The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “Ah,” 6340097/227/3 replied. “Figures. Wouldn’t be the first time. Probably some of them are copies you people made, thinking they were just, you know, buildings. Not to worry, though, this is definitely the real thing.” He was inside the organ now, fiddling with pipes and stops. “Plasma level’s a bit down,” he said, “but the main reactor’s in pretty good shape, considering. Just as well nobody’s been fooling about with it, really. There’s enough fuel in there to blow your island off the map if it cooks off.”

  Paul visualized thousands of middle-aged ladies playing church organs all over the country, twice every Sunday, and shuddered down to his socks.

  “Now, then.” 6340097/227/3 had emerged from inside the organ and was clambering up the pulpit steps. “All I’ve got to do now is lay in a course, and she’s ready to roll.” He leaned out of the pulpit, reached for the little board headed “Hymns” and slotted in 134, 96, 308; ditto for “Psalms”, 42, 90. “Well,” he called out, wiping his forehead, “I guess this is goodbye. Thanks for all your help.”

  Paul looked at him. If he’d been waiting for something along the lines of Unless, that is, you fancy coming too, he’d have been disappointed. But of course, he’d have refused.

  Of course . . .

  “Safe journey,” he said, rather lamely, and added, “Um, Godspeed.”

  6340097/227/3 nodded. “At least till I’m out of your atmosphere; then I can throttle back and save on fuel.” He frowned, as if worried about something. “It’s all turned out pretty well for me,” he said, “assuming this crate actually makes it off the surface, but I’m fairly sure it will. Hope things work out as far as you’re concerned.”

  “So do I,” Paul replied; and smiled, because you don’t meet an angel and help him get back home and walk away empty-handed, it says so in the rules. No: you go home, and when you get there, everything’s been sorted out. Your girlfriend’s waiting by the door with tears rolling down her cheeks, and as soon as you’re inside your boss rings to apologize, and then the garage calls to say it doesn’t need a new cylinder head after all, and everything is happy ever after. “Well, cheers,” he said; and he turned away and walked out, closing the door firmly behind him.

  Just in case, he retired what he felt would be a safe distance; outside the churchyard (presumably it had originally been the designated danger zone) and a hundred yards further down the street, for luck. Nothing happened for what seemed like a very long time; and then, quite suddenly, there was a blinding flash of pure white light – He couldn’t help looking away. By the time he turned his head back, the church was already way up in the sky, white fire roaring from all four flying buttresses, the steeple piercing the darkness like – well, like the nose of a skyrocket. Knowing it was a pointless gesture, he waved, until the black dot was folded back into the night, and there was nothing left to see except the faint glow of smouldering grass beyond the churchyard gates.

  Right, he said to himself, turning homewards. Now for the fun part.

  He didn’t run back to his flat, he had enough self-restraint for that. But there was nobody waiting for him, no messages on the answering machine, no notes slipped under the door. He stayed awake as long as he could, but nobody came. He woke up at four a.m. on the sofa, still fully dressed, wondering if it had all been a dream; then he caught sight of the teacup, pushed halfway across the table where the angel—correction, where the travelling salesman had left it.

  Next day there was a bit on the local news about a fine old church having been torched by vandals, but no repentant girlfriends or apologetic employers, and the garage rang to say that the rear shocks were pretty well knackered as well.

  Angels, he thought. Yeah, right.

  Three months later Paul was sitting on his sofa, watching the afternoon soaps, wondering if he could be bothered to shave and nibbling last night’s cold pizza, when something crashed through his window, nearly lacerating him with broken glass. It was a meteorite – a meteorite with a button on the side. He pressed it, and two slips of thin plastic film fell out.

  On one of them was written, “Dear Paul, Got home safe. Sold the cups-with-handles idea to our biggest corporation for an obscenely vast amount of money. Fifty-fifty, do you agree? Regards, 6340097/227/3.”

  The other slip of plastic was a cheque, bilingual in English and bizarre squiggles, for 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 czxyskd, drawn on the Bank of Gamma Orionis Four.

  Eventually, Paul had it framed and hung it on the wall. It cost him twenty quid to get the broken window mended.

  MATH TAKES A HOLIDAY

  Paul Di Filippo

  Paul Di Filippo is one of the best of the modern generation of humorists. Cleverly observed quips and remarks shimmer from his computer like a dog shaking itself after a swim. Although he sold his first story in 1977 he didn’t really hit his stride till the mid-eighties, since when there has been a regular flow of ingenious and unusual stories, observations and commentaries on this weird world and others. My favourite amongst his works so far is The Steampunk Trilogy (1995), a grotesque and fascinating creation of an alternate Victorian world. There are more anarchic stories in Ribofunk (1996), Fractal Paisleys (1997), Lost Pages (1998) plus a new novel, Spondulix (2001). The following story, completed with the approval of Rudy Rucker (in case you wonder!), is pure Di Filippo.

  Lucas Latulippe pitied the religious physicists and mystical biologists, the prayerful chemists and godly geologists of his acquaintance. As a mathematician who chanced also by a fervent and unexpected mid-life conversion to be a practising Catholic, Lucas felt extreme sadness when he contemplated the plight of his fellows in the scientific community who sought to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with the tenets of their secular professions. The Creation versus the Big Bang, the Garden of Eden versus Darwinism, the Flood versus plate tectonics. What a mind-wrenching clash of diametrically opposed values, images, priorities and forces these valiant men and women faced every day! To embrace the rigorous cosmos of Einstein, Hawking and Wilson without letting go of the numinous plenum of Augustine, Mohammed or Krishna – an impossible task on which one could waste much valuable mental energy better spent formulating theorems.

  Lucas owed his unique peace of mind and consequent productivity entirely to his youthful choice of discipline. When his epiphanical conversion had ineluctably struck him – one cool autumn day while daydreamily crossing the campus and witnessing a dove alight on the chapel steeple – Lucas had faced no interior conflicts. His newfound faith offered no impediments to his practice of theoretical mathematics, nor did his academic pursuits interfere with his worship.

  That was the beauty of the kind of rarefied math Lucas practiced. It was completely divorced from practical implications, had no bearing on the workings of the universe, and thus held no potential for conflict with the received wisdom of the Church. Oh, certainly the other, less refined sciences used math to embody and clarify their own findings, contaminating the glorious legacy of Pythagoras and Euclid to a certain degree. Lucas would not deny, for instance, the famous observation that a simple little equation underlay the hard-edged reality of the atomic bomb. But admitting this much was like saying that a few of the same glorious words employed by C. S. Lewis could be utilized in the instruction sheet for assembling a playground swingset.

  Blessed with such an ethereal conception of his discipline, Lucas enjoyed an ease of worship that he was certain scientists of any other ilk could not experience. He attended Mass daily with a clean conscience and an undisturbed soul. In the parish church not far from his office (attended mostly by Hispanic immigrants with whom Lucas exchanged few words), he was able to feel an unconstrained and untainted relationship with God, Whom Lucas actually dared to think of as the Supreme Mathematician.

  Lucas Latulippe pitied his peers. He prayed daily they could all some day experience the raw glory of mathematics.

  “Dear God, please allow my mocking colleagues to witness the transcendental glory of Thy sovereign math
ematical Holy Spirit—”

  But despite his deep faith he never really expected that one day his prayers would be answered.

  For some unfathomable reason of His Own, at this exact non-instant of the eternal, unbegun Now that filled Heaven from one infinite end to the other, God had chosen to manifest Himself as a Sequoia Tree, albeit the largest Sequoia ever to exist. The crown of this enormous redwood standing in for the ineffable Face of the Creator soared into the Heavenly clouds – galaxies? – far out of sight of the two human figures standing at its gnarly base rooted not in soil but in the very stuff of celestial hyperexistence.

  Despite the immeasurable distance separating the two auditors and the invisible foliage of the God Tree – from which Crown as from a Burning Bush one might reasonably assume any Voice ought to issue – the Words of God resounded quite plainly in the ears of the man and woman standing tensely at the Tree’s base.

  “Do I have to send both of you to your Mansions, or will you cease this bickering instantly?”

  The dark-eyed woman continued to glare at the man, who glared just as fixedly back with gaze of piercing blue. Their enmity seemed implacable, until an ominous quaking of the numinous stratum beneath their bare feet conveyed to them the actual measure of God’s rising displeasure. The tension and anger dissolved then from their postures, and they turned partially away from each other, pretending to adjust their identical white robes or study the unvarying quilt of uncreated Ur-stuff on which they stood.

  “That’s much better,” God commended. “Now you’re both acting like real Saints.”

  The young woman shook her black wavy hair and smiled, an expression that lent her rather coarse and Mediterranean features an alarming rather than reassuring cast. Her long flowing samite robe failed to conceal a not unattractive figure. “Some of us never forgot the humility we exhibited in life. But those who lorded it over peasants back on Earth seem to have become even more haughty once beatified.”

  Beneath furry brows, the eyes of the older male Saint threatened to combust. His magnificent, almost Assyrian beard seemed to writhe as if alive. “You wilful daughter of Eve! Disobedient toward your mortal father in life, you continue to disrespect your Eternal Father after death!”

  “Dioscorus, my earthly father – just in case you’ve forgotten, Hubert – was a disreputable pagan who had his pious Christian daughter beheaded. Should I have honoured such a parent?”

  “You are deliberately obscuring my point, Barbara. I am merely arguing for a proper chain of command and obedience—”

  “Because you’re descended from the kings of Toulouse! And because you were once a bishop!”

  “What of it? I’m proud to have been Bishop of Maestricht and Liege!”

  “Certainly, certainly, a wonderful item on your CV. But you were once married as well, don’t forget!”

  Saint Hubert coughed nervously. “The Church had different policies back in my time—”

  Saint Barbara crossed her arms triumphantly across her chest. “On the other hand, I am still a virgin. A virgin and a martyr!”

  Stiffening his pride, Saint Hubert countered, “I was tutored by Saint Lambert himself!”

  Barbara snorted. “I learned my precepts at Origen’s knee!”

  “I was vouchsafed a vision – a cross appeared between the horns of the stag I hunted!”

  “I experienced a miraculous transport from my tower prison to a mountaintop!”

  “As Bishop, I converted almost the whole of Belgium!”

  “I was one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers! You probably prayed to me!”

  “You – you insolent young pup!”

  “Young pup? I was born four centuries before you!”

  “Where’s your historicity, though? Not a single documented proof of your actual existence. Why, you’re positively mythical!”

  “Mythical! You dirty old huntsman, I’ll show you what a sock from a mythical Saint feels like—”

  “ENOUGH!” God’s thundering command froze the Saints just at the point of coming to blows. Chastised, they separated and attended circumspectly to God’s further speech, His Utterances tinged with a rustling of Sequoia foliage.

  “Now, pay attention. I summoned you before Me, Hubert, because I had a new assignment for you. Conversely, Barbara, you intruded yourself. What claim do you make upon My Audience?”

  Barbara sniffed like a frustrated teenager. “It’s not fair. We’re both Patron Saints of Mathematicians, but You’re always giving Hubert the best missions. Pardon me, Lord, but it strikes me that Heaven might have a, shall we say, glass ceiling?”

  The Sequoia shivered nervously. “Please, Saint Barbara, do not raise this touchy issue. I have spent the past mortal century trying to remedy this perceived imbalance between the sexes in My Church, and I don’t need to have My Works undone by hasty accusations. Why, how many appearances of the Virgin have I authorized this year alone—? But why am I humouring you thus? I do not have to justify My Ways. This is one of My favourite Privileges. Now, tell Me what objections you have to your recent assignment.”

  Saint Barbara placed her hands on her hips. “I’ve been watching over the same fellow for several years now, and I’m sick of his face. I need a change.”

  God paused in that endearing fake way He had, as if consulting a file. “Hmmm, one Rudy Rucker. Yes, you’ve done an admirable job of reforming him. He’s truly treading the path of righteousness now. But wouldn’t you like to hang in there until he wins the Nobel Prize in 2012?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. The last time I visited this Rucker character he pinched my arse so hard I was black and blue for days!”

  Saint Hubert muttered, “Virgin – ha!”

  “Well,” God continued, “I suppose I could transfer his care to Saint Francis de Sales, under Francis’s remit for writers, since that’s what Rucker’s Nobel Prize will be awarded for . . . Consider it done! Now, are you arguing that you should take over Hubert’s new task?”

  Saint Barbara seemed a trifle discomposed at her easy victory, and disinclined to ask for too much. “Not take it over, exactly. Perhaps we could share?”

  Saint Hubert nearly shouted. “Share my mission! With this little chit? How she ever got to be patron of mathematics anyway, I’ll never know.”

  “I have as much mathematical ability as you, Hubert.”

  “You commissioned one measly tower window as a mortal patroness of architecture, and that qualifies you? In my day—”

  “QUIET!” God ordered. “My Mind is made up. Both of you will answer the prayers of My faithful servant by name of – ah, I have it right here – Lucas Latulippe. Go now, and manifest My inscrutable Being.”

  The Sequoia popped out of existence without apprehendable transition, leaving the two Saints face to face.

  Hubert sighed wearily. “Thy Will be done. Shall we take a chariot pulled by some cherubim?”

  “If you’re too tired. But on such a beautiful day, I prefer to walk.”

  Saint Barbara set off across the pastures of Heaven, and Hubert gamely followed.

  “Why I didn’t pot that cursed holy stag with an arrow when I had a chance—”

  * * *

  Pisky Wispaway weighed a muffin short of three hundred pounds. Old family photographs (from idyllic days in Piscataway, New Jersey) testified to her early existence as an indubitably trim child of elfin features who must have evoked many a smile from adoring adults when queried as to her name. Unfortunately, the whimsical legal name bestowed on her by her parents sat less endearingly on the fatty shoulders of the dean of the Astronomy Department at Lucas Latulippe’s university. Yet so good-hearted was Pisky – so relatively reconciled to her sad status as campus butt of all sniggering fat jokes was she – that she never winced when called upon to introduce herself, even insisting to just-met acquaintances, “Call me Pisky, please.” With bouncing curly auburn hair of which she was inordinately proud, clad in one of her many billowing, colourful tent dresses and several yards of costume-
jewellery necklaces, Pisky could often be seen sailing across the quad like some massive galleon pregnant with cargo from the Far East.

  Today Pisky sailed into Lucas’s office, catching him behind his desk. A big smile bisected her round face, causing her eyes nearly to disappear within the crinkled flesh surrounding them.

  “You’re coming to our party this afternoon, aren’t you, Lucas? For our new professor, remember? Doctor Garnett.”

  Lucas liked Pisky well enough as a distant colleague. She was an intelligent and affable individual. But he had come to intensely dislike her increasingly frequent visits to his office, often on the slightest of pretexts. He suspected that certain romantic inclinations underlay these pop-ins, feelings he did not now feel capable of reciprocating. Moreover, she so filled Lucas’s small quarters that he invariably felt suffocated, especially when trapped behind his desk, away from the window. Not a sizeable fellow himself, Lucas simply could not compete for spatial domination with the oversized woman.

  Anxious now to empty his office of Pisky’s bulk, Lucas nonetheless felt compelled to prolong the conversation by asking, “Will Hulme be there?”

  “Why, of course Owen will be there. He’s our senior professor.”

  “I don’t know if I will attend then. You realize of course that we don’t get along—”

  Pisky brushed Lucas’s objections aside with a wave of one hammy be-ringed hand. “You just have to ignore Owen when he tries to get a rise out of you. That’s what all the rest of us do. He’s prickly with everyone, you know. ‘Brilliant but prickly,’ that’s just how New Scientist characterized him.”

  Lucas squirmed in his chair, finding it hard to breathe. Was Pisky actually using up all the air in the room? “I comprehend those personality defects, Pisky, and I would be perfectly willing to overlook Hulme’s barbs if they didn’t always concern my faith. That’s one topic where I cannot let his insults slide off me. He’s not just demeaning me, you know, but two millennia of holy men and women.”