The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  The details of the admiral’s death are recorded in The Annals of the Aphasian Speed Corps.

  While the admiral was guarding the commission’s rear flank, a projectile icicle fell nearby and shattered the quill of a stately old ostrich feather tree. A barb from a falling vane knocked the little pink snail from the admiral’s right epaulet. The snail hit a quill stump and was knocked unconscious. The uniform groped blindly for its guiding intelligence. But in its clumsy searching, it stepped on the snail with its boot. Then it dropped in a heap, for it had crushed its own head.

  The Mollusk Boys were lost without their admiral. Rather than face conversion into papier-mâché, they decided to throw a party inside their ammo dump—a party featuring mixed drinks, barbecued ribs, and tiki torches. And we all know that drinking, barbecuing, tiki torches, and high explosives simply don’t mix.

  After centuries of Alba’s prohibition against death, death was making up for lost time.

  * * *

  —

  Many tribal leaders of the eastern and western frontiers had remained with their tribes instead of riding to the defense of Lotus City. Fate now forced them to confront the Black Glacier in their homelands. The guerrillas of the wilderness areas dreamed up a surprising number of tactics for confusing and delaying a malevolent glacier. The last-ditch resistance of these bits and scraps of outlying territory provided the Ontological Controls Commission—now reduced to King Skronk and the Secret Piano—with the time they so desperately needed for dismantling and unraveling Empress Alba.

  The tribes went down fighting—the Snoogs of Ababastan, the Yng-Nen of the Isle of Bristles, the Loudmouth Orpers from the Inside-Out Isthmus, the Fright Bulbs, the Life Machines, and other tribes seldom encountered by the civilized ectoids of the empire. Men, women, elders, children, and even tiny rough sketches took up arms. But all were frozen into papier mâché statues by the dark dank shadow of the advancing ice wall. And where was their warrior empress? Where was Alba?

  Every continent is surrounded by oceans, and Aphasia was no exception. The cloud continent was surrounded by two vast oceans of air, the oversky and the undersky. Aphasia also boasted a sea, the Sea of Cirrus, which lay to the north of Caravan Beach. Ridges of cloudwave extended to the horizon at sea level. These seaborne cirrus didn’t behave like normal clouds. They moved, slowly but visibly. They formed out at sea, rolled gradually south, and broke against the shore. Towering above the beach, the Impossible Bluffs ran from east to west. This was the nephographical region to which the captors of the lotus empress had fled.

  The empress, if you watched her from the beach without binoculars, was a smear of dirty white being carried like a sack over the broad shoulder of a taller smear of green. The green smear was laboriously making his way down the bluffside, avoiding steep ravines and dead-end overhangs. The first two smears were followed by an indistinct blur like a small albino giraffe with extensible legs.

  Skronk was trying to reach the beach. On cloudsand, their situation might improve. Commercial travelers sometimes traversed the beach. Someone might give them a lift. Or some ally might spot them from the air. Given a moment’s peace, the piano could proceed with its regression therapy.

  Skronk enjoyed the sea air and the sight of the open sea stretching to infinity—wavering white arabesques against a background of porcelain blue undersky. The waveclouds merged or tangled, crowded together or spread themselves out, grew as wide as houses and dwindled to nothing. Many ectoids got dizzy just looking at them. But not Skronk.

  “Let me down,” whined Empress Alba. “Please. This hurts.”

  “If I set you down, will you run away?”

  “Do you think I want to be wandering in this pestilent wilderness by myself?”

  “All right then.”

  Skronk set Alba down. She ran away. She soon slipped on some loose vapor, slid a few yards, wedged her foot in a crevice, and sprained her ankle. Skronk and the piano climbed down to the spot where she sat. She was trying to extricate her foot. Skronk stood over her, glowering.

  “Help me up,” she demanded. “This is your fault.”

  “I don’t think so.” Skronk whipped a machete from his tool belt. With a single whistling stroke, he struck Alba’s head from her neck. The head bounced some distance down the bluffside.

  “Oww oww oww oww oww!” yelled the head as it tumbled.

  When the head came to rest, Skronk retrieved it and dangled it by its long golden hair in front of his nose. “Go to your room,” he growled. And so saying, he flipped up the lid of the Secret Piano and tossed Alba into the sounding box. She landed on a row of velvet-padded wooden hammers. Skronk slammed the lid and cast her into darkness.

  “What a grouch,” Alba said to herself. She tried to nurse her sense of grievance, but she felt very odd without arms or legs. Also her nose was running. She’d always been allergic to sea air.

  Skronk and the piano walked across the windswept beach toward the brink where the continent ended. Cloudsand blew against their legs.

  “Someone’s coming,” said the piano.

  Skronk climbed a tall crag to get a better view. He shouted down to the piano. “It’s a tank crab. One of the Speed Corps. Maybe we can flag it down.”

  “Hurry!” cried the piano. “Those things move like greased lightning.”

  Skronk ran to the center of the beach. He stood there and waited. Eventually the piano joined him, though its legs were ill-suited to the terrain.

  “Have you ever seen a tank crab move like that?” asked Skronk.

  “It seems to be injured,” said the piano.

  A tank crab in camouflage paint (serial number ASC-eleventy-threeve-fivety-sixen) halted not far from the ontology commissioners and fell on its side. A slovenly young man in combat fatigues emerged from an escape hatch in the tank’s undershell. He stood squinting at Skronk and the piano and scratched a crusty elbow. “How did you get here?” he asked them.

  “Gumsnot,” said Skronk. “How did you get here?”

  “Me? You’re asking me? How would I know?! In one chapter I’m here! In some other chapter I’m there! I can’t figure out the connections! No one tells me anything!”

  “Calm down. What’s wrong with your tank?”

  Gumsnot blew his nose on a handkerchief. “I couldn’t drive it. So I got it drunk to slow it down. We went out to Wriggleberry Lagoon. I’m a little impaired myself.”

  “You were born impaired. Can you fit the three of us in there?”

  Gumsnot turned and squinted at the crab. “Probably. Did you say three?”

  “Alba’s inside the piano. She’s being punished.”

  The crab stirred and attempted to right itself. “You really mush excush me,” it said. “I ushually go mush mush fashter than thish.”

  “How far have you got with the regression?” asked Gumsnot.

  Skronk hung his spiny head. “Gamma phase.”

  “You mean you still have two more to go?” said Gumsnot. “Oh I see. So we’re all going to die.”

  “Just drive the damn tank. We can’t stay here. We’re being stalked by a glacier.”

  “It’s everywhere, Your Highness. Before long it will be here.”

  Minutes later the crab was trundling along the coastline with Gumsnot, Skronk, and the piano all jammed inside the cockpit and feeling none too comfortable. The sea wind wailed at the gunnery slots. Skronk spoke to the piano.

  “Let’s tackle phase beta. Start playing. Put the empress under.”

  “Her head is in the way of my hammers.”

  “Well, tell your little friends to move her. My hands are too big.”

  Two of the secret piano rolls climbed inside the sound box. They rolled Alba’s head across the hammers to the treble end of the box and propped her upright. “The boss can spare one octave,”
they told her. “And the acoustics in here are really not bad. We hope you enjoy the concert.”

  While the piano rolls climbed out again, the piano unfolded its screen into a crooked zigzag. Due to spatial constraints in the cockpit, that was as far as the unfolding got.

  The head began to weep.

  “Do you mind?!” said the piano. “I’m trying to play a piece! Just because you’re depressed is no reason to upset me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alba sniveled. “I’m sorry. My nose is running, and I haven’t got my handkerchief.”

  “Boo hoo,” said Skronk. “Things are tough all over.”

  Now Alba began to cry very loudly.

  “I refuse to play under these conditions,” declared the piano.

  Gumsnot left the pilot’s chair and peered down into the sound box. “Wow. She’s sort of pretty, for a head. What happened to all the wrinkles?”

  Alba screamed.

  “Alba?” said Gumsnot. “Is something wrong with you?”

  “Wrong? With me? You’re asking me what’s wrong with me? I haven’t a clue. I don’t even know who I am. I thought I was a farm girl from Wyoming. But before that I thought I was a goddess from outer space. So what do I know?” Gumsnot produced a slightly used handkerchief and helped Alba to blow her nose and dry her eyes.

  “What can I do about a hyperactive glacier? It’s not my fault.”

  “It’s not a glacier, Alba.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Listen to the secret piano music. Listen all the way through. Then you’ll know what the glacier is.”

  “Am I really the Empress Alba, Gumsnot? Am I anyone?”

  “You’re the heart and soul of the empire, Alba. If you turn to papier-mâché, we’ll all pop like soap bubbles. You are Aphasia. Now close your eyes.”

  She closed her eyes. She felt much safer that way. She made a resolution to keep them closed for the rest of her life. Eyes were far too delicate to be exposed to the elements.

  Gumsnot patted the hair on the crown of her head. Then he returned to his station.

  The Secret Piano began to play a tensely modernist piece, suitable for the soundtrack of a film noir. Alba thought she recognized the piece. She didn’t like it. It sounded morbid. A stereoscopic phosphene image began to form on the inner surfaces of her eyelids, just as it was forming on the crooked screen overhead. Alba didn’t want to watch another stupid silent film, but the only alternative was to open her eyes.

  Up on the screen, a station wagon was driving Interstate 101 along the Oregon coast. Views of the Pacific Ocean swung past. There were evergreens and sea gulls and dark gray clouds that threatened rain. The station wagon and the cars that whisked past in the opposite lane were old model cars, suggestive of the 40s or the 50s. In the back seat sat a seven-year-old girl with haunted eyes. A green barrette held back her fine blonde hair. She was wearing her best white party dress.

  Skronk leaned toward the piano and carefully pressed one ear to its side, snapping some of his ear spines against the white paint. The piano tried to ignore the cactus king. It was also trying to ignore the mumbling inside its sound box.

  “Helpless as a little girl,” Alba said to herself. “Helpless as a seven-year-old from Roseburg, taking a road trip with her father. Why is she sitting in the back seat? Why is her father sitting alone? Where is her mother? Where is her brother? Why couldn’t they come along? And why was there suddenly a padlock on the basement door? And why was the house full of smoke just as the girl and her father were leaving on this peculiar road trip? And not tobacco smoke either, but smoke that smelled like burning wood and gasoline. Her father has presented the girl with a mystery. But there aren’t enough clues, and he’s hardly said a word all day. Is that me? Is that little girl me? What’s wrong with my Daddy? What’s gone wrong?”

  The film was interrupted by flashes of the memories that were tormenting the girl. Sinister glimpses of domestic details better left unseen. Was it possible? Could Daddy have killed Mommy? And killed her brother? And be planning to kill her? Surely she was making a terrible mistake. Daddy pushed in the dashboard cigarette lighter.

  The tank crab was sobering up, as its accelerated metabolism burned off the inkohol in its system. The soberer it became, the faster it ran across the cloudsand. The ride inside the cockpit got rougher. Gumsnot strapped himself into the pilot’s chair. Alba’s head began to roll around the sound box, absorbing some of the hammer blows and causing gaps in the fabric of the music.

  The cigarette lighter popped out. Daddy lit his cigarette. He always smoked when he was nervous. The little girl with Alba’s eyes watched him closely. She couldn’t shake the stubborn intuition that at any moment Daddy was going to drive through the guardrail and take a plunge down the cliffside to the surf-pounded rocks below. Daddy wanted to die, but the little girl didn’t.

  “Is that what the real world is like?” asked Alba’s head. “No wonder I wanted to escape.”

  Skronk had lost interest in eavesdropping and was watching the film. “It’s like watching paint dry,” he observed aloud. “It’s boring, and there’s nothing you can do to make it happen faster.”

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on her,” said Gumsnot over his shoulder. “She’s had a confusing life.”

  “That must be why she refuses to remember it.”

  On the screen, the grille of the station wagon broke through the guardrail in slow motion. The car began its plummet through empty air. Its horizontal momentum carried it farther out to sea than Daddy had expected. It missed the rocks and the surf zone entirely. But it was going very fast indeed when its grille hit the surface of the ocean.

  As the action slowed to a crawl, the camera eye tracked forward into the station wagon’s interior. The girl was curled in a ball, floating in midair at a strange angle, suspended between the roof and the rear seat. But free fall was just a prelude. Now metal was impacting against water, and she suddenly felt heavy. Her cranium was as dense as a cannon ball. The momentum of that cannon ball would soon propel her straight through the windshield. The steering wheel held Daddy in place, but the girl sailed past him—a flying rag doll. In extreme close-up, the skin of her forehead pressed against the windshield. It was bone versus safety glass now. The image separated into blobs, which subdivided into droplets and evaporated. Then a new image condensed—two white blobs on a field of greenish gray.

  The girl was outside her body, watching herself drown. The water was dark and unbelievably cold, like water from some other dimension. She couldn’t tell which way was up. She couldn’t feel any pain, which was disorienting.

  The camera zoomed back, isolating the dying child and her soul inside a field of inky darkness. The girl was definitely dying. But thanks to the diving reflex and to the imperfect interconnectedness of the human brain, millions of her cranial neurons were still available as a medium for stray thoughts. And thereon hung the tale of Aphasia.

  It took more than a few clouds or a few acres of Wyoming to found an empire in the noosphere, you see. It took a few billion neurons. It required a human sacrifice. And not just any old brain tissue would do. What was required was gray matter from which the owner’s soul and psyche had been radically expunged. Cortical tissue like that didn’t grow on Bong Trees. It was like a dish of sterile gelatin. A perfect medium for the growth of ectoid cultures.

  The tissue didn’t have to be available for long. Ectoids lived on a different time scale from biological forms. Ectoids could pack millennia into the time it took a little girl to drown.

  And there they were, on-screen at last. Ectoids of every shape and size came swimming from the edges of the frame toward the drowning girl at the center. They filled the screen, inquisitive and bickersome, like neon cartoons of benthic invertebrates. Lured from the noosphere by the promise of a better life, they converged on the vacant b
rain. They needed a place to live.

  The child floated a few yards beneath the surface, almost lost in shadow, suspended between worlds. The camera zoomed in on a floating cloud of fine blonde hair. Myriads of ectoids began to wriggle their way into the girl’s skull. The girl’s ejected soul liked the looks of them and followed them in, disguised as a cartoon of a green tadpole.

  Montage of domed Aphasian cities springing up like mushrooms.

  Title card: HERE ENDS FALSE MEMORY BETA: “THE SINKING STATION WAGON”?*3

  “That was ‘Theme From The Sinking Station Wagon,’ ” the piano informed them. “No applause please. I’m doing this for the empire.”

  Skronk reached into the sound box and extracted Alba’s head. “I think you’ve been punished enough,” he told her.

  “Oh Skronk. What have you done to me? Now I’m not even a grown-up anymore. I’m just a brain-dead drowned girl from Oregon. Am I her or am I here?”

  The crab juddered to a halt. The commission piled up against the pilot’s chair. “Avalanche!” screeched Gumsnot.

  The weight of the black ice was shoving a section of the Impossible Bluffs down onto Caravan Beach. The glacier had caught up with Alba again. Now it meant to bury her alive. The tank crab leapt onto the back of the onrushing cloudslide and ran up the flowing scree, fighting the current to stay in one place. Then it lost its footing and bounced down a river of streaming cloudrubble—thoroughly out of control. Inside the crab, the piano fell from floor to ceiling to floor. Ten legs akimbo, the crab tumbled onto an unburied strip of beach sand.

  It ran northwest, following the coast line, or so it believed. But it found itself trapped on a narrowing peninsula, with the Black Glacier itself blocking retreat. Inevitably the crab retreated to the peninsula’s far end, where it was cornered. There was nothing around it but the sky above, the sky beneath, and moving rafts of cirrus colliding with the shoreline in slow motion. And of course the looming glacier.