted to try it. Naturally. We had enough equipment for
everyone. But those people? Senility had left my personality more or less
untouched under the dustbunnies, but, looking at my colleagues with new
eyes... Tyler, who kept eighty-year-old kiddie porn mags in her desk?
Berzinski, who walked imaginary dogs on real leashes? Stevens, who loved to
reminisce about his glory days in the Great Chimpanzee-Fucking Project of '31
(tell him he's full of shit, and he'd just smile his soft dirty smile: "Ah,
don't you wish you could have been there, too?")... these people wanted new
lives? They were dead already, they just hadn't realized it yet. Even the
ex-me never quite recovered after he'd lost the luck of the draw. He went all
to moping self-pity. And he was a pretty worthless fuck, anyway; I should
know.
The Mitsuis were the best androids ever designed. Battery-powered with
solar recharge. Titanium skeleton and electromuscular power. No internal
moving parts. The warranty expired a long time ago, but my new body should
last a few hundred years if I'm careful. Time enough for anything.
I burned the institute behind me. Some of the others might have been
caught in the fire, I don't know. It didn't seem to matter much at that
point. Now? Now I'm just kicking around, passing time, checking out the
world. I thought it'd be fun to see the East Coast the way I always wanted it
to be, and I was right.
I shut up and look the old guy in the eye. He seems a little nervous. And
who can blame him? I think he's sensed that I've said more than a stranger
who expects to part a stranger usually does.
"You're gonna kill me, aren't you?"
"Well, I hadn't really thought much about it, but, yeah, I suppose I will."
"What the hell? Why?"
"Well, I could say I have to, that I think you'd track me down and catch me
when my batteries ran out, but that'd be bullshit, because I'd do it anyway.
Or I could ask you why the hell you want to live a couple more years if your
life is so unpleasant. But that'd be bullshit, too, because I really don't
care. No, the reason I'm going to kill you is that the world'll be a more
beautiful place without you."
A long pause. "You're a pretty crazy fucker."
"You might want to run, you know. I doubt it'll do much good, but it's
traditional."
Another long silence. The shotgun's hollow boom makes it permanent.
Alone again, which is how I like it. Any place, even this rotting patch of
highway with free finest-quality geezer carcass no extra charge, is nicer when
you're alone. Something to do with the ancient territorial instinct, I think;
the old urge to piss on a tree. I have a lot of trees to piss on these days,
and it feels good.
______________________________________________________________________________
Curtis Yarvin hatched in Maryland, larvated in the tepid waters of Brown
University, and will shortly be pupating in Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
He likes to read Pynchon and Lucius Shepard, smoke fat cigars, and howl at the
moon. Send him lots of mail, rattle his cage, poke sticks through the bars;
he don't bite.
[email protected]
______________________________________________________________________________
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InterText is the network fiction magazine devoted to the
publication of quality fiction in all genres. It is published
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FTP from network.ucsd.edu (IP# 128.54.16.3). If you plan on FTPing
the issues, you can be placed on a list that will notify you when
each new issue appears --just mail your request to [email protected].
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQ]
QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQ]
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QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ]
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QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\QQQ]
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
CORE is available by e-mail subscription and anonymous ftp from
eff.org. Send requests and submissions to [email protected].
CORE is an entirely electronic journal dedicated to e-publishing
the bestest, freshest prose and poetry being created in Cyberspace.
CORE is published monthly.
/
DDDDD ZZZZZZ //
D D AAAA RRR GGGG OOOO NN N Z I NN N EEEE ||
D D A A R R G O O N N N Z I N N N E ||
-========================================================+<OOOOO>|)
D D AAAA RRR G GG O O N N N Z I N N N E ||
DDDDD A A R R GGGG OOOO N NN ZZZZZZ I N NN EEEE ||
\\
\
The Magazine of the `Dargon' Project Editor: [email protected]
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and
inspired by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by
David "Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The
Dargon Project centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon
in the far reaches of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named
Makdiar, and as such contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword
and sorcery flavor.
DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file, text-only
format. For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL to the
editor, Dafydd, at the userid [email protected]. This request
should contain your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid
internet address) as well as your full name. InterNet (all
non-BITNET sites) subscribers will receive their issues in Mail
format. BitNet users have the option of specifying the file
transfer format you prefer (either DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or
SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all electronic subscriptions are Free!
______ () , _
/ / /`-'| // /
--/ /_ _ / / . . o // __/ _ ______ __. ____
(_/ / /_</_ /__-<_(_/_<_</_(_/_/_)_/ / / <_(_/|_/ / <_
The Journal of the Gamers' Guild of UCR
Contact: [email protected]
ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
The Guildsman is an electronic magazine devoted to role-playing
games and amateur fantasy/SF fiction. At this time, the Guildsman
is available in LaTeX (.tex) source and PostScript formats via
both email and anonymous ftp without charge to the reader. Printed
copies are also available for a nominal charge which covers
printing and postal costs. For more information, email
[email protected] (internet), ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
Back issues of The Guildsman are available via anonymous ftp at
potemkin.cs.pdx.edu (131.252.20.145) in the pub/frp/ucrgg directory
Thank you, thank you very much
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