Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215

by TTA Press Authors

  It seemed that even with the cream, Zeno's tea was very hot indeed. Setting his mug down with a clatter, he began fanning his hands at his mouth, theatrically gasping for breath. Alan took it for a joke, and let out one of his grating laughs. But this was no farce.

  Zeno squeaked and clutched at his throat; beads of sweat covered his face; foam coated his lips. He dropped to the floor in a heap, spasmed his limbs like a starfish, and beat a tattoo on the floor.

  Hardly knowing what to think, Alan knelt over his inert friend, massaging his chest. The man had stopped breathing; he had no pulse. Alan made as if to press his mouth to Zeno's, hoping to resus-citate him. But then he smelled bitter almonds—the classic sign of cyanide poisoning.

  Recoiling as abruptly as a piece of spring-loaded machinery, Alan ran into the bathroom and rinsed out his mouth. Her Majesty's spy-masters had gone mad; they'd meant to murder them both. In the Queen's eyes, Alan was an even greater risk than a rogue atomic scientist. Alan's cryptographic work on breaking the Enigma code was a secret—the very existence of his work was unknown to the public at large.

  His only hope was to slip out of the country and take on a new life. But how? He thought distractedly of the ear-shaped form he'd grown in the Petri dish at home. Why not a new face?

  Alan leaned over Zeno, rubbing his poor, dear chest. The man was very dead. Alan went and listened by the room's door. Were MI5 agents lurking without, showing their teeth like hideous omni-vorous ghouls? But he heard not a sound. The likeliest possibility was that some low-ranking operative had paid the maid to let him dose the tea—and had then gotten well out of the way. Perhaps Alan had a little time.

  He imagined setting his internal computational system to double speed. Stepping lively, he exchanged clothes with Zeno—a bit tricky as the other man's body was so limp. Better than rigor mortis, at any rate.

  Finding a pair of scissors in Zeno's travel kit, Alan trimmed off the pathetic, noble beard, sticking the whiskers to his own chin with smears of honey. A crude initial imitation, a first-order effect.

  Alan packed Zeno's bag and made an effort to lift the corpse to his feet. Good lord but this was hard. Alan thought to tie a necktie to the suitcase, run the tie over his shoulder and knot it around Zeno's right arm. If Alan held the suitcase in his left hand, it made a useful counterweight.

  It was a good thing that, having survived the estrogen treatments, Alan had begun training again. He was very nearly as fit as in his early thirties. Suitcase in place, right arm tightly wrapped around Zeno's midriff and grasping the man's belt, Alan waltzed his friend down the hotel's back stairs, emerging into a car park where, thank you Great Algorithmist, a cabbie was having a smoke.

  "My friend Turing is sick,” said Alan, mustering an imitation of a Greek accent. “I want take him home."

  "Blind pissed of a Monday morn,” cackled the cabbie, jumping to his own conclusions. “That's the high life for fair. And red spats! What's our toff ‘s address?"

  With a supreme effort, Alan swung Zeno into the cab's rear seat and sat next to him. Alan reached into the body's coat and pretended to read off his home address. Nobody seemed to be tailing the cab. The spooks were lying low, lest blame for the murder fall upon them.

  As soon as the cab drew up to Alan's house, he overpaid the driver and dragged Zeno to his feet, waving off all offers of assistance. He didn't want the cabbie to get a close look at the crude honey-sticky beard on his chin. And then he was in his house, which was blessedly empty, Monday being the housekeeper's day off. Moving from window to window, Alan drew the curtains.

  He dressed Zeno in Turing pajamas, laid him out in the professor-ial bed, and vigorously washed the corpse's face, not forgetting to wash his own hands afterwards. Seeking out an apple from the kitchen, he took two bites, then dipped the rest of the apple into a solution of potassium cyanide that he happened to have about the place in a jam jar. He'd always loved the scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when the Wicked Witch lowers an apple into a cauldron of poison. Dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through!

  Alan set the poison apple down beside Zeno. A Snow White suicide. Now to perfect the imitation game.

  He labored all afternoon. He found a pair of cookie sheets in the kitchen—the housekeeper often did baking for him. He poured a quarter-inch of his specially treated gelatin solution onto each sheet—as it happened, the gelatin was from the bones of a pig. Man's best friend. He set the oven on its lowest heat, and slid in the cookie sheets, leaving the oven door wide open so he could watch. Slowly the medium jelled. Alan's customized jelly contained a sagacious mixture of activator and inhibitor compounds; it was tailored to promote just the right kind of embryological reaction-diffusion computation.

  Carefully wielding a scalpel, Alan cut a tiny fleck of skin from the tip of Zeno's cold nose. He set the fleck into the middle of the upper cookie sheet, and then looked in the mirror, preparing to repeat the process on himself. Oh blast, he still had honey and hair on his chin. Silly ass. Carefully he swabbed off the mess with toilet paper, flushing the evidence down the commode. And then he took the scalpel to his own nose.

  After he set his fleck of tissue into place on the lower pan, his tiny cut would keep on bleeding, and he had to spend nearly half an hour staunching the flow, greatly worried that he might scatter drops of blood around. Mentally he was running double-strength error-checking routines to keep himself from mucking things up. It was so very hard to be tidy.

  When his housekeeper arrived tomorrow morning, Alan's digs should look chaste, sarcophagal, Egyptian. The imitation Turing corpse would be a mournful memento mori of a solitary life gone wrong, and the puzzled poisoners would hesitate to intervene. The man who knew too much would be dead; that was primary desi-deratum. After a perfunctory inquest, the Turing replica would be cremated, bringing the persecution to a halt. And Alan's mother might forever believe that her son's death was an accident. For years she'd been chiding him over his messy fecklessness with the chemi-cals in his home lab.

  Outside a car drove past very slowly. The brutes were wondering what was going on. Yet they hesitated to burst in, lest the neighbors learn of their perfidy. With shaking hands, Alan poured himself a glass of sherry. Steady, old man. See this through.

  He pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down to stare through the open oven door. Like puffing pastry, the flecks of skin were rising up from the cookie sheets, with disks of cellular growth radiating out as the tissues grew. Slowly the noses hove into view, and then the lips, the eye holes, the forehead, the chins. As the afternoon light waned, Alan saw the faces age, Zeno in the top pan, Alan on the bottom. They began as innocent babes, became pert boys, spotty youths, and finally grown men.

  Ah, the pathos of biology's irreversible computations, thought Alan, forcing a wry smile. But the orotund verbiage of academe did little to block the pain. Dear Zeno was dead. Alan's life as he'd known it was at an end. He wept.

  It was dark outside now. Alan drew the pans from the oven, shud-dering at the enormity of what he'd wrought. The uncanny empty-eyed faces had an expectant air; they were like holiday pie crusts, waiting for steak and kidney, for mincemeat and plums.

  Bristles had pushed out of the two flaccid chins, forming little beards. Time to slow down the computation. One didn't want the wrinkles of extreme old age. Alan doused the living faces with inhi-bitor solution, damping their cellular computations to a normal rate.

  He carried the bearded Turing face into his bedroom and pressed it onto the corpse. The tissues took hold, sinking in a bit, which was good. Using his fingers, Alan smoothed the joins at the edges of the eyes and lips. As the living face absorbed cyanide from the dead man's tissues, its color began to fade. A few minutes later, the face was waxen and dead. The illusion was nearly complete.

  Alan momentarily lost his composure and gagged; he ran to the toilet and vomited, though little came up. He'd neglected to eat any-thing today other than those two bites of apple. Finally his stoma
ch-spasms stopped. In full error-correction mode, he remembered to wash his hands several times before wiping his face. And then he drank a quart of water from the tap.

  He took his razor and shaved the still-bearded dead Turing face in his bed. The barbering went faster than when he'd shaved Zeno in the hotel. It was better to stand so that he saw the face upside down. Was barbering a good career? Surely he'd never work as a scientist again. Given any fresh input, the halted Turing persecution would resume.

  Alan cleaned up once more and drifted back into the kitchen. Time to skulk out through the dark garden with Zeno's passport, bicycle through the familiar woods to a station down the line, and catch a train. Probably the secret police wouldn't be much interested in pursuing Zeno. They'd be glad Zeno had posed their murder as a suicide, and the less questions asked the better.

  But to be safe, Turing would flee along an unexpected route. He'd take the train to Plymouth, the ferry from there to Santander on the north coast of Spain, a train south through Spain to the Medi-terranean port of Tarifa, and another ferry from Tarifa to Tangiers.

  Tangiers was an open city, an international zone. He could buy a fresh passport there. He'd be free to live as he liked—in a small way. Perhaps he'd master the violin. And read the Iliad in Greek. Alan glanced down at the flaccid Zeno face, imagining himself as a Greek musician.

  If you were me, from A to Z, if I were you, from Z to A...

  Alan caught himself. His mind was spinning in loops, avoiding what had to be done next. It was time.

  He scrubbed his features raw and donned his new face.

  Copyright © 2008 Rudy Rucker

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BOOKZONE—Review of 2007

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  PAUL RAVEN

  2007 was an exciting year for me, not least through becoming Book Reviews Editor here at Interzone. The downside of that has been that I've not had the amount of spare time I used to reserve for reading—so while I've been working more closely with books, I haven't read anywhere near as many as usual!

  The upside is that I've had access to some great novels without having to wait for my personal budget or the local library to accom-modate them.

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  A number of titles have taken close looks at the nastier side of humanity—whether as individuals or organisations, or simply as a collection of behaviours. Richard Morgan's Black Man (ironically renamed thirteen for the US market) tipped over the rock of prej-udice and exposed some writhing and wriggling nastiness to the sunlight, and in the process delivered that rarest of things: an intelli-gent yet brutal action thriller.

  Ken MacLeod's the execution Channel does something similar with terrorism and the politics of fear, masquerading as a subtle alternate history with an SF-nal core.

  Meanwhile Adam Roberts delivered a subtle satire of religious fundamentalism in all its flavours in land of the headless, a book whose sly humour and unreliable narrator I enjoyed as much as other reviewers appear to have loathed them.

  2007 also provided plenty of what, for lack of a better or less clichéd word, one might describe as ‘romps'. Rudy Rucker's Post-singular is definitely a romp, a breezy and playful psychedelic adventure through California and the multiverse, replete with talk-ing cephalopods, nanotechnology swarms, geek speak and hipster slang ... and a generous side serving of human interest.

  KarlSchroeder'ssecondinstalmentinhisVirgaseriesissetagainst one of the lushly realised fictional worlds that are rapidly becoming his trademark. Queen of Candesce has a backdrop that's simultan-eously steampunk and space opera, a complex and believably flawed lead character, and plenty of action and intrigue.

  Marianne de Pierres stepped boldly into the space opera arena with a strong opening gambit in the form of dark space, a richly and complicated novel that deploys feminist issues and complex characters to compelling effect, and that bodes well for a strong series to follow it.

  And already I'm running short of space, without having mentioned Charles Stross’ halting state or Ian MacDonald's Brasyl or any short fiction at all ... nor Douglas Rushkoff ‘s testament and Brian

  K. Vaughan's y: the last Man, two superb (and very genuinely sf-nal) serial comics drawing near their closing points. So much to praise, so little time!

  But I can pick my personal favourite with ease. One volume I knew that wouldn't pass through my hands for review nor be acquired by the library was Subterranean Press's beautiful ascendancies: the Best of Bruce sterling. So as a card-carrying Sterling fanboy, I pre-ordered my copy long ago—and I savoured every story in a collection that will remain on my favourites list for many years to come.

  What is still more interesting is watching my colleagues on the Interzone reviews team trace their own favoured threads through the year, and noting how often the same books and themes crop up, albeit in different contexts.

  For instance, Ian MacDonald's Brasyl makes repeated appearances—not just here but in many other 2007 retrospectives, both in print and on the web—but not with universal acclaim. It's interesting to see how polar the opinions on a single work can be. I take that as a sign of rude health in both the world of sf publishing and the criti-cal apparatus of active fandom as well.

  It should also be obvious that 2007 was a year not just bountiful in alternate history novels but unusually blessed with examples of the form that were—as well as being greatly acclaimed by critics and readers alike—frequently not marketed as science fiction at all. Whether this is a statistical blip on the radar of publishing or a sign of a growing trend remains to be seen.

  Enough of my rambling. Let's hear from the team!

  aNdy hedgeCoCK In2007I read the Middle Mind, Curtis White's dazzling but depress-ing indictment of the degradation of culture under late capitalism: a searing assault on art that is unimaginative, uncritical and utterly relentless in its pursuit of a fast buck. The books I've chosen are tools for the destabilisation of the Middle Mind. Inventive, provocative and idiosyncratic, they illuminate a landscape of grey and glutinous cultural flotsam with flashes of imagination.

  John Crowley's endless things completes a harrowing, exhilar-ating and mind-opening journey that began when I bought a copy of Aegypt, the first book in the ‘Aegypt Cycle', twenty years ago. Since then, Crowley has taken his readers through the Rosicrucian Enlightenment of Dr Dee and Giordano Bruno, the consciousness revolution of the 1960s and two ends of the world. Our symbolic journey continues in the company of Pierce Moffet, a freelance scholar and magus manqué, who rejects philosophical orthodoxy and highlights the limitless human capacity for metamorphosis and spiritual growth. Endless Things is illusive, allusive and erudite: it demands high levels of concentration, but repays that with the unalloyed pleasure of its wit and revelatory storytelling.

  Another story cycle with an eschatological thread is Mike Carey's increasingly dark Felix Castor series. dead Men's Boots, the third Castor book, takes the eponymous supernatural gumshoe from familiar territory in North London to the stamping ground of a dead American serial killer in Alabama. Castor investigates the suicide of a fellow exorcist, whose malevolent spirit haunts his widow, and uncovers a chilling supernatural conspiracy. Castor's world is one in which the dead are increasingly reluctant to stay dead, and encounters with demons, zombies and werebeasts are increasingly common. Carey's meticulously developed sense of place, fine ear for dialogueandrichcharacterisationmakeittotallyconvincing.Castor has the damaged charm of Chandler's Marlowe and the supporting cast—not least the vegetarian lesbian succubus and paranoid zom-bie hacker who support Castor's investigations—contribute to the reader's acceptance of escalating levels of supernatural mayhem. MikeCareyisanassuredandentertainingstorytellerwhotranscends the supernatural thriller with his erudition and symbolically chilling insights into the way we live now.

  Finally, the standout story collection of 2007 was Christopher
Fowler's old devil Moon—a welcome return to short dark fiction by one of its masters. There are 22 stories—hilarious, experimental and disturbing by turns—that demonstrate Fowler has lost none of his knack to unsettle and beguile. Who could fail to be beguiled by a story that that alludes to a lecture on Hungarian Erotic Bathchairs, delivered in Welsh? The stories themselves and the author's intro-duction are heartening reminders that the battle against the culture of the Middle Mind is far from over.

  Copyright © 2008 Paul Raven

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  TONY LEE

  With its revised timeline and ‘uncertainty is information’ paranoia, Ken MacLeod's execution Channel is a fine novel of British dys-topia, all the better for its subdued authorial polemic. The cathartic satire of land of the headless by Adam Roberts appealed to, or annoyed, my militant atheist views. It's certainly one of the darkest SF realms yet imagined. Paul McAuley's Cowboy angels serves up plenty of notions borrowed from sci-fi TV, along with some gripping action scenes, but proved a major disappointment from such a well-respected genre author. Michael Marshall Smith's haunted house novel the servants was rather ordinary, despite some atmospheric writing about Brighton as the off-season locale. Then, along came Ian McDonald's Brasyl to spoil a pleasant reading period. I enjoyed bits of the present-day stuff, but found the historical and futuristic chaptersextremelyirritatingorvaguelyboring,soIsoonabandoned—without regret—this widely overrated book.

  William Gibson's spook Country is packed with purposeless incidents, and lacks a plot or proper SF content. The novel's overly stylised prose so frequently borders on impressively ‘exotic’ non-sense there's wry amusement on nearly every page. Here's a “Darth my ride” limousine door that opens “like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bomb-proof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.” There's a dose of designer drug ‘Rize', which chills out “like a molecule-thick silver membrane of Chinese antimatter.” Several weird yet amiable char-acters operate in a murky grey area of international commerce and techno art where commonsense, never mind legality, finds no place or purchase. It seems like a fashionable location, location, location ... but, honestly, who'd dream of living there? Isn't that the ultimate test of any ‘ideal’ fictional setting?