FSF Magazine, February 2007 Page 7

  As Stone had guessed—no, it was a certainty!—they turned and fled.

  With a wan smile, Stone watched the last of them round the corner. They could have killed him with their numbers, but each of them could not count past himself, an army of one, no army that.

  * * * *

  This last door would not be broken into by brute force. This Stone knew, but he had not come unprepared. He removed the gem that his old friend N'Loopa had given him, hearing again his old friend's words, “This be seek rock, some say Eye of Old God called sometimes Abathoth. Can find your way on journey, sure, but more more power too. Find man or woman's heart. Find lost thing. Find hidden thing."

  Stone held the gem up to the door, as one might hold a candle up to illuminate a murky corridor. The gem cast an eerie, greenish light that uncovered what cunning spells sought to conceal from human eyes. Upon the door, strange runes were drawn in a square, and, as Stone looked on, one symbol grew brighter, then faded as another underwent the same transformation, dark to bright then dark again. Some primal voice spoke to Stone without words, without sound. Stone knew what to do. He leaned forward and touched each symbol as it shone.

  When the cycle had completed, the door swung open silently. Stone entered the room with his sword held high. The Librarian was motionless, slumped forward on his desk, a small lamp illuminating his bald pate.

  Stone thought to slay him in his sleep. The old man's power and cunning were not to be underestimated. And the advantage of surprise was not to be traded for some misguided notion of fair play.

  Even as Stone thought this, the Librarian looked up.

  "Son,” the Librarian said, “your mother's been worried sick. Where have you been?"

  Stone spoke, undaunted: “I have been many places. I have fought and reveled in lands beyond Atlantis and Mu, beyond the reach of your assassins. I have stood under a midnight sky where three moons illuminated the naked daughters of Lenthe, Goddess of Lust, as they danced their lascivious dances and fought for my seed."

  The Librarian sighed. “Your mother went to bed in tears. I told her I'd wait up."

  "My mother was killed by your minions when I was just a child. And I am no son of yours. I doubt my father is alive, for—"

  "Yes, the mines of that small village you grew up in are dangerous.” The Librarian shook his head, expressing fatigue, disgust. “It was a simple field trip to the Museum of Natural History, Edward. Mr. Miller was extremely upset when he discovered you'd slipped away from the group. I assured him that it has happened before and that you'd turn up. That assurance didn't keep your mother from hysterics. I finally talked her into taking a sedative."

  "My mother is dead,” Stone said. “And I have had enough of your words."

  The Librarian smiled. “Do you intend to hit me with that umbrella, Edward?"

  Stone's eyes rose slowly to his clenched hand. The sword was gone—and in his hand, instead: a thin black umbrella!

  Stone felt the strength go out of him. The blue smoke that encircled him was not, as he had foolishly assumed, the familiar effluvium produced by the Librarian's pipe. No, this was some insidious vapor that distorted—

  And then that thought was gone, and Stone lost consciousness before the floor smote his forehead.

  * * * *

  III

  Remembrance of Things Past

  He went to the classes and returned to his room. How long he had done this, he did not know.

  "I think I'm overmedicated,” he told the school's physician, who nodded and said, “Probably. In time we can reduce the dosage, but for now....” He shrugged. “Better safe than sorry."

  They called him Edward, a name he hated. “Call me, Ed, okay?” he said.

  So his fellow students called him Ed. His teachers insisted on Edward, to taunt him, he assumed.

  This day he lay on the bed and opened the new novel they had assigned him. At least, he thought, it's a short one.

  It was about some teenager named Holden. It was “written” by Holden, although it wasn't really written by him. There was a writer out there who had really written the book, pretending to be Holden.

  Ed hated this, hated the levels of the lie, the depth of dissembling. In the novel, this Holden kid calls everyone a “phony,” and complains about everything and doesn't do much of anything, just drifts around, and talks about how he'd like to be the one who stands around watching children play in a meadow where there's a cliff. This imaginary teenager's imaginary job would be to grab a kid up if he strayed too near the cliff's edge. Only: Why have children playing in such a dangerous place just so you could be a hero? Ed thought Holden was a silly, coddled creature. But Holden wasn't real, was as blameless as the air. The person responsible for Holden's inflated ego and miserable personality was this Salinger who wrote the book, this fool, this writer, making a voice in his head, imitating the accent, the gestures, the slouch, imagining this whiny teenager. Ed couldn't exactly explain why this was so enraging. This Holden Caulfield was a worthless waste of time, and that was bad enough, but it seemed a thousand times worse that someone had intentionally brought Holden to life. What an abomination: a listless author giving birth to a listless teenager!

  That night Ed tossed and turned in his sleep and was harried by fantastical dreams that he could not remember, dreams that left him covered with sweat. In the morning, he resolved to stop taking his pills. He went to a drugstore on Livingston and bought a bottle of vitamin C pills that were white, oval shapes—just like the pills he swallowed each morning. He poured these pills into a plastic sandwich bag and walked down to the medical annex where Nurse Werther was drinking coffee and watching the news on the overhead television. She sighed the way she always did when anyone interrupted her, as though she wasn't being paid to dispense medications but did it out of the goodness of her heart, despite the ingratitude of those she served.

  When she came back with the pill bottle, Ed pretended to stumble. He grabbed at the table to right himself, and Nurse Werther's coffee went over.

  "Shaw!” she shouted. As she ran off to get a paper towel, Ed grabbed the bottle, turned away from the retreating nurse, opened the bottle and poured its contents into his left pocket. Another few seconds, and he had emptied the plastic bag's contents into the bottle and screwed the cap back on. Nurse Werther hadn't returned. When she did, and when she had finished mopping up the spilled coffee while sighing copiously, she watched Ed take his pill.

  Tomorrow and the next day and the next day, he would dutifully come in and take his vitamin C.

  * * * *

  Three weeks later, Ed finished the obligatory book report. His report began, “If I met Holden Caulfield in an alley, I would kill him with a rock,” but he didn't hand that one in. He didn't want trouble. So he pretended he was one of the prissy girls in the class, and he wrote about how much he liked the book, and he used the word “alienation” because that was his teacher's favorite word that month.

  He went to classes. Time turned the color of a rain-laden sky. When people called him Edward, it didn't bother him so much.

  * * * *

  "Many people consider this the greatest novel of the twentieth century,” the professor said.

  Wonderful, Edward thought. He was in a different part of the university now, and here the level of complexity was deeper. Many of his fellow students never finished a sentence, so besieged were they by elaborate, subtle thoughts.

  At least I don't have to read it in French, he thought, as he studied Volume 1, which contained four novels, the first half of this imposing masterpiece. He flipped through the pages of the book. There were 1,141 of them. Many pages were flat blocks of small type with no indentions, no paragraphs. The translator was a man named C. K. Scott Moncrieff, and Edward wondered if that was a pseudonym but realized he didn't really care.

  With trepidation that was immediately validated, he began reading the first paragraph:

  For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had pu
t out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say, “I'm going to sleep."

  Two sentences in, and his brain already felt dull and heavy. His eyes traveled over several sentences before his attention kicked in again:

  ...Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.

  Edward read on. No one had to tell him that this Proust guy wrote while lying down. The convoluted sentences induced a fever state that destroyed his sense of time.

  * * * *

  Edward stopped attending classes, but in this crowded university, away from the usual parental supervision, his absence was not noted, and he did manage to drop by the medical annex for his vitamin C dose, so Nurse Werther wouldn't raise an alarm.

  He was free to dream. He lost all sense of the convoluted sentences, and they began to devour him. He could make no clear distinction between reading and staring at the ceiling. He had heard other students speak of this lack of clarity, the way the sinuous thoughts would turn to sounds, cadences that induced trance states. He thought he might die, but felt no sense of fear. He was interested only in describing this state with the longest sentence he could fashion.

  He hadn't eaten in days, perhaps weeks. Could one not eat for weeks? He stumbled toward the bed and fell. He grabbed an end table to steady himself, but it accompanied him downward, and a drawer fell out, tumbling as it fell. The bottom of the drawer was revealed, and on it, lashed with silver tape, was a book. Edward peeled away the tape and studied the book, a paperback. The end table, which he had brought from home, was old, and the book had clearly been affixed to its hiding place long ago. He thought he remembered it, remembered reading it surreptitiously, late at night, the way one might remember eating a crumpet with some tea in some long ago past. He studied its garish cover, an oil painting of massive cavemen marching out of the mist of some brutal prehistoric dawn. A pale white woman is draped over the gigantic shoulder of one such brute. She is as white, whiter, than the moon above. She is naked.

  Edward lay on the bed reading the book. Halfway through the first story, a sharp knife stabbed his stomach. He identified the knife: hunger. He ate the cheese and ham in the refrigerator, washing it down with six or seven beers. He ate a loaf of bread. He had bought these groceries some time ago. There may have been mold growing on some of the items, but he did not care. He was not fastidious.

  He slept soundly and was roughly awakened by a man he felt he ought to know.

  "You're alive,” the man said. He was a big man, and his eyes burned with impatience.

  "Who are you?” Edward asked.

  "You know,” the man said, and Edward was surprised to discover that he did know. This was the man who had made the sentences his slaves and so escaped the dust and tedium of West Texas.

  "They said you were dead."

  "They would say that, wouldn't they?"

  Of course they would!

  The man leaned closer, his eyes solemn, intense. “The real question,” he said, “is who are you?"

  Edward would have said he didn't know, but the answer was on his tongue when he opened his mouth. “Stone."

  The man nodded and turned away. “I've taken the liberty of breaking this window. You're a sound sleeper.” He waited, as though Stone might want to refute this. Stone said nothing—and the man continued. “I thought you might wish to leave without attracting attention.” Then the man was in the window, a silhouette, and then he was gone. Without hesitation, Stone followed, leaping into the night, the star-bright air roaring in his ears like the welcoming roar of a vast crowd. The soles of his shoes slapped down on the asphalt parking lot; he stumbled forward, but he did not fall. He looked around at the campus, the rows of stark winter trees against the mist-enshrouded lamps, the stately admin building to his right, dormitories one through eight receding in the distance like some trick of a mirror or too much to drink.

  "Come on!” the man shouted. He was on down the path; another ten feet and he would disappear behind the tall evergreens that lined Burroughs Way. He raised his arm, and described an urgent arc. “Come on!” he shouted. “We'll be safe once we reach the jungle!"

  And Stone knew he was right.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Helper and His Hero: Part 1 by Matthew Hughes

  Last year, our serialization of Terry Bisson's “Planet of Mystery” went over well, so we thought we'd oblige readers with another two-part adventure. This one comes courtesy of Matthew Hughes, whose tales from the Penultimate Age of Old Earth have made him one of our most popular writers in recent years. “The Helper and His Hero” marks the culmination of the sequence of Guth Bandar stories he has been spinning (all of which will be assembled into a novel and published in June as The Commons). Readers of Mr. Hughes's novel Black Brillion will find many echoes of that story in this tale ... but actually, you need not have read any of the past stories to enjoy this one. You doubt? Read on and see—

  Guth Bandar was adrift in a formless, limitless, gray nothing. Above him was nothing, ahead and to all sides was nothing, and below was nothing. But no, far down (an arbitrary direction—it was simply the view between his feet), something moved. Something tiny that, as he watched, grew larger as it came toward him.

  Now Bandar felt a shiver of fear. For this no-place could be only one place. He was adrift in the Old Sea of preconsciousness, the inert and timeless realm that underlay the collective unconscious of humanity. Only one thing moved in the Old Sea: the great blind Worm that endlessly swam its “waters” in search of its own tail. And only one thing could divert the Worm from its eternal, futile quest. As early nonauts had discovered when they had hacked their way through the floor of the Commons and dipped into the pearl gray nothingness beneath, the Worm sensed any consciousness that entered the Old Sea—and inerrantly swam to devour it.

  It is a dream, of course, Bandar told himself. He applied the nonaut techniques that would allow him to take charge of the dream, to change its dynamic, or to wake from it.

  But nothing happened. He floated in nothingness, and the Worm came on. Now it seemed as long as his hand. In moments it looked to be the length of his forearm, its undulating motion hypnotically compelling his gaze. Bandar looked away, sought to concentrate on the techniques of lucid dreaming, but when he looked again, the Worm was as long as his leg. Its great dark circle of a mouth, rimmed with triangular teeth, grew larger as he watched.

  A wave of panic swept through him. He flailed against the nothingness, as if he could swim away. But there was nothing to push against, nowhere to go even if he could somehow achieve motion. And still the Worm rose beneath him, its gaping maw now as wide as a housefront and still relentlessly enlarging.

  "What do you want?” Bandar called into the void. There could be only one agent behind this: the Multifacet, the entity that was the collective unconscious paradoxically become conscious of itself, that for its own obscure ends had ruined Bandar's career only to abandon him. Was it now back, with some new demand? Or had it, as he had often feared, simply gone mad and tossed him into the Old Sea, for no other reason than that it had the awful power to do so?

  The mouth of the Worm loomed beneath him now like a black moon, still rising. “Tell me what you want!” Bandar screamed, while a part of his mind offered him the obvious answer: maybe it just wants you eaten.

  "I did everything you asked!” he cried. “What do you want now?"

  And as the Worm rose to swallow him a voice from the nothingness said, “More."

  * * * *

  Bandar awoke in his comf
ortable seat in the well-appointed gondola of the midafternoon balloon-tram, the dream-fear fading along with all memory of the Worm. He discovered that, while he had been dozing, two late arrivals must have boarded just before the conveyance lifted off from the terminal in the heart of Olkney.

  One of the two would have drawn attention wherever he went, for he was quite possibly the fattest person Bandar had ever seen, although he was light enough on his feet as he made his way among the scattered armchairs in which passengers disposed themselves for the trip to Farflung, at the edge of the Swept, the great, unnaturally flat sea of grass that Bandar had always longed to travel.

  The fat one's companion was a young man in nondescript garb wearing a slightly soiled cravat that identified him as a third-tier graduate of the Archon's Institute for Instructive Improvement, where the great and the titled had sent their children from time immemorial; its history faculty was tangentially connected to Bandar's alma mater, the Institute for Historical Inquiry.

  But it was not the possibility of academic connection that gave the nonaut a start; rather, it was a fixity of expression and a fierceness about the eyes that gave Bandar the impression that the young man's features might never have arranged themselves into the full complement of expressions that a normal human visage displays over a lifetime, even a short one. Bandar allowed this initial impression to linger in his mind while he sought to see what associations it might conjure up from his unconscious. Moments later, a series of images floated onto his inner screen, and he was surprised to note that all of them were faces he had encountered in the Commons; he realized that the stranger, who was now seating himself across the gondola's wide aisle and engaging in low-voiced argument with the fat man, showed the same simplicity of character as that of an idiomatic entity.