The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Inez shook her visitors’ hands, feeling in both cases a pang of humiliation. The hair loss was necessary, and yet just then her baldness seemed but one degree removed from stark nakedness. She wished someone had thought to include a wig in her ensemble.

  “We’re a small community at present,” said Meredith. “Including you, we number only seven—seven lucky beneficiaries of aneuploid theory.”

  Barry said, “There are still five vacant cottages, so obviously Philoghast intends to keep on curing people.” Realizing that his spectacles had taken a toboggan ride down his nose, he extended his index finger and pressed the frames back into place. “Hey, Professor Montaugh, I’ll bet you’re hungry, am I right?”

  “Famished. Please call me Inez.”

  “Every Friday, a crate of food glides down from the sky on a parachute.” Barry reached into the knapsack, drawing forth a plastic-wrapped block of muenster cheese, a can of mixed nuts with a pull-top lid, and a bottle of Glacéau Smartwater. “Atoll K is no paradise, but we’ve found it doesn’t pay to complain.”

  “Atoll K?”

  “From the available climatic and geological evidence, our best guess is that we’re somewhere in Long Island Sound,” said Meredith. “It’s hard to tell, because the fog bank never lifts.”

  “Of course, this place isn’t really an atoll,” said Barry. “Coral reefs rarely grow above—how’s this for a laugh?—the Tropic of Cancer. Apparently it’s just a name Philoghast likes. Atoll K. Rather musical, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I must have been unconscious a long time,” Inez mused, opening the can of nuts.

  “About two days,” said Meredith. “The nurses kept replenishing your ether cone. It’s all part of the procedure.”

  Inez spent the next five minutes consuming the feast her fellow survivors had brought her. “So when do I get to go home?” she asked, taking a swig of Smartwater.

  “That’s the thing, Inez,” said Barry. “You won’t be going home. None of us are going home.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Once your sister was told of the arrangement, she agreed to propagate the necessary cover story,” said Meredith. “To put it bluntly: yesterday Inez Montaugh committed suicide. Better that fate, she reasoned, than ceding her intellect to glioblastoma, bit by bit by bit.”

  “You mean—everyone thinks I’m dead?” croaked Inez, dumbfounded.

  “Everyone except Philoghast, his team, and your sister—and none of them will breathe a word,” said Barry.

  “This is appalling.”

  “More appalling than death?” asked Meredith.

  “I’m supposed to be writing a novel.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to write it in your head,” said Barry.

  “Sandor was allowed to go home,” Inez protested. “He has an apartment with a herpetorium.”

  “As Philoghast’s first great success, Sandor enjoys many privileges,” Meredith explained. “The rest of us are castaways. Whether you accept the situation or not, you are now and forever bound to these shores, performing such duties as our overlords require.”

  “Overlords? You mean Philoghast and his team?”

  “Come with us, Inez,” said Barry. “It’s time you met your tumor—or, in the parlance of Atoll K, your squid.”

  A highly regarded Partisan Review essay by Inez, “The Aesthetic Reversal of Estrangement,” found her arguing that the malaise of modernity traced largely to “the displacement of genuine rotation by mere escape.” Many and various were the modes of flight—vodka, video games, sedatives, barbiturates, sex, Hollywood movies, Jesus, the Internet—available to the average consumer, a category in which she felt obliged to include herself, each such egress promising deliverance from everydayness and alienation but in fact providing only a gaudier sort of despair. No longer could Huck and Jim climb aboard their raft and drift into a timeless, stateless, mythic zone. No longer might Prince Andrei lie wounded in the dressing station at Borodino and know himself for the first time. Call me Ishmael, but when next the Pequod sails, I’ll be staying behind, sitting in the television lounge of the Spouter Inn, watching the NBA playoffs.

  When Inez stepped out of the rational domain of her cottage and entered the zone called Atoll K, she wondered if her newly healed brain, in processing so radical a rotation, might sicken once again. Though surrounded by soaring levees of fog, the island offered an unobstructed view of the heavens, the midday sun burning savagely in a cobalt sky. Barry and Meredith guided her across a tract of brown grass and down to the beach. Seagulls wheeled above the surf, filling the air with ornery squawks. The incoming tide exploded against ragged gunmetal rocks. Clinging to a series of long, fat jetties, the seven tumors varied considerably in magnitude, the largest boasting the proportions of a Quonset hut—presumably it was the first to scuttle free of its host—the smallest equivalent in size to a kayak. Eyeless, lipless, sheathed in pulp, the malignancies all exhibited the same morbid complexion, the gray-green of dead Mitteleuropan flesh. There was no question why the human inhabitants of Atoll K called these creatures squids, for each displayed a wriggling array of long, tapering, serpentine arms extending from the primary body mass. Beyond these spectacular tentacles, Inez noted countless anomalous protuberances: nodes, knobs, lumps, teats, studs, stalks. She did not doubt that the smallest squid was her own glioblastoma multiforme, for its acerbic thoughts now flowed into the brain it had once called home.

  Labor diligently, Inez Montaugh, do my bidding, and you will find your banishment bearable.

  “Dr. Philoghast said nothing about banishment,” ran Inez’s silent reply.

  Nor did he speak of Atoll K, where you and your fellow castaways will spend your lives toiling on our behalf.

  “What cause do you have to abuse us?”

  Tumors don’t traffic in reasons. We exist to rule over you, just as you exist to serve us.

  Defiantly Inez informed her squid, “That remains to be seen.”

  Inevitably she recalled the last movie she’d discussed in “Fuck Me Again, Dr. Frankenstein.” In its own tawdry way, Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters was an iteration of the Frankenstein motif, only in this case the “mad doctor” was whatever coterie of scientists had poisoned the monsters’ Pacific island habitat with radioactive fallout. It now occurred to Inez that the film boasted an allegorical dimension. Corman’s ludicrous mutants were not so much atomic as carcinomatoid, for the disease took its name from the Latin word for crab, cancer—to an ancient Greek, karkínos—in acknowledgment of a malignant tumor’s tendency to spread outward like the multiple legs of a crustacean.

  When Inez told Barry and Meredith that her squid had engaged her in psychic conversation, neither survivor seemed surprised.

  “No doubt it tried to intimidate you,” said Barry.

  “It told me we’ll be spending our lives toiling on behalf of itself and its brethren,” said Inez.

  “Slaves of tofu,” said Meredith in a corroborating tone. “In fact, you’re about to see a demonstration.”

  As if on cue, the rest of Atoll K’s human population came marching across the beach, pushing a hay wagon jammed with a half-dozen 55-gallon drums. Parking the vehicle on the largest jetty, the four exiles unloaded the drums and pried off the lids. One by one the prisoners upended the unwieldy receptacles, setting free a white, homogeneous, curdish substance, so that before long a vast mound of pale nourishment rose from the slick wet rocks like a hill constructed by ants the size of Corman’s crabs.

  Now the feasting began, the seven tumors wriggling toward the mound and seizing great lumps of tofu with their tentacles. At first Inez wondered how the neoplasms would ingest their meals, for they appeared to have no mouths, but it soon developed that something like the opposite was the case. Under the influence of hunger, these creatures became nothing but mouths—rows and rows of alimentary orifices: maws, jaws, muzzles, beaks, food vacuoles. For the next twenty minutes the tumors gorged themselves, filling the air
with a cacophony of gurgles and belches. Occasionally one of the larger neoplasms would produce a gaseous emission, accompanied by a deep tympanic vibration.

  “What happens if they aren’t fed promptly?” Inez asked Barry.

  “You can guess the answer,” he replied. “The squids turn violent. Those tentacles can be cruel.”

  “I see.”

  “Look on the bright side, Inez. You’re a survivor. Your tumor was ablated. You’ve got thirty or forty years ahead of you.”

  Like many people who live inside their heads, Inez Montaugh was essentially a shy person, and she took no pleasure in the prospect of meeting the exiles who’d delivered tofu to the squids. Along with Barry and Meredith, however, these four citizens of Atoll K proved the saving grace of her imprisonment. Arnold Garber the Random House fiction editor, Patricia Klein the Columbia comparative literature professor, Tobias Sleight the Village Voice art critic, and Rachel Ginsburg the SoHo fashion designer were excellent conversationalists, prepared to discourse on those topics Inez particularly favored, from epistemology to gender politics, eighteenth-century novels to post-impressionism.

  For all this, she soon came to regard Atoll K as indubitably the worst place on Earth. The principal source of her misery was the local tofu industry. Throughout the first two months of her incarceration, Inez passed many hours in the soybean fields, plucking pods from the stumpy plants, and many more hours in the sprawling open-air pavilion, extracting the seeds and turning them into milk—a tedious method that entailed soaking, grinding, boiling, and straining the harvest. When sufficient fluid was in hand, Inez and her colleagues would pour it into cauldrons filled with calcium sulfite. The mixture quickly solidified, whereupon the workers upended the cauldrons, spilling the coagulated contents onto picnic tables. With the help of canoe paddles, everyone then sculpted the curds into the sort of low-grade tofu that tumors found delectable.

  At no point in the process were the prisoners exempt from the prying perceptions and remorseless appendages of their overlords. Within the first month of Inez’s incarceration, all seven squids reached maturity, each growing as large as the Goodyear blimp, and with their gargantuan proportions came a corresponding increase in viciousness. Even the shortest hiatus in tofu production, whether real or imagined, was met with the sting of a tentacle. Barely an hour went by in which a worker was not flogged for presumably shirking his duties. One particularly malicious neoplasm, Arnold Garber’s pancreatic tumor, whipped its former host so fiercely that the poor man had to spend three days recovering from his lacerations in the community’s makeshift infirmary.

  “I’m missing the larger picture here,” said Inez to Barry. “What’s Philoghast’s game?”

  “I wish I knew,” said Barry. “Perhaps it’s a sociological experiment.”

  “The frontiers of knowledge,” muttered Inez. “Dr. Rukh, come back, all is forgiven.”

  “More like the frontiers of sadism,” said Patricia Klein.

  “Our imprisonment seems utterly without purpose,” noted Tobias Sleight. “I’m happy to be my tumor’s keeper—but must I also be its minion?”

  “Perhaps there’s a hidden harmony on Atoll K, but we’re too self-involved to notice it,” said Rachel Ginsburg.

  “‘To hope till hope from its own wreck creates the thing it contemplates,’” said Inez.

  “What?’ said Rachel.

  “Shelley.”

  Beyond the promiscuous application of its tentacles, Inez’s glioblastoma found other ways to make her life awful. For some reason, the neoplasm had developed a penchant for seafood, and so it required her to get up before dawn each morning, launch a fishing dory, and trawl the waters off the western shore for cod. It was all unspeakably Hemingwayesque, The Middle-Aged Woman and the Sea. On the average day she caught nothing, and her unforgiving squid flogged her accordingly.

  Boat, oars, open water: under other circumstances, those three facts would have prompted Inez to entertain fantasies of escape. Invariably she was deterred by what befell Tobias Sleight, who one drizzly November day boarded a smack and rowed into the fog bank when he should have been checking his overlord’s lobster pots. Instantly the tumor gave chase, straightaway snagging the fugitive. Tobias ended up bound to a rock like Prometheus, held fast by a tentacle, a posture the malignancy required him to maintain for two days. Only through sheer luck and a hearty constitution did the young man elude death from thirst and exposure.

  Before the year was out, two more tumors came to live on the island, an ovarian neoplasm and another glioblastoma, followed shortly thereafter by the corresponding cancer survivors. The newcomers, former NYU students from wealthy families, moved into adjacent cottages. In her precancerous life, Justine Norton had studied anthropology. Before going under Philoghast’s knife, George Traymore had imagined becoming a lawyer.

  Although they both worked assiduously in the soybean fields and the processing pavilion, Justine and George were inevitably assaulted by their squids. When Inez saw these two thrashed and blameless young people lying on their cots in the infirmary, moaning and bleeding, something snapped within her. From that moment onward, she knew herself to be at war with the overlords of Atoll K. Somehow, some way, come hell, high water, or an alliance of the two, she would engineer the extinction of these fiends without faces.

  Not until the following spring did a promising epiphany bloom in Inez’s imagination. She was laboring in the soybean fields, sowing seeds with an eye to an abundant autumn harvest, occasionally thinking about Attack of the Crab Monsters, when suddenly her ruminations bore fruit.

  Among the most impressive traits of the giant mutant crabs was their ability to draw intellectual nourishment from those they devoured. In consuming a human brain, a Corman crustacean acquired the person’s mind en passant, so that in time the monster’s nervous system became the locus of a psychic community. Inez now speculated that, just as the movie’s voracious beasts were keen to incorporate their victims’ neuronal matter, so might the Atoll K squids be enticed into absorbing somatic substances from their former hosts. Unlike the benevolently expanded consciousness of a mutant crab, however, the side effects of such assimilation would be biologically disruptive—so disruptive, in fact, as to seal the tumor’s doom.

  “To put it crudely,” she told Barry, Meredith, and Arnold later than night, speaking in a low whisper as the three huddled conspiratorially in her cottage, “we must give ourselves to our neoplasms, mind and body and soul—but mostly body. Their DNA is pledged to a deviant evolution, with karyotypes as twisted as Dr. Caligari’s cane. Our cells, by contrast, are paragons of order and balance—and therefore intrinsically hostile to aneuploid nuclei.”

  “By that reasoning, Inez, the tofu should be making the squids sick, but instead they’re thriving on the stuff,” Arnold protested.

  “Unlike the soybeans, each of us is the natural chromosomal enemy of his tumor. We threaten to bring symmetry to creatures that thrive on cellular incoherence.”

  “In other words, I could try giving my breast tumor a bad case of myself,” said Meredith.

  “Exactly.”

  The computer geek said, “And I could arrange for my bladder tumor to develop a cancer called Barry Curtis.”

  “The males among us will have no trouble making the necessary infusions,” said Inez. “When it comes to the women, each attack must be keyed to the proper time of month.”

  Ten nights later, Inez’s menstrual cycle having peaked, she stood naked before her glioblastoma, its protoplasm shimmering in the light of a gibbous moon.

  “Even a god must assuage its libido.”

  My what?

  “Call your sexual appetites what you will—they cannot be denied.”

  What exactly are you proposing?

  “You are a creature of many nodes and innumerable extrusions. Some of them are surely erogenous.”

  Perhaps.

  “Be honest.”

  I said, “Perhaps.”

  “Don’
t lie to me.”

  All right. True enough. Some of my nodes are erogenous.

  “Allow me to fulfill your deepest desires.”

  The glioblastoma forthwith waved one of its stalks, a fluted protrusion no larger than a carrot.

  S’il vous plaît.

  Inez pressed her bare flesh against the tumor’s gelatinous membrane and, using its spines and crevices as rungs, climbed toward the ardent stalk. The journey had nothing to recommend it. The creature stank of rotting seaweed, decaying fish, and rampant carcinoma. At last she reached her destination. Having ascended the squid without mishap, she hummed a hymn of triumph, then spread-eagled herself across the neoplasm’s central hump. Inevitably she thought of Ahab preparing to thrust a lance into his bête blanche—from hell’s heart I stab at thee, and all that.

  “I shall fuck you till you become delirious with delight,” said Inez, impaling herself. “I shall fuck you till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”

  You have my permission.

  “Now and forever, your gratification is my gladness.”

  Ahhhh…

  Upon hearing that Inez had mounted and seduced her squid, the other prisoners resolved to enact their own such assignations. Throughout the month of June, Atoll K became the scene of an epic and unprecedented orgy. Owing to the universal workings of a ubiquitous Eros, each tumor received from its former host prolific doses of humanigens. It occurred to Inez that menstrual blood and seminal fluid had probably not been put to such a purpose before, but that was no reason to doubt the efficacy of her scheme.

  Day and night, through sun and rain, the couplings continued. The tumors took palpable satisfaction in the new ethos of Atoll K, even to the point of declining to punish perceived sloth in the soybean fields and alleged inefficiency in the processing pavilion. By kissing their squids, or so it seemed, the prisoners had given karkínos a new understanding of itself, awakening the better angels of its nature. For the moment, at least, concupiscence had domesticated the crab monsters.