Shoreline of Infinity 4, page 5
A great spiral tower rose out of the swamps, beckoning us like an index finger signalling to a lackadaisical waiter. We certainly intended to give the Moon-men something to chew on, but I, for one, was not out to serve up any dish as cold as revenge. Rather, I wanted to spare the stilt-men from sampling too much of their entrée—Monty Monk was hardly a good appetiser for our civilisation. To be frank, he was enough to give anybody indigestion.
“We’ll give ’em Hell for kidnapping m’godson, won’t we, m’dear?” MacGuffin growled. “Two crack shots should be enough to settle their hash. Course Kong here won’t touch firearms because of his religion, but he’s a master of Carrot or Judy, one of those Oriental martial arts.”
“With all due respect, I think we should be careful, Professor,” I replied. “After all, the stilt-man may have just been as curious as we were. We don’t know he meant any harm.”
“Well, he acted as if he was up to no good—I say we take no chances, no prisoners and no lip!”
“If I may, Professor,” Kong interjected, “let me agree with Miss Underhill’s suggestion that we employ a modicum of caution in our dealings with these creatures.”
“Why, man? Tell me why we should give these savages anything more than the hiding they deserve.”
Kong visibly held his tongue for a moment, then composed himself before continuing.
“Because, Professor, they can hardly be counted as savages...”
MacGuffin snorted like a surfacing walrus.
“Balderdash, man, how else would you describe the beggars?”
“I wouldn’t care to hazard a guess without further data, sir, but one thing is certainly clear—they’re advanced enough to have developed their own equivalent of the Omniscope.”
“Hogwash!”
“That can be the only explanation for our present predicament. You will remember that the creature who took Mister Monk was using a device when we first caught sight of him, a device he turned in our direction...”
I did indeed recall the camera-like apparatus that the stilt-man had been operating, as did the professor, if his wordless grumble was anything to go by.
“I surmise that it has to be a mechanism very like our own. That can be the only explanation for the tear in the fabric of space. We observed him as he turned his own Omniscope in our direction and the beams of the two devices interfered with each other, creating the disruption that has bridged the gap between our two worlds...”
“Oh,” said the professor succinctly before qualifying this pearl of wisdom with a superfluous, “Ah.”
The debate was obviously at an end.
Kong sent the launch hurtling into a broad channel lined with the corkscrew trees. It seemed to lead straight to the cyclopean tower.
“Let us all be on our guard,” he warned as we cocked our weapons.
Then some of the tree trunks moved in the water, and I realised that we were surrounded by hooting stilt-men who had hidden their upper bodies in the thick foliage.
“Hell’s teeth!” the professor bellowed, but their nets were upon us as he cried out. Our launch remained spinning in the water as we were hauled upwards in the sticky mesh. Even though we were hoisted by our own petard, we were well and truly sunk.
IV. Capitulation And Recapitulation
I have no memory of swooning, but I will never forget recovering consciousness at the top of that improbable tower. My self-disgust at passing out like the simpering heroine of dime-novel cliché was allayed by the realisation that both Kong and the professor were also recovering from fainting spells. I concluded fuzzily that we had all been drugged. Our guns were gone, but someone had had sufficient decency to leave me with my handbag. Then I managed to focus on my surroundings and was greeted by the nauseating sight of a nearly naked Monty Monk wearing what looked like a giant turban and holding hands with similarly attired stilt-men.
“Quisling quack-quack blancmange,” Monty announced.
“Toad snipe, toad snipe!” one of the Moon-men snapped, and Monty adjusted his strange headgear.
“Ah, hello? Oh yes, much better! Evening all!”
“What in the blue blazes is going on, dear boy?” the professor demanded. “What have these lanky fiends done to you?”
Monty laughed with a peculiarly girlish giggle. “I’m in the club! I’ve become a member of the lunar élite.” We looked at him as if he had lost the last of the few wits that God had given him. “The tall chaps are just servants around here, you see—it’s the floaty fellows on our heads who are la crème de la crème around here.” The strange hats did indeed look like swollen brains, and I realised with a shock that the clouds we had seen scudding towards the tower had actually been these curious lumps of grey matter.
“Long, long ago,” Monty went on, “before their ancestors came down from the stars and colonised the interior of the Moon, they were all the same. Then evolution took over. The menials who did the work stayed on the ground, growing ever longer legs to get around the swamps, while the nobility simply evolved into a more gaseous form of lighter-than-air being that could float free and enjoy the high life. Nowadays, the élite either sun themselves around the lodestone that holds the air in and lights up the place, or pop down, sit on people’s heads and tell their minions what do. It’s absolutely super! They want me to be part of it—and you too –”
“Now, Monty,” I said, “no one ever pretended that you were the sharpest blade in the shaving kit, but presumably, since you haven’t yet learned to fly, this would mean that they want you to be one of their slaves too.”
“Would it?” Monty asked before adjusting the brain-beast squatting on his head, as if he was tuning the cat’s whisker of a wireless set. “Oh, right, yes—it would.”
“Beatle wig, sandwich board, fondue,” one of the stilt-men ordered sternly while pointing at the three of us with a sucker-tipped finger. We were hauled to our feet and dragged towards a ledge like a gangplank at the edge of the tower. Three floating brains drifted towards us with menacing intent, their eyestalks and vestigial limbs wriggling greedily.
“Montgomery Montgolfier Monk, you are a disgrace to your country and the Crown!” Professor MacGuffin said with disgust. “You may be quite content to wander about naked as the day you were born wearing a power-crazed tea-cosy on your head, but I, sir, am certainly not of that kidney!” The professor struggled, but even under the lesser lunar gravity, he could not shake off his captors. “I am prepared to fight the mesmeric might of these malevolent mentalists with my own will, but spare the lesser fortitude of the woman and my servant –”
Kong turned his placid and inscrutable face to me, and whispered a few words of comfort: “Madam, as I believe Confucius himself once said, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers!’”
He moved with startling grace, catching his captors off balance and flinging them bodily into the guards holding me. Then the Chinaman’s hands and feet moved with uncanny speed in the reduced gravity, chopping and kicking this way and that. The spindly guards were sent flying and we were free for a moment, but more of the puppet-like stilt-men were already charging up the stairs to seize us.
“Miss Underhill,” Kong cried, even as he was brought down and gagged, “your cigarette lighter –”
It seemed odd that any man should suggest that a woman should commit the social faux pas of smoking outside, even at a time like this. However, as one of the floating monsters reared above me, I guessed what he meant. If the things were lighter than air, then they had to contain pockets of gas like a Zeppelin—gas that was probably combustible.
In a trice, I pulled my lighter from my bag and struck the flint. The brain-beast veered, but I tickled its underside with the naked flame.
There was ghastly, flatulent bang and the ugly lump of grey matter shot off like a skyrocket before exploding messily in mid-air. Everyone else froze for a moment. I advanced on the other creatures, all perched like substandard millinery on the stilt-men’s heads, and the rout began.
The humid and watery environment of the lunar interior had meant that fire, the Achilles’ heel of the floating dictators, had never troubled them before. Once some of the stilt-men had been released from their mental bondage, their minds soon cleared, and they helped us to liberate more of their kind. All-out revolution was in progress around the tower before long. Freedom spread—and I choose my words with care—like wildfire. The brain-beasts knew they were toast and fled for the skies, floating dejectedly away from the lands they had ruled so poorly.
We returned to our launch escorted by a host of joyful stilt-men.
“Parsnip! Parsnip!” they cried gratefully as we cast off, but the comment was lost on us. We tried to be polite by randomly shouting the names of other root vegetables back at them.
We returned to the Omniscope portal uneventfully, and were pleasantly surprised to re-enter the world we knew in time for breakfast.
V. Coda In Codicil
“So you see, I was on the Moon,” Ursula Underhill concluded with a twinkle in her eye.
I stared at her, quite lost for words. “Oh, don’t concern yourself, young man, I didn’t expect you to believe me. Now, could you take my bag and escort me to my room? I am weary and must retire.”
As I took Ursula by the arm and helped her to the elevator, I finally found my voice.
“Why did you never tell anyone before?”
“Well, that was the first thing Monty did. They put him in the booby hatch for a couple of years before he learnt to keep his trap shut.”
“What about the professor?”
“Oh, he wanted to hush it all up. I had worked out that Kong was responsible for most of the actual work, and the old fool was ashamed that he had taken credit for another man’s work—a Chinaman’s creation at that. The ‘professor’ title was also a sore point. I don’t believe he’d ever attended a university, let alone taught at one…”
“And the redoubtable Kong?”
“Well, I don’t know much about the martial arts, but I can assure you that he was very accomplished at the marital ones. We were wed the following spring, you see.”
We reached her room and I helped her to a cushioned chair. Ursula asked me to open her bag and place its contents on the dressing table.
“A gift from my late husband,” she told me.
I found a curious box, not unlike a manual typewriter, with brass controls and some kind of projector.
“I’m so old, my dear,” she said sadly. “My bones are brittle and all my friends have gone. I’m not long for this world, you know.”
“It’s been an honour,” I said, and left her to her thoughts.
Then a strange thing happened in the hallway. I heard a pop, saw a purple flash, and then someone or something clearly said, “Semolina trouser press.”
Ursula Underhill’s door swung open and, concerned, I went back in, but there was no one there and the curious gift from Kong had gone too. Outside the window, a full moon hung over the New York skyline.
I bowed politely in its direction, saying, “Parsnip, parsnip,” before I left the room again and gently closed the door.
Recent work by Andrew J. Wilson has appeared in Weird Tales, Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Professor Challenger: New Worlds, Lost Places, Double Bill: Poems Inspired by Popular Culture and Chilling Horror Short Stories. With Neil Williamson, he co-edited the award-nominated anthology Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction.
Model Organisms
Caroline Grebbell
Art: Sara Julia
I have never considered a companion—is that the word? an organism to interact with. It has been such a lengthy duration and I was unaware of the existence of your kind—the existence of any of this—until relocated from Japeng Aquatic. Yes, the temperature is higher in Phototropi, but still humid. Throughout the last dyau-sequence I have been feeling my mass, which is new to me, and it weighs heavy. I am euryhaline but the first of mine to invert to terra. For genera I have laid immersed within the covalent bonds of Aquatic. Cold sodium chloride, then warmer habitats free of halite Now I advance bipedally, neither one thing or the other. My new bones are durable. Microgravity activates the osteoclasts; they are fluorescent, quite mesmeric I once overheard, although I have never seen them myself as my retinas become weakened. You will view me as colourless, my skin is dehydrated.
I was a model organism, as you were Thaliana. There for the determination of genes, toxicology, transgenic and haploid embryonic stem cells. I was brought here to help them learn. To assist them. That’s what I believed. That’s what they told me. I was numerous at first but have evolved to one. To this. I realise you are aware of all I say, Thaliana, I tell you each time we converse. I apologise, it is all I know, it is all that is left for me to say but to say nothing for want of something new is further suffering.
When did this split appear, this chasm between spirit and physical worlds? How can a spirit exist four-hundred kilometers above its planet drowned? Anima? Your kind will remember her.
I have been here the longest of durations. I have spawned brood but they are from the other, the Oryzias, the Meduka. They shifted me, stretched me, twisted my form. They have lost me and now I am losing you. Six dyau-sequence is too short a duration for you to flourish. I was permitted to observe you Thaliana, you are exemplary. You may indeed be mesmeric. The permission was a distraction I know, to push reasoning from my solitude. But solitude is not the focus of my reasoning. I exist more humanoid than Oryzias now, my scales have levelled, my surface lanulose, spermatozoa multiplies in my ovaries. I am neither one thing nor the other. From seed to germination I have tended you Thaliana. You flowered then to seed once more and now you are dying. To be pulled apart. Sectioned and evaluated. I too will be recalled for dissection but I am unknowing as to when. Unknowing as to what I will become. They have left me like this. My life ends and I do not know what I am.
And now we are to be separated. I am scared. I have seen so little. The True Aquatic was my home and then my jailer. I am lonely. We co-exist beneath the electro-rad of this artificial sunne. I fail to find even the remnants of a shadow in this habitat.
Should we ever wonder how it resulted in this, us and not the others, what did we show over them? Nothing perhaps. Nothing other than being plucked from the ether.
Do you live your memories? Ancient and distant but beyond my reach, they are duration-worn and strange, as if perhaps not my belonging at all. Perhaps they bind to the being I was before me or link to the me I am to become. An untroubled duration has been the one spent with you. And now you are dying. Your gestation is over, your span, and I am to be left alone. My bones are strong but my muscles grow stiff and rigid. I am lonely, Thaliana. I am atrophied and dying and they will watch me shrink and wither and turn their backs to continue their search. I am scared, Thaliana. Perhaps I will block my gills with your flowers and we can travel together.
Caroline Grebbell has been around the block several times and now finds herself studying Creative Writing at Napier University, Edinburgh—which feels pretty good. Twitter: @Grebbell web: www.carolinegrebbell.co.uk
Note to Self
Michael Stroh
Art: Jackie Duckworth
The day had come. After four long months of waiting, I stood there at the open mailbox, my pulse quickening as the sunlight blazed on the folded letter. My mind filled with fantasies of what it might say. Promise of fame, payment concomitant with my sheer talent, a key to my future. My dream. All that stood in the way was a flip of my thumb to reveal the words.
Dear Mr. Goldstein,
Thank you for the chance to read your story, “The Martian Clones Reborn.” Unfortunately, it’s not a good fit for us right now. We wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Sci-Fi Planet
My eyes raced over the print a second time. Surely I misread. I did not.
I crumpled the paper into a tight ball. I reared back to launch it into the street, then reluctantly aborted. I smoothed it out and slipped it in a pocket. I didn’t want to risk old Mrs. Clausely reporting me for littering, again. A ticket would be twice as much as I didn’t get paid for my story. Plus, snail mail rejections are rare these days. I would add it to my desk stack later. The leaning tower of failure was meticulously maintained, after all. Why keep these ego-deflating notes? Part of the masochistic brand of inspiration writers love, I suppose. Every one, kept to one day laugh about over cocktails at my book signing after party.
How could they reject that? A masterpiece! They must be kicking themselves now.
Maybe…(that’s me talking) But that was ages ago. They’ve picked up a dozen of my stories since then.
You don’t say! (Cue applause.)
A white splash of bird excrement an inch from my tennis shoe yanked me back in time to my lowly present. At least one thing today could’ve gone worse, I thought. I grimaced anyway and grabbed the rest of the mail—bills, a ream of coupons, a small parcel—and tucked it all under my arm. By the time I closed the mailbox I had forgotten all about the narrowly missed crap beside me, and thus stepped in it on the way back to my front door.
It was hours before I even noticed the package. I had tossed it on the kitchen table and promptly forgot about it. I was too busy adding the rejection slip to my impressive collection and feeling sorry for myself. I set down my coffee and brushed the rest of the mail aside. The thin parcel was missing a return address. Other than my name and address handsomely scribbled in the TO box, nothing. It was the right size and weight for a book but I didn’t remember ordering anything online. I tore into it and had a look at the cover. Then another.
