onthe canadian magazine of the fantastic

|.

John Park
; Marc Brutschy
~ Susan Urbanek Linville
- Kate Riedel
Ken Rand

Jancis M. Andrews ~

nonfiction by
Derryl Murphy
Steve Mohn
art by James Beveridge

FALL 2002 $5.95

www.onspec.ca:
 on spec
acknowledgements
The donors listed below have all given generously in the past year.
We are grateful for their support.

sponsors
Alberta Community Development, Cultural Industries Branch;
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts;
The Canada Council for the Arts;
Advanced Education and Career Development;
and Clear Lake Ltd.

patron
Rick LeBlanc and the Infrastruction Network

supporters
Billie Scott
Roger Moore

behind the scenes support

The continued success of On Spec is possible only because of the generous donation of time
and assistance from wonderful people such as:
Jane Bisbee and Paul Pearson of Alberta Community Development and Alberta
Foundation for the Arts, Don Bassie and the Made in Canada website; Jeff de Boer and
Debbie Puffer; the organizers of Con-Version/CanVention; Candas Jane Dorsey and
Tomothy Anderson of Tesseract Books; Merrill Distad and Randy Reichardt of the
University of Alberta Library, Gordon Snyder and Cesar Guimbatan of Snyder Fine
Arts, Donna McMahon, Robert Runté, Donna Weis, and Edward Willett.

Financial support
provided by The Alberta The Alberta
Foundation for the Arts, Foundation Aloeria
a beneficiary of Alberta for the Arts COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Lotteries. COMMITTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE AND THE ARTS

c*>
Financial support provided — Le Conse pes Arts | THE CANADA CoUNCIL
by The Canada Council DU CANADA | FOR THE ARTS
for the Arts DEPUIS 1957 | SINCE 1957

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the

Publications Assistance Program (PAP), toward our mailing costs.
onspec fall 2002

fiction
Tn PEIN siesce sncertsinesindrmasiaentiainciencetnndents
*Sthetics ,
Beauty to the Beholder... ccc Susan UrbaneR Linville...26
KGB GO UNG sca dccts Saree scceiesaceccrtacsarcectck
DOOLE LADOOLct csnesiedi
seratncbso sacs 40
SOU] "TASter sesscsasncccuvnaremcmtowcinaneateoscentiaies TON PUAN crsssssnscscteecsitetceteat
ests 52
White Gat Sith iss setlist
ltnand cana haceMichael Dewey .oscvcsvocsoscscsevievivseviceseie 62
SURE MAM acess 22 scacscs csareeenonrnmeeceayrs DG Ks VOW isiscasccissvssscstsiscsivenies 74
CHO COLAC BS ists ccesscstestincnetsnctnarnumcnins KOVAW AT COISS oc. cststesestscen
testesiol86
A Gift for Michael Moone)... NCIS M. ANAKEWS .ceccccsesvscsicesesve 92

art
About Our cover artist ics..c cea. sfCMOS BOOT
AGE scissile nctntiosii 21

nonfiction
Editorial: Why pride and
determination keep us from
Wearing CMfOi Nats cacssisscsccctstcnasnascsans
LETTE MUTI scsccticmcncnistncriamnnniaeesD
Prix Aurora: Award vciissessscicdcssiacsscveiseeet Congratulations! ....c.cccccccececen 25
On Film & SF: Personal FX wuss SUEUG MOM tics sscincctecs
Babee cathsete 106

ADOUEOUT COMtTIDUCOMS wits Beast a series tate eto Sel Raes 114

cover ©2002 James Beveridge

www.onspec.ca
onspec fall 2002

Publisher: The Copper Pig Writers’ Society

General Editor: Diane L. Walton
Art Director/Poetry Editor. Barry Hammond

Art Advisor: Gordon Snyder

Production Editor: Jena Snyder

Fiction Editors: Derryl Murphy Holly Phillips Jena Snyder

Diane L. Walton Peter Watts
Executive Assistant: Stacey-Lynn Antonation
Publisher's Assistant: Danica LeBlanc
Cover Artist: James Beveridge
Webmaster: Rick LeBlanc, The Infrastruction Network

On Spec is published quarterly through the volunteer efforts of the Copper Pig Writers’
Society, a nonprofit society. Annual subscriptions are $22.00 in Canada for individuals
and $30.00 for institutions (price includes GST). GST # 123625295. Full subscription
rates on page 5.

Send all mail (letters, submissions, subscription requests or queries, art samples,
advertising rate card, etc.) to On Spec, Box 4727, Edmonton, AB T6E 5G6. Ph: (780)
413-0215. Fax: (780) 413-1538. Email: [email protected].

Please note: we do not read emailed fiction, poetry, or nonfiction submissions. Art-
work and nonfiction are commissioned only. For contributors’ guidelines, payment
schedule, and complete back issue details, see our web page (www.onspec.ca).

No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without consent from the individual
author or artist.

Publication and promotion of this issue have been made possible by financial assis-
tance from Alberta Community Development, Cultural Industries Branch; The Alberta
Foundation for the Arts; The Canada Council for the Arts; the Department of Canadian
Heritage; Alberta Advanced Education and Career Development; and Clear Lake Ltd.

On Spec is a member of the Canadian Magazine Publishers’ Association (CMPA) and

the Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Association (AMPA), and is distributed in Canada by
CMPA and AMPA, and in the United Kingdom by BBR.

Printed in Canada by Capital Colour Press, Edmonton AB

Publications Mail Registration Number 08148 ISSN 0843-476X
Postage Paid at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Email: [email protected]
© 2002 The Copper Pig Writers’ Society
 Here we are, with a secret that, more
often these days, is being shared by other
small magazines. Lean forward and let
me whisper it in your ear...

Editorial:
Why pride and
determination keep us
from wearing tinfoil hats
Derryl Murphy, Fiction Editor

I REMEMBER BEING THERE AT CONTEXT ’89 IN EDMONTON

when the first issue of On Spec premiered, and I remember wondering
how the hell was it going to last. At the time, of course, I was still three
years shy of selling my first story, and aside from my part in running
the convention, I was not at all involved in fandom. I had no idea what
was out there for short fiction aside from the usual larger-circulation
suspects.
Happily, for those people who choose to pay attention, there are
plenty of choices out there. Obviously, because the bigger magazines
(and websites) pay more money, they will more often than not attract
the bigger names. But not always, and of course that does not always
preclude the (perceived) quality to be any better. Each person has his or
her own taste, and that includes editors.
 As editors, all of us here at On Spec wish we could pay more. SFWA,
the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, defines pro rates
as three cents (US) per word, and then has a couple of other rules to
determine whether or not a magazine meets its standards for member-
ship. Now three cents, in my opinion, is very little money. Magazines
back in the pulp days sometimes paid a penny a word, and if you paid
any attention in school or read the odd newspaper, you will know that
inflation can’t even see that rate in its rear-view mirror. And to top it off,
glossy magazines—usually nonfiction, mind—will pay 25 cents, 50 cents,
a buck a word.
Well, we're not Time, or Discover, or Outside, or SCIFI.COM. What we
are is a modest little magazine with one immediate disadvantage (we're
Canadian, with a Canadian dollar), and yet here we are, with a secret
that, more often these days, is being shared by other small magazines.
Lean forward and let me whisper it in your ear:
Not only do we like what we’re doing, we know what we're doing.
Think about it. We’ve been publishing since 1989, and the only time
we changed beat we didn’t miss it, we increased it, from twice a year
to four times, with a brief stop at three. And now here we are, having
reached the phenomenal milestone of our 50th issue. The landscape
out there is littered with the corpses of other magazines, some of them
big and glossy with a lot of money being thrown against the wall. Yeah,
we get some help from kindly angels bearing grants, but that wouldn’t
stop us from eventually stumbling and ending up in a ditch somewhere,
living in a cardboard box and mumbling nonsensical political thoughts
in between swigs of cough syrup (metaphorically speaking, of course).
And yet we don’t; we're still here, still publishing, successfully fending off
the little voices because this is where we’re meant to be.
Knowing what we’re doing largely involves the production of the this
magazine, in which case modesty and a sense of shame at not being able
to take a larger load would preclude Peter and Holly and me from taking
more credit, since getting this thing into your hands so largely rests on
the shoulders of Jena and Diane. But knowing also includes picking the
right stories, and while I don’t doubt that if we actually got together in
person to select them there would be wedgies, noogies, and the occa-
sional finger in the eyeball, we somehow still come up with a magazine
full of excellent stories four times a year.
Actually, the word “somehow” doesn’t really apply. So many writers out
there remember that we are looking for the best, for good quality work
that says something, and they do us the favor of treating us as profession-
ally as we try to treat them. It’s a joy to receive these stories, and it’s a joy

4 onspec fall 2002

to print them for you as well.
That joy gets extended, too, when Gardner Dozois and Ellen Datlow
& Terri Windling put of their Year's Best Science Fiction and Year's Best Fan-
tasy and Horror volumes and we see what notice the authors we publish
are getting. I can’t speak for the other editors, but I always feel a little
paternal (to the point when, at ConDuit in Salt Lake City a year and a
half ago, I introduced Jim Van Pelt and Lee Modesitt as “my boys”), and
of course, paternal pride means it’s time to tell you how well theyve been
doing. Think of this as that form letter from Cousin Carl you always get
at Christmas.
In YBSF, Gardner gave Honorable Mentions to “The Trickster’s Lot” by
Lena DeTar, “The Super Man and the Bugout” by Cory Doctorow, “Clos-
ing Time” by Matthew Johnson, “Green Time” by Steve Mohn, “Swans”
by Vera Nazarian, “Neighbors” by Kate Riedel, and “The Saturn Ring
Blues” by James Van Pelt. Ellen and Terri gave Kate Riedel’s story an
Honorable Mention in their anthology, as well as “Last One” by our very
own Holly Phillips.
Congratulations to all of these writers, to all other writers we’ve chosen
to grace our pages, and to my fellow editors for continuing to not only do
a job, but to do it well. There’s a lot here to give pride. ¢

Can't find ON SPEC in your favorite

bookstore?
Subscribe now and save!
Canada: USA: Overseas:
1 year $22.00 $22.00 US $27.00 US
2 years $36.00 $36.00 US $48.00 US
3 years $48.00 $48.00 US $62.00 US
Institutional
(per year) $30.00 $30.00 US $35.00 US
All prices include GST and shipping and handling!
Send check or money order to ON SPEC, Box 4727, Edmonton,AB T6E 5G6.
To pay byVisa, include your Visa number, expiry date, name as it is printed on
the card, and your signature.
You can also email ([email protected]) phone (780-413-0215) or fax (780-413-
1538) your Visa information to us.
Please indicate whether you want your subscription to start with the current
issue or the next issue (i.e. Fall 2002 or Winter 2002).

onspec fall2002 5
Maggie went away on another job. No
big deal, she told him, just a delivery
escort. She‘d be back by the weekend.
But she wasn't.

Imprint
John Park

RAIN BEATS AGAINST THE WINDOWS. IN THE APARTMENT, THE

sound saws at Keg’s nerves. On the street it will be worse. He will hear
the screams hidden in the rush and spatter, and today he dare not take
a pill to muffle them.
He goes through his checklist one last time. Special ops raincoat. Com-
munications hardware. Countermeasures software cubes. He pauses,
starts to estimate what these have cost him in cash or hours of inven-
tion, shakes his head and goes on to the belt pouch—the essentials, the
bioware gels. Keg looks them over again, closes the pouch, rechecks the
fastening. Then he reconsiders whether he should take the old 9mm
semiauto he keeps in the trunk that serves as a coffee table.
Now he knows he’s stalling. The gun has never been an option, for any
number of reasons; it’s not that kind of vengeance, for one. He closes the
door, locks it and checks the handle once, twice. Goes out into the rain.
He walks quickly, head lowered, trying not to listen. He is not going
to the apartment on 17th, but his thoughts start to drift there. Perhaps
it was pheromones, he thinks bitterly. Then he gives up and lets himself
remember how it started with Maggie.
Keg was late for his mandatory shrink appointment, hurrying down
the corridor. Half ameter from him the exit door opened and someone
strode out into his path. His arms came up to take the collision. Her head
was lowered, giving a glimpse of her dark hair tied back. She couldn’t
have seen him in time, but somehow she reversed direction, and gave
him a brief stare as she slipped between him and the wall and was gone.
He was left with a memory of hard brown eyes and pale, square face, and
an odd tension in his chest where she had not collided with him.
A week later, the illicit shipment of pills he needed for the nightmares
was delivered by a stocky brunette in black who marched into his living
room, handed it over and collected his payment, without once meeting
his eyes. She was turning to leave when Keg found himself saying, “Tagu-
chi. Ten-thirty, Tuesday.”
She stopped, half-turned, still not quite looking at him. “What?”
“You're an army psych-casualty. One of his patients. I have the session
after you.”
She paused. “You were wearing a gray windbreaker, brown cords and
Adidas. A centimeter closer and I’d have broken your neck.”
It sounded almost like a threat, but he said, “Sanctimonious old sod,
isn’t he?”
She was about to go. He’d have to give her a reason to stay, and that last
line wasn’t going to do it. She would leave now.
“Could be worse,” she said. “He listens. He doesn’t tell me what I am
or ask too many stupid questions or expect to fuck me.” She was still half
turned towards the door.
“You've got a good memory,“ Keg said. “You hardly saw me.”
“Part of the job.”
He heard the tension in her voice, and guessed it meant Specials.
Neural mods could be permanent, they said.
“I was just in electronics,” he told her. Sig int.”
“Sounds safe.” Then she looked at him. “Oh—you were in the
swamps.”
“In the blue-helmet brigade. When it all fucked up. When we stood by
and let it.”
“T heard,” she said. “Never saw it. I’m glad I didn’t.”
“It was our motto: Too few, too late, two-faced, here till two tomorrow.” He
shook his head. “I made that up. I’ve got regular sessions there for three
years. Part of my separation agreement. What about you?”
“They plea-bargained me a dishonorable plus Taguchi, as long as I stay
out of the news. How did you get it?”
“I hit a superior—”
“So did I.” She met his eyes then looked away, rubbing her thumb and

John Park 7
fingers together. “Put him in hospital for three months.”
“They wanted to keep it quiet in my case.”
“In mine they had to. Black ops. Everything is quiet all the time. We
don’t exist.”
“Aren’t you a risk to them?” Keg asked. “Don’t you have to watch your
back?”
“As long as I keep Taguchi happy, and stay out of sight, they'll leave me
alone. I’m the worst evidence I’ve got against them, and I’m not look-
ing to become meat for the scandal vultures.” She checked her watch. “I
gotta go...” In the doorway she paused. “Look. There’s a pseudointellec-
tual joint called the Subduction Zone.”
“The Abduction Zone, the Seduction Zone, the Subtraction Zone.
Delete your brains, dignity and your bank account all in one go. Great
place. Haven’t been there for weeks.”
“I’m sometimes there after 1900.”

KEG’s EARLY WHEN HE REACHES THE SUBDUCTION ZONE TO MEET PRINCE, SO HE

has to wait, but he fades into the background pretty well. A pale stocky
man, tending to fat, looking a bit slower than he really is. Maybe even
conspicuously inconspicuous.
Prince, looking like the lead from a 1980s Dracula movie, pushes his
way past the two tiger-faced bouncers in camouflage-striped leather,
through the holodeck cowboys, the pharmo-pushers and cyberspillers.
He orders a mundane beer, sips at it for ten minutes then heads for the
back.
Keg waits a minute and follows. The service door swings open and he
is out in the rancid drizzle. Prince nods to him. “Let’s go, boys and girls,”
he says to no one in particular. “Showtime.”
They head towards the docks. Two blocks later, under a dead street
lamp, they put on their high-priced, hooded raincoats, the chromogens
synch, and they effectively vanish from human eyes.
Prince unzips a pocket in his raincoat and pulls out what looks like
a wide flashlight. They’re in an alley between two warehouses, a block
from the waterfront. The rain has almost stopped, but light overspilling
from the warehouse security floods makes a sickly, underwater dimness.
Prince hunches towards a metal junction box beside a rusted steel door,
and brings the device against it. Sheltered by his body, it shoots out
sparks like tiny spurts of ground amethyst, and a fist-sized disc of metal
drops into Prince’s hand.
He nods to Keg. “Open it up. All the way.”
Keg finds the receptacle for his optic coupler, pulls down his VR

8 onspec fall 2002

glasses and hacks in.
The clean geometries. Primary colors, right-angles and smooth curves.
He’s in familiar territory. Find the node, trace it back, choose the neu-
tralizing virus and shoot it in. On to the next. Through the defense-lines
of pulsing ruby and the ramparts of burning gold, a cool emerald-green
corridor is coming into existence. Keg hits the last button and hears the
metallic click and groan as the door beside them unlocks.
When he pushes up the glasses, Prince nods again. From the way he’s
squinting, Prince is checking the elapsed time on his ocular readout.
“Not bad.”
The door is rusted and stiff, but together they slide it open. Prince
produces a pencil beam and flashes it into the doorway. Just below eye-
level, the size of ahand, a silver skull and cross bones floats in the center,
attached to nothing Keg can see.

THAT FIRST TIME WITH MAGGIE IN THE SUBDUCTION ZONE, THE AWKWARD
conversation stumbled to a halt and finally died. Maggie pushed her
chair back and stood, avoiding his eyes, muttering about an early day
tomorrow, do this again sometime. After a moment, Keg decided to give
up too, and caught up to her at the back door.
It was starting to rain. Keg had spent two hours not talking about
jungles and brown rivers and a rain storm, and the first drops stung his
face like sparks.
And without any warning he was back five years, patrolling by that
river, sweat pooling under his blue helmet and his flak jacket. Beams of
murky sunlight slanted through the trees, mosquitoes dancing in them
like snow on a detuned video screen. As he watched, the beams dimmed
and vanished, and there was a hollow rumble of thunder. The jungle
was being operatic, signalling more than the afternoon downpour. He’d
been here just long enough to glimpse the jungle’s language, and he
sensed that something more than the weather had changed, before he
pinned it down to the river. It was stippled with raindrops, starting to
foam, but there was something else. At the bend upstream, the surface
churned with leaping, struggling, fighting fish, knotted tight about
something the current was going to sweep past him.
Branches bowed down, spilling clammy streams; the leaves shook and
wind roared among them like the sea. He knew what to expect, but not
that it would be a child, or that he would recognize the boy, and he
would bejust the first of Christ knew how many, coming down in ones
and twos all that long drenching guilt-choked afternoon.
We could have stopped it, he thought then and often afterwards. We

John Park 9
practically stood and watched.
He had not heard the screams, but now, whenever it rained, children
screamed in his head.
Thad a platoon and a radio. I could have stopped it.
And just as quickly he was back in the clammy dark, and Maggie was
starting to turn away. He wondered what she had spent the evening not
saying.
It had been hopeless from the first, he thought, a stupid thing to hope
for. Too much to expect from either of them. He fastened his coat. No
point in watching her walk to the corner. Get out of the goddamned rain.
Under a street lamp, a pusher was working the other corner, sur-
rounded by clients. Most of them looked less than ten years old. Probably
lured by the glam more than the hits at first, though the chemistry would
keep them coming back, start them paying. But right now, it was the
charisma, the charm that held them—the black leather and gold chains,
the swagger. The storm-trooper uniform from what looked like the real
world. Rain blew in Keg’s eyes. The betrayer peddling hope. Something
twisted inside him.
He started forward, echoes of unarmed-combat training stirring dimly
in his muscles.
The pusher saw him, stepped clear of his clientele, shook his head
disapprovingly. Keg paused, noted the eyes flicking from side to side, the
short ceramic blade being jabbed towards him. If he was going through
with this he’d better not let himself stop to think.
Feint, grab. Twist. The knife skittered away, but the pusher slipped out
of his grasp.
Keg moved forward again.
He was seized from behind and smashed against the lamppost. He
staggered, and his feet were kicked away.
The pusher’s muscle. Two of them, maybe more coming. He didn’t
think he could get up. He swallowed, gripped his keys between his fin-
gers.
He heard running footsteps.
Maggie sprinted into sight, became a blur, too fast to follow.
Then one of them was face-down, motionless. Another was on his
hands and knees, head lowered, seemingly unable to move. The third
was sitting staring at his arm, and looked to be getting ready to scream.
Keg suddenly realized he’d heard several rapid thuds and a sickly snap-
ping noise.
The kids had vanished.
Maggie came over to him, looking as though she’d jogged an easy

10 onspec fall 2002

couple of kilometers. “Amateurs,” she said, with sudden surprising bit-
terness. “Let’s go. Unless you want to stay and play nursemaid.”
He shook his head, grabbed the lamp post to haul himself upright.
“Thanks,” he mumbled. “That was pretty stupid, of me, wasn’t it?” He
lurched after her.
“It was worse than stupid, but that can wait. What did you think you
were doing? You must have seen that sort of thing often enough. You
weren't trying to impress me were you? I mean it would’ve been impres-
sive, seeing you get your balls smashed in, but not in the usual way.”
Keg didn’t want to think about that. “The kids,” he said. “Him. Talking
to those kids. That fucker...” He retched. “Bastard didn’t even have a
blue helmet.”
*Go home,” Maggie said. “Next time, let’s meet in daylight.”

FROM THE SHADOWS IN THE ALLEY, PRINCE MUTTERS, “DON’T MOVE.” HE RUSTLES
behind Keg, then comes back with a couple of broken chair legs. He
waves one under the skull and crossbones. With a faint tearing sound,
five centimeters of wood fly off and rattle against the wall.
“Monofilament,” mutters Prince. He’s peering at the inside of the
door frame. “Take your arm off just as easy.” He uses the chair leg to
push something on the inside of the frame. With a faint whirr, the skull
and crossbones rises out of sight.
Prince waves the leg in the open space, runs it round the frame and
base of the doorway, then steps through. “They won’t warn us about the
next one. Stay right behind me.” He hands Keg the other piece of wood.
“Use this before you go anywhere you haven’t checked or seen me check.
Especially at eye level and ankle height. Look for pieces of dead rats. Use
the flashlight too—you can get reflections sometimes.”
He goes forward. His pencil beam licks over flaking concrete walls and
a low ceiling, and he moves onto a long ramp leading down.
“Why'd they warn us about the trap at the entrance?” Keg asks in a
tight whisper.
“Not us. Them. Some weapons are more likely to hurt your own side
than the enemy. They usually get abandoned pretty quick.”
“Right.”
Keg makes an effort to think of a better time, near the beginning. No
darkness, no buried fears. No rain.

MAGGIE WAS WAITING NEAR THE MIDDLE OF THE BRIDGE OVER THE ESTUARY. AS HE
reached her she turned and leaned on the rail, looking down. She’d
pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead, where they flashed like

John Park 11
another pair of eyes. The sunlight caught tiny scars in the corners of
her real eyes, where optical implants must have been removed. She was
probably still trying to adapt to doing without them.
The bridge vibrated constantly from the trucks on the autoguide
behind them, maglev trains on the rails below. A steady, high-pitched
roar filled the air and the breeze carried the smell of ozone and lubri-
cating oil. He leaned beside her, then took a coin from his pocket and
flipped it over. Watched it fall, tumbling and glittering, and fall and fall.
After the coin vanished a tiny white splash appeared, and as if that was
her cue, she asked, “Why'd you join up then?”
Picking up the two-day-old conversation, he said, “I don’t know any-
more. But it wasn’t to stand at attention and watch people—kids—being
murdered.” He shook his head and spat. “We might as well have been
selling tickets.”
Beneath them the tide was running. Squinting his sunward eye, he fol-
lowed a harbor-patrol orca as it glided from under the bridge and away,
looking no bigger than a log. It cruised slowly though the shadow of the
bridge, waves jostling and bouncing over it.
For a moment he heard thunder and the sounds of wind and rain in
dense trees. Just for a moment. Then he was back, his short stubby fin-
gers resting easily on the bridge rail.
Beside him, the sun was full in her face, flattening it into a mask. She
had been watching him watch the river.
“I joined up to go,” he said, “’cause it would mean fresh curry right
round the corner, dirt cheap, every day.”
She nodded, slowly, watching his eyes, but didn’t smile. “I could kill
you right here,” she told him, “five different ways, easy. That’s the way I
think now. Always planning, one step ahead. The way | think about every-
one, always.” She turned and leaned on the rail again, facing the shore
and the river mouth. Her shoulder brushed his. “Thought you ought to
know. Most men don’t like it.”
He swallowed and turned to look into her face. After a long slow
breath, he said, “The sun was in your eyes. Shouldn’t you be between
your enemy and the sun?”
She nodded again. “I’m working at telling myself you’re not my
enemy.”
“Right. And I’m trying not to hear children screaming in my sleep, or
when it rains. Whenever it rains.”
“Trouble is,” she said, “the other night, those three goons... I wasn’t
supposed to do that again. Ever.”
There was an emptiness in her voice. Keg tried to tell himself she was

12 onspec fall 2002

over-reacting.
“I can’t hide it from Taguchi, and he'll report it. I’m a security risk:
remember, officially I don’t exist. They'd pull me in for deprogramming.
Have you heard what that’s like? But when I stop seeing Taguchi, I lose
my settlement money. I have to find something else.”
Keg stared sickly into the brown water, his knuckles white on the rail.
She went on. “I know who they worked for, those freelance muscle.
She'll need to replace them.”
Maggie was looking across the water to a low hulk, an island or shoal of
megabarges. When Keg asked, she muttered, and at the time he didn’t
understand what she meant: “Steel.”

SOME OF WHAT KEG LEARNED ABOUT STEEL CAME LATER FROM LISTENING TO
Maggie’s dreams, after she had accepted him enough to sleep beside
him without triggering her attack reflexes. Maggie would moan and start
to murmur, and Keg would hold her and stroke her hair without waking
her, and feel her mutterings start the images in his brain.
Steel was the pale goddess of Maggie’s underworld. Diamond eyes.
Hair like a swathe of optical fiber, skin like the silver wrapping of a qual-
ity videocube. A natural albino, maybe. From Maggie’s nightmares, Keg
began to form a picture of Steel’s ruthlessness—stories of human experi-
ments to develop new biomed merchandise, revenges she’d taken.
Maggie still seemed pretty much on the outside of all that, helping
guard the couriers or watch the payoffs, but she obviously knew at least
as much about Steel as he did, and he could see what the knowledge
was doing to her. He knew he should try to talk her out of it. Sometime.
Sometime soon.
Maggie went away on another job. No big deal, she told him, just a
delivery escort. A new partner, but no risks, relatively speaking. She’d be
back by the weekend.
But she wasn’t. Not by the start of the next week, nor the following
weekend.
Keg tried every address and contact he could think of. He couldn’t
eat. He tried to sleep, and awoke sweating, with a choked scream in his
throat. He paced the streets around her apartment on 28th. When a cop
asked him for ID, all that stopped Keg trying to strangle him was the fear
that he would be in jail when Maggie reappeared.
Finally one morning, the light was on in her window. He counted twice
before he went up: sixth floor, fourth from the corner. When she opened
the door, the eagerness on her face died as if a switch had been turned.
She moaned and turned away. He grabbed at her, realized she might kill

John Park 13
him, and didn’t care.
“Where—? What have—?” He choked on the inadequacy of the words.
“What happened to you?”
“Nothing. I'm all right. Leave me alone.”
“Where were you? The job—”
“It went off. It was okay. Stop it.”
“It’s been a week, and, you—”
She pushed him back, her eyes desperate, and now with a real threat.
“Leave me alone.”
When he left, Keg stumbled in the early sunlight. He couldn’t focus
on anything but a vision of the jungle and the brown river. This time the
river brought Maggie towards him. Her body was limp, her mouth slackly
agape. The rain splashed over her open eyes until the current rolled her
face under water and carried her away.

PRINCE AND KEG REACH THE BOTTOM OF THE RAMP. WATER LAPS AGAINST A DOCK.
Even with the night glasses cranked right up there’s no sign of anything
else.
“You called it?” Prince whispers.
“It’s coming.“ Keg checks the time. “We’re still early.”
At their feet the water hisses and bulges. A dark rounded shape
emerges, lies rocking beside the dock. One of Steel’s submersibles. The
hatch opens. Prince steps onto the deck, grasping the hatch rim to pull
himself up and in. He stops.
“What’s wrong?” Keg whispers.
Prince shakes his head. Slowly he brings out his flashlight, then his
gun, and stands to peer into the hatch.
Something jerks into sight. Prince’s gun fires once, blinding through
the night glasses. Then he’s yanked forward, half into the submersible.
Keg scrabbles over the hull, grabs at the hatch, and swings himself in
head-first. Something like a thick metal rope slides over his face, starts to
tighten around his shoulders. Prince is flailing nearby, his breath coming
in fierce grunts.
Keg claws in a pocket, find what he hopes is the right gel and slaps it
against the ridged surface bruising his chin. The grip loosens, and he
grabs at the ridged metal, follows it as it swells towards the trunk, slaps on
more gel. He gets to what has to be the head, and Prince pushes some-
thing into his hand. The cutter. Keg finds the trigger and jams the wide
end against the metal skull, listens to the cracking and sparking, and
keeps it there after the sounds stop and their attacker is still.
“Save the charge,” Prince rasps. One-handed he slams the hatch shut.

14 onspec fall 2002

Lights come on, and they remove their glasses. Prince opens his coat,
tests his shoulder, winces and puts the coat back on.
They have been attacked by a large metal snake. Keg takes a breath
and tries to will his pulse to slow down. “From the way it waited and then
went for you,” he says, “I guessed it had biocontrol. These gels contain
blockers for bioelectronic synapses. Very specific, very powerful.”
“You said it was all clear.”
Keg shrugs and kicks the snake. “Autonomous. Like guard dogs. They
don’t show on the screen; I can’t stop them.”
“Shit. Great time to find out.” Prince points to the navigation readout.
“We're on our way.”

AFTER A MONTH, KEG MOVED MAGGIE FROM HER APARTMENT ON 28TH AND PUT
her up in a smaller place on 17th. She was too out of it to argue, barely
seemed to notice the change. Then he found he needed more money to
keep her alive.
He spent most of his savings on electronics. He remembered pass-
words, shortcuts, found security-cracking code, adapted it, began to
invent his own. He found he had an instinct for encryption keys, for the
type of countermeasures he was likely to meet.
And gradually he pieced together what had happened on Maggie’s last
job for Steel.
He gleaned information though the Net, or in a far corner of the Sub-
duction Zone, sometimes from the girls with the cybersockets he took
home, after his visit to 17th had been worse than usual.
What he learned had made him understand that he really ought to be
staying clear. By now he’d seen images of those who had crossed Steel:
the synthetic diseases, the testing of interrogation techniques, the exper-
iments in mind-sculpture. Most of that had been a couple of years back.
Now she was quieter. Something had driven her underground.
Eventually he thought to ask about Maggie’s partner on that last job.

“I CAN CUT WIRES AND JUMP FENCES,” THE PRINCE SAID AT THEIR FIRST MEETING IN
the Subduction Zone. “Cut throats if Ihave to. Never been much good
with the computer shit. I need someone for that, for the alarms and the
sensors, the security Als.”
If Prince had convinced himself this was all his own idea, Keg wasn’t
going to disillusion him.
“I do that,” Keg said, bluffing a little, “every week.”
“You good at it?”
“Good enough. Learned it in the military. I can carry a field pack and I

John Park 15
won't get in your way or slow you down much. I've been inside her com-
plex, on the wire, and got out, once already.”
“How you do that?”
“Knew what to look for.” Keg made himself relax, meet the Prince’s
eyes. “Contacts. Still got ’em. Biologicals too. I spent the last couple of
years learning them. Contacts for those, as well.” He took out a couple
of stims, pressed one to his throat, handed the other to Prince. “Try a
sample.”
Prince eyed him then pressed the stim to his neck. After a few moments
he closed his eyes and sighed. “Pretty good.”
“Thought you'd like it.” Keg peeled his own stim away, held his hand
out for Prince’s. “Proprietary,” he explained. “Can’t leave them around
for anyone to find.”
Prince peered at him, then handed it over, nodding slowly. “You been
inside? Crap—all you done is peer through the window and worry about
ju-ju faces spoiling your sleep.” He ordered another round. “Man, we’re
going inside.”

IN THE SUBMERSIBLE, KEG LOOKS AT THE SNAKE'S HEAD. “EYES HERE. THESE THINGS
look like other sense organs. Power socket. But no teeth, not even a taser
output.” He realizes he’s starting to babble, isn’t sure he can stop. “A
once-only effort, a prototype that never got put into production?”
“Could be,” Prince mutters.
“Too hard to control, I wonder. Like you said—more danger to Steel’s
security forces than to intruders?”
“Part of the game with Steel,” Prince says. “Make something. Can’t be
sure if it’s what you want till you try it. Then it turns round and bites you
half the time.” He grinned. “She knows that. Why she’s down here.”
“She got bitten,” Keg says, getting control again.
“Just nipped. One of her pharma projects. Turned out she was an ideal
victim, chemically. Just a touch from her own lab, and she knew she was
on the knife edge, ready for anyone to push her off. Destroyed the stuff,
the recipe, the lab, the staff, all ofit.”
“But not quite all.”
“Well, no, not quite.” Prince stares past Keg, his smile cruel. “I was her
partner—in everything. She shoved me out. Threw me to the sharks.”
“She left you alive,” Keg suggests. “In one piece.”
“Because I was too quick, and now she’s scared. Knows what I might do
to her. And I’m gonna do it now. After I take her files, and her money,
I’m gonna do it.”
“Sounds pretty bad.”

16 onspec fall 2002

 “Oh itis. Oh, man, it’s bad. She’ll hate me even worse and she won't be
able to doa thing about it. This psycho-pharma thing she was cooking up.
Came in two parts. A lock and a key. Tried it on monkeys. Give a monkey
a dose of the lock part and give another one the key. Pheromones, some-
one said, but they weren't sure. Anyway, put the two monkeys together,
and the first one’s in love with the key one. For life. Age doesn’t matter,
sex, hardly even species. Doesn't matter if the other runs away, takes its
food, beats the shit out of it, the monkey’s in love.”
“And Steel?” Keg asks, because the silence would be too prickly.
“That’s the joke. That’s the best part. She’s sensitized. She’s perma-
nently sensitized. All you need is the key.”
“And you've got the key.”
“I’ve got the key. I’ve got the key. I saved a phial from the incinerator.
She’ll beg me, she’ll scream and grovel and she'll hate every minute of
it. She’ll want to kill me, and there won’t be a thing she can do to hurt
me.”
The submersible bumps against something and stops. The hatch
opens.
Prince goes to the ladder. “Security. You’ve got everything shut down
over here?”
“Everything I could find.”
“Have to do. Let’s go.”
Another ramp, leading up, under a dim concrete ceiling, with normal
lighting this time. Security cameras scan across it, their output redirected
to a dead file. At the top is a narrow door, locked. Keg verifies that it’s not
part of the main security perimeter, finds its control circuit and overrides
it. The door slides up. Prince thrusts his wooden stick into the doorway,
and splinters fly.
He grins. “What'd I say? No more warnings.” He reaches into a pocket.
“Trouble with monofilament, it’s mostly carbon. And carbon burns.”
The device he holds produces a brush of blue flame the length of his
thumb. Carefully, he sweeps it in a spiral outwards from the center of the
doorway, producing a web of white sparks. “The stuff’s pretty harmless
if it’s not under tension, unless you breathe a chunk of it. But might as
well make certain.”
Another door. Clear.
A short corridor, and one more door.
A guard on the other side of it.
He and Prince must have eyeballed each other for an instant. But all
Keg remembers is Prince’s strike, twist and throw. And his only thought
afterwards is: yes, that was how Maggie would have done it. And she

John Park 17
would have been just that fraction of a beat faster.
Prince takes a deep breath and grins. “We’re here.” He strips back the
access panel to the ventilation system for Steel’s suite. “Ready when you
are.”
Keg nods and pulls out the atomizer. Screws it into the air intake. His
urge to babble has eased.
“How long?” Prince asks. “Ten minutes to get them all well-rested?”
Keg nods. “Ten should do it.” He sits on the floor.
While he waits, he lets himself replay the last time he went over to 17th
to see Maggie.
“Can I come in?” he asked in the doorway, keys in his hand.
“You pay the rent,” she muttered.
At least she admitted recognizing him.
Her hair was still mostly dark, straggling over her shoulders. She was in
black, as usual, jeans and T-shirt. When she closed the door behind him,
he was surprised once again at how small she was, how thin.
Pizza and soyburger wrappers spilled from the waste bin. Keg did a
rough count and compared it to the number of days since his last visit.
“You should eat more,” he mumbled. “Get outside now and then.” She
was almost close enough to touch. If he took a step, reached out...
“Yeah.” She shrugged and turned away.
The computer was wrecked again. Shards of glass from the monitor
and handfuls of black innards were strewn over the splintering hard-
wood floor.
The attack dummy beside the window looked as though it wouldn’t last
much longer either.
And there were pictures all over the walls again, even the window. Not
a hint of Keg’s presence, any of his time with Maggie. Just Prince’s pic-
tures—slashed and crumpled, then painfully smoothed out and pasted
back together. How many hours...?
Keg loaded the refrigerator, emptied the garbage bin.
Maggie sat on the floor, staring at one of the database headshots, a
full-face portrait, it looked like from Keg’s angle. She had a roll of mask-
ing tape in one hand, but seemed to have forgotten what she was going
to do with it.
It had been a mistake to come. It was always a mistake.
“What would you do if you found him, eh? Maggie? What would you
do?”
She gave Keg a look of need and hatred that made him swallow and
look away.
Maggie got up and took the portrait to the attack dummy. She taped it

18 onspec fall 2002

carefully over the dummy’s face, stepped back and launched a swivel kick
at it. Hit the shoulder. At her second attempt she missed and sprawled.
“Help me up,” she cried at Keg. “Get back here and help me up.”
And he did. He watched her throat-jab the dummy, and slap it over
both ears, then throw both arms around it and weep.
Then he left.
Two hours later, Keg visited Darko, who had a specialized factory in a
large basement room with a converted swimming pool.
The air over the pool smelled like the river below the chemical plant.
Condensation beaded the rivets of the braces supporting the tank. A
couple of flickering fluorescents sent scales of light across the surface.
Keg leaned forward and peered into the brown water, could see noth-
ing but his own blurry reflection, elongating and shrinking.
Water slopped in the tank, seeming about to calm but never quite set-
tling into stillness.
“What’s in there?” His whisper seemed to ring off the damp brick base-
ment walls.
“Just my synthesizer. Filling your order.”
The water swirled.
Keg couldn’t see more than a small dark shape. But then the lapping
of the water caught his ear. It was not random now; its clucks and hisses
were forming thin piping syllables, muffled words...
He turned to Darko, who held up a hand, concentrating.
The water stilled, its sounds an empty muttering once more.
“What'd it say?” Keg asked hoarsely.
Frowning, Darko pointed back to the tank. Keg turned and saw some-
thing breaking the surface.
Its face was small, elfin, innocent.
When he had wrenched his gaze away from its eyes, he saw what it was
holding out to him in one delicate hand. Stiffly he knelt and reached out
and took the gels and the aerosol.
“What she said, man, was make sure you use it all within three weeks
because that’s all it’s good for, and you’re not getting any more.”

KEG GETS READY TO POP THE DOOR. HE PAUSES, HIS FACE A COUPLE OF CENTIMETERS
from the metal, moistens his lips. “You’re sure this key of yours will
work?” he asks Prince.
“You think I haven't tried it? Little bodyguard on the last job, while
Steel thought she was still easing me out. We spent a week after the job,
me and the guard, and she was begging me. For a week. Man, I know it
works!”

John Park 19
 Keg lowers his head, then swallows and turns back towards Prince.
Prince is pulling out a gas mask.
Brusquely Keg waves it away, thrusts a gel into Prince’s hand, puts one
on his own tongue.
“These are better,” he mutters. “Antidote.” He waits until Prince has
swallowed, then opens the door. There is a faint scent of lilacs. Keg
silently counts to twenty.
Prince is still outside. He leans against the wall, shaking his head.
“What’s wrong here?” he mumbles.
“The gel,” Keg says, stumbling into his prepared speech. “There’s a
hypnogenic component. You should remember that. You explained it to
Maggie, while you were telling her about Steel. It had to be tailored to
your biochemistry, but looks like we got it right. I needed a partial DNA
sample, but that was easy. Remember the stim I leaned you the first time
we met?”
Prince nods, staring, unable to speak.
Keg uses his old command voice. “So now I want you to go into that
room where Steel is sleeping. Take this gel with you and place it on her
throat. Wait two minutes. Then kiss your bride, just the way you intended.
You will have her key and she will have yours. Don’t let any alarms sound
for three hours. Understand? Understand? Now do it.”
Zombie-like, Prince walks into the room.
As he makes his way out, Keg pictures Darko’s pool, and the childlike
face that had whispered from the brown water and offered him gifts, like
a tentative blessing.

IN THE APARTMENT ON 17TH, THE TV NEWS-ANCHOR DESCRIBES WHAT SEEMS TO BE

an aborted suicide pact that left a couple crippled and bleeding on the
freeway exit above the waterfront. Both parties are in hospital, expected
to recover.
Keg switches it off, closes his eyes and exhales slowly. Then he fits
another chip into the shell of Maggie’s computer. He frowns and tests
a circuit, reaches for the next chip. Maggie comes and sits beside him,
chewing a slice of pizza, then just sitting in silence as he works. After a few
minutes, she gets up and attacks the dummy again. Keg pauses to watch
her as she moves across the window, from silhouette to half-highlight and
back, limbs pistoning. The sound of her blows fills the room like a giant,
trapped heartbeat. Outside, it is raining, but the dead are quiet.
END

20 onspec fall 2002

 About our cover artist

James Beveridge
JIM BEVERIDGE IS A TRANSPLANTED EASTERNER FROM WINDSOR,
Ontario. However, he’s been causing visual chaos in Edmonton long
enough to consider himself a citizen of the Prairies. Last summer he
exchanged freelancing in ink, brush and airbrush for pixellating the
net with online-game design for pixelStorm Inc. He’s still designing
covers for SF publications such as On Spec and the SFWA Bulletin. This
year he was the surprised recipient of the 2002 Aurora Award for Artistic
Achievement. He will endeavor to continue being worthy of that honor.
This guy’s a lifelong SF/F fan, although not quite to the rabid state, t’is
a fine line he’s perhaps yet to cross. In high school he dreamed of doing
covers for mainstream novels. Hopefully he will eventually do some, how-
ever until then he’s enjoying what he still considers his first love, bring-
ing other possible realties and futures to life.
His website is http://members.shaw.ca/jimbeveridge
Look for a feature on Jim’s work in our Winter 2002 issue!
!am the dominant eye and feel
| have a certain responsibility to
take charge...

‘Sthetics
Marc Brutschy

I AM AN EYE.
The prosthetic right eye, to be specific, of Mr. Carlos Santiago. The left
eye is also prosthetic, and is senior to me by three months, but I am the
dominant eye and feel I have a certain responsibility to take charge. The
left eye disagrees.
Mr. Santiago suffered for over two years from a progressive eye disease
before deciding to undergo surgery last August. That he has adjusted so
well to his new prosthetic eyes, I think, is a credit to my understanding of
the human mind and its frailties. The left eye feels it is due some credit
as well, but I think it’s just being egotistical.
After all, the left eye has barely enough processing power to enable
sentience, while I have ten times that much. I admit that it was a fluke
that dominant eyes like myself were manufactured with such advanced
capability, but prosthetics were in high demand last year and process-
ing power was cheap. I just don’t know why the left eye can’t accept this
simple fact.
Lately, the left eye has tried to form a stronger alliance with the pros-
thetic left hand that Mr. Santiago acquired after his skiing accident.
Frankly, I don’t see the point of it. The left hand is merely a device, with
hardly any processing power at all. They say that between the two of
them, they have the majority vote, but I don’t take this seriously.
These thoughts have taken six thousand clock cycles, during which I
recorded an image and passed it along to the optic nerve as usual. Mr.
Santiago has been walking across campus, and as he rounds the corner of
Boden Hall a new image comes in that demands my immediate attention.
Mr. Santiago’s girlfriend Tia is standing on the walkway directly ahead,
but she doesn’t notice him because she is busy kissing Derek from her
zoology class.
I know instinctively that Mr. Santiago will be very upset by this image.
Several million clock cycles pass while I struggle to decide whether to
send the image to the brain. In the end, I hesitate so long that a new
image comes in, and it is too late.
The left eye objects immediately, saying that I have no right to censor
what Carlos is allowed to see. The left eye always calls him “Carlos.” It
does this just to irritate me because it knows I think this is too familiar
and inappropriate, especially for a subordinate eye. We argue for several
billion clock cycles, and more images are lost. In the end, though, it
doesn’t matter, because I control access to the optic nerve, and I have
decided to block any images I believe will upset Mr. Santiago.
This turns out to be quite a few images, and Mr. Santiago has to stop
walking because his vision has gone completely black. For a moment
he rubs his eyes, and even I can’t see what is happening. Then a female
voice calls out his name, and when Mr. Santiago looks up blindly, I can
see that Tia is staring at him in shock. Derek is walking rapidly away, and
as soon as he’s out of view I’m able to send an image to the brain.
Mr. Santiago sees Tia walking over to him, but she speaks before he
can. The conversation is relayed to me by the auditory nerve.
“Carlos, I’m so sorry,” she says. “Please don’t blame Derek. He only
kissed me because I said I was in love with him.”
Why is she confessing? She will ruin everything. I don’t know if her
brain has been augmented by prosthetics, but if so, they must have con-
siderably less processing power than I do.
“Derek? You're in love with Derek?”
She holds her hand to her mouth. “I should have told you sooner, but
I didn’t want to hurt you.”
There is a new signal from the brain for tears to well up in Mr. Santiago’s
eyes, but I ignore it, as it would be an embarrassing display of weakness.
Instead, I boost the contrast so that Tia’s features appear craggy and aes-
thetically displeasing, hoping that this will lessen the distress of losing her
as a girlfriend.
Mr. Santiago is turning away now, heading aimlessly down the walkway.

Marc Brutschy 23
I suspect he is quite dejected, and the hypothalamus confirms this. It is
clear enough that Mr. Santiago needs a new love interest, and I start scan-
ning ahead. As he approaches the edge of campus, I find her—tall, with
long reddish-blonde hair, and extremely attractive.
I use a soft focus on her, like they do in the magazines, and wash out
the peripherals. Then I reduce the contrast and apply an edge effect to
give her a subtle aura. The result is simply stunning, and it can’t fail to
catch Mr. Santiago’s full attention.
It does, and his head turns immediately, tracking her as she walks across
the street toward him. He is still staring at her a moment later as he steps
off the curb and into the street, but it isn’t until he hears the sound of tires
screeching that his head turns back again, and by then it is too late.
The car is only a few feet away when the first frames start to come in,
and I frantically send them down the optic nerve, but the brain is much
too slow to react. For an agonizing eight trillion clock cycles I watch
the impending impact, and then there is a flash of blue sky as we are
catapulted overhead, followed by a glimpse of onrushing asphalt—

I REGAIN FOCUS SLOWLY.

The hospital room is stark and empty, and there are no flowers. I know
Mr. Santiago must find the surroundings depressing, and I try to use soft
focus to help make the room seem more aesthetically pleasing but there
is something wrong. I have no control. I query the brain, but a new and
unfamiliar presence responds.
There has been surgery!
Mr. Santiago’s occipital lobe was damaged in the accident and had to
be replaced by a prosthetic equivalent. The new occipital lobe tells me
this, and when I probe further, I am shocked to find that it has eighty
times as much processing power as I do. I send a query about my inability
to change focus, and the response is almost unbelievable.
The new occipital lobe has taken over all of my higher functions—
eyelid movement, pupil diameter, focusing, and even control of the tear
ducts. I object strongly, but it points out that, compared to it, 1am merely
a device. This statement seems unnecessarily hurtful, but when I com-
plain, there is no response. I have been cut off.
Worse yet, it soon becomes clear that the occipital lobe cares nothing
for visual aesthetics, and is content to let Mr. Santiago view our bland,
tedious world exactly as it is. Now there is nothing left for me to do but
stare relentlessly, unblinkingly ahead like some cheap plastic camera
lens. It’s so unfair.
I can’t even cry. ¢

24 onspec fall 2002

 2002 Prix Aurora Awards
Winners are listed in bold. For full details, see www.sentex.net/~dmullin/aurora/

Best Lonc-Form Work IN ENGLISH Best Work IN FRENCH (OTHER)

In the Company of Others, Julie E. Czerneda Solaris, Joél Champetier, réd.
Ascending, James Alan Gardner L’Année 1998 de la science-fiction et du
Teeth, Edo van Belkom fantastique québécois, Claude Janelle et Jean
Maelstrom, Peter Watts Pettigrew
The Chronoliths, Robert Charles Wilson Dissection par un résurrectionniste du XIXe
siécle fantastique en Amérique francaise, Mario
Best Lone-Form Work IN FRENCH
Rendace
Les Transfigurés du Centaure, Jean-Louis
«Les Bibliothéques imaginaires», Mario Tessier
Trudel
Ithuriel, Michéle Laframboise Arristic ACHIEVEMENT
Le Messager des orages, Laurent McAllister James Beveridge
Le Pouvoir d‘Emeraude, Danielle Simard Lar deSouza
Jean-Pierre Normand
Best SHort-Form Work IN ENGLISH
Scott Patri
“Left Foot on a Blind Man,” Julie E.Czerneda
Martin Springett
“Waking the Dead,” Robert H. Beer
Larry Stewart
“Equations,” Mary E.Choo
Ronn Sutton
“After the Internet,” Mark A. Rayner
“By Her Hand, She Draws You Down,” Fan ACHIEVEMENT (FANZINE)
Douglas Smith Voyageur, Karen Bennett & Sharon Lowachee,
“The Red Bird,” Douglas Smith eds. (USS Hudson Bay / IDIC)
“The Deed of Snigli,”
Marcie Tentchoff BCSFAzine, Garth Spencer, ed. (BC SF Assoc.)
Made in Canada Newsletter, Don Bassie, ed.
Best Short-Form Work in French
Opuntia, Dale Speirs, ed.
«Souvenirs de lumiére», Daniel Sernine
OSFS Statement, Paul Valcour, ed. (July-
«Klé», Natasha Beaulieu
December) (Ottawa SF Society)
«Huit harmoniques de Lumiére»,
Joéi
Champetier Fan ACHIEVEMENT (ORGANIZATIONAL)
«Bientdt sur votre écran», Eric Gauthier Peter Johnson (USS Hudson Bay/ IDIC)
«L’Enfant des Mondes Assoupis», Yves Paul Carreau (KAG Kanada)
Meynard (Solaris 139) Cathy Palmer-Lister (ConCept 2001)
«La Parade du Hoyl», Douglas Smith Bernard Reischl (MonSFFA &
www.monsffa.com)
Best Work In ENGLISH (OTHER)
Yvonne Penney (SF Pubnites in Toronto)
“Underwater Nightmare,” Isaac Szpindel
(Rescue Heroes Cycle Il ) Fan ACHIEVEMENT (OTHER)
Call of Cthulhu: Unseen Masters, Bruce Ballon Alex von Thorn, fan writing
Charles de Lint,”Books to Look For” Janet Hetherington (Cinema Scarité) [film
Wild Things Live There: The Best of Northern reviews]
Frights, Don Hutchison,
ed. Lloyd Penney, fan writing
On Spec (The Copper Pig Writers’ Society) Larry Stewart, entertainer
Nancy Kilpatrick, for editing (World Fantasy Jason Taniguchi (one-man SF parody shows)
Convention 2001 CD-ROM)

onspec fall 2002 25

Believing the future could not be
changed was something much
different when the survival of a species
was at stake...

Beauty to the
Beholder
Susan Urbanek Linville

MAKISHA DOUGLAS’ CHEEKS WARMED. HEAT FLUSHED HER

upper body and sweat coated her face and arms. This can’t be possible,
she thought. At one hundred sixty-three, she shouldn’t be having hot
flashes.
She removed her wide-brimmed hat and narrowed her eyes against the
bright Cephal sun. She fanned her face with the woven hat but received
little relief. The spectrophotometer on the rocky ledge beeped, letting
her know it had completed its spectrochemical analysis ofa cliff dwelling
lichen sample.
“Save,” she said. She closed the case and climbed jagged rocks to the
plateau.
A continuous breeze traveled westward across the shrub-dotted land-
scape. Tall red-thorns with twisted trunks bowed toward her, their purple
leaves twirling in the wind, revealing gray undersides. The only sound
was thejingling of glass lenses hanging from poles that marked a foot-
path along the plateau edge.
 From this vantage point she saw red and orange adobe dwellings cling-
ing to the gray rock like wrinkled fingers. Most of the Cephal population
lived in the gorge cut by the planet’s lone major river system that drained
its single continent. She walked to a pole and lifted one of the magnify-
ing lenses to her eye. Dwellings opened onto the valley floor through
elaborate archways decorated with suns and stars. Blue-skinned Ceph-
als carried seed to the fields, three of their four arms wrapped around
woven baskets, the fourth inevitably intertwined with a comrade’s. They
always worked in pairs or triads, never alone. Thousands of three-fin-
gered hands turned fertile soil, as dark and rich as Makisha’s skin, near
the river.
Makisha let the lens fall on its cord and wiped sweat from her forehead.
A Cephal herd approached on the pathway, at least a dozen chest-high
blue balls waddling on large-toed feet, arms and hands continuously
hugging and fondling, eye stalks scanning. Their heads remained low,
tucked into the niche between their rounded shoulders, necks com-
pressed. Eyestalks turned. A few Cephals raised magnifying lenses to get
a closer look at the creature with teeth. Such probing stares were a con-
stant reminder that she was a solitary alien among a communal people.
A hot flash enveloped her, bordering on pain. Makisha wanted to snap
at them: Let go of each other. Find yourselves. Do something on your
own for a change. Instead, she extended an arm and hummed as loudly
as she could. A crude greeting at best, but all that her larynx would
allow.
Some responded by touching her tentatively when they passed; others
pulled back. They all hummed. Makisha continued, not bothering to
look back. She knew many still stared at her and understood snippets of
their hum-speech: alien, afraid, ugly, stink.
It was a half-hour descent from the plateau to Meeting Rock, a natural
stone platform near the Cavern of the Beauty, or more literally, the one
whose visions bring beauty to the world. Makisha ducked under a lens-coy-
ered archway and skirted circular inscriptions on the platform floor, not
wanting to damage their subtle craftsmanship. Cephals congregated
near the cavern door awaiting a chance to commune with the Beauty.
Water dripped steadily into a depression near the opposite wall. Makisha
avoided the crowd and went for the water. She cupped her hands and
drank, then poured water over her face and let it cascade down her cot-
tons and bare legs.
Cooler, but still not feeling well, she made her way to the platform
edge where prisms hung from branching poles, refracting rainbow
colors. A telescope faced the sky, the tube constructed of woven fibers.

Susan Urbanek Linville 27

She remembered the formal procession of Cephal weavers, bodies round
and firm with pride, arriving to present the Beauty with their largest tele-
scope. They had seemed like human children, touting trinkets made in
an afternoon as if they represented a lifetime’s work. Still, Makisha had
been moved. In her five years on-planet, she’d developed a certain fond-
ness for Cephals and their complex simplicity.
Strange, Makisha thought, running her fingers along the telescope,
interlocking plant fibers worn smooth by hundreds of hands before hers:
of all the technology Earth had to offer, lenses were their only interest.
Makisha had barely managed a straight face as Cephal scientists discovered
planets and sunspots. Did they believe she’d just dropped from the sky?
How many times had she explained that there were whole galaxies out
there, billions of worlds to be explored, millions of civilizations to be
nurtured?
Dried, Makisha wound through groups of waiting Cephals and entered
the cavern. The Beauty and her attendants weren't there, only the smells
of sweet fruit and pungent mildew. Bioluminescent plant strands hung
from the ceiling, dimly illuminating the area. Makisha retrieved her
portable diagnostic unit from a plastic crate that contained her personal
belongings and opened it on the floor. The screen glowed blue.
“Complete physical analysis,” she said. Cool air surrounded her. She
placed her hand on the rubbery pad and felt a prick to her little finger.
“Two minutes,” the machine said. She watched the digital readout of
her heart rate, breathing, and levels of hundreds of blood components.
“One minute.” The data screen went blank. The machine pricked her
finger for another blood sample. Makisha’s stomach tightened. Some of
her blood component levels: proteins, enzymes, glucose, lipoproteins,
and steroidal hormones—displayed in red.
“Analysis complete,” the machine said. “Protein, enzyme and hor-
monal levels suggest onset of menopause within 190 days. Suggest
hormone replacement therapy until cellular rejuvenation can be com-
pleted. Suggest cellular rejuvenation immediately to avoid loss of cellular
compliance.”
Makisha removed her palm from the machine. She wasn’t due for
rejuvenation for ten years, but her body apparently had other plans.
Menopause was a signal that millions of her cells had reached a halfway
point in their downward spiral to inevitable death.
Heat spread across her skin and her brain flooded with memories of
her mother, not as a post-modern painter or Cajun cook, but a corpse-
like figure talking to walls and urinating in bed. Her mother had died for
no reason, refusing gene therapy to the end. Makisha wouldn’t let time

28 onspec fall 2002

have her so easily. In order to optimize her rejuvenation, she would have
to abandon her analysis of Cephal organic chemicals and return to an
Earth colony. It was a never-ending battle against time.

THE CAVERN’S HEAVY FIBER DOOR SCRAPED OPEN AND THE BEAUTY’S ATTENDANTS
entered. Oblong heads bobbed atop narrow necks and tentacle-like
eyestalks dipped and swiveled, a sign that they were comfortable, if only
marginally, with her presence. They clasped each other with two of four
thin arms and their abdominal skin wrinkled, condensing already fat
bodies into mounds of flesh.
“You are ill?” Tall-One hummed. He looked at the display, and Lens-
Holder stared at Makisha through a lens twice the size of her eye.
“No,” Makisha said in English. Only the Beauty and her two nameless
attendants could understand English. She pointed to a row of numbers.
“These are hormone levels. There is a drop in these levels and a rise in
these.”
“The body is wrong?”
“I am going through an aging process. Human females change over
time and lose the ability to have offspring. It is called menopause.”
“Hmm,” Lens-Holder said. “You become sterile like the Beauty.”
“Yes, you can think of it that way.” Sterility would be her only similarity
to the Beauty.
“Then we will have two Beauties?” Lens-Holder squinted the lids of her
IR-sensitive eye. She was making a joke.
“Yes.” Makisha smiled. “And when the new Beauty is born, you will
have three.”
Tall-One hummed. “How will we know which to follow?”
“Maybe you should not follow any of them.”
Tall-One’s mouth tube sagged and his eye stalks stared at each other,
a sign of confusion.
“Do not worry.” Makisha touched his shoulder and his skin rippled.
“There will not be three. I must leave.”
“Leave?” Lens-Holder’s eye smile vanished.
“You have changed,” a voice rich with undertones said. Makisha
turned. The Beauty stood only as tall as her armpit, but massed twice a
normal Cephal. The attendants moved aside, careful to avoid her touch.
The Beauty moved forward and crouched next to Makisha. “You will
return to your people.”
“Yes,” Makisha said.
“It is time to give you my fluid.”
“Nowe” Surprise flared through Makisha. After five years of requests,

Susan Urbanek Linville 29

the Beauty was finally consenting to give her the bioactive compound she
produced. Makisha had watched Cephals faint after receiving a touch
from their prophet. She’d witnessed crowds of hundreds fall into mass
hypnosis in their Beauty’s presence. According to the attendants, the
Beauty saw the future. Makisha had been anxious to sample her secre-
tions since day one. The lab back home would be even more interested.
“You will join my vision in two nights. I will give you my fluid then.”

THE CEPHAL CROWD RUMBLED AND HUMMED, A WET MASS OF INTERTWINED

flesh that stretched to the river edge. Skin undulated, producing
bioluminescent light, a pool of bright haze that surrounded Meeting
Rock like a reservoir or a lake. Eyes peered forward, many using lenses,
straining to see if the Beauty had appeared. The air smelled of freshly
peeled oranges.
Makisha stood at the platform center clad in a luminescent wrap that
covered her torso. Nearby, young attendants-in-training squirmed, rub-
bing and soothing each other. At their center, a female with a pregnant
belly that sagged almost to the ground received fleeting caresses and
encouragement. She would give birth to the next Beauty.
Hands clasped behind her back, Makisha waited with apparent calm,
but she was far from calm. Hormone levels spiked repeatedly, causing
dilated blood vessels and burning skin. She felt bloated, anxious and very
nearly on fire.
Tall-One and Lens-Holder, aged skin almost devoid of luminescence,
approached from the cavern, lower arms intertwined.
“The Beauty is prepared,” Lens-Holder hummed. She examined Maki-
sha through her lens.
Tall-One motioned with his upper arms and the crowd’s hum intensi-
fied, vibrating the platform. Makisha had watched the Beauty present to
gatherings before, but never this large. Cephals must have come from
the very northern regions of the valley. Some even had the leathery skin
of plateau dwellers.
The Beauty moved out of shadow with lumbering grace, wet skin quiv-
ering, dark belly markings undulating. The crowd quieted. Three of the
younger attendants detached and flitted about her like moths drawn to
light, colored lenses masking their optical eyes, clear lenses held to their
IR-sensitive ones. They hummed and chanced glancing skin-touches
until one fell sideways and lay still.
Makisha watched the attendants, a part of her longing to feel their
rapture. The fallen one roused itself and rolled to its feet. It hurried
to the herd surrounding the pregnant female and was smothered in

30 onspec fall 2002

embraces.
“Here,” Tall-One said. He moved to the platform edge and rolled for-
ward into the seething mass of Cephals. Makisha walked to the edge and
hesitated. Arms wrapped and released her legs like lapping waves. The
Beauty moved forward and Makisha was pushed toward her, then pulled
away. A thick secretion emerged from the Beauty’s abdomen, smelling
like bitter wine. The Beauty grappled Makisha’s hand and the secretion
thinned and flowed toward her.
Heat blasted Makisha, raising sweat and flushing her cheeks. She’d
seen this ritual many times, but had never been so intimately involved.
She felt an intense excitement, but also an undercurrent of fear. What if
the secretion had human side effects? It seemed unlikely, but so was her
presence on this planet, so was the sudden onset of menopause.
Lens-Holder grabbed Makisha’s free hand and extended two arms to
Tall-One, forming a bridge of skin. Secretions poured across them like
a living river. The Cephals hummed and undulated as if writhing with
ecstasy. Makisha felt only the heat of her body and the sting of the fluid.
Her excitement—and her fear—dulled.
The herd of young attendants watched longingly. One by one, they
trundled forward and attached themselves to Makisha and Lens-Holder
like barnacles until the pregnant female hunched quivering and alone.
Beauty turned her eyestalks to the crowd and hummed the ritual greet-
ing.
“My atoms. My molecules. My body. My beauty.”
The atoms of the universe, making all things, Makisha recited in her
mind. The molecules that make life. The body that works and creates.
The one whose visions bring beauty to the world.
The crowd rumbled a low tone that vibrated Makisha’s bones. She
detected pleasure but also anxiety.
“Time is like the river,” the Beauty said. “We float on its currents.”
The crowd initiated a low thumping chant.
“What of the sun?” a single voice hummed.
“The sun?” Makisha looked back at the Beauty. Were they still wor-
ried about sunspots? She’d lectured the Beauty’s inner circle and had,
through them, addressed several bodies of scientist-weavers to dispel
their fears.
“I am ready to give you my vision,” the Beauty hummed.
“The sun!”
“We exist because of the sun,” the Beauty said. “We give thanks for
the light it provides.” Her eyestalks pointed to the night sky and the
secretions passing over Makisha turned from clear to white. “I see. We

Susan Urbanek Linville 31

all see.”
Not all of us, Makisha thought.
The attendants swayed and lifted their eyestalks. They hummed songs.
Makisha’s vision blurred and she felt sick to her stomach. She glimpsed
a sun, many suns on separate paths, but it was no more than a daydream,
nothing powerful. Was this all that the Cephals saw? Did they mistake
this for vision?
A hot tide crashed over Makisha, a wave of lava across her chest and
cheeks. Her heart shuddered. Heat enveloped her in a suffocating
embrace. She closed her eyes. She felt ready to combust. This was what it
would feel like to fly too close to the sun.
Light sparked and her visual field filled with stars, with suns, with a red
wall of flame. Sweat coated her face, her abdomen, her arms, blended
with the Beauty’s secretions. Suns expanded, contracted. Exploded.
The attendants cried out and pulled away. The vision ended. Makisha
took a deep breath.
“It is true,” Tall-One hummed.
“This is the beginning,” the Beauty said. She swiveled her eyestalks
toward Makisha.
“The sun will explode,” a young male blared.
The Beauty canted forward and lowered her eyestalks as if sick. Tall-
One clambered onto Meeting Rock and huddled with Lens-Holder.
Emotion crested the crowd as a bright luminescent wave followed by
high-pitched wailing. Cephals surged forward, compressing hundreds
into the platform edge. Arms flailed. Lenses crashed on stone, their sup-
porting poles collapsed.
“Get the Beauty to the cavern,” Makisha said.
Cephals stepped atop fallen comrades.
“Back away.” Makisha waved her arms and exposed teeth, but they
barely slowed. The push from the rear was too great. “Move,” Makisha
shouted. The attendants’ eyestalks lowered. They vibrated with fear.
“It is finished,” Makisha hummed as best she could. “Finished. Fin-
ished.” She grabbed the Beauty and rushed to the Cavern.
“Not good,” Lens-Holder wailed. She and Tall-One followed Makisha
to the doorway and through it. Makisha placed the Beauty on the floor
mat.
“What are we to do?” Lens-Holder hummed. “It is the end of the
world.”
“Close the door!” Sweat trickled down Makisha’s side. With one swift
motion, she slammed the door and brought down a locking bar.
The cavern was cool and quiet. Makisha examined the Beauty. “I am

32 onspec fall 2002

sorry if I frightened you,” Makisha said. She knelt on the mat-covered
floor. The Beauty shivered.
“I must comfort my people,” the Beauty said.
“No,” Makisha insisted. “Not now. Wait until they calm down.”
“This is the beginning of their death,” the Beauty said.
“What do you mean?”
“The future is set, Ma-ki-sha. You have given the people a vision. You
have given the people fear. They will lose the will to live.”
“But Iam nota Beauty. I don’t have visions.”
The Beauty looked at her with one eye. “You have fulfilled my vision.”
“What does that mean?”
“Two orbits after you arrived, I saw the end of the people. I saw them
sitting in fields, leaving ground fallow and looms empty. Dead bodies
littered the river edge.” The Beauty lowered her eyes and hummed. “I
had no time on which to anchor the vision. What I saw could have been
one orbit or a hundred orbits downstream. I see now that your vision
provided the anchor. It begins.”
“But it was a mistake.” Makisha’s stomached churned. Believing the
future could not be changed was fine if you needed to know what and
how many crops to plant. It was something much different when the sur-
vival of a species was at stake.
Makisha looked at the crate that held her personal effects: family
photos, vids, clothing that she’d repacked for her return.
“I admit that it is not easy for me to live in your culture. I have prob-
lems communicating.” Makisha faced the Beauty. “But I have friends
also. If Icreated some kind of vision that frightened people, I will cor
rect it before I go.”
“You will do nothing,” the Beauty hummed. “Time cannot be
changed.”
“I can explain that the vision was false.”
“No.” The Beauty waddled to a water pool at the rear of the cavern.
“The vision was delivered. Now time will complete it.” She bent forward
and took a drink through her straw-like tongue.

MAKISHA STUDIED THE SPECTRAL ANALYSIS OF THE BEAUTY’S SECRETION. IT was

very similar to human neurotransmitters, maybe a hallucinogen of some
type. She compressed the chemical composition file and readied it for
transmission.
“Sample Delta-3, 173. Cephal secretion from sterile female known as
the Beauty. Substance has at least hallucinogenic properties, but claims
have been made that it allows one to see the future. I’ve had some strange

Susan Urbanek Linville 33

visual experiences and believe the substance deserves additional study.”
Makisha saved the message with several others and carried the com-
munication unit outside. Cephals mulled about the platform. One asked
if the Beauty was present. He wanted to see his final death. Makisha
hummed the word no as clearly as she could. Obviously, they had taken
the mistaken vision seriously, but maybe these Cephals were just a fringe
element. Could an entire culture be so gullible?
Makisha placed the communication unit on a stone bench and
extended the antenna. Swaying lenses translated the morning light into
blues and greens. Even without a magnifying lens, she saw that the Ceph-
als had stopped working—all of them. Many simply lay in archways and
tubeways of their adobe dwellings. Makisha felt uneasy.
Surely, this would last only a day or two. When they grew hungry they
would see the futility of following a false vision. They would go back to
work.
Makisha oriented the antenna toward an orbital satellite. The screen
confirmed connection with a green flash.
“Communication: From Makisha Douglas. To SpaceChem Laborato-
ries. Message for Transportation Director Huga Samlin. I request trans-
port from Cepha to Hedron’s Colony for cellular regeneration. Please
see attached analysis file.” She uploaded the results from her diagnostic
test and sent the first message.
Now for the secretion analysis. “Communication: From Makisha Doug-
las. To SpaceChem Laboratories. Message for Analyis Unit Director—”
A loud humming broke her concentration. Makisha turned. The
Beauty lumbered across the platform, accompanied by Tall-One and
Lens-Holder. Small groups of Cephals pushed toward her but she waved
away them away. “The future is clear,” she said again and again. “Go
home. There will be no more visions.”
Anger warmed Makisha. She couldn’t believe the Beauty was doing
this. She’d always seemed concerned for her people. Makisha closed the
communication unit and walked toward the Beauty.
“You cannot just tell them to die,” Makisha said.
The Beauty barely glanced at her. “Iam the Beauty,” she said. “You will
return to your people. It is not your concern.”
Makisha took a deep breath. It wasn’t her concern. She was a guest on
this planet, invited to take chemical samples, not make moral decisions.
But how could she stand by and let them destroy themselves?
“The future is not just one path,” Makisha said. “Look at these lenses.
Each shows a different view, a different perspective of your world.”
The Beauty trained eyes on one lens after another. Her abdomen

34 onspec fall 2002

 brightened momentarily and excreted a small amount of fluid. She
hummed sadness.
“It depends upon which lens you choose,” Makisha said. How could
Cephals be so excited by lenses and yet refuse to see that the same con-
cept applied to futures? The Beauty might be their lens upon a future,
perhaps even the most probable future, but lenses could be re-aimed.
“There are other futures. You have to create the one that makes sense
for your people.”
The Beauty’s eyestalks settled on the lens closest to her. It faced the
plateau across the river and was meant for examining rocks. Now, it
offered only orange sky and the silhouettes of protruding formations
that moved in and out of focus. She closed her eyes.
“We will make no new lenses.”
“Why not?” Makisha said, frustration rising. “You can change that with
just a few words. I will help you—”
“No,” the Beauty said. “You will leave.”

IT HAD BEEN SEVEN DAYS AND STILL THE PEOPLE DID NO WORK. MAKISHA WALKED
the length of Meeting Rock. How could they just curl up and die?
Lens-Holder sat near the waterdrip with the pregnant female, sipping
half-heartedly through her tongue. Tall-One and the Beauty huddled
near the telescope on a woven rug bearing a sunburst design. I’m not
responsible, Makisha told herself. I don’t have the power to stop them.
Anger bubbled inside her. Why did she feel so responsible?
The Beauty looked faded, her skin dry and sagging. Makisha remem-
bered holding her mother’s clammy hand, the blue veins in her eyelids,
her shallow, slow breathing.
“Your ship comes for you?” Lens-Holder hummed.
“Yes,” Makisha said. “I wait for a message.”
“Our futures will part.”
“Yes. I will return home to live.” How could she explain to them?
“Humans fight to live. We develop drugs to extend life. We alter our
chromosomes.”
“I am happy to know this,” Lens-Holder said.
Heat covered Makisha and she saw her mother’s face on videoscreen.
“I'm not going through with the treatments. Since your dad died and you kids have
moved away, I just don’t have the will.”
“It’s up to you, Mom.” Makisha had been busy with life a continent away.
Go ahead, Mom. I have my own life to live. It wasn’t until years later that
she’d realized the consequence of her words.
Lens-Holder’s eyestalks bent forward. Makisha experienced a sense of

Susan Urbanek Linville 35

déja vu. What if she had talked to her mother, encouraged her to con-
tinue with the rejuvenation treatments? How many years would she have
lived?
Makisha walked to the Beauty and touched her abdomen. “You must
stop your people.”
One of the Beauty’s eyes opened and she let out a low hiss. Secretions
trickled from her pores but she didn’t speak.
“They should not have to die.” Makisha touched the fluid. “Show them
another vision, the real vision. There is a future for them.”
She felt dizzy. Her fingers burned. Lenses turned and clinked. She saw
futures: she was collecting chemical samples on a new world; working a
chemical analysis machine in a vast lab; traveling in a dark suspension
hold; holding a newborn Beauty, surrounded by Cephals. The visions
were all mixed up, merging together, moving apart. Until I focus, she
thought. Until I see.
“There is more than one future,” she said with renewed certainty.
The Beauty closed her eye.
She wanted to shake the Beauty, make her see, make her admit the
truth.
You will leave echoed in her mind.
Iam not responsible, she told herself. She hoped the SpaceChem-con-
tracted ship would arrive soon so she wouldn’t have to watch them die.

THE DAY OF THE BEAUTY’S DEATH WAS COOL AND CLOUDY. LENS-HOLDER WAS
first to notice the Beauty’s body had grown stiff. Tall-One slept on the
platform next to the corpse, seemingly oblivious. Lens-Holder, the more
optimistic and curious of the attendants, had lost weight but remained
alert and active. Makisha suspected she had been eating some of her
supplies.
“We have to move the Beauty,” Lens-Holder said. She touched a finger
to the edge of Makisha’s shirt, searching for the comfort of contact.
Makisha held one of her hands.
“I can do it.”
“She must be taken to the mud.”
“T know.” Makisha had accompanied a “funeral” procession two seasons
ago when her favorite weaver died. She had never really spoken to the
old Cephal, only argued in a type of sign language about the trade value
of his rugs. He always seemed to get more glass trinkets from her than
she thought the rugs were worth. When he died, his children brought
her a beautiful rug emblazoned with bright stars that he’d stubbornly
refused to sell her for years. As his body sank into the bog, she wondered

36 onspec fall 2002

if he’d been joking with her all along.
“T will go with you,” Lens-Holder said.
“You are too weak.”
Lens-Holder wouldn’t take no for an answer. She walked slowly and
stumbled over rocks, but never stopped in the hours it took to reach the
bog. The dark surface bubbled with gasses and smelled of rotting eggs.
Lens-Holder pointed to an inlet covered with orange vines. “The
Beauty must be placed there. All Beauties go there.”
They walked into the bog, feet sinking into tarry goop. Lens-Holder
stopped when she was waist deep. “Here,” she said.
Makisha laid the Beauty gently atop floating vines, arranged the arms
at her side and straightened her eyestalks. Secretions oozed from the
body’s abdomen.
“It is done,” Lens-Holder said.
Done, Makisha thought. Everything is done. Tears filled her eyes. She
remembered her mother looking so life-like at the funeral, better than
she’d looked before her death.
Mud claimed the body slowly, taking the Beauty’s three-fingered
hands, submerging her eyestalks.
Lens-Holder was too weak to extract herself from the muck. Makisha
pulled the attendant out with a loud slurp and Lens-Holder wrapped
arms around Makisha’s neck and stomach like a small child. How many
days until she’d return with Tall-One? And then Lens-Holder?
If you could only think for yourselves, Makisha thought. If only I could
show you. Their culture had been dependent upon visions of a Beauty
for longer than anyone remembered. How could she hope to change
them in a few days?
“You are the Beauty,” Lens-Holder hummed.
“What?”
Lens-Holder’s IR-sensitive eye smiled. The Cephals were dying and she
was making a joke. She lifted a lens and stared through it at Makisha’s
face. Makisha’s abdomen clenched. She struggled to keep moving with-
out dropping the Cephal.
Makisha focused on Lens-Holder’s magnified eye and remembered
her making a joke about magnifying hums instead of visual objects.
Makisha couldn’t remember the joke, but she remembered laughing out
loud and scaring the attendant. Curiosity characterized Lens-Holder.
Soon that spark would be lost. Somehow that was even more profound
than the Beauty’s death.
Makisha’s tears emerged.
She had cried at her mother’s funeral, adopted the motions of grief,

Susan Urbanek Linville 37

and gone on with her life—a life that hid from the future as well as the
past. Now tears streamed down her face but not the empty tears she’d
shed for her mother. These were cleansing, like light beading on a pane
of darkness.
What had she seen two days before when she’d touched the Beauty’s
secretions? Not the Beauty with her people, not the Beauty holding a
new child. It had been Makisha who stood among the Cephals, sharing
in their joy, holding the next Beauty aloft for all to see. Makisha. Me.
She touched Lens-Holders face, caressed the smooth, supple skin.
Once aging progressed too far, even genetic renewal could not reverse
the decline. If she stayed long enough for a new Beauty to assume her
duties, she would surely pass optimum regeneration time. Her skin
would thin and wrinkle. Her hair would gray, her breasts would sag and
her muscles lose their strength. She would be choosing death, like her
mother. Something she’d sworn never to do.
Makisha gazed farther up the canyon where green and red shoots
poked through dark soil. In a hundred days, the valley would be filled
with color and the citric odor of blossoms.
If Ichoose to give up life, she thought, at least it will be for a purpose.
“Yes,” she said. “I am the new Beauty. We must tell everyone.”

DIRECTOR SAMLIN’S MESSAGE ARRIVED THREE DAYS LATER. SHE HAD ARRANGED FOR
a transport to stop at Cepha in less than a week, standard time. Makisha
called up her transmission log and noted several files still queued,
including the analysis of the Beauty’s secretions.
Makisha had already reproduced secretions from the Beauty and used
her vision to show Lens-Holder a new future. If she forwarded the molec-
ular analysis to SpaceChem, it could revolutionize mankind’s vision of
space and time.
Makisha oriented the communication antenna. What would humans
do with the ability to see futures? Would they learn to avoid their mis-
takes? Would they settle for making safer bets?
Makisha powered up the unit. The screen flashed blue. Or would they
end up like the Cephals, trapped in a world of crystal balls where no one
made choices of their own?
She aimed the Beauty’s telescope, and focused on a dim yellow star.
She squinted, trying to see Earth though it was quite impossible through
such a crude device. Still, it was enough.
We're fighters because we can’t see the future, she thought. We fight
the odds because there’s always a chance for success. That’s what got
us into space; that’s what colonized a dozen planets. And that was what

38 onspec fall 2002

would save the Cephal people, if Makisha had to show each and every
one of them her vision.
“Communication: from Makisha Douglas to SpaceChem Laobratories.
Message for Transportation Director Samlin. Please cancel my request
for transfer.”
She deleted the file containing her detailed analysis of the Beauty’s
secretions and created a second voice message for the Analysis Group.
“Attached, find recent data analysis of plant species. Attach all.”
Heat flashed across her cheeks and chest and she fanned herself with
her hand. Sterile, she thought, but not dead. Death did not seem like the
terrible ending she’d envisioned, but more of a natural process. It was
like seeing through a new lens.
My atoms, she thought, imagining the Beauty’s rich tones. My mol-
ecules. My body. Makisha pulled back from the telescope. “Send.” Her
data beamed skyward, minus the most important scientific discovery of
her career. She felt no regret.
This was her world now. She was ready to die here, sowing the seeds
of a vibrant future.
My beauty. ¢

YOU'RE HERE BECAUSE

YOU LOVE THE ARTS.

>)
x

“C
$O ARE WE.

3
3 The Alberta
Foundation
for the Arts
A
COWMUNTY OEVELCOMENT
$ COMMITTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE AND THE ARTS

’ : ‘9) Says
°
6
T+ -L ADNAN ERO

onspec fall2002 39
All it would take was a good puff of
wind for some sparks to jump the gap
and then wed be barbecue...

Kid Brother
Kate Riedel

THE NIGHT WAS DRY, LIKE EVERY NIGHT THAT SUMMER, AND
someone wasn’t watching his fire, and next thing you know the dry grass
and brush were blazing away like hell, everyone yelling and stamping
around, getting water was hopeless.
And then the blare and clang of the fire trucks closed in, and everyone
grabbed whatever they could and skedaddled, cinder scattering under-
foot as we crashed through the weed-tree thickets in the dark along the
railroad tracks.
We gathered in a loose crowd at a safe distance to look back at the red
glow, listening to the flames crackling and the firemen yelling. Looked
like we weren’t going to burn down the town after all, but I figured,
dark or not, time to be moving on—although, hell, jail would have at
least guaranteed a breakfast of sorts—when there was a new commotion,
some shadows surrounding another single shadow, and it didn’t look
good for the man in the middle.
I generally kept myself to myself, but I thought I'd seen him earlier, set-
tling down alone at the edge of the jungle. That was probably why his fire
had got away from him: too close to dry grass. Just a kid, maybe fifteen.
He couldn't have been on the road long; he still had that fresh, innocent
look. Reminded me of my brother.
 So I stepped up and said, “Leave the kid alone. Anyone could have
started it.”
Someone yelled, “He could have stopped it!”
Boots on cinders.
“Listen,” I said, “are we gonna stand around waiting for the cops?”
They shut up then, and everyone did a quick fade into the brush.
When I stepped out on the road some time later, a shadow followed me.
“Just wanted to say thanks,” the kid said quietly behind me.
“Which way you going?”
He hesitated, then said, “West.”
“Aren't we all, Kid,” I said, and we fell into step together.
He had a name, but I never called him anything but Kid, and that'll
do for you too.
You didn’t ask too many questions, that was the rules. But travelling
together, you gotta talk about something, so I got most of his story, same
way he got most of mine.
We'd both been orphaned. Some family friends had taken in my kid
brother and sister, but I was old enough to look after myself, except the
local box factory closed down, and no one in the city was hiring. And
when I'd gone back to ask after my brother and sister, the family had
pulled up and left, no one knew where.
The kid told me he’d hit the road after his uncle’s farm failed.
“Drought?” I asked.
“Flood,” he answered.
He’d been taken in by the uncle after his parents died. “Uncle Bart
treated me square,” he told me. “So I didn’t mind the work. But I guess I
wasn't cut out for farming. Like one morning, the spring after I'd come
to live with him. The weather was really funny, changeable, you know, wet
snow, then wind and rain, and then, just as we sat down to lunch, thun-
der and lightning. So like a stupid kid, I said, ‘Now all we need is hail.’
The words weren't out of my mouth when it started to hail, and Uncle
Bart reached across the table and belted me.
“Aunt Mary told me later that Uncle Bart was sorry he’d hit me, and
my wishing for hail hadn't made it hail, but it had been a silly thing to
say, because hail was about the worst thing that could happen to a farmer
with the fruit just set on.” He laughed, but not like he meant it. “Well,
you know, of course I knew that.”
“You ever wish you could go back?” I asked.
“I gave up wishing a long time ago,” he said.

WE ROLLED INTO IOWA IN TIME FOR CORN-PICKING. I CAN STILL SMELL THE DRY SCENT
of the corn leaves, horses standing patiently while you pick a section of
Kate Riedel 41
the row, then pulling the one-sided wagon a ways down, stopping again.
It was hot, hard work in that kind of late fall heat you get in October,
with a dust haze over everything. But my, that farmer’s wife fed us good:
fried chicken and home-made bread and potato salad and coleslaw and
dill pickles and sweet pickles and three different kinds of pie, all set out
on a sawhorse and plank table under a tree. Well, I guess you can see
what was most important to us, those days.
That’s where we met the girl.
You ran into women on the road now and then, but they were either
tough broads that no one messed with, or whores that everyone messed
with unless they happened to have a protector.
But here was this girl, wearing boy’s clothes, but that didn’t hide any-
thing, swiping ears of corn off the stalks and into the wagon with that
hooked glove, fast as any man. The kind of girl you’d look once, and
think, not much there. Look twice, same thing. Look the third time, and
you'd start wondering why you were looking so often. I could see the kid
sneaking looks, and don’t think I didn’t worry.
At the side of the field was a stoneware crock of drinking water set
out for the pickers. One guy with a sweat-stained shirt, the front caked
with dirt like he’d never figured out you can wash in a river, gets in line
behind us and starts razzing the kid about settling the dust, and pretty
soon it was like back at the jungle where we'd had the fire. But the kid
handled it better this time, just said, calm-like, “Some people will believe
anything,” had his drink, and left.
I say he handled it better, but the penny didn’t drop until after we
were back at the wagon. How maybe he'd told the story about the hail
to someone else, and the story had maybe improved a little in somebody
else’s telling.
But then I saw the girl watching him.
At supper that night I found the kid and the girl had already filled
their plates and were off together under a mulberry tree. I was of two
minds about that, but decided, kids, leave °em alone. Then here comes
Dirty Shirt, sees the pair of them, and says to the kid, nasty-like, “I been
there first.”
Or something like that.
The girl stays cool as a cucumber; the kid sets down his plate and
stands. But then another guy laughs and says to the kid, “Oh, he talks
big, but talk’s about all he does.” And then to Dirty Shirt, “Show ’em,
why don’t you?”
Dirty Shirt tries to back off then, but another guy grabs him and the
first guy grabs his shirt, like he’s going to pull it open, but then the farm-

42 onspec fall 2002

er’s wife comes out of the house with the pies, and everyone straightens
up and behaves, except Dirty Shirt whines to the girl as he slinks off, “You
didn’t hafta do that, you coulda just said you weren't interested.”
The girl says, still cool, “I could have, except you didn’t ask.” She
doesn’t even look at him. She’s already holding out her hand to me. “Of
course you're Bill. I’m Liza.”
She talked like she’d been brought up with some education. She had
my life history out of me before I knew it, but I noticed she didn’t have
much to say about herself.
Next morning Liza signaled the kid to come pick on her wagon, but
he stuck with mine, not saying much, and when the day was over—it was
our last day on that farm—he wanted to hit the road right away rather
than waiting till morning.
It put us ahead of the rest of the crowd on the next job a few miles
down the road. But when I saw the kid look around at every newcomer, I
couldn’t help wondering whether he was hoping the girl would turn up,
or hoping she wouldn't.
Then our wagon reaches the end of the field next to a dry ditch beside
the road, and the horses stop so we can get the last stalks in the row, and
above the swish and thunk of picking, I hear whistling, some kind of
mournful hymn tune.
I’m trying to figure out what the tune is, when this old man stands up
from where he’s been sitting hidden by the ditch bank, still whistling,
breaking off between bars to say, “Whoa there, whoa there,” quiet and
careful, so as not to startle the horses. He’s maybe not as old as his white
hair and beard make him look. He doesn’t look like a bum; doesn’t have
the kind of all-over gray look that bums get no matter how hard they try
to stay clean.
He steps up to the wagon and asks if we’d seen a girl. Around sixteen
or so, he said, thinnish, pale hair in braids, green eyes. “They said at the
last farm that she might have gone with you.”
Well, when he was gone, I turned Dutch uncle. “You and Liza,” I said.
“You didn’t—”
“What?” Closest I’d ever seen him to sullen.
“You know what. If Daddy’s coming after us with a shotgun, I'd appre-
ciate knowing.”
“Oh. That. No.” And the way he blushed I had to believe him. About
that.
And the horses moved on and stopped. The kid was singing to himself
as he picked. “Will the circle...” Swipe. Thunk “...be unbroken...” Swipe.
Thunk. “...by and by, Lord, by and by...”

Kate Riedel 43
By THE TIME THE SNOW CAME WE HAD OURSELVES A BERTH UP NORTH AT A LUMBER
camp, which was no Sunday school, but the married couple who did
the cooking and laundry had kids, and that kept the guys in line, some.
The woman spent her free time trying to get a bit of schooling into
her bunch, and sometimes the kid would listen in. Once I found him
working through one of their books. He looked up and grinned. “I used
to hate this stuff. It’s a cinch, now.”
“Arithmetic?”
“Yeah. I remember, back when I was in school, I was so afraid I’d fail an
arithmetic test, I went to bed wishing for a blizzard so there wouldn’t be
any school. The next day the snow was waist-deep and still coming down.
There was no school for weeks.”
A lumberjack playing solitaire across the way spoke up. “I remember
that storm. Stock frozen solid standing up in the pastures. My brother
got lost between his house and barn. Frostbite so bad they had to take off
his foot. Spring thaw washed away half his outbuildings.”
The kid quit grinning, like he’d been punched, and went back to his
book.

COME SPRING, IN ST. PAUL WITH OUR PAY IN OUR POCKETS, FIRST THING THE KID
does is convert most of his to a money order and mail it off to his uncle.
I figured to have a good time with some and spend the rest on train fare
out west, where there was supposed to be work.
We stopped in a diner for steaks for two instead of stew for a hun-
dred—no matter how good the food is when it comes into a lumber
camp, by the time it reaches the table it’s been cooked into a mess—and
there waiting tables is our corn-picking girl friend, looking mighty fetch-
ing in a dress and apron.
When I asked the kid if he wanted to come along with me that evening
he said no thanks, Liza had said she’d go to a movie with him, and he’d
meet me back at our room.
Well, he sure had more money left next morning than I did. It wasn’t
a passenger train I'd be taking west. And the kid said, heck, he might as
well go along.
So there we were outside the railroad yards, watching our chance with
the rest of the bums to hop the west-bound freight before it picked up
speed. We haul ourselves into the car, and who’s there but Liza, back in
her boy’s clothes.
The kid’s not happy to see her.
“Look,” she says, “I’ve been working at it.”

44 onspec fall 2002

 “How?” he says, deliberately not taking the hand she held out. “Frying
steaks?”
Already sounding like an old married couple, I thought, and having a
hangover to sleep off, I went and did so.
I wasn’t too thrilled to have Liza tagging along. Other guys. You know.
But whatever she'd done to that guy back in Iowa, word must have got
around, because we never had any trouble that way.
But the bickering! Not with me, with each other. I never heard what
it was they fought about, they kept their voices down, but it reminded
me of my brother and sister. Well, that’s kind of how I'd come to look at
them.
There wasn’t going to be any corn to pick that fall, at least none anyone
could afford to have someone else pick for them. There was wind all the
time, it seemed like, always with this dust in it, getting right down to your
lungs, settling into your clothes until you were the same color as what
was left of the fields. Like that farm wife’s laundry: the clothes were white
enough when she hung them out, but they dried dirt-gray.
The farm house, in the Dakotas somewhere, hadn’t seen any paint
for a long time. The yard was just dry bits of grass trying to hold the dirt
down. There was a rusty Model T in front with a star-shaped crack in the
windshield, almost like a bullet hole, but probably from a pebble kicked
up from the road.
The woman was trying to hang out her laundry and comfort a fussy
baby at the same time. Liza took over hanging up the clothes. The kid
and me helped her husband round up half a dozen head of beef cattle
that had broke out, about as ornery a bunch of brutes as you could ask
for, but we finally got them penned up behind the barn, and figured
we'd earned our supper.
“If you guys hadn’t come along, I'd have just let the bailiff do it,” the
farmer said. “If he’s gonna take em anyway, he should have to work for
*em, like I did.”
“Like that?” I asked.
“Like that. They say there’s work to be had out west. I suppose that’s
where you're heading?”
I nodded.
He looked out across a field where the only bright spot was some wil-
lows along a stream away to the west.
“Look at that. Came up this spring all green, the prettiest thing you
ever saw. Just needed rain. We waited for rain. Come June, all we got is
this damn wind straight out of hell.”
He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his face, and we pretended it was

Kate Riedel 45
sweat he was wiping at. He held out the handkerchief to show us the dirt
streaks. “What ain’t on my face is a mile up in the air and headed for the
Atlantic Ocean.” He shoved the handkerchief back in his pocket.
The vegetables in the stew we had for supper were last year’s, but the
meat was good, not much fat but cooked tender. There was probably at
least one of those steers the bailiff wasn’t going to get.
“There was an old fellow stopped by here a couple of days back,” the
woman said. “He was asking if we'd seen a girl and a boy about the age of
your brother and sister. You know him?”
“T don’t think so,” I said, but I suddenly remembered the old guy back
in Iowa.
“He was an interesting man,” the woman said. “Seemed to know some-
thing about almost everything. He even knew how droughts happen. He
said this one was... what was that word the man used, Jack?”
“Cyclical.” He husband didn’t seem to think the old fellow had been
interesting.
“He said it was cyclical, that it happened every few years, but it was
never really bad until...”
“Leave it,” said her husband.
“I’m afraid Jack ran him off with his shotgun,” the woman said with an
apologetic smile. “Of course, it wasn’t loaded—”
“Hell, we grew the best damn wheat in the world! We might again, if we
could just get some rain!”
The baby got restless then and the woman got up to walk him. Liza
nudged the kid and they excused themselves. I found them on the front
porch, arguing. “God dammit,” I heard the kid say and he never swore
in front of women, and that included Liza. “God dammit, it would only
make things worse.”
“We'll never get a better chance,” I heard Liza answer.
“What, I’m supposed to believe a sideshow trick—”
“It’s not a sideshow trick.”
“Yeah, well, there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? Thanks, but
no thanks.”
They saw me and moved apart. Liza ducked back into the house anda
few minutes later I heard dishes clattering and low voices as she helped
the woman clean up.

WE CAMPED UNDER THOSE WILLOWS I’D SEEN, AND MOVED ON THE NEXT DAY. THE
early morning sun cast our shadows ahead of us on the dusty road, and
I’m thinking about how fresh and clean mornings used to smell but
don’t seem to anymore, when there’s a rattle coming up behind us like

46 onspec fall 2002

only a tin lizzie can make. It’s the one from in front of the farmhouse; I
recognized the star-shaped crack on the windshield.
The kid takes off running. The farmer pulls up and dives out of the car
and goes after him. I take off after the farmer.
Liza stays on the road.
He’d collared the kid by the time I caught up to them, and I collared
him and yelled, “What’s going on?”
“He can do it,” the farmer says. “The girl says he can do it!”
“She’s crazy!” the kid gasps, having trouble talking with his collar
twisted around his neck.
“What does who say he can do?” I asked, keeping my grip on the
farmer the way he was keeping his grip on the kid.
“That girl. Back when she was helping with the dishes yesterday, she
told my wife. He can make it rain!”
“You're crazy,” I said.
“Then why'd he run?”
I looked around to call for Liza, to ask why the hell she’d pass on that
stupid story to someone who already had enough trouble. But she wasn’t
there.
“Look,” the farmer was saying, “you think I got enough gas left for this
tin can that I can afford to run after you for nothing? She said you'd say
you couldn’t, but she swears you can.”
The kid’s stopped struggling now. He looks sort of pleading-like at the
farmer and says, “Do you think if I could that I wouldn't?”
“How do I know? You might be like that old guy who said the soil
blowing away was our fault for plowing up the buffalo grass and planting
wheat. Breaking his goddamn cycle.”
“Use your head, man,” I said. “If you’re going to ask anyone to make it
rain, it'll have to be God.”
“I’ve asked Him,” he said. “I’ve prayed, and prayed, and prayed—”
He let go of the kid then and strode back to the car, and there was no
pretending this time that what was on his face was sweat.
Liza was gone again.
“She can take care of herself,” the kid said.
“Yeah, I guess she can,” I said.
I don’t think we spoke two words after that, until we hopped a freight
just outside a gray little elevator town.
We had the car to ourselves, so it was safe enough to go to sleep, but
we both sat up, looking through the open door at the stars like hope too
distant to grasp.
“Why would Liza do something like that?” I said finally.

Kate Riedel 47
 “Well, you heard the talk.”
“Where'd the talk come from?”
“I guess someone ran into someone else from back where I come from.
My uncle told that hail story for a joke; he thought it was funny after a
while. Problem is, he told the one about the rain, too. And I think he did
believe that. That’s really why I left.”
“What rain?”
“I said we should have hail, and we did. I wished for snow, and we got
snow. And it was so dry, I wished—for Uncle Bart’s sake, you know—I
wished for rain.”
“That’s crazy. Besides, if you could make it rain just by wishing, why
wouldn’t you do it for that poor sap back there?”
“Because I can’t make it stop!”
Honest to God, I was so mad. Now I knew how my mother felt the time
she found my little sister screaming because my kid brother and me had
teased her that if you poked your belly button, you'd fall apart and then
my brother poked her in the belly button. I wished I had someone to lay
into, the way Ma had laid into us.
“Look, Kid,” I said, “Weather’s an act of God. We’re well rid of that
girl.”

THE TRAIN ROLLED ON. WE PICKED UP SOME COMPANY ALONG THE WAY, AND MORE
on the next train. Once we passed a bunch of guys riding in the other
direction, waving and yelling at us to go back, there was nothing back
where they'd come from.
We stayed put, what the hell.
It was so nice and green and cool among the pines of the foothills that
the kid started singing, “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she
comes,” and some other guys chimed in.
But the green was bogus. There was always a whiff of smoke on the wind,
and sometimes we’d see plumes of it. Guys from the railroad patrolled
the tracks to put out any sparks from the engine or train wheels.
Then, middle of the night, the train stops with a rattle and bang, and
someone outside yells, “All right, you bums, we know you're in there,
time to earn your fare!” The kid and I got hauled out with the rest,
handed shovels, and told to march.
The smoke-smell was sharp now, and the night was hot in a way that
had nothing to do with the season. The wind carried a purring, crackling
sound, like a camp fire, only a camp fire sounds comforting. Not loud,
but not even the tramp of the guys all around us could make it go away. I
suppose we could have cut and run and no one would have been able to

48 onspec fall 2002

stop us, but it was strange ground, not a place you'd want to be lost in, in
the dark except for a forest fire.
At dawn we found ourselves in a long, narrow meadow. The sound was
more like a bonfire now, clouds of smoke billowing towards us, with a
pink tinge that sure as hell wasn't reflected sunrise. And someone yelled,
“All right, you shiftless sons-of-bitches, start digging!”
What we were doing—not that anyone bothered to explain it to us—
was digging up a break to prevent the fire crossing the meadow to the
trees behind us. Well, that was hopeless. We could see the fire now, it was
traveling through the tops of the trees, and all it would take was a good
puff of wind for some sparks to jump the gap and then we’d be barbecue.
When I pushed that shovel into the ground I felt like I was digging my
own grave with a head start on hell.
Because the only thing you could see through the smoke was the
flames, the fire-sound was a roar, and I thought my lungs were fried for
sure—when out of the smoke lurches someone lugging two buckets of
water, and by God it’s Liza. All I cared about by then, though, was the
water. I sucked down a dipper-full and soaked my handkerchief good to
tie around my face, and then turned to tell the kid to do the same.
Liza had him by the arm, yelling at him.
“Leave him alone,” I yell.
But Liza holds on, yelling, “Stop it! You can stop it!”
Just then what I’d been scared would happen, happened; the wind car-
ried a spark across the meadow, and a pine tree behind us caught it and
exploded like a rocket, and there we were, trapped in the middle with
nowhere to run.
“Do you want us all to die?” she yells.
I didn’t believe it at first. Not even when I felt the first drop. Not even
when the guys started yelling, “Rain! By God, rain!”
The kid must have been holding that wish back so hard that when he
finally let it out, it was like a dam bursting, no pat-pat-pat, but a pound-
ing like thunder on the ground, and steam hissing until I think maybe
we've missed being barbecued just to be steam-cooked. But the rain
keeps coming hard and the steam kind of fades, and there’s grown men
laughing and dancing around like idiots, waving their shovels, soaked to
the skin and not minding at all.
I don’t know how long that went on, but it must have been awhile,
because when I look down there’s rivulets washing down the moun-
tainside, carrying soot and dirt, and not just charred twigs, but small
branches.
The kid hasn’t been doing any dancing. He’s just standing there, his

Kate Riedel 49
face screwed up so I know it isn’t just rain on it.
And I remember.
He can’t make it stop.
Now there’s the occasional clump of dirt coming apart as it washes
down the mountainside. The rivulets are wider, cutting through the
ground where it’s been burned, and as I watch I can see roots come into
view as the dirt washes away. I think, mudslides. The others have thought
of it too; they’re getting the hell away from there, down the mountain.
The rain’s pounding straight down so hard I can barely hear Liza
when she yells at me; finally she tugs my sleeve. “Bill!” One braid’s come
loose, hair plastered across her face, and her shirt wet and clinging so
I’m seeing parts of her that are new to me. “Bill! Do you think the fire’s
out? Really out?”
“I think we better get out while the getting’s good.”
She drops my arm. Then she holds her hands out in front of her, palms
up, just at waist level.
Not a word of a lie, her fingers start to glow, like she has a flashlight
held up tight to the backs of her hands.
I think, J shoulda run. Then I think, But J wouldn't be seeing this if I had.
And then I think, Do I want to see this?
What I see is steam rising from her hands.
At first the light is just from her hands. And then, gradually, it’s from
above her, too, as the clouds break right over her head. Just a little, it’s
still raining where we are, but around Liza it’s stopped.
The clear patch above her gets wider and wider, and the clouds
pull away like frost on a window when you blow on it. The sun breaks
through.
And pretty soon the rain stops completely.
Liza stood there for what seemed forever, steam rising around her. I
doubt if she was any warmer than if she’d just run a race. But in a circle
around where she stood, the ground was dry.
The kid’s staring at her.
She looks at him and grins, and says, “I told you I was working on it!”
and then she turns to me and says, “Isn’t that swell?”
“Peachy,” I mutter.
The kid’s mouth is hanging open. She laughs at him. And then he
starts to laugh.
After that performance I wouldn’t have touched that girl for all the tea
in China, but the kid throws his arms around her tight and hugs her and
even kisses her.
She pulls away and grabs his hand.

50 onspec fall 2002

 “You see?” she says, “You can make it rain, because I can make it
stop!”
The kid remembers me then, and says, “You hear that, Bill? Did you
see that?”
I can see it in his eyes, his fortune’s made.
Especially now that he’s got himself a manager.
But he’s a good kid; it won’t change him. At least not for a while.
And then someone says, “Well. I guess I should be grateful that you
didn’t join the circus.”
Liza let the kid’s hand drop and stood there, looking at the old man,
looking the way I'd felt back in the forest fire when they'd told us to start
digging. But she’s still—well, still Liza. “I can do it,” she says, defiant-like.
“I did do it.”
“You and who else?” he says.
And she starts to protest, but he just says, “Come along. You too,” he
adds to the kid. “If you want to.”
The kid hesitates maybe twenty, thirty seconds, then says, “All right.”
And then he turns to me and says, “Thanks.”
And when the kid says that, the old guy nods to me. Just that, but I felt
like I'd been handed I don’t know what. An IOU, maybe.
The old guy turns and walks away like he expects them to follow him.
And they do.
The kid looks back once, to raise his hand to me.

It’s NO BETTER ON THE WEST COAST THAN ANYWHERE ELSE.

But then they bombed Pearl Harbor, and I joined the Navy, and who
do I run into in the recruiting office but my kid brother.
Maybe, like I said, an IOU.
I never saw any of them again. ¢

Dedicated to the memory of my father and mother, who farmed in Iowa in the
1930s, and also to my four oldest sisters, who were born there.

Kate Riedel 51
Elias stepped forward, blood-stained
arm raised. Now he knew what he‘d
tasted, though hed never tasted it
before. His soul....

Soul Taster
Ken Rand

THE PRISONER’S BLOOD TASTED COPPERY. ELIAS SPAT THE

scarlet taint on the ground. “This one’s soul,” he indicated the
whimpering man on his knees in the courtyard before the tribunal.
“Black with sin. He knows murder, adultery, paganism.”
The judge made a mark in a book and nodded to two soldiers, who
dragged the emaciated, ragged man away. A red trail from his slashed
wrist followed, mingled with the bloody streak left by those who’d gone
before him in the long, hot afternoon.
A soldier pushed another prisoner to his knees before the tribunal.
The soldier slashed the man’s arm with a short sword. The prisoner
hissed in pain. Elias stifled a yawn—it had been a long day—bent to the
proffered font, and sucked.
He stood. King Nathan the Just’s soldiers peered from their positions
at the ruined gate, around the prisoners’ keep, and along the crenel-
lated walls of the vanquished Duke Onan Shear’s former castle. Slaves
fluttered fans to cool the sweat on the brows of the three tribunal judges,
who sipped cold drinks. The prisoners, huddled in a corral in the open
courtyard, sat or lay in mute fear, waiting their turn before the Soul
Taster.
 The white sun burned down through a merciless, windless sky, heavy
with the stench of fear and death. Crows called among the piled dead in
the battlefield beyond the castle walls, at the walls and broken gate, and
in the smoking debris around the inner courtyard.
Elias swirled the prisoner’s salty essence in his mouth, as if tasting wine.
He spat. He wiped his chin with a blood-soaked towel and nodded to the
tribunal.
“Sin, black as night. He knows murder, theft, deceit, dishonor to family
and lord, blasphemy, witchcraft. Much more. This one is—”
“No, please,” the prisoner wailed. “I beg you. Spare me. For the sake of
my wife and my unborn child.”
Lord Illin, First Judge, raised an eyebrow. “You beg for mercy in the
name of those you have dishonored?”
Elias sucked at a bit of gristle between his teeth. He frowned. Some-
thing about the taste of this prisoner nagged at him.
“In God’s name, my lord, I have not—”
“Silence.”
The prisoner bowed to the icy command. He quaked, body sweat-
slick.
Elias licked his lips thoughtfully. The taste was—different.
Lord Illin waved a dismissive hand at the prisoner, and two soldiers
bent to haul him away.
“Wait.” The prisoner struggled. The First Judge waved for the soldiers
to hurry about their duties. The day grew long and would not soon
cool.
Elias wiped frothy lips on a towel, watching the exchange. Thinking.
“I will give you his soul,” the man cried, “if you spare my life. His soul,
whom I serve. His. For my life.”
Again, Lord Illin waved, impatient. One soldier slapped the prisoner
with a gauntleted fist. The man grunted and blood sprouted on his brow,
soaking his face. The soldiers continued to drag his semiconscious body
away.
“Wait.” Elias stepped forward, blood-stained arm raised. His soul, the
prisoner had said. And Elias now knew what he’d tasted, though he’d
never tasted it before. His soul.
The soldiers hesitated, looking back at the tribunal for instructions.
First Judge Illin nodded for them to wait, lip curled in impatience.
“Speak, Soul Taster.”
“May I approach your lordships?” The judges exchanged glances, eye-
brows raised at the irregularity, and nodded.
Elias approached, bowed, and bent across the tribunal table to speak

Ken Rand 53
in a hoarse whisper. The judges gagged at his carrion breath. Elias
ignored the nobles’ discomfort.
“I have never me this prisoner, and I do not know his name. Yet I know
him.”
“How so?”
“T have tasted his darkness.” Elias smiled, crooked teeth pink, the gums
purple-black with old blood.
The First Judge drew back and raised eyebrows. “Say on.”
“When he says ‘I can give you his soul,’ he can mean but one.”
Lord Illin paled. “You don’t mean—”
Elias nodded. Licked his lips, snakelike.
The three judges conferred in whispers. At last Illin turned to Elias,
who stood back, blood-caked hands folded reverently across his chest,
head bowed.
Lord Illin motioned Elias to lean toward him. Elias complied. “Be
clear, Soul Taster. This one would name the body in which the soul of
the hated Ovegod Jeter, the Evil One himself, dwells?”
“T have tasted the taint ofitin his blood. The day has come.”
“How is that you can taste the knowledge ofit,” Lord Ilin said, “yet not
the name?”
Elias sighed, weariness etched on his brow. “Darkness conceals much.
I sense darkness, and sometimes what lies behind it, like shadows. I can
taste crimes like blasphemy, adultery, witchcraft. But the Evil One is
clever. His stealth is uncanny.” He shrugged, an apology. “I have never
tasted the like before. I am—mortal.”
Again, the judges conferred in agitated whispers.
“Could he—” Lord Illin paused thoughtfully. “Could he lie? To save his
neck? Deliver an innocent rather than—?”
Elias nodded, understanding. “Our enemy is uncanny.”
“You will be provided a torturer, to ensure he confesses true, and
betrays no innocent. We will witness. But let us retire for a moment first,
and refresh ourselves.”
Elias bowed. “What of the other prisoners? Shall I continue to taste
their souls?”
Illin sighed and muttered something Elias barely caught. It might have
been “Who cares what befalls this scum,” or similar words. He conferred
with his comrades again and ordered the prisoners condemned. “They
all sin,” he pronounced, loudly, so the witnesses could hear. “The tribu-
nal does no good service to confirm what is clear and known. Execute
them all, now.”
Elias heard a barely perceptible murmur from among the soldiers

54 onspec fall 2002

gathered around. Slumped shoulders and glazed eyes betrayed bone-
deep battle weariness. As Elias perceived it for the first time, so too did
their leaders, the judges of the tribunal. They seemed surprised.
The First Judge sighed, resigned. “Rest, all,” he called loudly to his
captain and troops. “Feast and rest. On the morrow at cock crow, we
begin.”
The soldiers murmured their content and went about their soldierly
business.
Guard around the captives’ pen was doubled. “Two score remain,”
one judge muttered to another as they left the yard, “and among them
hides the soul of the enemy of all God-fearing men. I will not sleep well
tonight.”
“I would hate to wear the Soul Taster’s sandals when it comes time to
try that soul.” Elias heard the group’s muffled laughter and looked away.
The judges retired for the eve to their tents outside the castle, beyond
the battlefield wasteland. The sun dropped behind the castle walls, cool
shade to some, and chill to others.
After a long day of tasting captured troops’ blood, Elias craved a sooth-
ing drink of cold, clear water to wash the salty grit from his mouth. He
found a tin cup at the guard station beside the torn and burnt gate and
walked to the castle moat.
A stream served as moat, running from Terrion Mount past the castle
and south to join the Long River in the Yemada Plain. A bend in the
river formed a protective arch around three parts of the castle. A steep
embankment formed the fourth side, making a natural fortress.
Brought down in a day’s siege by King Nathan the Just’s army.
Elias knelt on the stream bank, a good half-mile upstream from the
castle, and filled his cup. He tilted it back to drink, reveling in the clean
glacial taste, marvelously natural. God’s own handiwork, untainted by
man’s sins.
“I often wondered what the Soul Taster tastes when he eats.”
Elias started, dropping the tin cup. He bowed from where he kneeled
to the judge, Lord Illin, who stood a few paces away.
“IT apologize, lordship. I did not hear you approach.”
“You eat no meat. Yet no soul remains in dead flesh.”
“It is not good for the digestion, my lord, nor the palate, which I
must keep sharp for my calling. All things have souls.” Elias stood at the
judge’s nodded permission, hands folded, head bowed. Illin sat on a
stool that a slave placed near him. The slave withdrew twenty paces and
tried to make himself invisible.
“Except the body in which dwells the Evil One’s soul.”

Ken Rand 55
 “I amend: all living things have souls. The body the Evil One inhabits
has a soul. Jeter’s. Difficult to penetrate, that darkness, even for me. How
may I serve my lord?”
“Tell me of the prisoner who would confess the Evil One’s where-
abouts.”
“What of him?”
“I watched your face in the courtyard as he bargained for his life. I
wonder.”
“Wonder, my lord?”
“Did it not seem odd how quickly he offered to confess? Others before
him must have known the identity of the Ovegod’s host body. Yet, none
stepped forth. Why?”
“Enchantment? Fear?”
“Fear? The Duke’s head is spiked at the gate. Who did they fear?”
Elias took a breath, composing himself, despite his heart hammering
in his throat. “I believe, my lord, the captives fear the Evil One, whose
soul is among them still. Their own fear enchants them.”
“Yet the prisoner offered to confess. He betrays his God. Why, Soul
Taster? Why?”
Elias shrugged, moving slowly lest his trembling betray him. “Let us ask
him on the morrow.”
“In the course of time, Jeter’s host’s blood would have passed over your
tongue, anyway. As we would test all the prisoners. So we had planned.
Correct?”
“It is likely, my lord,” Elias said through tight lips.
“Would you not have tasted—Hzm, then? Eventually?”
Elias shrugged. “He is uncanny. We know so little of His ways. I found
knowledge of Him tainted in this prisoner today as so slight a shadow—I
confess I almost missed it.”
Lord Illin stood silent for a long time. Then: “Your power is imper-
fect?”
“As are all things human. Whereas, Jeter, the Ovegod—”
“I see.” And the First Judge turned on his heel and walked away.

SOLDIERS, THOSE AWAKE AT SUNRISE, WARMED THEMSELVES ON FIRES IN THE

courtyard, on the walls, and elsewhere inside the castle and beyond. On
those many small fires chickens, rabbits, cats, and dogs roasted. No cock
lived to crow the dawn.
The soldiers made excuses to abandon their duties to witness the
tribunal’s assembly in the courtyard. Their commanders did not object.
They too stood as witness in the yard and on the overlooking walls.

56 onspec fall 2002

 The tribunal assembled as they had the day before, a fresh white linen
cloth on the table. They faced the prisoner and the torturer and settled
with grave dignity into place before First Judge Lord Illin nodded to
proceed.
As the day before, except for the crows at feast, silence descended on
the courtyard.
A soldier pushed the prisoner forward onto his knees, the one who the
day before had offered to confess, and the torturer did his job.
The first screams scattered crows into the sky, where they cawed,
annoyed. They soon adapted to the screams and returned to their feast.
In time, the prisoner swooned and Illin nodded to the torturer to halt.
The torturer’s pale blubbery skin shown with sweat and small dots of
fresh blood. He dropped a many-tailed whip in a sack he’d brought with
him, sat on a stool, and toweled himself down, awaiting further com-
mand.
The judges likewise took the opportunity to refresh themselves. Slaves
poured fragrant cold mead into stone mugs.
Elias stood, hands folded, indifference etched on his face. The tor-
ture was redundant. Hadn’t the prisoner agreed to confess? Still, the
established procedures must be followed. It was, after all, for the greater
good.
At last, the prisoner regained consciousness. The judges deemed his
tongue lubricated enough by his own pain and blood that he would tell
only truth when asked the question.
“Who?” Illin bent forward, as did the others, the torturer, Elias, and
the soldiers.
The man tried to utter a name, but his dry tongue stuck in his mouth. A
splash of cold water loosened the whispered phrase: “Timon the Red.”
“Is this person among your comrades?” A judge pointed at the captive
compound across the courtyard. “Among those?”
The man nodded.
“You will point to him.” The judges stood and walked to the compound
gate. Two soldiers bore the prisoner along.
In the compound, a small corral of sticks and brambles lashed together
with rawhide, huddled the miserable prisoners. None moved, but for
their eyes. Their feral eyes, dark and haunted, watched the procession
outside their keep.
The tortured prisoner aimed a finger at a tall, red-haired man in the
arena. The other prisoners’ heads swiveled as if mounted on windvanes
to fix on the accused.
Who laughed.

KenRand 57
 Timon the Red laughed when he realized his comrade was naming
his body host of the Ovegod Jeter, the Evil One Incarnate. He shook his
head and laughed. He laughed a staccato cackle—madness. Drool spilled
from his open mouth and his arms and legs pulled into a fetal position.
He laughed, face red, contorted, shaking his head: “Nononono—”
“Fetch him.” The First Judge nodded to two soldiers and, without fur-
ther ado, turned back to the tribunal table. The other judges followed, as
did the torturer and Elias. A murmur flitted among the soldiers as they
dragged the mad prisoner forth. The one who confessed Timon the Red
as the Evil One was forgotten, left where he lay, his life spared as reward
for his confession.
The judges dismissed the torturer with a tossed coin. The silent man
bowed, gathered his gear, gave Elias a sidelong glance, one colleague to
another, and left.
“Soul Taster, step forth.” Ilin waved. Elias stood before the tribunal table.
He bowed.
“You have tasted countless sinners’ souls in your time, tirelessly,”
Illin said, voiced low and husky with wonder. “I have watched. You have
tasted wickedness that would have left lesser men mindless, would have
sent others screaming to their mothers for comfort, or to early graves.
Murder, adultery, paganism, witchcraft, deceit. greed—these and more
sins you have tasted. I confess I could not have withstood it, not for a
lifetime, as you have. How you do it, I cannot guess.”
The First Judge paused, took a deep breath, then his voice rose so all
could hear. “To your duty, Soul Taster. Do it.”
In the silent yard, and the growing heat, face impassive, Elias nodded
assent.
A soldier pushed the laughing prisoner forward. He pulled the man’s
arm away from his side and held it out. The soldier looked at the tribu-
nal, received their nod. Then he looked at Elias and got his.
The soldier slit the prisoner’s arm with a dagger.
The man hissed, laughter ceased, as a red line grew on the out-
stretched arm, near the wrist. The line widened and began to drip onto
the courtyard dirt.
Elias sucked at the substance of the prisoner’s soul.
At once, Elias sprayed red away from him, a hideous font. He screamed,
an animal in a trap, and fell to the ground on his back and convulsed,
spine rigid, head and heels banging against the hard dirt, eyes white. He
clawed at his chest, ripped his cloak to shreds, fingers gouged his bony
chest.
The tribunal stood as one in horror, eyes agog. “Hold him down.” Illin

58 onspec fall 2002

pointed to a soldier. “See he does not hurt himself.”
Two soldiers pinioned Elias’ arms and two pinned his thrashing legs.
Another tried to keep Elias from dashing his brains against the hard
ground.
In time, the convulsions eased, and the fascinated onlookers drew
breath. Elias looked around him, eyes wide, tried to speak. “I—I’m all
right.” He coughed, spasmed.
They helped him sit and water was brought, which Elias gulped. He
stood, with help, on shaky legs.
“Soul Taster?” Illin leaned toward him, hand extended, almost touch-
ing his, brow knit with concern.
“Never have I—” Elias coughed again. “Never have I tasted such foul-
ness, such black evil. Not just sin, to which an ordinary man might suc-
cumb. But evil, pure and black.”
The judges and soldiers stepped back from the prisoner, who sat, head
wobbly, eyes glazed, breath shallow. He blinked, tried to focus.
“In this body, then,” Lord Illin pointed at the man, voice husked with
awe, fascination, “dwells the soul of the Evil One, Jeter the Ovegod?”
Elias nodded, spit.
“Lies.” The prisoner found sudden strength, focus on Elias. “The
other one lied to you—”
“Silence.” Illin drew back in distaste.
“—to save himself. He hates me, always has.”
“Silence him,” Illin ordered. A soldier withdrew a sword from a scab-
bard and stepped toward the prisoner.
“As do you, Soul Taster.” The prisoner caught Elias’ eye. “You lie as
well.”
Elias gasped and flushed with shock. Anger.
The soldier hesitated, looking for a command from the tribunal. But
the First Judge hesitated, looked at Elias, a frown creasing his high fore-
head.
Elias swallowed a bellow of range between gritted teeth.
“Tell them the truth, Soul Taster. Tell them—”
The prisoner’s head lolled back from his slit throat, gushing blood in
a fine arc. Elias tossed the sword on the ground, the one he’d snatched
from the soldier. He stepped back, folded hands across his chest, head
bowed. Weary. His anger had been appeased by sudden, impulsive
action, as quickly gone as it had arrived.
Crows cawed from the battlefield beyond the castle walls. In the court-
yard, the only sound was a gurgle from the thrashing prisoner’s throat.
Soon the man lay still, blood purple in the dirt.

Ken Rand 59
 The judges conferred in a whispered huddle. At last, they nodded
and Lord Illin spoke. “Burn this body.” He pointed to the dead prisoner.
“Here. Do it now.”
Soldiers brought firewood and a torch. The stench of burnt flesh rose
into the air on a mushrooming black cloud. Soldiers, judges, and Elias,
all left the courtyard.
First Judge Lord IIlin motioned to Elias to join him in a leisurely walk
along the battlements. A private conversation.
For a long while, the two walked side by side in silence. “In all your
years, Soul Taster, did you ever imagine you would witness the day?”
“No, my lord. Never.”
“Yet hasn’t it been our goal since our mutual charges began, yours and
mine? To seek out not only sin in men, but to find and eradicate sin’s
very source?”
“As we have done today.”
“Have we?” The judge looked at Elias, eyebrow raised.
Elias sighed. “No, my lord. We have not. Today’s victory was—small.”
“Why so?” Illin sounded as if drilling a novitiate class in catechisms.
“Because when death occurred to Timon the Red, the soul in the body
returned to its immaterial plane. So it is written. So it is known.”
The judge nodded. “The Evil One lives on.”
“To seek a new host through which to manifest among men.”
“So, Soul Taster, our work continues.”
“Now, in nine months’ time, we test babes.” Elias sighed. “Where inno-
cence should dwell, we seek evil.”
“For this is how the evil passes from body to body, to manifest itself
among us. Or so it is written.”
“So it is known.”
Illin nodded. “I have no doubt you will deport yourself with your usual
humility and dignity.” He smiled as he placed a solicitous hand on Elias’
sleeve.
Elias found his own smile and cast his eyes down.
As they stood looking out over the battlefield, strewn with dead,
silence again befell them.
“Or did he speak the truth?” Lord IIlin addressed the moat below, into
which he flicked small stones.
“The prisoner? That his betrayer lied?” Elias shrugged. “I did find
deceit among that one’s sins.”
“I meant about you.”
Elias chuckled. “I confess my sins daily to my confessor. Deceit is never
among them.”

60 onspec fall 2002

 “Hm. But would it not be interesting if—”
“If what, my lord?”
“If we are wrong about how He passes among us. If Jeter the Ovegod,
the Evil One’s very soul, dwelt within—dare I say it? The Soul Taster’s
body? What better place to hide among us?”
“What better place, my lord? Hm. The body of a judge?”
First Judge Lord IIlin laughed. Elias, the Soul Taster, joined him. ¢

Science Fiction
Deposit Research
Collection
at the University
of Alberta Library
The University of Alberta Library is
soliciting donations to its recently
established Science Fiction Deposit
Research Collection to create a still larger,
publicly accessible, research collection of regional and national
significance, similar to that of Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science
Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy.
Science fiction and fantasy novels, journals, pulp magazines,
archives, and ephemera, as well as UFOlogy are being sought.
Donations are eligible for tax receipts for their appraised value.
For further information about the collection and donation
procedures contact:

Merrill Distad
at (780) 492-1429
(merrill. [email protected])
or
Randy Reichardt
at (780) 492-7911
([email protected]).

onspec fall 2002 61

“Road-kill makes for a nice organic
fertilizer. Chop it up into ten pieces,
scatter it in the soil bed, and you're
good to go.”

The Gathering
Michael Dewey

“I have seen great surprise expressed in horticultural works at the

wonderful skill of gardeners, in having produced such splendid
results from such poor materials...”

— Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

TED TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE STRING BEANS AND NEARLY

soiled his overalls. They were enormous! Beyond the size of anything his
Aunt Mag had managed to grow in all her living years.
“Holy cripes!” He plucked one off the vine for closer examination. “If
Old Maggie could see this...”
He was going to say she'd roll over in her grave, but that was no longer
possible.
The bean was longer and plumper than any string bean he’d ever seen,
at least twice the length of his hand as he measured from the bottom
of his palm to the tip of his middle finger. Ted caressed the vegetable,
unconsciously exploring its hills and valleys. Nearing the end, his finger
tips felt something odd, a small but firm, plate-like texture. A closer look
sent a sudden jolt through his body.
“Holy cri—”
 He dropped the bean and thumped his chest.
It couldn’t be.
He caught his breath and stooped to retrieve the fallen vegetable, as if
he were about to handle dynamite. His straw hat fell off and allowed the
sun a gander at his exposed head, just ripe for a good burning. Ignoring
the hat and squatting like a baseball catcher, he picked up the bean and
looked again. This time he could look at it without flinching.
The bean had a fingernail. A human fingernail.
Closer inspection showed that the bean indeed resembled a massive
gnarled green finger. The kind a kid named Jack might find on a giant’s
hand at the top ofa fairy tale beanstalk. He stared for a spell, wondering
how such a thing could’ve happened.
“Freak of nature,” Ted muttered, replacing the hat which—along with
the overalls, and despite his best efforts—made him look like a middle-
aged Tom Sawyer. Farm life. Quite a change from his former one as an
accountant. He felt himself smiling despite himself.
Ten paces back towards the house the smile vanished. He darted back
to the beanstalks, surveyed the other plants.
His jaw dropped.
Every bean in the garden had a fingernail.

TWO NIGHTS LATER TED MADE BEAN FINGERS FOR SUPPER. WITHOUT THE FINGERNAILS
of course. He snapped these off as you would the ends of any bean, as
he’d seen Aunt Mag do countless times. His imagination ran wild as he
prepared the beans for cooking: seed-pod knuckles, the snapping sound
that of breaking of bones. At one point he almost threw the whole lot
into the garbage, nearly overcome with the sickening feeling he hadn’t
experienced since dissecting frogs in seventh grade biology. But the nausea
passed, and soon enough the veggies were boiling away in the pot.
What else could he do with them? Sell them at the farmer’s market?
Nobody would buy beans with fingernails on them. And even though
they were the biggest beans he’d ever seen, he could hardly enter them
in the Blue Ribbon Vegetable Contest at the Hillsboro County Fair.
People would think he was Lucifer’s stepchild or something. So: eat
them, or let them rot. And Aunt Mag would surely come back to haunt
him if he did the latter.
Still, he kept his eyes shut when he shoveled the first forkful past his
lips, fending off surging mental images of dining cannibals. To his relief,
they tasted fine and went well with his lemon chicken and mashed pota-
toes with butter and sour cream. For dessert he had a slice of pecan pie
and really bad gas. He spent half an hour on the toilet passing evil wind

Michael Dewey 63
and not much else.
“Crazy, old Aunt Mag... You and your organic garden. What in the
world have we set in motion?” He was talking to himself now, just like
Mag used to before she’d been killed by the drunk driver. “Stubborn old
coot, I never should've let you do the gathering by yourself that day.”
The swirling of the flushing toilet brought him back from his trance.
Time to water the garden. He yanked up his pants.
That’s when it struck him. He hadn’t checked the other vegetables
for deformities. After discovering the anthropomorphic beans, Ted had
avoided the garden and devoted two days to crunching numbers.
My God, why didn’t I think to check the other plants? If beans could
grow into fingers, then surely...
Neglecting his boots, Ted made haste out the back door and across the
lawn. His socks acquired grass stains with each lumbering stride.
“Aunt Mag’s prize-winning veggies,” he repeated over and over. An
incantation. A useless one, he feared.
He hopped the fence awkwardly and dropped to his knees before the
first row of lettuce.
“Oh, don’t tell me!”
Maybe his eyes were playing tricks. He rubbed his fingers over a mas-
sive, leafy head. He felt the sensation of fuzz. Small white hairs, half an
inch long. Each leaf was covered in it, and—checking further up the
rows—each head of lettuce as well. Same with the cabbages. Furry with
human hair.
In a frenzy, Ted scrambled from row to row, from vegetable to veg-
etable. The peppers, long and pointy, felt like cartilage and had holes
like... like nostrils. He unearthed a handful of carrots and found mam-
moth pointing fingers, complete with knuckles and nails. They were like
the beany digits of some race of orange cretins. Another yank revealed
radishes transmuted into big toes. He plucked the potatoes from the
ground and dropped them, horrified: they gazed back with human eyes.
He turned to the pumpkins... gigantic orange globes with strange, flimsy
lumps protruding from the sides. Ears!
“Maggie! What have we done?” he moaned.
He kicked one aside and moved over to the... cantaloupes. Surely, not
the canta—
“What have I done?”
The huge round melons had nipples.
On every plant he found some oddity, some monstrous distortion of
nature. Each shattered the bounds of agricultural possibility.
“Aunt Mag’s prize-winning veggies,” he cried, deflated. “Everything’s

64 onspec fall 2002

gone haywire. It’s all a waste.”
He dropped to the ground, his face collapsing into the soil like a wilt-
ing plant, sobbing.
Sorry, Aunt Mag. Burn it all. I’ve got to burn it all. He rolled over in the
dirt, felt something smooth and firm pressing up against his cheek. A
big, juicy, plum tomato rested inches away from his watery eyes.
He hadn't checked the tomatoes.

OF COURSE, NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF TED HADN’T SHOWED UP

unexpectedly at his aunt’s home in New Hampshire four years before. It
had been a sunny July afternoon, back when the old bird was very much
alive and kicking.
“lll be a monkey’s uncle and a chimp’s aunt!” Margaret Munson said,
poking her head up from the garden. “Is that Theodore James Harrison
seer”
She cocked her head to avoid the glare of the sun and raised a gloved
hand to her brow. Bristly silver hair dangled in a long pony tail from
under a sun-faded red bandanna. Her short legs straddled the tomato
plants. Dirt caked the knees of her patched denim overalls.
“Yes, Aunt Mag,” said the tall man in the neatly pressed gray Armani
suit and powder-blue tie. “It’s me, Ted.” He stopped at the short fence
that encircled her garden, his face carefully devoid of expression.
“Surely the creek must’ve risen. Now I was expecting the milkman, but
when I saw you coming, I said to myself, this fellow’s dressed up rather
fancy for a milkman. Couldn’t be the postman neither, because he usu-
ally comes at noon and it’s well past noon now, and besides I already got
my mail to—”
“It’s me, Mag. We've established that it’s me,” Ted said, irritated. “How
are you?” He shifted his briefcase from right arm to left, already regret-
ting the question.
“Me? Well, I'm chugging along like the Chattanooga Choo-choo.
Taking the long, long way to Tipperary, Zippadee-doo-daa-ing my way
through, my oh my, yet another wonderful day.” She inhaled the clean
country air through her nostrils. “Still breathing, Theodore. And that’s
half the battle when you’re m—”
“That’s great, Aunt Mag,” he interrupted. “Glad to hear it. Listen.
Mother asked me to pay you a visit.”
Mag bent over to pull some weeds. “How do you like my farm? Com-
pletely organic, you know. Nothing but natural fertilizers.”
Ted shrugged.
She smacked her forehead with an open, soiled palm. “Oh, Maggie

Michael Dewey 65
May—Maggie May—here tomorrow—gone today. What kind of hostess
am I?” She shook her head and pointed to the gate. “Come on in, Theo-
dore. Why don’t you roll up those fancy sleeves and lend your old Aunt
Margaret a hand? Come tip-toe through the tulips, or tomato plants, as
the case may be.”
“Aunt Mag! You're not listening to me.”, Ted dropped his briefcase
and propped two frustrated fists on his hips. The thought of playing in
the dirt disgusted him. “Please try to focus, because I don’t have time to
waste. It’s nearly four o’clock and I still have three clients yet to visit.” He
let out a deep, impatient breath. “Mother asked me to pay a visit because
she’s worried about the...she’s worried about you. She said you might
need some help.”
“Your momma? Worried about me?” Mag’s joints creaked as she raised
herself up again, a fist full of weeds thumping against her flat chest.
“Come now, Theodore. I haven't seen front nor back of your momma
in almost ten years. And you, my only nephew, going on twelve years
now. I know I’m loonier than a rooster crowing midnight, but I’m not
buying that crock of road apples no matter who’s selling it—you or your
momma!”
She disgustedly threw the weeds into a pile and yanked off her gloves.
“Look at you. Forty years old and pouting like a pampered French
poodle. Don’t you dare come marching on to my property after all this
time like John Philip Sousa, huffing and puffing on your tuba, dictating
brassity-ass terms to me.” The old lady couldn’t see as well as she used to,
but she could still bore holes with her glaring green eyes, like Venetian
glass orbs, fired with anger. “You’ve got some nerve!”
“Aunt Mag, wait.” Ted removed his hands from his hips and placed
them carefully on the fence. “You've got it all wrong. I... we... [just came
by to help you with your taxes. Mother said that you would probably need
help wi—”
“Do I look like a flapjack in a frying pan to you? I’m not one for gam-
bling, but I’d be willing to bet you’ve got some kind of Magna Carta in
that Ivy League briefcase of yours that you want me to scrawl my Maggie
Hancock on. Some parchment full of legal mumbo-jumbo that puts me
in one of them shut-in places where I can spend the rest of my days
wading in my own drool. Of course, leaving you and your momma, with
her newly found concern, to sell my house and farm before I even have
a chance to wet the bed.” She formed the letter C with each hand and
began rubbing her wrists, alternating back and forth in quick motions.
The friction sounded like anxious sandpaper on wood. “It relieves the
tension,” she said, staring down his judging eyes. “Tension that wasn’t

66 onspec fall 2002

here before you came along. Now if you want to help me, Theodore,
grab a rake and start weeding. I’ve got some prize-winning vegetables to
grow.”

“WHERE ARE YOU OFF TO NOW, AUNT MAG?” TED ASKED, FAILING TO KEEP THE
indignation out of his voice. Doing the books for his aunt’s two-bit farm
stand was one thing, but geriatric daycare was something else entirely.
“Oh, here, there, and everywhere; following the Yellow Brick Road;
climbing every mountain. The hills are alive with the sound of music, you
know. I’m going out to have a listen and you’re coming with me, Theo-
dore.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him up from the table. “Those
accounts can wait another day or two. Right now I need help with the
gathering.”
“The gathering?” What the hell was the old biddy up to now?
“That’s right, the gathering. I'll need you to carry some of the heavier
loads for me.” She threw two dirty brown burlap sacks at him. She
laughed when one opened in mid-flight and landed across his face, like
a largemouth bass swallowing a baited hook. “Let’s go. I'll drive.”
They puttered along the roads of the New Hampshire countryside in
her old beat-up Subaru Brat. Maroon and rust colored. She called it the
tractor and never pushed the needle past twenty. She talked up her usual
storm of oral cocktails along the way—part memory, part song lyrics, part
homemade expressions.
Ted sat shotgun with the window down. The breeze helped drown
out the old lady’s yapping at least, and brought some relief to his hot,
bothered face. In the past month he’d learned to thoroughly dread these
weekly trips to Maggie’s, but his mother had convinced him of the long-
term fruits they’d reap from his short-term suffering. Securing the family
position in Maggie’s will was well worth enduring the annoying oddities
of his ostracized aunt.
The old woman was obviously playing tag with senility. And yet,
strangely, Ted felt that he was “it.” He was the one chasing after her; he
wondered if she’d ever be caught. She was so damned unpredictable.
Uncontrollable. Dangerous, even. Elusive as a moth, she flew erratic and
free-form. She fluttered through life, breaking through all his comfort-
able categorical nettings.
Ted found comfort in bottom lines. And the bottom line was this: visit-
ing Aunt Mag was a high maintenance project, much too time consum-
ing for a busy accountant like himself. He longed for the day when she
finally passed on to that great organic garden in the sky. Then he’d be
free of the old coot once and for all, free to sell the damn house and the

Michael Dewey 67
miserable acre she called a farm. If the real estate market stayed its pres-
ent course, he and Mother stood to make a bundle.
The bottom line: he was in it for the money. So for now he was stuck
with her. Stuck listening to her bothersome droning, her mindless prat-
tle. And stuck with this... gathering, as she called it. The latest of Aunt
Mag’s mystery errands.
The Subaru’s tires whined as Mag jammed on the brakes. “Whooop-
eee! Jumping jackpots! Theodore, grab the shovel.”
Stiffarming the dashboard, Ted glanced ahead and immediately
understood what the gathering was all about.
“O natural,” Mag said with a crooked smile, running out to examine
the raccoon carcass in the middle of the road.
Ted neared the beastly corpse, flat shovel in hand. His innards pro-
tested. The creature’s head was obliterated. Run over about a dozen
times, he guessed. All that remained was an unsightly clump of blood,
fur and pulverized bone smeared into the pavement. It was clearly a
raccoon; the tail was the giveaway, thick and striped like Daniel Boone’s
cap.
“Loosen that tie and start scraping, my lad,” she said, holding a burlap
sack open. “Quick, before another car comes along.”
“I—I—I can’t do this, Aunt Mag. This is... utterly repulsive.” He
caught a whiff of the foul stench. His stomach churned acid. He hated
the sight of blood.
“Well, aren’t we just a pussy in a panther’s clothing. It won’t bite you.
Doesn’t even have a head anymore.” She snapped the burlap bag. “Let’s
go!”
“Mag, surely you don’t intend to...”
“Bury the damn thing? Of course I’m going to bury it. What in the
name of God’s green acres do you think I’m going to do, eat it for break-
fast? I always said, there’s no sense in wasting a perfectly good dead crit-
ter. Look at it. Sure as heck won’t help the pavement grow.”
“Oooooh, bury it.” Thank heavens.
“Poor thing deserves a proper burial, don’t you think?”
“So this is the gathering? Road-kill patrol?”
“Chicken in the bread pan and Johnny come marching home! Give
it any name you like. Listen, Theodore. Don’t be turning up that col-
lege-educated nose of yours. Road-kill makes for a nice organic fertil-
izer. Returns all those natural nutrients to the soil. Manure, dead birds
and fish guts work the best, but next best thing is a good, old fashioned
hunk of road-kill. Chop it up into ten pieces, scatter it in the soil bed,
and you're good to go. That’s what I say. Come on now, shake a leg.”

68 onspec fall 2002

She snapped the sack again. “Quit groveling and start shoveling. I’ve got
some prize-winning vegetables to grow, and we’ve got to get to the vet’s
by four thirty. He’s got a sick rabbit that’s not long for this world.”

“It’s FIXED, THEODORE! I’M TELLING YOU, IT’S FIXED. THAT MARTHA DEWITT WINS
the blue ribbon every year, no matter what her crop looks like.” Maggie
balled her bony fingers into tense fists. “Mother Nature’s weeping as we
speak, Theodore. Crying tears of injustice. Niagara Falls on a rainy day.
Canadian side, of course.”
Ted shrugged. Hicksville County Fairs were absurd by nature. A waste
of time.
“Did you see her cucumbers, Theodore? Puny and flaccid, like my
poor John’s—”
“Mag!”
“Well, ’'m mad, Theodore. Madder than a Hatter drinking coffee at a
tea party. Poor Johnny, God rest his precious soul.”
“You've got a right to be mad, Mag,” he said, humoring her.
“You're telling me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, so help you God. That judge is nothing but a horny toad around
that Martha’s cleavage. Hornier than a pup with two peters, I'll say. Influ-
ences his judgment every year. It’s not right.”
The drive home from the fair was nearly maddening. In the three years
since Ted had been helping Aunt Mag, she’d come in second or third
every time. And her venting grew exponentially with each set-back. He
tuned her out, bristling at the thought of dealing with her burgeoning
dementia. She was losing more of her faculties each day. Memory loss.
Spells of disorientation. Signs of Uncle Alzheimer moving into her attic.
“Aren’t you coming in the house, Mag?” Ted paused in the driveway,
holding a basket of second-place red bell peppers.
He turned when she didn’t respond. She was still in the car. She was
crying.
He dropped the basket. He’d never seen the thick-skinned old Yankee
so vulnerable. He opened the passenger door and leaned in to help her
out. She clutched at him desperately. He stiffened—an instant’s instinc-
tive revulsion—then forced himself to relax. Her frail arms hugged him
for dear life. She soaked his shirt with tears. She cried—a good, long
cry—and after that came the rocking.
“There, there, Teddy bear,” she said.
Rocking gently.
“There, there, Teddy bear. Auntie’s here, so don’t be scared.” She was
rocking him now, like a baby.

Michael Dewey 69
 What did she say? Teddy Bear?
“There, there, Teddy bear. Auntie’s here, so don’t be scared.” She was
singing softly now. And the melody unnerved him, but not as much as
what followed.
Moving her hand between them, she unbuttoned her blouse.
“There, there, Teddy bear. Auntie’s here, so don’t be scared.”
By the time Ted backed away, her small, wrinkled breast was exposed.
“Mag! What are you—”
“There, there Teddy bear. I know you’re hungry, but Auntie’s here.”

THE FIRE GLOWED WARM AND GENTLE, LIKE THE BALM OF A DESERT BREEZE. MAGGIE
sat alertly in her rocker, sipping tea with honey. Ted tried to relax in the
La-Z-Boy beside her. She’d had a good nap after the fair, after... She’d
been exhausted. Overwhelmed.
“Aunt Mag,” he began. “Did you...”
It took more courage than he’d expected.
“Did you used to call me Teddy bear?”
The confusion on her face gave way to a smile from decades past. “Why
yes, yes I did. Did your momma tell you that?”
“No, Mag. You called me that this afternoon.”
“Did I?” Her eyes showed the laboring strains of a failing memory.
“Well, I haven’t called you that for a long, long time. Not since...”
She trailed off, drifting like smoke up the chimney.
“Not since what?” He leaned over and touched her spotted hand.
“Not since your momma told me stay away from you. Told me leave her
family alone until you were a grown man.”
“Mother said that? I knew there were problems between you two, but why
would she...?” He had to know. “Was it because of the breast-feeding?”
Mag said nothing. For a few moments the only sound came from the
birch logs crackling in the fire.
“Yes, because of the breast-feeding...and because of the drinking.”
She sipped her tea.
“Drinking? You mean you—”
“I mean her,” she said softly.
“No, what do you—”
She fixed him with a stare: he felt like a deer in headlights. “I mean,”
she said in a voice much stronger than it had any right to be, “that I was
breast-feeding you because your momma was a drunk! A flat-out, falling-
down-on-her-face, hollow-legged drunk!”
Her words paralyzed him.
“It wasn’t supposed to be that way.” she continued after a moment,

70 onspec fall 2002

calm again. “We were supposed to have our babies together—your
momma and J—but that’s not what happened.”
“You were pregnant too?” He squeezed her hand. “I had no idea.”
“Your cousin Melinda Jean was stillborn. My little Melinda.”
“Oh, Aunt Mag. I’m sorry. I never knew.”
“I know, dear. I know. It’s not the kind of thing people talk about at the
dinner table or at family reunions. It brings up a belly full of hurt.” She
swallowed another mouthful of tea. “Understand, Theodore, J was the
one who should have started on the booze.”
“But Mother never touches alcohol.”
“You were born two weeks after Melinda Jean,” she told him. “And
unfortunately, your father disappeared three days after you were brought
home from the hospital. I guess he didn’t have the wherewithal for
fathering. Left your momma stranded with an infant boy to care for.
Didn’t come back till you were three.”
“So you helped Mother raise me?”
“I took care of you for months on end, while she cried her eyes out.
Niagara Falls on a rainy day. Canadian side, of course. She had every
right to be depressed, but the drinking... that’s another story. She pretty
near drank herself to death at the time. I know she was hurting inside,
but it wasn’t right to be doing that with a little baby to take care of. That’s
what drove us apart, eventually.”
“So during that time, you... fed me...”
“I had to, Theodore. I had the milk in me and you were starving like
Mahatma Gandhi on a hunger strike.”
“And Mother was...”
“At the time, your momma was in no shape for mothering.”

“Goop GOLLY! THESE ARE THE LARGEST PLUM TOMATOES I’VE EVER SEEN!” JUDGE
Thompson's eyes were wide with wonder as he marked his clipboard.
“Bigger than butternut squash, Theodore Harrison. How did you ever
grow these, these magnificent vegetables?”
“Aunt Maggie’s all-organic magic garden,” Ted said with pride. “She
may have passed on, but I like to think there’s still a little piece of her in
everything that grows in that garden.”
Thank God the tomatoes are normal, he thought. Pleased he had entered
them in the Blue Ribbon Vegetable Contest at the Hillsboro County Fair.
Pleased he hadn't sold the farm, despite his mother’s protests.
“She was a fine woman, your aunt was, with a splendid green thumb.”
“Yes, she was. She certainly was.”
Judge Thompson moved on to the next table to inspect Martha

Michael Dewey 71
DeWitt’s eggplants, while Ted’s thoughts drifted back... still a little piece of
her in everything that grows in that garden...
Digging up her coffin had been the easy part. He’d worked by moon-
light the night after the funeral; the loose dirt had been easy to excavate.
Dismembering Aunt Mag had been the hard part... separating her limbs
with a hacksaw, the sound of metal teeth scraping against bone... the
smell of clumping, funeral parlor make-up and decaying skin... the
touch of her stiff, cold limbs. The sight of tearing flesh. Not an experi-
ence he’d ever forget.
The amputations had taken all night: hands, feet, legs, arms. Finally
the head. Aunt Mag’s lifeless head had been Ted’s only consolation
throughout the whole gruesome experience. Jerking up and down, it
appeared to nod in approval as he applied the saw to her neck. She
wanted this. Yes, she would’ve wanted this.
The head dropped to the ground with a thud and rolled around on
the basement floor like a piece of a broken mannequin. He felt an eerie
bond with Mag as he tied her hair into a pony tail with her bandanna. A
tear dropped from his eye to her withered cheek.
Ten pieces in all, including the torso. Ten pieces of Mag’s life to be
planted in the garden, nourishment for the soil. By dawn she was buried
again. Chop it up into ten pieces, scatter it in the soil bed, and you're good to go.
Isn’t that what she'd said?
How could I have done that? His last road-kill patrol. His last Gathering.
Then again, how could I not have?
It had been what she wanted. Of that much, he was certain.

THE SUBARU’S TIRES SPUN WILDLY, LEAVING A SMOKE SCREEN OF DUST BEHIND. THE
blue ribbon lay on the dashboard; the basket of tomatoes rode shotgun
on the passenger seat. He hadn't expected the noise. Others had heard
it too. That, that thumping sound, just barely this side of audible, but
growing. The dogs had heard it first, had come sniffing and growling.
Then the small children had started looking, well, intent on something.
Ted had made his escape as the first adults had begun congregating.
He'd had to get the tomatoes out of there before someone found out.
Before Martha DeWitt raised a protest.
Shifting into fourth, the fair a safe distance behind, he breathed a sigh
of relief.
“Zippadee-doo-daa. Zippadee-ay. My oh my, what a wonderful day.” He
felt a smile splitting his face. “We did it, Aunt Mag! Ha-haaaa! We won the
blue ribbon!” He had to shout just to hear himself over the thump-thump-
thumping shaking the basket.

72. onspec fall 2002

 Steering one-handed, he reached in and removed one of the huge
tomatoes. Kissed it. Revelled in its warmth, the pulsing strength of the
ventricles.
No sense in wasting a perfectly good dead critter. She'd said it herself.
Ted had always had a fondness for the bottom line. ¢

1, 2003
August 28 - September
TO FiCO N 61st World Science Fiction Convention
Guests of Honour: George R. R. Martin, Frank Kelly Freas,
Mike Glyer, and Toastmaster: Spider Robinson
GoHst of Honour: Robert Bloch, the spirit of Toronto Worldcons
Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Royal York Hotel, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Renaissance Toronto Hotel at Sky Dome

Memberships: Attending - $220cdn, $145us; Supporting or Child- $60cdn, $40us.

Rates effective January 1, 2002.
Please make cheques payable to "TORCON 3", VISA & MASTERCARD accepted.
Important Information: TORCON 3
Chair@ TORCONS.ON.CA ~ direct line to con Chair ‘
[email protected] ~ Tell us your thoughts P.O. Box 3, Station A,
Info@ TORCONS.ON.CA ~ General inquiries Toronto, Ontario Canada M5W 1A2
Publications
@ TORCONS.ON.CA ~ PR's
Email: [email protected]
Volunteers@ TORCONS3.ON.CA ~Volunteer for the con Website: HTTP://WWW.TORCON3.ON.CA
*Worldcon* and “World Science Fiction Convention® are registered service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an
unincorporated literary society

onspec fall2002 73
On the floor, nothing else mattered
except the dance. It was performance
art taken to the next dimension, as
living color and living light...

Suit Man
David K. Yeh

MATT JACKED HIMSELF INTO THE SUIT. IT WAS DIFFICULT BY

himself. He wished Rachel were around to help. She always knew how
to work the patches just right, cinching here and recalibrating there.
But Rachel was in Ibiza pulling in a thousand a night on tips alone,
and wouldn't be back until the season was over. He remembered laying
eyes on her for the first time. She’d been working the Phoenix Club for
Freddie Q in from Chicago. Half the dance floor had stopped to watch.
There were lots of rich suburban kids who could afford top-of-the-line
equipment, mainly slummers from Woodbridge. But few knew how to
really work the hardware. She was a pro. She was locked-down into a
skintight Baudrillard import, all black and gold iridescence streaming
across her limbs. She moved like a tiger made of molten metal.
Afterwards, Freddie introduced Matt in the VIP lounge. She liked Matt’s
face, she said. Her perfume had smelled of burnt sugar and peaches. She
said he reminded her of her kid brother.
He rechecked the modem, and snapped it in place tight against the
base of his skull. He felt the familiar uplink charge buzz down his spine.
Carefully, he unplugged the hangers and stepped out of the closet. The
first time online in any suit was always something special. He stood in
front of the full-length mirror and made a conscious effort to relax
his breathing. He ran a broadband spectrum check. A rainbow halo
coalesced over his head and floated down his body, fading out when it hit
the floor. He ran the check again across amplitude and phase. Smooth as
silk. He started to grin like an idiot, he couldn’t help it. He’d spent two
months’ salary on this used Wachowski. Of course, it was worth it. It was
practically brand new.
The previous owner had taken a bullet in the back. The shooting had
made headlines. Johnny Liguimez had been the mayor’s illegitimate
grandson. Everyone knew that story. And now the kid was dead, gunned
down at the Guvernment Night Club. It was tabloid stuff. That had been
a year ago. How this Wachowski found its way into the run-down pawn
shop at Church and Dundas, Matt had no idea. He wasn’t about to ask
either. But he had recognized the suit the second he laid eyes on it. He’d
seen it on CityTV, in the security-cam’s frame-by-frame replay. There
was the unmistakable, perfectly round hole right between the shoulder
blades, and the uglier, larger stained hole in the chest.
Rachel wouldn’t have approved if she knew. For all her glamour and
cool, she was sometimes downright conservative. But for Matt, this was a
find hejust couldn’t pass up. There was something gothic and romantic
about wearing a murdered man’s suit. The pawnbroker specialized in
antiques and collectibles. Bloodstained cyberwear wasn’t his usual stock.
Matt offered an opening price. Without a word, the man took the suit
down from where it hung beside an autographed Tie Domi jersey, and
started wrapping it up. Matt’s heart must have skipped a beat or two. The
old guy’s wife watched him from the top of the stairwell. Nobody was
smiling except Matt. Not that he cared. The only thing that mattered
was that he was now the owner of an authentic Wachowski Model Nine
Series DanceSuit,
Of course, the repair job was something to consider. But there wasn’t
anything Matt couldn't fix. He had a rep as a hardware jock in the local
scene. He was the first to use subdermal implants to amplify the interface
signal. Now every hardcore Suit was using subs. The underground cyber-
labs were making a fortune thanks to Matt. Spread the groove was all he
had to say. He wasn’t a bioengineer. He was an artist. The Wachowski
took him a week’s steady work. He kept his phone off the hook, polished
off two cases of Coke and a carton of smokes. All the time, he listened
to Moby and imagined what he’d look like on the floor next to Rachel.
Moby was what his mom used to listen to when he was a kid. It made him
think of the sea. It was a bittersweet recollection.
Along the way, he uncovered some unusual residual memory. It was
anomalous stuff. No matter how much he scrubbed, he couldn’t wash it
out. It was like a really bad biofeedback burn. The mesh had been badly
David K.Yeh 75
fused. He hadn’t expected this much damage. In the end, he was forced
to rent a nano-scalpel from St. Mike’s and let the little assemblers pick
out the bad molecules one by one. That took almost seventy hours and
another month’s paycheck. Okay, so he’d be eating Kraft Dinner for the
rest of the summer. He’d done it before.
When he was finally finished, Matt knew the Wachowski was in better
shape than when bought brand new. He’d upgraded the texture mapper,
installing a Barthes-4000, and even added a wetwrap to the axial sensor
array. Standing in front of the mirror, he looked and felt like a million
bucks. So what if he’d dropped out of grad school? So what if he worked
nights programming PRN chips for drooling schizos down at the dark? So
what if his dad didn’t even talk to him anymore? Matt understood suits.
“Pickup Single Gun Theory, Velasquez Deep House remix,” said Matt.
The stereo kicked in, hard and loud, heavy on the bass, drowning out the
streetcars rumbling past on Roncesvalles. The mice in the floorboards
scrambled and ran. At the sound of the music, the suit began vibrating,
almost imperceptibly. Matt started to sweat a little, between the thighs
and under the armpits. He felt like he was being cranked up the first
huge drop on a rollercoaster ride at Wonderland.
But Wonderland was for kids. He was a Suit Man.

IN THE OLD MOVIE SaTuRDAY NIGHT FEVER, THERE’S A SCENE WHERE JOHN
Travolta’s character. Tony Manero, steps out onto the dance floor in his
polyester vanilla ice-cream suit and the whole world just transforms for
him. Matt used to dream this scene over and over when he was a kid. As
it turned out, it was Rachel’s favorite movie as well. They got a laugh out
of that, but they took it seriously too. It was more than an aesthetics they
shared, it was a philosophy of life. On the floor, nothing else mattered
except the dance. It was performance art taken to the next dimension,
as living color and living light. The DanceSuits were cyberwear: four
million liquid crystal pixels stretched across your skin in direct synaptic
linkup to the central nervous system. That was the basic Club Monaco
issue. Top-line imports like the Baudrillard or the Wachowski-9 series
might have up to six times the resolution and processing speed, as well
as holographic embedding. These were the Stradivariuses of DanceSuits.
But they didn’t guarantee you could play. It took a certain mindset to
operate a suit, a special skill and talent. It was a Zen state. Matt was a
purist. Too many club kids had burnt out the titanium-nikel micromesh
on their suits rushing on Ecstasy or Wave. Drugs and suits never sat
together well. So those who did wear the DanceSuits stood a breed
apart from the chemical-happy clubbers, adored and envied. At any big
event on any Saturday night, there might be one Suit out of every twenty
76 onspec fall 2002
dancers on the floor. But out of every twenty Suits, there might be only
one like Rachel. Or one like Matt.

Marr PAID THE DRIVER AND STEPPED OUT OF THE CAB. A STINK OF ROTTING FISH
came in off the shore. Another spill. It was all in the news. The Great
Lakes were going to rat piss because of the Americans. Matt didn’t want
to hear about it, much less smell it. He hurried to the front of the line.
They knew him here at the Orange Room. The big bouncer, Leroy, saw
him coming, unhooked the red rope and let him in. Where the Suits
went, the crowds followed. But Matt wasn’t dressed tonight. He was here
to check out the Samurai from the Bronx who was supposed to be the
next big thing on the East Coast. He was also meeting Rachel. She had
flown in three days ago. She had sounded rough on the phone. She was
just getting over a case of food poisoning. She was more upset than sick.
She was fighting with her insurance company over expenses. She needed
a night out. She needed Matt.
Dr. Fox, the resident DJ, was just finishing up his set. It was a little
after midnight and the room was starting to feel crowded. Dry ice mush-
roomed across the kaleidoscopic dance floor. In one corner, a cluster of
Vk-heads lounged, goggled and gloved, giggling amongst themselves.
Matt scowled in disapproval. What the hell were they doing here? VR
junkies had never impressed Matt, the way they tripped out of the world
as if reality were too much for them to handle. Suits and VR junkies were
aesthetic enemies. Matt had written a story around that a couple years
back for NOW magazine. Why did: they even bother coming out to the
clubs if they were going to disconnect?
He spotted the Samurai up in the DJ booth, jacking in. The kid looked
prepubescent. He was wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt that read TUNE
across his chest. Matt smiled. He owned the same shirt. The kid adjusted
his headphones and let the last track roll to an end. In the silence that
followed, the crowd started to whistle and holler. The Samurai raised one
hand as if in benediction, then hit a switch. The sound of the ocean began
to pour over the floor. The kid was sampling Moby. Matt laughed out loud.
A slim pair of hands encircled his waist from behind and a husky voice
spoke in his ear, “Check out this girl. It’s his little sister.”
Matt watched the female Suit step up onto a podium. The figure was
slight, elfin. She was wearing rollerblades. Her body seemed made of
water, translucent and streaming. Her arms extended into sinuous,
shimmering pseudopods. The bass kicked in. She twirled madly, explod-
ing into fire. The crowd roared. The flames fanned out into spiraling
crowns edged with scintillating stars. The crowd began to dance. Matt
nodded in approval. It was a nice effect. But only subdermals allowed that
David K.Yeh 77
kind of control, and this Suit was definitely underage. “She’s fourteen,”
said Rachel. “It'll be five years before she can buy herself a drink in this
place.”
Matt turned his head and kissed Rachel on the temple, “They get
younger and younger,” he complained. “What is it with the implants?
What are they looking for?”
“The same thing you were looking for, Matt, when you went under the
knife. How old were you?”
“I was twenty. That was eight years ago. It was a statement then.”
“It still is now. It’s just a new generation. You should be happy. Isn’t
your dream to have everyone in the whole world suited-up and dancing
together? These two kids from the Bronx are riding the edge.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“We're still the best, darling,” Rachel smiled wickedly. She stepped
around to give him a big hug. Perfect brown skin, green eyes, explosive
black hair. Plunging V-neck leopard print bodysuit. She looked fabulous.
“I missed you,” said Matt. “How are you feeling?”
Rachel laughed dryly. “Like hell. Glad to be home though.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I’m on antibiotics. On second thought, I'll have a gin and tonic. We’re
celebrating, aren’t we? You said on the phone you had something to tell
me. Let’s see. You’ve found the perfect boy and you're getting married.”
“No, not quite. Close though.”
Rachel studied him narrowly. All around them, phosphorescent dol-
phins leapt and fell. The crowd surged like the sea. Brilliant sapphire
planes of light fanned together to form icebergs that shattered into a
thousand seagulls. Matt started to giggle. Rachel took him by the hand.
“All right,” she said. “Tell me about it, and make it a double. Why do I
suddenly have the feeling I’m not going to like this?”

OF courSE, RACHEL DIDN’T APPROVE. BUT SHE ALSO KNEW MATT WELL ENOUGH
to understand what the Wachowski meant to him. If a man had been
murdered in the suit, she didn’t want to hear anything about it. In
fact, she was the one who suggested they test it out next week at the
Transcendence Ball. Tickets had sold out a month ago. But Rachel was
invited to a pre-Ball dinner party up in Yorkville thrown by one of the
organizers. Matt could be her date. It wasn’t the first time she had pulled
a stunt like this. There were a lot of reasons Matt loved Rachel.
The night before Transcendence, he tried on the Wachowski again. A
good suit was an artist’s instrument. He lit a single diamond pixel in his
hand. He ran it across his fingertips, engaged the holographies and let it
slowly bloom out of his palm, a crystalline fractal that floated off his skin
78 onspec fall 2002
before fading away.
It took Matt’s breath away,
Corporate head-hunters had spotted Matt when he was still a grad stu-
dent at U of T. There had been a career waiting for him to happen then.
He could be living in a condo on New Ward’s Island by now. But he had
chosen his path. He remembered getting his first DisneyKids DanceSuit
on his eleventh birthday. He fused its mesh within eight months. The
warranty replaced it twice before the manufacturers caught on and sent
him a more durable TeenSuit model through the mail. When other kids
were skateboarding and playing road hockey. Matt was watching Electric
Circus and lighting up like a Christmas tree in the living room. His mom
thought it was cute. His dad had more serious reservations. Dad was right
in the end.
Moby sang about his troubles with God, It wasn’t until years later that
Matt looked back and thought about what had pushed his mom to the
breaking point. She had been a free spirit trapped in a marriage that was
slowly suffocating her to death. Maybe others could live that way, but not
Mom. On a trip to visit her sister in Charlottetown, she walked into a rip-
tide under the stars. Everyone called it an accident, but Matt knew better.
He had just started university that year. He supposed she had waited for
him. Matt hated her for it.
In the clubs, under the lights. Matt found something close to absolu-
tion. He didn’t need the booze or the drugs to make it work. But he did
wear a suit. He imagined what it must be like to float beneath the sea,
to look up and see the twinkling stars of the universe so far overhead.
Tomorrow, he would shave his body. He would oil his skin and charge up
his amps. He would step out onto the dance floor wrapped in the twenty-
four million pixel relays of his new suit, and the whole world would trans-
form for him. Maybe then he might just find himself the perfect dance.

“DJ YOSHI IS GOING TO BE SPINNING IN THE TRUDEAU LOUNGE AT TWELVE-THIRTY,”

exclaimed Rachel, carefully filing the pads of her fingertips. She sat
cross-legged in the middle of her four-poster bed, framed by purple and
baby-blue lava lamps. “I'd like to start with Yoshi. I think that would be
nice.”
Matt, who had just finished showering, glanced out of the bathroom.
“Where do you keep your eyedrops?”
“Second shelf on the left.” Rachel pulled on the gloves of her Baudril-
lard. She flexed her hands, adjusting the subdermals in her forearms. “I
haven’t danced in weeks. I want to start with someone friendly. Yoshi is
our friend, isn’t he?” This last remark she addressed in a little girl’s voice
to her suit laid out beside her on the sheets. Yoshi was one of Rachel’s
David K.Yeh 79
favorite DJs, a rising star out of Japan. Matt didn’t mind the new Tokyo
trance so much. Of course they could start the evening there. But at
one o’clock he was moving onto the main floor when Bionic-Flux from
Detroit was scheduled to take over.
“Are any of your other friends coming?” he called out.
Rachel lay back, curling up with her white feather boa. “No. Just you
and me, darling. But guess who else I found out is going to be there?”
“Who?”
“Some scouts from Nike Emporium. They’re in town to sign fresh
talent for a new ad campaign.”
“Oh, really,” muttered Matt.
“I hear they're looking for male performers...”
“Not interested, Rachel.”
“Their contracts—"
“It’s Nike,” declared Matt. “Yes, I know. Their contracts are the best
in the business. You've told me this before. I just don’t want to be in the
business.”
“Matt, I don’t understand you.” Rachel sat up in bewilderment. “It’d
be so easy for you. The money’s amazing. All you have to do is dance—”
“To Their beat, to Their music, to Their marketing campaign.” Matt
stuck his head out the door. “Look, I’m not going to tow any fucking cor-
porate logo! You know I respect your work, Rachel. You're a professional,
and that’s what you do. But that’s not what I do. Thanks for your interest,
but no thanks. You should know by now. So can we just drop it?”
Rachel’s smile compressed into a thin line. “All right, darling,” she
finally said. “Have it your way. Just promise me you'll be polite to them.”
She poked at the wedge of lemon in her drink. “I said that they could
talk to you.”
Matt leaned against the doorframe. What was he supposed to say?
Rachel was too beautiful to be angry with, “I'll be polite.” He dropped
the towel from around his waist. “Now could you please help me into my
goddamn suit?”

THE NIKE SCOUTS WERE AT THE DINNER PARTY. MATT WAS POLITE. HE POCKETED
their business cards and excused himself to the balcony. They had never
even seen him dance. But Rachel had put in the word for him. He
knew she meant well. Underneath his clothes, the Wachowski purred
in neutral, a tingling sensation across his skin. Matt always suited-up a
couple hours before dancing. It gave the receptors a chance to habituate
to his biochemistry. It added up to microseconds of better response time,
but it made a difference.
The view across the city was spectacular. The sun had just set. Lake
80 onspec fall 2002
Ontario glittered from the lights of the condos on New Ward’s Island.
Matt lit a cigarette and watched satellites drift across the sky. Behind him,
raucous laughter rose above an old Bjork track.
The only reason he ever ate sushi and drank champagne was because
Rachel invited him to parties like this. She was something of a star on the
dance circuit. He could be too. That was her whole point. So why was he
living in a cockroach-infested flat on Roncesvalles? Maybe it was because
dancing was the only thing he ever had. He wasn’t about to exchange it
for money. Matt had paid off his debts long ago. He didn’t owe anybody
anything. That was the way he liked it. Nobody was going to own him.
He hesitated, eyes wide open. Something was wrong. The hairs slowly
stood up on the nape of his neck. Static ran down his back. Something
was definitely wrong. A sudden sharp pain punched through his chest.
Matt staggered. The Wachowski vibrated violently for a second, then
shut down. Matt gasped, his heart pounding. He started coughing. He
thought he was going to throw up. Rachel was at his side. “Matt!” She
held onto him. “What’s wrong? Matt?”
“...big time sensuality...” sang Bjork.
He knew others were watching. He straightened himself with an effort.
Broken glass and ice crunched underfoot. “I’m fine. I’m okay.” He
brushed her off. “You know me, too much tempura and it’s heartburn city.
Gotta cut back. Bad habit.” He waved and smiled at the others. He mut-
tered under his breath for Rachel, “Where’s the freaking washroom?”
The pain was intense. He tried not to panic. In the bathroom, he
leaned over the marble sink and almost did throw up. Gradually, the
pain began to lessen. He could breathe again. His suit had crashed.
“Fuck,” he cursed. He fumbled at his shirt buttons. “Fuck!” This was not
good. His pupils were dilated. He opened his shirt front, unclipped the
charger under his left armpit and plugged it into the wall. At least the
backup diagnostics were working. He ran a systems check. Abruptly, the
Wachowski came back online. Matt blinked. “What the...?”
A knock. “Matt, let me in.” Rachel. He stared into the mirror. “Matt.”
He unlocked the door without looking away. Rachel came in and shut
the door behind her. She stood beside him. After a moment, she whis-
pered, “Matt, that’s not funny.”
“I’m not doing it,” said Matt. Down the hall, someone was making a
toast. Glasses clinked to a round of applause and loud cheers.
“It’s looping,” said Rachel.
“I can see that.”
As they watched. Matt’s chest exploded, frame by frame, and a bullet
lazily spiraled outwards in a spray of blood. The image faded. A burst of
static, then the same fuzzy sequence.
David K.Yeh 81
 “What is it?” Rachel asked.
“I’m not sure. A bug in the system.” His voice was shaking.
“Well, make it stop.”
“All right.” The image disappeared.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” said Matt. “Nothing.” .
Rachel shook her head. “What do you mean, nothing?”
“Look, I didn’t do anything. I think it was a random data trace, a
residual echo. It’s probably burned itself up by now. I don’t think we’ll
see it again.”
“Bullshit.” Rachel stood back. “Matt, take off the suit.”
“Why?”
“You know why. That’s his memory imprint. Take off the suit. “
“It doesn’t work that way, Rachel. Look, it’s impossible—”
A sharp knock on the door. The party was getting ready to leave for
Transcendence. Matt stared at Rachel. Sweat beaded on his upper lip.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“What about the Wachowski?”
“I’ve checked the Wachowski, It’s fine. We’re fine. Let’s go,” He felt
like he was floating underwater, dragged down by a riptide, but every-
thing was okay. He reached out and held Rachel by the shoulders. “I’m
fine. Trust me.”
Far overhead, he could see the twinkling stars of the universe.

WHEN HE WAS REALLY LITTLE. MATT’S MOM USED TO SHOW HIM OLD CELLULOID
footage of Woodstock back in *69, dirty kids with long hair dancing in the
rain. She would tell Matt how Grandma had been one of them, and how
nine months later she had been born.
Music and dancing was in their blood, she said. Except for his looks,
Matt was nothing like his father. She passed on to Matt all her old CDs,
Everything from Madonna to Erasure to the Chemical Brothers. Any-
thing that had a beat. At her funeral, Matt had them play Radiohead’s
“Fake Plastic Trees.” Not that it was her favorite song, but he thought it
summed up her life. Dad pretty much stopped talking to him after that.
That was when Matt seriously started getting into the suits.
He made it through university and even got into grad school. But his
one focus in that whole time never changed. He stuck to the raves and
circuit scene, avoiding the popular virtual clubsites. He was old-fashioned
that way. He and Rachel had that in common. They had come a long way
since tie-dye T-shirts. In the end, Suits were ironic anachronisms in an
age of hyperreality. For Matt, his whole life was embodied in the dance.

82 onspec fall 2002

All he ever needed was the right music. All he ever wanted was a suit. And
now he had the suit. He wasn’t about to let anything stop him now. He
was ready for Transcendence.
This year, the Ball was taking place at the massive Olympics Rotunda.
There would be three dance floors and eleven world-class DJs. It was a
smoggy, humid evening by the Lake. But inside, the atmosphere was crisp
and artificially cool. Matt could taste the dry ice in the air. There might’ve
been a thousand people milling around the vast hall. Transcendence was
an upscale party. A strict dress code was enforced. He held onto Rachel’s
hand and ran a diagnostics again on the Wachowski. Everything checked
out fine. The music had started up an hour ago. He could feel the bass
beat in his breastbone and in the autofeedback from his suit.
“Where should we change?” he asked.
“This way,” said Rachel, and led the way up a flight of stairs to the VIP
back room.
The VIP room was filled with gilt mirrors and white couches. There
was one other Suit in their party, an English brother in a Ninjastar. His
name was Chevin, and he was friendly enough, with the Chinese picto-
gram for “peace” tattooed on the back of his shaved head. He offered
Matt a line of E off the lid of his gleaming battery case.
“No thank you,” said Matt.
5)
“Whoa,” exclaimed Chevin. “Is that what I think it is?”
Matt nodded and smiled. He stubbed out his cigarette, folded his shirt
and pants and put them in his duffel bag.
Chevin stared. “I ain’t never seen a “Chowski up close before,” he
sniffed. A static charge scrolled across his torso. “I hear that mother
don’t even use vector graphics, is that right?”
“Nope. Raster interface.”
“Chevin, darling,” said Rachel, “this is the same Matt I was telling you
about.”
“Right! Hey, man, I saw you dance at the Black and Blue last year.” He
grabbed Matt by the shoulder. “You were incredible. Didn’t you used to
wear a Lucas IV?”
“Nope. Lucas III upgrade. That’s gone. Took out its wetwrap.”
Chevin stared at Rachel and then back at Matt. “Did you sign with Nike
Emporium too?” he finally asked.
“Nope,” said Matt. He pulled on his hood and secured the chin clamp.
He rechecked the modem, and snapped it in place tight against the base
of his skull. He felt the familiar uplink charge buzz down his spine.
“Their contracts—”
”
“Are the best in the business,” said Matt. “I know.

David K.Yeh 83
 Chevin held out a vial of Wave. “Care for a bump?”
“No thank you.” He was done changing. “We can leave our stuff here?”
Rachel nodded. “All right.” The music swelled up through the floor.
Matt stood very still, eyes half-closed, listening to his suit. On the glass
coffee table, the water in the tall crystal vase of white roses trembled. He
remembered the funeral. He remembered the sea. Matt drew a breath.
“Let’s dance. “
A Ninjastar was probably the only DanceSuit model that could handle
a user speeding on E or Wave. Matt made sure to lose Chevin as fast as
he could. In the Trudeau Lounge, Yoshi had come on early. Word had it
that Vancouver’s Sticky Rick was down with food poisoning. “It’s all the
genetic engineering,” complained Rachel, ordering a double at the bar.
“Aren’t you still on antibiotics?” asked Matt.
“I suppose so. You sure you don’t want a drink?”
“T have a drink,” said Matt, swirling the ice in his Coke. He took a last
drag off his cigarette. “Nothing beats good ol’ fashioned aspartame and
caramel extract.”
“Don’t forget nicotine,” Rachel laughed. “In any case, gin is older that
Coca-Cola, darling. Cheers to us, who live in the Stone Age.”
“Cheers to us.”
Even with their suits in neutral. Matt knew that he and Rachel were
turning heads. They made a good looking couple. The Wachowski’s
moulded silver mesh was unmistakable. Rachel’s black Baudrillard was
its perfect companion piece. Yoshi was five metres away, spinning his
trademark trance laced with traditional Japanese instrumentation. The
disco ball glowed like a full moon. The lighting was dark, almost mini-
malist. There were already three other Suits on the dance floor. They
always reminded Matt of angels or ghosts.
“C’mon, darling,” said Rachel, putting down her empty glass. “They’re
waiting for us.”
“You go ahead. I just want to lounge for a bit.”
Rachel slyly glanced around. “Cute boy?”
“I just want to lounge a bit,” Matt repeated patiently.
Rachel regarded him for a second. The dimples showed in her cheeks.
“Have it your way, darling.” She squeezed his hand. “You know where to
find me.” She pulled her hood down. Matt watched as she stepped onto
the floor.
Rachel was everything his mom could’ve been. He had missed her
badly when she was in Ibiza. When he heard she was sick, he had to resist
rushing over to her apartment. That would’ve been the last thing Rachel
wanted. But she let him know in her own way how much he meant to

84 onspec fall 2002

her. He could smell her faint perfume on his collar, burnt sugar and
peaches.
The pain hit him again.
This time it wasn’t so bad. The Wachowski stayed online. It was operat-
ing fine, in fact. The pain was inside of him. Matt sucked in air and tried
to light another cigarette. It fell from his fingers. “Jesus...” he whispered.
He was bleeding. The holographies were running some kind of bizarre
S&M software. As he watched, his chest bloomed open and his exposed
heart glowed iridescent with every beat. Crimson light poured down his
torso. Matt couldn’t stop it. It had to be some dormant virus program,
some kind of sick joke.
People were staring at him. Rachel hadn’t noticed yet. Matt walked
quickly towards the washroom. He shoved his way through the crowd.
Control receptors weren’t responding. He couldn’t shut down the
Wachowski. He reached around to the small of his back and pulled its
battery pack. The image remained.
That was impossible.
He double-checked to see if he had disengaged the power source.
Yoshi’s dark, melodic strains hung glittering in the air. Matt stood with
his hands at his sides, breathing hard. What was this sensation? Every-
thing was alien to him, yet so familiar. It was an old hunger, an aching
need. The crowd moved around him, flowing like the sea. Music was
everywhere. He held up the power pack. He touched the glimmering
projection of his bleeding heart.
The nano-scalpel had missed something. That was obvious. But at this
point, it had nothing to do with the Wachowski anymore. It had every-
thing to do with Matt.
Across the room, a girl in a tie-dye T-shirt smiled at him, damp flow-
ers in her hair. Her form wavered and disappeared. But the afterimage
remained.
The pain was there, it was just bearable. He had always held it inside
of him. Hell, he hadn’t even cried at the funeral. Only it was out now.
People put the strangest things in their bodies. But wasn’t that what
made the body real? A lifetime of memories. Without them, he was noth-
ing more than a ghost. He carefully snapped the battery back into its
slot. The suit began to softly glow. In anticipation, people stepped away,
giving him room. His eyes were watering. But Matt wasn’t about to start
to cry. Not here, not now. After all these years, he was just finally begin-
ning to understand who he loved most in life. He was going to dance. ¢

David K.Yeh 85
It didn’t smell like any chocolate Id ever
come across. And I'd handled it all: bars,
beans, fifty percent ground, fine ground,
right up to the pure stuff...

Chocolate Kings
Karen Traviss

SOME PEOPLE—WELL, SOME PEOPLE JUST DESERVED TO BE

child sacrifices, and Superintendent Nuataxtl was one of them. He had
the timing of a sadist. There we were, filing away our last crime reports
for the day and just waiting for the sun to dip below the horizon, and in
he came. There was no getting out that door now.
“The mescal bar’s going to miss you tonight, Ahuatl,” he said. “In fact,
it might be missing you tomorrow night too. All of you. You've just got to
see what Customs turned over at the airport.”
Now, the appeal of the Commercial Branch—a.k.a. Fraud Squad—to
half-hearted detectives like me was that you usually worked business
hours: no night surveillance, no armed blags and no resisting arrest.
(Although I did nick a very stroppy accountant last season, and those
little bean-counters can put up a hell ofa fight.) And faster promotion,
too, because most coppers didn’t consider fraud-busting to be real men’s
work. It was a good way to get a desk job at HQ—if you fancied working
in the Big Temple, that is.
This wasn’t a desk job night. “Sergeant, we have forensics squad on
its way and you'll take the mobile assay team with you,” said Nuataxtl.
“We're talking big haul here, my son. Headline stuff.”
 “Tobacco?” I asked. They got excited about illegal tobacco, although I
couldn’t work out why people drank the stuff. “How much?”
“No, counterfeit xocolatl. Five tons of it. And guess where it’s come in
from?”
“No idea, Super.”
“Some freeze-arse state called Helvetica.”
It was what we had all dreaded. The Europeans had found a way to fake
chocolate. It wasn’t just our economy that was at stake.
It was our whole way of life.

DON’T GET ME WRONG. I’VE GOT NOTHING AGAINST EUROPEANS. I MEAN, IF THEY
weren't cleaning the hotels and driving the buses, we'd have to do it.
But they liked easy money. My mate Kahpua (a bit of a liberal) reckoned
they were driven to crime because the respectable jobs like architecture,
priesting and chocolate production weren’t open to them.
But this particular job wasn’t easy money. It was high tech. Believe
me, when I got out the squad car and walked across that runway to the
cargo plane, it was like stepping onto a film set. There were hi-lux arc
lights and cordons and sniffer dogs going bananas, whining and leaping
around because they could smell something and couldn’t reach it.
A thin lad in a Customs uniform was walking towards me in that way
that said he was trying to intercept, but I wasn’t going to stop. We almost
collided. He whipped out his obsidian badge and flourished it. I pulled
out my big jade one.
“Piss off, son,” I said, as kindly as I could. “This is police business now.”
I shoved past him and began looking for a technician. I only spotted
the senior forensics officer from the fact that it said SFO in really big
letters on the back of his high-visibility tabard. Otherwise he’d just have
been another bloke in a white noddy suit with a mask on, like the rest of
the crowd swarming round the plane. I didn’t need to ask why he needed
the mask. As soon as I got close enough, I could smell it.
There was the meaty, bitter tang of the pure-grade xocolatl, and then
the—well, there was only one way to describe it. The stench of cheap
vanilla made me want to throw up.
I actually heard Kahpua gag behind me.
“Oh, fucking Feathered Serpent, Sarge, that’s disgusting,” he said. Nor-
mally I'd have stuck him on a charge for blaspheming, but I had to agree
with him. It didn’t smell like any chocolate I’d ever come across. And
I’d handled it all at the Imperial Mint during training: bars, beans, fifty
percent ground, fine ground, right up to the pure stuff.
“Can I see it?” asked the SFO.

Karen Traviss 87
 “You're looking at it,” he said, well muffled, and spread his arms to
reveal a big smear of brown grease down his chest like someone had
crapped on him. He pulled the mask down from his face. He talked as
best anyone could when they were trying to hold their breath. “They've
packed every double-skinned wall on the aircraft with it.”
I looked at the plane again. It was a tatty little tin can, with brown rust
stains along every riveted seam. The bright arc lights didn’t flatter it
much. I was amazed it had survived a five thousand mile journey.
“So, they blew it in like insulation?” I asked.
SFO rolled his eyes in exasperation and pushed the mask back on his
face to suck in a bit of cleaner air. “No, they poured it in, you moron,”
he said. “In liquid form. That’s not rust. It’s chocolate leaking out the
bloody seals. Don’t you people talk to Customs? This is the fifth consign-
ment we've had through this year. It’s just a lot more than usual, that’s
all.”
I would normally not take kindly to being called a moron, but I was dis-
tracted by the suggestion that those secretive bastards in Customs should
have briefed us. We'd have a word with them later. Poured? Poured what?
And then the xocolaltl bean dropped, as my mum would have said.
“It’s frozen in a water suspension?” I asked, trying to look like I'd paid
attention in chemistry class.
“No.”
SFO handed me a disposable paper mask and led me over to the tail
end of the plane, where they'd set up a screened area. There were blokes
in coveralls—and masks, of course—trying to funnel a shiny, slimy, stink-
ing ooze of brown stuff from an opening in the tail section into big metal
drums.
“They're bloody clever for Euros,” SFO said. “We’ve worked it out.
They mix the chocolate solids and oils they can get hold of with veg-
etable fat—about forty percent dilution, I’d say—toss in fake vanilla sub-
stitute, and bulk it out with something they call sugar. Now that’s a pretty
inert monosaccharide compound they get from beets.”
“Oh yeuch...”
“You haven’t heard the worst yet. Some of the stuff is a bit on the light
side, color wise, and I’ve known them add a burned version of the mono-
saccharide called caramel so it looks as dark as the real thing. When it’s
cold, it sets solid.”
He took a plastic sample tub from his tabard and shook it: it rattled
like pure stuff. And then he took my hand (yeah, I know, but I was mes-
merized by then) and tipped a couple of shiny beans into my palm.
They looked like the real thing. And then they began to soften and

88 onspec fall 2002

spread in the heat of my hand and IJ actually watched them turn into that
brown gunk.
“This stuff,” said SFO, “has been turning up all over the Empire. And
you can pass a lot of it off in cooler places before it’s spotted.”
“How was it getting past Customs, then?”
“Easy. It’s brown. It’s runny. They were putting it in false lavatory tanks
on board and letting the sanitation wagon pump it out and take it away
for collection and remolding later.”
I'd forgotten about Kahpua. He was right behind me, and I turned to
look at him. He was pretty dark-skinned, but he was definitely looking
ashen right then. I turned back to SFO. “So is there a quick test for this
stuff?”
“Oh, you just taste it,” he said, and dabbed his tongue onto the brown-
smeared palm of his protective glove.
I heard Kahpua’s rapid sprint away from us and into the bushes. He
never did have much of a stomach on him.

WE GOT OUR FACES ON THE NEWS (AND WE ELBOWED IN FRONT OF THOSE CUSTOMS
bastards, too) but it wasn’t enough to brag about a five-ton haul. We were
under pressure to stop the counterfeit currency coming in. Sniffer dogs
were one thing, but the politicians wanted to know why we had to pay to
stop those Helvetics from undermining our economy. Wasn’t there a way
of tackling the influx at source?
We had a meeting about it. We didn’t like meetings much, but I
thought I'd better learn to get good at them ifIhad delusions of promo-
tion. The senior Customs officers lined up opposite us, all smarting from
the row over who had jurisdiction.
“Come up with an idea,” said the Commissioner. (A big bloke. I mean
really big.) “One that doesn’t involve bombing Helvetica back to the
stone age, although it hasn’t got that far to go from what I hear. We’ve
been warned off being too heavy on emerging nations. You know, we’ve
got all the chocolate, the World Bank, etcetera etcetera and bleeding
heart etcetera.”
He had placed a pile of the counterfeit forty percent pure in the
center of the big polished stone conference table to concentrate our
minds. I really did like that room: turquoise inlays up the walls, decora-
tive crystal skulls on dinky little pedestals and a ceremonial seat at the
end of the chamber. It gave HQ a nice traditional Aztec feel. All you
needed was the priest and the obsidian dagger and we would have been
back in the good old days, when we weren’t being buggered about by
the third world.

Karen Traviss 89
 “We can impose trade sanctions,” said a Customs officer.
“They don’t buy anything from us,” the Commissioner said. “They
can’t afford it. Next?”
“We could choke their xocolatl supply at source.”
“No-o-o, we can’t starve them of currency. Empire Bank and all that.”
I was still staring at the various shiny fakes on the cool table. They were
holding shape pretty well, and the shapes were whatever they'd managed
to pour the liquid into when they were scrambling to collect it—cups,
bars, knobbly shapes, even a pudding mould. It seemed a strange thing
to do with chocolate. There was powdered chocolate for drinking
(with water, honey and a real vanilla pod, of course) and chocolate for
spending (cultivated regular, uniform size) and there was investment
chocolate, selectively cultivated for huge beans and whacking high theo-
bromine and caffeine content.
But bars? Globes? Shapes?
And then it hit me.
Sometimes, just sometimes, you get those flashes from nowhere, right
out of the dark earth. Clever buggers get those all the time, but ordinary
blokes like me get them once in a lifetime. When you get one, you've got
to grab and make it work for you.
“We could sell it back to them,” I said.
There was a silence. I didn’t know if it was an ooh-he’s-clever silence,
or a who-let-him-in-here silence. I looked round all those rigid jaws and
narrowed eyes and wondered if I’d said goodbye to inspector rank right
there and then.
“Do you want to expand on that?’ said the Commissioner.
No, I didn’t: not really. But there was a bigger jade badge at the end of
this tunnel. All I had to do was dig.
“Well, it tastes odd, but when it’s solid you can chew it,” I said.
“National tastes vary. There are people in Europe who like rotted milk.
In big lumps. So who’s to say we couldn’t get one of the food companies
to tart this up a bit and market it back to them?” I was on a roll. The gods
were right there with me. “We could put almonds in it. All sorts of things.
We could make it into shapes, like eggs and mountains and things. Then
we tell them how good it is, and they have to pay for it from their xocolatl
reserves, so we gradually shift the balance of xocolatl back here.”
The Commissioners big face lit up. “You really do want that inspector’s
badge badly, don’t you, son?” he said. “Let me put that idea forward. It’s
got everything. It’s politically sound, it might even show a profit, and it’ll
teach those Helvetic types a lesson.” He pushed the stool back from the
table with an eeeek of stone against tile. “And if it fails, we can say it was the

90 onspec fall 2002

deranged idea of a junior officer.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.

KaHPUA AND I SAT IN THE MESCAL BAR WHEN THE SHIFT HAD ENDED. IT WAS THE
same most nights: we filed the reports for the day, and then went and got
pissed as handcarts. (Yes, I know, wheels: the Europeans did have their
moments.) Except this night I took my inspector’s jade badge out of the
fob inside my jacket and slapped that on the bar in front of me.
“Two pints of your finest, Freddie boy,” I said to the pasty-faced little
Euro polishing the glasses. “I’m celebrating. And have one for your-
self.”
“How did you get the idea?” Kahpua asked.
“It was looking at the shapes. That’s all. Just reminded me of cakes and
sweets. It’s what they call an intuitive leap.”
“Stull can’t look at the stuff,” he said. “Why the almonds?”
“If they try to smuggle it back to us, the little gritty bits will be easy to
spot. And they'll clog up their machinery.” I had to laugh. “It’s the eggs
and the tile-shaped ones I like best.”
“Seriously, though, you think they'll fall for it? That this stuff is worth
buying?”
“Don’t underestimate Aztec marketing ingenuity,” I said. “There'll be
a novelty market for a while, and then they'll get the message. Don’t mess
with the Aztec fraud squad.”
I looked up at the mirror-backed bar, between the bottles and badges
and memorabilia garnered from year upon year of Mexico City police
officers who drank here. It was a bit of a black museum, really, stacked
with objects liberated surreptitiously or otherwise from investigations—
deactivated firearms, the odd obsidian blade, and a jar of unidentifiable
dried-out stuff that was probably from a path lab.
And then there was the newest addition to the collection: one of my
chocolate bars, the one shaped like a piece of square-tiled floor. I looked
at it and felt a little sad, shiny new jade badge or not.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’ll ever really catch on.” ¢

Karen Traviss 91
What he saw, gleaming mother-of-
pearl amidst the moonlit circle of
whitecaps, was the head and shoulders
ofan enormous horse...

A Gift for
Michael Mooney
Jancis M. Andrews

BECAUSE HANSEN HATED FLYING, HE AND MICHAEL WERE

taking the evening ferry from Tsawwassen to Victoria, where they would
spend the night. A sales chart, stamped “Hansen Heavy Equipment”
lay on the seat between them, its graph angling upwards. Long mouth
working busily, Hansen was extolling the new sales policy, which entailed
firing the salesman with the fewest sales at the end of every month. “Gets
them off their fuckin’ butts,” Hansen had said, pinning up the chart
that tracked each man’s progress. Michael’s mouth felt full of dust. Yes,
sales had zoomed. It had also turned the sales staff against one another.
Nowadays, the fear in the office was palpable, as those at the bottom
fought not to be the man given the shove. Because he was the sales
manager, it fell to Michael to do the shoving.
Oblivious to passers-by, Hansen had closed his eyes and thrust stubby
legs into the aisle. Michael had the window seat. Coastal mountains
thrust a jagged black spine into the moonlit night and the Georgia Strait
was a yawping blackness except where rows of whitecaps had formed
a great circle, an indication, perhaps, of a whirlpool. Glistening silver-
white in the moonlight, the whitecaps looked like an altar cloth laid over
the darkness of the world.
“The new policy goes into the contract, okay?” Hansen grunted with-
out opening his eyes. “Then we can promote the Pave-Omatic 144.”
“We'll go go go!!” Michael said, repeating one of his boss’s slogans.
Passengers’ voices were intermingling with the rumble of the ship’s
engines. Pins and needles had attacked Michael’s feet and even his
fingers held a steady tremor, as if his body were merely an extrusion of
the ferry. When Hansen reached for yet another sales report, Michael
waited; however, his boss remained silent. Lifting his tape recorder,
Michael turned a shoulder to Hansen in order not to disturb him and
leaning towards the window, murmured, “Donna, send this one to Jack-
son’s Road Machinery in—”
Something was glowing in the darkness. He glanced towards it, his lips
already forming the word “Toronto.” What he saw, gleaming mother-of-
pearl amidst the moonlit circle of whitecaps, was the head and shoulders
of an enormous horse.
His lips froze about the arriving syllables. The communal language of
passenger and ferry passed away.
Pearly forelegs ending in great silver hooves burst through a wave and
reached for a whitecap. The horse began pulling itself out of the sea.
Michael saw a long glistening back and powerful haunches ending in
a massive, shimmering tail and long feathery tail fins. Wheeling in the
same direction as the ferry, the horse began diving and re-appearing,
keeping pace. Rainbows flew from the streaming mane; from the tail,
foam flew like blown snow. The great neck turned and the head moved
from side to side, as if the horse were searching the ferry’s windows.
A trembling struck up in Michael’s flesh. Without taking his eyes from
the horse, he touched Hansen on the arm.
“Huh?”
“Look,” Michael whispered.
Hansen’s face puckered up. He was twinned into the same type of
expensive business suit as Michael: navy blue three-piece, white silk shirt
and red tie, although Hansen’s tie was of a bloodier hue. Removing his
glasses, he leaned towards the window, so that Michael was treated to a
potpourri of talcum and aftershave. The ferry was starting to plunge up
and down, as if it had met a heavy swell.
“What?” Hansen asked.
The horse was leaving the ferry behind, its forelegs and long powerful
tail a shimmering ballet against the darkness, its long feathery tail fins
rising and falling like the veils of a bride.

Jancis M.Andrews 93
 “What—what do you see?”
“What d’you mean?” Hansen frowned, jamming on his glasses. “Hey,
this fucking boat is bouncing!”
The horse was dancing on a swell, looking back as if it were waiting
for the man-made thing to catch up. Again the pearly head moved, as
though the horse were searching the ferry.
“Jeez, how many lifeboats does this thing have?” Hansen asked ner-
vously, elevating his pale eyebrows at Michael.
“Got to go to the washroom,” Michael mumbled.
Inside the cubicle, he threw up, and then leaned his forehead against
the cold comfort of the formica partition. He hadn’t touched any booze,
he didn’t do drugs, he’d had his yearly physical only a month ago. “What
the hell,” he whispered, “is going on?”
Some minutes later, he returned to his seat. Hansen, scowling over
sales sheets, moved to let him past but did not speak. Michael pressed
his face to the window. Patches of fog had appeared; in the darkness
between them, the lights of a coastal town glimmered their faint and
fragile gold. And there, a celebration of pearl and silver in the moon-
light, was the horse, weaving and diving between the fog patches, light
streaming from its body and tail.
“I’m not satisfied with Benson’s performance,” Hansen was grum-
bling. “He’s had Mansini Distributing for a month and he’s still not got
an order. Get rid of him.”
Dragging his gaze from the horse, Michael got out, “Ed Benson’s—
been pretty sick—”
“We can’t play fucking nursie any longer. Chuck him and give Mansi-
ni’s to George Jones.”
“But Ed’s—got kids—”
“Shoulda pulled his socks up then, shouldn’t he?” grunted Hansen. He
grabbed at a pen clattering against the side of his brief case. “Hey, I don’t
like this. Sea’s turned choppy.”
Michael turned haggard eyes towards the window and leaned forward.
His stomach loosened. The horse had drawn much nearer, enabling
him to see it more clearly. It was a stallion and its length from ears to
tail fins must have measured about forty feet. Hooves reflected silver
arrows back to the moon, the enormous tail fins shone sapphire when
they lifted clear of the water, opaline when they swept beneath. Sweating
coldly, Michael saw the lustrous head turn and two blue-green jewelled
eyes search the ferry. There could be no doubt that the horse was look-
ing for something. Someone. It had moved slightly ahead, its gaze roving
leisurely but deliberately down the length of the windows.

94 onspec fall 2002

 Swallowing repeatedly, Michael waited. Then the horse found him.
Up, up went the great silver hooves as the horse reared, and it seemed
almost to applaud as Michael’s window drew level. Michael’s mouth
opened and a sound weazled out. Throwing back its head as if in reply,
the horse opened its shining mouth, and although he heard nothing,
Michael knew that it had whinnied. Then the horse plunged its head
into an oncoming whitecap, its back arched, and the great shining tail,
terrifying in its enormity and beauty, rose vertically into the air and sank
beneath the waves. It did not appear again.
Michael had no clear memory of how he coped with the remainder of
the crossing.
On his return to Vancouver, he insisted he have another physical,
citing extreme exhaustion. Pressing and prodding, Doctor Hunter
mused about ulcers and the stress of today’s downsizing on the business
executive, and then recommended a change in diet; possibly, he sug-
gested, even a change of career.
“I’m forty-one, I can’t switch careers now; besides, my salary is excel-
lent. Frank, I was just wondering—”
Off-handedly, he asked about the effects on the mind of watching
shows such as The Twilight Zone, which featured the supernatural. The
doctor only half-listened to Michael’s seemingly aimless nattering, but
when pressed, remembered a couple of television studies.
Their local library had only one book on the subject. Michael read it,
then returned it none the wiser and left with several books on psychol-
ogy and the male climacteric or male menopause. These he speed-read
during the lunch break in his office, so that he wouldn't have to parry
questions from his wife, Joan. Lately, her tongue had developed a razor’s
edge.
The articles on the male climacteric helped not at all, while the
accounts of other people’s hallucinatory experiences carried him into
a world of horror—the monsters that could stalk the psyche! Giant rats,
torturers, obscene parts of bodies—what had he to do with aberrations
such as these? Besides, the horse had not been monstrous, but beautiful.
Yet each description seemed to touch something within him, as if he
were a distant relative to the mentally deranged. In the torment of the
small hours, they advanced upon him, misshapen souls, beckoning from
their warped world, their sly voices inviting him to rejoin the family...
He found himself telling Joan, “I’m thinking of leaving Hansen’s.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Are you utterly mad? You fought to get
that job!”
Why had he said a crazy thing like that? And to Joan, who was a

Jancis M.Andrews 95
neurotic worrier!
“I—er—”
Defying both sets of parents, they had married at nineteen while he
was still studying for his teacher’s certificate. Why had he been so set on
marrying her? Because she was the double of the young Elizabeth Taylor
in National Velvet, which had seemed a splendid reason at the time.
“Don’t be an idiot, Michael,” she shrilled, indicating their cedar and
glass living room. “You left teaching because you yourself said the big
money was in sales!”
“I—the doc suspects I’m getting an ulcer—”
“Then take a holiday! Listen, you’re due to take over Walter’s posi-
tion when he retires. Don’t give up, Michael, not when we're starting to
afford all the nice things we've always wanted—”
“I think we’ve got enough already—”
“But it’s not paid for, is it, Michael? It’s not paid for!”
Her temper was rising, her lips tightening into the all-too-familiar thin
line, her violet eyes darkening, yet with a flame at the back of them
“What’s got into you, Michael? Are you forgetting our sons? What
about university fees? And what about me? I could’ve taken a sound
degree in science, but I stayed home to look after you all, didn’t I? That
was because you asked me to. It’s always what you want, isn’t it Michael...”
And on and on.
Did this slowly burgeoning enmity happen in most marriages? And
it was true; he had asked her to stay home. That was the political cor
rectness of two decades ago: Wifey stays home and makes everybody
comfortable while hubby brings home the bacon. Nowadays, of course,
it was different.
Next morning, he fired Ed Benson; in the evening, he drank himself
stupid. He was therefore too befuddled to know if it really was Ed trem-
bling in the doorway, or whether the white-faced salesman was merely a
projection from the nightmares that were beginning to trouble him.
“You tell that bastard,” the hazy figure said, “that one of these days, he’s
toast. Okay? You tell that bastard that.”
But Michael convinced himself he’d only suffered yet another night-
mare.

A WEEK LATER, WHEN HE AND HANSEN WERE ON THE TRIAL FERRY RUN FROM
Tsawwassen to Bellingham, the horse danced towards them out of the
moon.
Michael turned a bloodless face toward Hansen. “Sorry,” he mumbled,
“what did you say?”

96 onspec fall 2002

 A frown was working Hansen’s face. His glasses flashed. “For Chrissake
pay attention, Mooney,” he grunted. “Your face has been stuck in that
fucking window ever since we got on this boat. I said we’re gonna have to
cut the commission from three percent to two.”
“But—the contracts—”
“We'll renegotiate. Or else.”
In the seat in front of Hansen, a woman read a novel, her face drawn
in concentration. Beside her, a little boy was pushing a red truck around
the window, whispering to himself. Michael could see one enormous tail
fin flashing beyond the truck’s wheels. The little ferry began to bounce.
On came the public address system. “Good evening, ladies and gentle-
men. Captain Bourque here,” a carefully casual voice intoned. “We seem
to have encountered—oh, just a lee—ttle bit of a rough sea. Please
remain seated until further notice. Those on the port side will see the
lights of Tsawwassen if they look now.”
The address system clicked off. With the languid movement of a placid
wave flowing up a beach, passengers on the left-hand side turned to look
out of the windows. At the same time, the lights flickered and went out.
And there, clearly visible through the port-side windows, was the horse,
leaping and diving in the moonlight. Surely to God, Michael thought, his
hands trembling against his seat, surely someone...
“San Francisco,” Hansens’s voice pronounced in the darkness. “We’ve
got to smarten up the distributor there, Mooney.”
Someone has to see it, Michael thought, I can’t be the only one.
The lights came on again and passengers turned back to papers and
magazines, or settled their heads against their seats, trying to snatch some
sleep. In a minute, however, the ferry shuddered and began bucking.
“Hey, what the fuck—” began Hansen. But Michael wasn’t listening.
Instinctively, he had pressed his face to the window. And his instincts
were right—the horse had dived under the ferry and re-emerged on the
starboard side. It was plunging towards him, its great tail lashing the sea
into phosphorescent falling stars. Then it paused, the pearly head lifted,
and it seemed to Michael that, even though the lounge was crowded,
the horse had singled him out, as if the sea creature’s gaze and his were
drawn irrevocably towards each other like lovers. Dimly, he heard Han-
sen’s voice snorting and blowing like something feeding from a trough,
but all his attention was on the horse. Up went the silver hooves, body
and tail rose out of the water amidst streams of phosphorescence, and
the horse pirouetted, turning so that it hung like a great gleaming jewel
against the night before crashing into the sea.
“Mooney, will you get your fucking head out of that fucking window! I

Jancis M.Andrews 97
asked what promotions you're planning for the Spreader Two-Twenty?”
“The truth is, the truth—sick headache—can’t talk—”
“Really? Sorry to hear that,” Hansen said, his gaze sweeping over
Michael, as if there were clues to be picked up from Michael’s undistin-
guished nose, his receding hairline, his thinning sandy hair. “Bit sudden,
isn’t it—hey—you're shivering! Jeez—” Hansen’s pupils suddenly
expanded in affront. “Mooney, you’re not going to pull a heart attack
on me, are you?”
As if mesmerized, Michael’s gaze was drawn back to the window.
“Just—just let me sit quietly,” he whispered as the horse reappeared and
began waltzing in the moonlight. “Just let me rest.”
The shining head sank, the great tail flipped skywards, and the horse
dived. Seconds later, the ferry began bucking again, causing passengers
to exclaim and grasp at their seats and a child to tumble on his back.
Michael closed his eyes and waited, knowing the horse was making for
the port side. Almost immediately, the ferry jerked and once more began
tossing about. He could hear people exclaiming, hear the calming voice
of the captain, could feel Hansen’s hand on his arm... fearfully, he
turned his head. The horse had reappeared about one hundred yards
away on the starboard side. The eyes flashed jewelled light towards him
and the horse dived once more before reappearing only seconds later
about twenty yards away from where it had gone down. It was, he real-
ized, playing a game, sometimes diving under the ferry, at other times
racing ahead. Often, it turned to look at him, as if inviting him tojoin it
in a joyous game of tag. A fog bank appeared, pale cloudy ferns knotted
to the sea, and the horse leaped and frisked between them as passen-
gers worried aloud about the sudden, strange weather conditions, and
the ferry bucked and shuddered about the equally shuddering body of
Michael Mooney.
“Helluva trip,” Hansen said uneasily. “Better not be the Big One.”
The Big One was the earthquake predicted to hit the western coast,
which was part of the so-called “Pacific rim of fire.” If the earthquake
occurred in the Strait, it would cause the giant wave known as a tsu-
nami.
“Heard a queer thing recently,” Michael mumbled. “Some salesman—
not one of ours—is telling people that twice—he saw—a huge seahorse
playing around the ferry—”
“Christ! Sure glad he doesn’t work for me!”
“This man—is supposed to be—the steady type—”
“Booze,” Hansen said confidently.
“I believe he—doesn’t drink much—”

98 onspec fall 2002

 “Fella obviously needs a break in the worst way.”
“Yet he’s always been ambitious—” Michael said, and his voice failed.
“Shit!” said Hansen. “You’re gonna have to get rid of Sam Yee as well.”
He brought up a spreadsheet on the laptop screen. “That seahorse,” he
threw out, “could be a gift from the gods.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know—that Greek stuff. My gran had a brass clock decorated with
that Neptune fella standing in a chariot and holding the reins of three
seahorses. Maybe Neptune just decided to send that sales fella one of his
horses, ha ha ha!”
“But why?”
“For Chrissake, Mooney! Can’t you recognize a joke?”
“But why a gift to him? Why him?”
“Maybe Neptune thinks the fella needs to escape, o’course,” giggled
Hansen. “Now for Chrissake, let’s get on with next year’s projections.
Better get that fella to a psychiatrist as soon as possible,” he said over the
top of his glasses. “He’s a nut case.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Michael said, and smiled wanly into Han-
sen’s big, pink, healthy face.

AT HOME, JOAN TOOK HIM TO TASK FOR HAVING MENTIONED HE MIGHT LEAVE
Hansen’s. Again and again, he reassured her he hadn’t meant it, but her
furious, frightened probing continued. When, after supper, she threw
herself into an armchair, tightly folded her arms and sat glaring at a
comedy show on TV, Michael escaped into his study.
For a minute, he stood unmoving, then drew in a deep breath, walked
to his computer, clicked on to the Internet and typed “Mythology” into
the search engine.
The sheer volume of material was overwhelming. Mythological tales,
one writer suggested, were about search and discovery, including the
quest for a truer self. Often they involved a journey, which could be cir-
cular, leaving from and returning to the same place. Science and myth,
he read next, represent the left and right hemispheres of our brains and
are equally important; they are not, contrary to modern thinking, dia-
metrically opposed. Another click brought up “Science is to myth what
we are to our ancestors, a modern rendition of a continuing story,” while
a search for information on Neptune brought up only that Neptune was
the Roman name of the Greek sea god Poseidon, sometimes portrayed
as half-man, half-fish, and that he governed the sea. The gods, the writer
continued, were believed to interact on occasion with people, a contact
that might end in death for the human involved; or alternatively, he/she

Jancis M.Andrews 99
might be carried to a beautiful, blessed land known as “The Fortunate
Isles,” where they would enjoy blissful, eternal life. All these writings
seemed to come to the same incredible conclusion: that an intangible
psychic world existed alongside the tangible physical world and that it
was every bit as real—
The door flanged open.
?
“Do you realize how lucky you are to draw such a high salary?’
“Yes, agree one hundred percent, Joan, it is an excellent salary—”
“Yet you dare talk about leaving—”
“Look, please, don’t worry about it. It was a stupid thing to say, please
forget it—”
“Forget it? How can I? Have you forgotten Hansen’s excellent pension
scheme—”
“Yes, it is excellent—”
“And then there’s the insurance benefits. If anything happens to you,
the boys and I will be well taken care off, and that’s vitally important,
Michael, because I can’t have a career now, can I? All I’ve got for twenty
years of looking after you is homemaker skills, and Big Business doesn’t
value those, does it, Michael?”
“Look, I wish I'd never mentioned it—”
“But you did mention it,” Joan cried, with a bitterness that stunned
him. Her eyes were bright with tears. “Women don't realize how they
harm themselves by staying home—it’s not fair!”
No, it wasn’t fair, he could see that—
“You're only forty-one, Joan, you're intelligent, you could train for
something—”
The sudden violence in her face shocked him into silence. After a
while, she said slowly, “Oh, thank you very much. You asked me to drop
getting my Degree, and now you're saying I can train to be something
else? What—a shop clerk? McDonald’s, maybe? Thank you, Michael.
Thank you very much indeed.”
“I—I’m sorry, Joan—”
She stalked into the living room. Heart sinking at the unpleasant eve-
ning ahead, he followed her.
Fearing her reaction, he had not told her about the horse. Nor had
he said anything to his two sons, aged sixteen and eighteen, because
they took after their mother. Instead, after some hesitation, he visited a
psychiatrist and tried to remember all the non-events of what, when he
looked back on it, seemed to be his non-life. Had Michael wanted riding
lessons as a child and been denied them? Dr. Lynn Georges enquired.
No? How about his last name, Mooney? Was he a Kabbalarian by any

100 onspec fall 2002

chance, subscribing to the ancient theory that one’s fate is linked inex-
tricably to one’s name; to illustrate, the moon controlled the tides and
a Kabbalarian might insist that anyone with Michael’s surname had an
inborn connection to the sea or to water. No? Had he, she asked sud-
denly, as if this line of thought led to another, ever been punished for
bedwetting?
“None of those things. Doctor, these last few days I’ve had severe
stomach pains. Do you think my stomach problem is triggering off the
hallucinations?”
Dr. Georges asked about the color of his stool—black, perhaps, indi-
cating internal bleeding?
“I’ve had a physical and everything seems fine, but just lately I’ve been
in real pain.”
“Inform your family doctor immediately, okay? In the meantime, think
about anything that could link you to horses or to water.”
August arrived; gratefully, he realized that for a whole month he
wouldn't have to endure a ferry trip. Meanwhile, the pains in his stomach
continued, but an X-ray came up blank, making him wonder if the fiery
stabbing was caused not only by his wretchedness at having to sack a man
every month, but also because of his worsening relationship with Joan.
She seemed intent on dredging up every disagreement they'd ever had,
and each quarrel seemed to open the door to another, like an endless
passageway of mean little rooms. I know the marriage vow was for richer,
for poorer, for better, for worse, he told himself, but this is hell...

WHEN SEPTEMBER ARRIVED, THE TRIP FROM TSAWWASSEN TO SEATTLE HAD TO

be cancelled because his stomach pains were so severe. Then a trip to
Victoria came and went without incident, as did another trip in October,
crossings that were made during the day. Michael proposed to Hansen
that they travel during the day in future.
“No, it’s best we keep the day free for meetings. Listen, Charlton
Brothers have a new garbage compactor.”
“Yes. It’s better than our Compactor 430.”
“Well, we got to get rid of the 430s whether they do a good job or not.
So when we meet with the president of Lancet, we’ll offer him a week in
Vegas with some T and A thrown in. How’s that stomach of yours?”
“They're going to take a biopsy from my bowel. Sometimes I can’t
move.”
“Hey,” grinned Hansen, brightening, “tell them to check for ground
glass, eh? Us married guys never know if the little woman’s decided to
polish us off.”

Jancis M.Andrews 101

 “What? You've got to be kidding!” Michael exclaimed.
Hansen paused to take in Michael’s expression, then giggled, “Jeez!
Know something, Mooney? You wouldn’t recognize a joke if you fell over
it!”
Three days later, he and Hansen had to visit Victoria, and Michael
manoeuvred the schedule so that they would be forced to travel during
the noon hour. Hansen seemed strangely restless.
“Queer weather,” Hansen said. “Look at the fucking sun. Red. Don’t
like it.”
Michael, too, was unable to concentrate. He and Joan were sleeping
apart now. That morning, after a night’s severe pain, he had turned to
tell her that he was leaving for the office, and for a terrifying second,
found himself looking, not into the violet eyes of the young Elizabeth
Taylor of National Velvet fame, but into the pitiless eyes of the beautiful
Wicked Queen from Snow White. Then the face had changed back to
Joan’s familiar features. He didn’t know what had happened or what it
meant. He knew only that the moment surfaced again and again as if his
subconscious were forcing it on his attention.
“By the way,” Hansen tossed out. “We'll be reforming the company
pension and insurance schemes. Too rich. Not fair on the sharehold-
co
Michael noticed how Hansen’s solid paunch rounded over his knees.
“My son Brad,” Hansen continued, “has graduated top of his econom-
ics class. He’s looking for a position, possibly in sales.” He removed his
glasses and his gaze rested on the Hansen logo emblazoned on Michael’s
briefcase.
A pain began burning Michael’s gut; soon, he was shifting in his seat
in an attempt to find relief. Blood swelled in his ears, provoking a dull
roar in which the passengers’ voices were drowned and dreamlike,
ghost-tones of souls lost at sea. Sweat trickled down his forehead and he
turned towards the window and mopped discreetly, hoping that Hansen
wouldn't notice. God, if they couldn’t discover the cause of this pain
soon... From this angle, the coastal mountains on either side of the Strait
were out of sight and the view was of asmooth, endless sunlit sea, giving
the impression that the ferry had halted at the edge of the world.
“Brad will go far,” Hansen was concluding, his eyes bright. “Chip off
the old block. Yes, sales.” And when he looked at Michael, the light in his
eyes seemed to snap into darkness, as if he had switched Michael off.
Michael suffered another vision. As though a spotlight had been
thrown, he saw Hansen’s bristling blond-white hair, brushed straight
back from the heavy pink forehead, the big, blunt nostrils jutting beyond

102 onspec fall 2002

the long line of thin lip. Behind the glasses, Hansen’s eyes were small
and...yes, piglike. The vision continued: Hansen, clopping down the
gangplank, brief case clutched in one pink trotter...
And then he realized that a brilliant light, over and above the reddish
sunlight already filling the lounge, was creeping up the blue vinyl of the
seat in front of him. At the same time, the ferry began tojiggle.
The public address system clicked on; the captain’s voice said, “Fuck-
ing hell,” before the tone changed to professional cream and murmured,
“Just a little turbulence, ladies and gentlemen. Please remain seated until
further notice. Parents are asked to keep their children beside them.”
The light was brightening, spreading over the white-painted bulk-
heads, and it seemed to Michael that the lounge was beginning to smell
like a rocky shore at low tide. He did not look out of the window. Instead,
he said silently to the shimmering vinyl in front of him, “In the name of
Christ, leave me alone.”
The jiggling intensified.
“Hey, what’s that salty smell—reckon we’ve hit some sort of storm?”
Hansen began nervously, and then the captain’s voice cut in, “Attention
all crew, all personnel to their—
”
The address system went off with a rush. “Shit! Lightning! gasped
Hansen.
The ferry had begun to leap like a creature gone mad at the end ofa
chain. The light beyond Michael’s window was blinding, of the sun yet
also of the moon, filling the lounge with gold and silver... two children
sitting with their parents began crying, as did an old woman sitting by
herself. Foam was smoking whitely across the windows. Slowly, Michael
turned his head and what he saw, about ten feet away, as the ferry reared
and plunged with its stricken passengers, was a flashing, enormous silver
hoof. Michael’s mind, which had already offered itself up to death, noted
almost mechanically that the hoof must be about one foot in diameter.
Then he saw that there were two hooves: a right and a left, flashing past
the window like enormous sculptures of silver, dazzling his eyes—
“Look out the window,” he mumbled into Hansen’s terrified face,
“look—look—”
“It’s the Big One!” Hansen screamed, clawing at Michael’s sleeve,
“God—where’s the fucking lifebelts—”
Children were also screaming now, as were many of the passen-
gers. Michael tore away from Hansen’s scrabbling hands and suddenly
Hansen turned green and threw up into the gangway. The ferry dropped
endlessly, shot up into the air, slid sideways in a great curtain of foam,
and he heard the captain’s voice, “Crew... stations...”

Jancis M.Andrews 103

 The hooves were dropping slowly below his vision, and the shining
forelegs came into view. Spray was zig-zagging in lacy ribbons down
the window; his nostrils stung with the reek of salt. Clinging to the seat
as Hansen continued to throw up, Michael saw the horse’s coat, each
hair lustrous within its own light, as if they were composed of filaments
of pearl. The note of the ferry was changing, the engines clacking,
barking—the ferry slipped to one side, the stern tipped skywards and
Michael’s stomach was forced against his ribs as the ship tore helplessly
down a mountainside of water—people were screaming and the engines
were screaming and the seat was leaping under his hands, his ears were
bursting—everywhere there was weeping and screaming—someone was
praying wildly to Jesus: Hansen—!
Beside him, the shining forelegs continued their long, revolving
descent, rounding into knees of such bedazzlement that his eyes began
to water. He saw the swell of the upper forelegs, and the beginning of
curves belonging to a chest of gigantic proportions; shoulder muscles
rotated in splendid radiance, and after that came the endless curve of a
luminescent throat. Clinging to the frail lifeline of his seat, mouth drag-
ging in air, Michael waited, the cries of the passengers falling about him,
the ferry a demented thing. On and on the length of the throat, and at
last, the parted mouth, pure as an alabaster shell, and he could see the
great pearls of the teeth, and the immense mother-of-pearl tongue, and
then the great glistening cheekbones, like the planes of a carved chal-
ice of pearl, and then the iridescent mane, scattering light, and then at
last, that for which he had been waiting, and when it filled the window,
Michael knew that his body had reached its limit and now had no sensa-
tion at all, so that his grasp fell away and his body bounced about within
his seat. The faceted eye moved into his vision: a crystalline aquamarine
mass refracting light like a sunlit sea. Held within it was the reflection of
his own tormented face, reflected and reflected and reflected, his thou-
sand mouths howling, and above his howls was a high whinnying, like a
great wind come out of space...
The ferry dropped like a stone, hurling Michael out of his seat and
sending him crashing against other flailing passengers. His forehead
smashed against a metal stair and he yelled in agony, lifting both hands
to protect his head as blood poured into his eyes. Blinded, he fell across
the screaming stranger struggling on the floor beside him before feeling
around with bloodstained hands for the stair handrail.
Again came the whinnying summons, louder this time. Somehow, he
pulled himself upright and tried to balance his trembling body against
the plunging bulkhead as he wiped blood from his eyes. The open door-

104 onspec fall 2002

way at the top of the gangway stairs was shimmering with indescribable
effulgence; the reek of salt was choking him.
Once again, the long-drawn out, unearthly whinny. Silvery light began
spreading down the stairs.
And suddenly, a strange, profound peace opened within Michael, a
slow, soul-deep acceptance of what had to be. A man being escorted
to the gallows, he felt, might know this same renunciation, might even
experience the strange sense of dignity that came to him now. Stepping
over the stranger screaming at his feet, he began working his way hand
over hand up the stairs and towards the light.
“Mooney—I'm hurt—Mooney—”
A couple of deckchairs cartwheeled past the stairs’ open doorway
before they splintered against something solid further down. Michael
continued climbing.
“Mooney—my leg—oh God, Mooney, my leg—”
The air was a blinding, diaphanous shimmer. The horse’s summons
was full-throated now, ringing in his ears, powerful, drawn-out chords of
an unearthly music.
“Yes, I'm coming,” Michael whispered. He reached the doorway and
stepped on to the splintered chaos of the deck, hair whipping about his
bloodied head.
A gigantic wave reared up before crashing over the deck, and then
roared towards him until he was thigh-deep in swirling, glistening icy
foam. Lifting his arms, he held them out towards the glorious crea-
ture waiting just beyond the deck rail, and as he struggled forward, he
breathed a prayer that his bloodstained hands would have the strength
to fasten on to that iridescent mane, and never let go.

MS lives here.

There’s one thing you can predict in life.

MS makes life unpredictable.
MS Multiple Sclerosis
2 w Society of Canada
1-800-268-7582 www.mssociety.ca

Jancis M.Andrews 105

The intention of good FX is not to
deceive but to avoid looking fake or
cheap. Good FX don't lie: they follow
through.

On film & SF:

Personal FX
Steve Mohn

I'VE BEEN WRITING A STORY ABOUT A MAN WHO EARNS A LIVING

telling faked images from real, mainly so people who bring him
incriminating images can disavow them safely or get a good lawyer.
Writing fiction about visual imagery isn’t impossible but one might
sensibly leave images to the movies, since images are what movies do.
So why do movies stumble when they imitate footage purportedly from
TV or other movies? A news broadcast or Larry King or Jay Leno barking
a monologue is easy. The camera angles and cutting patterns are well
known. The sets exist. But when we get films-within-films, the “clips” look
as if the directors never watched a film. In Notting Hill, Julia Roberts plays
an actor; as proof we see a clip from her hit SF film. And no matter how
silly, no SF film has ever employed a shot like it—no standard industry
production would. Yet the shot offers evidence supporting a role, a story,
a whole concept.
What do filmmakers think they are showing when they use images
meant to pass as evidential? Surely the makers of The Blair Witch Proj-
ect understood “found footage” to mean unprofessional at least. And
Andrew Niccol, writer and director of Simone, had to offer something
very polished, very professional, again and again, to convince us that
a simulated personality called Simone could fool common viewers not
only into believing her real but into falling for her as if she’s Dietrich,
Madonna and Princess Di—when she’s just a beautiful blond with a few
lines. She appears in films-within-films, on TV, at a stadium concert, in
production stills, but no one has the forensic sense to examine any of her
material and judge its validity—and she’s matted into all ofit. The prem-
ise is that she’s digitally perfect—“I am the death of real,” Simone tells
us. “I was ones and zeros. I was nothing.” And unlike Rei Toei, the idoru
who slips out of nano-assemblers everywhere in All Tomorrow’s Parties, to
become someone no longer virtual, Simone is maintained as code. No
one must know that she’s a synthespian, though everyone in Jdoru knows
Rei Toei is not real. Her novel runs on that energy. Simone runs on a farce
of keeping her ga-ga public from learning what she truly is.
Because the assumption here is that we are incredibly stupid. That
there exists a line of demarcation: on one side Real; Unreal on the
other.
And we can’t see it, not since computer imagery became so neatly
convincing. But sit close to the screen next time and you probably won’t
fail to tell what was caught with the camera from what was FXed in post.
The gurl-surfer movie, Blue Crush, shows many surfers, some laying pipe
on professionals-only waves. It’s easy enough to find the shots that fake
the star negotiating the curl of the wave to win the big competition. Not
so easy from the back row, much tougher on DVD at home, but still
possible if you know what to look for. I once had 20/15 vision but not
anymore. I still see these things by looking for them. I like to, it’s part of
my fun. But anyone can spot FX-work. It’s good but not seamless. And if
you really had to prove the legitimacy of some image, you wouldn’t just
squint at it. You would do what art experts, materials testers and homi-
cide-lab workers do—look close. Very close. And learn what to look for.
Like that guy in my story, you would blow up the image, creep it frame-
by-frame, scan it backwards, skew the colors false, even crack the picture
and go right into the code. Because actually Simone 7s ones and zeros,
and so is Rei Toei:
She is a voice, a face, familiar to millions. She is a sea of code, the
ultimate expression of entertainment software. Her audience knows
that she does not walk among them; that she is media, purely. And
that is a large part of her appeal. (All Tomorrow’s Parties/55)
Here there’s no coyness, no pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone
in the world, as if that’s still an option. Now less than ever, if only because
so many people do not believe what they are told by corporations, gov-

Steve Mohn 107

ernments, press agents, actors who are just good friends or the Singa-
pore police. The idoru is a hologram and then some, but understood to
be a projection—she even emits light. To please her fans, Simone must
perform in a stadium; her hologram is projected into stage smoke. For
the length of a concert. Continuously. And no one twigs to it. The actors
who beg to co-star with Simone never actually work with her. Well, she’s
shy. This is just slack writing, though Gattica and the screenplay for The
Truman Show prove that Niccol can do better. Also fake better: in Gattica,
one man’s effort to genetically impersonate another is prodigious, the
stuff of every scene; while the infrastructure that engulfs poor Truman, a
man whose whole life has been a TV show, is appropriately vast.
In the Sixties, when TV was technologically thin and movies were
considered superior, location shooting was the rage. Fake-looking
shots made kids cry: “Fake!” Some became directors whose film and TV
productions destroyed the clumsy charm of bad FX. But people watch-
ing films today don’t sit there believing in any sense that the tornados,
aliens or bullet wounds are real. What they don’t like is being yanked
out of their enjoyment of a story, which depends on going into a kind of
trance, like a writer’s trance, or an actor’s, in which they pretend that the
story, the words on the page, the performances are true. Cheap FX ruin
that—and that’s all good FX are for. They don’t break the trance. And
seeing the FX-work when watching a film is like reading and noting what
other writers do with rhetoric, dialect, metaphor. Noticing craft doesn’t
automatically ruin the trance of enjoyment.
Even when the FX become the trance it shouldn’t mean that anyone
is really being duped. The intention of good FX is not to deceive but to
avoid looking fake or cheap. Good FX don’t lie: they follow through. No
hand prints or smudges, no bare patches on the freshly painted wall. In
Idoru, Chia Pet McKenzie, a girl of fourteen, spends nearly as much time
ported into cyberspace as she does in physical space, and never seems
confused. Her father has given her a virtual Venice, which presents as “an
old dusty book with leather covers, the smooth brown leather scuffed in
places into a fine suede...” (Jdoru/35) Wearing VR glasses and fingertip
sets, Chia opens to:
The Piazza in midwinter monochrome, its facades texture-mapped
in marble, porphyry, polished granite, jasper, alabaster (the rich
mineral names scrolling at will in the menu of peripheral vision).
[...] She had no idea what this place was meant to mean, the how or
why of it, but it fit so perfectly into itself and the space it occupied
[...] The gnarliest piece of software ever.... (Idoru/ 35-36)

108 onspec fall 2002

 Nothing in cyberspace is physically real and, in Gibson, no one treats
it as such. It’s a different thing, with a different basis. In All Tomorrow’s
Parties, Rei Toei assembles herself out of code and molecules to become
physical. But not human—it would be beside the point, perhaps even in
bad taste.
That writers might do images at least as well as filmmakers, for whom
images are ninety percent of the game, is not so surprising. Before
photography, movies and video, “natural description” (its true poetic
category) happened all the time. What is surprising is how well M.
Night Shyamalan, for one, captures the imagistic flavor of TV news and
home video in Signs. The emotionally blighted family trapped in that
farmhouse during days of hostile alien first contact can only follow the
event on TV and nearly all they get is a static, uninformative shot of
lights hanging over Mexico City. How right that is! How often we’ve had
to stare helplessly at unfolding events with nothing but a distant static
camera that makes us wait and wait: the real story, the lives reaching
crisis, are mostly withheld. And when you do get “front-line” news in
Signs, you get birthday party footage from South America, handheld and
off-focus—coded textures we’ve learned to read as documentary, true,
frighteningly “live.”
The strange part of all this is that it’s less surprising that Simone gets
its most essential images wrong every time. The film clips within the
film look like no film you've seen since Antonioni: bleak geometries,
empty skies, unmoving cameras—huh? I can think of nothing made in
the last thirty years that looks like that. There is a vaguely futuristic feel
to Simone, which mostly shows up in Jay Mohr’s costumes. Nazi architect
Albert Speer might have done those designs, to say nothing of Nordic
Ms. Romijn-Stamos in the title role. If the look means anything, what
does it mean? If it means nothing, why is it there?
We live in an unprecedented age of imagery. We are assured each
day of how sophisticated we are in this respect. At the same time, artists
worry us with fears of virtual realities replacing observed reality, conspira-
cies that reach the highest levels but with the nine-tenths-invisible mass
of icebergs supporting them, or nations that wage wars for the sake of
reelection campaigns—the tail wagging the dog. So easy to fake realty,
to fake-out the most sophisticated image consumers of all time! Then
we look hard, like that guy in my story, at the images offered as proof of
how easily duped we are, and see absurdity, accident, assumptions that
crumble as you creep the film, monochrome it, boost the contrast. We
need what writers have had since the /nstitutio Oratoria of the first-century
Roman rhetor, Quintilian: a rhetoric of image. Maybe if filmmakers knew

Steve Mohn 109

what they were doing and, more to the point, knew that we knew what
they were doing, they would become better at it.
e

Works cited in this essay (for movies, directors are named):

Notting Hill, Roger Mitchell, Universal Pictures, 1999.

Simone, Andrew Niccol, Niccol Films, New Line Cinema, 2002.
William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York,
1999.
, Idoru, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1996.
Blue Crush, John Stockwell, Imagine Entertainment, Universal Studios,
2002.
Signs, M. Night Shyamalan, Blinding Edge Pictures, Touchstone Pictures,
2002.

THE SUNBURST AWARD

FOR CANADIAN LITERATURE
OF THE FANTASTIC
is a juried award consisting of a cash prize of $1000 and a
special medallion. Based on excellence of writing, it will be
presented annually to a Canadian writer who has had published a speculative
fiction novel or book-length collection of speculative fiction any time during
the previous calendar year. The Sunburst Award Administration Committee
and its researchers maintain annual reference lists of Canadian literature of
the fantastic. We recommend that writers and publishers check the list to
ascertain that their work(s) are on the list.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Email committee secretary, Mici Gold, at: [email protected]
The Sunburst Award, 106 Cocksfield Ave., Toronto ON Canada M3H 3T2
www.sunburstaward.org

110 onspec fall 2002

 about our contributors
Jancis M. Anprews is the author of published fiction in Marion Zimmer Brad-
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair ley’s Fantasy Magazine, Writer’s of the Future
(short story collection, Ronsdale Press, Anthology Vol. 11, Sword and Sorceress #18,
Vancouver, B.C. 1992). At age 14 she ran and HMS Beagle Vol. 110. She has a PhD
away from school but returned at age in biology from the University of Dayton
34, enrolling in Grade 9. She obtained a and at present is Assistant Editor for the
B.F.A. from U.B.C. when she was 57. Journal of Comparative Psychology. She is
also a science writer for WonderLab
James BEVERIDGE (please see page 21). Museum of Science and Technology and
freelance writer for the Herald-Times in
Marc Brutscuy lives in the San Francisco Bloomington. In her free time she enjoys
Bay Area where he works as an analytical painting and gardening.
chemist. This is his second published
story, the first having appeared in Terra StevE Moun Steve Mohn has appeared
Incognita. severally in On Spec, The New York Review
of Science Fiction and recently with a story
MicHaEL Dewey was born and raised in in The Third Alternative. He lives in Mon-
scenic New England. His years living in treal.
St. John’s, Newfoundland, while his wife
attended medical school, provided the Derry. Murpuy has some new stories
opportunity to begin writing imaginative out somewhere, but he doesn’t want to
stories such as this one. He currently lives commit until he sees things in hand. In
and teaches in Western Massachusetts the meantime, if you want to wallow in the
where his creative impulses have driven glory of his past successes, Derryl recom-
him to attempt his own hand at (dare we mends you go to www.fictionwise.com/
say it?) a vegetable garden. “The Gather- eBooks/DerrylMurphyeBooks.htm and,
ing” is his first professional sale. for a small fee, read some of his reprints,
including a few from this very magazine.
Susan UrRBANEK LINVILLE lives in Bloom-
ington, Indiana, USA, with her husband, JouN Park was born in England and is
teenage daughter and three cats. She has now a partner in a scientific consulting

about ourcontributors 111

firm in Ottawa. His stories have appeared well as the Turnstone Press anthology
in Galaxy, On Spec, and Tomorrow maga- Divine Realms. “To Others We Know Not
zines and the anthologies Far Frontiers, Of,” published in Weird Tales, is included
Cities in Space, Tesseracts, ~, -*, ~, and -*, in the recent Year's Best Fantasy 2 from
Northern Stars, and TransVersions, as well Harper/Eos.
as in French and German translations.
“Imprint” started life over a decade Karen Traviss is a journalist from Hamp-
ago, as a cyberpunk parody, which helps shire, England. Her previous work has
explain how well he is known as a writer appeared in Asimov's and On Spec, and
of comedy. she has more stories coming up shortly
in Realms of Fantasy and Asimov's. The first
Ken Ranp lives in Utah where he writes novel of her City of Pearl trilogy is due to
“semi-fulltime.” His fiction has appeared be published by HarperCollins. Website:
in Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, Writers of the www.karentraviss.com.
Future, Talebones, and four dozen other
magazines and anthologies. He wrote The Davip K. YEH has lived in downtown
10% Solution: Self-editing for the Modern Toronto for the last nine years. He is a
Writer (Fairwood Press), and Tales of the graduate of the George Brown Theatre
Lucky Nickel Saloon (Yard Dog Press). School and holds his M.A. in sociology
from Queen’s University. In Toronto, he
Kate RIEDEL is originally from Minnesota, has written and produced four plays. He
but is now a card-carrying Canadian currently works full-time as an expres-
citizen living in Toronto. Previous pub- sive arts therapist. This is his first short
lication credits include Not One of Us, On story to appear in print. David likes to
Spec, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as dance.” ¢

in upcoming issues...
In upcoming issues of On Spec, you'll find new work by Ari
Goteman, Kate Rebel, Ken RAND, Wes SmiDerLe, Kevin Cocke, GARY
ARCHAMBAULT, DANIEL KSENYCH, PATRICIA RUTALE, STEVEN Mitts, STEVEN
Mouan, TERRY HAYMAN, JEAN-CLAUDE DUNYACH, Harvey WaLKER, MELISSA
Harpy, Patricia DiscHNeR, E.L. CHEN, HOLLy PHILLips, Lestié BRowN, STEVE
Moun, LeaH Boset, and many more!

112. onspec fall 2002

 A4, colour, US$7 or US$36 for six issues
(or equivalent in Canadian dollars)
payable to TTA Press
5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK
www.tta-press.freewire.co.uk

SPECIAL OFFER TO ON SPEC READERS:

FREE EXTRA ISSUE TO ALL NEW SUBSCRIBERS!

IRDAUTERNATIVE tt

Extraordinary New Fiction

Cinema, Art, Interviews, Reviews

= One of the most acclaimed new magazines

\ ...a landmark publication SF Site

Impressive, slick and thoroughly professional Locus

CANADIAN MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION
UASSOCIATION DES EDITEURS DE MAGAZINES CANADIENS.

IT’S HOT THE SAME IFIT’S HOT CANADIAN

GET THE GENUINE ARTICLE
FOR HUNDREDS OFTITLES VISITGENUINE-ARTICLE.CA

DISPLAY
TILL DEC 15/02
| 03

27415005