by Rena Rossner
He hadn’t been surprised that the stone women on the temples had matzo-ball breasts. After all, they were ancient, weren’t they? But this woman in the flesh – hers were something he had only imagined. She was soft and warm, but they could have been made of tin, they were so conical. They only confirmed, however, his thoughts that the woman of today would love to look like that if she could. Of course, she must have been a freak, a beautiful one but nevertheless a fantasy come to life in flesh. Breasts like these didn’t grow on women, or he would have seen them on statues. They needed guidance.
Not that he planned to give it to them. No siree. Now that he’d escaped, he saw – through the squalor of death and fear, the confusion of cruelties intended and unthinkingly dealt out, this war that he helped to serve – not only the opportunity but the responsibility to engineer a shining, uplifting future.
He was just having what isn’t supposed to be but what many have experienced: a great war – when in a nightmare, a blonde turned up, ‘Dead Man’s Bride’ from Terror Tales.
One pitiless noon he was sitting outside his tent, a wet kerchief over his head. He had been dreaming – but only daydreaming, and sketching rockets.
‘Wise guy,’ she cracked, as if that nut were fresh. She had a hand on her hip and one of those so-sure-of-herself voices that fit her cover-girl looks, on that cover. But she mustn’t have travelled with a compact. Her peach-gold skin was pitted with oozing sores, one eye filled with dirt, and her skull poked out like the Andaman Islands, from a blue-tinged scalp.
Yes, Irv had been around. He noticed not only that, but that her breasts were like two flops of camp stew. Man, did she need engineering, and uplift.
She sidled around behind him and hung her head over his shoulder. ‘That’s what I want,’ she said. ‘We all want it.’
‘This?’ He drew the nose cone, then another one beside it, and drew straps.
‘Exactly.’ She snatched up the paper as something precious, and held it to her ravaged chest. He was almost charmed. And she didn’t smell half as bad as other unexpecteds he’d come across, unreported ‘casualties’, the still oozing dead.
He wondered if someone had put her up to this. ‘Do you know the woman in that black lace number in Eerie – ’
‘Corinne? She prayed for you! Thank her for your luck changing.’
He repressed a smile. He’d always reckoned this blonde for a tale-spinner, but it was flattering nonetheless.
‘Can she come here?’
The earth moved, and up from it crawled Corinne. That bra had not lasted half as well as it should have. It was even less recognizable than Corinne.
But she retained some of her strawberry-blonde set hair. It had looked to be so shellacked that its preserved curves looked set for her to be displayed in a museum.
‘Dis war will end,’ she said through her lipless mouth. ‘And you will become the greatest brassiere designer there ever was.’
He jumped up. They could have tossed a grenade in his lap, his heart pounded that bad. He wanted to flee into the jungle, but knew they’d follow. What did they have to lose? He couldn’t lose them, so he said simply, like some dumb grunt, ‘I’m sorry but I’m a rocket man.’
‘Not on your life, you’re not,’ said the Dime Mystery Maid, now to his left. He looked her over, and was unsurprised to note that her flimsy slip of a bra, which couldn’t hold two flies, had slipped to her waist. What with her ribs sticking out, and her breastbone and all, he had to remember what her problem was. Ah yes, no breasts to speak of.
Before the rest of his troop came back from manoeuvres, he was surrounded by a bevy of former cover girls, all insisting that he heed their call. Their story was that it was too late for them, but they still had their duty, which they would carry out no matter what.
‘Not,’ chuckled the siren named Mitzi (‘of “Crisis in Utopia” ’, she reminded him) ‘that “no matter what” means anything to us. We have forever. And a purpose in death.’
‘But why should you care?’
‘Haven’t you noticed that we’re all young dead?’ said Mitzi. ‘Models don’t last long. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel solidarity with the girls still walking the streets in flesh and bras. They don’t want old-fashioned bodies. They don’t want straps that fall down. They need up and outlift! And you’re gonna give it to ’em, Captain.’
The girls, as they called themselves, gave her the best they could with a Bronx cheer.
They were more persistent than gunfire in an assault. And they didn’t let up for sleep or regrouping. He’d seen so much already in this war that he didn’t think them any more strange than some of the orders he’d been given by Command. Nor the sights that he came upon and helped to make, because of the orders from people whose war experience was intensely spent on maps only pocked by pins.
He argued with the girls. Then he tried to reason, telling them what a waste a creative brain like his would be – to engineer brassieres – when space (and the needs of war of the future) cried out for a genius with solutions.
‘But you’re such a genius in this,’ said Corinne, giving her lacquered hair a flick, which exposed her shapely bones. ‘Besides, you can’t deny your heritage.’
‘What’s that s’posed to mean,’ Mitzi shot.
‘He’s a Hebe, that’s all. No offense, Mitzi, but you know.’
Mitzi would have flashed her eyes, but she couldn’t even blink them. Instead, she said, ‘Captain Wiseman. Irving. Be a doctor.’
‘Or better yet,’ piped up the woman who still had chunks of her zaftig build, dug into her terrible torture marks. ‘A psychiatrist.’
So suddenly he had two allies, sort of.
And there was war amongst the girls till finally, he was shipped home, a month after the war officially ended.
The ship was crammed full of men, but that didn’t stop the girls boarding too. They weren’t alone. There was a whole contingent of dead with missions, attached to both troops and officers. Irving sensed this, though they were better at hiding than any soldier he’d ever known. He never talked about them to anyone, and no one told him of the dead who stalked them. Does it take war to bring them out, he wondered. And if so, could at least there be the retribution of having them pester just as much the idiots in Command, the civvies who made money from the war, or glorified all the wrong things about it. But he’d been around enough by now to figure that only soldiers were delivered these particular rations – these dead, all on missions.
So while the living had to come to terms with peace, war raged amongst the girls and at him – a constant ack-ack about his future, all the way to New York Harbour. But not one of them advocated rockets. Even to reminisce about riding them on covers, as (formerly) big-chested Bertha L’Amour had in ‘Payload: Vavoom’, rockets were a no-go zone. If he brought them up, the girls would sing Big Band hits – and with their torn-out and rotted voice boxes, now that was the stuff of nightmares.
So when he walked down the plank and saw his mother, shorter than he remembered, he strode up to her and hugged her long and hard, with a grip less manly than his looks. Then his uncle shyly shook his hand. Leo looked at him with awe, his mother with simple pride. Nothing more had reached them but the briefest ‘I’m doing well. This land is beautiful’ for years.
Two hours later, over the gefilte fish, he said to his uncle, ‘There still a job working with you?’
‘Irving.’ His uncle placed his fork on the plate and wiped his mouth. ‘Don’t you dream any more?’ He looked intensely at his fish. ‘I’m sorry. I can only imagine what you’ve seen.’
‘Leo,’ Irving said. ‘You’ve seen it too.’
Leo reached out and took his hand. ‘You can come to work tomorrow. I’ll make sure they take you. A veteran with skills.’
‘Over my dead body,’ said Bessie Wiseman, splashing the chicken soup. ‘You must go back to school. That’s an order, Rocket Man.’
And somehow, in that little apartment in the Bronx
, the wind howled outside and the lift creaked with arthritis, but the girls couldn’t get in. Out on the pavement this chorus of sirens pitched everything they had up at that window – wheedles, soft-soap, promises, demands – in brassy blare to rot-muffled croak, they threw their voices up at Irving, safe inside.
But they knew they’d been defeated.
And Irving Wiseman did become a rocket designer, a military scientist on typically low pay and sworn to secrecy about his achievements, but happy as clams are supposed to be, and they don’t complain. A clam who didn’t even notice, and was never told by his uncle, that while he was gone, the Conical Bra had come out, a great success, and from a competitor. It was engineered with military precision, even had maximum reinforcement.
When the girls found out, they felt so stupid about having missed it all, having gone on a mission to the other side of the world (that failed anyway) when all the action was happening at home, that they slunk back to their holes and never regrouped.
ZAYINIM
ADAM ROBERTS
1
Jonie stole one of Daniel’s books. ‘Borrowed’, we might say; but she knew what stealing was, and she knew what she was doing. On the other hand, her mother was always pressing her to read books, and – to be truthful – there was little else to do. Jacob and the others were away, so the rest were supposed to lie low, which was the mostest BORINGness, and Jonie had read all her other books. So she snuck into Daniel’s room. It was actually the cab of one of the trucks, but he’d hung up drapes and set up a bookcase and made it quite homely. She picked a likely looking codex, and danced back to her den.
The book was called Beyond Good and Evil by a guy called Nate Char – an American, presumably, by the name. The title promised a crime-and-punishment story, or (more exciting) a crime-but-no-punishment story. But actually it was all dense prose like this:
Assuming truth is a Jew – what then? Is there not reason to suspect that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, have known very little about Jews? That the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to the Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for impressing the Jews? Certainly Truth has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien – IF, indeed, it stands at all!
That was the point at which Jonie bailed. She threw the book on the floor and lay on her bed for a while, chewing her fingernails. She spent five minutes trying to nibble her two pinkie nails into talons, and then gave up on that and bit them both close to the finger. Then she leapt up. Ran, with the uncoiled sudden energy of bored youth, out of her room, past the fence and to where her mother was working.
‘What’s a philosopher?’
‘Somebody who tries to fathom the universe,’ her mother replied, without looking up.
Jonie waited. After a while she cracked. ‘Don’t you want to know why I asked?’
Her eyes still on what she was doing, her mother returned, ‘Why did you ask?’ in a level voice.
‘I borrowed one of Daniel’s books. It says that philosophers are in love with the Jews. So are they not Jews, these philosophers?’
‘There have been many Jewish philosophers,’ said her mother, with that particular tone in her voice that was the closest she ever came to laughter. ‘But there have also been philosophers amongst the Goyim.’
‘Zombies? Zombies want to fathom the whys of the universe?’
Her mother looked up, and angled her head. ‘I didn’t say there were any zombie philosophers’
‘Isn’t Goy another word for zombie?’
‘No,’ she replied, returning her attention to whatever she was writing.
Jonie waited an age in the ensuing silence – whole minutes – before the energy danced out of her. She pirouetted from one end of her mother’s desk to the other, and back again. Her mother continued plugging away at whatever she was doing, undistracted. ‘Is Daniel on the prim?’ Jonie asked.
‘Your uncle is on perimeter duty, I believe,’ mother replied. ‘Perhaps you wish to apologise for taking one of his books without asking his permission?’
‘Later!’ Jonie cried, and raced out of her mother’s room.
Elisheva was on the main door, but she’d always had a soft spot for Jonie and didn’t need much persuading. ‘Take one,’ she insisted, pressing a loaded bolt-gun into her hands. ‘Remember: aim at the bluest eye.’
‘Sure, yes, OK, of course, I know,’ Jonie told her, in an ecstasy of impatience. Then the heavy triple-shield iron door grated noisily open and Jonie ran out into the sunshine. She didn’t so much as look back at the compound; she just ran. Lay-low week take that!
The long grass hissed like snakes as she sprinted through it. She came out at the rise, and the lake was spread out all before her in the afternoon sunshine, each of the myriad wavelet inset with a pip of bright sunlight. To the left was a bole of willows, like a knot of giant green jellyfish trailing their tentacles in the water. Everything was pale green and dark green, and the water was blue-green, and Jonie ran in the sunlight direction: widdershins around the island. Down into a declivity, and up onto a small hill, and then she saw Daniel – dressed in bright red, standing like a flame in the field.
The red was on purpose, of course. The Zayinim were attracted to the bright colour, and would strut and stumble in Dan’s direction, rather than bothering the compound. Of course, that put the pressure on Dan’s marksmanship. But his marksmanship was fabled. Zayin was the Hebrew Z, Z-for-zombies, although it also meant dick, and lezayen meant to insert the dick, which Jonie thought was pretty funny, actually. Not that she had a whole lot of experience of dick, and still less of insertion. She hooted Daniel’s name, and galloped so hard down the slope to him that she was out of breath by the time she arrived and it took her ages to get her breath back, and she had to lean her hands on her knees and face the ground like she was about to spew.
Daniel’s creased face was trying to do stern. ‘Shouldn’t cry out like that, little one,’ he told her. ‘Shrieking. They’re not deaf, you know.’
‘To what do you owe the pleasure?’ Jonie said. ‘I’ll tell you, Daniel. I read one of your books.’
‘But I haven’t written any books, Jonie,’ said Daniel, genuinely puzzled.
‘It was called Better than Good and Worse than Evil,’ Jonie pressed. ‘It’s by an American, and it’s about philosophers. It said philosophers were in love with truth, and also in love with Jews, and I figured that meant they weren’t Jews. But who isn’t a Jew? Apart,’ she added, sweeping her right arm in a broadcast indicative gesture.
Daniel looked nervously around, in case one of them was slouching towards them. But the view was clear. ‘Slow down,’ he begged.
‘A Zayin can hardly talk, and surely a Zayin can’t write, so I’m thinking a Zayin can’t be a philosopher. Thus and therefore I was wondering – since it’s your book, you explain.’
When old Daniel frowned the three horizontal lines on his brow went, as it were, from normal to bold font; but more than that, two angled lines converging on the bridge of his nose sprang into visibility, like a giant V.
He holstered his gun, and pulled a long, sharp-ended stick from a loop on the other side of his belt. Jonie couldn’t imagine what he was going to do with it, until he jabbed it hard into the soil, and then unfolded a sort of hinged canvas seat, no bigger than two cupped hands. He sat on this and took a breath. ‘You’re going too fast for me, child,’ he said, and began extricating materials for smoking: a white tube the length of a live round; a lighter as red as his clothes. ‘But the book is called Beyond Good and Evil, and it’s not by an American. It’s by a German, and it was very popular with the people who – ’ And he nodded in the direction of the lake, to indicate all the Zayinim in their terrible masses, somewhere over there.
‘No,’ said Jonie, delightedly, ‘kidding.’ She flopped into the grass at her uncle’s feet, and clutched her own knees to h
er chest. ‘So it is a zombie philosophy!’
‘No,’ said Daniel, sounding now like a ventriloquist talking whilst simultaneously holding his cigarette between his lips. A click and the end became an ember. He breathed the smoke in deep. It made a loud, sibilant sound going in, like silk on silk. Then he let it out very slowly. ‘It was written before that. But it inspired the people who made themselves into – that.’
‘Wolf Hitler!’ exclaimed Jonie, excitedly.
‘He was one of them, one of the worst. But not the only one.’
‘Tell me the story again,’ insisted Jonie.
Daniel drew hard on his cigarette again, and breathed out a spear of smoke into the mild afternoon air. ‘Well the Wolf hated Jews. And he was a ruler of Europe, and he made allies with others who hated Jews. And there was a big war; the whole world fought it. But the Wolves and the Bears banded together, and won that war.’
‘If they hated the Jews, why didn’t they kill them?’ Jonie asked.
‘They did. They killed the Jews in Europe, and Russia, and north Africa. There were other Jews in America, and although America lost that war and signed away reparations and agreed to,’ Daniel coughed sharply, ‘dis-ad-vantageous trade agreements and so on, they at least kept their Jews.’
‘What happened next?’ Jonie pressed. She knew what happened next; but it was good to hear the story told.
‘Well, the Wolf had a dream. He wanted to make a race of supermen, and this was because of books like the one you stole from my room, you know.’ Jonie made a shocked face, but her uncle was smiling. ‘The archetypal warriors, new warriors of a new war, were the üboatmensch, and they were the prototype. That’s what the writer of your book talked about,’ (Jonie began to suspect he couldn’t remember the guy’s name) ‘how to become more like the üboatmensch, solitary hunters, utilising new technologies to destroy and inhabit new worlds and so on. Anyway. Anyway, the Wolf had the resources of the world at his disposal, so he made it come true. Through –’ Daniel drew a curlicue of smoke in the air with his cigarette, gesturing at the vagueness of the next word ‘– science. Invincible warriors. Regenerating flesh, self-repairing gene-loads, immortality. Beyond mortality. And from a simple dose of a serum! So he dosed up an army and invaded China, and destroyed it. But it wasn’t enough to give it to the army only – the people wanted it too. Everybody wanted it!