by Kage Baker
“Hey, look, Louis, don’t get sore. I don’t dictate public taste, I just try to accommodate it. People live such sad lives. Why not take their minds off the fact by entertaining them?”
“And this is to be my choice, isn’t it? I can die an unknown scribbler of essays or I can write the kind of thing you want for your photo-plays and live a successful and famous man.” Stevenson shut his eyes tightly. “Well, you can get straight back to Hell with your infernal trunk. I won’tsell my soul for eternal fame and you can tell your master so from me. Thee and all thy works I utterly reject.”
“Believe me, Louis, you’re taking this all the wrong way,” the other said soothingly, getting down on his knees beside him. “Isn’t it possible to use people’s appetites to instruct them in a, uh, positive moral way?
Sell ‘em tickets to the Palace of Excess and then slip ‘em out the back to Wisdom by putting up a sign that says This Way to the Egress? Sure it is. Sure you can. You will. Dickens did it all the time. And even if there is something wrong with the entertainment business, can’t you atone for what you do? You can use your loot to do something good. Fight injustice. Defend the brown guys oppressed by white guys, maybe. Louis, you can use this talent of yours to do such good.”
“This is just the way you’d have to talk to convince me.” Stevenson was trembling, clenching his poor scabbed hands. “Fiendish. Fiendish. Can’t you let me die in peace?” The other looked at him with something like compassion. He leaned forward and said:
“Has it occurred to you that you might be wrestling with an angel, Louis?” Stevenson opened his eyes again and stared at him, sweat beading on his high brow. “Come on now. We’ve almost got it right. Tell me why the pirate is chasing after our hero. Is he after a treasure map? Is he in love with one of the girls? Are they rivals from childhood? Tell me the story, Louis.”
Stevenson’s breathing had grown steadily harsher. “Very well,” he began, covering his face with his long hands and staring up through his fingers at the stars, “your damned pirate’s the man for me. Perhaps he’s got a cloak that blows about him as he makes his entrance in a storm, black as shadows dancing on the wall of the night nursery, black as devil’s wings. And if you’re good, and lie very still, he can’t see you… why can’t he see you? Evil’s not blind, no, Evil walks in the sun with a bland and reasonable face.” He lowered his hands and glared at Joseph. “But there’s some horror to him as he searches for you there in the dark. You can hear him coming. He’s a limping devil, you can hear his halting step—or his wooden leg! The man is maimed, that’s it, he’s had a leg clean gone by a round broadside of twenty-pound shot!” He sat up in excitement, taken with his creation.
“And that’s the mark by which you may know him, for you couldn’t tell, else, he looks so big and bluff and brave, like somebody’s father come to chase the night horrors away. There’s your subtle evil, man, there’s the pirate as honest seaman in plain broadcloth, a man full of virtues to win your trust—until he finds it convenient to kill you. Yes! And the damnable thing is, he’ll have those virtues! Not a mask, d’you see? He’ll be brave, and clever, and decent enough in his way—for all his murderous resolution—oh, this is the man, ecce homo, look at him there large as life! Dear God, he’s standing there beside you even now, leaning on his crutch, and there’s the parrot on his shoulder—” He threw out his frail arm, pointing with such feverish conviction that Joseph, who had been sitting spellbound in spite of himself, turned involuntarily to look. Louis’s voice rose to a hoarse scream:
“Oh, give me paper! Give me even a scrap of that yellow paper, please, you can have the bloody soul, only let me get this down before he slips away from me—” and he groped at his pockets, searching for a pencil; but then he went into a coughing fit that sprayed blood across the other man’s trousers. Aghast, Joseph pulled out a tiny device and forced it between Stevenson’s teeth.
“Bite! Bite on this and inhale!” Stevenson obeyed and clung to him, nearly strangling, as the other fumbled out another needle and managed to inject another drug.
“Jeez, this wasn’t due to happen yet! I’m really sorry, Mr. Stevenson, really, just keep breathing, keep breathing. Okay? You’ll be okay now. I promise. This’ll fix you up just fine.” After a moment Stevenson fell back, limp. His coughing had stopped. His breathing slowed. Joseph had produced a sponge and a bottle of some kind of cleaner from the trunk and was hastily dabbing blood from his trousers.
“See what you made me do?” Stevenson smiled feebly. “Blood-red ensign’s hoisted at last. Disgusting, isn’t it?”
“Hey, you’ll be okay. What I gave you ought to keep it off for months. You won’t even remember this.” He finished with his clothes and went to work on Stevenson’s. “Besides, I’ve seen worse.”
“I dare say you have.” Stevenson giggled again. “My apologies for the blood. But it’s a sort of a metaphor, isn’t it? And now you’ve foxed your own design, for I’ll die and he’ll never live, my limping devil… though he’d have been a grand piece of work… “
“Oh, you’ll live long enough to write about him.” Joseph peered critically at his cleaning job and decided he’d gotten everything out. “Not that it’ll do my masters any damn good.” Stevenson closed his eyes. Joseph gave a final swab at his shirtfront. As he was doing so the trunk made a chattering noise and spewed out another sheet of paper. Almost absently he reached out to tear it loose, and glanced at the reply:
CLIENT SAW “NOTES” ON KNIGHTS IN ARMOR STORY,LOVES IT. DE GUSTIBUS NON
EST DISPUTANDEM. SOME ADAPTATION POSSIBLE. SECURE RIGHTS ON FORGERY
BELOW AND PROCEED TO NEXT ARTIST.
Stevenson had opened his eyes again at the sound the trunk made. Joseph looked up from his communication and met his gaze with a frank smile.
“Well, Louis, you’ve won. Your soul has been tested and found pure. You’re one of the elect, okay?
Congratulations and let me just ask you one last favor.”
“What’s that?” Stevenson was groggy now.
“Can I have your autograph? Just sign here.” He put the pen in Stevenson’s hand and watched as Stevenson scrawled his name on the paper, just below the cleverly faked holograph of plot outline and character notes.
“Thanks, pal. I mean that. Sincerely.” The other fed the paper into the trunk and this time it did not return. He stood and hoisted the trunk up to his shoulder.
“I’ll be running along now, Louis, but before I do I’d like to give you a piece of advice. You won’t take it, but I feel compelled. That’s just the kind of guy I am.”
Stevenson peered at him. Joseph leaned down.
“You really would live longer if you’d give up the cigarettes.”
“Tempter, get thee below,” Stevenson croaked.
“Funny you should say that, you know, because that is where I’m based. In a geographical sense only, of course, ‘down’ and ‘south’ being sort of the same. Little suburb just outside of Los Angeles. We produce our photo-plays down there. It’s not a great town for writers, Louis. I know you like to travel and everything, but you’d want to leave this one off your world itinerary. Believe me, it’s not a place for a man with your scruples to work. The climate’s good, though, and they really like your stuff, so it might have suited you. Who knows?”
“I’ll die first.” Stevenson closed his eyes. The other man nodded somberly and walked away into the night.
In entirely another time and place, there was a whirl and scatter of brown beech leaves and the trunk was there, spinning unsteadily to a halt; and as there had been no witness to observe its previous arrival, there was no witness now to notice that it was spinning in the opposite direction. It slowed and stopped, and the winter silence of an English forest settled over it. When the lid popped, the trunk fell over, and the man in the brown suit had to push the lid aside as he crawled out on hands and knees through a small cloud of yellow smoke.
He crouched on the forest floor a moment or two,
panting out stasis gas. As he got to his feet and brushed off his clothes he heard the approaching rattle of an automobile. He looked at his (for lack of a better word) watch.
It was December 3, 1926.
At that precise moment there was a mechanical squeal followed by crashing sounds and a thud, coming from beyond a nearby grove of trees.
He grinned and gave a little stamp of his foot, in appreciation of perfect timing. Then he turned and ran in the direction of the accident.
The automobile was not seriously damaged, although steam was hissing from the radiator cap under the hood ornament. The bug-eyed headlights stared as if in shock. So did the woman seated behind the wheel. Her cloche hat had flown off her head and lay outside the car. He picked it up and presented it to her with a bow. She turned her pale unhappy face to look at him, but said nothing.
“Here’s your hat, Mrs. Christie. Say, you’re lucky I came along when I did. I think you’ve had a bump on the head. That sort of injury can cause amnesia, you know.”
She did not respond.
“Don’t worry, though. Everything’s going to turn out all right. Allow me to introduce myself, Ma’am. I represent the Chronos Photo-Play Company. You know, I’m quite a fan of your mystery novels. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that was a real peach. You ought to do more with that Hercule Poirot guy.” She just looked at him sadly.
“Tell you what.” He leaned his elbow on the door and looked deep into her eyes. “You look like a lady who could use a vacation. Maybe at a nice anonymous seaside resort. What do you say we go off and have a nice private talk together over a couple of cocktails, huh?” After a long moment of consideration she smiled.
“I don’t believe I caught your name,” she said.
This story is a tribute to the Dunites qf Moy Mell, a community of poets, scholars, artists, Utopians and visionaries. They used to reside in the high dunes behind the ruins of La Grande, in shacks made of driftwood and wreck salvage. They lived by poaching clams and stealing vegetables from the local farms; they brewed mead from stolen honey. At night, around driftwood fires, they argued the nature of Hindu goddesses or told stories of Finn MacCool, or charted their fortunes in the stars.
Every so often winter gales will move a dune and some trace of them will surface for an hour: the rusted-out skeleton of a Model T, a mound of sand-scoured bottles lavender and green, an old boot, a midden of white shells and rusted tin cans.
Lemuria Will Rise!
* * *
Somewhere god has a celestial polaroid of me, standing in the Dunes with a painted clamshell in one hand and a sprig of Oenothera hookeri ssp. sclatera in the other, staring heavenward with a look of stupefied amazement. When He needs a mood lightener, He takes a look at that picture and laughs like hell. It was 1860 and the Company had sent me to Pismo Beach. The place was not yet the vacation destination of Warner Brothers toons; the little town of cottages and motels wouldn’t exist for another generation or two; but it did feature all the clams one could eat, and all the sand too. I wasn’t there for the clams, though.
If you stand on the beach at Pismo and look south, you can see twenty-odd miles of shore stretching away to Point Sal, endless lines of breakers foreshortened into little white scallops on blue water. The waves roll in on a wide pale beach toward a green line of cypress forest, rising on low sandhills to your left. Beyond them, and further south, rise the Dunes.
You never saw anything so pure of line and color in your life, though the lines shift constantly and the color is an indefinable shade between ivory and pink, or possibly gold. Even on a gray day they glow with their own light, pulsing as cloud shadows flow across them.
Beautiful, though I couldn’t see how anything could be growing out there; and yet this was where I was supposed to find a rare variant of evening primrose.
Everywhere else in California, Oenothera hookeri is a lemon-yellow flower. In 1859, however, a salmon-pink subspecies was reported,growing only in a certain place in these very Dunes, and a single sample collected and preserved. Now, Evening Primrose Oil from the yellow flower has a number of recognized medical uses, such as being the only substance known to help sufferers of Laurent’s Syndrome, that terrible crippler of the twenty-first century. Thanks to a unique and.complex protein, it helps retard the decay of those oh-so-important genitourinary nerve sheaths afflicted by Laurent’s. Analysis of the only surviving sample of the pink variety showed it to have had an even more unique and complex protein, which would probably stop the decay of the nerve sheaths entirely, bringing bliss and continence to those suffering from the Syndrome.
Unfortunately for them, it will be extinct by their time, long since destroyed by the ravages of the off-road vehicles of the twentieth century. Interestingly enough, Laurent’s Syndrome and its attendant neuro-vascular damage occurs most frequently in people who spend a lot of time with their reproductive organs suspended over internal combustion engines—such as the ones that power dune bikes. Mother Nature giving a rousing one-fingered salute to off-road enthusiasts, I suppose. Not my job to judge—I was only there to gather samples, test them for the suspected properties, and (if they tested positive) secure live plants for the greenhouses of my Company, Dr. Zeus Inc. Dr. Zeus operates out of the twenty-fourth century and makes a pretty penny, let me tell you, out of miracle medical cures obtained by time travel.
So I shouldered my pack, settled my hat more firmly on my head and set off down the beach, keeping to the hard-packed sand and splashing through the surf occasionally. There were clams just below the surface of the sand, massed thick as cobblestones. They were big, too, and beautifully danger-free: no sewers yet dumping E. coli, no cracked pipes leaking petroleum surfactant, no nuclear power plants cooking the seawater. In fact there weren’t even any railroads through here, this early, and precious few people.
My spirits rose as I strode on, past future real estate fantasies with quaint Yankee names like Grover City, Oceano, La Grande: mile after mile of perfect beach and not a mortal soul in sight. I’d build a driftwood fire, that was what I’d do, and have a private clambake. I had a flask of tequila in my pack, too. Why couldn’t all my jobs be like this? No tiresome mortals to negotiate with, no dismal muddy cities, no noise, no trouble.
I turned inland at the designated coordinates and walked back into the Dunes. Squinting against the golden glow, I almost reached for my green spectacles; then paused, grinning to myself. Nobody here to see, was there? No mortals to be terrified by my appearance if I simply let thepolarized lenses on my eyes darken. Whistling, I trudged onward, a cyborg with a sun hat and camping gear. I found, as I moved farther in, that this was no desert at all. There were islands in this maze of glowing sand, cool green coves of willow and beach myrtle and wild blackberry. There were a few little freshwater lakes sparkling, green reeds waving, ducks paddling around; there were abundant wildflowers too, especially rangy stands of yellow evening primrose. Somewhere hereabouts must be my quarry. Climbing to the top of a dune I spotted it, on visual alone, a mere thirty meters south-southwest: a thicket of willow on three sides around a lawn of coarse dune grass, and all along the edge the tall woody stems bearing trumpet flowers of flaming pink! Could my work get any easier? I was actually singing as I plowed on down the side of the dune, an old, old song from a long way away. So I made a little paradise of a base camp on the lawn, with a tent for my field lab and a sleeping bivvy, and set a specimen straight into solution for analysis. But even as I bustled happily about, I was becoming aware of Something that pulled at one of my lower levels of perception. You wouldn’t have heard the subsonic tone, or noticed the faint flash of a color best described as blue; you might just possibly have felt the faint tingling sensation, but only if you were a very unusual mortal indeed. Reluctantly I crawled out of the lab and stood, turning my head from side to side, scanning. Anomaly, five kilometers due north, electromagnetic. And… Crome’s Radiation. And… a mortal human being. So much for my splendid isolation. How very tedious; now I’d have to
investigate the damned thing. Sighing, I pulled out my green glasses and put them on. I slogged up one dune and down another, following the signals through a landscape where one expected Rudolph Valentino to ride into view at any moment, burnoose flapping. God knows he would have looked commonplace enough, compared with what met my eyes when I got to the top of the last high dune, staggering slightly. In the valley below me was another green cove, with its own dense willow thicket and its own green lawn. But rising from the thicket on four cottonwood poles was a thing like a big beehive or an Irish monk’s cell, woven of peeled willow wands. On its domed top it wore a sort of cap of tight-braided eelgrass; a mat of the same flapped before a hole near its base. A path had been worn across the lawn, neatly outlined with clam shells arranged in a pattern. Real beehives were ranged in a tidy row there, woven skeps like miniatures of the house. All along the perimeter of the lawn, and poking up here and there out of the willows, were fantastical figures carved of driftwood, elaborately decorated withmussel shells and feathers. I saw Celtic crosses and sun wheels, I saw leaping horses, 1 saw stiff and stylized warriors with shields, I saw grass-skirted women of remarkable attributes. Strange, but not so strange as the mottoes and exhortations spelled out in clam shells on the face of every surrounding dune. The nearest one said GOD IS LOVE. DO NO HARM, REMEMBER, NOT ALONE, COME TOGETHER, and LEMURIA HERE shouted from dunes in the nearer distance. Farther off still rose the white-shell domes of prehistoricmiddens.
Staring down, I collapsed into a sitting position on the sand. Borne faintly up on the wind and the blue streaming spirals of Crome’s Radiation were the plaintive scrapings of a fiddle. Well, what do you know? A holy hermit, apparently; judging from the Crome Effect, one of those poor mortals who would one day be classed as “psychic.” The radiation from this one was so intense his abilities had probably driven him crazy, so he must have fled human society and somehow wound up here in the Dunes. Mystery explained. I allowed myself a smile.