The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Well, young man?” she said in a peppery sort of way. “Aren’t you going to help me up?”

  “Ma’am?” I gaped for an instant before gathering myself together. “Oh! Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.” I offered her my hand and helped her sit up. The little shimmer of light followed her head up. Oh, sweet Heaven, I thought. She’s one of the Saved.

  ***

  I opened the door from the baggage compartment reluctantly, fearful of the hound that must surely wait just outside. Still, what other choice did I have?

  There was Jackie, spattered from head to foot with shit and gore, and her clothes all in tatters. She stood with her legs braced, a cocky smile on her face, and the butt-end of her cigar still clenched in her teeth. LaBelle crouched by her feet—she shakily stood up when I emerged—staring at something in the distant marshes. Away off behind us, a howl of pain and rage like nothing I’d ever heard before dwindled to nothing.

  The hound was nowhere to be seen.

  First thing the old woman said then was, “Young lady. Do you think it seemly to be walking about dressed as a man?”

  Jackie took the cigar butt out of her mouth.

  “Get rid of that filthy thing too.”

  For an instant, I thought there was going to be trouble. But then Jackie laughed and flung the cigar out into the night. It was still lit and I could see by the way the old lady frowned that she’d noticed that too.

  I offered her my arm again and we made our way slowly up the train.

  She was Sugar’s mother. I never had any doubt about that. As we walked up the train, she questioned LaBelle and me about her son, whether he was well, was he behaving himself, did he have a special lady-friend yet, and what exactly did he have in mind for her and him?

  LaBelle was all in a lather to tell us how Sugar had arranged things. He’d kept in regular touch with the folks back home. So he’d been informed how his mother had spent her life just waiting and praying for the fullness of time so that she could die and get to see her baby boy again. Nobody’d had the heart to tell her about his new job. Sugar and his relations figured that since Divine Providence wasn’t going to bring them together, it was up to him.

  “He got it all worked out. He saved all his money,” LaBelle said, “enough to set himself up in a little place on the outskirts of Ginny Gall. You’ll like it there,” she assured the old lady. “People say it’s not half bad. It’s where the folks in Hell go for a big Saturday night.”

  The old lady said nothing. Something about the way her jaw clenched, though, gave me an uneasy feeling.

  ***

  The casino car fell silent when we entered.

  “Mama!” Sugar cried. He ran to her side and hugged her. They were both crying, and so were the girls. Even Billy-B had a strange kind of twisted smile on his face.

  Mrs. Selma Green took a long, slow look around the car and its inhabitants. She did not look content. “Sugar, what are you doing in such raffish company? What bad thing have you done to bring you to such a pass? I thought I’d watched over you better than that.”

  Sugar drew himself up proudly. “I never did a cruel or evil thing in all my life, Mama. You know that. I never did nothing you’d’ve disapproved of.” His eyes swept the room disdainfully, and to the damned and the crew alike he said, “Not because I much cared, one way or the other. But because I knew what you expected of me. There was bad company, at times, tried to mislead me. Wicked women urged wicked things upon me. But never was a man big enough or a woman sweet enough to make me go against your teachings.”

  Personally, I believed it. A man like Sugar—what need had he of violence? People just naturally made room for him. And those who wouldn’t, well, that was only self-defense, wasn’t it?

  But his mother did not look convinced. “What, then, are you doing here?” And there is absolutely no way I could do justice to the scorn with which she said that last word.

  Sugar looked abashed. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “They just didn’t like my looks, I guess.”

  “The truth, boy!”

  “I, uh, kind of mouthed off to the Recording Angel, Mama. That’s how I wound up here.” He grew angry at the memory; you could see it still rankled. “You oughta be grateful we’re letting a roughneck like you squeak by, he said. Don’t bend no rules for me, I told him. I’d expect a little more gratitude than you’re showing, he says. Ain’t grateful to man nor angel, says I, for something I earned on my own right. Oh, that angel was mad enough to spit nails! He wanted me to bow and truckle to him. But I got my pride. I told him I wouldn’t play nigger for nobody. And I guess that’s what brought me here.”

  “We don’t use that word,” Mrs. Green said smartly. Her son looked puzzled. “The N-word.”

  “No, Mama,” he said, all contrite.

  “That’s better. You’re a good boy, Sugar, only sometimes you forget yourself.” She allowed herself a small, austere smile. “You’ve got yourself in another fix, and I guess it’s up to me to see you right again.”

  She yanked the emergency brake cord.

  With a scream of brakes that could be heard all the way to Diddy-Wah-Diddy, the train ground toward a halt. In the blackness of the night I heard monstrous things struggling toward us through the shit and filth of the marshes of Styx. I heard the sound of dangerous wings.

  “Oh, Mama!” Sugar wailed. “What have you done?”

  “Deceit don’t cure nothing. We’re going to have it all out, and bring everything into the open,” she said. “Stand up straight.”

  ***

  So there it was.

  The trial was held up front in the locomotive, with two Judges towering over the engine, and the damned crowded into the front cars, climbing up on each other’s shoulders and passing every word back so those in the rear could follow. To one side of the engine crouched Bagamothezth, Lord of Maggots. Two long, sagging pink paps hung limply down over his hairy belly, and living filth dropped continually from his mouth. A rank wind blew off of his foul body. To look upon his squirmily tentacled eyelids and idiot gaze was to court despair.

  The other judge was an Archangel. He shone whiter than house paint and brighter than an incandescent bulb, and to look upon him…Well. You know that awful feeling you get when you look through a telescope at some little fuzzy bit of light that’s maybe not even visible to the naked eye? Only there it is, resolved into a million billion stars, cold and clear and distinct, and you and the Earth and everything you’ve ever known or thought about just dwindles down to insignificance? That’s what the Archangel was like, only infinitely worse.

  I found myself staring at first one Judge and then the other, back and forth, repulsed by the one, repelled by the majesty of the other, but unable to look away. They were neither of them something you could turn your back on.

  Bagamothezth spoke in a voice shockingly sweet, even cloying. “We have no claim upon the sanctified Mrs. Selma Green. I presume you are declaring an immediate writ of sainthood upon her?”

  The Archangel nodded. And with that the old lady was wrapped in blazing light and shot up into the night, dwindling like a falling star in reverse. For a second you could see her shouting and gesturing, and then she was gone.

  “Sugar Green,” Bagamothezth said. “How do you plead?”

  Sugar stood up before the Judges, leaning forward a little as if into a great wind. His jaw was set and his eyes blazed. He wasn’t about to give in an inch. “I just wanted to be with my—”

  Bagamothezth clucked his tongue warningly.

  “I just—”

  “Silence!” the Archangel roared; his voice shook the train and rattled the tracks. My innards felt scrambled. Him and Sugar locked eyes. For a minute they stood thus, longer than I would’ve believed any individual could’ve stood up to such a being. At last Sugar slowly, angrily bowed his head and stared down at the ground. “How do you plead?”

  “Guilty, I guess,” he mumbled. “I only—”

  “William Meredith Bones,
” the Archangel said. “How do you plead?”

  Billy-B squared his shoulders and spoke up more briskly than I would’ve expected him to. “All my life,” he said, “I have followed the dollar. It has been my North Star. It has proved comprehensible to me in ways that men and women were not. It has fetched me here where human company would have brought me to a worse place. To the best of my lights I have remained true to it.” He spread his arms. “Sugar offered me money to smuggle his mother on board. What was I to do? I couldn’t turn him down. Not and be true to my principles. I had no choice.”

  “How much,” asked the Archangel in a dangerously quiet voice, “were you paid?”

  Billy Bones lifted his jaw defiantly. “Forty-five dollars.”

  Those of us who knew Billy roared. We couldn’t help it. We whooped and hollered with laughter until tears ran down our cheeks. The thought of Billy inconveniencing himself for so paltry a sum was flat-out ludicrous. He blushed angrily.

  “So you did not do it for the money,” said Bagamothezth.

  “No,” he muttered, “I guess not.”

  One by one, LaBelle, Afreya, and Sally were called upon to testify and acknowledge their guilt. Then I was called forward.

  “Malcolm Reynolds,” the Archangel said. “Your fellows have attested that, out of regard for your spiritual welfare, they did not involve you in this plot. Do you nevertheless wish to share their judgment?”

  Something inside of me snapped. “No, no!” I cried. I couldn’t help noticing the disgusted expression that twisted up Billy Bones’ lips and the pitying looks that the girls threw my way, but I didn’t care. I’d been through a lot and whatever strength I had in me was used up. Then too, I had seen what goes on in Diddy-Wah-Diddy and points south and I wanted no part of any of it. “It was all them—I had nothing to do with any of it! I swear if I’d known, I would’ve turned them all in before I would’ve let this happen!”

  The Judges looked at one another. Then one of them, and for the life of me I can’t remember which, cleared his throat and passed judgment.

  ***

  We got a new crew now. Only me and Goatfoot are left over from the old outfit. The train goes on. The Judges ruled that Sugar’s love for his mother, and the fact that he was willing to voluntarily undergo damnation in order to be with her, was enough to justify his transfer to a better place, where his mama could keep an eye on him. LaBelle and Afreya and Sally, and Billy Bones too, were deemed to have destroyed the perfect balance of their souls that kept them shackled to the railroad. They were promoted Upstairs as well.

  Me, I’d cooked my own goose. They accepted my plea of noninvolvement, and here I remained. The girls were pretty broken up about it, and to tell the truth, so was I, for a time. But there it was. Once these things been decided, there ain’t no court of appeal.

  I could’ve done without Billy-B’s smirk when they handed him his halo and wings, like he’d outsmarted all the world one more time. But it was a pure and simple treat to see LaBelle, Afreya, and Sally transformed. They were good girls. They deserved the best.

  With all the fuss, we were all the way to the end of the line in Beluthahatchie before anybody noticed that Jackie had taken advantage of the train being stopped for the trial to slip over the side. She believed, apparently, that it would be possible to backtrack through three hundred eighty miles of black-water marshes, evade the myriad creatures thatdwell therein, the least of which is enough to freeze the marrow in your bones, cross the Acheron trestle bridge, which is half a mile high and has no place to hide when the trains cross over, and so pass undetected back to New Jersey.

  It made me sad to think on it.

  And that’s all there is to tell. Except for one last thing.

  I got a postcard, just the other day, from Chicago. It was kind of battered and worn like it’d been kicking around in the mails a long time. No return address. Just a picture of a Bar-B-Q hut which, however, I don’t expect would be any too difficult for a determined individual to locate. And the message:

  If one boundary is so ill-protected, then how

  difficult can the other be? I have a scheme

  going that should reap great profit with only

  moderate risk. Interested?

  J.

  P.S. Bring your uniform.

  So it seems I’m going to Heaven. And why not?

  I’ve surely seen my share of Hell.

  Radio Waves

  I was walking the telephone wires upside down, the sky underfoot cold and flat with a few hard bright stars sparsely scat-tered about it, when I thought how it would take only an instant’s weakness to step off to the side and fall up forever into the night. A kind of wildness entered me then and I began to run.

  I made the wires sing. They leapt and bulged above me as I raced past Ricky’s Luncheonette and up the hill. Past the old chocolate factory and the IDI Advertising Display plant. Past the body shops, past A.J. LaCourse Electric Motors-Controls-Parts. Then, where the slope steepened, along the curving snake of rowhouses that went the full quarter-mile up to the Ridge. Twice I overtook pedestrians, hunched and bundled, heads doggedly down, out on incomprehensible errands. They didn’t notice me, of course. They never do.

  The antenna farm was visible from here. I could see the Seven Sisters spangled with red lights, dependent on the Earth like stalactites. “Where are you running to, little one?” one tower whispered in a crackling, staticky voice. I think it was Hegemone.

  “Fuck off,” I said without slackening my pace, and they all chuckled.

  Cars mumbled by. This was ravine country, however built-up, and the far side of the road, too steep and rocky for development, was given over to trees and garbage. Hamburger wrappings and white plastic trash bags rustled in their wake. I was running full-out now.

  About a block or so from the Ridge, I stumbled and almost fell. I slapped an arm across a telephone pole and just managed to catch myself in time. Aghast at my own carelessness, I hung there, dizzy and alarmed.

  The ground overhead was black as black, an iron roof that somehow was yet as anxious as a hound to leap upon me, crush me flat, smear me to nothingness. I stared up at it, horrified.

  Somebody screamed my name.

  I turned. A faint blue figure clung to a television antenna atop a small, stuccoed brick duplex. Charlie’s Widow. She pointed an arm that flickered with silver fire down Ripka Street. I slewed about to see what was coming after me.

  It was the Corpsegrinder.

  When it saw that I’d spotted it, it put out several more legs, extended a quilled head, and raised a howl that bounced off the Heaviside layer. My nonexistent blood chilled.

  In a panic, I scrambled up and ran toward the Ridge and safety. I had a squat in the old Roxy, and once I was through the wall, the Corpsegrinder would not follow. Why this should be so, I did not know. But you learn the rules if you want to survive.

  I ran. In the back of my head I could hear the Seven Sisters clucking and gossiping to each other, radiating television and radio over a few dozen frequencies. Indifferent to my plight.

  The Corpsegrinder churned up the wires on a hundred needle-sharp legs. I could feel the ion surge it kicked up pushing against me as I reached the intersection of Ridge and Leverington. Cars were pulling up to the pumps at the Atlantic station. Teenagers stood in front of the A-Plus Mini Market, flicking half-smoked cigarettes into the street, stamping their feet like colts, and waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t help feeling a great longing disdain for them. Every last one worried about grades and drugs and zits, and all the while snugly barricaded within hulking fortresses of flesh.

  I was scant yards from home. The Roxy was a big old movie palace, fallen into disrepair and semiconverted to a skateboarding rink which had gone out of business almost immediately. But it had been a wonderful place once, and the terra cotta trim was still there: ribbons and river gods, great puffing faces with panpipes, guitars, flowers, wyverns. I crossed the Ridge on a dead telephone wire
, spider-web delicate but still usable.

  Almost there.

  Then the creature was upon me, with a howl of electromagnetic rage that silenced even the Sisters for an instant. It slammed into my side, a storm of razors and diamond-edged fury, hooks and claws extended.

  I grabbed at a rusty flange on the side of the Roxy.

  Too late! Pain exploded within me, a sheet of white nausea. All in an instant I lost the name of my second daughter, an April morning when the world was new and I was five, a smoky string of all-nighters in Rensselaer Polytech, the jowly grin of Old Whatsisface the German who lived on LaFountain Street, the fresh pain of a sprained ankle out back of a Banana Republic warehouse, fishing off a yellow rubber raft with my old man on Lake Champlain. All gone, these and a thousand things more, sucked away, crushed to nothing, beyond retrieval.

  Furious as any wounded animal, I fought back. Foul bits of substance splattered under my fist. The Corpsegrinder reared up to smash me down, and I scrabbled desperately away. Something tore and gave.

  Then I was through the wall and safe among the bats and the gloom.

  “Cobb!” the Corpsegrinder shouted. It lashed wildly back and forth, scouring the brick walls with limbs and teeth, as restless as a March wind, as unpredictable as ball lightning.

  For the moment I was safe. But it had seized a part of me, tortured it, and made it a part of itself. I could no longer delude myself into thinking it was simply going to go away. “Cahawahawbb!” It broke my name down to a chord of overlapping tones. It had an ugly, muddy voice. I felt dirtied just listening to it. “Caw—” A pause. “—awbb!”

  In a horrified daze I stumbled up the Roxy’s curving patterned-tin roof until I found a section free of bats. Exhausted and dispirited, I slumped down.

  “Caw aw aw awb buh buh!”

  How had the thing found me? I’d thought I’d left it behind in Manhattan. Had my flight across the high-tension lines left a trail of some kind? Maybe. Then again, it might have some special connection with me. To follow me here it must have passed by easier prey. Which implied it had a grudge against me. Maybe I’d known the Corpsegrinder back when it was human. We could once have been important to each other. We might have been lovers. It was possible. The world is a stranger place than I used to believe.