Benjamin Rosenbaum is an American science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction writer and computer programmer, whose stories have been finalists for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the BSFA award, and the World Fantasy Award.
Born in New York but raised in Arlington, Virginia, he received degrees in computer science and religious studies from Brown University. He currently lives in Basel, Switzerland with his wife Esther and children Aviva and Noah.
His past software development positions include designing software for the National Science Foundation, designing software for the D.C. city government, and being one of the founders of Digital Addiction (which created the online game Sanctum).
His first professionally published story appeared in 2001. His work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Harper's, Nature, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. It has also appeared on the websites Strange Horizons and Infinite Matrix, and in various year's best anthologies.
Source: Wikipedia
The Ant King and Other Stories is a dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron's zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children's collective goes house hunting.
The Ant King and Other Stories is being released as a Free Download under Creative Commons license on August 5, 2008.
If you'd like to get the book version, The Ant King and Other Stories is available from: Small Beer Press ; your local bookshop ; Powells ; all the usual book shops and web sites, and is distributed to the trade by Consortium.
This book is governed by Creative Commons licenses that permit its unlimited noncommercial redistribution, which means that you're welcome to share it with anyone you think will want to see it. Please see below for the full terms. Please remember to attribute the source—especially the good people at Nature for "Falling." If you do something with the book you think we'd be interested in please email (info@lcrw.net) and tell us. Thanks for reading.
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For Esther:
my beloved
my foundation
and my lucky break
Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
After several months of hard work on himself with the group, Stan was ready to open a shop and sell the thousands of yellow gumballs. He did this because he believed in capitalism, he loved capitalism. He loved the dynamic surge and crash of Amazon’s stock price, he loved the great concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining through a handkerchief, he loved how everything could be tracked and mirrored in numbers. When he closed the store each night he would count the gumballs sold, and he would determine his gross revenue, his operating expenses, his operating margin; he would adjust his balance sheet and learn his debt-to-equity ratio; and after this exercise each night, Stan felt he understood himself and was at peace, and he could go home to his apartment and drink tea and sleep, without shooting himself or thinking about Sheila.
On the night before the IPO of gumballs.com, Sheila came to Stan in a dream. She was standing in a kiddie pool; Stan and his brothers and sisters were running around splashing and screaming; she had managed to insert herself into a Super 8 home movie of Stan’s family, shot in the late seventies. She looked terribly sad.
“Sheila, where are you?” Stan said. “Why did you leave me, why did you become gumballs?”
“The Ant King has me,” Sheila said. “You must rescue me.”
Stan woke up, he shaved, he put on his Armani suit, and drove his Lexus to his appointment with his venture capitalists and investment bankers. But the dream would not leave him. “Ant King?” he asked himself. “What’s this about a goddamn Ant King?”
On the highway, near the swamp, he pulled his Lexus over to the shoulder. The American highway is a self-contained system, Stan thought. Its rest stops have video games, bathrooms, restaurants, and gas stations. There’s no reason ever to leave the interstate highway system, its deadness and perfection and freedom. When you do reach your exit, you always have a slight sense of loss, as when awakening from a dream.
Stan took off his shiny black shoes and argyle socks, cuffed his Armani suit pants above the knees, and waded through the squidgy mud and tall reeds of the swamp. He saw a heron rise, flutter, and soar into the midmorning sky. Ant King, Ant King, he thought.
Miles underground, the Ant King was watching an old episode of Charlie’s Angels on cable.
“Which one do you identify with?” he asked Sheila. “The blonde one, or the pretty brunette one, or the perky, smart brunette one?”
“Stan may come rescue me, you know,” Sheila said.
“I like how you never see Charlie. And how Boswell—is that his name, Boswell?—how he’s kind of a foil and audience for the girls. There’s all this unrealized desire—Boswell desires the girls, but he’s got no chance, and I think they desire Charlie, but Charlie’s invisible.”
Sheila picked at a seam in the orange sofa. “It is possible. He might come rescue me.”
The Ant King blinked and tried to smile reassuringly. “Sure. No, yeah, definitely. I think the two of you are just going through a phase, maybe. You know, it took him a while to deal with, ah, what he’s going through.”
Sheila glared at him. “You are so full of shit!” she said.
The Ant King threw his bag of Doritos at her. “Fine! I was just trying to be nice!” he shouted. “I’m full of shit? I’m full of shit? What about your dorky boyfriend?” He grabbed the remote and changed the channel, showing Stan, sitting in his Lexus with the door open, toweling off his muddy feet. “He’s a lost cause, baby. You want me to respect a guy like that?”
“I hate it here,” said Sheila.
The Ant King smoothed his antennae and took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m sorry about throwing the Doritos. Maybe I overreacted. Okay?”
“I hate you, too,” said Sheila.
“Fine,” said the Ant King, savagely snatching up the remote control and turning back to Charlie’s Angels. “Be that way.”
“Gumballs are more than candy, isn’t that right, Stan?” said Monique, smiling broadly.
Stan nodded. His feet were still wet, inside his argyle socks. “Yes, gumballs have a lot of, ah, a lot greater significance than just candy.”
Monique paused and looked at Stan brightly, waiting for him to go on. Across the table, the three Credit Suisse First Boston underwriters—Emilio Toad, Harry Hornpecker, and Moby Pfister—sat stone-faced and unreacting in their gray double-breasted suits.
Stan tried to remember the gumballs.com business plan. “They have hard shells,” he said. “People, ah, they want challenge . . . the hardness, the gumminess . . . ”
Monique broke in smoothly. Monique, all seven post-gender-reassignment-surgery feet of her; Monique, always dressed to the nines and tens; Monique was a Valley legend for her instincts, her suavity, her rapacious, exemplary greed. Stan had sold Monique on the idea of gumballs.com, and she had invested—found him the right contacts, the right team—and here they were at the Big Day, the Exit Strategy.
“Stan!” she cried joyously, fixing him with a penetrating stare. “Don’t be shy! Tell them about how gumballs are sex! Tell them about our top-gun semiotics professors, tell them about gumballs as a cultural trope! You see,” she said, swooping onto Hornpecker, Pfister & Toad, “you can’t think of this as a candy thing, a food & bev thing, a consumer cyclic thing; no way, José! Think Pokémon. Think World Wide Wrestling. Think Star Wars!”
“Could we get back to the numbers,” said Emilio Toad in a voice that sounded like a cat being liquefied in an industrial-strength mixer. The gray faces of Harry Hornpecker and Moby Pfister twitched in relief.
Later, after the deals were signed and the faxes were faxed, Monique and Stan took a taxi to a cigarillo bar to celebrate.
“What, like, is up with you today?” said Monique, crouched somewhat uncomfortably in the taxicab, her knees almost touching her chin, but exuding her usual sense of style and unflappability.
“Um . . . just IPO jitters?” said Stan hopefully.
“Cut the crap,” said Monique.
“I had a dream about Sheila,” Stan blurted out.
“Oh goddess,” said Monique. “Not this again.”
“It seemed so real,” Stan said. “She said I had to rescue her from the Ant King.”
“Well, you’re not my only weirdo CEO,” Monique said, giving him a manly, sidearm hug, “but I think you’re the weirdest.”
The next morning, nursing a cognac hangover and a throat raw from cigarillo smoke, Stan stood bewildered in front of a two-story building in downtown Palo Alto. It looked a lot like where he worked. There on the signboard were the other companies in his building: Leng Hong Trading; Trusty & Spark, patent attorneys; the Bagel Binge, marketing department; MicroChip Times, editorial. But no gumballs.com, Inc.
“I thought you might be here, sir,” said Pringles, his secretary, appearing at his elbow.
“Huh? Pringles!” said Stan. The day before, Pringles had been dressed in a black T-shirt reading “Your Television Is Already Dead” and twelve earrings, but now she was in a smart ochre business suit, carried a mahogany-colored briefcase, and wore pearls.
“We’ve moved, sir,” she said, leading the way to the limousine.
On the highway to Santa Clara, something occurred to Stan. “Pringles?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“You didn’t use to call me sir—you used to call me Stan.”
“Yes, sir, but we’ve gone public now. SEC regulations.”
“You’re kidding,” said Stan.
Pringles stared out the window.
The Gumballs.com Building was thirty stories of mirrored glass windows with its own exit off Highway 101. A forty-foot cutout of the corporate animated character, Mr. Gumball, towered over Stan, exuding yellow hysteria. Pringles escorted Stan to his office suite on the thirtieth, after giving him a building pass.
“Wow,” said Stan, looking at Pringles across his enormous glass desktop. “Nice work, Pringles.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So what’s my schedule for today?”
“Nothing lined up, sir.”
“Nothing?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh. Could I look at the numbers?”
“I’ll order them from Accounting, sir.”
“Can’t I just ask Bill?”
“Sir, Bill is the CFO of a public company now. He doesn’t have time to look at the numbers.”
“Oh. Shouldn’t I have a staff meeting with the department heads or whatever?”
“Vic is doing that, sir.”
“Vic? Who’s Vic?”
“Vic is our Executive Vice President for Operations, sir.”
“He is?”
“Yes, sir.”
Stan looked at his desk. There were gold pens, a golden tape dispenser, a framed picture of Sheila, and a glass jar full of yellow gumballs. They were the last of the Sheila gumballs.
“Pringles?” Stan said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I don’t have a computer.”
“That’s right, sir.”
There was a pause.
“Anything else, sir?”
“Um, yeah. Pringles, what do you suggest I do today?”
Pringles turned and walked across the expanse of marble floor to a teak closet with a brass doorknob. She opened it and returned with a leather golfing bag, which she leaned against the glass desk.
“Pringles, I don’t golf,” said Stan.
“You need to learn, sir,” said Pringles, and left.
Stan took a gumball from the glass jar and looked at it. He thought about biting into it, chewing it, blowing a bubble. Or at least sucking on it. I really should try one of these sometime, he thought. He looked at Sheila’s picture. He put the gumball in the pocket of his Armani suit jacket.
Then he went to look for Vampire.
“Hi,” said Stan, looking around a corner of a cubicle on the seventeenth floor. “I’m Stan.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said the occupant of the cubicle, not looking away from her monitor.
“No, really, I’m Stan, I’m the CEO here.”
“Yeah, I believe you, so? What do you want, a medal?”
“Well, uh,” Stan said. “So what are you up to?”
“I’m storyboarding the Mr. Gumball Saturday morning cartoon pilot, and I’m past deadline, and I’m paid shit, Mr. CEO.”
“Oh, okay,” said Stan. “I won’t bug you then.”
“Great,” said the cartoon storyboardist.
“Hey, by the way, you don’t know where the sysadmins and stuff are, though, do you?” Stan asked.
“I thought you weren’t going to bug me then.”
After many such adventures, Stan found himself in the third sub-basement of the gumballs.com building, close to despair. It was 8 p.m., and his building pass expired at nine.
Suddenly, faintly, from far off, Stan heard the sound of horrible, ghostly shrieking and rhythmic pounding.
Thank God, Stan thought, heading toward the sound. And indeed, as he got closer, he could tell he was listening to one of Vampire’s thrash goth trance doom CDs.
Stan had feared that, like Pringles, Vampire might suddenly be wearing a suit, but as he emerged into Vampire’s blacklit cavern, he saw that Vampire was wearing knee-length jet-black hair, a black trenchcoat, fingerless studded leather gloves, and giant surgical-steel ear, nose, lip, and tongue piercings, as always. Perhaps he was surrounded by an even larger array of keyboards, monitors, and machines than yesterday, but it was hard to tell.
“Vampire!” Stan shouted over the music. “Am I glad to see you!”
“Hey, man,” said Vampire, lifting a hand in salutation but not looking away from his monitor.
“So, hey, what are you up to?” said Stan, looking for somewhere to sit down. He started to take a broken monitor off a folding metal chair.
“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” Vampire shouted.
“Oops, oops, sorry,” said Stan, backing off.
“No problem,” said Vampire.
“So, ah, you were saying?” Stan said hopefully.
“Lotta new machines coming in,” said Vampire. “What do you know about NetBSD 2.5 routing across multiple DNS servers?”
“Absolutely nothing,” said Stan.
“Okay,” said Vampire, and nodded.
Stan waited a little while, looking around. Finally he spoke again. “Ah, Vampire, ever heard of a, the—this is going to sound silly but—the Ant King?”
“Nope,” said Vampire. “I knew an AntAgonist once, on the Inferno BBS.”
“Oh,” said Stan. “But, um, how would you go about finding out about the Ant King?”
“What search engines have you tried?” asked Vampire.
“Well, none,” said Stan.
“Well, try Google, they’re good.”
“Okay,” said Stan. “Um, Vampire?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t have a computer anymore.”
Vampire turned and looked at Stan. “You poor bastard!” he said, and pointed. “Use that one.”
The Ant King was sound asleep on the sofa, cans of Dr. Pepper littered around him. Sheila got up gingerly, took off her sneakers, and held them in one hand as she crept for the door, clutching a Dorito in the other.
It was a lucky moment. Sheila passed several of the Ant King’s henchmen (who were all bald and stout and wore identical purple fedoras) asleep at their desks, and threaded her way through the dark rooms of the Ant King’s lair to the tunnels at the edge of it. She stopped at the mouth of the biggest tunnel. Far off, she could hear running water.
Something moved in the darkness beyond, a great hulking shape. Sheila moved cautiously forward. With a horrible dry clicking and rustling, the gigantic Black Roach of Death scuttled forward.
With trembling hands, Sheila fed it the Dorito, as she had seen the Ant King do, and reached up to pat its enormous antennae. Then she slid past it into the passageway.
She walked forward, into the darkness. Ten steps; twenty. Nervously she chewed, and blew a bubble. The bubble popped, echoing loudly in the tunnel. Sheila froze. But there was no movement from behind. Carefully she spat the wad of gum into her hand and pressed it into the wall. Then she moved forward. Thirty steps. I can do this, she thought. Forty.
Suddenly Sheila was terribly hungry.
I’ll eat when I get out, she thought grimly.
But that didn’t seem quite right.
She searched her pockets and found another Dorito. She lifted it to her lips and stopped. No. No, not that. Something was troubling her. She let the Dorito fall to the ground.
I didn’t prepare properly for this, she thought. This isn’t the way you escape. You need a plan, you need resources. Anyway, there’s no rush.
She began creeping back down the tunnel.
It’s not so bad here anyway, she thought. I’m all right for now. I’ll escape later. This was just a test run. She stroked the antennae of the Black Roach of Death idly as she passed.
Damn Stan anyway, she thought as she crept back through the dark rooms. Am I supposed to do this all by myself? That guy! Big talker, but no action.
On the TV, some CNN talking head was upset about market valuations. “Ten billion for gumballs? This is the perfect example of market froth! I mean there’s no business model, there are no barriers to entry; only in today’s . . . ”
Sheila switched to MTV and sank into the couch next to the Ant King.
“Hi,” said the Ant King drowsily.
“Hi,” said Sheila.
“Hey, I missed you,” said the Ant King.
“Stick it in your ear,” said Sheila.
“Listen, your ambivalence about me is really getting old, Sheila,” said the Ant King.
“Ambivalence about you? Dream on,” said Sheila. She took a yellow gumball from the dish on the coffee table, popped it in her mouth, and bit down. A crunch, a rush of sweetness, the feeling of her teeth sinking into the gumball’s tough flesh. Sheila smiled and blew a bubble. It popped. She wasn’t hungry anymore. “I hate your guts,” she said.
“Yeah, whatever,” said the Ant King, rolling over and pulling a pillow over his head. “Grow up, Sheila.”
The search on Google.com had returned several bands and music CDs, an episode of the King of the Hill cartoon, the “Lair of the Ant King” slide at the local water park, and several video games in which the Ant King was one of the villains to beat. Stan listened to the CDs in his car, watched the cartoon in a conference room with a video projector, and installed the video games on a receptionist’s computer on the fifth floor and played them at night, hiding from the security guards. He popped down to visit Vampire a lot, and avoided Pringles and his office entirely.
“I’m on level 5,” he said, “and I just can’t get past the Roach.”
“And you’ve still got the magic sword?” said Vampire, not looking up.
“No, I lost that to the Troll.”
“You don’t even have to go to the Troll,” said Vampire, who never played video games but read the video game newsgroups religiously. “You can cross the Dread Bridge instead.”
“I always die on the Dread Bridge when it breaks in two.”
“You’re not running fast enough,” said Vampire. “You’ve got to run as fast as you can, and jump at the last moment.”
“It’s tough,” said Stan.
Vampire shrugged.
“How are things with you?” Stan asked.
“The patch for mod-ssl 1.2.4.2 is totally incompatible with the recommended build sequence for Apache on Solaris. Solaris is such crap.”
“Oh,” said Stan. “Okay.”
“Hey, I got you something,” Vampire said.
“What?” said Stan.
“That,” said Vampire, pointing.
On top of a rack of dusty computers Stan saw a four-foot-long sword in a gilded leather sheath. Its ivory handle depicted a spiral of crawling ants. Stan pulled the sword a little out of its sheath, and an eerie blue light filled the room.
“Cool, huh?” said Vampire. “I got it on eBay.”
Holding his magic sword, Stan left the elevator on the thirtieth floor and cautiously approached his office. He hadn’t been there in a week; he felt like he should check in.
Pringles met him at the door. “This isn’t your office anymore, sir,” she said.
“It’s not?” Stan said. He tried to hold the sword at an inconspicuous angle. Pringles ignored it.
“No, sir. We moved Vic in there.”
“Oh, really? Say, when do I get to meet Vic, anyway?”
“I’m not sure, sir. He’s quite busy these days, with our acquisition of Suriname.”
“We’re acquiring Suriname? Isn’t that a country?”
“Yes, sir. Follow me, please.”
“Um, Pringles,” said Stan, hurrying to catch up. “Am I, ah, still CEO?”
Pringles opened the door of his new office. It was a lot smaller.
“I’ll check with HR, sir,” she said, and left.
That afternoon, as Stan sat at his new, smaller desk, Monique stopped by.
“Hey, hey,” she said, “so here’s where they’ve got you, huh?”
“Monique, what’s going on? Have I been, um, usurped?” It seemed like the wrong word.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it, tiger,” she said, sinking into a leather visitor’s chair, and crossing her legs. “Gumballs is doing great. Vic’s doing a good job, you should be proud.”
“But Monique—I don’t do anything anymore.”
“Oh, stop whining,” Monique said. She rolled her eyes. “God, you make such a big deal out of everything. Cool sword.”
“Thanks,” said Stan glumly.
“Look, you’re a startup-stage guy, not an operations-stage guy. Just enjoy the ride.”
“I guess,” said Stan.
“There you go. Listen, you clearly need cheering up. I’m babysitting my sister’s kid on the weekend, we’re going to the water park. You wanna come?”
“Sure,” said Stan. “Why not?”
Monique came by Stan’s apartment Saturday morning, and Stan came outside, dressed in a blue oxford and chinos and carrying a bathing suit and towel, and his magic sword. Monique was wearing a silver blouse, a blue miniskirt, a silk scarf, and sunglasses. Her sister’s kid had a shaved head, powdered white skin, black lipstick, and kohl, and was wearing combat boots and a wedding dress adorned with black spiders.
“Stan, this is Corpse, my sister’s kid,” Monique said.
“Hi,” said Stan.
Corpse snarled, like a wolf.
“Great, everybody ready?” said Monique.
In the car, Stan said, “So, Corpse, what’s your favorite subject in school?”
“Shop,” said Corpse.
“Aha,” said Stan. “And what do you want to do when you grow up?”
“Bring about the violent overthrow of the current political order,” said Corpse.
“Really? How come?” asked Stan.
Corpse’s eyes rolled back into their sockets, exposing the white.
“Takes after me, don’t you, Corpse?” said Monique happily. Corpse said nothing.
“But, Monique,” said Stan. “You’re a venture capitalist. You are the current political order.”
Monique laughed.
“Corpse,” said Stan, “I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but ah, are you a boy or a girl?”
“You teleological totalitarian!” Corpse shouted. “Your kind will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes!”
“Now, Corpse, be nice,” said Monique. But she was grinning.
Stan stood in line for the water slide in his bathing suit, behind Corpse, who was still wearing the wedding dress. He had left his sword in the locker room. He felt naked without it.
Corpse sat in the mouth of the water slide tunnel, waiting for the “Go” light to turn green. Stan looked over at the slide to his left. It was a boat ride; in a puffy inflatable boat, four stout, bald men in business suits and purple fedoras sat waiting for the green light. Behind them was a Mexican family in bathing suits, waiting with their boat.
That’s funny, Stan thought. He looked closer at the fedoraed men.
In their boat was a glass jar filled with perhaps three hundred yellow gumballs.
The lights turned green; Corpse vanished into the slide and the men in the boat slid into their tunnel. Despite the sign reading One At A Time, Wait For The Green Light, Stan jumped in after Corpse.
Halfway through the twists, turns, and splashing chaos of the tunnel, Stan collided with Corpse. “Hey!” Corpse yelled, and was sucked away again.
Stan was dumped out into a great basin. He went under and came up spluttering, chlorine stinging his nose. Standing unsteadily, he looked over at the end of the boat ride. There was no sign of the men with the fedoras: The water there flowed peacefully.
“Hey!” said Corpse, splashing him. “You’re not supposed to go two at once!”
“I thought you wanted to overthrow the current political order,” said Stan, still watching the boat ride.
“Oh, right, so let’s start with the water park,” Corpse said.
“Why not?” said Stan. The Mexican family, in their boat, emerged from the boat ride. There was no question: The other boat had vanished while in the tunnel.
Monique was standing next to the basin in her polka-dot bikini, yelling into her pink waterproof cell phone. “No, you idiot, I don’t want you profitable! Because we can’t find backers for a profitable company, that’s why! Well find something to spend it on!” She clicked off the cell phone and shook her head. “Some people are so stuck in the Old Economy.”
“Can I borrow that?” Stan asked.
“Okay,” Monique said, handing him the phone. “Don’t lose it.”
“Meet me at the boat ride in five minutes,” Stan said, and, dialing Vampire, hurried off to get his sword.
The light turned green, and the boat containing Monique, Corpse, and Stan, holding his magic sword, slid into the tunnel.
“Did you get in?” shouted Stan into the pink cell phone over the roar of rushing water. The boat surged through the great pipe, spun into a whirlpool, then rushed on.
“Yeah,” said Vampire, over the cell phone. “It wasn’t easy, but I’m in. Actually, after I cracked the session key it wasn’t that bad, they’ve got a continuous telnet session going over a Pac Bell router, so . . . ”
The boat lurched and heaved to the right and a cascade of water flew over them. Stan shouted, “So, did you, you know, open the secret door or whatever?”
“Oh, right,” said Vampire, and typed a command to the water park’s main computer, setting the “Lair of the Ant King” ride into “real” mode.
The rubber boat rushed into a curve. In front of them, a section of wall swung away and the boat flew out of the pipe, into darkness and space, falling between black canyon walls.
“This ride is cool!” said Corpse, as they fell.
When the boat hit the great subterranean river below, it bucked, and Monique and Corpse grabbed onto the handles set into its sides. Stan thought about whether to drop the pink cell phone or the magic sword, and while he thought about it, he flew out of the boat and disappeared into the icy rapids.
“Stan!” Monique yelled.
“Bummer,” said Corpse.
The surging river slowed as it widened, they glided past massive black cliffs, and at last the rubber boat coasted up to a dock, where several stout men in purple fedoras helped Monique and Corpse onto dry land.
The Ant King bowed, and his antennae bobbed. “Well, this is an unexpected pleasure,” he said.
“Cool lair,” said Corpse.
“Why thank you,” said the Ant King. “You both look soaked. We have robes and changing rooms right over here. Care for an espresso?”
“Sure,” said Monique.
“Got hot chocolate?” said Corpse.
“Why yes we do,” said the Ant King.
“Okay, there’s a little yellow bird here,” Stan said.
“You still got the rod?” said Vampire over the pink cell phone.
Stan looked down at the crook of his arm, where he was uncomfortably carrying a rod, an axe, a loaf of bread, and a key. He was still in his bathing suit, dripping wet, and exhausted from wandering the tunnels for hours. The blue glow of his magic sword dimly illuminated the room, including a small yellow bird, which watched him suspiciously.
“Put the rod down,” said Vampire. Stan let it slide out and clatter to the ground.
“Now catch the bird,” Vampire said.
With the pink cell phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder, and his collection of found objects in the crook of his sword arm, Stan edged toward the bird. It looked at him dubiously, and hopped away.
“I can’t seem to get ahold of it,” Stan said.
“All right, forget the bird. It’s only extra points anyway.”
“Extra points!” shouted Stan. “I’m not trying to get extra points, I’m trying to get Sheila!”
“Okay, Okay, keep your hat on,” said Vampire. “Get the rod again and go north.”
While Stan wandered a maze of twisty little passages, leaving found objects and pieces of bread according to Vampire’s instructions, in order to differentiate the rooms from one another and thus navigate the maze, and Corpse and Monique changed into fuzzy purple terry-cloth bathrobes, and Sheila watched Comedy Central and felt inexplicably restless, the Ant King logged onto a network and sent a message, which appeared in the corner of Vampire’s screen.
Think you’re pretty smart, huh? it said.
“Okay,” said Stan, “uh, I’m in the room with the axe again.”
“Hold on,” said Vampire. “Message.” He did some tracking to find out where the message had come from, but no luck: he found a circular trail of impossible addresses.
I know I’m pretty smart, he typed back at it.
Not as smart as you think, the Ant King typed back at him. You think I would leave sendmail running on an open port on my real proxy server? As if I didn’t know about the security hole in that baby.
“Okay, I think I see the way out here,” said Stan. “This is the room with the two pieces of bread—have I gone east from here?”
“Hold on a sec,” muttered Vampire.
“I don’t think I have,” said Stan.
Okay, I’m stumped, typed Vampire. If that’s not your real proxy server, what is it?
It’s my PalmPilot, the Ant King typed back. With a few tweaks to the OS. And you’re hogging a lot of memory on it, so I’d appreciate it if you logged off, Vampy.
Hey, hold on, Vampire typed. Is this AntAgonist?
Used to be. Not anymore, typed the Ant King.
“Hey, I’m out!” Stan said. “It’s opening up into a large cavern. Wow, this is great, Vampire!”
No shit! typed Vampire. How have you been, man?
I’ve been great, but I can’t say the same for you, typed the Ant King. You are rusty as hell. What are you doing selling gumballs for a living anyway?
“Oh, shit,” said Stan. “Oh, shit!”
“What?” said Vampire curtly, typing furiously in the chat window.
“Vampire, it’s the bridge. It’s the Dread Bridge! I always die at the Dread Bridge.”
“I told you, man,” Vampire said absently, as he chatted with the Ant King. “You’ve just gotta run fast enough.”
Cell phone in one hand, sword in the other, Stan began to run. His bare feet slapped against the planks of the Dread Bridge; the bridge swung crazily over the chasm, and he fought for balance. As he neared the middle he threw the sword ahead of him, and it clattered onto the ground beyond the bridge. He stuffed the cell phone into the waistband of his bathing suit, and ran on. Suddenly he heard a snap behind him, and he jumped. The bridge broke beneath his weight, and swung away. Stan flew through the air, but not nearly far enough; he fell, and barely managed to grab the planks of the bridge beneath him. He hung on as the ropes strained; he thought they were going to break, and he screamed in terror. But the ropes held. Stan swung over the dark canyon, clutching the planks.
“Hey, are you okay?” Vampire said.
“Yeah,” Stan panted. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Great,” Vampire said. “Listen, I know this is kind of a bad time, but there’s something we need to talk about.”
“Huh?” said Stan. “What?”
“Well, this is kind of awkward for me, but, you know, I haven’t really been feeling fulfilled professionally here lately . . . ”
“What?” said Stan.
“So, well, I’ve decided to accept another offer of employment, basically.”
“You’re kidding,” said Stan. “From whom?”
“From the Ant King, actually. I’m pretty excited about it; it’s a whole different level of responsibility, and—”
“The Ant King?!” yelled Stan. “The Ant King?!”
“Yeah, actually it turns out I know him from way back and—”
“But, Vampire!” yelled Stan. “Listen, aren’t we in this together?”
“Hey, Stan,” Vampire said. “Let’s not make this hard on ourselves, okay? This is just the career move I think is right for me right now . . . ”
“Vampire, we can give you more responsibility!” Stan could feel the cool air of the endless chasm blowing against his feet. “More stock! Whatever you want!”
“That’s great of you to offer, Stan, really,” said Vampire. “But, you know, it’s getting really corporate here, and that’s just not my scene. I think I’ll be happier in a more entrepreneurial climate.”
“But, Vampire!” Stan shouted, and just then the ropes above him groaned and one snapped, and the planks he was holding onto twisted and spun. Stan was slammed against the wall, and the pink cell phone popped out of his waistband and fell into the darkness. He waited, but he never heard it reach the ground.
Crap, he thought, and began to climb the planks, toward the ledge above.
“Yes!” said the Ant King. “Exactly! Wile E. Coyote is the only figure of any integrity in twentieth-century literature.”
“Totally,” said Corpse.
“Come on,” said Monique. “What about Bugs Bunny?”
“An amateur!” said the Ant King. “A dilettante! No purity of intention!”
“Pinky and the Brain?”
“Losers! Try to take over the world indeed!”
Sheila cleared her throat. “Um, does anyone want some more pretzels?” she asked.
“Are you the one we’re here to rescue?” Corpse asked. Sheila blanched.
“Yeah, she’s the one,” said the Ant King. “So listen—Star Trek or Star Wars? ”
“Oh, please,” said Corpse. “Babylon 5!”
“Excellent choice!” said the Ant King.
“I like Star Wars. Particularly Darth Vader,” said Monique.
“I’ll just go for some more pretzels then,” Sheila said.
“But then he bails on the Dark Side in the end!” the Ant King said. “See? No integrity!”
Cold and angry, clutching his magic sword in both hands, Stan stood before the gigantic Black Roach of Death.
“Come on, big boy,” he yelled. “Make my day! Meet my sword, Roach Motel! You’re gonna check in, but you’re not gonna check—”
With a lazy swipe of its great claws, the roach batted the magic sword out of Stan’s hands. It flew away and clattered into the darkness. Then the roach grabbed Stan around the throat and lifted him high into the air.
“Eek!” Stan screamed in terror.
“He’s a friend of mine,” yelled Sheila, sprinting out of the darkness.
“Sheila!” choked Stan.
“Here, c’mon, boy, put him down, here’s a Dorito,” Sheila said.
Reluctantly the roach dropped Stan, ate a Dorito, allowed itself to be petted, and crawled back into the tunnel.
“Thanks,” croaked Stan, as Sheila helped him up.
Hand in hand, Sheila and Stan made their way through the tunnels leading away from the Ant King’s lair.
“Don’t look back,” Stan kept saying. “Okay? Don’t look back.”
“Okay already,” Sheila said.
Suddenly Sheila stopped.
“What?” said Stan, careful not to look back at her.
“I’m, um, I’m hungry,” said Sheila.
“Me, too,” said Stan. “Let’s go.”
“But listen, we could just sneak back and grab a bite to eat, right? I mean, I ran out here because I heard you were finally coming, but I would’ve packed a sandwich if I’d—”
“Sheila, are you nuts?” said Stan.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Sheila.
Stan felt in his pockets. The left one was empty. The right one had something in it—a gumball. Dry. He pulled it out and squinted at it in the dimness. He remembered putting a gumball into the pocket of his suit jacket, but . . .
“Okay, so I’m going back,” Sheila said.
“Quick, chew this,” Stan said, handing the gumball back to her without looking back.
She chewed the gumball, and they walked onward through the tunnel.
“I never thought I’d say this,” said the Ant King, stirring his espresso nervously. “Sheila will be angry, but—well, how can I put this—”
“Spit it out already,” Monique said.
“Yeah,” Corpse said.
“Corpse, I just—I feel like you really get me, you know?”
“Yeah,” Corpse said softly. “I feel the same way.”
Monique whistled.
“Would you . . . ” The Ant King blushed. “Would you like to stay underground with me forever and help me rule the subterranean depths?”
“Wow, that would be totally awesome!” Corpse said.
“Oh god, your mother’s going to kill me,” Monique said.
“Oh come on, Aunt Monique, don’t turn into a hypocrite on me! You always told me to follow my heart! You always say it’s better to get into trouble than to be bored!”
“I didn’t say you can’t do it,” said Monique. “I just said your mother’s going to kill me.”
“So does that mean I can?” asked Corpse.
“How about if we do this on a trial basis at first,” Monique said. “Okay? And you—” she pointed a menacing finger at the Ant King. “No addictive gumball crap, okay?” His antennae stiffened in surprise. “Yeah, Aunt Monique knows more than you think. You watch your step, buddy.” She turned to Corpse. “You have one month,” she said. “I’ll talk to your mom. Then you come back up and we talk it over.”
“Oh gosh, thank you, Aunt Monique!”
“You have my word,” said the Ant King. “Corpse will enjoy life here thoroughly. And it will be very educational.”
“I bet,” said Monique.
“Hey, can we violently overthrow the current political order?” Corpse asked.
“Sure,” said the Ant King. “That sounds like fun.”
Epilogue
Stan sat across the desk from Lucy the HR person, who smiled at him brightly. “So what are your skills?” she asked.
“I founded this company,” he said.
“We try to be forward-looking here,” she said. “Less progressive organizations are focussed on past accomplishments, but our philosophy is to focus on current skills. What languages can you program in?”
“None,” said Stan. “I can use Microsoft Word, though.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Lucy said. “Anything else?”
“I’m pretty good at financial analysis,” Stan said.
“We are actually overstaffed in Accounting,” Lucy said.
“I could work in Marketing,” Stan said.
Lucy smiled indulgently. “Everyone thinks they know how to do Marketing. What about Customer Service?”
“I think I’ll pass,” said Stan.
“Okay,” Lucy said brightly. “Well, I’ll let you know as soon as something else opens up. Gumballs.com cares about you as an employee. We want you to know that, and we want you to enjoy your indefinite unpaid leave. Can you do that for me, Stan?”
“I’ll try,” said Stan, and he left.
Stan finally met Vic at the company Christmas party in San Francisco. As he expected, Vic was tall, blond, and athletic, with a tennis smile.
“Stan!” Vic said brightly. “Good to finally meet you. And this must be Sheila.”
“Hi!” said Sheila, shaking hands.
“Hi, Vic,” said Stan. “Listen, I . . . ”
“Great dress,” Vic said to Sheila.
“Thanks!” Sheila said. “So what’s running the show like?”
Stan said, “I wanted to . . . ”
“It’s actually quieted down a bunch,” Vic said. “I’m starting to have time for a little golf and skiing.”
Stan said, “I was wondering if we could . . . ”
“Wow!” said Sheila. “Where do you ski?”
“Tahoe,” said Vic.
“Of course,” laughed Sheila.
Stan said, “Maybe if we could take a few minutes . . . ”
“So is your wife here?” Sheila asked.
Vic laughed. “No, I’m afraid I’m single.”
“Wow, are you gay?” Sheila asked.
“About 80–20 straight,” Vic said.
“Hey, me, too!” Sheila said.
Stan said, “It’s about my job here at . . . ”
“But really, I just haven’t found anyone I’ve clicked with since moving to the Bay Area,” Vic said.
“I know what you mean!” Sheila said.
Stan said, “Because I have some ideas about how I could . . . ”
“So where were you before the Bay Area?” Sheila asked.
Later Sheila came up to Stan at the punch bowl.
“Stan, you know, things haven’t been going so great for us lately.”
“Uh huh,” Stan said.
“I want you to know, I really appreciate you rescuing me . . . ”
“Hey, no problem,” Stan said.
“But since then, it just seems like we aren’t going anywhere, you know?”
“Sheila, I love you,” said Stan. “I’d give my life for you. I’ve never found anything in my life that means anything to me, except you.”
“I know, Stan,” she said. “I know. And maybe I’m being a bitch, but you know, that’s kind of hard to live up to. You know? And I’m just not there yet.” She put her arms around him. He stiffened. She let go and sighed. “I just think . . . ”
“Are you going to run off with Vic?” Stan said. “Just give it to me straight.”
Sheila sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I guess I am. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” Stan said.
Stan left the party and walked to the Bay Bridge. He looked down into the black water. He thought about jumping, but he didn’t really feel like dying. He just didn’t feel like being him anymore.
He decided to become a bum and walked to South of Market, where he traded his suit, shoes, and wallet for an army jacket, a woolen cap, torn jeans, sneakers, a shopping cart, three plastic sacks, and a bottle of Night Train in a paper bag. But he wasn’t a good bum. He was too polite to panhandle, he didn’t like the taste of Night Train, and at campfires he felt alienated from the other bums—he didn’t know any of the songs they liked, and they didn’t want to talk about Internet stocks. He was hungry, cold, lonely, tired, and sober when Monique found him.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“Go away, Monique,” he said. “I’m a bum now.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Monique. “And how’s that working out?”
“Lousy,” Stan admitted.
Monique got out of her BMW and squatted down next to where Stan lay. The other bums moved away, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads in disgust.
“I’ve lost everything I love,” Stan said.
“Aren’t you the guy who loved the dramatic surge and crash of Amazon’s stock ticker? The concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining a handkerchief? How everything can be tracked and mirrored in numbers—numbers, the lifeblood of capitalism?”
“Well, yeah,” Stan said.
“Get in the car,” Monique said. “You’re hired.”
Stan got in the car.
I had buried my parents in their gray marble mausoleum at the heart of the city. I had buried my husband in a lead box sunk into the mud of the bottom of the river, where all the riverboatmen lie. And after the war, I had buried my children, all four, in white linen shrouds in the new graveyards plowed into what used to be our farmland: all the land stretching from the river delta to the hills.
I had one granddaughter who survived the war. I saw her sometimes: in a bright pink dress, a sparkling drink in her hand, on the arm of some foreign officer with brocade on his shoulders, at the edge of a marble patio. She never looked back at me—poverty and failure and political disrepute being all, these days, contagious and synonymous.
The young were mostly dead, and the old men had been taken away, they told us, to learn important new things and to come back when they were ready to contribute fully. So it was a city of grandmothers. And it was in a grandmother bar by the waterfront—sipping hot tea with rum and watching over the shoulders of dockworkers playing mah-jongg—that I first heard of the valley of giants.
We all laughed at the idea, except for a chemist with a crooked nose and rouge caked in the creases of her face, who was incensed. “We live in the modern era!” she cried. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”
The traveler stood up from the table. She was bony and rough-skinned and bent like an old crow, with a blue silk scarf and hanks of hair as black as soot. Her eyes were veined with red.
“Nonetheless,” the traveler said, and she walked out.
They were laughing at the chemist as well as at the traveler. To find anyone still proud, anyone who believed in giants or shame, was hilarious. The air of the bar was acrid with triumph. Finding someone even more vulnerable and foolish than we were, after everything had been taken from us—that was a delight.
But I followed the traveler, into the wet streets. The smell of fish oozed from the docks. Here and there were bits of charred debris in the gutters. I caught her at her door.
She invited me in for tea and massage. Her limbs were weathered and ringed, like the branches of trees in the dry country. She smelled like honey that has been kept a while in a dark room, a little fermented. A heady smell.
In the morning, brilliant sunlight scoured the walls and the floor, and the traveler and her pack were gone.
I hurried home. My house had survived the war with all its brown clay walls intact, though the garden and the courtyard were a heap of blackened rubble. My house was empty and cold.
I packed six loaves of flatbread, some olives, a hard cheese, one nice dress, walking clothes, my pills and glasses, a jug of wine, a canteen of water, and a kitchen knife. I sat in the shadow in my living room for a while, looking at the amorphous mass of the blanket I had been crocheting.
That granddaughter: her parents both worked in the vineyards, and when she was a child, she would play in my courtyard in the afternoons. When she scraped her knees bloody on the stones, she refused to cry. She would cry from frustration when the older children could do something that she couldn’t—like tie knots, or catch a chicken. Sitting on my lap, her small body shaking, her small fists striking my back slowly, one and then the other. In the evening she would perch on my courtyard wall, looking toward the vineyards, her eyes burning like candles, searching for the first glimpse of her parents coming home.
I decided not to take the knife. I did not know if I would have trouble at the checkpoints, but sane grandmothers rely on moral authority rather than force: a bitter, weak, futile weapon, but the one we can manage best. I replaced the knife with a harmonica.
Because the traveler had had fresh grapes in a bowl in her room, I started out toward the vineyards. Because there had been red ash caked in the soles of her boots, I passed through the vineyards into the somber dust of the dry country. And because a valley of giants would have to be well hidden, I left the dry country at the foothills of the snowy mountains.
I knew I was right at the checkpoint, because the soldiers who waved me through were pawing through the traveler’s sack, arguing over her silk scarves.
In the wild country of the foothills, I saw the smoke from her campfire, a loose thread of pure white in a sky the color of old linen.
Her eyes were redder than before. Her clothes were muddy, and I knew she had been thrown to the ground by the soldiers. Defending her scarves.
She tore the pack from my hands and opened it like someone ripping a bandage from a scab. She threw my things to the ground: my flatbread, my walking clothes, my canteen, my cheese. I watched her, my hands aching. When she found the harmonica, though, she began to laugh. Gently I took the pack from her hands, and I spread our things on a flat rock, while she stood and laughed with her eyes closed.
Her pallet was soft, and the skin of her back was warm.
She would not tell me what the giants were like. I wondered if they were beasts, or an army, or sages. I thought they might be dangerous—that they might tear apart my old body, eat me up with their sharp teeth. Instead of a mausoleum, an iron box, a white shroud, my grave would be a giant’s intestines. That way my body would be useful. That way, maybe, I would find release, instead of this enduring.
When we came to the pass that led to their valley, it was bitter cold. I wished I’d brought warmer things. The valley was twisting, vast, and wooded. The traveler took my hand to lead me down the trail. “Soon,” she said.
The first giant smiled when he saw us. He had a big, round belly and soft eyes too large for his face, and full lips, and shaggy brown hair like yarn. He was naked, and his stubby penis wobbled as he walked. It was the size of a kitchen stool.
There was a small dark woman sitting on his shoulders, holding on to his yarnlike hair. She was only forty-five or fifty years old, and she wore the ragged remains of a doctor’s uniform: white lab coat, black pants, flats. She peeked at us, and then hid her face in her giant’s hair.
The traveler let go of my hand and ran into the valley, calling out. A lean, red-haired giant woman with heavy breasts came out of a cave and picked her up.
I followed, watching the traveler. The giant tossed her into the air, higher than a steeple or a minaret. And caught her again. Tossed her, and caught her again. My stomach was cold with terror. If she fell from there, she would shatter. She was screaming with laughter. The giant was grinning. They did not look down at me.
I wandered into the valley. The giants looked at me curiously, ate the fruits of the trees, slept by the river. At last I stood by a giant who was sitting against a tree, looking shyly at his hands. His skin was the color of teak. His hair was black and curly. He picked me up and sat me in his lap.
The thing about the giants, is this. The reason no one wants to leave, is this. They hold you. You only need to cry or call, and strong hands as big as kitchen tables pick you up and cradle you. The giants whisper and hum, placing their great soft lips against your belly, your back. They stroke your hair, and their fingers, as big as plates, are so delicate. You fall asleep held in the crook of their arms, or on their shoulders, clinging to their hair. The giant women feed you from their breasts—great sagging breasts as large as horses, with nipples as large as pitchers. The milk is sweet and rich like crème brûlée.
When they hold you to their chests and hum, your curl your old and scarred and aching body against that great expanse of flesh and breathe, just breathe.
We have seen planes. Then there was a missile that snuck into a giant’s cave one night. One giant was sleeping in there, with three little grandmothers on her belly. The missile sought them out, in the tunnels of the cave. The ground roared and shuddered and broke. Smoke poured out of the mouth of the cave. We did not go to see what was left in there.
So they are hunting us. My friend the traveler is restless again. But I will not leave. When the planes pass over, we hide. In a cave, I nestle against my giant’s chest, bury my face in his hairs, as long as mixing spoons, as thick as blankets. I feel my granddaughter’s eyes from far away, searching, searching, hungry.
An orange ruled the world.
It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.
The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men on their tractors wept with joy; the tractors’ motors rumbled hymns of praise.
Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, “Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch.” And the passengers would be silent with awe.
The governor of Florida declared every day a holiday. On summer afternoons the Dalai Lama would come to the grove and sit with the orange, and talk about life.
When the time came for the orange to be picked, none of the migrant workers would do it: they went on strike. The foremen wept. The other oranges swore they would turn sour. But the orange who ruled the world said, “No, my friends; it is time.”
Finally a man from Chicago, with a heart as windy and cold as Lake Michigan in wintertime, was brought in. He put down his briefcase, climbed up on a ladder, and picked the orange. The birds were silent and the clouds had gone away. The orange thanked the man from Chicago.
They say that when the orange went through the national produce processing and distribution system, certain machines turned to gold, truck drivers had epiphanies, aging rural store managers called their estranged lesbian daughters on Wall Street and all was forgiven.
I bought the orange who ruled the world for thirty-nine cents at Safeway three days ago, and for three days he sat in my fruit basket and was my teacher. Today, he told me, “It is time,” and I ate him.
Now we are on our own again.
On my return from Plausfab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, that styles itself “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”) aboard the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know.
Two great blond barbarians bearing the livery of Outermost Thule (an elephant astride an iceberg and a volcano) stood in the hallway outside, armed with sabres and needlethrowers. Politely they asked if they might frisk me, then allowed me in. They ignored the short dagger at my belt—presumably accounting their liege’s skill at arms more than sufficient to equal mine.
I took my place on the embroidered divan. “Good evening,” I said.
The Raja flashed me a white-toothed smile and inclined his head. His consort pulled a wisp of blue veil across her lips, and looked out the porthole.
I took my notebook, pen, and inkwell from my valise, set the inkwell into the port provided in the white pine table set in the wall, and slid aside the strings that bound the notebook. The inkwell lit with a faint blue glow.
The Raja was shuffling through a Wisdom Deck, pausing to look at the incandescent faces of the cards, then up at me. “You are the plausible-fabulist, Benjamin Rosenbaum,” he said at length.
I bowed stiffly. “A pen name, of course,” I said.
“Taken from The Scarlet Pimpernel ?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow curiously.
“My lord is very quick,” I said mildly.
The Raja laughed, indicating the Wisdom Deck with a wave. “He isn’t the most heroic or sympathetic character in that book, however.”
“Indeed not, my lord,” I said with polite restraint. “The name is chosen ironically. As a sort of challenge to myself, if you will. Bearing the name of a notorious anti-Hebraic caricature, I must needs be all the prouder and more subtle in my own literary endeavors.”
“You are a Karaite then?” he asked.
“I am an Israelite, at any rate,” I said. “If not an orthodox follower of my people’s traditional religion of despair.”
The prince’s eyes glittered with interest, so—despite my reservations—I explained my researches into the Rabbinical Heresy that had briefly flourished in Palestine and Babylon at the time of Ashoka, and its lost Talmud.
“Fascinating,” said the Raja. “Do you return now to your family?”
“I am altogether without attachments, my liege,” I said, my face darkening with shame.
Excusing myself, I delved once again into my writing, pausing now and then to let my Wisdom Ants scurry from the inkwell to taste the ink with their antennae, committing it to memory for later editing. At PlausFab-Wisconsin, I had received an assignment—to construct a plausible-fable of a world without zeppelins—and I was trying to imagine some alternative air conveyance for my characters when the Prince spoke again.
“I am an enthusiast for plausible-fables myself,” he said. “I enjoyed your ‘Droplet’ greatly.”
“Thank you, Your Highness.”
“Are you writing such a grand extrapolation now?”
“I am trying my hand at a shadow history,” I said.
The prince laughed gleefully. His consort had nestled herself against the bulkhead and fallen asleep, the blue gauze of her veil obscuring her features. “I adore shadow history,” he said.
“Most shadow history proceeds with the logic of dream, full of odd echoes and distorted resonances of our world,” I said. “I am experimenting with a new form, in which a single point of divergence in history leads to a new causal chain of events, and thus a different present.”
“But the world is a dream,” he said excitedly. “Your idea smacks of Democritan materialism—as if the events of the world were produced purely by linear cause and effect, the simplest of the Five Forms of causality.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“How fanciful!” he cried.
I was about to turn again to my work, but the prince clapped his hands thrice. From his baggage, a birdlike Wisdom Servant unfolded itself and stepped agilely onto the floor. Fully unfolded, it was three cubits tall, with a trapezoidal head and incandescent blue eyes. It took a silver tea service from an alcove in the wall, set the tray on the table between us, and began to pour.
“Wake up, Sarasvati Sitasdottir,” the prince said to his consort, stroking her shoulder. “We are celebrating.”
The servitor placed a steaming teacup before me. I capped my pen and shooed my Ants back into their inkwell, though one crawled stubbornly toward the tea. “What are we celebrating?” I asked.
“You shall come with me to Outermost Thule,” he said. “It is a magical place—all fire and ice, except where it is greensward and sheep. Home once of epic heroes, Rama’s cousins.” His consort took a sleepy sip of her tea. “I have need of a plausible-fabulist. You can write the history of the Thule that might have been, to inspire and quell my restive subjects.”
“Why me, Your Highness? I am hardly a fabulist of great renown. Perhaps I could help you contact someone more suitable—Karen Despair Robinson, say, or Howi Qomr Faukota.”
“Nonsense,” laughed the Raja, “for I have met none of them by chance in an airship compartment.”
“But yet . . . ,” I said, discomfited.
“You speak again like a materialist! This is why the East, once it was awakened, was able to conquer the West—we understand how to read the dream that the world is. Come, no more fuss.”
I lifted my teacup. The stray Wisdom Ant was crawling along its rim; I positioned my forefinger before her, that she might climb onto it.
Just then there was a scuffle at the door, and Prem Ramasson set his teacup down and rose. He said something admonitory in the harsh Nordic tongue of his adopted country, something I imagined to mean “Come now, boys, let the conductor through.” The scuffle ceased, and the Raja slid the door of the compartment open, one hand on the hilt of his sword. There was the sharp hiss of a needlethrower, and he staggered backward, collapsing into the arms of his consort, who cried out.
The thin and angular Wisdom Servant plucked the dart from its master’s neck. “Poison,” it said, its voice a tangle of flutelike harmonics. “The assassin will possess its antidote.”
Sarasvati Sitasdottir began to scream.
It is true that I had not accepted Prem Ramasson’s offer of employment—indeed, that he had not seemed to find it necessary to actually ask. It is true also that I am a man of letters, neither spy nor bodyguard. It is furthermore true that I was unarmed, save for the ceremonial dagger at my belt, which had thus far seen employment only in the slicing of bread, cheese, and tomatoes.
Thus, the fact that I leapt through the doorway, over the fallen bodies of the prince’s bodyguard, and pursued the fleeting form of the assassin down the long and curving corridor cannot be reckoned as a habitual or forthright action. Nor, in truth, was it a considered one. In Śri Grigory Guptanovich Karthaganov’s typology of action and motive, it must be accounted an impulsive-transformative action: the unreflective moment that changes forever the path of events.
Causes buzz around any such moment like bees around a hive, returning with pollen and information, exiting with hunger and ambition. The assassin’s strike was the proximate cause. The prince’s kind manner, his enthusiasm for plausible-fables (and my work in particular), his apparent sympathy for my people, the dark eyes of his consort—all these were inciting causes.
The psychological cause, surely, can be found in this name that I have chosen—“Benjamin Rosenbaum”—the fat and cowardly merchant of The Scarlet Pimpernel who is beaten and raises no hand to defend himself; just as we, deprived of our Temple, found refuge in endless, beautiful elegies of despair, turning our backs on the Rabbis and their dreams of a new beginning. I have always seethed against this passivity. Perhaps, then, I was waiting—my whole life—for such a chance at rash and violent action.
The figure—clothed head to toe in a dull gray that matched the airship’s hull—raced ahead of me down the deserted corridor, and descended through a maintenance hatch set in the floor. I reached it, and paused for breath, thankful my enthusiasm for the favorite sport of my continent—the exalted Lacrosse—had prepared me somewhat for the chase. I did not imagine, though, that I could overpower an armed and trained assassin. Yet, the weave of the world had brought me here—surely to some purpose. How could I do aught but follow?
Beyond the proximate, inciting, and psychological causes, there are the more fundamental causes of an action. These address how the action embeds itself into the weave of the world, like a nettle in cloth. They rely on cosmology and epistemology. If the world is a dream, what caused the dreamer to dream that I chased the assassin? If the world is a lesson, what should this action teach? If the world is a gift, a wild and mindless rush of beauty, riven of logic or purpose—as it sometimes seems—still, seen from above, it must possess its own aesthetic harmony. The spectacle, then, of a ludicrously named practitioner of a half-despised art (bastard child of literature and philosophy), clumsily attempting the role of hero on the middle deck of the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, must surely have some part in the pattern—chord or discord, tragic or comic.
Hesitantly, I poked my head down through the hatch. Beneath, a spiral staircase descended through a workroom cluttered with tools. I could hear the faint hum of engines nearby. There, in the canvas of the outer hull, between the Shaw’s great aluminum ribs, a door to the sky was open.
From a workbench, I took and donned an airman’s vest, supple leather gloves, and a visored mask, to shield me somewhat from the assassin’s needle. I leaned my head out the door.
A brisk wind whipped across the skin of the ship. I took a tether from a nearby anchor and hooked it to my vest. The assassin was untethered. He crawled along a line of handholds and footholds set in the airship’s gently curving surface. Many cubits beyond him, a small and brightly colored glider clung to the Shaw—like a dragonfly splayed upon a watermelon.
It was the first time I had seen a glider put to any utilitarian purpose—espionage rather than sport—and immediately I was seized by the longing to return to my notebook. Gliders! In a world without dirigibles, my heroes could travel in some kind of immense, powered gliders! Of course they would be forced to land whenever winds were unfavorable.
Or would they? I recalled that my purpose was not to repaint our world anew, but to speculate rigorously according to Democritan logic. Each new cause could lead to some wholly new effect, causing in turn some unimagined consequence. Given different economic incentives, then, and with no overriding, higher pattern to dictate the results, who knew what advances a glider-based science of aeronautics might achieve? Exhilarating speculation!
I glanced down, and the sight below wrenched me from my reverie:
The immense panoply of the Great Lakes—
—their dark green wave-wrinkled water—
—the paler green and tawny yellow fingers of land reaching in among them—
—puffs of cloud gamboling in the bulk of air between—
—and beyond, the vault of sky presiding over the Frankish and Athapascan Moeity.
It was a long way down.
“Malkat Ha-Shamayim,” I murmured aloud. “What am I doing?”
“I was wondering that myself,” said a high and glittering timbrel of chords and discords by my ear. It was the recalcitrant, tea-seeking Wisdom Ant, now perched on my shoulder.
“Well,” I said crossly, “do you have any suggestions?”
“My sisters have tasted the neurotoxin coursing through the prince’s blood,” the Ant said. “We do not recognize it. His servant has kept him alive so far, but an antidote is beyond us.” She gestured toward the fleeing villain with one delicate antenna. “The assassin will likely carry an antidote to his venom. If you can place me on his body, I can find it. I will then transmit the recipe to my sisters through the Brahmanic field. Perhaps they can formulate a close analogue in our inkwell.”
“It is a chance,” I agreed. “But the assassin is half-way to his craft.”
“True,” said the Ant pensively.
“I have an idea for getting there,” I said. “But you will have to do the math.”
The tether that bound me to the Shaw was fastened high above us. I crawled upward and away from the glider, to a point the Ant calculated. The handholds ceased, but I improvised with the letters of the airship’s name, raised in decoration from its side.
From the top of an “R,” I leapt into the air—struck with my heels against the resilient canvas—and rebounded, sailing outward, snapping the tether taut.
The Ant took shelter in my collar as the air roared around us. We described a long arc, swinging past the surprised assassin to the brightly colored glider; I was able to seize its aluminum frame.
I hooked my feet onto its seat, and hung there, my heart racing. The glider creaked, but held.
“Disembark,” I panted to the Ant. “When the assassin gains the craft, you can search him.”
“Her,” said the Ant, crawling down my shoulder. “She has removed her mask, and in our passing I was able to observe her striking resemblance to Sarasvati Sitasdottir, the prince’s consort. She is clearly her sister.”
I glanced at the assassin. Her long black hair now whipped in the wind. She was braced against the airship’s hull with one hand and one foot; with the other hand she had drawn her needlethrower.
“That is interesting information,” I said as the Ant crawled off my hand and onto the glider. “Good luck.”
“Good-bye,” said the Ant.
A needle whizzed by my cheek. I released the glider and swung once more into the cerulean sphere.
Once again I passed the killer, covering my face with my leather gloves—a dart glanced off my visor. Once again I swung beyond the door to the maintenance room and toward the hull.
Predictably, however, my momentum was insufficient to attain it. I described a few more dizzying swings of decreasing arc-length until I hung, nauseous, terrified, and gently swaying, at the end of the tether, amidst the sky.
To discourage further needles, I protected the back of my head with my arms, and faced downward. That is when I noticed the pirate ship.
It was sleek and narrow and black, designed for maneuverability. Like the Shaw, it had a battery of sails for fair winds, and propellers in an aft assemblage. But the Shaw traveled in a predictable course and carried a fixed set of coiled tensors, whose millions of microsprings gradually relaxed to produce its motive force. The new craft spouted clouds of white steam; carrying its own generatory, it could rewind its tensor batteries while underway. And, unlike the Shaw, it was armed—a cruel array of arbalest-harpoons was mounted at either side. It carried its sails below, sporting at its top two razor-sharp saw-ridges with which it could gut recalcitrant prey.
All this would have been enough to recognize the craft as a pirate—but it displayed the universal device of pirates as well, that parody of the Yin-Yang: all Yang, declaring allegiance to imbalance. In a yellow circle, two round black dots stared like unblinking demonic eyes; beneath, a black semicircle leered with empty, ravenous bonhomie.
I dared a glance upward in time to see the glider launch from the Shaw’s side. Whoever the mysterious assassin-sister was, whatever her purpose (political symbolism? personal revenge? dynastic ambition? anarchic mania?), she was a fantastic glider pilot. She gained the air with a single, supple back-flip, twirled the glider once, then hung deftly in the sky, considering.
Most people, surely, would have wondered at the meaning of a pirate and an assassin showing up together—what resonance, what symbolism, what hortatory or aesthetic purpose did the world intend thereby? But my mind was still with my thought-experiment.
Imagine there are no causes but mechanical ones—that the world is nothing but a chain of dominoes! Every plausible-fabulist spends long hours teasing apart fictional plots, imagining consequences, conjuring and discarding the antecedents of desired events. We dirty our hands daily with the simplest and grubbiest of the Five Forms. Now I tried to reason thus about life.
Were the pirate and the assassin in league? It seemed unlikely. If the assassin intended to trigger political upheaval and turmoil, pirates surely spoiled the attempt. A death at the hands of pirates while traveling in a foreign land is not the stuff of which revolutions are made. If the intent was merely to kill Ramasson, surely one or the other would suffice.
Yet was I to credit chance, then, with the intrusion of two violent enemies, in the same hour, into my hitherto tranquil existence?
Absurd! Yet the idea had an odd attractiveness. If the world was a blind machine, surely such clumsy coincidences would be common!
The assassin saw the pirate ship: Yet, with an admirable consistency, she seemed resolved to finish what she had started. She came for me.
I drew my dagger from its sheath. Perhaps, at first, I had some wild idea of throwing it, or parrying her needles, though I had the skill for neither.
She advanced to a point some fifteen cubits away; from there, her spring-fired darts had more than enough power to pierce my clothing. I could see her face now: a choleric, wild-eyed homunculus of her phlegmatic sister’s.
The smooth black canvas of the pirate ship was now thirty cubits below me.
The assassin banked her glider’s wings against the wind, hanging like a kite. She let go its aluminum frame with her right hand, and drew her needlethrower.
Summoning all my strength, I struck the tether that held me with my dagger’s blade.
My strength, as it happened, was extremely insufficient. The tether twanged like a harp string, but was otherwise unharmed, and the dagger was knocked from my grasp by the recoil.
The assassin burst out laughing, and covered her eyes. Feeling foolish, I seized the tether in one hand and unhooked it from my vest with the other.
Then I let go.
Since that time, I have on various occasions enumerated to myself, with a mixture of wonder and chagrin, the various ways I might have died. I might have snapped my neck, or, landing on my stomach, folded in a V and broken my spine like a twig. If I had struck one of the craft’s aluminum ribs, I should certainly have shattered bones.
What is chance? Is it best to liken it to the whim of some being of another scale or scope, the dreamer of our dream? Or to regard the world as having an inherent pattern, mirroring itself at every stage and scale?
Or could our world arise, as Democritus held, willy-nilly, of the couplings and patternings of endless dumb particulates?
While hanging from the Shaw, I had decided that the protagonist of my Democritan shadow-history (should I live to write it) would be a man of letters, a dabbler in philosophy like myself, who lived in an advanced society committed to philosophical materialism. I relished the apparent paradox—an intelligent man, in a sophisticated nation, forced to account for all events purely within the rubric of overt mechanical causation!
Yet those who today, complacently, regard the materialist hypothesis as dead—pointing to the Brahmanic field and its Wisdom Creatures, to the predictive successes, from weather to history, of the Theory of Five Causal Forms—forget that the question is, at bottom, axiomatic. The materialist hypothesis—the primacy of Matter over Mind—is undisprovable. What successes might some other science, in another history, have built, upon its bulwark?
So I cannot say—I cannot say!—if it is meaningful or meaningless, the fact that I struck the pirate vessel’s resilient canvas with my legs and buttocks, was flung upward again, to bounce and roll until I fetched up against the wall of the airship’s dorsal razor-weapon. I cannot say if some Preserver spared my life through will, if some Pattern needed me for the skein it wove—or if a patternless and unforetellable Chance spared me all unknowing.
There was a small closed hatchway in the razor-spine nearby whose overhanging ridge provided some protection against my adversary. Bruised and weary, groping inchoately among theories of chance and purpose, I scrambled for it as the boarding gongs and klaxons began.
The Shaw knew it could neither outrun nor outfight the swift and dangerous corsair—it idled above me, awaiting rapine. The brigand’s longboats launched—lean and maneuverable black dirigibles the size of killer whales, with parties of armed sky-bandits clinging to their sides.The glider turned and dove, a blur of gold and crimson and verdant blue disappearing over the pirate zeppelin’s side—abandoning our duel, I imagined, for some redoubt many leagues below us.
Oddly, I was sad to see her go. True, I had known from her only wanton violence; she had almost killed me; I crouched battered, terrified, and nauseous on the summit of a pirate corsair on her account; and the kind Raja, my almost-employer, might be dead. Yet I felt our relations had reached as yet no satisfactory conclusion.
It is said that we fabulists live two lives at once. First we live as others do: seeking to feed and clothe ourselves, earn the respect and affection of our fellows, fly from danger, entertain and satiate ourselves on the things of this world. But then, too, we live a second life, pawing through the moments of the first, even as they happen, like a market-woman of the bazaar sifting trash for treasures. Every agony we endure we also hold up to the light with great excitement, expecting it will be of use; every simple joy we regard with a critical eye, wondering how it could be changed, honed, tightened, to fit inside a fable’s walls.
The hatch was locked. I removed my mask and visor and lay on the canvas, basking in the afternoon sun, hoping my Ants had met success in their apothecary and saved the Prince; watching the pirate longboats sack the unresisting P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw and return laden with valuables and—perhaps—hostages.
I was beginning to wonder if they would ever notice me—if, perhaps, I should signal them—when the cacophony of gongs and klaxons resumed—louder, insistent, angry—and the longboats raced back down to anchor beneath the pirate ship.
Curious, I found a ladder set in the razor-ridge’s metal wall that led to a lookout platform.
A war-city was emerging from a cloudbank some leagues away.
I had never seen any work of man so vast. Fully twelve great dirigible hulls, each dwarfing the Shaw, were bound together in a constellation of outbuildings and propeller assemblies. Near the center, a great plume of white steam rose from a pillar; a Heart-of-the-Sun reactor, where the dull yellow ore called Yama’s-flesh is driven to realize enlightenment through the ministrations of Wisdom-Sadhus.
There was a spyglass set in the railing by my side; I peered through, scanning the features of this new apparition.
Certainly none of the squabbling statelets of my continent could muster such a vessel; and only the Powers—Cathay, Gabon, the Aryan Raj—could afford to fly one so far afield, though the Khmer and Malay might have the capacity to build them.
There is little enough to choose between the meddling Powers, though Gabon makes the most pretense of investing in its colonies and believing in its supposed civilizing mission. This craft, though, was clearly Hindu. Every cubit of its surface was bedecked with a façade of cytoceramic statuary—couples coupling in five thousand erotic poses; theromorphic gods gesturing to soothe or menace; Rama in his chariot; heroes riddled with arrows and fighting on; saints undergoing martyrdom. In one corner, I spotted the Israelite avatar of Vishnu, hanging on his cross between Shiva and Ganesh.
Then I felt rough hands on my shoulders.
Five pirates had emerged from the hatch, cutlasses drawn. Their dress was motley and ragged, their features varied—Sikh, Xhosan, Baltic, Frankish, and Aztec, I surmised. None of us spoke as they led me through the rat’s maze of catwalks and ladders set between the ship’s inner and outer hulls.
I was queasy and light-headed with bruises, hunger, and the aftermath of rash and strenuous action; it seemed odd indeed that the day before, I had been celebrating and debating with the plausible-fabulists gathered at Wisconsin. I recalled that there had been a fancy-dress ball there, with a pirate theme; and the images of yesterday’s festive, well-groomed pirates of fancy interleaved with those of today’s grim and unwashed captors on the long climb down to the bridge.
The bridge was in the gondola that hung beneath the pirate airship’s bulk, forward of the rigging. It was crowded with lean and dangerous men in pantaloons, sarongs, and leather trousers. They consulted paper charts and the liquid, glowing forms swimming in Wisdom Tanks, spoke through bronze tubes set in the walls, barked orders to cabin boys, who raced away across the airship’s webwork of spars.
At the great window that occupied the whole of the forward wall, watching the clouds part as we plunged into them, stood the captain.
I had suspected whose ship this might be upon seeing it; now I was sure. A giant of a man, dressed in buckskin and adorned with feathers, his braided red hair and bristling beard proclaimed him the scion of those who had fled the destruction of Viking Eire to settle on the banks of the Father-of-Waters.
This ship, then, was the Hiawatha MacCool, and this the man who terrorized commerce from the shores of Lake Erie to the border of Texas.
“Chippewa Melko,” I said.
He turned, raising an eyebrow.
“Found him sightseeing on the starboard spine,” one of my captors said.
“Indeed?” said Melko. “Did you fall off the Shaw?”
“I jumped, after a fashion,” I said. “The reason thereof is a tale that strains my own credulity, although I lived it.”
Sadly, this quip was lost on Melko, as he was distracted by some pressing bit of martial business.
We were descending at a precipitous rate; the water of Lake Erie loomed before us, filling the window. Individual whitecaps were discernable upon its surface.
When I glanced away from the window, the bridge had darkenedevery Wisdom Tank was gray and lifeless.
“You there! Spy!” Melko barked. I noted with discomfiture that he addressed me. “Why would they disrupt our communications?”
“What?” I said.
The pirate captain gestured at the muddy tanks. “The Aryan war-city—they’ve disrupted the Brahmanic field with some damned device. They mean to cripple us, I suppose—ships like theirs are dependent on it. Won’t work. But how do they expect to get their hostages back alive if they refuse to parley?”
“Perhaps they mean to board and take them,” I offered.
“We’ll see about that,” he said grimly. “Listen up, boys—we hauled ass to avoid a trap, but the trap found us anyway. But we can outrun this bastard in the high airstreams if we lose all extra weight. Dinky—run and tell Max to drop the steamer. Red, Ali—mark the aft, fore, and starboard harpoons with buoys and let ’em go. Grig, Ngube—same with the spent tensors. Fast!”
He turned to me as his minions scurried to their tasks. “We’re throwing all dead weight over the side. That includes you, unless I’m swiftly convinced otherwise. Who are you?”
“Gabriel Goodman,” I said truthfully, “but better known by my quill-name—Benjamin Rosenbaum.”
“Benjamin Rosenbaum?” the pirate cried. “The great Iowa poet, author of Green Nakedness and Broken Lines? You are a hero of our land, sir! Fear not, I shall—”
“No,” I interrupted crossly. “Not that Benjamin Rosenbaum.”
The pirate reddened, and tapped his teeth, frowning. “Aha, hold then, I have heard of you—the children’s tale scribe, I take it? Legs the Caterpillar? I’ll spare you then, for the sake of my son Timmy, who—”
“No,” I said again, through gritted teeth. “I am an author of plausible-fables, sir, not picture-books.”
“Never read the stuff,” said Melko. There was a great shudder, and the steel bulk of the steam generatory, billowing white clouds, fell past us. It struck the lake, raising a plume of spray that spotted the window with droplets. The forward harpoon assembly followed, trailing a red buoy on a line.
“Right then,” said Melko. “Over you go.”
“You spoke of Aryan hostages,” I said hastily, thinking it wise now to mention the position I seemed to have accepted de facto, if not yet de jure. “Do you by any chance refer to my employer, Prem Ramasson, and his consort?”
Melko spat on the floor, causing a cabin boy to rush forward with a mop. “So you’re one of those quislings who serves Hindoo royalty even as they divide up the land of your fathers, are you?” He advanced toward me menacingly.
“Outer Thule is a minor province of the Raj, sir,” I said. “It is absurd to blame Ramasson for the war in Texas.”
“Ready to rise, sir,” came the cry.
“Rise then!” Melko ordered. “And throw this dog in the brig with its master. If we can’t ransom them, we’ll throw them off at the top.” He glowered at me. “That will give you a nice long while to salve your conscience with making fine distinctions among Hindoos. What do you think he’s doing here in our lands, if not plotting with his brothers to steal more of our gold and helium?”
I was unable to further pursue my political debate with Chippewa Melko, as his henchmen dragged me at once to cramped quarters between the inner and outer hulls. The prince lay on the single bunk, ashen and unmoving. His consort knelt at his side, weeping silently. The Wisdom Servant, deprived of its animating field, had collapsed into a tangle of reedlike protuberances.
My valise was there; I opened it and took out my inkwell. The Wisdom Ants lay within, tiny crumpled blobs of brassy metal. I put the inkwell in my pocket.
“Thank you for trying,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said hoarsely. “Alas, luck has turned against us.”
“All may not be lost,” I said. “An Aryan war-city pursues the pirates, and may yet buy our ransom; although strangely they have damped the Brahmanic field and so cannot hear the pirates’ offer of parley.”
“If they were going to parley, they would have done so by now,” she said dully. “They will burn the pirate from the sky. They do not know we are aboard.”
“Then our bad luck comes in threes.” It is an old rule of thumb, derided as superstition by professional causalists. But they, like all professionals, like to obfuscate their science, rendering it inaccessible to the layman; in truth, the old rule holds a glimmer of the workings of the third form of causality.
“A swift death is no bad luck for me,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said. “Not when he is gone.” She choked a sob, and turned away.
I felt for the Raja’s pulse; his blood was still beneath his amber skin. His face was turned toward the metal bulkhead; droplets of moisture there told of his last breath, not long ago. I wiped them away, and closed his eyes.
We waited, for one doom or another. I could feel the zeppelin rising swiftly; the Hiawatha was unheated, and the air turned cold. The princess did not speak.
My mind turned again to the fable I had been commissioned to write, the materialist shadow history of a world without zeppelins. If by some unlikely chance I should live to finish it, I resolved to do without the extravagant perils, ironic coincidences, sudden bursts of insight, death-defying escapades, and beautiful villainesses that litter our genre and cheapen its high philosophical concerns. Why must every protagonist be doomed, daring, lonely, and overly proud? No, my philosopher-hero would enjoy precisely those goods of which I was deprived—a happy family, a secure situation, a prosperous and powerful nation, a conciliatory nature; above all, an absence of immediate physical peril. Of course, there must be conflict, worry, sorrow—but, I vowed, of a rich and subtle kind!
I wondered how my hero would view the chain of events in which I was embroiled. With derision? With compassion? I loved him, after a fashion, for he was my creation. How would he regard me?
If only the first and simplest form of causality had earned his allegiance, he would not be placated by such easy saws as “Bad things come in threes.” An assassin and a pirate and an uncommunicative war-city, he would ask? All within the space of an hour?
Would he simply accept the absurd and improbable results of living within a blind and random machine? Yet his society could not have advanced far, mired in such fatalism!
Would he not doggedly seek meaning, despite the limitations of his framework?
What if our bad luck were no coincidence at all, he would ask. What if all three misfortunes had a single, linear, proximate cause, intelligible to reason?
“My lady,” I said, “I do not wish to cause you further pain. Yet I find I must speak. I saw the face of the prince’s killer—it was a young woman’s face, in lineament much like your own.”
“Shakuntala!” the princess cried. “My sister! No! It cannot be! She would never do this—” She curled her hands into fists. “No!”
“And yet,” I said gently, “it seems you regard the assertion as not utterly implausible.”
“She is banished,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said. “She has gone over to the Thanes—the Nordic Liberation Army—the anarcho-gynarchist insurgents in our land. It is like her to seek danger and glory. But she would not kill Prem! She loved him before I!”
To that, I could find no response. The Hiawatha shuddered around us—some battle had been joined. We heard shouts and running footsteps.
Sarasvati, the prince, the pirates—any of them would have had a thousand gods to pray to, convenient gods for any occasion. Such solace I could sorely have used. But I was raised a Karaite. We acknowledge only one God, austere and magnificent: the One God of All Things, attended by His angels and His consort, the Queen of Heaven. The only way to speak to Him, we are taught, is in His Holy Temple, and it lies in ruins these two thousand years. In times like these, we are told to meditate on the contrast between His imperturbable magnificence and our own abandoned and abject vulnerability, and to be certain that He watches us with immeasurable compassion, though He will not act. I have never found this much comfort.
Instead, I turned to the prince, curious what in his visage might have inspired the passions of the two sisters.
On the bulkhead just before his lips—where, before, I had wiped away the sign of his last breath—a tracery of condensation stood.
Was this some effluvium issued by the organs of a decaying corpse? I bent, and delicately sniffed—detecting no corruption.
“My lady,” I said, indicating the droplets on the cool metal, “he lives.”
“What?” the princess cried. “But how?”
“A diguanidinium compound produced by certain marine dinoflagellates,” I said, “can induce a deathlike coma, in which the subject breathes but thrice an hour; the heartbeat is similarly undetectable.”
Delicately, she felt his face. “Can he hear us?”
“Perhaps.”
“Why would she do this?”
“The body would be rushed back to Thule, would it not? Perhaps the revolutionaries meant to steal it and revive him as a hostage?”
A tremendous thunderclap shook the Hiawatha MacCool, and I noticed we were listing to one side. There was a commotion in the gangway; then Chippewa Melko entered. Several guards stood behind him.
“Damned tenacious,” he spat. “If they want you so badly, why won’t they parley? We’re still out of range of the war-city itself and its big guns, thank Buddha, Thor, and Darwin. We burned one of their launches, at the cost of many of my men. But the other launch is gaining.”
“Perhaps they don’t know the hostages are aboard?” I asked.
“Then why pursue me this distance? I’m no fool—I know what it costs them to detour that monster. They don’t do it for sport, and I don’t flatter myself I’m worth that much to them. No, it’s you they want. So they can have you—I’ve no more stomach for this chase.” He gestured at the prince with his chin. “Is he dead?”
“No,” I said.
“Doesn’t look well. No matter—come along. I’m putting you all in a launch with a flag of parley on it. Their war-boat will have to stop for you, and that will give us the time we need.”
So it was that we found ourselves in the freezing, cramped bay of a pirate longboat. Three of Melko’s crewmen accompanied us—one at the controls, the other two clinging to the longboat’s sides. Sarasvati and I huddled on the aluminum deck beside the pilot, the prince’s body held between us. All three of Melko’s men had parachutes—they planned to escape as soon as we docked. Our longboat flew the white flag of parley, and—taken from the prince’s luggage—the royal standard of Outermost Thule.
All the others were gazing tensely at our target—the war-city’s fighter launch, which climbed toward us from below. It was almost as big as Melko’s flagship. I alone glanced back out the open doorway as we swung away from the Hiawatha.
So only I saw a brightly colored glider detach itself from the Hiawatha’s side and swoop to follow us.
Why would Shakuntala have lingered with the pirates thus far? Once the rebels’ plan to abduct the prince was foiled by Melko’s arrival, why not simply abandon it and await a fairer chance?
Unless the intent was not to abduct—but to protect.
“My lady,” I said in my halting middle-school Sanskrit, “your sister is here.”
Sarasvati gasped, following my gaze.
“Madam—your husband was aiding the rebels.”
“How dare you?” she hissed in the same tongue, much more fluently.
“It is the only—” I struggled for the Sanskrit word for “hypothesis,” then abandoned the attempt, leaning over to whisper in English. “Why else did the pirates and the war-city arrive together? Consider: the prince’s collusion with the Thanes was discovered by the Aryan Raj. But to try him for treason would provoke great scandal and stir sympathy for the insurgents. Instead, they made sure rumor of a valuable hostage reached Melko. With the prince in the hands of the pirates, his death would simply be a regrettable calamity.”
Her eyes widened. “Those monsters!” she hissed.
“Your sister aimed to save him, but Melko arrived too soon—before news of the prince’s death could discourage his brigandy. My lady, I fear that if we reach that launch, they will discover that the Prince lives. Then some accident will befall us all.”
There were shouts from outside. Melko’s crewmen drew their needlethrowers and fired at the advancing glider.
With a shriek, Sarasvati flung herself upon the pilot, knocking the controls from his hands.
The longboat lurched sickeningly.
I gained my feet, then fell against the prince. I saw a flash of orange and gold—the glider, swooping by us.
I struggled to stand. The pilot drew his cutlass. He seized Sarasvati by the hair and spun her away from the controls.
Just then, one of the men clinging to the outside, pricked by Shakuntala’s needle, fell. His tether caught him, and the floor jerked beneath us.
The pilot staggered back. Sarasvati Sitasdottir punched him in the throat. They stumbled toward the door.
I started forward. The other pirate on the outside fell, untethered, and the longboat lurched again. Unbalanced, our craft drove in a tight circle, listing dangerously.
Sarasvati fought with uncommon ferocity, forcing the pirate toward the open hatch. Fearing they would both tumble through, I seized the controls.
Regrettably, I knew nothing of flying airship-longboats, whose controls, it happens, are of a remarkably poor design.
One would imagine that the principal steering element could be moved in the direction that one wishes the craft to go; instead, just the opposite is the case. Then, too, one would expect these brawny and unrefined air-men to use controls lending themselves to rough usage; instead, it seems an exceedingly fine hand is required.
Thus, rather than steadying the craft, I achieved the opposite.
Not only were Sarasvati and the pilot flung out the cabin door, but I myself was thrown through it, just managing to catch with both hands a metal protuberance in the hatchway’s base. My feet swung freely over the void.
I looked up in time to see the Raja’s limp body come sliding toward me like a missile.
I fear that I hesitated too long in deciding whether to dodge or catch my almost-employer. At the last minute courage won out, and I flung one arm around his chest as he struck me.
This dislodged my grip, and the two of us fell from the airship.
In an extremity of terror, I let go the prince, and clawed wildly at nothing.
I slammed into the body of the pirate who hung, poisoned by Shakuntala’s needle, from the airship’s tether. I slid along him, and finally caught myself at his feet.
As I clung there, shaking miserably, I watched Prem Ramasson tumble through the air, and I cursed myself for having caused the very tragedies I had endeavored to avoid, like a figure in an Athenian tragedy. But such tragedies proceed from some essential flaw in their heroes—some illustrative hubris, some damning vice. Searching my own character and actions, I could find only that I had endeavored to make do, as well as I could, in situations for which I was ill-prepared. Is that not the fate of any of us, confronting life and its vagaries?
Was my tale hen, an absurd and tragic farce? Was its lesson one merely of ignominy and despair?
Or perhaps—as my shadow-protagonist might imagine—there was no tale, no teller—perhaps the dramatic and sensational events I had endured were part of no story at all, but brute and silent facts of Matter.
From above, Shakuntala Sitasdottir dove in her glider. It was folded like a spear, and she swept past the prince in seconds. Nimbly, she flung open the glider’s wings, sweeping up to the falling Raja, and, rolling the glider, took him into her embrace.
Thus encumbered—she must have secured him somehow—she dove again (chasing her sister, I imagine) and disappeared in a bank of cloud.
A flock of brass-colored Wisdom Gulls, arriving from the Aryan war-city, flew around the pirates’ launch. They entered its empty cabin, glanced at me and the poisoned pirate to whom I clung, and departed.
I climbed up the body to sit upon its shoulders, a much more comfortable position. There, clinging to the tether and shivering, I rested.
The Hiawatha MacCool, black smoke guttering from one side of her, climbed higher and higher into the sky, pursued by the Aryan war boat. The sun was setting, limning the clouds with gold and pink and violet. The war-city, terrible and glorious, sailed slowly by, under my feet, its shadow an island of darkness in the sunset’s gold glitter, on the waters of the lake beneath.
Some distance to the east, where the sky was already darkening to a rich cobalt, the Aryan war boat that Melko had struck successfully was bathed in white fire. After a while, the inner hull must have been breached, for the fire went out, extinguished by escaping helium, and the zeppelin plummeted.
Above me, the propeller hummed, driving my launch in the same small circle again and again.
I hoped that I had saved the prince after all. I hoped Shakuntala had saved her sister, and that the three of them would find refuge with the Thanes.
My shadow-protagonist had given me a gift; it was the logic of his world that had led me to discover the war-city’s threat. Did this mean his philosophy was the correct one?
Yet the events that followed were so dramatic and contrived—precisely as if I inhabited a pulp romance. Perhaps he was writing my story, as I wrote his; perhaps, with the comfortable life I had given him, he longed to lose himself in uncomfortable escapades of this sort. In that case, we both of us lived in a world designed, a world of story, full of meaning.
But perhaps I had framed the question wrong. Perhaps the division between Mind and Matter is itself illusory; perhaps Randomness, Pattern, and Plan are all but stories we tell about the inchoate and unknowable world that fills the darkness beyond the thin circle illumed by reason’s light. Perhaps it is foolish to ask if I or the protagonist of my world-without-zeppelins story is the more real. Each of us is flesh, a buzzing swarm of atoms; yet each of us also a tale contained in the pages of the other’s notebook. We are bodies. But we are also the stories we tell about each other. Perhaps not knowing is enough.
Maybe it is not a matter of discovering the correct philosophy. Maybe the desire that burns behind this question is the desire to be real. And which is more real—a clod of dirt unnoticed at your feet, or a hero in a legend?
And maybe behind the desire to be real is simply wanting to be known.
To be held.
The first stars glittered against the fading blue. I was in the bosom of the Queen of Heaven. My fingers and toes were getting numb—soon frostbite would set in. I recited the prayer the ancient heretical Rabbis would say before death, which begins, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One.”
Then I began to climb the tether.
The real estate agent for Pirateland was old. Nasty old. It’s harder to tell with Geezers, but she looked to be somewhere in her Thirties. They don’t have our suppleness of skin, but with the right oils and powders they can avoid most of the wrinkles. This one hadn’t taken much care. There were furrows around her eyes and eyebrows.
She had that Mommystyle thing going on: blue housedress, frilly apron, Betty Crocker white gloves. If you’re going to be running around this part of Montana sporting those gigantic, wobbly breasts and hips, I guess it’s a necessary form of obeisance.
She said something to someone in the back of her van, then hurried up the walk toward us. “It’s a lovely place,” she called. “And a very nice area.”
“Look, Suze, it’s your mom,” Tommy whispered in my ear. His breath tickled. I pushed him.
It was deluxe, I’ll give her that. We were standing under the fity-foot prow of the galleon we’d come to see. All around us a flotilla of men-of-war, sloops, frigates, and cutters rode the manicured lawns and steel-gray streets. Most of the properties were closed up, the lawns pristine. Only a few looked inhabited—lawns bestrewn with gadgets, excavations begun with small bulldozers and abandoned, Pack or Swarm or Family flags flying from the mainmasts. Water cannons menacing passerbsy.
I put my hands in my pants pockets and picked at the lint. “So this is pretty much all Nines?”
The Thirtysomething Lady frowned. “Ma’am, I’m afraid the Anti-Redlining Act of 2035—”
“Uh-huh, race, gender, aetial age, chronological age, stimulative preference or national origin—I know the law. But who else wants to live in Pirateland, right?”
Thirtysomething Lady opened her mouth and didn’t say anything.
“Or can afford it,” Shiri called. She had gone straight for the rope ladder and was halfway up. Her cherry-red sneakers felt over the side for the gunnel running around the house. Thirtysomething Lady’s hands twitched in a kind of helpless half-grasping motion. Geezers always do that when we climb.
“Are you poor?” Tommy asked. “Is that why you dress like that?”
“Quit taunting the Lady,” Max growled. Max is our token Eight, and he takes aetial discrimination more seriously than the rest of us. Plus, he’s just nicer than we are. I don’t think that’s aetial; I think that’s just Max. He’s also Pumped Up: he’s only four feet tall, but he has bioengineered muscles like grapefruit. He has to eat a pound or two of medicated soysteak a day just to keep his bulk on.
Thirtysomething Lady put her hand up to her eyes and blinked ferociously, as if she were going to cry. Now that would be something! They almost never cry. We’d hardly been mean to her at all. I felt sorry for her, so I walked over and put my hand in hers. She flinched and pulled her hand away. So much for cross-aetial understanding and forgiveness.
“Let’s just look at the house,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets.
“Galleon,” she said tightly.
“Galleon then.”
Her fingers twitched out a passkey mudra and the galleon lowered a boarding plank. Nice touch.
Frankly, we were excited. This move was what our Pack needed—the four of us, at least, were sure of it. We were all tired of living in the ghetto—we were in three twentieth-century townhouses in Billings, in an “age-mixed” area full of marauding Thirteens and Fourteens and Fifteens. Talk about a people damned by CDAS—when the virus hit them, it had stuck their pituitaries and thyroids like throttles jammed open. It wasn’t just the giantism and health problems caused by a thirty-year overdose on growth hormones, testosterone, estrogen, and androgen. They suffered more from their social problems—criminality, violence, orgies, jealousy—and their endless self-pity.
Okay, Max liked them. And most of the rest of us had been at least entertained by living in the ghetto. At birthday parties, we could always shock the other Packs with our address. But that was when all eight of us were there, before Katrina and Ogbu went south. With eight of us, we’d felt like a full Pack—invincible, strong enough to laugh at anyone.
I followed the others into the galleon’s foyer. Video game consoles on the walls, swimming pool under a retractable transparent superceramic floor. The ceiling—or upper deck, I guess—was thirty feet up, accessible by rope ladders and swing ropes. A parrot fluttered onto a roost—it looked real, but probably wasn’t. I walked through a couple of bulkheads. Lots of sleeping nooks, lockers, shelves, workstations both flatscreen and retinal-projection. I logged onto one as guest. Plenty of bandwidth. That’s good for me. I may dress like a male twentieth-century stockbroker—double-breasted suit and suspenders—but I’m actually a found footage editor. (Not a lot of Nines are artists—our obsessive problem solving and intense competitiveness make us good market speculators, gamblers, programmers, and biotechs; that’s where we’ve made our money and our reputation. Not many of us have the patience or interest for art.)
I logged out. Max had stripped and dived into the pool—or maybe it was meant as a giant bathtub. Tommy and Shiri were bouncing on the trampoline, making smart-aleck remarks. The real estate agent had given up on getting anyone to listen to her pitch. She was sitting in a floppy gel chair, massaging the sole of one foot with her hands. I walked into the kitchen. Huge table, lots of chairs and sitballs, enormous programmable foodcenter.
I walked out, back to the Lady. “No stove.”
“Stove?” she said, blinking.
I ran one hand down a suspender. “I cook,” I said.
“You cook?”
I felt my jaw and shoulders tense—I’m sick of being told Nines don’t cook—but then I saw her eyes. They were sparkling with delight. Indulgent delight. It reminded me of my own mother, oohing and aahing over brick-hard cookies I’d baked her one winter morning in the slums of Maryland, back when my aetial age was still tied to Nature’s clock. My mother holding up the wedding dress she’d planned to give me away in, its lacy waist brushing my chin. One evening in college, I’d looked up at the dinner table, halfway through a sentence—I was telling her about The Hat on the Cat, my distributed documentary (a firebrand polemic for Under-Five Emancipation; how cybernetics would liberate the Toddlers from lives of dependence)—and saw in her eyes how long ago she’d stopped listening. Saw that I wasn’t Nine to her, but nine. Saw that she wasn’t looking at me, but through me, a long way off—toward another now, another me: a Woman. Big globes of fatty breasts dangling from that other-me’s chest; tall as a doorway, man-crazy, marriageable; a great sexualized monster like herself, a walking womb, a proto-Mommy. She was waiting for that Susan, Woman-Susan, who would never show up.
“I cook,” I said, looking away from the Lady’s eyes. Putting my hands in my pants pockets. I could have used a hug, but Max was underwater and Tommy and Shiri were trying to knock each other off the trampoline. I went outside.
“We could bring in a stove module,” the Lady called.
Outside, a pigeon was poking through the lawn. It was mangy and nervous enough to be real. I stood for a while watching it, then my earring buzzed. I made the Accept mudra.
“Suze?” Travis said.
“Why are you asking, Travis? Who do you think is wearing my earring?”
“Suze, Abby’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“She’s not picking up. Her locator’s off. I can’t find her anywhere.” When Travis was nervous, his voice squeaked. Now he sounded like a mouse caught in a trap.
I looked at the active tattoo readout on my left palm. Travis was home. I made the mudra for Abby. No location listed. “Stay there, Travis. We’re on our way.”
I ran up the plank. Max was dressed again, rubbing his dreadlocks with a towel from the poolside toweltree. Tommy and Shiri were sitting at a table with the Real Estate Lady, looking over paperwork in the tabletop display.
“We’ve got to go. A personal emergency has come up,” I said. Max was at my side instantly.
“Listen, we want this place,” Shiri said.
“Shiri, we all have to talk about it,” I said.
“What’s to talk about?” Tommy said. “It’s awesome.”
“This is the first place we’ve looked at,” I said.
“So?”
The Real Estate Lady was watching us with a guarded expression. I didn’t want to say that Abby was missing. Not in front of her. Not in front of that can-you-really-be-trusted-to-look-after-yourselves-all-on-your-own-without-any-grownups attitude that came off her like a stink. I took my hands out of my pockets and balled them into fists. “You’re being totally stupid!” I said.
“What’s the emergency?” Max said quietly.
“I know what Travis and Abby would say,” Tommy said. “They totally want a place like this. Let’s just get it and we’ll have the rest of the day free.”
“We can go wind gliding,” Shiri said.
“Travis and Abby didn’t even agree to getting a house yet, never mind this house,” I said. I felt Max’s hand on my shoulder.
“That’s because they haven’t seen it,” Tommy said.
“What’s the emergency?” Max said.
“There’s probably been a train wreck and Suze has to make sure she’s the first ghoul at her flatscreen,” Shiri said.
“Screw you,” I said and walked out of the house. I was shaking a little with adrenaline. I got in our clowncar and clicked on the engine. Max hurried out the door behind me. I slid over to the passenger seat and he got in to drive.
“We can pick them up later,” he said. “Or they can take a cab. What’s up?”
I made the Abby mudra and showed him my palm. “Abby’s missing. Travis hasn’t seen her, and she’s not picking up.”
Max pulled out into the street. “She left the house this morning early, with that old black-and-white camera you got her. She was going to shoot some pictures.”
I flipped open the flatscreen in the passenger-side dash and logged in. “That’s no reason for her to turn off her locator. I hope she didn’t stay near the house—a Nine walking around alone in the ghetto, taking photographs—imagine how that looks.”
We hummed and whooshed out of Pirateland, up a ramp onto I-90. “Abby wouldn’t be that dumb,” Max said. But he didn’t sound too sure. Abby’s impetuous, and she’d been melancholy lately. “Police?” he asked, after a moment.
I shot him a sharp look. The police are Geezers—height requirements keep Under Twelves out of their ranks, and the Teens are mostly too uneducated and unruly. I didn’t have any strings to pull with them, and neither did Max. “We wait until we have more data,” I said. “Now shut up and let me work. Head home.”