Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  “You can’t say that, Dottie. What you and I have—what we might have. We’ve only just—”

  “No. I don’t mean I wish you were dead, Frank. Or even myself. I mean things as they are…” She raised her golden eyes and blinked more slowly. “…and Warren.”

  The tides were turning as the Glorious Nomad beat against the deepening autumnal waves. Frank found himself giving talks about the Grecian concept of the transmigration of souls, and how the dead were assigned to one of three realms. Elysium, for the blessed. Tartarus for the damned. Asphodel—a land of boredom and neutrality—for the rest. To reach these realms you first had to cross the River Styx and pay Charon the ferryman a small golden coin or obolus, which grieving relatives placed on the tongues of the dead. To attain you desires, he concluded, gazing at the papier mache masks of ruined, once-human faces arrayed before him in the Starbucks’ Lecture Suite, you must be prepared to pay.

  Poison? The idea had its appeal, and there were plenty of noxious substances on board which Frank might be able to wrangle access to, but neither he nor Dottie were experts in biochemistry, and there was no guarantee that Warren couldn’t still be re-resurrected. Some kind of catastrophic accident, then—especially in these storms? Something as simple as disabling the magneto on one of those big bulkhead doors as he went tottering through…? But getting the timing exactly right would be difficult, and there was still a faint but frustrating chance Warren would make some kind of recovery, and then where would they be?

  The options that Frank and Dottie explored as they met on the spray-wet deck over the next few days seemed endless, and confusing. Even if one of them worked flawlessly, other problems remained. There was an opportunity coming for them both to leave ship together when the Glorious Nomad dropped anchor by the shores of old Holy Land for an optional tour in radiation suits, but Dottie would be expected to act the role of the grieving widow, and suspicions would be aroused if Frank were to resign his post and then be spotted with her. No matter how many jurisdictions they skipped though, they’d still be vulnerable to prosecution, and also blackmail. But one of the things which Frank was coming to admire as well as love about Dottie was her quickness of mind.

  “What if you were to appear to die, Frank?” she shout-whispered to him as they clung to the ship’s rail. “You could… I don’t know… You could pretend to kill yourself—stage your suicide. Then…” She gazed off into the tumbling light with those wise, golden eyes. “…we could get rid of Warren instead.”

  It was as perfect and beautiful as she was, and Frank longed to kiss and hold her and do all the other things they’d been promising each other right here and now on this slippery deck. Disguising himself as Warren for a few months, hiding under that toupee and behind those sunglasses and all that make-up, wouldn’t be so difficult. Give it a little time and he could start to look better of his own accord. After all, the technology was continually improving. They could simply say that he’d died again, and been even more comprehensively re-resurrected. All it would take was a little patience—which was surely a small enough price to pay when you considered the rewards which awaited them: Dottie freed of her curse, and she and Frank rich forever.

  Drowning had always been the most obvious option. They’d toyed with it several times already, but now it made absolute sense. Toss Warren overboard, he’d sink like a stone with all the prosthetic metal he had in him. And if they did it close to the stern—threw him down into the wildly boiling phosphorescent wake of the Glorious Nomad’s eighteen azimuth propellers—he’d be torn into sharkmeat; there’d be no body left worth finding. Sure, alarms would go off and one of the hull’s cameras might catch him falling, but even the most sophisticated technology would struggle to make sense of whatever was going through the forecast force eight gale. Especially if they waited until dark, and Warren’s body had on one of the transmitting dogtags all crew were required carry, and was wearing a lilac-stripe blazer.

  By next day, the kind of storm which had shipwrecked Odysseus was brewing, and the Glorious Nomad’s public places soon fell empty as her passengers retreated to their suites. The barber’s shop closed early. The several swimming pools were covered over. The ornamental lake in the Pleasure Park franchise was drained. The air filled with the sounds of heaving and creaking, curious distant booms and bangings, and a pervasive aroma of vomit.

  Heading along the swaying passageways to their pre-arranged meeting point, Frank already felt curiously convinced by the details his own suicide. His last talk on board the Glorious Nomad was of how Orpheus tried to rescue his dead wife Eurydice from the Underworld, and it had taken no effort at all, staring at those white-faced zombies, to put aside his usual catch-all smile and appear surly and depressed. Ditto his few last exchanges with colleagues. Fact is, he realised, he’d been this way with them for years. Everything, even the ferocity of this storm, had that same sense of inevitability. Back down in his sleeping tube, he even found that it was far easier than he’d expected to compose a final message. He’d been able to speak with surprising passion about the emptiness of his life: the sheer monotony of the talks and the tours and the berthings and the embarkations—the long sessions in the gym, too, and the ritual seductions with their overcoming of fake resistance, and the inevitable fuckings and even more inevitable break-ups which followed, with their equally fake expressions of regret. Just what the hell, he’d found himself wondering, had he been living for before he met Dottie? Looked at dispassionately, the prospect of his own imminent death made every kind of sense.

  He arrived at the junction of corridors between Challengers Bowling Arcade and the smallest of the five burger franchises just two minutes early, and was relieved to find the whole area empty and unobserved. Dottie was as punctual as he’d have expected, and somehow still looked beautiful even dressed in a grey sou’wester and half-hauling her dead husband up the sideways-tilting floor. Warren was in his usual brushed velour top, crumpled nylon slacks and Velcro trainers, although his sunglasses and toupee were all over the place.

  “Hi there Frank,” Dottie said, grabbing a handhold and supporting Warren by a bunched ruff behind his neck. “I know it’s a terrible night, but I persuaded Warren that we might feel fresher if we took a walk.” Frank nodded. His mouth was dry. “Maybe you could help me with him?” she added, shoving Warren into Frank’s half-surprised embrace.

  “There you go, fella,” Frank heard himself mutter as he propped the withered creature against the bulkhead. “Why don’t we take this off…?” Quickly, he removed Warren’s black top, which slipped worn and warm and slightly greasy between his fingers, although it was the feel and sight of Warren beneath that really set his teeth on edge. The dead man muttered something and looked back toward Dottie with his usual puppy-dog longing, but made no discernable attempt to resist.

  “Maybe this as well…”

  The toupee felt ever warmer and greasier.

  “And this…”

  Here came the sunglasses, hooked off from what passed for ears and a nose. Frank had to judge every movement against the rising, falling waves. But, Jesus, the man was a mess.

  “Looking a bit cold now, Mister Hastings…”

  Frank shucked off his own blazer.

  “So why don’t we put on this?”

  A few more manoeuvres and Warren was wearing Frank’s crew blazer. Frank almost forgot the crew dogtag until Dottie reminded him in a quick whisper. Even then, Warren in this new attire looked like nothing more than a particularly bald and anaemic scarecrow, and Frank was wondering how this switch will ever convince anyone until he swung the weighed hatch open and was confronted by the sheer size and scale of the storm.

  The deck was awash. Dottie hung back. Salt spray ignited the air. It was a miracle, really, that she’d able to do as much as she had to help when you considered the deal this dead husk had forced on her. Now all she had to do was keep hold of his nylon top, toupee and sunglasses. The sky shattered in greys and purples. For all his slips and
struggles as he manoeuvred Warren Hastings toward the Glorious Nomad’s stern, Frank Onions felt like he was Odysseus sailing from Circe’s island, or Jason with his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. Soon, he would reach those warmly welcoming shores that Dottie had been promising him.

  A few last staggers and he was clinging to the final rail, and still just about keeping hold of Warren, although they were both equally drenched, and it was hard to distinguish between sea and sky out here. Then he felt the steel clifface of the Glorious Nomad’s stern rising and straining until her screws were swirling above the waves, and it seemed for a long moment that the whole ship would simply carry on climbing until the ocean dragged her down. Frank skidded and nearly fell as he grabbed Warren’s arms and tried to haul him over the rail.

  “Stop squirming you bastard!” Frank screamed into the wind even though Warren wasn’t squirming at all. As the ship teetered and began to fall back he tried to lift him again, and this time got some better kind of purchase. This, Frank thought, as he and Warren swayed like dancers over the stern’s drop, was far closer to a dead man as he’d ever wanted to get, but for all the wet grey skin, cavernous cheeks and birdcage chest, there was something about Warren Hastings in this stuttering light that didn’t seem entirely dead. Something in the eyes, perhaps, now they were stripped of their goggle sunglasses, or in the set of that mouth now that the powder and rouge had run. The guy had to have worked out what was happening, but there was still no sign of any resistance, nor any sense of fear. If anything, Frank thought as he finally managed to hook one hand under Warren’s wet and empty armpit and the other under his even emptier crotch and gave the final quick heave which tipped him over the rail, that last look conveyed something like relief—perhaps even a sense of pity…

  “Did it work? Are you okay?”

  Already, Dottie had managed to clamber up the deck. Already, the curse of her imprinting was broken, and her arms are quickly around him. Roughly and wetly, they kissed.

  “I love you, Frank,” she said, and her arms were strong and the ship’s searchlights and alarms were blazing as she drew him behind a lifeboat into the lee of the storm and took out something silver from her sou’wester pocket that squirmed and uncurled like a living jewel.

  “I love you.”

  She said it again, and kissed him harder as he felt a sharpness crawl across his neck.

  “I love you.”

  She held him tighter than ever as pain flared inside his ear.

  “I love you.”

  She said it again and again and again and again.

  Where has he not been? What has he not seen? He’s looked down on an Earth so small that he could blot it out with his thumb, he’s skysailed to the peak of Mount Everest. If there was a price to pay for all this glory, Frank Onions would willingly have paid it. Most glorious of all to him, though, eclipsing every moonrise and sunset, is his continuing joy at sharing Dottie’s company. The money—even the incredible things that it can buy; the glass terraces, the submarine gardens, the refurbished Burmese palaces—is just the river, the coin, the obolus. To be with her, and to share his flesh and blood with her, is an experience which pales even the furthest heights of sexual ecstasy.

  Days change. The living die and the dead live, but Frank’s love for Dottie is unchanging. He has, once or twice, much as one might gaze in awe at bare footprints left across an ancient floor, looked back along the path which brought them together. He knows now that the real Warren Hastings married his beautiful sixth wife just a few months before he died, or perhaps simply disappeared, in circumstances that other times and cultures might have regarded as mysterious. Since then, and as before, Dottie has remained just as stunningly, agelessly, beautiful. And she always has a companion whom she likes to term her husband. Sometimes, when the circumstances suit, she even calls him Warren. Frank has no need to ask Dottie why she chose death above life. He already understands perfectly. After all, why would anyone who had the money and the choice wait for old age and decrepitude before being resurrected? And what sacrifices and demands wouldn’t they then make, to ensure that they remained eternally beautiful?

  Dottie is Frank’s world, his lodestone. He lives with and within her, and would sacrifice any or organ or appendage or bodily fluid joyously. As for himself, he knows that he’s no longer the well-kept specimen of a man who was first enraptured by her. Only last week on the glassy plains outside Paris, he gave up a good portion of his bone marrow to her, and a third re-grown kidney. The effects of these and other donations, along with all and the immune-suppressants he must continually take, leave him thin and weak and dizzy. His hair has long gone, he must wear sunglasses to protect his bleary eyes, and he shuffles hunched and crabways. He realises that he’s already starting to look like the creature he tossed over the stern of the Glorious Nomad, and that the wonders of the life he’s now living cannot last forever.

  In the circles in which they move, far removed from the Glorious Nomad’s ruin-inspecting tribes of meekly departed middle executives, Frank and Dottie’s relationship is seen as nothing unusual. As she once said to him in what now seems like a different existence, who now knows or cares about what is legal? Sometimes, when the weakened husks like himself who accompany Dottie and her companions grow close to failing, they head off to live some lesser life for a few weeks, and enjoy the thrill of finding a fresh and willing replacement. They call it re-crossing the Styx. It’s a new kind of symbiosis, this imprinting, and it strikes Frank as a near-perfect relationship. It’s only when the pain and weakness in his thinning bones sometimes get the worst of him, and he gazes around at the golden creatures who surround him, that he wonders who is really dead now, and who is living.

  Afterword

  No writer can ever really understand the effect their words have in the minds of their readers, but it’s often been said over the years that the general tone of my writing is “dark”.

  This assessment surprised me when I first began to come across it, back in the times when I made an effort to read rather than avoid my reviews. After all, I don’t think many of us devote much thought to wondering how the tones and moods in which we view the world differ from those of others; we simply see and interpret things as we believe they truly are. Neither do I think of myself as a particularly gloomy person. Quiet, sure. Thoughtful, maybe. But pessimistic, or miserable, or prone, even, to depression? No. Not that I don’t love the strange and the Gothic, and I am at least as inclined to watch a horror film as a romcom. But I love Father Ted and The Simpsons, and revere P G Wodehouse, and am, as my patient family will attest, a ready source of many stupid jokes. Still, I do accept that we all carry a kind of weather with us, be it sunny or rainy in the world outside, just as in that Crowded House song. And perhaps, although I’d like to think of it as a willingness to deal with the wide range of human experience, my personal weather is a little dark.

  When you’re writing a story, there’s generally—or at least there should be—far too much else going on to worry about its overall mood or world view. Not that the mood and attitude isn’t there, of course. And, at least if you have any variety in you as a writer (which, let’s face it, some very good and successful writers don’t) it should vary from scene to scene and story to story. But this tone thing, this mood business, is one of those areas that I’d certainly advise anyone who wanted to write fiction to try to ignore, or at least not to dwell on. If a story works, it works.

  The best insight I’ve able to give myself into the moods and atmospheres which are to be found in my fiction came from considering the works of other artists in a variety of fields for which, over the years, I’ve felt the strongest response. Here, again, I’d never really thought of them to being of any particular mood at all, but simply thrilling, liberating, memorable and moving in all their very different ways. My favourite music, for example, runs from Mahler to King Crimson with Richard Thompson and Joni Mitchell and Keith Jarrett along the way. I had to take a few steps back from my
normal reaction to realise that, just possibly, one of Mahler’s death marches, or the slow-rolling mellotrons and dark sunsets of King Crimson’s Starless, could be considered a little “dark”. That, or Donald Sutherland lying juddering to his death in a ruined palazzo in Don’t Look Now, or Robert de Niro’s rictus smile as he lies lost in an opium daze at the end of Once Upon a Time In America. Or, come to think of it, the fate of the two lovers in Keith Robert’s “Weihnachtabend”, which I’ll mention again in the last afterword in this collection. For me, they all just feel right.

  Then there’s death, which has also often felt pretty right to me as an artistic subject to explore, from Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius to Led Zeppelin’s In My Time Of Dying, with Richard Thompson’s When I Get To the Border, Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration and Brahms’ German Requiem thrown in. We all die, of course, and we all grow old. In fact, along with love, and life itself, it’s surely the greatest shared human experience, so to me it’s hardly surprising that it should crop up regularly in my work, or the work of anyone else with any serious pretensions of being a writer. In fact, it’s likely that one of the great subconscious appeals of SF to me has always been the way it allows death and all its attendant woes, glories and mysteries to be examined and interrogated from angles which more naturalistic fiction cannot hope to achieve. Robert Silverberg, in his brilliant patch between Dying Inside and Born with the Dead, did little else.