Logorrhea

by John Klima

  He talked to everyone he could find—Arabs, Jews, Christians, Bantus, Moslems. Holy men and beggars. Merchants and royalty. Over time, his body grew lean and weathered but strong. His eyes narrowed against the sun and yet he saw more clearly. Fighting brigands in the steppes. Running from Indians with blow darts in the Amazon.

  If only they could see “Vignette” now, he thought as he pulled an arrow from his shoulder and prepared a charge with Sudanese warriors against the fortifications of some other tribe. Climbing a mountain in the Himalayas, eyelashes clotted with frost, an avalanche crushed over them in a blink and as he dug himself out, he thought, I’ll show you the good of the Green.

  After a time, though, it really didn’t matter to him if he ever found the Tablet—in fact, he no longer believed in its existence. He was homesick for Smaragdine and his friends there. So one day he began to head back, slowly. Some months later, he was close enough that all he had to do was cross the river by ferry and the walls shimmering in the distance would be real once more.

  But he wasn’t a fool. He’d brought three miraculous things with him, in a chest banded with gold: an ancient book from Siberia made of broad, thick leaves, written in a secret language none alive knew; a healing tincture from the Yucatan that smelled like honeysuckle and chocolate; and a shiny green stone that tribesmen in the Amazon had told him was a god’s eyeball that had fallen from the sky one night. At least he wasn’t returning empty-handed. With any luck the king would reward his efforts, or at least forgive his trespasses.

  Word must have spread about his return, for a royal pavilion awaited him on the far side of the river.

  But it was not the king who greeted him there. Instead, it was a woman and her retinue. At first he did not recognize her. Then he realized it was the King’s daughter, five years older. She had wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She had let her hair grow long. It hung free to her shoulders, framing a face that seemed too wistful, too sad, for one still so young.

  “Where is the king?” he asked.

  “He died a year ago,” she said, and he could feel her gaze upon him, lingering over every scar and bruise on his stubbled face. “I rule Smaragdine now.”

  “I didn’t find the Tablet, but I brought back a chest of treasures,” he said. It was somewhere behind him, but he couldn’t stop looking at her.

  “I don’t give a damn about any of that,” she said, and leaned up and kissed him on the lips.

  Vivisepulture

  AND THE TURK came down upon Smaragdine like a storm of plagues and breached the city gates and slew the defenders on the walls with arrows and their horsemen, led by their captain Baryut Aquelus, outstripped their infantry and so came unto the great Lyceum where the priests had hidden the Green Tablet, and Baryut took the heart of Smaragdine from that place, leaving the priests dead upon the steps as they rode out again.

  And in the streets beyond they came upon the din of fierce battle, for the Smaragdineans had recovered from their surprise and now fought like demons for their city and men fell in great numbers on both sides as the city began to burn.

  Raising his sword, Baryut led the way for the Turk, cutting down any who opposed them.

  But when he rode under the shadow of the city gates and looked back, Baryut saw that the Smaragdinean prince Farid, upon a black charger, had come up behind and slain his riders and would soon overtake him.

  Safety lay at the semaphore tower by the river, but Farid outstripped the Turk and forced him up into the hills and ravines and the coffeehouse beyond.

  Farid was only a few paces behind him, driven by righteous conviction.

  The Tablet became heavier and heavier in the Turk’s hands and the prince shouted at him now, sword slicing the sky into jagged pieces.

  “Bring it back or I’ll feed you to my dogs!” Farid shouted. “You are very brave, although I don’t know if you understand that!”

  “And here I took you for a bit of a sycophant, Farid,” Baryut shouted back. “A bit of a hanger-on.”

  “Not in the least. You believe too little and know too much.”

  Soon Baryut was trapped at the edge of a ravine. In a coffeehouse. A ravine. The prince would kill him now and the Tablet would go back to Smaragdine and he would never write another book. Or perhaps even another sentence.

  Baryut wheeled around and drew his sword to make his stand at the edge of the ravine.

  “Sacrilege!” Farid screamed, galloping forward. Their horses came together and they were now so close that Baryut could smell the betel nut on Farid’s breath, could see the design on the green T-shirt he wore under the blazer.

  The force of their swords clashing shuddered up and down his arm and the ground beneath their horses’ hooves caved away and they fell headlong into the ravine, still in their stirrups.

  The horses were dead by the time they reached the bottom, necks snapped. The tablet had cracked into a hundred pieces.

  Baryut and Farid were buried alive under the pebbles and rocks and boulders dislodged by their descent. Their mouths filled with dirt. Their bones broke.

  Then, because Farid could not reach his sword, he shot Baryut in the stomach.

  Baryut looked up at the ceiling fan and could hear a slow pounding that he knew was his blood abandoning his body.

  As Baryut died, he had the satisfaction of knowing Farid would die, too, soon enough.

  Within a month, the flesh decayed from the bodies of the two men, leaving only bones. In four months, the shifting of earth confused the collapsed skeletons of the horses and the men until there was no difference between the two.

  That spring, the rains came and water trickled through the ravine, loosening the stones, picking through the bones and the pieces of the Green Tablet. Every year, the water dislodged more and more fragments until over time the Tablet became not a hundred pieces but two hundred and then a thousand, until no one piece was any larger than a Smaragdine coin.

  Beyond the ravine, more wars were fought. Some the Turk won, some the Smaragdineans won. Men died searching for the Tablet. Smaragdine became a backwater held together by the weight of dead ritual and then, eventually, broken by a mad dictator who fancied himself an architect on a grand scale.

  Pieces of the Tablet were carried away by the rainwater and entered the river. Fish ate them and became strange with the knowledge, uttering sentences in a language no one understood. Herons ate the fish and fishermen noticed how mournful and heavy their eyes became.

  In a hundred ways, the Green Tablet reentered the world, but like the men, it had been buried alive and its knowledge with it. Reborn, it became a hidden thing, seen in glimpses from the corner of the eye. Sometimes things happened because of the Tablet that no one could understand because no one knew what the Tablet said anymore. Perhaps they never had.

  And still people searched for it, never realizing it was all around them and in them, and that they could search their whole lives, die because of it, and yet it was there all the time, in front of them, even in the pattern of green mold across a dirty floor in a Tashkent coffeehouse or somewhere in the blood leaking from my body or in the patient whir of the ceiling fan overhead or in anything in the world that received love or hate or some lingering attention or…anything always forever.

  LOGORRHEA BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  DANIEL ABRAHAM (cambist) has been published in the Vanishing Acts, Bones of the World, and The Dark anthologies, and been included in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology. A Shadow in Summer is his first novel. He is currently working on the Long Price Quartet, the second volume of which, A Betrayal in Winter, will be published in 2007. He lives in New Mexico with his wife.

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI’s (macerate) writing has appeared in High Country News, Salon.com, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It has been anthologized in various “Year’s Best” collections of short science fiction and fantasy, nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards; his story “The Calorie Man
” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year in 2006. Paolo lives in Colorado.

  JAY CASELBERG (eudaemonic) has published short fiction in such markets as Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and Amazon Shorts, and is the author of the Jack Stein book series which includes Wyrmhole, Metal Sky, The Star Tablet, and Wall of Mirrors. He currently resides in Germany.

  MATTHEW CHENEY’s (elegiacal) work has appeared in a wide variety of venues, including English Journal, One Story, Locus, SF Site, Failbetter. com, and Ideomancer. He writes regularly about SF and literature at his blog, The Mumpsimus. He currently lives in New Hampshire.

  ALAN DENIRO (sycophant) is the author of the short-story collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead from Small Beer Press. He lives in Minneapolis.

  CLARE DUDMAN (eczema) is the author of the novels Edge of Danger, One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead, and 98 Reasons for Being (all published by Penguin). She has won three awards for her writing and has worked as a scientist and teacher.

  HAL DUNCAN (chiaroscuro) is the author of the Book of All Hours, which is comprised of the novel Vellum and its follow-up, Ink. He lives in Glasgow.

  THEODORA GOSS (dulcimer) has published stories in places such as Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Alchemy, and Polyphony. Prime Books recently published her short-story collection In the Forest of Forgetting. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

  ELIZABETH HAND (vignette) is the author of eight novels, including Generation Loss, and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Saffron & Brimstone. She lives on the coast of Maine.

  ALEX IRVINE (sacrilege, semaphore) is the author of several novels including A Scattering of Jades and The Narrows. His short fiction has been collected into Unintended Consequences and Pictures from an Expedition. He currently lives in Maine.

  JAY LAKE (transept) lives and works in Portland, Oregon, within sight of an 11,000 foot volcano. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with novels from Tor Books, Night Shade Books, and Fairwood Press. Jay is also the coeditor with Deborah Layne of the critically acclaimed Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. His next few projects include The River Knows Its Own from Wheatland Press, The Trial of Flowers from Night Shade Books, and Stemwinder and Mainspring from Tor Books. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short fiction and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing. Jay can be reached at www.jlake.com or by email at jlake@jlake.com.

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK (insouciant) is the author of more than ninety novels. Moorcock’s most popular works by far have been the Elric novels. His writing has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the British Fantasy Award, among others. His novel Mother London was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Cornelius quartet won the Guardian Fiction Prize. He currently splits his time between Texas and France.

  TIM PRATT (autochthonous) lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Heather Shaw. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Best American Short Stories: 2005, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Year’s Best Fantasy, among others.

  DAVID PRILL (vivisepulture) is the author of the cult novels The Unnatural, Serial Killer Days, and Second Coming Attractions, and the collection Dating Secrets of the Dead. His short fiction has appeared in Salon Fantastique, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Subterranean, SCI FICTION, and Cemetery Dance. He lives in a small town in the Minnesota north woods.

  MICHELLE RICHMOND’s (logorrhea) new novel, The Year of Fog, will be published in March by Delacorte Press. Richmond’s previous books are the story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, which won the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the novel Dream of the Blue Room, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Glimmer Train, Playboy, the Kenyon Review, Oxford American, the Believer, Salon, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2006 Mississippi Review Fiction Prize.

  ANNA TAMBOUR (pococurante) lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales &…and her first novel, Spotted Lily, were both Locus Recommended Reading List selections.

  JEFF VANDERMEER (appoggiatura) is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, as well as a past finalist for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial awards. Jeff is the author of several books, most recently Shriek: An Afterword. VanderMeer’s books, including City of Saints and Madmen, have made the year’s best lists of Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Weekly, Publishers’ News, and Amazon.com. Jeff’s editorial work includes the Leviathan anthology series and the Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann.

  LESLIE WHAT (psoriasis) attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1976 but stopped writing to do other things, like maskmaking and puppetry, tap-dancing and stage performance, babies, and community work. She published her first story in Asimov’s in 1992 and has since added over one hundred publication credits in a variety of forms: plays, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and documentary scripts. She won the Nebula Award for her short story “The Cost of Doing Business” and received her MFA in writing from Pacific University in 2006. She teaches fiction writing through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

  LIZ WILLIAMS (lyceum) did a variety of part-time jobs, including a now-infamous stint on Brighton Pier as a tarot reader, before full-time work as administrator for an education program in Kazakhstan. This was not entirely successful and resulted in a partial collapse of the Kazakhstani cabinet. She is the author of ten novels, most recently the Inspector Chen novels Snake Agent and The Demon and the City. She currently resides in England.

  NEIL WILLIAMSON (euonym) coedited the all Scottish anthology Nova Scotia with Andrew J. Wilson. He is a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle. His stories have been published in magazines like the Third Alternative, Interzone, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and are collected in book form in The Ephemera, published by Elastic Press. He lives in Glasgow.

  MARLY YOUMANS (smaragdine) is the author of six books, including two young-adult fantasies, The Curse of the Raven Mocker and Ingledove. Her awards include The 2001 Michael Shaara Award for The Wolf Pit, and her short fiction has appeared in places like SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, and Salon Fantastique. She lives in upstate New York, a place that is a bit like the Snow Queen’s palace: too cold for mortals and too far from the Carolinas, though still on the Appalachian spine.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  John Klima has previously worked at Asimov’s, Analog, and Tor Books before returning to school to earn his Master’s in Library and Information Science. He now works full time as a librarian. When he is not conquering the world of indexing, John edits and publishes the acclaimed genre zine Electric Velocipede, through which he has published authors such as: Jeffrey Ford, Catherynne M. Valente, Hal Duncan, Liz Williams, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others. John and his family recently escaped the hustle and bustle of the East Coast by moving to the Midwest.

  LOGORRHEA

  A Bantam Spectra Book / May 2007

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  * * *

  Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  * * *

&n
bsp; Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Logorrhea : good words make good stories / John Klima, editor.

  p. cm.

  1. Short stories, American. 2. American fiction—21st century. I. Klima, John, 1971–

  PS648.S5L64 2007

  813'.010806—dc22 2007005885

  www.bantamdell.com

  Introduction copyright © 2007 by John Klima

  “The Chiaroscurist” copyright © 2005 by Hal Duncan, originally published in Electric Velocipede #9

  “Lyceum” copyright © 2007 by Liz Williams

  “Vivisepulture” copyright © 2007 by David Prill

  “Eczema” copyright © 2007 by Clare Dudman

  “Semaphore” copyright © 2007 by Alex Irvine

  “The Smaragdine Knot” copyright © 2007 by Marly Youmans

  “A Portrait in Ivory” copyright © 2007 by Michael and Linda Moorcock

  “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” copyright © 2007 by Daniel Abraham

  “Logorrhea” copyright © 2007 by Michelle Richmond

  “Pococurante” copyright © 2007 by Anna Tambour