FSF Magazine, August 2007 Read online

  So it happened that a few minutes after the slaughter, I entered the amphitheater with Master Po on my arm. My white robe enfolded me, the hood hid my face. I deposited him on his throne and sat down at his feet. He cleared his throat and in that dry, crisp little cricket voice that somehow reached the back of the hall with perfect clarity, made his announcement.

  "Brothers and sisters, honored guests, I have sad news to communicate to you. I'm sure you've heard an alarm bell ringing and an outcry of grief. As you know, Heaven's Footstool is very old, as orbital stations go. When I was born, it had already been serving humankind for almost a hundred years. We now have unquestionable evidence that its orbit is at last decaying. Soon this station must plunge into the atmosphere and be consumed.

  "Instead of grieving further, let us be grateful in our hearts that we have had this exceptional place so long. When the shuttle arrives tomorrow, our honored guests will be the first to board, then the brothers and sisters. The Chief Monk and I will go last of all. That is as it should be.

  "Now I call upon the Chief Monk to lead us for our last devotions in Heaven's Footstool."

  The lights vanished. Again we were in the primal darkness from which being somehow distills itself—either spontaneously, wu-wei, as the scientists and the Taoists claim, or at the word of some sort of Ever-Living One, as the various faiths begotten by my people avow. Deepening my voice, trying for the orotund periods of the Reverend Aung Chai, I declared:

  "Thus, my brothers and sisters, do all things begin. This is the original state, the abyss without form and without mode of the waste and wild divinity. And then the light appears."

  * * * *

  In Manypalms Oasis, I spent the first night back beside my wife Anna, hoping never to rest anywhere else until I rested for good. I even welcomed the burden of my own recovered weight, pressing me down, nailing me to the bed.

  We got up early, because there was a sight we wanted to see. While showering—my own shower, no vacuum plumbing, water plunging downward the way it was supposed to—I decided to write this narrative. Yeah, I turned in the customary formal report to HQ, with numbered paragraphs, all the customary bureaucratic boilerplate. But it was full of uncomfortable truths, and by the time it sees light outside the Security Forces, I know goddamn well it will have been transformed into something rich and strange. HQ isn't about to admit publicly that some of its own people were up to their armpits in the CM's racket.

  By contrast, this account is taken direct from the omni I carried, the one that recorded it all, including the times when I made a fool of myself. I intend to file it, along with the memory cube, someplace safe—not in the archives of the Security Forces.

  After a gulp of coffee, Anna and I set out walking along the edge of the desert, holding hands like young lovers. The sun hadn't yet appeared. The sky was a perfect pale fluorescent blue, the coming day a fiery serpent along the horizon's rim. The bulk of the Mountain Lion reared up to our right; cacti spotted the barrenness, otherworldly shapes that ranged from bristling spheres to long, thin Giacometti sculptures. That was when she chose to ask a question she'd carefully avoided until I'd had a chance to rest and unwind.

  "Was the last night in orbit pretty bad?” she wanted to know. “When I first saw you I thought, oh great Tao, he looks like he's been through another Planet Bela."

  I took a deep breath, knowing it was better to get the whole story out, and only then try to recover.

  "It was bad,” I admitted. “Not like Bela, but bad enough. The heat built up faster than we expected. When it hit 36C, everybody was outside their cells, shuffling through the halls, trying to get a breath. Robes were too damn hot, people were half naked, wrapping themselves in wet towels. The bulkheads got hot, the deck got hot, the ceiling got hottest of all. Our prisoners in the Hub turned out all the lights, or maybe they just burned out—good thing they couldn't shut off our air supply too, without shutting off their own.

  "Emergency lights came on. When the decks got too hot, people took off their stickums and floated in the red dimness like ghosts trailing their shrouds. Councilor Mmahat started having hysterics, so I punched him out. That was satisfying, but really I was just as scared as he was, only hiding it better. I was thinking: if the shuttle doesn't arrive on time, we'll all be steamed like rice."

  She shivered. The desert was cold in the morning, but that wasn't the reason. She put an arm around my waist, hand pressing my hara, holding me down to Mother Earth.

  I told her about the finish. How the supply shuttle arrived on the dot and locked onto Heaven's Footstool. How Sister Jann and I worked the airlock together until the seals hissed open. People jostled forward, only to meet the shuttle captain, who was armed and going the other way. I told him to jettison his cargo, because over a hundred people had to be jammed into the shuttle somehow. He refused, the perfect bureaucrat, because he was responsible for the cargo until it was signed for. So Master Po signed the manifest in kanji, which nobody else could read, and only then would the captain agree to dump the cargo so the rescue could proceed. The guests surged through the lock, Mmahat supported by his handmaiden, who seemed to be holding up a lot better than her master. The monks followed.

  Last act. Everybody was aboard the shuttle except Black Death and me. He trotted up from A Ring, wearing only a loincloth and his stickums, panting like a dog and sweating rivers. His whole torso was covered with a spiderweb of fine white scars. He told me that our prisoners got the door to the Hub open somehow, and he had to shoot two more of them.

  "Aung Chai?” I asked.

  "Still inside, I guess. The leader didn't lead. Or he led from the rear.” His grin gave me a flash of gold.

  "Come aboard, Honored Champion Rhee."

  I was following him, the last rat leaving the falling star, when guess who came running in from D Ring? The CM was wild-eyed and wringing wet, and waving a pistol. He spotted me standing just inside the shuttle's loading port and the shuttle's door closing. He knew we'd cut loose in a few seconds, and with the airlock open every bubble of air in Heaven's Footstool would rush howling into the void, blowing him with it.

  "I'll die!” he shouted. “I'll die!"

  "The great weakness of the demonic personality,” piped up Master Po's voice at my elbow, “is that it believes in nothing but its own ego. Then how can it face death and the disintegration of the ego?"

  Well, I know how the CM faced it. He didn't. After all, I insulted pumas by comparing him to them. He didn't die like a lion.

  Instead of pumping shots at us in a final gesture of defiance, he ran to the control for the outer door of the airlock and pressed it. It began closing, sealing him inside alive and saving him for an infinitely worse death than being quick-frozen and blown into space. He was willing to be roasted alive in order to live another few minutes, a few hours at most. As some theologians have argued, a demon isn't cast into hell—he makes it for himself.

  Meantime the nuclear steel door of the shuttle's port closed with a hiss, clamps clanged loose from the flanges of the airlock, and we began to drift away from Orbital Station One, which had been so many things, a place of learning, a place of prayer, and now had one last role to play—a burning tomb.

  "What happened to Master Po?” Anna wanted to know.

  "Earth's gravity got him. Or maybe post-traumatic stress. He'd been through a lot, you know. His heart action was weak anyway, and shortly after we landed he passed out—went into syncope, as you medical types say. Sister Jann tried to revive him, but couldn't. I think that devastated her more than anything else. Afterward, she told me she's leaving the White Monks to join the Mother Teresa Guild and spend the rest of her life caring for the dying."

  "She does have a tropism for death, doesn't she?” Anna murmured. “Curious.... On a more practical note, what about your pension?"

  "I wouldn't start spending the extra money yet. You've seen the news coverage. They're calling me Colonel Albatross because I always seem to be present at disasters. Cou
ncilor Mmahat's promoting a temple at New Angkor dedicated to his pal Aung Chai. By the time the official historians get finished, the CM will be the heroic captain who went down with his ship, and I'll just be the dumb cop who destroyed Heaven's Footstool. After all, that's what I did."

  "No, you didn't,” she said.

  She stamped her size-4 foot on the dusty ground. "This is Heaven's Footstool. The real one. And always has been."

  She'd told a truth worthy of Lao-tzu. Also she was telling me never to leave it again. I nodded agreement, but then went back to gawking at the sky, as usual. The reason we were out so early was to see a sight announced on last night's news.

  "Look,” I told her. “Here it comes. Last orbit."

  A meteor came flashing out of the dark west. It passed over us toward the fiery east in a long, elegant arc that ended in nothing. Or in Everything—take your pick.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Films by Kathi Maio

  AND THE HOLLYWOOD

  RATHES OUTGRABE

  It is with ten parts dread to every one part anticipation that science fiction and fantasy fans learn that one of our classic novels or stories is about to be adapted for the big screen. Although we'd love to see our beloved favorite brought to life, we are rightly skeptical of Hollywood's ability (or fortitude) to do the job right.

  I could at this point digress into a litany of all the cinematic outrages that we have had to endure. But even if I limited the discussion to the last ten years, my list and blow-by-blow indignation would require a book length treatise. So, instead, I will just skip to a discussion of the adaptation at hand, and that is a reworking of the classic 1943 short story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) into a recent family film entitled The Last Mimzy.

  Judging from the two titles alone, we can guess that this will not be a particularly faithful adaptation and that some changes will seem irrational and completely unnecessary. For example, in an insult not just to Mr. Kuttner, but also to the great Lewis Carroll—whose “Jabberwocky” provides the original story's title—Mimsy is changed from an adjective to a noun in the movie. And for some unknown flippin’ reason the spelling is changed from a “sy” ending to a “zy."

  But hold on, my dear readers! If I allow myself to get this nitpicky about this film, even this one review will turn into a book length treatise. So let's move along. At least as far as a brief discussion of the gentlemen behind the movie.

  The Last Mimzy is one of those movies with a painfully long gestation period. (Usually a bad sign.) The script went through some nineteen drafts by five writers over a twelve-year period. The screenplay credits finally went to the often death-obsessed scribe Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost, Jacob's Ladder, My Life, Deep Impact) and New Line Cinema executive turned scripter (Frequency), Toby Emmerich.

  As you might guess, The Last Mimzy was released by New Line Cinema, where Mr. Emmerich is currently President of Production. And he isn't the only New Line exec to take a busman's holiday by assuming an actual filmmaker role in one of the studio's movies. In fact, the director of The Last Mimzy is none other than New Line co-founder, co-chairman and co-CEO, Bob Shaye.

  Although Mr. Shaye is primarily known as a man who knows how to market populist schlock movie franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Destination, and Austin Powers to the masses, he actually started out distributing edgy indie—although equally schlocky—fare like John Waters's Pink Flamingos (1972). More recently New Line has released interesting and intelligent features like A History of Violence (2005) and Little Children (2006) along with the countless dumb and dumber flicks like, you guessed it, Dumb and Dumber (1994) and its pale imitator, Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2003).

  For science fiction fans Mr. Shaye is best known as the man who watched Peter Jackson's pitch reel for a Lord of the Rings two-part movie (which had been rejected by most of Hollywood) and not only gave it a green light, but financed it for a three-film cycle. Riches, Oscars, Litigation, and Blood Feuds followed, in that order.

  What does any of this have to do with The Last Mimzy? Not a heck of a lot, except to say that film critics sometimes know too much about the provenance of a movie going in. That makes us even more jaundiced and suspicious and likely to dismiss a film before we give it a chance. And when it comes to a movie written by committee and directed by a studio head, well, let me just admit that my mind was reeling in horror even before I entered the theater.

  That admission over, I'll now say that I was pleasantly surprised by The Last Mimzy. Oh, it will outrage any reader requiring a literal rendering of the Padgett story. Likewise, the movie's sometimes jarring components are not only indicative of its surfeit of scripters, but also of a corporate mindset that wants to make a movie by recipe (give me some of the government bad guys from E.T., then let's throw in a cute stuffed critter who is much more, like in A.I ., etc., etc.)

  And yet.... And yet.... If you can turn off the voices that murmur all the reasons there are to dislike this film, you will find that it actually works as entertainment.

  Set in modern-day Seattle, The Last Mimzy follows a brother and sister a few years older than the original story's tykes. Ten-year-old Noah Wilder (Chris O'Neill) and his five-year-old sister, Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn), seem like normal upper-middle-class kids until they find a mysterious box during an Easter vacation on Whidbey Island. The contents are odd but not totally unfamiliar looking: a green translucent circuit board affair, a shivering blob that looks like a half-filled water balloon, a geode-looking rock that breaks apart, something that looks like a sea shell, and an old-fashioned-looking bunny rabbit doll that Emma immediately adopts and dubs Mimzy.

  The children are reluctant to share their discovery with their mother (Joely Richardson) and busy dad (Timothy Hutton)—especially after Mom dismisses one magical toy as a worthless paperweight. As a logical adult, she only sees a small slab of slate, but the children see the magic in these objects, and learn from them.

  And we're not just talking about your standard elementary school lessons, either. Before long, both children are showing a talent for telekinesis, and Noah is winning the local science fair with his ability to control spiders and make them work together to build a super-strong tunnel-like web bridge. That bridge design has Noah's hippie science teacher, Larry White (The Office's Rainn Wilson), murmuring words like “genius.” He is also blown away by Noah's latest doodles, which are exact copies of Tibetan sacred mandalas that the teacher saw in Nepal—and in his recurring dreams.

  When White tells his fiancée, Naomi (Crossing Jordan's Kathryn Hahn), about this, she encourages White and the children's increasingly worried parents to investigate the possibility that one or both children could be a tulku, the reincarnation of a great Buddhist lama.

  "What's with all the Tibetan folderol?” you may well ask. Surely this is one of the contributions of screenwriter Rubin, who has traveled throughout the Himalayas and is a student and teacher of meditation. How it all actually fits into the main story that links adorable little present-day Earth children with a future civilization looking for desperately needed genetic assistance is more than a little unclear.

  Perhaps Mr. Rubin wanted to write off his latest trip as a business expense. In any case, you may rest assured that you will be seeing mandalas everywhere from space wormholes to fields of futuristic posies in this movie. No explanation is ever really offered for any of it, but since the designs are pleasing to the eye, it easy for the viewer to go with the flow and add one more subplot to the disbelief they must actively suspend while The Last Mimzy plays itself out.

  The mandalas do suit the vaguely new-agey message that the film seems to want to deliver. This includes a not-too-heavy-handed environmental sermon about the dangers of pollution and DNA damage. Then there's the more than a little touchy-feely moral of the story, which seems to be that innocence and childhood purity are both the figurative and literal salvation of
the world.

  Just don't let the FBI or Homeland Security hear about it. Everything is a terrorist plot to them. The wholesome Wilder family comes under scrutiny after a “generator” the children help form from the space objects blacks out much of Seattle. Soon SWAT teams are raiding the place and the family is hauled off to a research facility by a Homeland Security wonk named Broadman (Michael Clarke Duncan) for interrogation and detention.

  I know that it hearkens (a little too obviously) back to E.T., but the Homeland Security subplot is by far and away the weakest aspect of the film. Duncan is unconvincing as a former Justice Department bureaucrat now in charge of the security of the Pacific Northwest. And his investigation of the “toys” the Wilder children found also leads to the most awkward and ludicrous product placement I've seen in a movie in a long time. When scientists do a deep scan of the dear little Mimzy doll, they are dumbfounded by the nanotechnology they find. The doll contains a cyborgian nervous system that is beyond their wildest dreams. But in the middle of one circuit board is the glowing logo of Intel.

  I hope Intel paid a lot for that placement. “Intel Inside” everything eons into the future? From Mimzy's embroidered lips to God's ear, sayeth the company CEO!

  By the time we reach the FBI secret lab, we know that the plot is quickly spiraling away from anything resembling the original story. This is a disappointment, but not really surprising.

  For all its wonder, the Padgett story is really a tale of horror—at least for adult readers. The fear and dread of the grownups in the story, from the concerned parents to the visiting kiddie shrink, builds to the concluding scene where a bereft father tries to fathom what has just befallen him. Children view a “through the looking glass” escape from parental and social controls differently, but since a truly tidy resolution is never offered, they too might find the story unsettling, if memorable.

  It is therefore understandable that Hollywood went for a more conventional happy ending to their version. Fine, I have no problem with a little hyperbolic wonderment FX whiz-bang to conclude our familial story, followed by a golden scene of flying future children at baby Buddha day camp. But was it really necessary that the filmmakers expunge so much of what made the Padgett story memorable?