It was a beautiful sunset, and Randi had left me to my own devices, and our bungalow has a little refrigerator filled with beer, and pistachios make one thirsty, so I consumed bottles equaling 1.4 liters. Our porch faces the Gulf of Thailand, and the sun was melting into its golden and purple constituents over the horizon, one of those moments of breathtaking heartbreaking beauty that make you realize how insignificant you really are. I knew Randi would want to share that feeling, so I got the camera and captured it digitally. Then, because I left the camera on the exposed porch, it began to rain torrentially.

The power went out and we waited in the dark for the taxi that would take us across the island to the famous Full Moon Party. When it arrived, I ran skidding and slipping through the darkness, and on the porch of our resort’s little eatery, I slid and lashed out to save myself, punching a statue squarely in the jaw. I yowled in pain, to the indescribable delight of the diners, and we loaded into the taxi. Taxis in Thailand are covered pickup trucks. You ride in the back with as many fellow passengers as the driver can find. They like to maximize their profits here. (Who doesn’t?) The necessarily harrowing passages do much to create a sense of camaraderie among the passengers. When we disembarked from our last drive (again, through torrential rain, up and down mountainous jungle roads), I gave my co-daredevils a bow and a grand wave: “Goodbye, everyone! Enjoy your journey, and good luck!” The response was enthusiastic and heart-warming.

On this jaunt, we journeyed with two Australasian girls, who were quite pleasant. Then we rolled our eyes as Mr. Fucking Females and his friends climbed in.

Let me tell you about this gentleman. On our first day on Koh Phangan, we were enjoying the blissful view from our porch hammocks, unwinding from the hectic pace of Koh Tao, letting our spirits dissolve as spirits dissolved us. It was another moment of stillness and utter beauty and quietude, one of those moments when you forget that our oceans are turning to acid, the economy is turning to shit, democracy is turning to fascism. The sea was perfectly flat and perfectly blue, and palm fronds moved gently in the wind.

Into this idyllic scene comes two young Norwegian fellows (I’ll go ahead and tell you they were Norwegian, though we didn’t learn this until later). They grasp Chang beers, they walk onto the beach, and one of them says loudly, in accented English, “Where’s the fuckin’ females?” Randi and I rolled our eyes at this crassness, which became inexplicable as they then conversed amongst themselves in Norwegian. Why would he say that one phrase in English? Then an older woman, presumably their mother, came up and spoke to them, and they spoke harshly to her, argued a bit, and she huffed away. My opinion sank lower. I can abide the Supreme Court selling our democracy, I can abide Turkey disavowing the Armenian genocide, but I cannot abide young men who disrespect their mother. The eccentricity of this character’s jackassery was only accentuated when he repeated the phrase at least twice more within my hearing. He was not even looking around for females when he said it. He said it once while walking down the beach, looking at the sand, and once while splashing in the water. I concluded that he had heard the line in a movie or TV show, loved it, and committed it to memory.

So. We rode with him and his two friends. They were actually quite pleasant, if enthusiastically vulgar. The subject turned to Bangkok, and, inevitably, live sex shows, on which subject their enthusiasm was only matched by their explicitness. At first I was determined to adopt Social Stance B, which is noncommittal affability masking subtle mockery and brutal judgement. But the beer had left my mind a-glow, and we had the bond engendered by facing death in a Thailand taxi, so after good-naturedly encouraging them to throw their empty bottles at passing cars for a while, I tapped Mr. Fucking Females on the knee and said, “You’re Mister - ” I was about to say “Fucking Females”, but he grabbed my hand, pumped it and said, “Paul. Pleasure!” with such open friendliness that I forgave him his faults. As, indeed, I would hope others would forgive me mine. Then we had several rounds of shouting, “Party party party!”, an old Norwegian custom.

Then with a festive sliding of tires in mud at high speed, we were there, at the biggest party in the world.

Today the wound is quite nasty. It is a trio of deep gouges backed by a purple-black bruise. Randi, in a mood of playful, experimental sadism, put tiger balm on it, causing miniature volcanoes of pain to fire ash-clouds of agony into my brain. But I have suffered worse than this, and I will suffer worse yet ere I die.

We were surprised to see the Norwegians in the cafe at an early hour, as we had assumed they would stay at the party much later than us, and rise consequently later. They had; Mr. FF came to our table and asked if we had enjoyed ourselves, and we responded noncommittally, having reverted to SS-B, but his inquiry was really an excuse to blurt his tragic story:

“Yeah, I was fine until some guy beat me down and took everything I had just walk up to me and BAM took my wallet took my smoke!”

We expressed our sympathies, and he made a gesture indicative of the lot of man: to suffer without knowing why; to be cursed with reason yet not with wisdom; to struggle to assert one’s identity and dignity in an unfeeling and merciless world; to be crushed in the winepress of society; to live, to live and then to die!

I was so despondent that I had another cup of tea.

Posted in Anomalous | 1 Comment »

I think you’ll find today’s installment thrilling. Polish your monocles, swirl your brandy skeptically, prepare for intrigue.

James busied himself with directing the offloading of the fragile and complex equipment: a pair of diving suits of his own invention, capable of withstanding the great pressures of the lake’s fantastic depth; a pneumatic harpoon; instruments that could analyze the level of sediment accretion on an artifact or fossil and name its date of origin within two months; even a small camera, also of Blankenship’s invention, that captured images on a rubber-celluloid compound rather than on gelatine plates, and so could operate underwater. By concentrating on the proper care of these marvelous machines, James was able to ignore that the Bellerophon, his pride and joy, was now a very expensive part of the tropical scenery.

By morning their small crew had unloaded the ship and set up camp on a patch of level ground not far from the rocky beach. Avery shot a wild pig and they had a good breakfast. Thereafter, Bellows picked up his rifle and vanished into the brush without a word to anyone. Avery watched him.

“Let him make the acquaintance of the natives or whatever he intends,” James said. “We have work to do. Fortunately the steam launch was undamaged in the attack.”

“How will we ever find this sunken city of yours, Jim?” Avery wondered. “This lake must be a hundred miles long.”

“Closer to five hundred, actually, and forty miles across at its widest point. The second largest lake in the world, after Baikal in Russia. Though the climate here is far more agreeable, I’m sure. A thorough survey has yet to be conducted. Though Sir Burton estimated its depth at a third of a mile, his techniques were rather rudimentary. Ergo, our secondary objective will be to construct a rough map of the bottom of this great lake.”

“And to bag Eustace.”

“Of course. But to our greater purpose, I have constructed – this.” James opened a crate and brushed aside the straw packing, revealing a shiny metal sphere.

“It’s brilliant, Jim. What does it do?”

“When submerged in water, it emits a tone on the frequency of six to seven hundred Hertz, and detects echoes of the same. The frequency and trajectory of these echoes, when processed through a calculating machine of astounding power and alacrity, will tell us the shape of the lake floor, and – one hopes – enable us to find the lost city.”

“And where is this calculating machine?”

James smiled and tapped his temple.

Avery laughed. “You really have no need of praise, do you?”

“I enjoy it nonetheless.”

Avery, James, and Larsen set out in the launch. The lake stretched out of sight in all directions, blue as a lapis lazuli, bright as a bowl of sunlight. Fishing craft moved sedately on the water. “Criminy, it feels like we’re back on the Med,” Avery said.

“Forgive me saying so, sir, but only a non-sailor could say such a thing,” Larsen said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“After crossing the Atlantic, to a true sailor, the Mediterranean becomes a lake; after crossing the Pacific, the Atlantic becomes a lake and the Mediterranean a placid pond. This…” He gestured at the vast water. “While grand, it’s nothing. It’s calm and still as a parkland puddle. We might as well be in a paddle boat shaped like a swan.”

Avery grinned. “You mistake me for a landlubber, Larsen. I’ve sailed around the Cape – both of them – to India and back.”

“Sailed,” Larsen said, “or merely traveled by ship?”

“Ah, you’ve got me there,” Avery said. “Still, there’s no denying that Tanganyika is quite the puddle!”

Larsen shrugged.

James lowered his sonic emitter on a boom. From the globe snaked two wires that terminated in rubber cups. He placed these over his ears, and readied a pencil and a pad of paper. He nodded to Avery, who picked up a small wooden box connected to the globe by a thick bundle of wires. From the box protruded a crank, which Avery spun furiously. James listened for a moment, then scribbled madly on his paper, producing a lengthy list of numbers. After a few minutes, he nodded, and Avery stopped cranking.

“Did it work?” he asked.

“I may have Verdi’s Anvil Chorus ringing in my ears for the next few weeks,” Jame said, “but I think I have a set of data from which to work. Let’s try again. My good Larsen, take us a quarter-mile upstream, or uplake, or whatever it is. That direction.” Larsen complied, and they took another reading. By lunchtime James’s pad was full, and they had traveled perhaps fifty miles south. They waited for an hour while James tabulated his results and sketched a rough map. Avery fished, and brought up a half-dozen brown and white cichlids. “There it is,” James said. “It’s hardly beautiful, but I’ve had to adjust my expectations. It seems that this lake has a high degree of stratification, and the bottom layers are almost entirely anoxic, which interferes somewhat with the operation of the sonic emitter. However, I’ve found that while Burton’s guess as to the mean depth of this lake are correct, he could not have imagined the distribution; I have found at least one point where the depth exceeds a mile!”

Avery whistled. Larsen grunted.

“And what of our sunken city?”

“Nothing – yet. It’s a big lake. We have time for a few more readings, though. Let’s put a good distance behind us before we take another.” They steamed for the better part of an hour before James called a halt. “We’ll try it here.” They deployed the emitter, and James listened, his pencil poised over the pad. “There’s something different in the echoes here,” he said. “The water is less stratified, though the depth is consistent. Perhaps an underground stream or spring feeds into the lake here. And the echoes are slightly broken and baffled. The surface is less regular. Which may mean – Larsen, take us a hundred yards east.” They took another reading. Delight spread on James’s face. “Heureka! I am in a state of having found it!”

“Shall we don our suits?” Avery asked.

“Don away, my good chap, don away!”

Larsen helped them into the bulky suits, which were tethered by stout cables to the launch. Larsen would have to haul them up; it would be quite impossible to swim two thousand feet upwards in the heavy suits. James thrice-checked the seals and toggled his wireless voice-telegraph. “Avery?” His own voice was fuzzy and harsh in his helmet. “Can you hear me?”

Avery’s baritone came booming back at him: “The moon on the ocean was dimmed by a ripple…”

“Yes, we all adore that song. I think the voice-telegraph operates satisfactorily. Prepare for the plunge.”

Avery picked up the pneumatic harpoon.

“Oh,” said James, “I assure you we will be quite unmolested by aquafauna at our intended depth.”

“Never into the breach unarmed,” Avery said.

James shrugged. His comrade had some eccentricities. “Into the breach, then!” he said, and, holding his breath despite the suit’s oxygenerators, he closed his eyes and stepped into the water.

#

Avery sank like a stone, the suit’s weight pulling him quickly into the darkening depths, from the bright aquamarine near the surface to the lightless void below. He fell for minutes that seemed like hours, the waterproof torch of James’s suit the only visible thing in the blackness of the lake. It came as a shock when his feet finally touched solid earth; he had forgotten their destination in the sightless, soundless freefall. James landed nearby.

He ignited his chemical torch, and light blazed from the top of his helmet, showing mounds of stones. “Not much stirring,” he said.

“No.” James’s voice crackled in his ears. “Precious little can survive at this depth, and without much oxygen, there is little incentive to venture here.”

“Not even weeds,” Avery said. “Bloody difficult to move, too.”

“That’s the weight of a half-mile of water on you. Let the suit’s motors do the work; you have merely to suggest movements. Now, the ruins!”

They lumbered toward the toppled heaps of stone. Certainly a city had stood there long ago; the stones were large, some almost colossal in scale, and even centuries or millennia of immersion had not erased the work of human hands. “This was definitely a support column of some larger structure,” James said, shining his light the length of a fallen pillar that Avery had mistaken for a bump in the lake bed. James blasted grime from the surface with his wrist-mounted waterjets. “Marble!” he said, astonished. “It’s utterly impossible, but I recognize the fine grain and near-translucence of Parian marble, from the Island of Paros – in Greece. Avery, how did the most prized stone of the classical world come to Lake Tanganyika?”

“Not by the night train, that’s for sure.”

“I agree with the gist of your remark, if not the wording. Most curious. But you see here, we have definite spiral fluting. It looks almost Athenian – but not quite. This was carved by no instrument as crude as a chisel.” James photographed the pillar and they moved on.

Their lights revealed only discrete segments of the city, but Avery was able to outline a composite in his head. No structure remained standing; whatever time-swallowed cataclysm had formed the lake had also shattered the city, and so they had the difficulty of mentally recombining the tremendous slabs of stone and the shattered columns into an image of what might have been. Avery imagined a city perhaps a mile across, very grand in its day, with broad streets radiating like spokes from a central temple or government building. There probably had been hundreds or thousands of wood or mud or brick houses outside of the city proper, but they had not stood the test of time.

James gasped over every new discovery. “I really don’t know what to think of this, Avery. The materials are from the northern Mediterranean, and some of the architecture reflects the classical, as well – namely the columns, where we see a corkscrew fluting that might be the ancestor of the Solomonic design.” His camera flashed. “But there are constant arguments to the contrary, such as these inscriptions, which appear to be, insanely, cuneiform, and the bas-reliefs resemble hieroglyphs more than… Are you listening?”

Avery was paying heed not to any physical signal, but to that instinct that had saved him from a tiger’s lunge in the jungles of India, or from a pit viper’s strike in the Australian outback – the prickling of hair at the back of his neck that told him that here was danger.

He flashed his light in all directions, but saw only the silent stones. As James had said, nothing could possibly survive at that depth. Yet for a moment he glimpsed the figure of a man, silhouetted against a white stone, and then it was gone. His eyes were playing tricks on him, no doubt, distorting the form he had expected into a bent and misshapen creature, but the vision was chilling nonetheless: a man’s limbs and torso, but a saurian snout, a thrashing tail…

“Avery! Pay attention, man! We stand in the greatest archaeological find of the century! Karnak is a paltry pile of bricks beside this! Troy is an uninteresting jumble of shacks!” Avery noted a familiar manic excitement in James’s voice. “Let’s investigate the central temple.”

It was disappointing, at least in Avery’s opinion. The nexus of the great city ought to be more than a broad dais and a few broken pillars, he felt, but they found little more. James, however, evinced no disappointment. He bent over the dais and photographed busily.

“That strange cuneiform spirals from the center. I can read most languages written in the Sumerian system – Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, and, of course, Elamite – but this appears to depict no language even remotely related.” Avery detected wonder and consternation mixed in his voice. “In fact, it’s not even pictographic – it seems phonetic, an innovation that came rather late to the Sumerian languages. But the verb structure appears almost Hellenic. Neptune’s beard, Avery, it’s Greek!”

Avery tried to whistle, but it came out as a burst of static in the voice-telegraph. “And what does that mean?”

“It means my Fellowship is secured, for one thing. The Greek alphabet surfaced in the ninth century before Christ. This is a version of proto-Greek rendered phonetically in cuneiform, which first appeared four millennia back and two thousand miles away. This suggests a common origin of the two languages!”

“But can you read it?”

“Maybe. Wait a moment.” He cleared grime with the waterjets. “A recurring ‘word’ - I use ‘word’ loosely. It’s more of a concept that only gains definition when paired with other ‘words’. The language allows for a good degree of ambiguity, as you see here.” He tapped the dais.

“Right-o.”

“I think, in this usage, the ‘word’ may be pronounced ‘Ensi-ka.’ It seems like a place name, perhaps a city or kingship.”

“The name of this city?”

“Doubtful. It distinctly uses an honorific case, implying something greater than this city. Perhaps this is a settlement or colony of Ensi-ka. Strange.” James inspected the rim of the dais. “The rest of these ruins are encrusted in centuries of grime, but it’s been disturbed here.”

“Jim, old boy, I am thinking of the better part of valor right now.”

“I assure you that we are perfectly safe at this depth. But I’ve learned to trust your primordial cunning, and I have more data than I can process right now. So long as these ancient stones promise to remain where they are, I can force myself to adjourn for the night.” He signaled Larsen through the voice-telegraph, and a moment later the clinking chains pulled them the fathoms to the surface.

#

James chatted excitedly to Larsen about their discovery the length of the ride back to camp, and Larsen responded with characteristic grunts, finally saying, “Pardon, Mr. Blankenship, sir, I just pilot the boat. This archaeo-business doesn’t interest me much.” James blinked, mouth open, having totally forgotten that he was talking to an individual rather than his own imagination.

They beached the launch alongside the wreckage of the Bellerophon. “Let’s look up Bellows,” Avery suggested, “and have a drop of summat hot.”

James shuddered. “You mean ‘partake of an aperitif.’”

“Right.”

“He ought to know of our progress and discoveries, anyway, so he can begin preparing my Fellowship recommendation to the Society.”

“My thoughts exactly!” Avery scampered up the beach to Bellows’s tent, then stopped suddenly as someone slipped out at the sound of his approach. In the twilight he recognized the Sudanese maid, in a fluttered state of half-dress. She disappeared into the brush. Well, he thought, evidently Bellows wouldn’t share a cradle with these black bastards, as he called them, but other sorts of horizontal furniture proved suitable. Fine for him, but it might look queer if word got out. Avery willfully forgot what he had seen, waited forty seconds, and called, “Bellows! Bellows, rendezvous in the mess for a toast to accomplishment and the broadening of archaeological and anthropological knowledge!” At Bellows’s muffled assent, he retired to the mess tent, where James had already cracked open a case of Armagnac brandy and was sipping delicately.

“Thank indifferent Providence our snifters survived the crash! Take yon glassware, Avery, and I’ll pour you a – tipple?”

“Careful, Jim. You’re approaching conviviality.”

“I may even collapse into flagrant amity,” James said, sharing one of his rare smiles.

The smile vanished at the interruption of Bellows’s whiskey-voice: “Then pony up a glass for me, lad, and I’ll show you how tippling’s done.”

James filled his snifter, and Bellows warmed the glass in his palms, then raised it: “To the broadening of all human knowledge, and to the two gents before me who have done so much in its service!”

“Thank you,” James said, touched despite himself, and Avery reflected that the stomach was a dead end; vanity was the way to James’s heart. They clinked glasses. Avery drank; James tasted; Bellows guzzled and refilled the glasses.

“Now, tell me what I should put in my letter to the RGS.” Bellows seemed overly cheerful to Avery; was it to cover his embarrassment at being caught with a mistress? No, Avery thought, that suspicion doesn’t do justice to such a fine fellow. He just likes to drink, that’s all.

“I wish I could tell you more,” James said. “But I must spend some time with my photographs and my books. I discovered traces of a dozen languages down there – rather, an omni-tongue, a synthesis of all languages, and I must refresh myself on my Sumerian declensions before I can begin to decipher it.”

“So you can read it?” Bellows asked over his glass.

James sniffed. “Please. Merely understanding a language is the most elementary step. I seek rather to understand the culture that the language represents, and place it in the broader context of the Western world; videlicet, to know the parents through familiarity with the child. Language can tell us much more than mere words.”

“Well, kudos, no doubt. But what culture, exactly? If it has links to Sumerian, I assume we’re dealing with an early Moslem tribe. Perhaps a settlement from Abyssinia? Mohammedans came south from Persia as early as the ninth century and established colonies in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian coast, one of which became Dar es Salaam.”

James shook his head. “Moslem architecture in east Africa favors local materials, especially mud bricks, which would not last under this lake. No. This may astound you, Mr. Bellows…”

Bellows theatrically gripped his seat.

“But I found and have photographic proof of traces of Greek architecture!”

Bellows looked from James to Avery, his eyes twinkling. “You’re putting me on.”

“No, sir,” James said gravely. “Avery can verify it.”

“I suppose,” Avery said. “I’m not up on my columns, but they were definitely twirly, and made of marble.”

“Blimey,” Bellows said quietly. “That toast was well-deserved! Let’s have another!”

They did. James told Bellows all about their discovery. The word “Ensi-ka” gave Bellows pause. “Scrawl out those symbols for me, boyo, if you remember them clearly.”

James obliged, a little sullen over the jibe at his memory. Bellows paid him no heed, and studied the cuneiform intently. “And you say it reads like Greek?”

“Yes.”

“Why not write it like Greek, then?”

“I can’t. There’s no exact analogue. You can’t just change from one alphabet to the other, this hardly being an alphabet in the first place… Results would not be verifiable.”

“Just give it a shot for old Bellows, eh?”

James rewrote the symbol in Greek. Bellows took the pencil and made a few adjustments where the vagaries of phonetic transcription allowed it. He tapped the new word. “I’m not up on my Sumerian, but I learned my Greek at Eton, and it’s still with me. What’s that word, my son?”

James reddened. “You must be joking. I present to you science, and you twist it into fairy-tale.”

“Just read the word, out loud, for the benefit of Avery here.”

“I will not. It is worse than a myth. It is a parable that teaches men to laugh in the face of ambition. A superstition that clouds the minds of men, the like against which I have sworn to fight.”

“I’ll say it, then,” Bellows said cheerfully.

His dislike for the man prompted James. “Hold your tongue, Bellows! Very well.” He pursed his lips and spat the word out: “Atlantis.”

“Described by Plato and Francis Bacon.” Bellows’s grin massed wrinkles on the sides of his face.

“And Mr. Jules Verne,” Avery interjected.

James shot him a scornful look. “Myth. What we have discovered today is fact.”

“And this word?” Bellows asked.

“An intentional mistranslation. Besides, the word doesn’t refer to our city as Atlantis; ‘Ensi-ka’ distinctly refers to another location. What we have here is a mere colony of a greater polis, which we can, for the sake of childish amusement, refer to as ‘Atlantis’ for the nonce. But our city is a stunning find in its own right.” James mused. “Which reminds me, it lacks a name.”

“Crocodopolis!” Avery shouted.

James and Bellows looked at him in surprise. “What?” Avery said. “I went to Eton, too.”

They drank to the new name, finished the bottle, and opened another one. “Of course,” Bellows said, his nose rosy, “the RGS will want physical artefacts in addition to your photographs and notes. But you look well on your way to a Fellowship, lad. Maybe one day you’ll even make Chartered Geographer, like myself.”

“Your explorations of Abyssinia are noteworthy,” James said. “What a country, back in the earlies!”

“Aye. Took a spear through the jaw and two arrows through the arm,” Bellows said. “I earned my Chartership. But it’s much harder for you boys. There are precious few dark corners left on this Earth. With your inventions, Mr. Blankenship, we’ll plumb the oceans, and then what will there be to discover?”

“I believe man will turn outward someday,” James said. “We will walk the surface of the moon and cold places beyond even that.”

“Nothing is safe,” Bellows said with a half-smile.

“What do you mean by that?” Avery asked.

Bellows turned a red-rimmed eye on him. “Nothing, boyo,” he said after a moment.

Screams interrupted their conversation. Avery was on his feet before the first cry faded, his Sharps in hand. “From the beach!”

He threw back the tent flap. Before him was a charnel scene. Crewmen, their own sailors and the hired Sudanese and Ethiopians alike, struggled with a huge reptile on the beach – Eustace. The croc had crawled from the water, and Avery could see how mammoth he really was. Avery had seen gunships smaller than Eustace. The crocodile shattered three tents with a sweep of his tail and knocked the gun-wielding men down like tenpins. Their rifles popped, flaring in the night, and sparks struck from his scales. Eustace croaked and lunged on a crewman; Avery recognized Larsen, leveling his rifle steadfastly even as the huge jaws came at him. He never fired the shot. Eustace’s jaws closed over him, clicked shut, and Larsen was gone.

“By Gad! He swallowed Larsen entire! Jim, have you any magic tricks up your sleeve? This beasty’s intent on gobbling us all!”

“I detest the word ‘magical’; it is anti-scientific and therefore anti-truth,” James grumbled. “Were we not just discussing the deleterious effects of superstition on the reasoning – ” He saw Eustace, and his eyes widened in fear. “By Herme’s perspiring buttocks! Run, Avery, that monster will devour us all!” James produced a gadget from his pocket, what looked like a fat pistol with copper wire coiled around the barrel. “Unless my magnox can check him. Prepare for positron perdition, Crocodylus niloticus ex!”

A blue bolt of electricity crawled along the coiling and sputtered out. James scowled at the useless weapon. “I am devising a theory concerning the operation of electrical equipment after prolonged submersion,” he said, quite calmly, and then Eustace was upon him.

“No!” Avery shouted, but the monstrous maw clacked shut. James was gone. “Now you’ve got a fight on your hands,” Avery growled, rolling up his sleeves. Eustace rushed at him; Avery saw a great black hole lined with white teeth, and he was in the cavernous mouth, then down the gullet, and he felt no more.

Great Jumping Jesus! Is he dead? What the hell’s going on? Come back next time to see!

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I am agog, aghast, astounded, appalled at the Supreme Court’s decision of last week. It seems that many are underestimating the damage this will do to our democracy; well, of the few who heard about this thing. I assume that the perception of most is “Supreme Court decides… BO-RING! Where’s the sports page?” But that illustration requires imagining that anyone reads newspapers these days, which we know is simply not true. More probably, Joe Methhead is watching his ten minutes of CNN to make himself feel smarter, and hears “Supreme Court decides…” and changes to “American Choppers” and yells for someone to bring him more meth.

You may sense rancor, and that is because we allowed this to happen. By our complacency, by our opting for mass entertainment over mass communication, by caring more about the goddamn American Idol than the American president, by sedating ourselves with cheeseburgers and lattes and pornography. We are trained to believe that politics are impolite or boring to discuss, all the easier to make us manipulable. It’s our parents’ fault, too, for preparing a nation where meaning is defined by buying and selling, but just as much our fault for accepting this parody of history.

And in this country where buying and selling is not a means to an end, but the end itself, it’s no surprise that politicians can now be bought and sold. It is almost impossible to overstate the harm that this decision will wreak on our democracy; it is almost impossible to imagine how it will not outright destroy it.

For example.
How could the health care bill have gone to shit? At one point, 80% of the American public wanted a public option. The Congress represents us, right? Google “health insurance political contributions”. How much did you donate to McCain or (for fellow Texans) John Cornyn? Something between zero and zero dollars, is my guess. Why the hell should they listen to you? And so our ostensible representatives vote against our interests. That’s how it happens. It’s as simple as that.

We know from Obama’s trouncing of Clinton and then McCain that the campaign with the most money can reach the most people most effectively; but Obama’s money came from the people, from folks who contributed for the first time ever to a candidate in whom they believed. And he knows it. These were people busting open their piggy banks and sending in ten dollars, fifty, a hundred. Corporations give millions, hundreds of millions, even billions. There is no way that our contributions - and therefore the importance of our interests - can compete with theirs.

These days, corporations split their donations pretty evenly - Coca-Cola may give as much to the Democrats as to the Republicans. All this means is that both parties will be equally in Coca-Cola’s pockets. But wait! Does the equal contribution they get from Pepsi-Cola mean that they will cancel each other out? Not at all. Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola have several mutual interests. Neither wants to be taxed. Neither wants to obey environmental regulations that cost money and time. Neither wants to spend the time and money to treat its workers humanely. These things transcend party lines and become a matter of us and them. You are not a corporation. You are a human, and your worth is not determined by your intelligence, or compassion, but by the money in your pocket. The currency of you is devalued. This is the triumph of our weird government-capitalism coition.

I notice that the webpage for emigrating to Canada is bogged down today.

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The follow-up to “Isle of Ignominy!” I love these characters. They are two things: an opportunity for me to pay homage to the great canon of 19th century adventure literature - Wells, Verne, Doyle, and, particularly in this story, H. Rider Haggard (and a bit of Kipling) - as well as a handy lens with which to deconstruct Victorian culture. For example, King Solomon’s Mines - helluva book, a great thrilling adventure, but, by our modern standards, fairly racist (and Haggard was one of the more enlightened writers of his time). We can try to reconcile or excuse these things, but wouldn’t it be more fun if the author himself had done that in the book itself? By means of inexplicable and shocking violence? I give you that and more, and ask you to let yourself enjoy it. Because reading is meant to be challenging, dammit.

I’ll publish this in four parts.

Blankenship & Dawes
in
Crocodopolis!
By Jens Rushing

“Sir Richard Burton asserts it as verifiable fact,” Bellows said, ashing his cigar in the cut-glass tray, adjusting his aim carefully to account for the slight pitch of the Bellerophon. “I don’t know how many papist missionaries have said the same over the past two-three hundred years, but my twenty years in old Afrique have led me to agree with them: it is simply impossible to navigate the Red Nile all the way to its source.”

“It’s amazing what you can do with money,” Avery Dawes replied.

Bellows grunted his assent. “And the Royal Geographic Society is honored to aid you, gentlemen. Pending your success, of course.”

“We’re most beholden,” James Blankenship said acidly. “This is how the hare must feel when the hawk deigns to notice him.”

Bellows laughed at length and sucked his cigar until the tip glowed in the half-light of the Bellerophon’s cabin. He puckered his thick, wrinkled lips and blew a perfect smoke ring. Avery whistled his admiration. Avery admired a good deal too much about the old bastard, James thought with a bit of irritation.

After boarding the amphibious ship at Khartoum, Archibald Bellows had thoroughly charmed the young Avery with his easy mastery of African customs and languages, his experience, his skill at firearms. A friendly shooting match from the boiler deck had established the old man as Avery’s superior – and Avery was no slouch. He came to respect, then revere the old man, annoying James with his prattle. Bellows spoke Arabic and a dozen other African tongues as naturally as if they were English. Bellows could split a toothpick with a thrown knife at twenty paces. Bellows could overpower an enraged alligator. Bellows – Bellows – Bellows.

James compared the two men. Bellows was weathered and tanned as a piece of bootstrap leather, and just about as savoury, with muscles like cables beneath his dark skin. Broken blood vessels stitched his hawk-nose, and James noticed that his hands shook if he went a day without a bit of “summat hot,” but there was still enough strength in those arms to break a man in half. He caught James studying him and croaked in his gin-thickened voice, “Care for a tipple, lad?” James declined.

Hard, dangerous living had corroded the old man; rather, the habits one forms as a result of hard, dangerous living had corroded him. Avery, on the other hand, was in the very blush of youth, the paragon of British manhood. Tall, broad-shouldered, strong-chinned, well-limbed, handsome enough in his way, James conceded, if you cared for that “Greek god” look. Avery could run a mile in four and a half minutes and hold his breath for three. He had demonstrated this, on several occasions, but not for vainglory; in addition to his other virtues, he was aggravatingly humble.

But beneath that craggy forehead slumbered an uncultivated mind, James reflected sadly. His friend sometimes exhibited a sort of animal cunning, but he had little predilection for the sciences, for the search for hard truths behind the gauzy enigmas of the banal. Not James. A restless drive possessed him to pierce that shroud and glimpse the naked profundity of the natural world. So, aside from Avery, his friends were Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes, Bunsen burners, and the writings of Darwin, Newton, Pasteur, and Copernicus – though Copernicus was on thin ice.

“The Society expects a full return on their investment in this expedition,” Bellows said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have funded the construction of this – tell me, Blankenship, why’d you give it such a mouthful of a name?”

“Bellerophon, the slayer of the Chimera, flew to Olympus and was struck down for his arrogance.”

“Is that your opinion of this little expedition?” Bellows said with a slanted smile. James reminded himself to be pleasant; Bellows was a Chartered Geographer in the RGS, and if James wanted to get his fellowship, and the attendant access to the coveted Foyle Reading Room, he needed to humor the man.

“No man of any color has sailed the Nile,” James said. “We’re attempting an upstream navigation along a fork only recently discovered – by myself – with no clear map of our path to Lake Tanganyika. We have braved crocodiles, bandits, mad monks and holy warriors of the Sudan, hippopotamuses…”

“And we’re almost there,” Avery interjected. “We should arrive tonight, in fact.”

“My point remaining,” James continued, “that our success aside, this is an extremely audacious undertaking. And we’re not half finished. Navigating the White Nile to its source is quite an accomplishment, but it is only a means to an end, the end being, of course, the search for Burton’s lost city.”

“And what do you think of that?” Bellows gestured with his cigar, now a stub.

“The source – ” James began. Bellows guffawed.

“The source,” he said, “is the most egregious liar, rake, muckrake, scoundrel, and fornicator in the Empire!”

James was perturbed. “If he were here, I’m sure Sir Burton would demand satisfaction for your words against him.”

“If he were here, I believe he’d take it as a compliment.”

“Regardless,” James said, “he claims to have learned of a pre-Moslem city beneath the waves. It could be true. Research leaves room for such a civilization, perhaps a fiefdom of the old Egyptian pharaohs, a vestigial appendage of their empire that outlived them and was deluged when the lake was created…” A grinding sound from below told him that the Bellerophon had left the river and was crawling uphill on its great treaded wheels. The smooth operation of the amphibious vessel satisfied him. It ought to; it was his own design.

“The lake appears in Ptolemy. Ptolemy was referencing Il Kha-Hati.” Bellows was smug. “I sincerely doubt the city predates Kha-Hati, who died in the sixth century before Christ. If it exists.”

James shrugged. “Maybe a Sumerian colony, traders from the Fertile Crescent. Or from the Indus valley. Pre-Ptolemaic ships could certainly cross from Baluchistan to Tanzania. Or a native civilization. Who knows? The possibilities are numerous. Africa is the cradle of mankind, after all.”

“Not any cradle of mine,” Bellows snorted, tilting his head at the Sudanese woman who was serving tea. “I wouldn’t share a cradle with these black bastards, eh?” He roared with laughter.

“Yes, well…” James said.

“How about you, Sonny Jim?” Bellows said to Avery. “Why’re you on this errand?”

“I just want a crack at Eustace, sir,” Avery enthused.

Eustace was a man-eating crocodile. Burton had named him, too, in his book on the Tanganyika expedition. The natives claimed that the giant reptile had devoured more than three hundred victims over the past four centuries. Avery was skeptical – if the victims were devoured, how could you tell how many there had been? – but if there was world-class game to be had, Avery and his Sharps buffalo rifle would be there.

“Aye, that’d be a prize, all right,” Bellows allowed. “Almost worth leaving what passes for civilization on this benighted continent and going back into the bush, among the dullest of the darkies. Now, you may think your average colored servant back in old England is stupid and lazy – God’s wounds! A backwoods Mulwesi could give him lessons on stupid and lazy! Thank God we’re here to lift them up with the hand of civilization.”

James bristled, and Bellows saw it. “I hope I haven’t offended you,” Bellows said.

“I subscribe to the emerging field of ethnology, sir, and the idea that one cannot judge another culture qualitatively; indeed, such would be a futile effort. Circumstance has rendered the European knowledgeable and ‘civilized,’ and circumstance has left these poor peoples subsistence-level farmers. It might have been otherwise – and was, fifteen hundred years ago, when the Italians ruled the degenerate rabble of Europe. No inherent virtue makes us superior.”

“Precisely,” Bellows said. “We are superior by Providence, and the virtue has followed as a result.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” James said.

“I know a little of that discipline of ethnology,” Bellows said. “It outlines five stages of the path to civilization: hunter-gatherer, agriculture, early civilization, feudalism, and, the apex of human achievement, modern liberal-capitalism. Only Europe has reached the last stage.”

The ride became smooth again. They were back on the river, the wheels retracting to allow the props to come out.

“What of cultures like China and Japan, which have great cities, huge noble classes, complex laws, and millennia of painting, sculpture, and poetry?”

Bellows dismissed them with a wave. “Static and corrupt. Well-painted corpses, but eaten up with worms on the inside. But, my son, you miss the benevolence of European superiority. We don’t hoard our wealth and knowledge, like the Manchoos of China or the brahmins of India. We build schools and make pygmy headhunters into little black Christians. We educate. We enlighten. We work great good on this Earth. Read your Kipling, my son.” Bellows’s tone was very gentle.

Before James could reply, a great crash echoed through the boat and they were thrown to the deck. Avery recovered with his customary alacrity and helped Bellows up, though the old man hardly needed help. He stomped out a fledgling fire where an oil lamp had fallen.

“A boulder – ” James gasped.

“A boulder!” Avery said. “Maybe you’ve never been whaling, old boy, but I’ve done a tour, just for fun, around the Horn – ”

“I sincerely doubt a whale has attacked us.”

“Not a whale, but some kind of beastie.” Avery snatched up his Sharps. “With me, sir?” he cried, and Avery and Bellows dashed from the cabin.

James staggered to his feet and followed them. They stood at the railing of the boiler deck, scanning the water over their rifle barrels. The river was a black swath with a lace of silver moonlight. “If it’s Eustace, may I have the first crack?” Avery asked.

“Take it if you can,” Bellows jibed.

James listened to the operation of the boat. A gurgle added to the swoosh of the props told him that they might be damaged, and he set off in that direction. The rifles boomed.

“Was that him?” Avery shouted.

“A mighty big croc, anyway!” Bellows said. James rolled his eyes. Leave them to their barbaric sport; he had the most advanced watercraft in existence to operate. The boat shuddered; another impact. James hurried through the trap that led to the boiler room, and beyond it the marvelous engine that converted steam to forward thrust. He opened the door to the engine room. Water washed his ankles. The twin drive shafts that terminated in the exterior props were submerged in water; the iron at the rear was torn and jagged; the Bellerophon, slowly but irrevocably, began to acquire a sternward slant as the river flowed into the hole. “Bloody – ” James said, but he didn’t get to finish that sentence.

The boat shook, and he sprawled on the floor, rolling into the watery end of the engine room. He grabbed a drive shaft and pulled himself up it. Rending metal screamed behind him and giant jaws clacked. A warm breath gusted over him, and James violated his most sacred rule of self-preservation; he looked back.

There was a flash of white teeth as big as Gurkha knives; a reptilian eye the size of a cricket ball; scaly armor that would make a legionnaire proud. Then the immortal Nile poured in to claim him.

#

Avery’s rifle was a part of his body. With the Sharps he had downed leviathan American buffalo, Swaziland bull elephants, Atlas bears, Bengal tigers, and Barbary lions. He leveled it at the river and waited for the slightest movement, his senses humming. Bellows was in the same state of a hunter’s readiness, and the old adventurer’s camaraderie warmed Avery.

A ripple creased the water, just a moment’s interruption of the smooth surface, and Avery and Bellows fired together. “Criminy!” Avery said. “Missed the devil!”

“If a devil there was,” Bellows said. “I think we were duped by a fish or serpent.”

The Bellerophon pushed upstream slowly. Before them the broad Nile widened further, and further still, until Avery wondered if they had reversed their course and returned to the Mediterranean. But, no, there were cliffs and dark, dense African forests far to starboard. They had reached Lake Tanganyika.

A second impact threw Avery against the rail; Bellows went over. Avery caught him with one hand – the old man weighed as much as a corn husk – and swung him back on board. The bow lifted slightly and the boat began to list. “We’re taking on water,” Bellows said.

“I suppose I’ll pop belowdecks and investigate. I thought I saw Jim disappear that direction earlier…”

Below, metal shrieked under tremendous strain. “No time for that,” Bellows said. “Get to the pilot deck and run us aground before we sink.”

“Jim won’t like that.”

“Better than losing his precious kit. This lake’s known for its crocs, my son. A swim here would hardly be a dip at Brighton.”

Avery nodded and leapt up the stairs to the pilothouse. Larsen, the pilot, struggled with the wheel. “It’s no good, sir,” he said. “She won’t answer. Rudder’s shot, and we’ve got plenty of steam, but props don’t seem to be doing a blasted thing.”

“Don’t fret, Mr. Larsen. Just aim for that sandy patch.” Avery pointed at a stretch of beach perhaps two hundred yards to starboard. “Run her aground.”

“Yessir.” Larsen knew how to follow orders.

Avery patted him on the shoulder. “There’s a fellow,” and he jumped down the stairs, intent on the engine room. In the boiler room he met Blankenship, dripping wet and white as a sheet. “What happened? Jim, my friend, are you uninjured?”

“I have made the acquaintance of your Crocodylus niloticus. But I append the appellation: Crocodylus niloticus rex.”

“Ye gads! Point me at him!” Avery shook his rifle.

“In the engine room – but you can’t – ” But he had. Avery flung open the door and water rushed into the boiler room. The boat tilted upward as the river sucked it downward; Avery struggled to seal the door, and sprang backward as a pair of giant jaws thrashed in the great hole before him. The snout measured five feet across, and Avery was sure he could fit his fist inside the flaring nostrils.

“This is what I came for, I suppose,” Avery reflected as the monstrous crocodile rammed its great head into the wall, bending the steel bulkhead as if it were aluminum. Fortunately, it could not fit through the narrow door and into the boiler room; though, due to the rate at which the Bellerophon was taking on water, they would soon find themselves in the unusual position of having a rampaging forty-foot reptile as the least of their worries. “Larsen’s taking the boat aground,” he told James. “We must seal this door, or we’ll sink before we make the beach!”

Eustace rammed the door again, the impact jarring Avery to his bones. He raised his rifle and fired; the shot went wild and glanced off the crocodile’s armor. “If not for this deuced rough ride, I could pick my shot and put one through his eye.”

“Here.” James put a canister in his hands. Avery recognized the cylinder as one of James’s anti-fire devices. He pulled the pin from a spring-loaded catch; white foam spewed from the nozzle. Eustace lunged again, jaws open. The boat rocked with the great reptile’s thrashing weight. Avery pitched the cylinder down his throat.

The jaws crashed together a foot from Avery’s face. His pugilist instinct compelled him to ram his fist into the crocodile’s nose. He might as well have punched a brick wall. Eustace snorted. “You know how to take a punch!” Avery said. “That would’ve felled Jack Gull himself!” Eustace snorted again, and foam sprayed from his nostrils, then bubbled through the locked teeth. The huge maw opened, foam gushed out, Eustace groaned terribly, and retreated into the river. Avery scowled. “Next time you’ll not be so lucky!”

He sealed the door. “Sorry about the bang-up, old boy,” he said.

“No bother,” James said. “As long as the equipment is safe, our research can go on.”

“By Gad, if he wasn’t a big one!”

“I am somewhat disappointed. The local legends put his age at four centuries. From what I know of Nile crocodile growth rates, and can extrapolate in this heated moment, he could not be over two hundred and fifty years old.” The ship’s horn blasted a deep note. “Now what could that mean?” James wondered.

“It means wrap your fists around that railing, Jim, my chum, and don’t let go – we’re landward bound!”

“Confound that Nordic numskull at the helm!” James shouted, but the shout was lost amongst a cacophony from the end of creation as half a hundred tons of boat collided with the shore: a crash, a grinding that penetrated the bones, and a long squeal of taxed steel that raked the brain. The boilers rattled in their mountings, and bolts under high pressure shot off and ricocheted around the room. They hurried to the deck. The Bellerophon was ruined. The pilothouse was a heap of planks, flattened in the crash; Eustace had shredded the stern; the beach, which was composed less of sand than small boulders, had crumpled the bow. A muted explosion, followed by a brief tremor, told them that the boilers had at last given up. The scent of smoke reached their nostrils.

“We’ve made it!” Avery said happily.

Wasn’t that thrilling? Come back Thursday to see what happens next.

Do you know why the sea captain is named “Larsen”? Because I’d just read The Sea Wolf. My brain, she is transparent.

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Talented Friend Stephanie Scarborough has a story up, and one of her old ones got turned into a podcast; surprisingly, and delightfully, so did one of mine! You remember, “Socks and Banshees“, that charming slice of marital life and undeath.

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Christmas 2006, I was working holiday for UPS. I rode in the passenger seat of a UPS truck and jumped out to drop off the packages while the driver organized the next drop. It was okay work. It gave me lots of time to ponder the worth of a college degree. I was also trying to get into grad school, get an MFA so I would be qualified for a more expensive kind of uselessness. Well, you know those artsy types, those tea-drinking professors who scorn literature as a source of “fun” or “pleasure”, who honestly believe that poetry still has something to give humanity, they vomit in disgust if presented with a piece of science fiction or fantasy. This was my effort to write a realistic story, something that could happen in real life, but still felt “deep”. Everybody told me to take out the weird hallucination scene with the Burger King king, but I wouldn’t do it.

… I didn’t get into the program. For which I give thanks every day.

Dog Street
By Jens Rushing

With Christmas coming and the bank account empty, I went to work for UPS. It wasn’t so bad. I’ve never enjoyed physical labor. I know there are certain types that claim to find it calming – people who claim to enjoy simple, repetitive motions, to find solace while lifting boxes or filing papers or mowing lawns. These people are liars. I have never found anything in physical labor other than exhaustion and discomfort. I have my own meditation exercises. I can draw crude genitalia in the sand of my tiny rock garden. I can sit in the park and imagine myself suffocating on the barren surface of the moon.

UPS afforded me no time for thinking. I was a driver helper. I rode around on the folding bitch-seat and ran the packages out whenever we stopped. I moved constantly. It was hard work, and cold, too; we didn’t have time to open the door at every stop, so it hung open, and the wind shrieked in and peeled the frozen flesh from my bones. The trucks, clearly not intended for operation by human beings, had only one heating vent in the center of the dash. It bled hot air directly to the outdoors, doing a wonderful job of increasing our infrared profile, but a shitty job of actually keeping us alive. My hands were purple by the end of the day, and needles of pain perforated them when I finally got home and thrust them under warm water.

The first day passed easily enough. As instructed, I met the truck in the CVS parking lot. My driver was a friendly black guy, thirtyish, who said first and foremost: “Man! I like that hat!” I liked him right away.

“I’m Leo.”

“Deon.” We shook hands. “We got bullshit work today, Leo. Never work too hard, Leo, because then they fuck you. See this?” He waved at the back of the truck. Boxes filled it, floor to ceiling. “Yesterday I made two hundred stops in seven hours. So today I get five hundred goddamn packages. Can’t go home til we’re done.”

“Gotta keep standards low.”

“You said it.” Deon went in the back and tossed packages around and swore profusely, maintaining a rich and constant stream of profanity. The profanity seemed a byproduct of his work, the way a properly operating vehicle spews exhaust. He levered a package into place: “Fuckin shit.” He scanned a shipping label: “Hell ass yeah.”

I stood, not wanting to just sit while he worked. I wanted to earn my pay, so I asked if I could help. “You just sit your sweet ass down and wait,” he said. “Take a break.” I sat my sweet ass down and waited. I watched a slatternly woman carry one kid and drag another into the CVS. The dragged kid cried and screamed. The carried kid just cried.

“Got any kids?” I asked.

“Got a little girl,” he said.

“You married?”

“Hell no,” he said.

“I am,” I volunteered. “Six months now.” I looked at my ring. Six months in and it was scratched all to hell. On our honeymoon in China I had absently banged it all along a quarter mile of the Great Wall, humming “La Marseillaise” and marking time with the click of gold on timeless stone. Lexi had thrown a fit.

“Entropy is the way of all things,” I told her. “Mountains crumble into the sea. All the works of man are for naught.”

“I don’t care!” she shrieked. “Don’t destroy our things! Entropy doesn’t need your help!” I couldn’t say anything; she was absolutely right. Lexi shrieked in much the same way when she found me idly whittling the computer desk or holding an open flame to a plugged-in extension cord. I had no explanation for my actions.

We began our route. It took us through a hideous part of town – a new development of low-income housing, nice houses, but all new. Brick boxes stretching out of sight. No trees more than a year or two old. As we crested a little hill we could see the entire zip code – an unbroken stretch of grey suburban roofs rendered in ersatz Cubism, angles and planes and no perspective. Perfectly hideous.

Deon drove with a surprising lack of skill. He ran the truck over curbs several times, each time executing the action with studious concentration, his brow wrinkled and lips puckered like he was planning chess stratagems rather than driving on someone’s lawn. I came to appreciate his driving style, as I might appreciate a painter who eschews technical achievement in favor of personal expression. I told him so. He thumped his chest. “Yeah, I drive from the heart.”

My job mainly consisted of finding clever hiding spots for packages. We concealed them behind any of the usual crap with which homeowners bedeck their porches: enormous planters, ceramic frogs, benches, bikes, pillars, packages from competing parcel services. Any would do. We had one box that was way too big to hide on the porch. I held the package while Deon cracked the gate to the backyard and peeked through. He whistled a few times. He opened the gate and stepped in, creeping cautiously to the corner, giving me hand signals that made no sense, his every nerve alert like a soldier in Nam searching for a tripwire. He sprang around the corner and quickly leapt back. His whole body trembled. “It’s okay,” he said. “No dogs.”

We dropped the package and returned to the truck. “I was bit once,” he explained. “Hurt!”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah! It was a little dog, but a mean bastard. One of them little brown and white dogs.”

I nodded. I knew just what he meant.

After an hour or so I had the job down. It was a simple job, but I found some small satisfaction in it. We came to a stop. I picked up the box and thought: “I feel competent! How good it is to be competent!” Then I fell out of the truck. I missed the two steps completely and fell on the curb and sprawled face-first on the grass. The package went flying. Deon hooted with laughter. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah, just… stupid,” I said. My face burned with the distinct sensation that I had done a very idiotic thing. When I was in seventh grade, I went to the state level of the national spelling bee after a brilliant performance at the district level. In the first round, on statewide television, I spelled “scroll” without an “r”. Of course I knew how to spell “scroll,” I just chose to be a fuckup at exactly the wrong moment. This same feeling descended on me now. I tried not to think about being twenty-five, degreed, married, and falling down stairs that a chimpanzee could have navigated with grace and aplomb. This fucking – no suitable noun came to mind. Leo’s indignation had no object beyond Leo.

I refuse to be that sort of bastard on principle, so I brushed the grass off my very attractive UPS uniform and dropped the damn package. I climbed back into the truck, which was moving before I got into my seat. One of the hundred humiliations we must endure daily. The human organism has coordination problems; you miss steps and tumble from a truck. The mind, stapled to this marionette, must bear it with dignity. My organism wasn’t done with me yet. Later that day, while examining a bruised knuckle, I walked directly into the side of the truck, missing the door completely. Deon laughed again. I was frozen. My knees hurt from jumping in and out of the truck. My ass ached. I tore a long strip of skin from my index finger somehow. I was an aching, bleeding, frozen mess.

“Shit,” Deon said as we rounded a corner. I assumed he was cursing at the recycling bin he had just flattened or the tiny sparrow caught in the grille. I paid it no mind. Soon I realized that we were circling, driving down the same street again. “There’s a dog,” he said, “bastard doesn’t chase anyone but me. Here he comes.” He pointed, and sure enough a small brown and black beast bounded from a yard. It fell into place beside the truck, two or three feet from the wheels, barking ferociously. “We’ll go around and do the other drops and come back here later. Maybe he’ll be inside.” His voice quavered.

I laughed. “It’s cool,” I said. “I’ll drop the package. I got a special way with dogs. They like me.” This was in no way true, but I hated to see that kind of fear in a grown man. I wanted to get the drop over with as soon as possible and put Deon’s fear out of my mind. It was embarrassing to behold.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” I said. “He’s all bark.”

“Okay…” He slowed and I vaulted through the door. I hit the ground fast and stumbled, then found my footing and sprinted for the house. The vicious little hound streaked for me, snarling and howling. I dropped the package and doubled back. It wouldn’t bite me, it was all bark. But the thing leapt for me, fangs bare. I ducked to the side and it sailed past. Before it could recover and mount a new assault I was in the truck. Deon gave it gas and the truck roared away.

“Hoo-ha!” I crowed. Exultation filled me. One thrilling encounter with a savage beast per day would make me a happy man. We drove a few blocks away and Deon parked with one wheel cocked rakishly over the curb. He put his head on the wheel and his arms over his head. Then, to my utter astonishment, a sob shook him, and another. He cried, muffled by his arms, and I squirmed in profound awkwardness. He stopped soon enough and wiped his face.

“Last time I saw my little girl,” he said, staring straight ahead, “her mama threw me out. I walk through the door and give my baby a hug and her mama says, ‘Nuh-uh. Get on out, nigger. You worthless. No good.’ And she spit on me, Leo! Right here!” He indicated his cheek. “I had nothin to say. Couldn’t say nothin to that. Couldn’t spit back. Couldn’t hit her. My little girl, she looked at me like – I don’t know. But I had to go right then, and I ain’t seen her since.”

I didn’t know what to say. What can you say to that? No advice or expression of comfort would fail to sound idiotic and useless. So I just squeezed his shoulder in a vague gesture of manly support. “All right. That’s kind of random, Deon.”

“Every time I pick up the phone to call her, I think of that fuckin dog.”

“I see,” I said. I did not see. Something occurred to me. “Hey, if you run over that dog in the course of duty, are you liable, or is the company?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’d be worth finding out,” I said.

So ended my first day. I got home after dark and banged on the door. I wore my uniform and carried a box under my arm. My wife opened the door. “Yes?”

“I have a package for you, miss,” I said. “I also have this box.”

“Oh, my, UPS man, do come in. Let me fetch you a beer. You just sit down.” Lexi got a Shiner and sat on my lap. She put a finger to her lips and arched an eyebrow in speculation. “Hmm,” she said, “what can Brown do for me?”

I told her about my day. She told me about her day and what her mother had done now and why she was going crazy. We baked chicken and potatoes and ate while watching television; afterwards I kissed her and she said, “My head hurts,” so that was that. “I have a long day of falling out of trucks tomorrow,” I said, and we went to bed.

In the last ten minutes of sleep, a vision came to me, an idea of amazing perfection and focus. I dreamed out a rock musical with a complete score. It was called “Here Comes the King.” A sleepy seaside village is shocked one day to see a King rising from the waters. He is the Burger King mascot, with the full robes and the big plastic face. The King merrily informs them that their lives are now his; those who dissent are decapitated and those who comply are likewise decapitated (the King can’t trust them). He rounds up all the women for his harem and enslaves the men in the construction of an enormous statue, a colossal likeness of the King. They doubt his power, so he rockets into the sky and flies out over the ocean, then plunges beneath the waves. He reappears shortly thereafter, hauling a whale by a fin. The King slices the whale open from stem to stern, and there, in its belly, is his throne made of bones. The bones are made of gold. The throne is crowned with sharpened femurs. The King rocks out on a double-necked guitar, the villagers dance, and a redhead harem slave teaches him the true meaning of love.

I sprang out of bed, knowing that I must record this magnum opus before it evaporated from my brain, and scribbled fragments of the libretto on a legal pad, chuckling at their wit, astounded that my subconscious had come up with such a bizarre yet intriguing creation. Then the words came slower, the melodies grew vague, and I re-read what I had written. It was garbage. I crumpled the paper and bounced it off Lexi’s forehead. She went “hmm” in her sleep and rubbed her nose. Deep dissatisfaction settled over me. A tremendous creative impulse had burned in my brain and been frustrated, stifled like a roman candle firing in a plastic bottle. I climbed onto Lexi’s recumbent form. “How can I give you everything within me?” I whispered, and bit her ear. She whimpered and backhanded my left eyeball. I tried not to sound banal, but naked emotion always sounds banal. “I have many hundreds of ambitions and hopes, all frustrated,” I said, and licked her cheek. She elbowed my temple and said, “mmm.” I went to work, strange thoughts percolating through my brains all the way.

My meditation technique:

The park is windswept and barren in winter. All the trees are bare of leaves, all the grass is brown and dead. I sit on a bench and the wind howls around me. I close my eyes and use the cold to transport myself to the moon, where the vacuum rips the oxygen from my lungs molecule by molecule, like bubbles rising from champagne. The molecules effervesce through my skin. I am completely alone, of course, and as I die, I behold the entire world. It looms in the blackness before me and fills up the whole sky. Distance renders its affairs picayune; my perspective grants me perfect clarity. That I don’t know the content of this clarity doesn’t matter; I simply acknowledge this clarity, and that’s enough to grant me a comprehensive if vague understanding of the day-to-day. It always works. I always go home filled with beneficence and patience sufficient to annoy everyone around me.

I met Deon at the CVS again. He was excited. “I asked, man, and guess what? The company takes liability as long as damages aren’t over two hundred dollars. And that dog’s a mutt! Can’t be worth more than fifty. What you think?”

“Maybe fifty,” I said.

“Today’s my girl’s birthday,” he said. “She’s seven.”

“That’s great. D’you get her anything?”

“We got only four hundred packages today,” he said. “Should be able to get this knocked out by seven.”

“I don’t have anywhere to be,” I said. We got to work. My seatbelt was broken. I had to mash the button repeatedly and tug on the buckle every time. Policy required that I wear it whenever the truck was moving, so it slowed us down quite a bit. I quit wearing it. I quit using the seat, too. I just stood in the cab and held on tight as we careened around corners on two wheels. We came to a nice two-story house with white columns flanking the door. Very tasteful. “I can’t deliver this package,” I said. “I had sex with that man’s daughter, and he knows it.”

“Bullshit,” Deon said.

“Really!”

“Just do it! Ring the bell and shout ‘UPS!’ and you’re done!”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Man, you can’t let this sort of bullshit hang you up. You got to face your fears.”

“Says the guy who’s scared of a little brown mutt.” That was too far. I regretted it. But Deon just grinned and punched me in the shoulder.

“Is,” he looked at the package, “Mr. Worley gonna bite you?”

“He very well might.” This whole time, of course, we were parked on Worley’s front yard, with a string of Christmas lights crushed under the tires, so the man himself stepped out to receive us. He was a tall guy, and he had “Semper Fi” tattooed across one muscular bicep, and I admit I was very much afraid of him. I sprang out of the truck, thrust the package at him, mumbled “UPS”, and pivoted on my heel.

“Do I have to sign for it?” he said.

Shit. He did. I got the pad out and punched up the signature screen.

“Thanks,” he said, scrawling his name in big block letters, “Leo.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. Then, because I am an idiot, I added, “How’s Sally?”

“She’s doing well! She just started med school. Yep! That kid’s going places.”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s really great.”

“How long you been at UPS?”

“Uh, I’m just working here for the season. A little extra cash, ya know. Nothing permanent.” I waved, a gesture encompassing the magnificent career before me.

“What’s your degree?”

I winced. “Communications.”

“I see.” He crossed his arms and nodded. “Yeah, you might wanna consider staying on at UPS. I understand they got great benefits. You might not be able to get something that good in the field of… communications.”

“We got to get going. Great seeing ya, Mr. Worley.”

“Mmhmm. I think our pool guy has a communications degree. No, wait. He has a communications MA. Have you considered that field? What about landscaping?”

“Don’t think I could handle it. Talk to ya later, Mr. Worley!” I ran back to the truck. My ears burned and I took off my hat to let the cold assuage my embarrassment.

“Not so bad!” Deon laughed.

“Fuck off and die,” I said. Mr. Worley stood in the yard and watched the truck until we drove around the corner. I wadded my hat in my hands and thought, “I am on the surface of the moon. I am on the surface of the moon.”

That whole day I gleefully anticipated our delivery to Dog Street. The moment of adrenaline – the rush of the canine lunge – the snap of jaws on empty air! Exhilaration! We ate our bag lunches in the parking lot behind 7-11 and while we ate I told Deon of an article I had read that morning. Five years ago, some teenage hooligans hurled a chunk of concrete from an overpass. It smashed through a woman’s windshield and shattered her collarbone. It tore the skin from her shoulder, neck, and cheek. Stunned, she drove her car into a pylon. She was paralyzed from the waist down, disfigured from the waist up. The paper interviewed her. They wanted to know how she had coped with her crippling injuries for five years. She wanted her anonymous attackers to know that they had been forgiven.

“Someone did that to me, they wouldn’t be forgiven,” Deon said. “They’d be dead.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are you gonna extract bloody vengeance when you’re in a wheelchair? This lady can barely talk, she’s in so much pain.”

“Well,” he said, and continued eating. Deon was a very picky eater. He ate cucumbers, carrots, and yogurt every day for lunch. He was rail-thin. He ate circumspectly, nibbling his food and chewing it seventeen times before swallowing (I counted). The yogurt he ate in maddeningly small spoonfuls. Deon knew we were about to deliver to Dog Street. I could tell he was thinking about it. His spoon-hand shook and the yogurt rippled.

“Deon,” I said, “So what if it bites you? Won’t kill you. It’s a twenty-pound little bastard, Deon. No reason to be scared of it.”

“Shuddup,” he said.

“You got plans tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Not gonna see your little girl on her birthday?”

“Fuck you.”

“You could at least call her. My dad’s a total deadbeat. Only time I talk to him is on my birthday and Christmas. But he always calls. And it’s stupid, but I really appreciate that.”

“Her mama spit on me.”

“So what? You’re above that shit, Deon.”

He crumpled up his lunch bag and tossed it into the dumpster. He looked at me, and the sudden ferocity in his eyes startled me. “If I were that woman,” he said, his voice unsteady but fierce, “I’d find out who those bastards were. I’d go to all the gas stations nearby and get their security tapes, and put out an ad asking for information, and hire a private investigator, and all that shit, and get their names. And then I’d wait until they grew up, until maybe they had real jobs and wives and kids, and then I’d come after them. Wheelchair or not. I’d learn their schedules, and buy me a gun, and catch them alone, on a rainy street at night, and the last thing they’d hear would be my wheelchair, going squeak squeak, squeak squeak behind them.”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Deon had constructed a fiction, like my Burger King fantasy. I understood. “That’s pretty fucked up, Deon.”

“But you believe I’d do it.”

“I don’t know, Deon.”

“Just you wait.”

We headed for Dog Street. Deon hadn’t said a single word since we left the 7-11. I got the deliveries for Dog Street lined up and ready to go. I wanted to move fast. This time I would lead the bastard on a wild chase – first, a contest of maneuverability, where I’d jump over lawn furniture and duck under clotheslines and maybe vault a fence. Then a flat-out race for the truck, my speed matched against his. God! It was going to be great!

The mutt streaked out of the yard like he’d been fired from a cannon, barking, barking. He fell into step beside the truck, not three feet from me, lips curled back, fangs exposed, hate roiling in his carnivore eyes. I stood in the doorway, gripping the handles, muscles tensed, ready to leap –

I almost fell out of the truck. Deon swerved, hard, and the huge tires rolled right over the mutt. A half-yelp escaped it, but the wheels crunched down, bones and organs pulped under their weight; the truck rolled on, leaving a lumpy red smear on the road. I dropped onto the bitch-seat. “You did it,” I gasped. “You crazy bastard, you really did it!”

“Hoo-ha!” he cried. Tension broke on his face, a big insane grin pent up too long. His hands shook on the wheel as visible relief rattled him. “Hoo-ha!” He began to speak, but his relief was too great for words; he only sobbed with laughter. I laughed, too. It was great.

We laughed until we cried. Deon took another street and stopped the truck. We laughed and wiped the tears and mucus from our faces. We laughed until it hurt. The laughter subsided in long shuddering bursts of giggles. Still chuckling, I picked up the package for that stop. I shook my head as I ran it to the door. I was light and bouncy. When I got back to the truck Deon had his cell phone out.

The End

I love dogs. It is not remotely funny to kill one, though sometimes, sadly, it is dramatically necessary.
Next week we will begin the truly epic tale of Crocodopolis.

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You think you know a market…

Everyday Fiction has, with me, a pretty reliable track record; they want stories, not thousand-word fictional things. They want a beginning, middle, end, with a climax and resolution, all the rivets tightened, all the numbers painted over. Nothing wrong with that, of course. That’s how we make stories.

But I like to send them all sorts of bizarre little things, which I often have a good presentiment will be rejected; they are not cleanly told, they are not satisfying, if anything they are confusing and alienating. But I like to foster confusion and alienation; they’re good for you, and we don’t get enough of them these days. Even if there’s nothing behind the curtain, confusion makes you think, dammit.

So I sent them “Le Danse Macabre”, a weird little dementer from several months ago, and waited for the rejection. It got in! Weird. But very nice. The reviewers thought it was richly told, but no one understood the ending. Let’s hope they don’t find this journal, because then they would learn that: neither do I.

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Bullet-pointed for readability in the age of Post-Literacy. (No, of course I don’t mean you, dear reader.)

• “Bathroom on bus” is not a selling point. It means you have one available if needed, yes, but you also have an excellent opportunity to learn how the tropical sunshine reacts with splashed urine in an enclosed metal tube. For five hours.
• Singapore is bizarre and amazing. A city built for beauty and pleasure, while our cities are built for cars.
• Thailand is the apotheosis of capitalism. People quite literally try to sell you things from the backs of swooping motorcycles.
• That said, the beaches are nice. But not as nice as Malaysia.
• In Malaysia and Thailand, almost all the tourists are Europeans, and almost all of those are German. Why is this? In Bali, there was a nice mix of Aussies and Americans and Canadians, in Vietnam much the same, but with a greater proportion of French, but here - almost all Germans. What’s the deal? Is their economy really doing so well right now, and the US’s so poorly? Or is it just because they have school holidays and the US doesn’t? Many of the tourists seem to be of retirement age - I suppose American retirees go to Costa Rica or the Caribbean or Florida. Fools! Thailand is cheaper and allows topless sunbathing!

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Wrote this last year, in Ubud, Bali, sitting on the patio of some classy yet deserted restaurant. My wife was doing yoga nearby, and I was staring over the beautiful emerald green rice paddies, thinking, now I’m really gonna get something done! Something of beauty and importance! Then two German tourists starting yakking in their abominable language and I couldn’t think straight, so I wrote this instead, one of the several stories I wrote that vacation in what I call the “Farmerian” mode. How accurate that is is not the issue here. I call it Farmerian, and, damnyereyes, that’s what it is as long as you’re on my webpage.

The satire was losing its timeliness even then, and now… who knows?

<!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>

Lunacide
By Jens Rushing

It was five years in the future, and we were finally blowing up the moon.

The public outcry was deafening, of course. The United Nations condemned the Lunar Destruction Initiative, fiercely, repeatedly, impotently. Amnesty International filed a lawsuit; the ACLU did likewise, though they were not certain exactly whose liberties were in danger.

(PETA stood at the sidelines, eager to join the fray, but unable to prove for the moment which animals were indigenous to the moon, and whether they were endangered.)

The heads of state of Great Britain, France, China, Russia, Japan, India, Germany, and a hundred other countries lambasted us publicly. “The moon belongs to the world,” they cried. “Ever since the first men and women had the capacity to gaze and wonder at that star-soaked silver circle, the moon has been the common property of our hearts and minds. You can no more take it than you can take the sun.”

Our beloved leader replied that the business about the gazing and wondering was very pretty, but in point of fact, there was a flag on that rock, and would they care to guess how many stars and stripes it had?

As for operations regarding the sun, he could make no comment at that time.

He issued an official statement, to wit:

“The interests of the moon and the interests of the people of this great nation have become mutually exclusive. This preemptive strike will prevent possible catastrophic events in the global community.” He put a good rolling inflection into catastrophic, and flashed a winning smile, and everyone felt a little better. He knew what he was doing.

Soon the roaring engine of public relations rammed this statement along the rails of popular opinion, giving the people of the world permission to do what they had always wanted to do: hate the moon. For, by 2016, it was impossible to open your front door without first shoving aside a snowdrift of empty Coke cans, cigarette boxes, lids from convenience store drinks, used lottery tickets, used condoms, used uranium rods from the Corner Fission 24/7, clumps of hair, mold-covered refrigerators, chipped and discarded assault rifles, a pack of coyotes, half-eaten cans of Nestle Dolphin & Kelp, and the barrels of untreated sewage that seemed to multiply when no one was looking. Nine out of ten public schools worldwide had closed down when cash-strapped governments stopped issuing handguns to teachers. Long-term marijuana use was finally linked to spontaneous human combustion. The grey macaque had overtaken mankind as Earth’s most successful primate.

We couldn’t fight the grey macaques. But we could fight the moon.

Hatred and merchandising are two sides of the same coin, and soon anti-Luna T-shirts and bumper stickers flooded the market. There was the thought-provoking design that read “One small button-press for man…” on the front, with an illustration of a forefinger hovering over a red button, and on the back, “One giant ass-kicking for the moon!” with a picture of a missile slamming into that unfortunate rock. There was the simple, yet powerful, logo of the moon surmounted by a red circle with a slash across it. Another design screamed “You’ve got to be a LUNATIC to like the moon!” Some protested that this T-shirt was insensitive to the mentally ill, but that ended when the President wore one on national TV.

The peak of the anti-moon craze, the perfect synthesis of art and commerce, was the release by a critically lauded gentleman philanthropist/country singer of the anthem “The Moon’s Ass + My Foot”. It was heralded as a “triumph of the human spirit.” The Nobel Committee created a prize for music.

We were all glued to our televisions on Launch Day. Dancers from around the world performed for hours in a flower-strewn and fireworked gala grander than any two Olympics ceremonies put together. Our beloved leader took the podium. “My fellow Earthlings,” he said, and broke into an unrehearsed grin of pure joy. “Yes, I really feel I can address you as such. We have never been so united. There is nothing we can’t do! There are no limits anymore!”

Ten billion people applauded, and the orchestra played a symphonic arrangement of “The Moon’s Ass + My Foot”. Our beloved leader pressed the button. Five thousand ICBMs roared heavenward atop five thousand pillars of flame, five thousand fiery talons striking at one point in the night sky. The explosion was a radiant burst of blue flaring to orange-white. We all agreed that it was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen.

“Destruction of Luna confirmed,” our leader reported. Ten billion people screamed with joy. Then they screamed with terror and the awful pain of death.

Several fussy old bowtie-wearing gentlemen had raised this point before Launch Day, but they had raised it in forgotten publications like Popular Science and National Geographic, so no one had heard: the moon exerted a significant gravitational pull on the Earth. Once the moon was smashed into a million pieces, Earth’s tectonic plates, which almost no one believed in anymore, started jumping around like Madagascar hissing roaches in a pan of hot oil. The Richter scale hit eleven. Three billion people died in fifteen seconds. California, Japan, China, and India were devastated. Aftershocks and secondary fires claimed millions more. Tsunamis pounded every coast in the world, killing virtually everyone in Vietnam, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Morocco, Malaysia, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, completely destroying London, Mexico City, Rouen, Copenhagen, Halifax, Rome, Athens, Vancouver, and a thousand others. The eastern US was underwater to the Appalachians. Those in inland cities, far from fault lines, were relatively unharmed, until the first volcanic eruptions buried them in ash.

But the destruction of that day, which claimed over four and a half billion lives, was nothing compared to the next day, when the fragments of Luna began to pelt the Earth. We will not detail the explosive impacts, the tsunamis, the smothering dust clouds, the shock waves that flattened mountain ranges.

Our beloved leader watched all this via satellite feed in his bunker, and his winning smile twitched the slightest bit. “Well!” he exclaimed, turning back to the cameras, as if any television sets still functioned, as if anyone survived to watch them. “We knew it would be tough going in, and we’ll stay the course. I have a five-year timeline…”

The End

Haha! Humanity is boned. Come back Thursday for something completely different.

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Wrote this some years ago for a “historical zombie” anthology. Didn’t get in, and I lost interest in marketing it. There are some parts I like. The end may be a bit overdone, but, whatever, live and learn.

Kingdom of Death
By Jens Rushing

The captain said to charge, so they charged. The soldiers clutched their rifles and raced across the muddy shell-pocked pasture. David stumbled and fell to the rear of the group, and the captain slapped his back with the flat of his sword: “Onward, you dog! Run!” They dashed madly for the safety of a low stone wall; bullets tore the air around them, seeking the vulnerable lives of the men. The soldier in front of David fell screaming with his face destroyed. David leapt over the falling form. Smoke erupted from the trees at the far end of the pasture, a denser white against the white of the cold morning mist, each puff punctuated by a rifle report meaning death for one of the grey-clad soldiers struggling across the field. Already a charnel slough covered the field: a uniform waste of human wreckage, pale faces frozen in heavenward cries, shattered limbs jutting angularly in immortal farewell waves. Here and there the bulge of a slain horse swelled from the wash of carcasses. The troops pushed across the field, contributing their living masses to the pageant of ruin.

On the ridge at the far end of the field, an array of howitzers belched smoke, and David felt and heard their deep rolling voices. The ground exploded upward – screams –the concussion knocked David on his back. The soldiers sprawled, broken, shredded by shrapnel. The wall! David crawled blindly on over a long succession of corpses. Only safety mattered – to be away from the scourging ball and shell! He cringed as shots ripped furrows in the uniforms of the dead men all around him, spraying his face with congealed blood.

The wall was too far away. He would never make it. Another shell burst near him and he was suddenly deaf, all sound evaporated but a high keening. Rifle shots shredded the air; he screamed soundlessly as a ball gouged a furrow along his shoulder. If he could make it to the wall he would live. But he knew he would never make it.

Someone tugged at his trouser cuff and he shook his leg. The grip was weak and soon relinquished. He struggled over the dead and dying, following the mandate of the only thought left in his brain: onward. Before him the ground opened in a sudden gaping hole. The scattered planks told him that a house had once stood here – a root cellar, then, left open to the sky by a shell. Safety. Escape from the kingdom of death. The soldier leapt into the hole and a lightning-burst of pain flared as he snapped his ankle on the uneven rubble below. He fainted.

His mind crawled into the recesses of his skull and set up camp. David was back in Jefferson, flinging coal into the boiler of a big sternwheeler. He put down his shovel and smelled the rich bayou air and watched the green water glide by. A black water moccasin curved across the surface and vanished with a flash of white underbelly; three fat turtles slid off a log as the sternwheeler neared; lithe white herons fished in the shallows and mockingbirds and red-winged blackbirds freighted the drooping, moss-draped cypresses and filled the dazzling day with their summer song. The sternwheeler nosed up to the docks. David had been gone for two weeks on the river run to New Orleans. Mina would be waiting, blushing and brimming with joy and desire. Her sweet face. Her soft hands and fair, fine skin. The pink flush of life that rose on her throat.

The insistent throb in his ankle drew his mind back. He fought it – but the pain forced him back. He was in a muddy little hole, and bullets shrieked overhead like harpies of old, descending to rend and annihilate him. The cellar measured perhaps ten feet square. Roots of long-dead trees protruded from the walls here and there, groping blindly. With a start David realized that he shared it with a blue-clad corpse. The corpse lay facedown in the mud, its right hand crushed under a fallen beam. David limped over to the body, his ankle screaming protest. He examined the corpse, searching for a weapon, anything. He had lost his own rifle when the first shell hit. David saw that a large spike protruding from the beam had pierced the corpse’s forearm between the bones and continued into the earth below, transfixing it. A long line of ants marched across the hand. A heavy putrescent stench curdled in his nostrils. David rolled the body with his foot and shuddered at the maggots boiling in the eyes and mouth. Cold, clotted blood had pooled in the downward side of the corpse, and the skin there mottled purple and grey. He turned the corrupted face downward and struggled against a surge of nausea.

An instant of a shrieking whistle, cutting through and beyond the ringing in his ears, warned him, and David flung himself to the ground as a shell crashed nearby; the ground heaved; agony exploded through his body as the land rebelled and rolled; the earth was above him, beside him, below him, shaking in a crazed and erratic pitch. Clods and stones rained on him. He panted and lay on his back. David wiped mud from his face and his hands came away bloody.

David pushed with his uninjured leg until he leaned against the rough sod wall. His ankle was already swelling in bulges of dark blue and red. He ripped the sleeve from his coat and wrapped the ankle tightly and the throbbing subsided a little.

His hearing returned. Through the ringing he grew aware of the distant screams of dying men – a cacophony rising from the whole length of the field, grey and blue alike, all wailing as death stole over them. To leave his little refuge meant joining the damned above. If he so much as peeked his head out, a rifle shot would smite it or a shell would tear it from his body. David would wait until night, when he could clamber from the hole and steal unseen back to his own lines. He thought of Jefferson. Here, in Tennessee or Kentucky or Virginia or wherever the hell he was, autumn crept into the bones with a chilling touch. At home, autumn only cut summer’s sweltering humidity. The cotton would be in bloom, the soft white bolls tossing in the wind like snow on the fields. Mina would start the fall canning and the fishing would be good.

David searched the grey patch of sky overhead. It was morning, yet the sky refused to brighten. Clouds smothered the land like a sodden blanket and the light filtered through only begrudgingly.

His eyes wandered to the corpse again. “Take the ridge,” the captain had said. “Take a bullet if you have to. It’s for your home, boys!” And the captain raised his rifle and shook it, trying to sound ferocious, but only sounding scared. And David recalled sweeter words spoken by Jefferson’s mayor when the draft was announced: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Sweet and fitting it is to die for your country. Possibly the blue-clad corpse facedown in an inch of muck had been told the same thing. Anger rushed into David’s head and hands; he clenched his fingers and his skin burned with it – sweet and fitting – and now, Mina in Jefferson, and he, doomed to die in a mudhole – bitter, bitter! He flung a stone at the corpse in his anger and recoiled, terror boiling his brains. His mind leapt back in his skull, seeking the refuge of sun-bright Jefferson, his legs spun in a futile attempt to burrow – for the corpse had moved. It jerked at the impact of the stone in seeming outrage, a sepulchral groan croaked forth, and tremors rolled through the body. The free hand, flecked by decay and crawling with ants, twitched, then clawed at the mud; the legs spasmed; and the horrible non-face turned slowly from the mud and raked David with its sightless gaze. The tatters of lips wrought guttural sounds, and the dead soldier crookedly rose, a marionette with half the strings severed. It lunged for David; he closed his eyes.

And, the death-blow not falling, he opened them. The corpse strained at the limit of its grasp, and David saw the fallen beam. The crushed hand was pinned. It could not reach him. The monstrous thing howled its rage and wrenched at the trapped hand. The impaling spike held. It lunged again, and caught again; it shook its gory head at David, wailing and howling senselessly. David averted his eyes and covered his ears, and he was unconsciously thankful that he had lost his knife, or he would have been compelled to plunge it into his heart at that moment.

His hands stopped the awful sounds – mostly. He retreated in the tiny cellar until his back pressed the damp wall. He clawed at the roots and pulled himself up, ignoring his ankle; he would take his chances on the battlefield. David climbed to the lip of the cellar and peeked out on the same scene. From his perspective, he saw the tips of the trees first. Even they were blighted. Flame, disease, or smoke had stripped them bare. Perhaps fifteen feet from his position lay the captain, dead hands clutching a Colt Navy revolver.

A stone exploded beside his head and a stinging spray of rock chips pelted his face. He fell back into the cellar, hands pressed to fresh wounds, rolling across the floor. David was senseless in his pain. He pressed his forehead and cheek, hoping to stop the blood pouring from the large gashes. Then remembrance speared him and he looked up and beheld the dead soldier, leaning over him, thin black lips spread in a macabre rictus. It struck.

It fell on him, biting ferociously, clawing with its free hand. David flailed with maniac blindness against the thing. He struck soft and reeking flesh again and again, with no effect on his attacker. Teeth clacked at his ears and pestilent claws dug fiery furrows on his arm and wounded shoulder. David gave himself up to screaming, his mind burned to extinction, his thoughts obliterated in the void.

He lashed out with all his strength and rolled away. The corpse shrieked after its escaping prey and leapt again, jerking at its fleshly tether. David lay in the furthest corner of the cellar, gasping for breath. Blood seeped from his wounds. The cold gnawed him. The mud chilled him. But he lived – he lived! The kingdom of death had not claimed him, though it dispatched a personal envoy to drag him to that ashen realm. His heart pumped hot blood through his living limbs, and that was rebellion enough. The beast would not claim him. David was stronger than the beast. Though the kingdom stretched far and withered all its shadow fell upon, David would turn his back on it and walk away. David wicked the precious pulse of life from the land; the pulse ran under wilted tree and sullied stream and blasted pasture all the way to Jefferson and Mina. Come nightfall, David thought, come nightfall.

The fallen soldier would not wait until nightfall, David realized. Dread sickened him; the corpse was gnawing at its own elbow. The muscles and tendons, weak and rotten from the damp and decay, parted easily under the gnashing teeth. David searched the sky. Noon had not yet come. Certainly the thing would free itself before night.

David shrugged off his shirt and tore it into shreds. He bound his ankle again, almost fainting as he tightened the bandage, and swabbed his face. Blood loss dizzied him, and he clung to consciousness desperately. He wrapped cloth around his forehead, staunching the flow of blood, and dabbed at his ripped shoulder.

He rested his forehead on his fist. “Heavenly Father,” he said. No further words came to him. He suddenly did not know how to pray. He wracked his brains and came up with nothing. “Amen,” he finished, and vaulted over the cellar wall and into the slaughter above.

David dashed for the captain. Shots echoed from the trees and bullets whined all around him, exploding off stones, ripping into the countless dead. David kept his head down and hopped forward as best he could on his one good foot, tripping over corpses that seemed to reach up to drag him down into their ghastly ranks. He threw himself to the ground and fumbled for the Colt. He tugged at it; the dead captain would not relinquish the weapon. David summoned his last strength and wrested it from the captain’s grasp, then flung his whole weight back toward the hole.

He dropped heavily into the mud and lay gasping. The excursion had passed so quickly that, if not for the weight of the revolver in his hand, it would have seemed a delusion. But – from one delusion to another. The insane, impossible creature broke its bond with a sound like a branch torn from a sapling. The fragment of arm dangled from the spike, and the remnant of the beast lurched forward.

David fired. The shot went wild. He fired again and the round shattered the soldier’s knee. It collapsed soundlessly but continued to crawl forward, teeth clacking together. David fired at the fallen beast and the shot thudded into its back, but it continued. He pulled the trigger and the hammer fell on an empty chamber. The hollow click seemed a death knell.

A half-second of shrieking warning, and the ground erupted upward as another shell hit, David flew, the corpse crashed against the wall, the earth pitched, and mud rained down. The impact of the shell gave David a half-second advantage. The corpse landed on its back, rutting the soil with its two remaining limbs, trying to turn over so it could resume its crawl, but David was upon it with a murderer-scream, bludgeoning with the long barrel of the pistol. The steel smashed wetly into the decayed skull over and over, until the skull was no longer a skull. At length his arm ached with exhaustion and the pistol fell from numb fingers. Unconsciousness crept in his brain and David allowed it to take him.

The sternwheeler nosed up to the docks and David sprang overboard without waiting for the gangplank. Mina waited for him, slim and beautiful as ever, and he seized her without preamble and kissed her as if he might never kiss her again. “My love,” he said, and “My love!” she sobbed in return.

Then, without having walked there, they were at their little cabin just on the outskirts of town, the sun blazing like molten brass and filling every inch of their young bodies with warmth. The little garden out front bloomed brightly with sunflowers and marigolds. Watermelons bulged amongst twisting vines and bluebonnets sprinkled the yard where a silk-maned pony grazed. “Come inside,” Mina said. “I have a surprise.”

She flung the door open, and a feast waited on the table: steaming cornbread, crumbly and dripping with honey; beans cooked with fat-marbled ham for hours; strawberries as big as a child’s fist. The sun poured in through the clean windows and bathed the table in gold.

Mina cradled a fat and healthy child. It gurgled and sucked its fingers. “Hush, hush,” she cooed. “We have a son, David,” she said. “You’re a father.” Pride and happiness swelled in him. He was likely to weep from joy.

Someone knocked at the door and David, irritated at the interruption, opened it. The captain stood without, dressed not in a long grey coat, but in white seersucker, with a broad white hat and a sparkling ruby tie tack. He stroked his beard – no longer wild and wooly, but neatly trimmed – and said, “Mine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever, amen.”

“Amen,” David echoed.

“The birds of the sky,” the captain said, and crows and cardinals and mockingbirds plummeted to earth in great numbers, dead before they hit. Their soft, small bodies carpeted the earth. “The beasts of the field,” the captain said, and the pony whinnied and reared in a dance-step of suffering, then fell dead, tongue lolling like that of a devil glutted with sin. “The happiness of the hearth,” the captain said, and David, choking on his horror and helplessness, watched as Mina’s fair young flesh shriveled from her skull, leaving only a grinning death’s head, her eyes and mouth swarming with crawling fat maggots.

David awoke in a tempest of insanity. Howling, he tore at his hair and clothes; he charged blindly forward, rebounding from the soft earthen wall; he collapsed to the ground, sobbing and sputtering. Sobs rocked him. The battlefield had torn the veil from his eyes, he knew, and allowed him to gaze into the void, and the void had whispered its truth to him: that life was a long procession into the maw of death, that all marched there inevitably, that all lay within the kingdom of death. That there was no delusion greater than escape.

Yet struggling, growing stronger; yet broken, still defying. Reaching for every ounce of endurance, David hauled himself from the pit. The moon had ascended and brought peace to the battlefield. Every inch of David’s body ached or bled; the weight of inevitability bore down on him, but he rose to his feet. Jefferson was scarcely eight hundred miles away. David picked his way through the fruits of war: shattered carts, mangled men, slain and bloated horses, the canvas of flesh on which rifle and artillery had wrought their deadly art.

He lifted his head to the glittering vault of stars. The clouds were gone. Night never held such promise.

The End

How about that? A happy ending? I never said I hated them, you just have to earn them. You kids want everything, never want to work for it. Get outta here.

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This story, I own, failed to find a market because of its own flaws; it is incomplete, a fragment, a jumble of imaginings culled from fin-de-siecle penny dreadfuls, drenched with jus au Maugham. It is weird and confounding. But I like it.

The World Over
By Jens Rushing

Mr. Carey held an unopened newspaper and watched grey waves lap the Brighton shore. He would like to come during the season someday, but lodging was cheaper in the autumn. His sweet Bess skipped up with one hand in Edward’s, the other holding her hat against the chill wind. “There are ices at the pavilion,” she said. “May we?”

He dug into his pocket and slipped a coin into his wife’s hand.

“You haven’t touched your paper,” she said.

“I was thinking.”

“Don’t think too much, dear,” Bess said, and led Edward away. Mr. Carey watched them go. A man, a sailor by his dress, strolled past them. He stood beside Mr. Carey’s bench and stretched his hands to the setting sun as if he would embrace it.

He sat and, without looking at Mr. Carey, spoke.

“What a sight!”

Mr. Carey murmured his agreement.

“Four long years since I last saw it. Four years since I stood on English soil. Funny – now the land of my birth feels alien to me, and I long for the sea. Life is funny, certainly, but its laughter is not of joy or mirth or merriment; it is cold, black laughter, with a cold, black pleasure in irony and bitterness.

“My father was a general, well-decorated, and he wanted the same path for me, but I was content to drive motor-cars at dizzying speeds down country lanes; content to play croquet on broad Windsor lawns that stretched down to the upper Thames; content to roar at the piano and drink fistfuls of delicate concoctions until I was strangled with elating poisons; content to play vingt-et-un, a penny a hand, until my life was fled from me.

“But my compelling passion was the theatre. What I thought was the absurd mundanity of life – I was such a fool then! – evaporated when I entered the sanctuary of the mind, the vault of the phantasmagoric, the crucible of the soul. The farces, the folies, high tragedy, low tragedy, vaudeville, mélédrame, pantomime, opera, operetta, and, my favorite, Grand Guignol. The chains of life, which even the wealthy bear, fall away and the heart takes flight.

“So it is natural that an actress proved my undoing: Spanish, dark hair, dark eyes, beautiful as a dream. I wanted to marry her. My family disapproved; go see your great-uncle, my father said, he has a solution to this problem. I met the old scoundrel at the Savoy for dinner. I woke up on a tramp freighter steaming for Wellington.

“I could not allow a year to pass. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. I jumped ship in the Canaries and tried to buy passage back to England. A one-armed Dutchman offered me a berth and invited me to seal the deal with drink. Fool me twice; shame on me. When my head cleared, I was on a whaling vessel bound for Antarctica.

“My heart shrank at the prospect of two years in the company of the vile Dutchman and his mongrel crew: tattooed Kanakas, swarthy swine of Vanuatu, an ancient Texan who hunted men for their scalps and claimed thirty-six kills, and a first mate who was not only a sodomite but a Frenchman to boot. The Negro cook practiced witchcraft in the scullery, and the ship’s boy caught in a net of horsehair little silver flying fish that he nailed to the mainmast.

“I protested to the captain at my impressment and I was beaten. I paid the first mate to murder the Dutchman; the Frog betrayed me, and I was beaten. I sought to drown myself; they fished me from the ocean with a gaff hook, and I was beaten.

“And I lay every one of these miseries at the foot of my miserable father. With every beating, my hatred grew like a canker on my heart until it was consumed. If only I could get back to England, then he would know suffering!

“I smuggled myself ashore in Argentina, only to fall under the power of a silver-mine slaver.”

“Slavery!” interjected Mr. Carey. “In our day!”

The sailor regarded him shrewdly. His left eye was milky. “Our enlightened day knows horrors greater than slavery, Mr. Carey,” he said.

“And there, the chains of being became literal indeed, and I sweat in the bowels of the Earth for two endless years. Every lash that fell on me was another blow for my father. Finally I broke my task-master’s head with my shackles and made good my escape. I stole a horse and rode north, then slithered in native canoes through a thousand miles of hell before I made Sao Paulo. There I worked as a merchant of women until I could pay my passage.”

“Really!” Mr. Carey said.

“I was benevolent. A boy raised a hand in anger to one of my employees; I slit his belly. No one questions that that was the right thing to do. But – after four years, I stand on Albion’s shore, breath the Brighton air, and – I wait! Finally vengeance is at hand. I have been ground in the gears of the world. My teeth are sharp. Let the blow fall.

“Evil is a matter of realized potential. It festers in every man, and all are forfeit before the one true god – the lord of the scythe!”

The sailor stood. “Looks like they’re selling ices at the pavilion.” He trotted away.

Mr. Carey watched the water. Iceberg thoughts emerged; he forced them under.

Bess approached, and he remembered that he loved her. She gave him an ice.

“This is cherry,” he said. “I prefer vanilla. It doesn’t matter.”

“You still haven’t touched your paper,” she said.

“Fighting in France,” he said. “Six thousand Allies dead, eleven thousand wounded.”

“How terrible,” Bess said.

“Not as bad as last week.”

The End

Feel better now? That’s not what I’m here for. Go to hell. But come back next Thursday for a zombie good time!

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Saw a burqa yesterday.

I would say I saw a woman wearing a burqa yesterday, but that’s not really the point of burqas, is it? Nope, I only saw a burqa, walking around and trying to be a person.

Malaysia is moderately Muslim. The majority of citizens are Muslim, but freedom of religion is guaranteed by law, and the Muslims get along well with the sizable minorities of Christians and Buddhists. The Muslims are fairly modern and progressive - no cloistered women, no stonings. Perhaps half the women wear headscarves.

But the presence of the burqa, which is certainly very rare in this country, reminded me of a passage from Dawkins where he talks about how moderate religion, by its very existence, condones extreme religion. The staff at that cafe were all (judging by their headgear) moderate Muslims, and would not permit themselves to be cloistered - but they didn’t bat an eye at the walking example of chauvinist cruelty - she was just a little more pious or a little more strict in her observance of wifely obedience than they, and good for her. But without the moderate faith, than the extreme would not be able to exist. The only expression of Islam could not be extreme - it would push itself into an irrelevant minority. Islam would not have the ground from which to grow extremists. Not every smoker develops lung cancer! But if no one smoked, there would be much less lung cancer.

Did you know? Marital rape is legal in Malaysia. They tried to outlaw it in 2004, but the influential conservative Islam clergy spoke against it. Better luck at gaining basic human rights despite your religion next time, ladies!

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Sometimes I shout random demands to Joel, and sometimes he is able to satisfy them and avoid electro-penitence. In this case, I demanded some titles for short stories, which I would then write - quick jump-starts for my creaking brain. “Love in the Time of Space Conquest” was one of his suggestions, and the pieces instantly fell into place. It made me feel good to write, and nasty, too. Inexplicably, my favorite markets failed to recognize the story’s Pharos-level brilliance, and so I give it to you, the reader, free of charge.

Love in the Time of Space Conquest
By Jens Rushing

Four hundred gravitic distortion lances fired in unison, twisting the expensive Solaran fleet into useless wreckage – but not before the Solaran admiral released a matter/antimatter seppuku bomb. The resulting mini-singularity swallowed the Solarans, stretching them to infinite lengths – “spaghettification” was the term, Captain Crozier thought, savoring the carnality of it – and the fleet vanished, technically undefeated even in death. Robbed of another victory, Crozier thumped the comconsole in frustration. Then he decided to vent his frustrations on his mistress, who awaited back in his spacious and well decorated quarters.

After a bout of intense, beautifully choreographed lovemaking, wherein both participants reached and then exceeded the human capacity for ecstasy, Crozier and his mistress, Madame Nancy, collapsed next to each other and drew idle lover’s cryptograms in the sweat pooling on each other’s chests. “Sometimes,” Crozier confessed with a sob, for he had a poet’s heart, “I wonder if we ought to be killing each other at all.”

“You mean the Solarans? Of course, darling, they’re barely human.”

“Not just them. Even – other humans. On Earth. Remember before we spread across the galaxy? We thought that by reaching the stars, we would unify humanity once and for all. Instead, we’ve just opened new battlegrounds. The most important resource in the history of humanity. Not salt or oil or fresh water, but new places to kill each other. The Resource Wars, of course, being the height of this absurdity, where the need for oil and the need for battlegrounds reached a synthesis. Chicken-egg situation.”

“If that’s so, my big brassy baldling, why don’t you hand in your stripes? We’ll buy a farm in one of the Jovian suburbs.”

Crozier chewed his lip. “I hate to say it, but I love the thrill of the battle. The thrill of knowing the brightest Solaran minds are trying to guess my thoughts and match them.”

“Is there a way to do that without having to kill people?”

“Not that I know of. There used to be a game called ‘chess’…”

“Related to BloodingChess?” Nancy asked. She loved BloodingChess.

“Possibly some ancient precursor. Perhaps I could rediscover it. Invent a variant of BloodingChess that doesn’t end in scalping.”

“If you don’t scalp, someone else will.”

“And that’s the devil of the thing, Madame Nancy, the whole bloody drama of human history! I’ve been reading books on this, and it’s inescapable. When we finally were able to move past wars for the sake of the God-construct, or wars over the ethnicity-illusion, then geologics forced the Resource Wars on us; then the Solar Diaspora revived the ethnicity-illusion. Though all life is one! Will it ever end?”

“It’s ugly,” Nancy said, “but we must defend ourselves. And the best defense is a good utter annihilation of all who stand against you.”

“Don’t I know it. But – even if we won and wiped out the Solarans utterly, within a generation, we would quarrel amongst ourselves, thermonuclearly speaking, and it’d begin again. No other species does this, you know.”

“Except the Northern Bastard Bear.”

“Except the Northern Bastard Bear,” he allowed. “Maybe, Madame Nancy, if salvation as a race is not attainable, we can achieve it for ourselves.” He studied the infinite ocean of stars beyond the viewport, remote and indifferent, then turned to her, the starlight reflected in his eyes, a fountain of new wisdom welling in his heart. “I will turn in my stripes, we will buy that farm, we will have our happy, healthy vat-children, and settle into humanity’s other age-old pattern: agriculture, reproduction, quiet happiness. Contentment within modest limits.”

“Oh, Captain Crozier!” Nancy trilled, raising her face to his. Their fingers twined, their hearts merged, a new vista of hope opened before them, a future far from the battlenebulae.

At that exact moment, a second Solaran fleet popped out of hyperspace a scant fourteen kilometers behind the Earth flotilla, its gigamasers already spooled up. The lieutenant in command in Crozier’s absence fired a barrage of subspace missiles, but the Solarans masered them out of the timestream before they reached their targets. In the crucial moment, the lieutenant hesitated. “Where the hell is the Captain?” he barked at the ensign. Half a second later, he died in excruciating pain as microwaves pulsed through him, boiling the water molecules in his body, bursting his eyeballs and sloughing his skin off, like a melting wax replica of a human being. The ship glowed red-hot, its electronics fused, every human on board perishing quickly, but not too quickly to experience the most awful agony imaginable, that kind of exquisite suffering that stretches seconds to hours. Crozier and Madame Nancy died on opposite sides of the cabin, their limbs spasming, their faces bereft of any recognizable human emotion.

The Solaran fleet went on to wreak its terrible vengeance against the human outposts on Luna, exploding Earth’s moon with a single fusion pulse, raining continent-sized rocks down on the blue planet below. The resulting shock waves, volcanic activity, and dust clouds would have eventually killed everything on Earth, but the Solarans had no patience after a century and a half of warfare, so they brought their kilometer-long ships into bombardment range and coldly, methodically scoured the planet of all life with fission bombs, tame singularities, and probing viridian beams hotter than the surface of the sun.

As the fleet turned away from the cooling, lifeless rock, the Solaran High Commandant breathed a prayer of regret for the carnage committed against the Northern Bastard Bear. Fortunately, they had a breeding pair back in Chi Centauri, and would one day be able to repopulate Earth with bears after a few millennia of terraforming. The noble beasts would roam free again; they were majestic creatures, and the Solarans admired them more than any other living being.

The End

Yes, pacifism is a nice idea, but difficult in execution, n’est-ce pas? Now the human race is extinct. That’ll learn ‘em. See you next Monday, dear reader, for another exercise in mirthful cruelty.

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Fifty-three days of vacation. Lots of time on trains and buses. It is also a pleasure to read on beaches. I am the first person to have discovered this. Fifty-three days - nine books.

• The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold. One of my favorite authors. Supposed to be her worst book. I am skeptical that she could write anything truly bad, but this, her first foray into fantasy after winning an armload of Hugos with scifi, is supposed to be quite terrible. We’ll see. It’s about a girl who wants to be a wizard, but girls can’t be wizards, but she’ll show those boys! Or something.
• The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber. Whatta writer. His later career may have degenerated into sad pseudo-pornography, but when he was on his game, few had his grace with storytelling, or his sense of humor. A Spectre is Haunting Texas, The Silver Eggheads, Our Lady of Darkness - classics. This one’s about some huge, impersonal alien force that kills billions of people.
• Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Red Mars was as amazing as I expected it to be. Robinson doesn’t write books, he writes visions. He doesn’t write future histories, he creates future realities. His books are primal, vital, sophisticated and wise, in tune with humanity, as you see in his so-real characters and his penetrating insight of personality, history, and psychology. I think I said on this page, or maybe just thought about saying, or maybe just dreamed it, that the really successful scifi writer must be a polymath; Robinson proves that with every book.
• Lovedeath, by Dan Simmons. Stupid name, but I cut it some slack because it’s evidently a translation from some German word that is highly appropriate for this collection of novellas. I’m a fan of Simmons’s work; even if he takes too dang long to get where he’s going (Ilium/Olympos did not need to be 1700 pages long), it’s worth the trip. These stories seem to be in the horror/fantasy genre, and should make nice breaks between the novels.
• The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. The third in the Old Man’s War series. Good military scifi adventure. I’ll read this one first.
• Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett. You know what made me like Pratchett again? Audiobooks. I think they may be the ideal format for ingesting his works. Whoever read The Truth won my heart with his versatile renderings of various accents; he lent the characters extra personality and revived my interest in the series. So, uh, I’ll be reading this one. On paper.
• Ringworld, by Larry Niven. My dad’s a big Niven fan. This is his seminal work. I enjoyed his scifi rendering of Dante’s Inferno (cowritten with Jerry Pournelle).
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. The moon demands independence! Silly moon, you rely on Earth exports!
• Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman. Forever War broke my heart and my brain. Did you hear? Haldeman was just named Grandmaster of the SFWA. Good on him!

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It took me two hours, but I’ve got a helluva lot of content lined up for you guys. Beginning next week, you’ll have an article or story posted automatically here every Monday and Thursday. Some of them are miscellaneous juvenalia, and some are genuinely good gems. I hope you enjoy them. I’m going to bed. Then to Malaysia.

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