Ember-Musk and Scent-of-Moss took their place with the other deciphering duos on the side benches while the Elders sat at the roundtable, softly scenting to one another.
Scent-of-Moss removed her portable projector from its carrying case. A familiar naturalist whose scent-signature escaped Ember-Musk sat next to them. She reeked of moldy cactus-needles: Congratulations on your discovery, Scent-of-Moss, Ember-Musk. Vibrational communications! Who could have conceived such a thing might be possible?
The universe is vast and mysterious, Ember-Musk replied.
I just wish that we were closer to unlocking the secrets of this hologram, Scent-of-Moss misted.
Perhaps the textual transmission will shed light on the subject, the naturalist responded.
Scent-of-Moss turned the projector's dial and the holoimage—reduced in size so that it stood unobtrusively in the palm of her third fore-hand—commenced vibrating again.
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—holo-seg 15 of 15 [] shiptime 09:03:22 [] 11/26/2251—
My people believe that history is written by the victors.
I wonder what the Reviled will write about us, about the war. Not that we've ever seen them writing, mind you. In fact, we've never heard them speak. But they're unquestionably literate judging from their ability to use our medical and military records to their advantage.
Were we anything to them besides food? Did they mourn their own losses? Were they even capable of such emotions?
If you're listening to this, I need to tell you—whoever ‘you’ are—that the finest legacies of our civilization, our art, literature and technological achievements, still exist unblemished on our beautiful world if you dare to trace this ship's path back to its point of origin.
They've kept me here in my holding pen aboard this ship with a few dozen other survivors, engineers who'd been working on The Deliverance. They fed us and extracted our blood through these intravenous tubes three times a day. The others are all dead now. I'm all that's left of humanity. It won't be long before I'm dead too, before the human species is finally extinct. The only silver lining is that for all their canniness, the Reviled have hunted their prey to extinction. At least that's the way it seems. Sometimes I wonder whether this might not be part of a larger plan they have. Could this be the way they operate, destroying species, going into an eon-long dormancy, then resurfacing when summoned again by a new intelligent species? Or maybe, just like humanity, which rendered so many species extinct, their urge to hunt and kill simply knows no rational bounds and they've committed suicide in the process. I pray it's the latter.
Before we left Earth, the Reviled downloaded diagrams of The Deliverance to the rest of its kind. I'm afraid that they may be constructing other ships, targeting the other habitable worlds we've detected, and that more ships will be following this one.
I'll be dead decades before this journey is completed. But if the legends are true, if the Reviled truly are immortal, they'll suffer horribly from hunger during the remaining years of this voyage. I doubt that they'll be able to live through the centuries-long trip through space. But if they do manage to survive, can you imagine how it will feel to know that kind of boundless, ravenous hunger, and to be unable to die...?
They deserve to suffer.
At least they won't be able to use the ship's stasis-pods to stay alive. We managed to damage them during that final day of battle. Strangely, sometimes from my cell I'll spot one of the Reviled in a distant corridor lying down in a pod anyway. Perhaps it's just bored. Though sometimes—I try not to think this way, but sometimes I can't help it—I wonder whether it's perhaps because of the pods’ coffin shape. Who knows what the goddamned fiends are thinking? They've turned off almost all of the ship's lights and seem to bask in the blackness of space.
In all the years I've been here, I've only been approached once by one of them. It stood in front of my cell, its white ghoulish face staring hard at me through the plexiglass. I fought through the nausea and stared right back at it. Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit, but I'm convinced it was trying to communicate with me. That it was trying to tell me something through some alien sense I was incapable of registering, but that it just couldn't find a way to bridge the enormous gulf that exists between us.
I'm proud to say we never stopped fighting. What they don't know is that I've been able to hack into The Deliverance's communications systems from the routers behind a wall-panel in this room. That I've managed to hide humanity's epitaph, this warning, in the gaps of this ship's transmission signal—should this ship ever, in fact, send a message.
I pray that I'm right about their mortality, that if this ship reaches its final destination all you will discover is human skeletal remains and thousands of piles of fine dust. But I fear ... Oh, what I fear.
* * * *
Scent-of-Moss and Ember-Musk kept the projector running, but turned their attention to the Council.
The decipherers who had decoded the text of the primary transmission—a tall naturalist and her scarlet-hued betrothed—stood at the center of the room. A sunbeam streamed down on them through the skylight. All scents dissipated, awaiting the news.
We made a major breakthrough with the primary transmission yesterday, she misted. That's when we discovered that, like the holoimage, the text too is accompanied by vibrations. In fact, the bulk of the data consists of this stream of pulses. Unlike the hologram's vibrations, however, which originate from the alien's anatomy, these appear to be computer-generated. By using certain of the rudimentary vibrations of the hologram as a deciphering key, we were able to make sense of a few patterns in the primary transmission, the tall naturalist continued. In fact, once decoded, we could barely believe the message's simplicity.
Quizzical, pungent scents now permeated the chamber.
The message is: ‘Invite us'.
An Elder sprayed a cactus-scented mist: But we've been transmitting the sweet-scents for months now.
Clearly, they haven't understood.
So all this time they've waited, another Elder scented. After traveling light years through space for who knows how long, they've waited patiently in orbit for us to transmit the sweet-scents in their language. Remarkable.
Who can explain the strangeness of the alien mind? the naturalist responded. Perhaps it doesn't want its actions to be mistaken as hostile. It's asking us to transmit an explicit invitation along with landing coordinates.
Scent-of-Moss misted softly to Ember-Musk: We should at least decipher the vibrations accompanying the alien holoimage first. It would be prudent to examine all of the evidence before deciding on our course of action.
Scent-of-Moss began to stand up and Ember-Musk pulled her down. Why must you always obsess about ‘evidence', wife? Why—just for once in your life—can't you simply ... trust in the Gods’ plan for us?
Ember-Musk, I can't explain it, but something's not right.
Scent-of-Moss ... he pleaded.
They were interrupted when the tall decipherer's supernaturalist betrothed stood and released a cleansing mist that dissipated the crowd's scents. He then sprayed: There's an additional request: the transmission asks that our invitation be earnest and heartfelt. We've been asked to pray for the aliens to join us.
The Presiding Elder lifted his red-painted visage to the sky and released a sweet, sweet vapor of joy: Ah, so the visitors believe in prayer! They've asked for both a transmitted invitation and a prayer, a combination of naturalism and supernaturalism.
A zephyr of the sulfur-tinged sea breeze at daybreak blew through the Chamber.
Scent-of-Moss stared wide-eyed at Ember-Musk as she joined the others in scenting her own profound wonder. Slowly, she reached out with her rear-arms and embraced his fore-arms. And for the first time in a long year, Ember-Musk smelled their individual scents, warm ash and cool greenmint, wafting and swirling and intermingling into a new aroma he could only describe as the quintessence of harmony.
* * * *
—holo-seg
1 of 15 [] shiptime 09:05:01 [] 11/01/2251—
Danger! Beware! This is a warning. I repeat: this is a warning. My name is Antonio Valencia Astacio and I am the last human alive. If you're receiving a transmission from this ship, you are in terrible, terrible danger. The creatures aboard this ship have ruthlessly exterminated my people.
They're relentless. Unstoppable. And they learn.
If you're listening to this message, and this ship is already orbiting your world, it means that—God help you!—death and destruction are lurking at your doorstop.
But it's not too late! Simply turn them away. Deny them entrance and they'll be powerless to act.
Listen to me! Before I begin my story, before I tell you about our final days on Earth, about the Fissure, about how all of this came to pass, I beg of you, don't welc—
* * * *
Ember-Musk turned off the projector as the Council called for a decision. Within minutes, they voted unanimously to transmit the translated sweet-scents, inviting the strangers to join them.
It filled him with pride to think that his people had finally solved the riddle of the primary transmission. It wasn't surprising to him that both naturalism and supernaturalism had played a part. He had never doubted that both worldviews, working in tandem, were necessary to better understand the universe, as the Prophecies had foretold.
As a team of naturalists, including Scent-of-Moss, transmitted the landing coordinates, the rest of them prayed. And within a matter of hours, the ship's colossal shadow fell across the continent, obstructing the light that poured through the Chamber's skylight.
When the heralds come, Ember-Musk thought, at the first scent of their arrival we'll understand our role in this strange, vast universe. At last we'll have our answers.
A tangy-scented mist of joy filled the air, a rapturous joy borne of wonder and curiosity and faith.
Copyright © 2007 Mercurio D. Rivera
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[Back to Table of Contents]
MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of Film Releases
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One of the iron laws of film reviewing is never, ever trust a film that sends a screening invite to Interzone without having to be pestered for it first. I learned this the interesting way in 1985 with the very first film I watched for IZ, memorable now for an encounter whose significance could hardly have been guessed at the time. I'd arrived at the screening knowing no one, but was taken generously under wing by the porn-mag crowd, a bunch of savvy young freelancers who'd found that the top-shelf glossies paid surprisingly decent rates for well-written film journalism. The reviewer for Knave was particularly fun, fannish, and welcoming, and even more startlingly turned out to be an IZ subscriber; and he pointed out a man in his fifties whose name was familiar from one of those minor British sf novels that any fan who spent enough time in second-hand bookshops ended up owning eventually. Not being a convention-goer, he had probably never in his life been in a room with two people who'd read his novel; and this, plus the liberal topups of wine, went alarmingly to his head. In the unshakable belief that he was talking to Kim Newman, he transferred his attention from the relieved Knave man and held forth passionately and relentlessly on the state of the genre, continuing to call me Kim throughout, until I was at last rescued by the start of the film.
This, as it turned out, was false deliverance: the film was Avi Nesher's bizarre spaghetti-peplum remake of She, which had already been on the shelf for two years, and still deserves to chart high on anyone's list of 100 Films to Die Before You See. Even in its moment, when a fusion of Mad Max and Conan didn't seem complete commercial seppuku, it was a startling reimagining of Haggard's safely out-of-copyright intellectual property, with an underclad and visibly uncomfortable Sandahl Bergman translocated in the title role to a soggy post-holocaust California (actually Italy) peopled by mutants, bandits, and mad scientists, all to a Rick Wakeman soundtrack and a Justin Hayward end-title song ("Eternal woman, you are proud, you are alone,” &c.) which between them seemed to have consumed most of the budget. Even by the standards of car-crash cinema, this was something else, and we dregs of the London film press watched with jaws slowly falling off. “Well,” chortled Knave to the new bug from IZ as the lights finally came up, “that was a baptism of fire.” Needless to say, She went straight to rental and was never reviewed, even by Interzone.
As it happened, I never saw the minor sf author again, though the Kim Newman thing continued sporadically and inexplicably for several years. But the Knave reviewer went on to do the Hugo-Nebula double twice over, on top of a creaking shelfload of pretty much every other award in the field, and in one giddy week in November 2007 had two of the top three films in the UK. One of these is a joyous gem and an instant classic of fantasy cinema, while the other is barking mad and leaves you with the absolute certainty that you have just seen the future of film. When the books are written, as one day they surely will be, on the cinema of Neil Gaiman, this extraordinary culmination of a decade of on-off adventures in film will surely at the very least mark the point when the rest of the world woke up.
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The epic of Beowulf's strange making begins with co-writer Roger Avary, who did magnificent work on the Elliott-Rossio script for Sandman before clashes with producer Jon Peters put an end to his involvement and the whole project subsided into its own dreamworld limbo. But it was the resulting friendship that led Avary to invite Gaiman on board his cherished pet directorial project Beowulf—only for DreamWorks to put the Avary-Gaiman version into near-fatal turnaround while five rival Beowulf films came and went (literally, in the case of the bizarre German porn version) and even Xena did her three-parter TV epic subversion. And then the weird things happen: Robert Zemeckis fell improbably in love with their script and bought it out as his next project in the motion-capture revolution he'd tried to ignite with The Polar Express. Gaiman and Avary, no longed constrained by live-action budgeting, rewrote their low-budget set pieces for spectacle; and the result is a fearlessly uninhibited exercise in rewriting the rules of film for an unfinished technology whose poetics is still being invented.
Beowulf is, in effect, a showreel for an emergent art which remains seriously imperfect in its present early stage of development, but whose staggering capabilities still blast you in your seat like a burp from a dragon. In the current state of the art, Zemeckis’ mocap technique still hasn't consistently mastered the trick of getting its digital puppets’ eyes to focus consistently on a point, giving the performances a spacey, masklike character and turning great actors into an ensemble of botoxed zombies, like watching the Evil Dead remake The 13th Warrior. But at the same time the immersivity of Zemeckis’ 3d camera is so revolutionary, especially in the extraordinary IMAX prints, that the sheer barminess of the whole enterprise becomes part of its sense of differentness from anything else: a mad script colliding with a mad director to produce something compellingly weird and new. If Zemeckis is right, and Beowulf convinces you that he is, then this film will soon come to seem like cinema's own Beowulf: a primeval, but by the same token foundational, work with its own haunting poetry and a vision that could only have been forged on the cusp of a momentous cultural transition between old and new worlds. “The time of heroes is dead, Wiglaf. The Christ-god has killed it, leaving the world with nothing but weeping martyrs and shame.” Perhaps in a generation we'll be looking back on live-action filmmaking with the same mix of nostalgia and remorse. It certainly won't look much like the world we've known.
It's almost meaningless to try and say whether the whole thing ‘works'. Purely as a reading of Beowulf, the Gaiman-Avary script feels to stand some way above the Crichton/McTiernan take but a bit below the low-budget Gerry Butler version Beowulf and Grendel. If it's wildly overblown, it's at least satisfyingly conscious of how deeply Beowulf's reception is entwined with the history of twentieth-century fantasy. The day zero of modern Beowulf studies is 25 November 1936, w
hen Tolkien delivered his seminal lecture on the poem to the British Academy: written, we now know, immediately upon completion of The Hobbit, and arguing triumphantly for the modernity of epic and of stories about cave-trolls and dragons. No subsequent readings have escaped from Tolkien's elegiac exposition of the text as a meditation on the interaction between the pagan and the Christian—in the poem, in Anglo-Saxon culture, and in his own imagination—and its unity in the life-cycle of the warrior as a microcosm of the human condition. And Gaiman and Avary have taken this a step further, linking the Grendel and dragon episodes with a Hollywood-friendly central conceit (Gaiman's radical solution to the problem of narrative unity) that works a lot better than feared; and their script is nothing if not full-blooded, and refreshingly unafraid of lapses into the Pythonesque, with its hearty warrior blokishness and lusty Geatish ‘songs’ (actually chanted, perhaps to avoid having to pay Alan Silvestri yet more composer royalties). I'm not sure Beowulf himself survives the surreal graft of Ray Winstone's Estuary Geatish ("I am here to kill your monsta!") on to a buff and youthful American body. But after this film I'm not sure of anything any more.
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Stardust is a different and much more conventionally successful kind of venture, though still an extraordinary highwire act. This time Gaiman isn't directly involved in the script, but shining down in a watchful but approving producer role as his 1997 fairytale of quest, romance and enchantment is adapted instead by surprise screenwriting debutante Jane Goldman and director Matthew Vaughn. The source text is a piquantly odd and multiform work, originally written as a serial novel in credited collaboration with its illustrator Charles Vess, pitched at adult readers and distributed principally through comics outlets, and yet nowadays best known in its slightly uneasy repackaging as a single-authored young-adult text novel. Vaughn's film embraces this new family audience, losing the rather ill-judged sex scene and further lightening the tone; Vess's art is used for reference and general inspiration, but wisely there's no attempt to follow its very specific and illustratorly idiom, and even the original structure is fairly freely reworked. The early scenes are a bit hit-and-miss, and the climax a largely nonsensical replot for the obligatory quota of noise and spectacle; but Goldman and Vaughan have done quite brilliant work on the middle act, expanding one of the book's best throwaway sequences into a warm and generous space at the heart of the story where the central romance can plausibly blossom in a way that seems rushed and implausible in the book.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 16