Asimov's SF, October-November 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  For hunting humans, and whether

  They allow man packs around here,

  Cuz he's got a good tick hound trained

  For the purpose. Ain't been the same

  Since they outlawed shining—

  Used to catch them humans

  All in a passel at night,

  Clumped up in their lairs

  With the tops so easy to remove.

  Be a shame, though, right enough,

  If they actually became endangered.

  Hate to give up hunting altogether.

  He gives his wings a shivery flap.

  Prob'ly ought to start leaving

  The little ones to grow.

  -

  —P M F Johnson

  Copyright (c) 2007 P M F Johnson

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novelette: DARK ROOMS

  by Lisa Goldstein

  Lisa Goldstein offers us a poignant look at the magic of Georges Méliés, one of science fiction's first filmmakers. The story was inspired by “a photograph of an elderly Méliés selling toys in a train station. As soon as I saw the image, I knew there was a story in it."

  Nathan Stevens first saw Georges Méliés in 1896, in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris. There, in the Salon des Indiens, the Lumiére brothers had opened the first moving picture theatre, and Stevens watched, entranced, as a train arrived at a station, a man watered his garden, a blacksmith worked at his forge.

  The pictures ended and the lights came up. The glow from the gaslamps was not harsh, but he sat there blinking, dazzled, his eyes filled with motion, with smoke and waves and wind-blown leaves. For a moment he wondered that his surroundings remained the same, that the train did not roar through the small room, flattening chairs as it went, or the sea crash through the walls and drown them all.

  Near him people were picking up their purses and canes, putting on their coats, stepping over his legs as they headed for the door. Finally the theatre, so crowded a few moments ago, was nearly empty.

  One other man had not moved. He was balding, with a drooping mustache and a trim goatee. He was blinking as Stevens himself had done, as if he were just waking from a dream, or loosed from some enchantment.

  Then he smiled, perhaps at Stevens, perhaps at a lingering memory from the pictures they had seen together. It was a kind smile, Stevens thought; you might see an uncle smile just that way as he gave a present to his favorite niece. But there was something else in it too, something deeper and more serious, and Stevens thought the man might know more about these films, perhaps even know how they were made.

  The man stood. “One minute, please,” Stevens said.

  The other man turned, a polite expression on his face. Suddenly Stevens could think of nothing to say, though he had been in Paris for six months and his French was nearly fluent. “A—an amazing thing, isn't it?” he said finally.

  “We will all be changed,” the man said, or Stevens thought he said. He put on his hat.

  “Wait,” Stevens said. “Do you know about these—these pictures? Do you know how it's done?"

  The man headed for the aisle. Perhaps he hadn't heard. Stevens hurried after him, but the man had reached the stairs and was climbing them quickly. Stevens followed and came out into the street. It was still daylight, a stronger light than that of the gaslamps, and he blinked again, bewildered, feeling as if he had surfaced by stages from strange depths.

  People walked past him or headed into the café, called out to each other or shouted for cabs. Coaches drove by, their wheels creaking, the horses’ hooves clattering against the street. The new automobiles sped past, smelling of hot metal and burning rubber and factory smoke, their horns blatting.

  A man of the same height and build as the one Stevens had seen walked away down the Boulevard des Capucines, adjusting his hat. Stevens ran after him, reached him, tapped him on the shoulder. The other man turned, but instead of the pleasant smile he expected Stevens saw a fierce scowl. For a moment, still tangled within the enchantment of the moving pictures, Stevens thought the man had performed a magic trick, had shaved off his beard and mustache and changed his soft brown eyes to an icy blue.

  “Yes?” the man said. “What do you want?"

  Stevens walked away, feeling foolish. It was March, but the air still held the chill of winter. He drew his coat closer around him and walked on.

  He was twenty years old, and had come to Paris to be an artist. He'd grown up in a small town on Lake Michigan; his father was a fisherman, and his grandfather had been a fisherman before him, and Stevens's own fate and future had seemed set—and would have been, if not for a maiden aunt who had taken an interest in him. In their town she was said to be artistic, said with pity and disapproval, in the same way people talked about the town madwoman. She had seen promise in him and encouraged him to escape to Paris; she had even given him some money she had from a small inheritance.

  He had arrived in Paris a half a year ago. He'd rented a studio and painted every day while the light held, working hard; his aunt's money would give him only a year in Paris, a year and a half if he was careful. He began to meet other artists, and went to cafés with them in the evenings.

  Then one day some friends took him to a studio he had never visited before. The paintings there were a revelation, not so much for their technique, though that was very good, but for the way the artist saw the world, the way he was able to take ordinary things and make them seem new, astonishing, as though no one had ever truly seen them before.

  Stevens felt inspired at first, and worked harder than ever. But now all his paintings seemed lifeless, ordinary, compared to this other man's; they lacked something, though he didn't know what it was. He was good, he knew that, but perhaps he was not good enough.

  Sometimes, when his work was going well, he thought he might be wrong, that he was brilliant, every bit the artist his aunt had seen. Sometimes, though, he would come up against his limitations, and then he would feel resentful. Why had someone else been given this talent and not him? He worked just as hard, he wanted it just as much. He could have painted that dancer, that lake, if only ... well, if only he'd thought of it.

  The day faded into evening. He stopped at a restaurant for dinner and then, feeling restless, he wandered the streets, his mind still busy with the train, the forge, the garden. One of the films had shown a parent feeding a child, infusing even that simple act with magic.

  As if the world around him was echoing his thoughts he saw the word “magic” shining out into the street, lit by the new electricity. He came closer and saw that it was part of a sign: “Théatre Robert-Houdin—Magic Conjured Within.” An old woman sat in a box outside, separated from him by elaborate wrought-iron bars, and so befuddled was he by the day's events that at first he thought she was a magic trick herself, that any moment she would disappear or turn to smoke.

  “One franc,” she said, holding out her palm. He paid and went inside.

  The theatre was dim, lit only by gaslamps turned down low. From somewhere a piano played. At first he could barely make out his surroundings; then rows of chairs swam out of the darkness. He found an empty seat on the aisle and sat down.

  A man stood on the stage with his back to the audience. He wore black formal clothing; the tails of his coat reached nearly to his knees. A woman in a shockingly small skirt stepped out from the wings. The man ushered her into a box and closed a door that covered her from the neck down, so that only her face was visible. He made a few passes with his hands and the woman's head floated out onto the stage, her eyes blinking, her mouth moving in a smile.

  The head started back to the box, flew past it, returned and missed it again. It swung back and forth across the stage in panic, trying in vain to rejoin its body, and the audience, too, seemed to panic, a few even crying out in alarm.

  The magician made another pass. The head went toward the box again and this time managed to glide smoothly inside. At first, horribly,
it faced away from the audience; then it turned around and the woman smiled.

  The magician opened the box and the woman stepped out, whole and safe. He turned toward the audience and held her hand, and they bowed and straightened. It was only then that Stevens recognized him; it was the man he had followed from the Grand Café.

  Stevens sat through the rest of the show impatiently, barely seeing any of the other tricks. At the end he headed up toward the stage, pushing past the crowds of people going the other way. A door stood open at the side of the stage, behind the piano, and he went inside.

  He found himself in a dim hallway, filled with objects he could barely make out in the gloom. He stepped carefully past wooden flats shaped like waves, crescent moons, stars, an Egyptian sarcophagus; past a man made of gears and wires. Ropes on pulleys draped down from the ceiling; three or four together tangled him like a spider's web and he pushed them out of the way.

  He turned a corner. Something came toward him, a monstrous head swollen like a balloon, wobbling on a string-like neck. He stopped, his heart pounding high and fast in his chest, and then realized that it was his own head, distorted in a mirror.

  Now he noticed a door open at the end of the corridor, heard voices, laughter. He peered inside and saw the man, the magician, along with his assistant and the cashier. The assistant had stripped down to her petticoat and was changing into her street clothes. The cashier spat on a cloth and rubbed off the man's makeup.

  Stevens went inside. The man looked up. He was younger than Stevens had first thought, in his mid-thirties.

  “I know you, don't I?” the man said. He tugged at his mustache, as if it were connected to a lever in his brain that might help with his memory. “Where was it...?"

  “This afternoon, in the Salon des Indiens,” Stevens said. “Where they showed those pictures—"

  “My God, that was you!” the man said. He looked startled, as though their meeting twice in one day exceeded all the laws of probability.

  “It's a funny coincidence, isn't it?” Stevens said.

  “Is it? Do you believe in coincidence?"

  “What else could it have been?"

  “Any number of things, I suppose. What did you want, at the theatre?"

  “To talk about those pictures. I saw the way you looked, after the lights came on. You were—you looked the way I felt. You know how they did it, don't you?"

  “The pictures, yes.” The man smiled, the same smile Stevens had seen at the theatre. “You love them as much as I do, don't you? I didn't see that then—I was in a hurry, I had to prepare for my first show here ... But we were supposed to meet, weren't we? That's why you found me again. Coincidences are the world's magic tricks."

  Stevens laughed, catching his enthusiasm. He would believe in coincidences if this man wanted him to; hell, he would believe in unicorns. “I don't know your name,” he said.

  “Georges Méliés.” He bowed; in his formal evening clothes it did not seem at all ridiculous. “And you?"

  “Nathan Stevens."

  “Come to my house tomorrow, Nathan Stevens,” Méliés said. “Do you know where Montreuil is?"

  Stevens knew only that it was a suburb on the outskirts of Paris. “I'll find it,” he said.

  The magician's house was larger than Stevens had expected, grander. He knocked at the door and a woman answered, not the one he had seen at the theatre. Without saying anything to him she turned and called out “Georges!"

  Méliés met him at the door. “Do you want tea?” he said, leading him inside. “Some pastries? No, what am I saying—you're not here to talk about trivia. Come on—I'll show you the camera."

  They went down a hall, past rooms where Stevens glimpsed plush chairs, Persian carpets, mediocre paintings in elaborate frames. He had never been in a house as richly furnished as this one, and for a moment he felt uncomfortable in his old trousers, his ragged collar hidden by a wool scarf. Then Méliés began to talk, and he forgot their differences and listened, fascinated.

  “That wasn't the first time I saw those films,” he said. “I was there the day of the premiere, sitting in the dark, and I could barely believe it when the pictures started to move. And when I came to myself again, my first thought was, This is for me."

  Méliés led him up the stairs. “I offered them ten thousand francs for a camera like theirs,” he said. “The Lumiére brothers. They said they wouldn't sell it, not at any price. So I found another one, a different kind, but unfortunately it isn't as good."

  He led Stevens into a room. The room held only a table, with a wooden box standing on top of it.

  Stevens went to look at the box. There were gears in front of it, or behind it, and an eyepiece. “So that's it,” he said. He ran his fingers along the smooth wooden surface, then bent and put his eye to the eyepiece.

  “I'm still fiddling with it,” Méliés said. “See, there's this screw here—it's supposed to wind the film ahead with every shot, but it's not working right. And I have to film outside, in the garden, because of the light. I've got a place all set up."

  “So the film moves, like—like a kinetoscope,” Stevens said, straightening. “But you don't have to look into a box for the pictures—you see it up on the wall, the same time as everybody else. It's—it's —"

  “Projected, yes,” Méliés said. “Come on—I'll show you the garden."

  “Not yet,” Stevens said. He bent and looked through the eyepiece again.

  * * * *

  Stevens visited Méliés often after that. They took the camera apart and put it together again, adjusted the screw and worked out where to perforate the Kodak film. Finally, after several false starts, they watched together as a second Stevens, this one formed out of light and shadow, walked across Méliés's wall, and, at the same time, by some strange alchemy, walked across the garden as well. When it was over they hugged and slapped each other on the back, shouting so loudly that Méliés's wife Eugénie came upstairs to see what had happened.

  They went out celebrating that night. Méliés took him to places he had never seen before, restaurants and theatres at the end of alleys or up a flight of darkened stairs, where men juggled knives and beautiful women ate fire. Every turn seem to take him to new parts of Paris, and in his increasingly befuddled state he wondered if Méliés had conjured them out of thin air.

  At one place he and Méliés had just sat at a table when a belligerent-looking man came up and told them they had taken his seat.

  “What is it you say?” Méliés said in English.

  Stevens laughed. He had never heard Méliés speak English before.

  The man turned to him. “What are you laughing about?” he said.

  “I'm sorry, I don't understand,” Stevens said in English. “My friend and I are tourists, from the United States."

  “Get out of my seat,” the man said angrily.

  He came closer. Méliés reached into the pocket of the man's overcoat and took out a frog. “Excuse me,” he said in French, holding the frog in the palm of his hand. “You seem to have a frog in your pocket."

  “Get out of here!” the man said.

  The frog croaked. Méliés put it in his pocket and they stood and ran for the door.

  They hurried down a few streets, then stopped. Stevens was laughing too hard to breathe. “Poor frog, to have such an owner,” Méliés said. “I'm glad we rescued it, aren't you?"

  “Were you carrying that frog all this time?” Stevens asked.

  Méliés turned serious suddenly, a drunkard's quick transformation. “Do you know, I don't think I was. And yet—somehow I knew it would be there."

  “What do you mean?"

  “I think—I think it was magic. True magic. There is true magic, you know. No one understands that better than a man who works illusions."

  “What? No—no, you can't believe—"

  “But I do. And do you know why I was able to work magic, when I never could before?” He put his face close to Stevens's; there was a thick sm
ell of wine on his breath. “It's because you're here. Do you remember that day when we met, and then met again? There's a bond between us—I felt it when I saw you at my theatre. And you feel it too, don't you? Apart we're nothing, but together—"

  Stevens nodded slowly. He did feel a bond, but it was because of their mutual love for moving pictures, nothing more. And yet—and yet—he hadn't seen the frog at the beginning of the evening...

  Méliés laughed suddenly. “I'm very drunk,” he said. “I'm drunk, and you don't believe me. It's all right—no one ever does. Let's go home, and we'll forget all about it."

  * * * *

  The day after their celebration it was Stevens's turn behind the camera, filming while Méliés stood at a table and did card tricks. Stevens had a fierce hangover—they both did—but he found that if he closed one eye and looked through the eyepiece he was able to concentrate.

  Two days later Méliés brought the film back from the developer. Stevens dimmed the lights and projected it on the wall, and they watched as Méliés passed his wand over the table, fanned out a deck of cards, pulled a missing card from his suit pocket. Méliés had made those motions yesterday, Stevens thought, and was making them again today, and would continue making them until the end of time, whenever anyone ran this strip of film. He had seen this magic before, of course, but this time it was him doing it; he was the magician, the priest of light and darkness.

  The film ended, and Méliés turned on the light, and as he did so something else was illuminated for Stevens. He was not a painter; he had never been one. But this was another kind of art, and he could do this, could create something permanent with film and a camera.

  He thought of his artist friends, and suddenly he realized that he'd nearly forgotten them, that he hadn't seen them in weeks. He wanted to tell them about Méliés, about his decision, and that evening he went back to the café.

  But to his surprise the artists were scornful, both of Méliés and his art. “My parents know his family,” one of them said. “His father's a rich man, a factory owner. And his wife's rich too. You didn't think he made his money on magic shows and moving pictures, did you?"