Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology)

by Nick Mamatas

  “My name is Linda Sue. I want to make babies with you.”

  “That rhymes,” he says.

  “Will you do it or not?”

  “Or not.”

  Linda Sue stamps her foot. “Come on.”

  “I’ll take you out first. Then we’ll see.” He takes her by the hand and leads her out of the bar, out into the heart of downtown New York City.

  New York City, population three hundred and twenty.

  He guides her to a restaurant he knows where the food is stacked in piles on hygienic white counters and the electricity works. She has two eyes and two hands and one set of lips, which means she is pretty. They each take a few slabs of food—the food here is free—and sit on the ground. He tells her about his life and her eyes open wide as headlights.

  “I’ve never known anyone who had a job before.”

  “It’s not a job. It’s a career.” He works at a factory, pouring liquid plastic into molds shaped like four-tined forks. “I have a quota to fill.”

  “Why don’t you just ask the Ganys for plastic forks? Why does someone need so many plastic forks anyway” She tears off a corner of her foodslab; it comes off onto her fingers like cotton candy. Or insulation.

  “They’re not for me, they’re for people.”

  “I don’t have to work. I don’t like to. I just ask the Ganys for everything. They like to give us stuff.”

  “Well, I don’t ask them.” He doesn’t think about the creatures dancing spider-like on his nerve. “I’m self-sufficient.”

  “Are we going to fuck or what?”

  “Later, later. If you’re good.”

  In Central Park they walk past a rusted-over carousel. She’s drunk from the amber-colored alcohol-infused drinkslab she’s consumed, and he’s propping her up, forcing her to walk straight.

  “I think I’m in love with you,” she slurs.

  “You don’t know what that word means.”

  They pass a pair of Ganys wrapped in the form of two wall-eyed Jamaican teenagers, humans whose bodies were either sacrificed to or commandeered by the intelligent energy beams. The girls giggle and point as they pass. He flips them off.

  “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “They patronize us. Don’t you see how they patronize us? There’s too many of them in this city. I want to get away from here, out into the country. Will you come with me?”

  “Nobody lives in the country.”

  “Exactly.” But he knows it is pointless; nobody lives in the country because there is no way to live in the country. The farms are all poisoned and the shadow of the plague still lingers. The Ganys, knowing this, constructed an invisible olfactory wall, to keep humans and germs from mingling.

  He will never leave New York City. Always a hotel, never a tourist.

  The story of the plague goes like this:

  Once you could be certain that you would not spontaneously grow legs from your shoulder blades and arms from your buttocks. You could be reasonably sure that ears would not sprout on your cheeks overnight. Then the plague happened, and you couldn’t take that for granted anymore.

  Until the Ganys came.

  They get back to the bar and she takes off her clothes. Her ribs stick out like a xylophone. The foodslabs keep them alive, but they aren’t the right kind of nourishment. But you couldn’t expect intelligent energy beams to understand food.

  Linda Sue’s body is fuzzy and indistinct, a peach-colored blur. His vision is cloudy from the tourists in his head. He crawls back to his corner.

  “Aren’t you going to fuck me now? Aren’t you going to give me my babies?”

  “No, I’m still not ready.”

  “Oh, screw you! You’re crazy. Why don’t you get the Ganys to fix that for you? They fixed it for me.”

  Now all you want to do is mate, he thinks. Not make love, you can’t love anymore. Mate with the last members of your species so you can bring us back from the brink of extinction. That’s all it is.

  “I can’t.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m leaving. I can find some other male to give me my babies. I don’t need you.” She slams the lockless door behind her. He hunkers down in the corner.

  He awakes to unclouded vision. The vacationers checked out of his optic nerve as he slept. He rubs his empty eyes and stumbles to the corner market, where he throws down a few skins and picks up some foodslabs.

  “You don’t have to pay for those,” the Gany monitoring the electricity says.

  “Yes, I do.”

  It would be so easy, he thinks sometimes, to go down to the place where the Ganys congregate, the place where you can go rent your body for a day or a lifetime to their volunteers, and just turn yourself over. Shut off your brain for as long as you wanted, and you’d get a nice pile of goodies when your assignment was over. But he’d never done that. Renting his eyes was as far as he’d go. And even that was done not out of love for the aliens or the desire for material objects but the knowledge that, if he did not do it, he would be marked a traitor and slated for commandeering.

  The Ganys have taken a special interest in humans. They had cordoned them off in cities with invisible olfactory walls, so that the remaining humans would be able to find one another more easily. And of course, they had brought The Cure. All of it was done for our—no, he thinks, their—own good.

  He takes a dramatic bow, as if addressing a live audience. And in a way, he is.

  He’s leaving the city today. He crams a stack of foodslabs into a looted knapsack and heads north on foot. He walks until the sun is directly overhead and then stops by a river to eat.

  The river is contaminated; he can smell the plague in it, festering. But there are drinkslabs in his pack, too. He tears off a few chunks of the tasteless foam and presses on.

  A half hour later he is halted by a smell halfway between burning plastic and dog shit. I’ve reached it, he thinks. The wall between New York City and the rest of the world. He holds his breath and trudges through the wall, but it is no use. He can’t hold his breath forever. His chest deflates and the putrescent odor fills his nose and lungs, as if the dog shit is being shoveled into his mouth by the handful. He gags, and vomits up a piece of semi-digested foodslab. Choking, he runs out of the wall, and takes a whiff of pure air.

  He didn’t even make it past the fifty yard line.

  Plunging back in, he finds the smell has changed. Now it’s the scent of burning tires. He moves to the right and hits a wall of solid rotting flowers. Moving forward, there is a stench like fish guts being baked in the sun. He stumbles backwards, and falls into the strong arms of a stranger.

  “Hello there, little guy,” a park ranger says. He looks into the ranger’s crossed and clouded eyes. A Gany.

  “I couldn’t get past the wall,” he says. His eyes are running with tears and there is vomit on his chin.

  “You shouldn’t be out here all alone.” The ranger gestures at his vehicle. “C’mon, let me give you a ride back home.”

  He doesn’t want to take charity from a Gany, but he doesn’t like the prospect of walking three and a half hours either, especially since he still can’t breathe in all the way and his stomach feels swollen and fluttery. He gets in the vehicle.

  “You have a mate back at home?” Of course, that’s the first thing the ranger would say.

  “No.”

  “Human beings should be fruitful and multiply. It says so in your holy book.” The Gany speaks with the friendly, homey Upper New York accent that was the ranger’s voice when he was in control of the body, but he can sense the cold analytical tone of the intelligent energy beam guiding it.

  He grunts and turns back to the window. Less than twenty minutes later the four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle pulls up in front of his bar. That fucking Gany read his mind.

  “You be safe now, partner.”

  He slams the door.

  In the apartment building across the street two humans are mating. For a moment, he wonders what it woul
d be like to forget everything, become a creature of instinct, every moment of your life unscripted and so automatic.

  Then he goes back into the bar.

  Erica L. Satifka lives in Pittsburgh, PA. “Automatic” is her first short story in a national publication.

  CHEWING UP THE INNOCENT

  Jay Lake

  Ariadne’s a beautiful kid, you know what I mean? The kind of child that people stop and look at when we walk down the street, her little hand in mine. The Daddy hand, the cross-the-street hand, the I’m-worried hand that drops away the moment there’s a swing to be swung on or kids with jump ropes or chalk. Little fingers, not so little any more, but still they clutch at me with an echo of that infant monkey grip, don’t-drop-me-from-this-tree-Daddy firm until she runs shrieking into her future.

  And I don’t mean beautiful-pretty, either. Though God knows she’s cute enough. I mean charisma to turn your head and a thousand-watt personality that can hold a room full of people. It’s not the RSO’s on the county watch list I worry about. It’s what will become of her. All that raw go-go in one little head and one little heart. And only six years old.

  I’ve painted this kid half a hundred times, photographed her so much I’ve gone through two digital cameras. Elaine doesn’t get it. “Quit screwing around with that stuff,” she tells me.

  “Look, the way the light falls on her face.”

  “So turn on the lamp.”

  “That’s not what I mean, hon—”

  “Come on. Pay attention.” Then we’re off in some half-hearted argument about the cats or her friend Lynette’s divorce or who might have swiped the stone chicken out of the back garden and what the hell we could do about it anyway.

  Until I’m down in the basement, developing black and white or sketching on sheets of foolscap taped to the walls. Ariadne, Ariadne, Ariadne. If I capture my daughter just right, maybe it will be okay to let her go.

  I never did get the point of art jams, not for years. My buddy Russell finally pushed me into one, about a year after my first montage ran in Oregon Alive! “Get out there, Jim. Take some fucking board and a sack of markers and go down to Speed Racer’s. It’s cool, man, I mean, just fucking cool.”

  He’s a hippie forty years out of time, Russell, with long hair and a taste for women’s underwear—with or without the women still attached—and a sense of purpose when it comes to my life. His own, that’s a different issue, but Russell ain’t married with the most beautiful kid in the world looking him in the eye every day.

  Russell’s been kicking my tail since we were both in our twenties. I still remember sitting in a Denny’s out on I-5 somewhere, on our way to some party down in Salem I’d probably forgotten about before I got home that night. “Look, man, you’ve got a hand a lot of artists would kill for. I’ve seen you whip off napkin sketches of the waitress that got our tab lost. Work.”

  I laughed over the ruins of my Grand Slam. “You’re so full of shit, long-hair. Work, my ass. You wouldn’t know the meaning of the word if I fed you the dictionary.”

  He got real serious for a moment. “I ain’t got your hand, either, Jim.”

  “Fuck my hand. I got projects due.” Marketing, bane of everyone’s existence. Someone’s got to write the scripts for those damned calls you get just when you’re sitting down to dinner. That was—and is—me. “Hello, Mr. Smith, I’m calling about your long distance service.”

  If only we could wire our phones to your oven timers, John Q. Public, we’d have it fucking made.

  So there went the party, and there went some years, and I won and lost a few girlfriends drawing good sketches of them. Some of those sketches a little too good. Elaine got interested after seeing me scribble on someone’s kitchen cabinets with a charcoal briquette one boring Labor Day cookout.

  She was pretty, petite, cuter than anyone I’d seen in a while. “So,” this woman says to goofy me, “you draw anything besides roses?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Smiles traded back and forth, and the long slide into marriage began. Who needs an art jam when you’ve got love at home?

  Years come and years go, but children are forever.

  “Daddy,” she says to me one day. “I’m thinking about trees.”

  “Photosynthesis, baby. Big green air machines.”

  “You’re weird, Daddy.”

  Or this one: “Daddy, how do I know what I see is real? I know the light hits my eyes and goes into my brain, but is that sidewalk really there? What about that dog?”

  What the fuck do I look like, Socrates to her Plato? (See, a liberal arts education is good for something besides writing call scripts and training sales people.) Or maybe Aristotle to her Alexander. This kid’s going to conquer the world some day. Who the hell wouldn’t love her beyond reasonable measure?

  My heart aches every time I see her. I don’t ever want her to have what I had. Or didn’t have.

  Or whatever.

  God damn it, I’m an artist, screw the words.

  Times like this, I go off and draw dark things with claws and teeth and distant eyes and mommy breasts. Then, sometimes, I roll them up, take them out in the yard when Elaine’s not around, and set them on fire.

  But sometimes, sometimes, I sell them.

  West Coast Design Review , last August issue. Fourteen hundred bucks for a illustration of my dreams of childhood. Lewis and Clark realized in a Geigeresque biomechanical mode, Sacajawea as a maternal ovoid.

  Most people have to pay for their God damned therapy. I get paid to perform my own.

  Paging Doctor Freud to the studio, there’s an aesthetic emergency in progress.

  Russell: “Draw more. Get out. Mix with the boyz and grrls.”

  Me: “I’m too old for this shit, got a kid to raise. Plus I got to run the early shift tomorrow since Shirl’s out at her aunt’s funeral.”

  Russell: “Jim, you’re going to be middle-aged toast soon. You’ve got a gift. Fucking use it.”

  Elaine: “Family comes first.”

  Then I’m back in the basement drawing evil mommy eating her boy over and over again like some tragic Greek hero, and hiding the pictures from my wife until I can burn them.

  Or send them out.

  “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, dad—”

  “What!?”

  “Look what I can do.” And she spins a one-handed cartwheel across the basement tile.

  For the love of God, I’d have to go to the hospital if I tried that. Hell, I couldn’t do that when I was six. Walking in straight lines wasn’t exactly a specialty of mine. Screw cartwheels.

  “That’s terrific, sweetie.”

  “Will you teach me to walk on my hands?”

  “Uh . . . ”

  And she’s off. The phone rings, upstairs calling. It’s easier than shouting through the floorboards and scaring the cats. “Pay attention to her.”

  “I’m on deadline.” A piece for Columbia River Review, Woody Guthrie dying on the cross with his guitar in the hands of a Roman soldier. Not big money, but a nice commission. Could be seen by the right people in Seattle, San Francisco. Could get some prints out of it. I’d been thinking about getting into prints. Russell’s influence.

  The exasperated sigh. The angry, ticking silence on the open line. The kid hurling herself against the basement door like some angry monomaniacal special ed student instead of the girl genius that she is.

  “I’m busy . . . ”

  And then I was alone, shit-heel number one for a couple of days around our house.

  So we were down at Speed Racer’s. Everybody there who wasn’t a drop-in is either too young, cool and good-looking for me, or they were long-established, settled into the scene. I felt like a cross between the new kid on the block and a dirty old man. I mean, I’m sorry, but twenty-somethings in black minis are just too hot for me.

  Where the fuck have the years gone?

  At least I managed to get off a few million phone calls along the way
. I could have started this stuff in my twenties and saved myself a lot of trouble.

  I would have left right then, but Russell had his fingers pressed hard into my elbow. He was wearing this sequined cocktail dress, which he actually looks pretty good in on account of his narrow ass and long legs, until you see the beard up front.

  “You’re sitting over here, Jim,” he says, like I’m the tard.

  Then somebody’s shouting out themes and there’s a fight between two Realists—I think, I never understood what they were screaming except that they both spoke shittier French than I do, merci beaucoup—and somebody was peeling off the biggest damned roll of butcher paper I’ve ever seen and the easels were out.

  So I went deep. It was like surfing, finding that energy, riding that wave. Mommy’s in the basement, chewing up the innocent, look out boy, she’s gonna get you. Markers squeaking, memories squealing, spiders crawling out of their memory holes. After a while—a couple of hours maybe?—I look up from a place where my scalp’s been tingling and my sweat’s been pouring and I was shaking like I ain’t done since I got over a bad case of being fifteen, and there were about eight people standing in a semicircle behind my chair.

  Russell was just smiling, beer in his hand. The rest of them were . . . well . . .

  I looked down at my drawing board and jumped out of my chair.

  “Jesus,” I said, “that thing would scare a priest.”

  Some sweet young thing in a black mini hugged me and whispered something in my ear I didn’t catch. It was French, and I’m pretty sure so was her tongue. Then there was beer and someone taped my evil-Mommy into the middle of a kaleidoscope of politicians and helicopters and camels and we had a grand old party that went on way past my curfew.

  On the way home, I wondered what the fuck had just happened to me.

  Granddaddy was an old man when I met him. I think he was born old. He had that tough Texas soul that didn’t give much of a shit for anything but Jesus, plowing the hard red dirt, and saving four percent down at the Piggly-Wiggly by arguing the night manager into the ground.