Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “Be my guest,” I said, marker pen at the ready. I make a point of using antique technology (repro, that is) for my Tough Love classes. The students find my pens and whiteboard as fascinating as I would quills and parchment. I could see it was going to take more than a few colored Textas to get this lot’s creative juices flowing.

  “Um,” said Tentacles, “let me see now. Be courteous to the teacher? Bow on entry?”

  I wrote, Be courteous, on the whiteboard. They could all read English; it was a requirement of entry to my course. Unfortunately, some of them were anatomically incapable of speaking it. “Thank you,” I said. “‘Bowing is perhaps too culture-specific. Any more?’”

  “Even when bored witless, one should not sleep in class,” offered a participant whose appearance was markedly sluglike.

  I wondered if the Unispeak had been programmed with a sense of humor; insouciance touched with ennui made this voice sound like those old recordings of Noel Coward. “Indeed,” I said, writing it on the board. “You won’t be getting much sleep at night, either. I’ll be setting you daily writing and reading tasks, and you’ll all have a piece ready for critique by your allocated session.” I wrote, Do your homework. “Now,” I said, turning to face their expectant eyes, “we’re going to go around the circle and introduce ourselves.”

  There was a ripple of movement which I took to indicate agreement.

  “Good. I’m Annie Scott, and as you know I was headhunted from the early twenty-first to run this course. Back then I was a university lecturer in creative writing and literary criticism. This is quite similar.”

  A collective sigh; the eyes rolled, blinked, flashed in what I decided to interpret as appreciation.

  “Your turn,” I said, glancing at Tentacles, who seemed the boldest.

  He gave his name. Even via the Unispeak it was unpronounceable. “Difficult, I know,” he said politely. “You may call me Dickens, if you prefer. I am a fervent admirer of that great writer, Charles Dickens.”

  “Dickens. Right,” I said.

  The introductions went on. Dickens had started a trend for literary pseudonyms. By the time we were around the circle we had Brontë, the one with the antennae; Seth the slug; Saramago, whose maniacal grin displayed three rows of pointed teeth; terribly tall, one-eyed Atwood; and Winton, who was vaguely humanoid. Two retained their own names: K’gruz and Armahalon. Armahalon had just sung us a formal greeting of a profoundly cerebral kind when I realized there was a ninth chair in the circle, and that it, too, was occupied. The table at which my students sat had obscured this final attendee; only the tips of its ears could be seen above the edge. I moved closer and peered down, trying not to seem rude. Eight students was standard. That was all they were paying me for.

  The creature sat quietly. It was pea-green and slightly fuzzy, like a cheap velour toy. There was a look about it that suggested a dog, or perhaps a corporeally challenged elephant, or one of those things you used to see in wildlife documentaries clinging to trees and looking helpless. The ears were enormous, fragile and winglike. The eyes were liquid and mournful. I had absolutely no idea whether it was an aspiring writer or some trendy kind of lap pet.

  “Er …” I ventured, “whose is this?”

  The students peered down, and the little creature turned its forlorn gaze up at them.

  Atwood shuddered. “I’m here to critique, not to be shed on,” she murmured.

  “If we’re talking lap pets,” Saramago put in, “give me a Zardonian bog-troll any day. Best alarm system in the Galaxy. And they keep your feet so warm at night.”

  “What will we discuss today, Teacher?” asked Seth in a voice like a bubbling mud pool.

  “Call me Annie, please. Tomorrow we’ll start critiquing one another’s work. Today we’ll practice on a piece by an established author, to ease you in. Critiquing is like walking on a wire. Some writers are utterly delusional about the nature and quality of their own work. Be honest, but temper your honesty with compassion. When someone critiques your writing, it can feel as if they’re hurting your beloved child.”

  “Ah, yes,” enthused Dickens, swirling his tentacles in a show of agreement. “Beloved child, yes. Better if we tell soothing lies?”

  “You must tell truths expressed with understanding and kindness,” I told him.

  K’gruz was wearing a full-body protective suit with a filter mechanism; his Unispeak appeared to be hard-wired directly into his head. The voice emerged from a speaker. “I cannot be kind about Saramago’s work!” K’gruz exclaimed. “He writes by hand, and he uses green ink secreted from his own disgusting glands. How can one take such a writer seriously? The presentation is entirely unprofessional. As for his oeuvre itself, it stinks more richly than the filth with which he sets it down. The concepts, the themes, the woeful lack of punctuation … where can I start?” If K’gruz had possessed eyebrows, at that point they would have arched extravagantly. As it was, he managed an expressive shrug that made his suit and its contents ripple.

  I opened my mouth to intervene before Saramago decided to use his teeth, but the ladylike Brontë cut in.

  “Ink? Ink is nothing! There is no point to any of it if we cannot divine a resonance, a truth, a transcendence, a—”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” growled K’gruz. “Your own work is nothing more than an inflated piece of fluff, hardly good enough for a quickvid on a short-hop interplanetary transit of the less salubrious kind. You’re in no position to question literary—”

  “Friends, friends!” Seth was trying to make peace. “Ground rules, please—” but nobody was listening. Saramago was snapping his teeth, Brontë’s antennae were trembling with indignation, Armahalon had one foot on the table, revealing scythelike toenails that were none too clean, and Winton was leaning back in his chair, laughing hysterically. Atwood was taking notes.

  “Excuse me—” I said.

  “Class, please—” I cried out.

  “Stop acting like a bunch of spoiled infants!” I yelled.

  “Alas, teacher,” Dickens spoke in my ear, “I fear this Tough Love is no more than a battleground for exhausted ideas.”

  Under different circumstances I’d have complimented him on his turn of phrase. Things were getting nastier by the second. Saramago had sunk his teeth into the nearest available object, which was Brontë’s hand; she was emitting little shrill cries of outrage. K’gruz was fiddling with a dial on his protective suit, from which a thin stream of evil-smelling yellow vapor was hissing forth. Seth and Armahalon were locked in an embrace that had nothing at all to do with interspecies attraction. Even Winton was getting in a random uppercut here and there. Atwood’s digits were tapping away overtime on her Personal Recording Device (PRD). She had the new model, the one that communicates direct with a Unispeak and reads your work back to you in your language of choice. So much for green ink. I was being paid a fortune to run this, and my class had degenerated into a whistling, shrieking, punching, gasping free-for-all.

  <>

  The stream of sound pierced my skull at a decibel level designed to induce rapid-onset insanity. It was clear from the sudden stillness and agonized expressions of the others that it had hit them the same way.

  <>

  The agony ended. Wincing, we took our hands off our aural receptors.

  “Who did that?” I asked shakily. It had been the most unthinkable kind of interruption, a violent mind-assault of the kind generally employed only in situations of military interrogation. I hadn’t thought I’d need to put No torture in the ground rules.

  Eight sets of eyes swiveled toward the handbag-sized creature, which turned its liquid gaze on me and spoke in a tone now mellow and musical.

  “Sorry, Teacher. I considered you a damsel in distress, and was compelled to attempt a rescue.”

 
; I wrote No mind-blasts on the whiteboard. “And your name is?” I snapped.

  “Ne’il.” The sound was delivered on a mournful, falling cadence. A neat glottal stop divided it into two clear syllables.

  “Neil?” asked Atwood. “Who Neil?”

  “O’Neill?” suggested Seth. “Eugene O’Neill?”

  I waited. Very probably, Green Handbag had stolen a march on me.

  “Wait a minute.” Brontë was scratching her head; it was an impressive sight. I had never seen such flexible antennae. “He forced a story into us with his beastly mind-blast. A fairy tale.” She glared at Ne’il accusingly.

  “Ne’il Gae-munn,” he said, making a little song of it.

  “Neil Gay-mun?” Winton echoed. “Who the heck was he?”

  I saw the shudder go through Brontë’s whole body; the cold disapproval enter Armahalon’s eyes.

  “Some of you know Neil Gaiman’s work, I see.” I ignored the chill in the air and went on gamely. “This is quite a coincidence, unless, of course, our friend here has psychic abilities. The story we’re going to look at now is one of Gaiman’s. It’s coming through on your PRDs now; please read it silently and we’ll discuss it when you’re finished.”

  There was a mutinous quality about the ensuing silence. After a little, Brontë spoke. “This exercise is a waste of time for me. I can’t comment on this kind of thing. I don’t understand the conventions.”

  “If I had known we were going to discuss genre fiction,” Armahalon delivered the offending word with brittle distaste, “I would never have enrolled for the class.”

  “I, too, am a literary writer,” Dickens put in apologetically.

  “This is for children,” growled K’gruz. “Stepmothers, dwarves, magic fruit … It can have nothing at all to do with an advanced class in literary critique.”

  I waited.

  Seth was a fast reader; he was already well into the story. “For children? Oh, I do not think so,” he said. “It is a dark tale. Unsettling.”

  “I need coffee,” Saramago declared, rising to his feet. “Call me when we get to—”

  “Sit down!” I said. “I’m in charge here. Read the story. Ne’il, why aren’t you reading? You are a participant in the group, aren’t you?”

  He smiled beatifically, and I imagined Yoda saying, Old am I. “I know the tale,” he said. “‘Snow, Glass, Apples,’ yes?”

  “All the same—”

  “By heart,” he said. “Is not that the home of all good tales: the heart?”

  “Some would disagree with you,” I told him in an undertone, for the class had been hooked by the story and was reading avidly now. “Some would say the intellect. Or even the soul.”

  “Mmm,” Ne’il said, his eyes luminous. “Or the balls?”

  I looked at him.

  “Or anatomical equivalent,” he said, glancing around the table. There was perhaps one and a half sets of testicles between the lot of us.

  “Good joke,” I whispered. “We’re seriously lacking in humor here. Do you think I can teach this lot to laugh at themselves? Can they find their own hearts, and one another’s?”

  “If hearts they have,” Ne’il said, grinning, “find them we will.”

  It was a grueling few days. Each student was different. Each was compelled by dreams, hopes, delusions; each was full of insecurity and prejudice, envy and bias. They knew their stuff, that was, the narrow personal corridor of fiction writing each had decided was worthy of his or her in-depth study. Some had real talent. Dickens had written a huge novel of nineteenth-century London, full of sly humor and unforgettable characters. Saramago surprised us with a piece in which comparative religion was studied through father/son relationships. I was impressed that a being with so many teeth at his disposal was the intergalactic equivalent of a humanist. Brontë’s work was lightweight, Armahalon’s impenetrably deep. Winton spent his nights in the bar and turned up late for class until I called him a slacker. The next day he brought us a delicate piece of short fiction, a gem of stylistic simplicity.

  “Ah,” Ne’il said. “You are a storyteller.”

  By the second day they were forming reluctant bonds. By the third day they were going to the bar en masse to down the brew of their choice and argue late into the night about Eliot Perlman’s use of the second person and whether magic realism was just a particularly pretentious form of genre fiction. By the final day most of them had seen their own work with new eyes. Brontë was the exception; she hugged her piece defensively, refusing to change a single word. Atwood was restructuring her picaresque epic into a verse novel. K’gruz had reduced the number of breast references in his manuscript from fifty-four to twelve, and found synonyms for pert and perky.

  Ne’il had submitted no written work at all. Every night as the members of Tough Love 3001 gathered in the Intergalactic Voyager’s smoky watering hole, he would sit amongst them and tell a story. They were tales of dragons and heroes, of hardship and quest, of self-discovery and heartbreak. They were myths, legends, sagas, and fairy tales. They were, without a doubt, genre fiction. From the moment the diminutive green narrator opened his mouth to the time when he said “and they lived happily ever after,” not a soul in that bar made so much as a squeak, a rustle, a sigh. Ne’il had them in the palm of his hand, or anatomical equivalent.

  At the final class, I thanked them for their dedication and hard work and was able to say quite truthfully that I was sorry the course was over. They offered grave compliments in return: they had learned much, they would never forget me, they would be back next year.

  “Where’s Ne’il?” I asked, seeing the ninth chair was empty. “Has his shuttle left already? He didn’t say good-bye.”

  “Alas, we do not know,” said Dickens. “Perhaps he has exhausted his fund of tales. All good things come to an end. Annie, we wish to present you with this gift in token of our appreciation.”

  I’d been rather hoping for a bottle of wine or perhaps a flask of the powerful k’grech they brewed on K’gruz’s home planet. This silver-wrapped parcel was more the size and shape of a cake, or maybe a hat. I tore off the ribbon and the shiny paper and choked in horror.

  It was a handbag. It was fuzzy and green, velourlike in texture, and had a cosy rotundity of form. The handle was constructed from two large, ear-shaped flaps knotted together.

  “We made it for you,” Armahalon said in his humming tones.

  “We made it all together,” said Saramago, showing his teeth.

  “I’ve never liked fantasy,” observed K’gruz. “All those dragons and women in gauze and leather. It’s so … so …”

  I clapped my hands over my mouth, wondering if I could make it to the gleaming toilet facilities of the Intergalactic Voyager before I spewed up my breakfast all over the floor. Stars spun before my eyes; my knees buckled.

  “Dickens, fetch water,” a familiar voice murmured somewhere close by. “Our attempt at humor has misfired. Annie, do not cry.”

  “You should read more nonfiction, Annie,” said Atwood drily. “Didn’t you know Ne’il’s species shed their skins every full moon?”

  I opened my eyes. There beside me on the floor was Ne’il, or at least I assumed it was he; his new skin was a delicate shade of mauve.

  “It’s closer to lilac,” he corrected, smiling. “See, you taught them to laugh.”

  “That wasn’t funny!” I snapped as my heartbeat returned to normal. “I thought—”

  “Ah,” said Ne’il, “you forgot my name. Is not the sweetest of fairy tales tinged with darkness? Such duality lies at the heart of all experience: light and shadow, safe reality and fearsome imagining, fruitful summer and fallow winter. Has not the most charming of Gae-munn’s work a tiny touch of horror?”

  “What?” gasped Brontë, looking truly affronted. “Fantasy and horror? You mean there’s such a thing as—double-genre?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Write your stories, dream your dreams, work hard, and come back next year if you can.
And if I don’t see you again, live happily ever after.”

  The bag was heavy. When I got back to my room I discovered it held three squat miniflasks of top quality k’grech, guaranteed to blow out the drinker’s eyeballs. My students had passed with flying colors.

  Chanting the Violet Dog Down: A Tale of Noreela

  BY TIM LEBBON

  Tim Lebbon’s novels include Desolation, Berserk, The Nature of Balance, Face, and Until She Sleeps. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He has won a Bram Stoker Award, a Tombstone Award, and two British Fantasy Awards, as well as being nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Lebbon is one of the young stars in the resurgence of speculative fiction in the UK; a number of his stories are being developed for film and television, and he has recently finished working with Mike Mignola on a new Hellboy project. You can read more about Lebbon’s work at www.timlebbon.net.

  Lebbon is never afraid of writing a “difficult” story. Characters in his world suffer and hurt in ways most of us can only imagine—and if we are actually honest with ourselves would never want to imagine. His signature on a story inevitably means that the reader is going to share some of that suffering. “Chanting the Violet Dog Down” is no exception. It offers a unique glimpse into the dark heart of Noreela, the setting for Lebbon’s most recent novel, Dusk, and its forthcoming sequel, Dawn (Bantam Dell). The land is in turmoil. Noreela itself is dying. The first stage of that long slow death is the fading of the magic that bound the bones of the world together, and with it, its powers to keep the stuff of nightmares at bay. The Mourners from the Temple of Lament do their best to help the dead find rest, but sometimes their best is not enough. There’s a wealth of information about the Mourners, the Violet Dogs, and the many wonders of Noreela on the dedicated Web site at www.noreela.com.

  Lebbon lives in Monmouthshire, Wales.

  The Mourner stared down at the empty graves, and began to wonder why.

  She had come a long way to be here and now that she realized her trip was wasted, there was little to do but turn and head for home. There were no dead to dwell over, no wraiths to chant down to peace with her strange songs … only a field of ragged holes, soil humped beside them like recumbent loved ones grieving lost friends.