The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

  And so, every day Erry Gisador rose up early and took the Marisinis out to the designated point in the ocean, dropped anchor, took a chair on the deck and fished all day long beside a beautiful woman who didn’t do a bit of anything except watch the sky with a set of binoculars and look pretty.

  Didn’t hurt she did all that watching in a two-piece sunsuit that barely covered her. This was mostly for show, for the other boats in the harbor or coming past when they were on the deep, but it was also too hot on the water to wear much if one was meaning to spend all day out on the deck. He liked to pretend she was also dressing like that for his benefit, but she made it clear enough that everything about her was just for looking.

  Not that he tested to see if it might be otherwise for the bold. He knew his business; you don’t mess with a client unless they straight-up ask to mess with you first. She could take off the sunsuit and stride about the deck as naked as the fish, and unless she also sat on his lap he’d not be making advances on that prospect.

  He could spend each day wishing she’d take off the sunsuit and set in his lap, and so he did. But that was the scope of it.

  After a few minutes the GPS blinked up. The’d reached Miss Lymerie’s designated pin. Erry dropped anchor, and then headed to the prow to notify his client that they had arrived.

  She was already in a deck chair, drinking water from a bottle and scanning the morning sky with her binoculars. He never asked what she was looking for; to do so seemed unwise. But the pressure of his curiosity threatened to blow open his forehead.

  “We here,” he said, sitting in the other chair. The rod and reel were already set to go.

  “It’s interesting,” she said. “Even without landmarks, there’s something about this stretch of ocean that’s starting to look familiar.”

  “Ohh, a criminal error, miss. Many a captain been lost asea for such thinking. I drop you in a new spot tomorrow and say we here, you won’t know it.”

  “But you didn’t do that.”

  “No, miss. The fish are tiring of me, but here I sit.”

  She checked her voicer, which no doubt had a GPS function, to verify he wasn’t blowing smoke. He’d’ve been offended, except this is how she was.

  He speculated on what her romantic life might actually be like. If there was another in it, how bad off were they, and was it worth it?

  Probably, he thought. But she was near-naked not two maders away. A man could imagine tolerating plenty under them circumstances.

  He knew exactly one thing about Miss Lymerie that was true, and it was surely only known as the shock caught her off-balance. On the third day, she was looking at her voicer much as always, when a ghost crossed her grave.

  “Are you all right, miss?” he asked her, knowing the answer. He saw it pass her face before she could well hide it.

  “I’m fine,” she said, haltingly. She put her voicer down and looked away.

  “Is it your friend?” he asked.

  “Is what my friend?”

  “You’ve death in your eyes, miss. Speak it out or you’ll welcome him in. Did your friend die? The one we waiting on.”

  “A yes. That distressingly quaint superstition,” she said. “No, it wasn’t my friend.”

  It wasn’t superstition, it was truth. Best way to keep death’s touch from your own soul was to speak the name of the taken. Everyone knew this.

  But she wasn’t talking, and as much he knew better than to press his charter on anything personal, he also didn’t much care to have a death-marked passenger on the Marisinis if he could skip it. So he sat there and waited for her to say more.

  She did, eventually.

  “It’s my father,” she said quietly. “I just got the news.”

  “Powerful sorry. He was sick, then?”

  Her default iciness bobbed back to the surface quick. “We’re not talking about it,” she said.

  Then she raised her binoculars to the horizon and he went back to fishing. They never talked of it again.

  “I think my friend will definitely be joining us today,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Is your friend a great swimmer?” he asked. “Or a fish?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “If they on another boat I should be knowing this much, miss,” he said. “There are things to be done.”

  They were facing the channel, but several leagues out of the thick of it. The Great Current drove ships southwest-to-northeast from the tip of Wivvol to the frozen shore of Annibat before curling ‘round Dorabon and southeast past Inimata and the steppes of Dunn. Were she to tilt those binoculars downward, she’d likely spot two or three Wivvolian shippers making a leg of that passage.

  “Not a boat,” she said, shaking her head. She had short black hair, but it was blonde at the roots, triggering his interest in wondering what she’d look like in her natural color.

  Get your head out your pants and your eyes on the waters, he thought.

  “What then?” he asked.

  “It’ll make sense,” she said.

  He sighed, cast a line, opened a can of beer, and waited on the fish.

  Two hours in, something new happened.

  “There,” she said, pointing to a spot in the sky that looked no more special than any other spot. It was over his shoulder, east, just below the rising suns.

  “I’m seein’ nothing but spots caused by the twins, miss.”

  “Bring us around,” she said.

  He dropped the rod and ran aft to call up the anchor.

  “Hurry,” she shouted. “We have to be there before anyone else.”

  “I thought we was where we had to be already.”

  He started the engine and rotated the boat so the bow was facing east. She climbed up beside him at the helm.

  “Do you see it?” she asked.

  “Miss, I only see the Dancers.”

  She handed over her binoculars. “It’s coming down at a fifteen degree angle,” she said. “Just beneath them.”

  There was some kind of special filter installed in her binoculars that countered the light from the suns. Without that interference…

  “Pal’s spirit, what is that?”

  Something was falling out of the sky. It looked like a fireball that was slowly burning out as it descended.

  “That’s my friend,” she said. “He’s a few days late, but these things can be imprecise.”

  “What things are we speaking of? Space travel?”

  She took back the glasses.

  “You should be able to see it with the naked eye in another minute,” she said. “Try to get as close as you can without capsizing us.”

  That ended up being a challenge. Miss Lymerie was right in that the thing they were tracking (it had definitely fallen from space) became visible in no time, but judging its speed and distance was a test. They were half a league off when it touched down, but it was coming in so hard and at such a steep angle he figured that if there was a part of it meant to float, it would bob up at right near where he’d put the Marisinis.

  Or, where he put the Marisinis before the thing touched down. It plowed a row into the ocean, causing a wake that buffeted them well off the mark.

  He steered back as quick as he could, until they were circling around his best-guess.

  His passenger was going between her binoculars and the voicer. He wondered if she had a way to track the location of the space debris on that thing.

  “How’s this?” he shouted over the engine.

  “About right,” she said. “Good work, captain.”

  He near blushed. It was the first kindness he’d heard from her since she started in with the flattery as a means to hire him.

  “Kill the engine,” she said. “But be ready to move.”

  He did, and then they drifted for a while, with nothing but the lapping of the ocean water on the side. The sea had swallowed up a violence that would have been a near-permanent scar on the land, and now it was as if none if it had happened.

/>   “There!” she shouted, after a good five minutes of listening. She pointed starboard, at a white balloon. Erry lit the engine and nudged them over, while Miss Lymerie dug out a long metal stick meant for hooking fisher nets.

  He brought the boat alongside the balloon, which by the time they arrived was five balloons. There was a person in the middle of them, in a heavy brown suit with a big fishbowl helmet.

  An astronaut, he thought. It’s a damned astronaut.

  She used the hook to catch one of the ropes connecting the spaceman to the balloons and pulled, until he was lined up with the rope ladder on the starboard side. Erry cut the engine again and went down to the deck.

  “Is he dead?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Hand me a fishing pole.”

  He retrieved the pole she was supposed to have been fishing with all week. She took it and started hitting the side of the helmet with the tip.

  “Come on, wake up,” she muttered.

  “We may have to lift him aboard,” Erry said.

  “That suit weighs about a hundred kalograms,” she said. “Throw in the weight of the man and I don’t know if you have something on board that can manage it.”

  “We can drag him to shore. Tie him up and head in, it’s not far.”

  “Let’s get something clear,” she said. “He was not here. This did not happen. Nobody can see us doing this. The minute we have him on the deck you’re pushing this boat as hard as you can so that we’re elsewhere when they come looking for him. It is very important that you understand this.”

  “Aye,” he said. “So we don’t drag him to shore, you say.”

  The astronaut stirred. Then he started panicking, which looked amusing as he could do little more than flap around until he got his bearings.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Miss Lymerie said. “Don’t struggle or you’ll puncture a balloon.”

  “Don’t think he can hear you, miss,” Erry said.

  “You’re right. Wrong language anyway.”

  Erry climbed halfway down the rope ladder until he was in the water to his knees. He reached out with one hand.

  “Take it, friend,” he said.

  The astronaut grabbed his hand. Erry pulled until the man was near-vertical, and able to get his glove around the rope ladder. Erry climbed up, and the spaceman followed.

  It was a slow climb. The suit must have been as heavy as the miss said. It seemed to take all the entirety of the astronaut’s strength to make it up.

  Once over the side, he collapsed onto his back. Miss Lymerie leaned over, found a latch on the helmet, and popped it open. When she twisted the helmet off, it looked like she was breaking the man’s neck, which was a curious sight.

  Then she said something in a language Erry didn’t know.

  Up to that point she’d been speaking the common tongue, which was a second language to everyone on the Canos-Holos, including Erry. (His birth language was the island tongue Biddobay.) What she said weren’t in either of those.

  He looked on the face of the man they plucked from the water. He had on a black head sock, but his face was easy enough to peg. This was a Wivvolian man.

  “What did you just say to him?” Erry asked.

  “I welcomed him home,” she said. “Now get us out of here.”

  About the Author

  Gene Doucette is a hybrid author, albeit in a somewhat roundabout way. From 2010 through 2014, Gene published four full-length novels (Immortal, Hellenic Immortal, Fixer, and Immortal at the Edge of the World) with a small indie publisher. Then, in 2014, Gene started self-publishing novellas that were set in the same universe as the Immortal series, at which point he was a hybrid.

  When the novellas proved more lucrative than the novels, Gene tried self-publishing a full novel, The Spaceship Next Door, in 2015. This went well. So well, that in 2016, Gene reacquired the rights to the earlier four novels from the publisher, and re-released them, at which point he wasn’t a hybrid any longer.

  Additional self-published novels followed: Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (2016); Unfiction (2017); and The Frequency of Aliens (2017).

  In 2018, John Joseph Adams Books (an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) acquired the rights to The Spaceship Next Door. The reprint was published in September of that year, at which point Gene was once again a hybrid author.

  Since then, a number of things have happened. Gene published three more novels—Immortal From Hell (2018), Fixer Redux (2019), and Immortal: Last Call (2020)—and wrote a new novel called The Apocalypse Seven that he did not self-publish; it was acquired by JJA/HMH in September of 2019. Publication date is May 25, 2021.

  Gene lives in Cambridge, MA.

  For the latest on Gene Doucette, follow him online

  genedoucette.me

  genedoucette@me.com

  Also by Gene Doucette

  SCI-FI

  The Spaceship Next Door

  The world changed on a Tuesday.

  When a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, everyone realized humankind was not alone in the universe. With that realization, everyone freaked out for a little while.

  Or, almost everyone. The residents of Sorrow Falls took the news pretty well. This could have been due to a certain local quality of unflappability, or it could have been that in three years, the ship did exactly nothing other than sit quietly in that field, and nobody understood the full extent of this nothing the ship was doing better than the people who lived right next door.

  Sixteen-year old Annie Collins is one of the ship’s closest neighbors. Once upon a time she took every last theory about the ship seriously, whether it was advanced by an adult ,or by a peer. Surely one of the theories would be proven true eventually—if not several of them—the very minute the ship decided to do something. Annie is starting to think this will never happen.

  One late August morning, a little over three years since the ship landed, Edgar Somerville arrived in town. Ed’s a government operative posing as a journalist, which is obvious to Annie—and pretty much everyone else he meets—almost immediately. He has a lot of questions that need answers, because he thinks everyone is wrong: the ship is doing something, and he needs Annie’s help to figure out what that is.

  Annie is a good choice for tour guide. She already knows everyone in town and when Ed’s theory is proven correct—something is apocalyptically wrong in Sorrow Falls—she’s a pretty good person to have around.

  As a matter of fact, Annie Collins might be the most important person on the planet. She just doesn’t know it.

  The Frequency of Aliens

  Annie Collins is back!

  Becoming an overnight celebrity at age sixteen should have been a lot more fun. Yes, there were times when it was extremely cool, but when the newness of it all wore off, Annie Collins was left with a permanent security detail and the kind of constant scrutiny that makes the college experience especially awkward.

  Not helping matters: she’s the only kid in school with her own pet spaceship.

  She would love it if things found some kind of normal, but as long as she has control of the most lethal—and only—interstellar vehicle in existence, that isn’t going to happen. Worse, things appear to be going in the other direction. Instead of everyone getting used to the idea of the ship, the complaints are getting louder. Public opinion is turning, and the demands that Annie turn over the ship are becoming more frequent. It doesn’t help that everyone seems to think Annie is giving them nightmares.

  Nightmares aren’t the only weird things going on lately. A government telescope in California has been abandoned, and nobody seems to know why.

  The man called on to investigate—Edgar Somerville—has become the go-to guy whenever there’s something odd going on, which has been pretty common lately. So far, nothing has panned out: no aliens or zombies or anything else that might be deemed legitimately peculiar… but now may be different, and not just because Ed can’
t find an easy explanation. This isn’t the only telescope where people have gone missing, and the clues left behind lead back to Annie.

  It all adds up to a new threat that the world may just need saving from, requiring the help of all the Sorrow Falls survivors. The question is: are they saving the world with Annie Collins, or are they saving it from her?

  The Frequency of Aliens is the exciting sequel to The Spaceship Next Door.

  Unfiction

  When Oliver Naughton joins the Tenth Avenue Writers Underground, headed by literary wunderkind Wilson Knight, Oliver figures he’ll finally get some of the wild imaginings out of his head and onto paper.

  But when Wilson takes an intense interest in Oliver's writing and his genre stories of dragons, aliens, and spies, things get weird. Oliver’s stories don’t just need to be finished: they insist on it.

  With the help of Minerva, Wilson’s girlfriend, Oliver has to find the connection between reality, fiction, the mythical Cydonian Kingdom, and the non-mythical nightclub called M Pallas. That is, if he can survive the alien invasion, the ghosts, and the fact that he thinks he might be in love with Minerva.

  Unfiction is a wild ride through the collision of science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror and romance. It's what happens when one writer's fiction interferes with everyone's reality.

  Fixer

  What would you do if you could see into the future?

  As a child, he dreamed of being a superhero. Most people never get to realize their childhood dreams, but Corrigan Bain has come close. He is a fixer. His job is to prevent accidents—to see the future and “fix” things before people get hurt. But the ability to see into the future, however limited, isn’t always so simple. Sometimes not everyone can be saved.