The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  A long silence. Then, “So you’ve figured it out.”

  “You’ve known all along,” I said bitterly. “Ever since I came off of the high-tension lines in Manayunk.”

  She didn’t deny it. “I suppose I should be flattered that when you were in trouble you came to me,” she said in a way that indicated she was not.

  “Why didn’t you tell me then? Why drag it out?”

  “Danny…”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “It’s your name. Daniel. Daniel Cobb.”

  All the emotions I’d been holding back by sheer force of denial closed about me. I flung myself down and clutched the pipe tight, crushing myself against its unforgiving surface. Trapped in the friendless wastes of night, I weighed my fear of letting go against my fear of holding on.

  “Cobb?”

  I said nothing.

  The Widow’s voice took on an edgy quality. “Cobb, we can’t stay here. You’ve got to lead me out. I don’t have the slightest idea which way to go. I’m lost without your help.”

  I still could not speak.

  “Cobb!’ She was close to panic. “I put my own feelings aside. Back in Manayunk. You needed help and I did what I could. Now it’s your turn.”

  Silently, invisibly, I shook my head.

  “God damn you, Danny,” she said furiously. “I won’t let you do this to me again! So you’re unhappy with what a jerk you were – that’s not my problem. You can’t redeem your manliness on me any more. I am not your fucking salvation. I am not some kind of cosmic last chance and it’s not my job to talk you down from the ledge.”

  That stung. “I wasn’t asking you to,” I mumbled.

  “So you’re still there! Take my hand and lead us out.”

  I pulled myself together. “You’ll have to follow my voice, babe. Your memories are too intense for me.”

  We resumed our slow progress. I was sick of crawling, sick of the dark, sick of this lightless horrid existence, disgusted to the pit of my soul with who and what I was. Was there no end to this labyrinth of pipes?

  “Wait.” I’d brushed by something. Something metal buried in the earth.

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s…” I groped about, trying to get a sense of the thing’s shape. “I think it’s a cast-iron gatepost. Here. Wait. Let me climb up and take a look.”

  Relinquishing my grip on the pipe, I seized hold of the object and stuck my head out of the ground. I emerged at the gate of an iron fence framing the minuscule front yard of a house on Ripka Street. I could see again! It was so good to feel the clear breath of the world once more that I closed my eyes briefly to savor the sensation.

  “How ironic,” Euphrosyne said.

  “After being so heroic,” Thalia said.

  “Overcoming his fears,” Aglaia said.

  “Rescuing the fair maid from terror and durance vile,” Cleta said.

  “Realizing at last who he is,” Phaenna said.

  “Beginning that long and difficult road to recovery by finally getting in touch with his innermost feelings,” Auxo said.

  Hegemone giggled.

  “What?” I opened my eyes.

  That was when the Corpsegrinder struck. It leapt upon me with stunning force, driving spear-long talons through my head and body. The talons were barbed so that they couldn’t be pulled free and they burned like molten metal. “Ahhhh, Cobb,” the Corpsegrinder crooned. “Now this is sweet.”

  I screamed and it drank in those screams, so that only silence escaped into the outside world. I struggled and it made those struggles its own, leaving me to kick myself deeper and deeper into the drowning pools of its identity. With all my will I resisted. It was not enough. I experienced the languorous pleasure of surrender as that very will and resistance were sucked down into my attacker’s substance. The distinction between me and it weakened, strained, dissolved. I was transformed.

  I was the Corpsegrinder now.

  Manhattan is a virtual school for the dead. Enough people die there every day to keep any number of monsters fed. From the store of memories the Corpsegrinder had stolen from me, I recalled a quiet moment sitting cross-legged on the tin ceiling of a sleaze joint while table dancers entertained Japanese tourists on the floor above and a kobold instructed me on some of the finer points of survival. “The worst thing you can be hunted by,” he said, “is yourself.”

  “Very aphoristic.”

  “Fuck you. I used to be human too.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted. Look, I told you about Salamanders. That’s a shitty way to go, but at least it’s final. When they’re done with you, nothing remains. But a Corpsegrinder is a parasite. It has no true identity of its own, so it constructs one from bits and pieces of everything that’s unpleasant within you. Your basic greeds and lusts. It gives you a particularly nasty sort of immortality. Remember that old cartoon? This hideous toad saying ‘Kiss me and live forever – you’ll be a toad, but you’ll live forever.’” He grimaced. “If you get the choice, go with the Salamander.”

  “So what’s this business about hunting myself?”

  “Sometimes a Corpsegrinder will rip you in two and let half escape. For a while.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. Maybe it likes to play with its food. Ever watch a cat torture a mouse? Maybe it thinks it’s fun.”

  From a million miles away, I thought: So now I know what’s happened to me. I’d made quite a run of it, but now it was over. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hoard of memories, glorious memories, into which I’d been dumped. I wallowed in them, picking out here a winter sunset and there the pain of a jellyfish sting when I was nine. So what if I was already beginning to dissolve? I was intoxicated, drunk, stoned with the raw stuff of experience. I was high on life.

  Then the Widow climbed up the gatepost looking for me.

  “Cobb?”

  The Corpsegrinder had moved up the fence to a more comfortable spot in which to digest me. When it saw the Widow, it reflexively parked me in a memory of a grey drizzly day in a Ford Fiesta outside of 30th Street Station. The engine was going and the heater and the windshield wiper too, so I snapped on the radio to mask their noise. Beethoven filled the car, the Moonlight Sonata.

  “That’s bullshit, babe,” I said. “You know how much I have invested in you? I could buy two good whores for what that dress cost.”

  She refused to meet my eyes. In a whine that set my teeth on edge, she said, “Danny, can’t you see that it’s over between us?”

  “Look, babe, let’s not argue in the parking lot, okay?” I was trying hard to be reasonable. “Not with people walking by and listening. We’ll go someplace private where we can talk this over calmly, like two civilized human beings.”

  She shifted slightly in the seat and adjusted her skirt with a little tug. Drawing attention to her long legs and fine ass. Making it hard for me to think straight. The bitch really knew how to twist the knife. Even now, crying and begging, she was aware of how it turned me on. And even though I hated being aroused by her little act, I was. The sex was always best after an argument; it made her sluttish.

  I clenched my anger in one hand and fisted my pocket with it. Thinking how much I’d like to up and give her a shot. She was begging for it. Secretly, maybe, it was what she wanted; I’d often suspected she’d enjoy being hit. It was too late to act on the impulse, though. The memory was playing out like a tape, immutable, unstoppable.

  All the while, like a hallucination or the screen of a television set receiving conflicting signals, I could see the Widow, frozen with fear half in and half out of the ground. She quivered like an acetylene flame. In the memory she was saying something, but with the shift in my emotions came a corresponding warping-away of perception. The train station, car, the windshield wipers and music, all faded to a murmur in my consciousness.

  Tentacles whipped around the Widow. She was caught. She struggled helplessly, deliciously. The Corpse
grinder’s emotions pulsed through me and to my remote horror I found that they were identical to my own. I wanted the Widow, wanted her so bad there were no words for it. I wanted to clutch her to me so tightly her ribs would splinter and for just this once she’d know it was real. I wanted to own her. To possess her. To put an end to all her little games. To know her every thought and secret, down to the very bottom of her being.

  No more lies, babe, I thought, no more evasions. You’re mine now.

  So perfectly in synch was I with the Corpsegrinder’s desires that it shifted its primary consciousness back into the liquid sphere of memory, where it hung smug and lazy, watching, a voyeur with a willing agent. I was in control of the autonomous functions now. I reshaped the tentacles, merging and recombining them into two strong arms. The claws and talons that clutched the fence I made legs again. The exterior of the Corpsegrinder I morphed into human semblance, save for that great mass of memories sprouting from our back like a bloated spider-sack. Last of all I made the head.

  I gave it my own face.

  “Surprised to see me again, babe?” I leered.

  Her expression was not so much fearful as disappointed. “No,” she said wearily. “Deep down, I guess I always knew you’d be back.”

  As I drew the Widow closer, I distantly knew that all that held me to the Corpsegrinder in that instant was our common store of memories and my determination not to lose them again. That was enough, though. I pushed my face into hers, forcing open her mouth. Energies flowed between us like a feast of tongues.

  I prepared to drink her in.

  There were no barriers between us. This was an experience as intense as when, making love, you lose all track of which body is your own and thought dissolves into the animal moment. For a giddy instant I was no less her than I was myself. I was the Widow staring fascinated into the filthy depths of my psyche. She was myself witnessing her astonishment as she realized exactly how little I had ever known her. We both saw her freeze still to the core with horror. Horror not of what I was doing.

  But of what I was.

  I can’t take any credit for what happened then. It was only an impulse, a spasm of the emotions, a sudden and unexpected clarity of vision. Can a single flash of decency redeem a life like mine? I don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it.

  Had there been time for second thoughts, things might well have gone differently. But there was no time to think. There was only time enough to feel an upwelling of revulsion, a visceral desire to be anybody or anything but my own loathsome self, a profound and total yearning to be quit of the burden of such memories as were mine. An aching need to just once do the moral thing.

  I let go.

  Bobbing gently, the swollen corpus of my past floated up and away, carrying with it the parasitic Corpsegrinder. Everything I had spent all my life accumulating fled from me. It went up like a balloon, spinning, dwindling…gone. Leaving me only what few flat memories I have narrated here.

  I screamed.

  And then I cried.

  I don’t know how long I clung to the fence, mourning my loss. But when I gathered myself together, the Widow was still there.

  “Danny,” the Widow said. She didn’t touch me. “Danny, I’m sorry.”

  I’d almost rather that she had abandoned me. How do you apologize for sins you can no longer remember? For having been someone who, however reprehensible, is gone forever? How can you expect forgiveness from somebody you have forgotten so completely you don’t even know her name? I felt twisted with shame and misery. “Look,” I said. “I know I’ve behaved badly. More than badly. But there ought to be some way to make it up to you. For, you know, everything. Somehow. I mean…”

  What do you say to somebody who’s seen to the bottom of your wretched and inadequate soul?

  “I want to apologize,” I said.

  With something very close to compassion, the Widow said, “It’s too late for that, Danny. It’s over. Everything’s over. You and I only ever had the one trait in common. We neither of us could ever let go of anything. Small wonder we’re back together again. But don’t you see, it doesn’t matter what you want or don’t want – you’re not going to get it. Not now. You had your chance. It’s too late to make things right.” Then she stopped, aghast at what she had just said.

  But we both knew she had spoken the truth.

  “Widow,” I said as gently as I could, “I’m sure Charlie…”

  “Shut up.”

  I shut up.

  The Widow closed her eyes and swayed, as if in a wind. A ripple ran through her and when it was gone her features were simpler, more schematic, less recognizably human. She was already beginning to surrender the anthropomorphic.

  I tried again. “Widow…” Reaching out my guilty hand to her.

  She stiffened but did not draw away. Our fingers touched, twined, mated. “Elizabeth,” she said at last. “My name is Elizabeth Connelly.”

  We huddled together on the ceiling of the Roxy through the dawn and the blank horror that is day. When sunset brought us conscious again, we talked through half the night before making the one decision we knew all along that we’d have to make.

  It took us almost an hour to reach the Seven Sisters and climb down to the highest point of Thalia.

  We stood holding hands at the top of the mast. Radio waves were gushing out from under us like a great wind. It was all we could do to keep from being blown away.

  Underfoot, Thalia was happily chatting with her sisters. Typically, at our moment of greatest resolve, they gave us not the slightest indication of interest. But they were all listening to us. Don’t ask me how I knew.

  “Cobb?” Elizabeth said. “I’m afraid.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  A long silence, and then she said, “Let me go first. If you go first, I won’t have the nerve.”

  “Okay.”

  She took a deep breath – funny, if you think about it – and then she let go, and fell into the sky.

  First she was like a kite, and then a scrap of paper, and finally she was a rapidly tumbling speck. I stood for a long time watching her falling, dwindling, until she was lost in the background flicker of the universe, just one more spark in infinity.

  She was gone and I couldn’t help wondering if she had ever really been there at all. Had the Widow truly been Elizabeth Connelly? Or was she just another fragment of my shattered self, a bundle of related memories that I had to come to terms with before I could bring myself to finally let go?

  A vast emptiness seemed to spread itself through all of existence. I clutched the mast spasmodically then, and thought: I can’t!

  But the moment passed. I’ve got a lot of questions, and there aren’t any answers here. In just another instant, I’ll let go and follow Elizabeth (if Elizabeth she was) into the night. I will fall forever and I will be converted to background radiation, smeared ever thinner and cooler across the universe, a smooth, uniform, and universal message that has only one decode. Let Thalia carry my story to whoever cares to listen. I won’t be here for it.

  It’s time to go now. Time and then some to leave. I’m frightened, and I’m going.

  Now.

  TOWER OF BABYLON

  Ted Chiang

  Ted Chiang (b. 1967) is a technical writer, producing documentation for programmers, and only occasionally turns his hand to fiction, but when he does it always results in something special. The following story was Chiangs first appearance in print, after several unsuccessful attempts. It was bought by Ellen Datlowfor Omni and promptly went on to win the Nebula Award presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

  The next year Chiang won the Campbell Award as Best New Writer. Since then it became almost an annual event that each new story would win one or other award, most recently the Locus Award for his collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002). The following story, at its simplest level, is about faith but, of course, it isn’t that simple.

  Were the tower to be laid down
across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days’ journey to walk from one end to the other. While the tower stands, it takes a full month and a half to climb from its base to its summit, if a man walks unburdened. But few men climb the tower with empty hands; the pace of most men is slowed by the cart of bricks that they pull behind them. Four months pass between the day a brick is loaded onto a cart, and the day it is taken off to form a part of the tower.

  Hillalum had spent all his life in Elam, and knew Babylon only as a buyer of Elam’s copper. The copper ingots were carried on boats that travelled down the Karun to the Lower Sea, headed for the Euphrates. Hillalum and the other miners travelled overland, alongside a merchant’s caravan of loaded onagers. They walked along a dusty path leading down from the plateau, across the plains, to the green fields sectioned by canals and dikes.

  None of them had seen the tower before. It became visible when they were still leagues away: a line as thin as a strand of flax, wavering in the shimmering air, rising up from the crust of mud that was Babylon itself. As they drew closer, the crust grew into the mighty city walls, but all they saw was the tower.

  When they did lower their gazes to the level of the river-plain, they saw the marks the tower had made outside the city: the Euphrates itself now flowed at the bottom of a wide, sunken bed, dug to provide clay for bricks. To the south of the city could be seen rows upon rows of kilns, no longer burning.

  As they approached the city gates, the tower appeared more massive than anything Hillalum had ever imagined: a single column that must have been as large around as an entire temple, yet rising so high that it shrank into invisibility. All of them walked with their heads tilted back, squinting in the sun.

  Hillalum’s friend Nanni prodded him with an elbow, awestruck. “We’re to climb that? To the top?”

  “Going up to dig. It seems…unnatural.”

  The miners reached the central gate in the western wall, where another caravan was leaving. While they crowded forward into the narrow strip of shade provided by the wall, their foreman Beli shouted to the gatekeepers who stood atop the gate towers. “We are the miners summoned from the land of Elam.”