FSF Magazine, June 2007 Read online

  If only he had listened to me, just the once. If he had taken in what I told him he would have come to you with an axe, and used it mercilessly. Afterward he would have consigned you to fire, until the memory of the twins flew up in the smoke. He would fire the entire hill, to put the last seal of certainty on his forgetting.

  The first few times when I scratched your shell I skinned the palms of my hands. The bark is rough against hands that have not been coarsened. My fists are bruised where they attacked your hard bark. I soiled you with traces of my blood, like a derisory, ridiculous offering. I struck, spat and scratched, a demented woman. This wound in the bark, a trace in the tissue like a scar, it was I who tore off this splinter with my fingernails, one night when silence wounded my ears. That silence asphyxiating me like a fetid smell, on top of the hill, you rearing up in front of me, roots anchored well in the ground. I would have sworn it was you who silenced the noise, who stole the air I was trying to breathe. The twins, weren't they enough for you? I risked glancing down to the bottom of the hill, where the houses were quiet, as if they were blind, then up toward the sky, glimpsed between your branches stretching out to scratch the stars. I felt the weight of the world crushing me. Then I concentrated on the shade of the twins that was in you.

  There were nights when I was so desperate I would have torn off the skin on my fingers to strip you of your bark, one flake at a time, leaving you naked, to get to my twins beneath the surface. Then you would have had to return them to me. I would have separated the Siamese creature with my fingernails, to make them into two again, Anna and Adam. I would have attacked you with bare hands, if I had thought it would have done any good.

  Instead, I learned. I discovered the intoxicating perfume of your bark after the rain. The feeling of wood beneath my fingers, solid and reassuring, all this power in my arms. The complexity of the mosaic on which my palms slipped, like the scales of an old and fantastic animal. I learned how to know your rough edges, at first with delicate care, as one discovers the skin of a new lover.

  Benjamin laughed the first time we made love, eight years ago, close to this place. He was a nineteen-year-old urchin who could not believe in his luck. We were married on this hill. After the ceremony he chased me through the brambles which tore at my marriage veils, as foolish as a schoolboy running after girls’ skirts. He planted two seeds in me while we lay between the trees, away from the gaze of others. I brushed past you in my torn skirts. Did you know then what was coming?

  The bark is not so hard to the touch when one grows used to it. I know through my fingertips the relief map of your grooves, your canyons, the edges where I wounded my hands. I learned the pattern of your wrinkles and your veins, your fault lines and your crevices, the map of your scars. I inspected you as if you were a door without a visible lock, one openable only by looking for the sesame spell. Or as if you were an ancient parchment that had to be deciphered. I'm sure it amused you to watch me? To see me while holding my little ones out of reach?

  I don't know how Benjamin failed to see the two masks set in the bark. Two faces drawn in the higher part of the trunk, just below the nodes of your main branches, as if carved from the same wood. They can be seen, though. The features are coarse: just eyes, nose, mouth. Neither lips, nor hair, nor eyebrows. But they seem a natural part of the whole, as if they have always been there. Two oval growths on the trunk, back to back. Admit that you did it on purpose! Two years that they turn their backs on each other, like the two faces of Janus. You did this deliberately, to separate them. It is all part of the irony of the thing: they are together, but they cannot see each other.

  You made them so that I cannot see them both at the same time. I have to choose between Adam or Anna. You placed them out of reach, just too far away for me to skim my fingertips across them. I did try, though. But you are huge, on a human scale. The trunk is so large I cannot encircle it with my two arms.

  You erased even their differences. The two faces are identical, like two African masks without distinguishing features. They were still at the age where people could confuse them. They often wondered which of the twins was the small girl, which the boy. The same round face, the same black hair cut short, the same eyebrows already clearly featured, inherited from Benjamin. Anna had a small dimple in her left cheek when she laughed. Of the two of them, she was already the wild one. She would have made my life difficult if she had grown up. Such a mischievous smile signals great crises ahead. Adam was calmer, more secretive. Undoubtedly because one day he would need boundless patience to unravel the damage of his twin tornado.

  I searched for them in the faces of the other children as they walked out of school. All the five-year-old kids of the neighborhood. I watched them passing, as I stood with the group of other mothers. I was rooted to the spot. All these good, home-loving women who would never come on the hill for their little ones. But it is true that I spent many days there, to keep an eye on the school. I hated them, those animated faces so full of life. All those little faces too adorable to be fair. They nauseated me.

  I sought and found two of them. A little boy, a small girl, both five years old. Almost alike enough to be twins. Perhaps they were cousins. Same black hair, same grasshopper limbs, like Adam, like Anna. One evening I arrived before their mothers. I carried them in my arms to you, offering a trade. And you refused them. I would have delivered every kid in the village to you if you had asked. I would have knifed them with a light heart for the return of my own twins. But carved in wood, the two faces were always waiting.

  Did they see me burying their soft toys and their clothing between your roots?

  From the first I believed that the face on the left was Anna's. It seemed to me I could see one of the masks smiling, if a smile could be detected under the bark. But I was deluding myself. They are identical, except for small details. And I cannot even see them side by side to compare them. To look closely at one of them, it is necessary to turn away from the other.

  Do they look at me, from their perch? And if they do see me, can they at least remember me? Perhaps their memory has become stilled, now that you and they have become one. I always believed that a child cannot forget his mother. You can't avoid such ideas, when face to face with your fears. Two children with the memory of a tree. Lost in their wooden sleep, their chlorophyll dreams.

  Certain evenings, I wound myself around your limbs so that I could press my ear against your skin. I thought I could hear something fluttering beneath your bark, almost within reach. It reminded me of my former life, when Benjamin's quiet breathing sometimes kept me awake in our bed. I thought I heard twin hearts beating slowly against my ear. But I was just deluding myself again.

  Have you at least let them grow? They are always five years old in my head—as they will be, undoubtedly, in their chrysalis. They would be cramped if they were growing physically. They would need to learn how to spread through your membranes to leave them changed. If you were to return them to me this evening, would I recognize them? Two years of sleep nourished by your sap, that must leave a trace. They would inevitably be changed. A little more arboreal, a little less human. But you would return them to me! I would take them again just as they are, I promise you. Benjamin would not understand, but I would take them again, no matter what form they might be in. And whether or not they recognize me.

  Was all this to punish me? My mother used to talk to the trees, in her time. She spent nights on this hill, although I never knew why. I was also born to listen to the voices of the trees, but I chose to be deaf to them. You undoubtedly did what you did as a way of recalling me to you, because until then I had refused to listen. But I learn quickly, you see. I listen and I learn. I am on your side now. Let me hear your voice, the one that made my twins run to this hill. They had the gift, too. They came here laughing. Toward their wooden cage. Toward their new skin.

  And now, this evening, I have come to ask you to take me. Let me become you. I come in peace, drunk with your perfume, to feel the reas
suring touch of wood beneath my palms. I want to blend myself into you, let the bark absorb me. Later, perhaps, you will reject me again. I will be made surrogate mother for you if that is what you wish. Since they will reappear one day. You know how empty a woman feels, when she is a mother without her babies? Benjamin fills his own void his way, by drowning the gaping hole they have left with too much whisky and beer. Me, I want only to take them into me again. Or then the three of us to melt into you.

  Let me join you. Ravage me if you must, nourish me with your sap. It is with pleasure that I will be made tree—what do I have to lose here? I don't fear for myself anymore, you see. All I wish is to reach the two faces, to add mine to the fresco. Perhaps one day Benjamin will suddenly pass here and will think he recognizes me in one of the masks. But he will push away the idea, think it the delusion of a drunkard, and he will go home again to sleep it off in the empty bed. Poor fool. How he adored his twins!

  I want to know what you did to them. It matters little to me that they became wood, foliage, chlorophyll. I want to know and to become like them, even if it is necessary to take a share of you. Accept me into you, put me near them, shelter me from the world.

  Don't make me wait any longer.

  Plumage From Pegasus: It's All Goodkind by Paul Di Filippo

  "[Terry] Goodkind's books are popular in part because, in a complicated world, he boils things down to stark contrasts—good is good, evil is evil, and heroes are studly, hyper-rational armies of one.... In a speech he delivered a few years ago at a bookstore in Virginia ... he jumped all over an unnamed novel (and the critic who praised it) because it featured a protagonist involved in a drug deal in Southeast Asia. ‘The author and the reviewer are saying that a drug dealer is a normative value,’ Goodkind said. ‘That is assigning value to the destruction of life. I instead write about people being the best they can be.'”

  —Dwight Garner, “Inside the List,” The New York Times, August 6, 2006.

  I was dreading my appointment with Commissioner Goodkine, but there was simply no avoiding it. If I wanted my novel published, the manuscript would have to clear the Federal Board of Literary Normative Values. And the fact that the Commissioner himself had demanded a meeting with me, I believed, did not bode well.

  So I dressed as conservatively as possible, affixing to the bosom of my suit jacket a cheap tin lapel pin that represented the image of the FBLNV's “Sword of Truth” (a broad Crusader's blade gripped by a studly hand and slicing off a turbaned heathen's head). Then I stuffed my manuscript in a battered satchel and headed downtown.

  The fat, heavy manuscript dragged my arm down and I grew even more depressed, if that were possible. I had never written overstuffed books this big, back before the establishment of the FBLNV. I had been something of a miniaturist, a composer of slim modern fables and surreal allegories. But such forms were proscribed nowadays, and the only acceptable fictions were uplifting paeans to man's nobility.

  The FBLNV was housed in a magnificent classical-style marble structure only a few years old. Occupying an entire square city block, it boasted enormous domineering columns at its portico. Inscribed on the lintel above the entrance was the First Rule of the FBLNV, adapted from Goodkine's own fiction, where it had been known as “Wizard's First Rule."

  PEOPLE ARE STUPID.

  I stared at the inscription, shaking my head in ironic bemusement. Then I realized that several video cameras were aimed at me, and that ironic bemusement was not an approved reaction to Federal institutions. So I straightened my shoulders and went inside.

  Displaying the official letter demanding my presence to several functionaries quickly earned me passage straight through the vast warren of busy clerks vetting the recreational prose of the nation and into the anteroom of Commissioner Goodkine's office. I sat alone there in a fairly comfortable chair, heavy satchel in my lap, with nothing to look at but a large wall plaque bearing the other nine Rules of the FBLNV, also borrowed from Goodkine's enormous “moral and philosophical” saga. I admired them for one reason: they packed more sententious twaddle into fewer words than any prose I had ever seen.

  After half an hour, the inner door to the Commissioner's sanctum swung soundlessly open of its own accord. The manly and assured albeit somewhat Mister Rogers-esque voice of Commissioner Goodkine himself summoned me inside.

  The office was decorated with many original paintings, both samples of the Commissioner's own amateur work—marine and wildlife studies—and canvases from his second-favorite artist after himself, Thomas Kinkade.

  Behind a broad expanse of mahogany sat Commissioner Goodkine, the ultimate objectivist arbiter of the nation's entertainment in prose form. His dense but micrometer-thick beard, eerily perfect, reminded me of the flocking that used to adorn the cheeks of the early G. I. Joe dolls, while his auburn pony tail invariably brought thoughts of Naomi Judd to my mind.

  Commissioner Goodkine did not arise, but offered me a seat in kindly tones. His stern yet beatific face remained neutral. I tried to summon up some anger at being called on the carpet in such a humiliating and potentially career-destroying fashion, but couldn't yet get fully aroused.

  And Commissioner Goodkine's next words disarmed me completely.

  "Mr. Badway, you have the authorial potential to be a best-selling force for the spiritual uplift of our glorious nation. That's why I chose to consult with you personally."

  "I—I do?"

  Commissioner Goodkine steepled his fingers and allowed a small fatherly smile to grace his lips. “Yes, you do, if you can only come to believe in the rightness of the Goodkine method and principles, which the entire American publishing establishment has seen fit to adopt, under legislative fiat accompanied by severe penalties of jail time and monetary fines for contravention. Remember the Wizard's—I mean, the FBLNV's Sixth Rule: ‘The only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.’ And the Goodkine program is the essence of reason."

  "Can I—can I assume then that you've seen some merit in my manuscript? That it might be published someday?"

  "Indeed. But not as it stands. Please, bring out your novel. The copy you provided to the Bureau is currently being examined by our third tier of vetters, that group personally trained by me in objectivist rigor."

  I dug the mass of printout from my satchel and placed it before the Commissioner. He rifled through it knowledgeably, before holding up a page.

  "Here's the kind of thing we'll need to fix. Your protagonist, Rodolpho—at one point he encourages a wounded man to chew on a root to assuage his pain."

  Commissioner Goodkine fell silent, obviously awaiting me to volunteer what was wrong with that scene. But for the life of me, I couldn't come up with any response except, “And...?"

  Now Commissioner Goodkine looked a little irritated. “Don't you realize that such a scene could be construed as advocating drug use, Mr. Badway? Do you consider drug use a normative value?"

  "No, no, of course not. Well, I suppose the wounded man could just suffer stoically, especially if I make him hail from a culture that embraces such a philosophy."

  "Excellent!” More pages were shuffled. “Now, how shall we interpret this passage, where Rodolpho embraces his fellow soldiers before battle?"

  I began to get the gist of what types of things would bother Commissioner Goodkine. “Uh, I take it that perhaps that display of affection might be seen as encouraging homo—"

  Commissioner Goodkine held up a hand. “No need to actually use that word, Mr. Badway, we understand each other perfectly. There are other Federal laws we must pay lip service to, after all—for a while yet, anyway. Let's move on. What about here, where a woman is shown with her child, but no mention is made of the existence of her legal spouse? And here, where peasants attempt to overthrow the lawful ruler of their kingdom? And here, where wizards decide to form a union? And here, where music is described as ‘pleasantly atonal?’ ‘Atonal,’ Mr. Badway, indeed! All instances of non-normative values, I think you'll agree."

&
nbsp; I stood up then and reclaimed my manuscript with a cold precision. All thoughts of giving in to the FBLNV's insane directives had fled my head.

  Commissioner Goodkine looked startled. “Mr. Badway, what's the matter? I thought we had come to an understanding?"

  "Do you recall your own Wizard's Tenth Rule, Commissioner Goodkine?"

  "Why, naturally. ‘Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self.’”

  "That's fine, so far as it goes. But you never stopped to consider that one man's truth might be another man's lies."

  My words had the same effect upon Commissioner Goodkine that logical paradoxes used to inflict upon thinking machines in cliched science fiction. His mental processes ground to a halt, and I was able to leave his office without further discussion or argument.

  "The greatest harm can result from the best intentions,” said the Second Rule on the plaque in the anteroom.

  Good point, I thought, and went home to write—non-normative all the way.

  Wizard's Six by Alex Irvine

  Alex Irvine's novels include The Narrows, One King, One Soldier, and A Scattering of Jades. His short fiction has been collected in Pictures from an Expedition and Unintended Consequences. His latest book, Batman: Inferno, has drawn some interesting comments on the Amazon.com page listing for it. (We won't repeat them here, save to say that “It's a freaken [sic] book!” is not cause for a negative rating in our eyes.)

  With this new story, Mr. Irvine ventures into the High Fantasy genre with affecting results.

  1

  In the spring Paulus set out north from The Fells, hunting the apprentice Myros. He cannot be allowed to collect his six, the wizard had said. If you cannot find his track, you must kill whichever of the six he has already selected. It did Paulus’ conscience no good to kill people whose only fault was being collected by an aspiring wizard, but he would be only the first of many hunters. Without the guild's protection, a wizard's six were like baby turtles struggling toward the sea. Best to spare them a life of being hunted.