by Eugen Bacon
One clap and Zhorr regained his true form. Silver ringlets of hair fell to his waist. Jeweled apparel full of shadows, melancholy and river song wrapped around him. Onyx eyes glittered and lit the hut. The grand magician of Diaspora towered two heads above his apprentice son.
He laid a gentle hand on Pickle’s shoulder, crisp with starched livery in lace, lavender and cream. “Tell me. What have you learned then? What have you really learned?”
Pickle’s face shone with clarity. “No matter how strong the urge or goodwill,” he said, “never use magic to flirt with history.”
“Unless—” said Zhorr with utmost professionalism, “you have a rule to cover it.” He ruffled Pickle’s copper head. “Well done, my boy. With that knowledge, you have earned a diploma. Now we must depart fast track and travel between worlds to where we belong.”
“Fast track?”
“Straight to the year 3059 and I will die in peace.”
“What about the no mess, no structural changes that favored us flying as birds to the vortex? Atomic fusion, chemical transfiguration and what else, that’s what you said.”
“Pure gumbo.” Zhorr toyed with tresses falling down his shoulder. He combed off tangle with a finger. “I always wanted to fly.”
Pickle’s brow creased. “But Papa—”
“Mmhh?”
“I am desperate to leave this world. My faith in you is restored. Partially restored, at least.” He glared.
“Did you ‘But Papa’ me to fault my motive?”
“Can’t we, must we not . . .”
“Must we not what?”
“Undo it?”
“Undo the flying bit or my dying in peace?”
“The damage. The course of history that you have altered.”
“Ah, that. Course we can undo it. It’s our obligation to do so. Yes, you must.” Zhorr’s strong fingers poked Pickle in the chest. “You,” almost absentmindedly. “Yes, you. Put your wizard hat on. Quick! Time leaks perilously.”
Before Pickle could lift a finger, the door burst open.
Zhorr and Pickle barely transformed to prior form—just barely!—before Emperor Ngosi fell in.
“I don’t want it anymore,” he cried. “I don’t want it!”
Zhorr scratched his salt and pepper wise-man hair and regarded the emperor with ancient eyes. He took a step forward, laid a hand on Ngosi’s shoulder, an action that appeared to carry calming effect.
“What is it you don’t want, Emperor Ngosi?”
“The power. Take it. Take it!” He tossed down his staff. “It has made a monster of me. Oh, what have I done? My own people! Zhorr, I am a sick man. My forefathers groan in their graves. I see reason now. I don’t want greater power.”
“Do you speak from your heart?”
“All men are equal. There’s no master race. Please remove your magic now.”
“I am delighted you have found sense. I couldn’t have enforced it without infringing your free will. Go home.” Zhorr gave Ngosi an indulgent pat on the back. “We shall work some arrangement.”
After Emperor Ngosi had left, shuffling his steps and carrying much weight, Zhorr and Pickle glanced at each other. Pickle spoke first.
“Your magic eyes didn’t see that coming.”
“N-no.” He was back in his jeweled robe. “Time travel brings paradoxes and anomalies. That was an anomaly.”
“Knowledge for the future. What happens now?”
“Ngosi has no need of us, really. Having seen light, his world will embrace him once more. The blood of a speckless rooster or three will appease the spirits of his forefathers. As for the powers of invisibility, he will no more use them for harm.”
“Yet you hesitate, Papa.”
“A small predicament really. Ngosi has no desire for greater power and he has already won the Maji Maji war. But, for the implications of changing history, although he is a reformed man, we must reverse the effects of my magic.”
“Heaven forbid. Reversal will—”
“Different historical outcomes are not necessarily better that the ones that eventuated them. We cannot tamper with this world. Take us back to exactly one minute before Ngosi and the elders first entered this hut and sat around the fire.” Fog touched his voice. It became hoarse, old as a museum. He glanced at his son with unwavering eyes. “You know what that means?”
Pickle nodded. “The calculation is simple.” He turned away from his father. “A simple calamity, really.” He stood still for a moment. “Ngoni warriors will use millet seeds and water to lose the war.”
“I cannot stop it.” Zhorr’s museum voice trembled. “And neither can you.”
“Yes.” Pickle answered. “No one can.”
In a flash, Pickle swished his gown. A glow of light on his forehead swelled in changing shape and size. It filled him with magical powers that lifted the grand magician’s philter of invisibility on the Ngoni.
The cloak whirred again.
Zhorr and Pickle soared with outstretched hands into naked space.
Soft tips of Diaspora mist lifted and touched a cobalt line of hillocks. Crystal water gushed between pieces of boulder and cascaded downward in a waterfall. A snow-crested mountain ridge climbed toward a floating fortress with an iron gateway. An array of white lights in every arched window blinked. The flying castle sighed in welcome exactly three nanoseconds before a timid rap on the wooden door of a mud hut somewhere in Ngoni country.
A GOOD BALL
“The game is alive,” coughed the score worm. It illuminated with body shimmers who was winning. It was the Cyclops.
The amphitheater erupted.
An umpire blew his horn and the third quarter of the ball game started.
The way the game played was by each group of ten players dodging a ball that was a human skull hurled by the opposing team. Wear had nearly leveled the boned shape to a smooth oval. When it struck a victim, they were banished to the sin bin, sometimes for eons, unless a release deal was struck by song, delivered in prose poetry.
The first quarter had seen the Troika lose a trinity of players and one-third. A third because the precocious fullback was only a child.
During the break, the Troika had put a valiant effort to rescue their trinity, if not the one-third. Their lead siren, a third eye for the nose and fur all over her three bodies, understood the value of a trio. She sang in light waves that accelerated in orthodox lines across the one end of the amphitheater to the other and found refraction in the audience. Resonance jumped between bodies, patterns and frequency emitting a synchronous melody:
Earth stories oblivious to time and space are not our element. Like the boy with cowlick hair and a briefcase on his lap: he is a terrorist. A suicide vest caresses his chest. He smiles. His eyes are a palimpsest swollen with poems about phantom virgins floating in songline. They flow in monochrome, infographics that cascade into the working sea of his creed. No contrition or penance, just a magnificent white bird, yellow-beaked. It supplicates on bended knee but its droppings are full of calligraphy. Text ricochets from bird poop, hopping and skipping in telescopic trails of full stops, semicolons and em dashes. No adjectives as the bomb erupts.
At the end of the tune, the score worm coughed and announced the verdict: “Your song was not quick to transition between notes. It was lacking in the depiction of humankind’s diversity.”
***
The Cyclops were deft with the ball in the second quarter, but the Troika—a trinity and one-third down—put a brave effort, dodging the skull until the horn went.
The lead Troika siren put on show oscillating waves that cartwheeled in red and blue to generate diversity in her sung prose poetry:
She sees a garden of commas. There’s a curl on the crown. The sky is the color of baking cookies, but a pessimist would say it’s the hue of sizzling bile, a task rath
er than a pleasure. There’s frost growing in the gully. The kind of ice that doesn’t drench thirst. And as she walks where punctuation is no taboo, she’ll lace up her boots and remember to set expectations. Or beyond simple genetics and much like a novice who just might eat the dog.
But the home crowd heckled. Again, the score worm delivered a verdict.
***
Things continued in pitiful fashion for the Troika in the third quarter. But when the faltering team’s siren sang in EM spectrum that vomited gammas and infrared, the crowd listened:
A soar of mercury [/ˈmərːkyə-rē/ n. a heavy, silvery metallic element] dries out stones until they burst to flame and scald the scorched Earth. No geometry on her face, just an interrupted purity of creation. No history of foreshadow, just a metaphor representing everything. There’s a direct connection to a hippie bible that was never likeminded to revive an old relationship, ritual or a golden gate. A parliament of owls elects a blond fox to lead a charm of finches soaring to a spirit that’s always here, decreasingly relevant as time goes on. But the fox is really a dog that came from the clouds beyond the epicenter of the city by the bay. It is an animal incapable of loving but thrives on heat [ready to mate] in an imaginary place where one day sooner—not Mother Nature—has the final say.
“That is a serious quest,” shimmered the score worm. “I search the term to describe your song. And half a century and ten thousand lives after, I still know it’s a great story. If the Cyclops have no challenge—”
“We have a challenge!”
“Let’s hear it then.”
The Cyclop singer was both ugly and beautiful. The blob of her face wore tiny eyes and a tubular nose that oozed blubber on the sulk of her lips. The softness of her fur reminded one of the Betelgeuse Star in its brightness and beauty. Her light was eye candy from space, a panorama that flowed like spice to quench the remotest need. Her song?
At root we are leaders, helpers, destroyers. At the start of evolution, it was never on that we would check boxes to interrogate an internal question whose answer simply stalls a weightless black hole. As we search beyond the moon for what’s left of an endless rain, a frenetic river smears fate into the night. The riverbed is a shadow whose shape is alternate art. It performs a hip-hop ballet that runs out of pirouettes. Our ancestors’ dreams never looked like missing, but we’re the wick and they are the flame. Together we burn. Encapsulated in a greater dimension that is unsightly and divine in this artificial world. You blink and it’s there, then it slips into a whisper of silence—did you see?
The amphitheater cheered in trickles, distracted by the blob and blotch snailing down the singer’s face and sliming the echoes of her prose.
“It is a brave intercept,” coughed the score worm. “But it’s dislocated to pose a decent challenge. This means the Troika one-third is released from the sin bin.”
***
Much was at stake in the final play. The precocious Troika child made a grab for the skull and knocked down two Cyclops. It worked angles, pushing and shoving. Suddenly another player on the ground. It was a Cyclop—dislocated joint.
Nearly matched up now, the game quickly degenerated into a bloodbath. Players slipped on gelatinous fluid, an earnest struggle for the last one standing. By sheer luck, not effort, a body bang severed a Troika’s jaw and she retired injured. It was the lead singer.
Unlikely that song would rescue the trinity, all understood they were condemned to the sin bin for eternity. But duty demanded righteousness in the score worm, one last call: “If the Troika have no challenge—”
“We have a challenge!”
“Let’s hear it then.”
The precocious child stepped forward. Her conehead, unrecovered from birth, was bald, blemished with yellows against a skinless pink. She studied the crowd, shifted from one chubby leg to another that could sprint with the velocity of light.
Her song generated weather. The amphitheater lit with two suns:
The shadow on the wall is an unquiet memory on home ground, choked with the dreams of refugees who’d crossed lands, traveled wars in chants of darkness and light only to find a wall built of humanity’s absence. How confusing their entanglement in the imperfect story of a better life that is a syncopation of deleted riffs nowhere seen. Just endless echoes of shadows in repetition.
Repetition.
Precisely different.
Ripped.
Notes in the mailbox.
Raped.
The crowd look at her, silent. As the two suns dimmed, there was a roar.
Encore! Encore!
“We were quick to transition,” coughed the score worm, “as we evolved past lesser beings to our current states. Sometimes we must kill frail creatures for their skulls, we must kill them to balance the universe. But the human story is one that needs us the most. This child has reminded us of it. We’ve seen a good ball. The verdict is a draw. Release the full Troika trinity from the sin bin.”
A CASE OF SEEING
4:00 am. East Wing King George Hospital—opposite Durham Harbour. Sydney. Detective Chief Inspector Lawfer McDaniel climbs tall from an old Passat and steps into a crime scene.
A forensic analyst takes a moment to regard Lawfer. It’s Tamyka: low thirties, slender face. She is wearing a navy vest inside a windcheater. “That hair, your rush to get here?”
Lawfer smiles. “Still roughly good-looking, yeah?”
“Stop fishing for compliments.”
Lawfer is unprofessional in lean jeans and a long-sleeved shirt rolled up at the cuffs, unbuttoned at the neck. Unpolished leatherwork boots.
Gray fog clouds the dawn air.
Forensics crew are setting up equipment in an area enclosed with blue and white tape that reads: DO NOT CROSS. POLICE LINE.
Lawfer surveys the scene. She nods at two constables in spanking new uniforms gazing at a crushed body on the gravel. One of the constables returns Lawfer’s nod. Low twenties, bald. His uniform is a size bigger than he needs.
“Boss.” This one’s face looks fresh, a kid plucked from his mum.
The other constable is fidgety.
“Ants in your pants, mate?” says Lawfer.
“Got to pee, boss.” He coughs, something chesty. Wipes the tip of his nostril with a knuckle, then rubs his hands to warm them.
Lawfer restrains herself from touching the blood. She sees through touch. Sometimes the seeing is crystal clear, as if she is watching a film. Sometimes it’s foggy: silhouettes. It is her gift. Or her curse. As early as she can remember.
***
A toddler went missing. Child’s mum, the woman next door, cajoled, hollered and wailed up and down the street, eyes broken, hair a jungle. “Thalia! Thali?” Clutching in her hand a teddy. Somewhere in the woman’s fever, she forsook the toy. Little Lawfer had picked it up, fallen by the gate. Just then: a flash of memory—torn jeans and a T-shirt, a man wearing a jacket the color of dirty trees. Thalia’s tiny palm wrapped in his fist.
Her charcoal curls, his gray mop. They vanished to the trees. No one saw Thalia again. Not alive, they didn’t. The water-drenched body face down in the creek was nothing like Thalia. For days, Lawfer beat herself. She had tried. Grownups refused to listen, batted away her beseeching. Her words spiraled away to no home run. She tugged a police officer’s sleeve but got no more than a tolerant smile. “Go home kid, this kind of mess—not for you.” How could Lawfer tell about the man who escorted Thalia inside the tree line where the thicket swelled? Even so young, Lawfer analyzed her motives. Explaining her knowledge meant explaining the seeing: she touched a fallen teddy and saw. A gift unaccounted for, populated with hits and misses. Sometimes she saw right, sometimes just blurs. Lawfer didn’t know how she did it. She just did. After the finding, she determined that she would grow up and join the force, make a smarter cop than the sleeve who found Thalia too late.
***
Lawfer smooths the frown creasing her forehead. She takes in the crime scene. Her upper lip twitches, a staccato lift at the left edge. She pulls on gloves, lifts a shard of glass from gravel. She sees the smash. Pumpkin-like.
“One bad fall,” she says.
“Just another crime scene, Lawfer,” says Tamyka.
“Not when this goddamn lip tweaks. First time it did, my mother passed. Next it twitched, Glenda was gone, yeah.”
“Shit happens,” says Tamyka. She flicks a single long braid that falls down her shoulders to her bum. High cheekbones. Striking hazel eyes on a clean complexion. She likes Lawfer, you can tell.
Lawfer scrutinizes splinters of wood merged with more shards of glass on crimson-spattered gravel. “Blood trails tell no big tale.”
“Not at first glance, no,” says Tamyka.
At first touch, yes, Lawfer knows. She lifts a splinter, sees through the gloves. She staggers at the impact. It is like a hammer on her head. It is the seeing, a distant memory now: the splinter was part of violence—something hit someone. What? Who? Lawfer looks up the building.
An hour, the clean-up crew is still going. After the botch-up of Thalia, Lawfer kept believing, enough to sign up as a copper.
Now she taps the shoulder of the fresh-looking baldie. She sees a woman’s face: a wasteland. The woman is related to the baldie. How? Sometimes Lawfer wishes the seeing would stop.
She says, “I remember you, constable. Always eating something. Guts don’t worry you, yeah.”
“Boss. Burger?”
“Please no, germs everywhere. And your name?”
“Robert Dale.”