Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction

by Claude Lalumiere

  “I cannot wait,” he said, and looked away.

  They were greeted on the deck pad by a couple of raincoated production assistants and a video crew. The PAs were shouting non-sequiturs into headsets hidden under their hoods as they led Max and Mimi through a Stonehenge of crates and equipment across the broad plateau of the tanker’s mid-deck, under a wide, corrugated-steel awning. Max was still wiping the rainwater from his eyes when the studio lights kicked in and the video crew pulled back for a wide shot.

  Mimi elbowed him: “Stand up straight,” she hissed. “You’re live.”

  Max didn’t have to be told twice. He’d spent the better part of three decades in the business, and his instinct in this area was even more deeply ingrained than his survival instinct. Max’s spine straightened like a zipper pulling closed, and he felt his lips slide back like covers off a missile silo, to launch a white-toothed grin he thought he’d shelved for good the day they stopped booking him on The Tonight Show.

  Max bounded across the floor of Jerry Wylde’s soundstage, up the three shallow steps to the set, and landed perfectly on the sofa beside Jerry’s desk, which had been faced with a single word, sea-green lettering on a midnight-black screen: KRAKEN! Nuremberg banners reading the same hung behind the set, illuminated from below with white-hot spots.

  Somewhere deep within himself, Max Fiddler screamed.

  But he was in character now, deep in character, and the scream was a quiet thing. Jim certainly didn’t hear it. He reached across the desk and clasped the thin, hairless hand that belonged to Jerry Wylde. Jerry was wearing a hot-pink double breasted Armani and his pith helmet. Without a thought, Jim told him how sharp he was looking tonight. Outside the still-open hatchway, lightning flashed close. But the lights in here were bright enough that Jim could ignore the flash. The neo-primitive cargo cult tribe who made up Jerry Wylde’s studio audience were loud enough that Jim didn’t have to ignore the thunder that followed. He couldn’t even hear it. They were chanting something he couldn’t quite make out and twirling their arms around their heads in tightly choreographed mayhem, and they looked quite terrifying with their frisbee-stretched lips and sponsor-scarified foreheads. Jim waved.

  “Ahoy there, Jim!” yelled Jerry as the audience began to settle down.

  “Ahoy yourself, Bwana Jerry,” said Jim. He’d started calling Jerry Bwana at the start of the second season but hadn’t used the word since the beginning of the third. The audience let out a nostalgic cheer. Jim crossed one lipo-weakened leg over the other and threw his head back in a near-perfect execution of the talk-show laugh.

  On cue, the audience started to chant again. This time Jim understood what they were saying: “Kra-ken! Kra-ken! Kra-ken!”

  “Right,” said Jim.

  Jerry put his hand over the mike. “Ah, it’s time,” he said into his lapel. “Let’s go to clip, Jeffrey.”

  Jeffrey, whoever he was, didn’t take even a heartbeat to shift gears. The studio went dark for barely a instant, and then the CGI projectors fired up and everything became a mottled green. The studio audience went into a panic with the unscripted change, but the projectors faded them to shadowy ghosts, and the dampers made their shouts into distant gurgles. Shit, thought Jim, his survival instinct grumbling. This was too real: every sense but smell told him they were under water.

  “The deep blue sea,” said Jerry, standing up and beckoning Jim to do the same. “You ain’t seen nothing like this recently, have you, Jim?”

  A heads-up prompter appeared in glowing red letters a few inches from Jim’s eyes. Marks the same colour bled up through the floor. As with the prompter, these glowed like brand tips to Jim but wouldn’t be picked up at all on camera.

  “I haven’t seen anything but this, Jerry,” read Jim, moving to mark 1 and facing the direction of the arrow. “The whole world’s sinking, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Jerry shrugged expansively. “Why Jim,” he said, “I’m not talking about the water. I’m talking about…” and Jim moved to mark 2, just a step away and facing the opposite direction “…this!” finished Jerry, his face obscured behind a silvery tumult of virtual bubbles.

  This time Jim screamed along with Max.

  He was facing a giant, glowing mass of tentacles — some of them must have been a dozen or more feet long — and staring into what seemed to be an immense eyeball, as big as a soccer ball. And then it was gone, jetting past him, and Jim could see the creature’s full cigar-shaped body, the tentacles at one end, a wide fin as big as a ship rudder at the other. The behemoth had snuck up behind him while he was reading his prompter. Jee-sus, thought Max. It must have been sixty feet long, glowing like a motel road sign from end to end; the suckers on its tentacles were each big enough to wrap a baseball.

  “Captain Nemo,” whispered Max, momentarily shocked out of character and into recollection. “A kraken. Twenty Thousand Leagues…” The welds on Max’s vault of suppressed Disney memories slipped open, and Max peeked inside long enough to remember the movie: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea … James Mason and Kirk Douglas and a submarine, and, yes, a great big rubber squid.

  Jerry elbowed him in the ribs. “Line,” he hissed.

  “What the hell was that?” read Jim, a little too quickly. “Some kind of sea monster?”

  Then Mimi stepped out of the murk, eyes focused on her own cue cards. She had changed into a form-fitting yellow wet suit and was carrying a drum-loading spear gun over her shoulder.

  “In a way,” she read, once the audience had applauded her entrance. “That’s a giant squid, Jim.”

  “Aww, Doctor Mimi,” said Jerry, aping disappointment with his usual brazen subtlety, “I wanted to see a kraken.”

  The muted audience went back at the chant with a renewed vigour.

  “Well, Jerry,” read Mimi, “that may be just what you’re looking at — there’s every reason to believe the legendary kraken, which were supposed to have plagued shipping routes for hundreds of years, were actually foraging giant squid, who…”

  Jerry’s eyes shifted their focus to some point beyond the horizon.

  “…mistook early sailing vessels…”

  Jerry wandered after the squid, leaving Jim and Mimi alone on-set.

  Mimi, ever the trouper, finished her line: “…for food.”

  “Boy,” read Jim, “I can’t wait until I take on one of these things for real, in a battle broadcast live around the world—” he swallowed, his throat incongruously dry given the illusion of ocean around them, before he read the next set of words “—just three days from now.”

  “One of them?” Jerry shouted from the murk — probably behind the A camera. “Just one? You know what they say, Jim: you can’t have just one!”

  The air around Jerry was disrupted by a burst of bubbles and motion. Max stumbled and almost fell as the image of the squid came back for a second pass — something he should have anticipated. But it wasn’t the one giant squid that freaked him out — it was the seven others, as big or bigger, that followed in the first one’s wake.

  “Jee-sus!” he yelled. “What the hell’s that?”

  He’d missed his cue again — the prompter flashed angry red and white — so he read: “Are my eyes deceiving me? Or are there eight giant squid down there?”

  “At least,” read Mimi. “What you saw was an image-enhanced holo we took just yesterday afternoon, from a divebot array just eight hundred feet below this ship. There could be more down there. Far more, in my professional opinion.”

  The audience oohed.

  “Far more,” said Jerry, rubbing his hands together with a sandpaper sound that gave the lie to the illusion of water around them. “Like the sound of that, don’t you, Jim?”

  Can’t have just one, thought Max/Jim crazily before the dark, frothing sea went darker behind his eyes, and he fell to the
studio floor in a dead faint.

  Episode 3: The Cabinet of Doctor Jerry

  They gave him a shot of something to wake him up for the welcome-back party, and whatever it was it certainly did the trick — Max was so alert that he felt like he could kill every one of the 37 houseflies crawling in and out of his ears if he wanted to, with nothing more deadly than the rock-hard tip of his newly rigidified tongue. He walked into the retrofitted mess hall unaided and sidled up to the bar.

  Max looked around the room for some conversation, but he was a little dismayed to realize he recognized almost no-one. Max sighed and took careful sips from the drink the barkeep placed in front of him. It could have been anything from mineral water to goat’s urine to his drug-benumbed taste buds.

  It was actually okay not knowing anybody to talk to; Max was in no mood for conversation anyway. All he would get would be some armchair-producer critiques of Jim’s last season on Wylde’s Kingdom; or, worse, some liposucking fanboy gushing over just how dangerous a giant squid really was, reeling off statistics and little-known facts about how big their beaks were and how long their tentacles could reach, and marvelling at how much balls Jim — they would call him Jim, not Max, always Jim, because Max was a nobody and in their formative years Jim had been the next best thing to a positive role model — just exactly how much balls Jim had going up against the kraken, and not just one, but seven … ten … a hundred — Christ, who knew how many? Did he have a plan?, they’d ask. Would this be Jim’s last hurrah?

  “Sure’y no’,” said Max to himself, his tongue about as agile as an ice-splintered tree stump. He must have said it louder than he’d intended; he drew uncomfortable stares from nearby conversations. Max took another sip of his drink.

  He began to wonder what he was doing here in the first place. It was true, there wasn’t really much he could have done to resist the AbSucker attack, and he could be excused for a certain amount of lassitude in its aftermath, as they ferried his sagging skin to the shuttle pad. Once on board the shuttle, it would have been tricky for him to do anything, really, but wait until they landed. And, on board the Minnow, Jerry had tricked him with lights and cameras, so, even had he wanted to, there wasn’t anything to be done then either.

  But now — was he going to wait until Jerry dropped him into a nest of giant squid, or whatever it was he was planning for him, before he took some kind of decisive action?

  Action.

  Max spotted two exits: the one he’d come in from, which led to the dressing rooms and studio after a few turns and ladders; and the washrooms, which Max recalled had a second exit leading through to an old barracks room, which after some doing led to the main deck and the lifeboats.

  Max made up his mind. He swallowed the last of his mysteriously flavoured drink, got up, and headed for the washrooms, trying his best to look nonchalant. It must have worked — not a soul even looked up as he left his party. Once out of the room, Max hurried along the narrow corridor, past the doors with the stick-figure sign and through to the barracks room. It was being used as a storeroom for the bar and was filled with crates of whiskey and beer and Pepsi. Max stepped gingerly around them and hurried down the hall. Max took a deep, optimistic breath. Things were going smoothly — just up a ladder, down this corridor, through a galley — or maybe a studio — and there he was: right next to the exit.

  Once on deck, it would be a simple repetition of his last escape: into a lifeboat, row like the devil’s behind you and, after a couple of hours, make with the flare gun and hope for the best.

  Max’s optimism flagged for an instant at that thought.

  The last time he’d tried this stunt, it hadn’t actually gone that well. A Japanese fishing trawler had picked him up after two days at sea, and the crew had recognized him instantly. Initially, Max had thought that was a good thing — Jerry had always led him to believe that Wylde’s Kingdom was universally revered: the only real critics were the fanatics at GET, said Jerry. But the truth was more complicated. The crew of this trawler were indeed regular viewers of the show, but as it turned out there were sharp divisions of opinion on just what kind of contribution Jerry and Jim were making to the world of televised entertainment and, following from that, the world in general. The long and the short of it saw Max barricaded on the bridge with a half-dozen rabidly loyal fans while the majority of the crew gathered mutinously below decks. The more reasonable of their number merely demanded the captain conduct a trial-at-sea for crimes against the planet. Others were ready to go so far as scuttling the ship, if it meant ridding the world of even a portion of the evil Wylde’s Kingdom franchise.

  Max was better off with the fans, but only marginally. The captain had damn near shattered Max’s elbow in a marathon arm-wrestling match, and the cook had been agitating for a karate tournament — the Wylde’s Kingdom website apparently claimed that yellow-belt Jim was a black-belt world champion, and the triple-black-belt cook wanted to try him out.

  Max had been lucky: the trawler was part of a Sony-owned fleet, and Wylde’s Kingdom still had enough cachet that Max was more valuable to the company’s media division alive than dead. So the Sony security forces squashed the mutiny, rescued Max from his fanboy-allies, and moved him to a Tokyo hotel suite, all within a few hours.

  Max found the ladder that led up to kitchen or studio and paused.

  The ratings of Wylde’s Kingdom being what they were these days, Sony would not be as quick to pull Max’s fat from the fire a second time.

  “Fug i’,” said Max. He scurried up the ladder and came out in one of the galleys. It was busy, all steam and sizzle and shouting, as Jerry’s craft services team prepared tray upon tray of the particularly bland cheese and fish canapés that Jerry favoured. One of the chefs there did notice Max, and for a moment he feared he was discovered. But the woman took Max’s arm, led him to one of the doors, and kindly explained that Jerry had declared craft services off limits to him until after the show.

  “Sorry, Jim,” she said. “I’ll make you up a nice fish broth later if you like.”

  “‘Kay,” said Max, relieved. He stepped out the door, and then opened another door, and then he was on deck. Lightning flashed at him in greeting, and the hard rainwater drenched him immediately. He walked stiffly out into the dark storm.

  There were no lights in which to hide here, no trickery to bring about his transformation into Jim. Max was alone with his thoughts. A bank of lifeboats swung in the wind, and he thought about lowering himself in one of those. He thought about the two days or more he would spend in his stolen lifeboat. He thought about the Grand Banks fishermen who plied these parts, and the 60 Minutes segment he’d seen on them last year. He thought about the prospects of being rescued by one of their boats and just what they’d do to him when they found out who he was. And he thought about giant squids, and what they’d do to him by comparison.

  “Fug i’,” said Max.

  He stepped back through the hatch and shut it behind him.

  Max took a deep breath and headed for the Minnow’s aft decks — where last he remembered they kept the gymnasium, the infirmary, and his old training maze.

  Max had been working out for barely an hour before Jerry showed up with the med team and the video crew. The intrusion pissed him off: three days was a hopelessly short time to train to begin with. He couldn’t afford to be doing live segments with Jerry today if he were supposed to be doing live segments with giant squid in three days. When the unit producer sidled up to the thigh-sculptor machine to tell him he was on in five, that was what he told her.

  “Don’t worry,” said the producer, a woman with a horse-long face and thinning red hair. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You with me, Jim?”

  Max sighed and mentally stepped back.

  “I’m with you,” Jim said.

  Jerry was standing slack-faced in the arch of the entryway sipping fr
om a bottle of vintage spring water. He nodded when the producer signalled him, then came over by Jim’s side. The videographer followed him. Max could tell that they’d started rolling: Jerry’s slack features came alive, with the same demon-jester grin that adorned all his merchandise.

  “Jim,” he said. “Jim Jim Jim Jim Jim.”

  Jim started another set of extensions, wincing at the pain of tearing muscle and stretching ligament as the hydraulics hissed in the bowels of the machine. “Hey, Jerry,” he said.

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” said Jerry, and turned to the camera. “Jim is preparing for the fight of his life. So he doesn’t have time for idle chit-chat — isn’t that right, Jim?”

  “Right,” said Jim.

  “Shh! Every extension, every contraction of those atrophied muscles of yours puts you one tiny step closer to being a match for the kraken, and I don’t want to stand in your way — so shh!” Jerry put his finger to his mouth. “Shh! Remember, Jim, the giant squid is probably the fastest animal on the planet — it’s got nerves as big around as your little finger, and that’s a bandwidth to beat. And its suckers? They have little ridges of chitin around them that work like drill bits on your skin.” Jerry made his hand into a claw and turned it back and forth like he was unscrewing the lid of a jar. “Let one get ahold of you, and it’ll bore a hole into your flesh. So be strong, Jim! Be strong!”

  Jim nodded. “You got it, Jerry.”

  “Okay,” said the producer, “cut it. How was that, Mr. Wylde?”

  Jerry’s face sagged. “Fine,” he muttered. “Send the team over. Time to juice him up.”

  Max barely felt the injection when it pricked his arm. Jerry and the TV crew walked out as the steroidal spasmodics kicked in. The med team stayed behind, putting a roll of padding between Max’s teeth and helping him onto a restraining stretcher so he wouldn’t injure himself in the early stages of the muscle-building phase.