Shattered Prism , Book 1

by Amir Naaman

  He came to the United States in the fifties. They knew who he was, of course, but they must have deemed him not useful enough (keep on reserve). In Leiber’s Le Dictionnaire Biographique des Surhommes he merits barely a page. He hung about in New York for a time, working small clubs, doing his act: he was a tall thin man, permanently serious, always in a suit. He fell in with the Jews for a time and eventually he made his way to Las Vegas.

  He wasn’t the only one. Übermenschen had always liked Vegas. They could disappear there, become background, lost amongst the neon and the clink of coins. Fogg was there in the seventies; the Electric Twins used to pack them in at the Sands. I don’t think anyone even knew what he was. I could tell you he met Lansky, worked for Hughes, and it might even be true, but his wasn’t that kind of story.

  He was just a drifter, someone on the margin of other people’s stories. Year after year in little clubs and cocktail lounges he’d do his act, move on, be there on the periphery. I think there’s a picture of Sinatra and the Rat Pack where you can see him in the background, but it could just be someone else who looked like him.

  He met Adele at an Atomic Cocktail party in the early sixties. High up in the Flamingo’s sky room where guests gathered to watch the test detonation of the nuclear bomb—the world’s worst weapon of mass destruction as entertainment—and served with cocktails by waitresses with short skirts and patient smiles. Adele was waitressing then; Bogdan was perched on the bar watching the mushroom cloud rising in the desert through the glass, a lit cigarette in his mouth. She said he’d looked a little like Bogart, though he admitted to me he’d only liked the actor in his early supporting roles, when all he could get was playing one gangster after another.

  Tigerman was there that afternoon, too, she said, dominating the room as he always did, prowling, with animal magnetism, his mane of hair flowing, his perfect muscles on display through the thin lycra (it was all the rage that year). Adele said Tigerman had circled Bogdan, that he scented him, his difference. But Bogdan was oblivious, and Tigerman had an audience to entertain. Tigerman’d left the party with two Pan Am stewardesses shortly after, so they never spoke.

  But she saw Bogdan, she said. She had on a smile when she said it, half sad, half wistful. She saw a man who was neither young nor old, who wore a suit that had seen better days and a face that never seemed to smile until it met her. When he smiled, she said, it was so rare it lifted up the day and rearranged it. Maybe that was his real talent, but I think it was only ever meant for her.

  More than anything, she said, he had seemed so lonely.

  When I try to trace them over the decades, it is as though the two of them never existed. A faded bill advertising his act in some club long wiped off the face of the earth. A note in a wedding chapel’s guestbook that could have been theirs or could have been anyone’s. Meanwhile I heard rumours. Cigarettes weren’t the only things he made vanish. He worked for the Jews and the Italians. Maybe he even did work for Hughes after all. Never a lot, and never anything flash. Guys went missing. Cops on the take who were taking too much. Bouncers with a side-line in dope. Pimps who forgot who they worked for. Cashiers skimming more than they should have.

  I don’t know what he did during the war. Maybe he really did spend it on an island out in the Pacific somewhere, drinking rum cocktails and listening to the wireless. I once asked him what he thought about Vomacht. About the change. Vomacht was dead by then, hanged in Jerusalem in sixty-four, I think it was. He just looked at me, out of eyes that were no specific colour. Then he shrugged, reached behind my ear, pulled out a lit cigarette, put it out on his tongue and swallowed it.

  It’s a cheap trick. Anyone can put out a cigarette on their tongue. The secret is to do it quickly, so that the flame goes out before it can damage the skin. I think most of them didn’t know how they felt when Vomacht died. In a way, he’d made them, but what were they? I’d seen the Green Gunman at Woodstock, and the Khmer trials, of the Three Brothers, as they called them, on TV, and I’d interviewed the Übermensch they call Sangoma on an assignment once. And I don’t think any of them knew what the hell they were supposed to feel that was different to everyone else. He had a trace of a foreign accent he never lost and, after he did the trick with the cigarette, he looked at me and said, ‘You just get on with it.’

  And that is as close I can get to telling you about Bogdan, or Bojan. He lived with Adele for forty-five years before she passed away of cancer, though she never smoked. Some people say those nuclear blasts the military did outside Las Vegas—over a hundred of them thought the nineteen fifties—may have contributed to it. But people just die. Sooner or later everyone dies.

  I lost touch with him eventually. I think he moved away. Vegas had changed and he never did have much of an act. He could be anywhere by now.

  Only sometimes I wonder if he’d ever smiled again, the way he’d smiled for her that afternoon, when he perched on the bar like Bogart, and the mushroom cloud rose in the desert outside. Sometimes I wonder, but like with most things in life, I guess I’ll never know.

  Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), of The Violent Century (2013) and of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), in addition to many other works and several awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.

  Kuszib

  Hassan Abdulrazzak

  Ur was excited to receive the free tickets from his boss. It was unexpected. His boss was not known for generosity. ‘I have to be in another sector this weekend’ he told Ur in his larger-than-life, baritone voice. Ur suspected an involvement with a new mistress.

  He couldn’t wait to get home. ‘Guess what, sugarlump?’ he said to his wife. ‘We’re going to the sampling feast!’ Ona’s eyes lit up for the first time in months.

  Ur knew that Ona was unhappy with their move to sector 2047-Centre Point. She never came out and said so but some resentments take a long time to simmer, and even longer to bubble and froth their way to the surface.

  With the tickets in hand, Ur felt he was finally delivering on his promise of a better life. The annual sampling feast was the place to be at this time of year. Tickets to the event were hard to come by. The feast offered everything: the chance to sample all the gastronomical delights of the sector, to mix with the cream of society and make contact one was unlikely to make through day-to-day work as a sorting clerk, which was what Ur was. A sorting clerk with big ambitions.

  ‘We even have access to the fashion show,’ Ur declared, barely able to contain his delight. He kissed Ona, tasting oregano and basil on her lips and tongue then with the tip of a spoon sampled the sauce she was preparing. They tried to make love that night but it proved, as on previous occasions since the move to 2047, to be a joyless affair. Ona woke up later in the night and began to sob quietly. Ur heard her but continued pretending to be asleep.

  The day of the feast finally arrived. Ur took Ona shopping in the morning. They purchased suitable outfits for the feast. He dropped her later at the beauty salon and whiled away the time looking at window displays of the latest semi-automatic harpoon guns. Upon returning home they showered, perfumed, dressed then stood examining one another for a final inspection.

  ‘You look wonderful tonight’ Ur said. Ona smiled as she recalled a song she had heard during her class at the fundament—a song from the old days.

  Ur parked the Paradigm Shift Hover Jet XL-5000 in parking space 2BON2B and the couple took the magnet capsule to Alliance City station (in a part of town that used to be called Revolution City in the old days). From there they reached the exhibition complex by disposable solar powered roller skates. The skates were discarded in the terrorism-proof bins outside the complex. It was possible to observe through the glass façade that the sampling feast was
underway.

  After passing through the main entrance, Ur and Ona inserted their invitations in the appropriate slots on the side of a metal security barrier. The laser beams between the poles of the barrier were switched off and they were able to get through. Next, they were approached by ten-foot robots designed to look like giant sector 2047 puppies. The robots scanned them for illegals. Ur had to remind himself that cute as these floppy-eared, chrome puppies looked, they were able to swallow and digest a terrorist within a fraction of a second. Bombs could explode noiselessly inside their atomically-enhanced steel stomachs.

  The great hall was designed to take the breath of those who entered. Using reflective surfaces and molecularly-manipulated paint, the designers managed to convey a sense of vastness, even infinity. The hall was a white desert, the inverse of dark space.

  Row upon row of stalls stretched like wave furrows. Farmers and merchants from all over sector 2047, not just Centre Point but further afield, were gathered to display their produce. The first fifty or so rows were dedicated purely to wine.

  Ona paused in front of one particular stall that had wine with peculiar labels. The labels carried a painting of a farmhouse and horses and fields stretching into the distance. It was like a picture out of an infobite manual. Ur asked the old merchant manning the stall if they could taste some of this wine. The merchant poured two generous samples and handed them over.

  ‘Smell it first’ he suggested to Ur, who was about to down it in one go.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is how it was done in the old days’

  Ur sniffed and was pleasantly surprised, even moderately aroused, by the aroma. Ona followed suit and a smile overwhelmed her face.

  ‘Now drink,’ the old merchant instructed.

  Ur began to drink. The wine caressed his throat like a sheet of velvet. Seconds later, an explosion of taste erupted in the back of his throat. The alcohol reached the brain and he felt his muscles relax with a substantial quantity of happiness.

  ‘This is not normal wine, is it? What’s it made out of?’

  ‘Grapes,’ replied the merchant.

  ‘Grapes?’

  ‘Red grapes to be precise. This is how they made wine in the old days. We are the only company that has been granted a license to create produce according to the old ways’

  ‘But this tastes great,’ Ona interjected.

  Ur and the merchant looked at her with surprise because neither one thought she was following their conversation.

  ‘There should be more things like this,’ she said. ‘We should be encouraged to learn about the old days’ Ona’s voice was ripe with enthusiasm.

  The old merchant poured another shot of wine for her then leaned forward to whisper, ‘The elders frown on this, my dear.’

  Ur finished his sample and asked, ‘Does your company produce any normal wines?’

  ‘Sure. Here try this’

  The merchant took out a container from the 37 degrees incubator and poured a sample in a fresh cup. It was local wine with the usual two rivers logo on the label.

  Ur tasted the wine. It was the familiar sort, the type he could obtain easily at his local market. He mulled over the question he wanted to ask then having formulated it, asked with confidence: ‘What kind of humans is this made out of?’

  ‘It’s from the blood of locals,’ the old merchant replied in a lacklustre voice, as he was unimpressed with Ur’s vague question. ‘Perhaps you want to know what we feed them?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ Ur answered, blushing a little at having his ignorance about wine revealed in front of Ona.

  ‘I prefer organic methods. This is what my company is all about.’ The merchant’s hands were now animating his speech. ‘So for a start we cook their meals. Not many wine merchants do that. Humans can eat raw meat but through millenniums of what they called their culture they acquired the habit of eating cooked food’.

  ‘Just like us!’ Ona yelped.

  ‘Yes, perhaps there is a degree of similarity to us.’

  ‘What do you cook for them?’ she said.

  ‘Whatever we can get cheaply: sheep, donkeys, rats, that sort of thing. Sometimes we feed them their own babies but we found it best not to make them aware of that, otherwise they get agitated.’

  Ona put her glass down. Ur took another sip from his.

  ‘We screen them for disease on regular basis,’ he continued. ‘They have so many viruses. We have to be careful especially when handling their liquids: blood, snot, sperm. Most of their viruses cannot cross over to us but we still have to follow council regulations’.

  ‘Well you have a good produce here. It’s quality.’ Ur said this knowing what he would be asked next.

  ‘Would you like to purchase anything, sir?’

  Before he had time to reply or fumble for his credit chip, Ona interjected: ‘Maybe later, there is still so much to see’

  She was always the sensible one. Ur also knew that, by saying this, she was reminding him of their old plan: to work in sector 2047-Centre Point until they have enough credit to buy a plot of sea back home.

  They sampled more wine from other regions of sector 2047. Mainly made from human blood although one or two stalls offered wine from the blood of dogs, cats, hamsters, ponies and pigs.

  Ona was getting a little drunk. Ur kissed her. She kissed back and he could feel a certain degree of fire. ‘But not enough’ he thought. The blood on their lips intermingled—her now brown African hair mixed with his German blond.

  Beyond the wine, came the meat stalls. Ona said to Ur it seemed that every part of the humans was used in one way or another. There were cuts of arms, torsos and thighs hanging from hooks and several counters displayed heads stuffed with fried tomatoes or peppers where the eyes used to be. Ur passed one head with two carrots sticking out of its ears. It looked comic and he could not help laughing at the sight.

  Then there were the sausages, piled one on top of another in refrigerated counters, made out of ground eyes, lips, cheeks, tongues, muscle, brain. In fact just about every part of the human anatomy went into these cylindrical delights. Ona picked one of the foreskin and herb coated sausages to examine it. A crowd had gathered around a small platform directly opposite them.

  It appeared as if a demonstration was going to take place. The butcher standing on the platform was dressed in an orange overall. On a table before him was an entire human leg. The tanned leg was smooth unlike others that the couple had seen earlier hanging from metal hooks. Something about it suggested femininity. The toenails were painted red and the middle toe was adorned with a thin silver ring. The butcher had one hand placed on the thigh and with the other hand held onto a cleaver, sharp as a finely calibrated laser beam.

  When a sufficient crowd gathered, he cleared his throat to speak, but before doing so he noticed the toe ring. With a flick of the cleaver it was removed. The ring flew in the air and landed somewhere behind him with a tiny jingle. The nail on the toe also came off and a small trickle of blood dripped over the other toes and onto the table. Ur knew that Ona and most of the others watching recognized that the leg was fresh.

  ‘The most important thing you’ve got to realise when making sausages is that the finished product is only as good as the ingredients it contains.’ The butcher’s voice bellowed silencing the few who were still engaged in conversation. ‘The meat must be fresh.’ He paused to let that point sink in. ‘It must also be high quality and have the proper lean-to-fat ratio. It’s no good using the obese for this which is why merchants who know what they are doing, make sure humans receive plenty of exercise on their farms. You give a human half a chance and he’ll just sit around doing nothing.’ Laughter erupted at that last comment. The butcher did not smile. ‘That’s not good. A fat human makes for a poor sausage indeed’.

  He raised his meat cleaver and brought it down with sufficient force as to cut a round portion of the upper thigh. He picked up the chunk of meat and shoved it forward. Ur noticed it was
now inches away from Ona’s terrified face. ‘See! No fat on this one. She’s a beauty. And look at the colour, it’s just marvellous’. Ur was nodding in agreement. Humans from Centre Point were beautifully sun kissed, making their meat particularly tasty. The butcher flung the meat into a solar powered grinder.

  ‘The temperature of the meat should be kept as cold as possible during the grinding and mixing. This grinder is kept at a constant four degrees and can be flicked into self-sterilizing mode when not in use. The low temperature keeps any nasty human germs from being active. Later the meat is cured with a mixture of anti-bacterial and anti-viral formulations before stuffing into hog casings. We found that human intestines lack the taste of their porcine brothers. Any questions so far?’

  ‘Yea I have a question,’ a youngster shouted from the back. ‘Why is there such a big price difference between the sausages?’

  The butcher lodged his cleaver in the middle of the leg and said, ‘That depends on the meat. Humans come in all varieties: black, white, pink, yellow and so on. That determines the flavour but also most of us from sectors one to twenty have taste buds that pick up other qualities. Scientists now think that what the human was thinking or feeling at the moment before processing can determine the quality of the meat’.

  A feminine voice announced through concealed speakers: ‘Will guests with tickets to the fashion show please proceed to the inferno hall. Take the gravity elevators down to seven-eighths.’

  The gravity elevator was a huge round platform rimmed with discontinuous metal bars and studded with hovering rubber poles. Through the gaps in the metal bars the guests, including Ur and Ona, entered and were told to hang onto the poles suspended in mid-air. The platform then descended down slowly through a shaft that was a giant aquarium. Ona gasped at the beauty of the scene: a multitude of colourful fish lining up like hover jets in traffic yet capable at a moment’s notice of changing direction. A school of them can fragment with a twist and a jerk reminiscent of a limb twitching in sleep. Humans had lived in the midst of this beauty but failed to appreciate it. This was one of the points discussed at length in a document titled ‘The Moral Case for Sector 2047 Invasion’ she had read.