FSF, October-November 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  Ludo goes to Palimpsest in search, initially, of his missing wife. Sei goes because she has always been obsessed with trains, and she can hear and speak to the hearts of the trains in the city—because they're alive, like wild creatures, and they bear passengers not by some tidy exchange of tickets, but rather by the cunning and determination of those who desire to be passengers. November is found by bees. Oleg? By the living form of his dead sister.

  But the only way to return to the city, once they've seen it once, is to find other lovers who also bear the mark. The mark is a destination; the people who bear it—in many cases—are totally incidental. They seek each other out of need, out of addiction, and they barely see each other at all. There's only one way to reach Palimpsest, not as a tourist, but as a citizen.

  And to gain that one small possible entrance, a war was fought in Palimpsest itself, and half the city has died. The war is not over, although people speak often as if it is; the war won't be over, until that final door is open. The door, of course, is the Quarto; the four pages (or eight pages) that are the building block of books. Sei, November, Oleg, and Ludo.

  The only joy in the book is theirs, and it occurs late, and it occurs at cost and with pain, blood, sacrifice, a giving over of parts of self in service to making the dream their only reality.

  I could not put this book down. When I start a Valente novel, I never can put down the book unfinished, because I find her voice and her words so strong, her metaphors so striking, they draw me in.

  I'm left wondering—still, after days and days—how I feel about the book. Because in some ways, the four exist for each other until the moment they achieve their dreams—the dreams of a fickle city, a place in which the loneliness of a teenager justifies the war that killed and mutilated so very many of its citizens. If there is a tie between Ludo and November, it is the ambivalent tie of worshipper to god—and, you know, we crucify ours, more or less.

  I can read about them, though; I can read about the alienation and the isolation and the loneliness of these characters—and it speaks to me while I read. But after? The novel seems to elevate all of these things; Palimpsest seems to imply that only by celebrating, by devoting oneself to alienation, isolation, and madness can one achieve that joyful entry into a very ambivalent paradise. And it must be ambivalent because desire and need drive the city, speaking to it, and those whose needs are loudest, like the squeaky wheel, get the grease. In the end, though, the city is a Palimpsest, and the desires of others will eventually overwrite yours if your needs are now met, obliterating your tale.

  But ... it makes me think, and it lingers in the mind where more pleasant tales drift away, unanchored.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelet: BANDITS OF THE TRACE by Albert E. Cowdrey

  I didn't see the first issue, which was unfortunate, because I was just about the right age to get interested. As far as I can remember, my introduction to F&SF—anyway, my in-depth introduction—came about this way. In the summer of ‘64 I joined a house party in upstate NY to escape the intolerable New Orleans heat. I had friends in the Village, stopped off to carouse a bit, arrived late to the party and found that every bed in the farmhouse had been taken. I received temporary quarters in the barn, which was already inhabited by several thousand chipmunks. If they'd only slept there I wouldn't have minded, but the little devils had built a freeway under my bed and did a lot of commuting. So sleep was out, but there was a light in the barn, and in an old cupboard, voilà! I discovered a linear yard or so of dusty F&Ss. I got in some good reading that night, also the one following. When I was upgraded to a bed in the farmhouse, I took them with me (the magazines, not the chippies) and finished almost every story in such time as eating, swimming, badminton, boozing, and fooling around permitted. I bet very few of your other contributors have been introduced to F&SF by members of the Order Rodentia!—Albert Cowdrey

  She'd guarded it long and guarded it well. She'd lived in darkness until she turned white, all of her. She'd watched the bleaching happen, slowly, back before her eyes went opaque and before new layers of soil closed off the last dim trickle of light.

  Never mind. She had other ways of being aware.

  She depended on burrowing creatures like rats and moles, first to let a little air in—enough for her, because she breathed so slowly—then to supply her food—not much, but enough. After rains, water seeped through the crumbling brickwork, so she could drink. What more did she need?

  * * * *

  Professor Kendall Keyes sat at his desk staring at a page from the first (and so far only) chapter of his forever forthcoming history of frontier life in the South.

  God, how frustrating. The treasure was lying right in front of him, but he couldn't crack the code, not even with the aid of a Gideon Bible he'd snitched from a bedside table in the Beau Rivage casino, on his last gambling jaunt to Biloxi. Yet the code had to be simple—an invention of two farm girls living in the backwoods....

  And how about his other clue to the mystery? He glowered at a pile of five lead plates, discolored by time, each one an inch thick and a foot square, each with a single word gouged into it, probably by a steel chisel. Ten bucks apiece at Tom's Trash & Treasures, and for what? Unless he could find out where they came from, the plates were useless too.

  "She-it,” he said.

  He spun his squealing swivel chair to face the window and glared at the campus of Central Mississippi State College—the red-brick classroom buildings and labs, the galleried residence halls, the cushioned lawns and twining paths. Students sat on the long, low branches of the live oaks, munching sandwiches or poring over books or fiddling with iPods and Blackberries and Christ-knew-whats. The tall pines of Reservoir Park provided a green backing; a sign on a distant water tower hailed Bonaparte, Mississippi: A Great Place to Live!

  A great place to rot, thought Keyes sourly. How could he have drifted into a life that was so unworthy of him? He spun the chair back and pulled a half-worked Times crossword from the middle drawer of his desk. If the choice was between writing his book and working a puzzle, he'd work the puzzle. Though he wasn't making much progress there, either. Uncompleted words left the crossword looking like Swiss cheese, only with square holes. He was glaring at it when somebody began tapping on his door—probably a damn student.

  "Entrez-vous,” he said, hoping the knocker would think he'd got the professor of French by mistake, and move on. Instead, the door opened about a foot and Houdini's bearded face inserted itself into the aperture.

  "Well, Mr. Marx,” Keyes said. “What a surprise."

  Bernard Marx had won his nickname as the Famous Disappearing Student, signing up for dozens of courses, sitting in on one or two lectures, then dropping out. Watching him sidle in—skinny, randomly attired, tripping over the untied laces of his Reeboks—Keyes thought he knew what he'd come for.

  "I suppose you want an Incomplete,” he said hopefully. One less blue book to read, come exam time.

  "Nuh-uh. Actually, I'm enjoying your class."

  "You are?"

  "Yeah. I like all that frontier stuff. Men were men in those days. What I'd like is some extra reading. I've read all the stuff on the bibliography and it's okay, but.... Hey. Is that the Times Sunday crossword?"

  For a moment Keyes just sat there, struck dumb by the notion of a student who'd not only completed the readings two weeks into the term, but wanted more. Meantime Houdini approached his desk, peering through expensive-looking rimless glasses that enlarged his eyes to the semblance of baroque goldfish.

  "Maybe you're not gonna finish that?” he queried hopefully. “My Times didn't come this week, and I really, really need my puzzle fix."

  "As a matter of fact,” said Keyes, regaining his voice, “I am.” Then added, with reluctance, "If I can just get the damn theme. Something to do with Wayne Somebody or Somebody Wayne. I don't think it's that old movie, Wayne's World, it's something else. For instance, this clue says Wayne's town? Six letters, starts wit
h G. I've been thinking of John Wayne and western towns, but—"

  "Bruce,” said Houdini.

  "What?"

  "Bruce Wayne. Batman. Batman's hot right now. Try Gotham."

  Keyes entered Gotham, and it fit. “How about Wayne's marching foe?” he asked.

  "Penguin. March of the Penguins, get it?"

  Keyes did. What was this guy doing at Central, anyway? He asked if Houdini were local.

  "Oh, yeah. Dad moved here the year before I was born. He was a tobacco lawyer. For a while he was the king of torts. You know, tort lawyers love Mississippi, because all they have to do is show a local jury a big corporation and they whack it with a billion-dollar judgment. Dad used to say, ‘What a great state. If only they had a decent deli.’”

  "Your Dad's, uh, deceased?"

  "No. In prison. Got five years for trying to bribe a judge. It's not all bad. With him in the slammer I've been able to avoid the Ivy League and all that succeed-or-die crap. I study what I please, play games, work puzzles. Mom's too busy shopping to care. But Dad gets out next month, so I'm afraid the good times may be over."

  Keyes gazed thoughtfully at Houdini. “About the extra reading."

  "Oh, yeah. Right."

  "I'll make a list of books you can get through interlibrary loan. Oh, and I've been working on a book of my own."

  Keyes took the dog-eared printout of his manuscript from under the Gideon Bible and handed it over. “Just one chapter so far, but you might enjoy reading it. It's kind of a hundred-and-seventy-year-old slasher movie, and it ends with a really neat puzzle. Maybe,” he suggested, in an offhand sort of way, “you can solve it."

  "My kind of stuff,” beamed Houdini, taking the pages. “And I like the title. Okay, okay, okay."

  As Keyes was seeing him to the door (an uncommon courtesy for him) Houdini tripped over his shoelaces again twice. Big eyes glued to the first page, he'd already begun reading the chapter that Keyes had titled—

  BANDITS OF THE TRACE

  Among the iconic figures of the early frontier—men like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie—Robert Tole stood out, less famous than they, but a lot meaner.

  Tole was a bandit who worked the Natchez Trace, a 440-mile woodland track running south from Nashville, up hill and down dale, into fathomless marshes on one side and out on the other, abominable in wet weather and dangerous at all seasons. After selling their goods in New Orleans, flatboatmen used it to return to their homes in the Ohio country. Settlers used it to move south and west into the newly opened lands of the Mississippi Valley. The men wending northward had their profits tucked away in their saddlebags, while the people wending southward were burdened with everything they owned, money and animals and seed corn and furniture and featherbeds—all the whatnot they hoped to use in their new land.

  For bandits, opportunity beckoned. No single haul was enormously rich, but the Trace yielded good, steady, dependable profits for enterprising scoundrels willing to shoot their victims down, gut them like fish, fill their carcasses with gravel, and dispose of them in God's own wet graveyard, the eternally flowing fourth-largest river on Earth, so conveniently close at hand.

  None did a better business than Robert Tole. His success depended on his rangy, powerful body—his deadly shooting eye—and, more than anything else, on his clever and ruthless lover, Justice Urquhart. Exactly why this small, intense female villain bore such an improbable name was a story in itself. Her father, Jacob Urquhart—known as Wrath-of-God to his neighbors—spent six days a week farming a spread on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. On Sunday he morphed into a particularly ferocious clergyman of the Sure and Everlasting Hellfire sect, and every one of his endless sermons was attended by his long-suffering wife and by his daughters, Justice and Chastity, the only survivors of a brood of seven whose other members perished in infancy.

  "What's in a name?” the farmer-clergyman had wondered, decided a lot, and named his girls (he had no sons) for virtues he particularly admired, to give them something to live up to. The results were not encouraging. The others, if they'd lived, might have exhibited Faith, Prudence, Charity, Mercy, and Wisdom, but the only ones who actually grew up were influenced by their names in reverse, if at all: Justice turned out a bandit, while Chastity became a whore. Detecting their appetite for sin, Wrath-of-God cast out of his house these “double damn'd Dotters of Satan,” leaving them freer than most women of the time to find their own way in the world.

  Years later, Justice told her slave Jimson grim tales of her childhood—of endless graces delivered while the dinner chilled; of labor in the fields “from can't-see to can't-see;” of beatings administered with leather harness or a willow branch; of hiding from her father's fury in a cistern, trying to support her younger sister while keeping her own head above water. Shortly after the girls left home, the farmhouse caught fire one winter night and consumed both parents. Justice hinted broadly that the fire had been no accident—though whether she was telling the truth or merely boasting, nobody ever knew.

  How she met Robert Tole is equally uncertain. Perhaps at a barn-raising, or a church service, or a quilting-bee. But it seems more likely that she met him thirty miles downriver in the hell-raising precincts of Natchez-under-the-Hill, a perfect place for birds of their feather to flock together. There Jim Bowie (the Alamo still far in his future) made his hunting knife famous by driving it into the heart of an enemy during a brawl on a sandbar. There carousing river-rats like Mike Fink butted and gouged each other for cheating at faro, then relaxed in the arms of ladies as repugnant as themselves. Chastity worked in the brothels for a time, and perhaps Justice did too, but the records are few and obscure, and all we know for certain is that she told her slave boy, “I larnt Sin as I larnt the Bible, in a hard School."

  In any case, she and Robert Tole found each other. Perhaps the Devil was the real matchmaker. He certainly had few if any more enthusiastic disciples, and—until Bonnie and Clyde rolled across the South in their flivver a hundred years later—he had none more loyal to their unhallowed union.

  Exactly how the diminutive Justice (she stood hardly more than four feet high at a time when the average woman was closer to five) ruled the hulking and brutal Robert was one of the mysteries of the time. For rule him she did.

  Consider sex. A confirmed womanizer before he met Justice, he became as monogamous as a churchwarden afterward. Some people suggested that her secret was a Byzantine panoply of sexual skills she'd acquired Under-the-Hill and deployed to keep him drained of lust. But many believed that Tole stayed faithful to Justice simply because he was afraid of her—she was a dead shot, and absolutely fearless. Whatever the inner secrets of their relationship, they made a formidable pair.

  Picture a party of settlers moving down the Trace (nobody sane rode it alone). A guide on horseback leads the way, followed by yoked oxen pulling wagons, perhaps with a slave or two prodding them on. The women are riding in the wagons, nursing babies or chewing snuff or gossiping; the men, armed to the teeth, ride or walk alongside. Moving at two or three miles an hour, the immigrants lurch and canter into one of the marshy spots, where the trail narrows and quaking bogs clothed in fever green stretch away to either side. The undergrowth is dense, the insect chorus loud as a church organ.

  Suddenly a shot rings out. The guide topples from his horse. Crows take flight, screeching like rusty hinges. Children are crying, a woman screams. Gunmen hidden in the brush begin firing into the demoralized settlers. A startled horse plunges into the bog and promptly sinks to its saddle girth. A rider at the back of the column turns to flee, but Justice steps from the undergrowth holding a horse-pistol in a two-handed grip and shoots him down. Robert Tole, having stashed the long rifle he used to open the attack, arrives with a pepper-pot pistol in each hand and begins shooting anything that moves. Three or four hireling villains emerge from the brush to finish the slaughter. Men, women, and children are butchered and some are scalped, for frontiersmen as much as Indians like to carr
y away a trophy from a good day's hunting.

  The settler party has been erased. The bodies are loaded into one of the wagons, hauled to the river, gutted, and thrown in. Giant catfish swarm to the feast. Meanwhile Justice divides the loot, and the hirelings take their shares and slip away, to reappear next day as peaceful farmers or even as substantial citizens of the brand-new hamlet of Bonaparte. The lion's share of the valuables are taken to Tole's Cavern—of which, more in a moment. The wreckage is set afire. By sundown that part of the forest is empty of human life. Even the crows are quiet.

  That night the chief villains relax in the Cavern. Armed now with a goose-quill pen instead of a pistol, Justice sits writing on a mahogany lap-desk while Robert dictates. “Hereafter fine Gentlemen had better call me Robert Toll, for each and every one that passes along the Trace must pay Toll to him who rules the wild Countrey, the which is not some Quarter-Wit in Washington, nor some strutting Ass in a Militia Uniform, but is in fact Mine Own Self."

  When the letter is finished, folded, and closed with sealing-wax, a local boy will earn himself a handful of the cheap paper money called shinplasters by delivering it to the Natchez post office. In time the editor of the Advertiser or the Southern Galaxy will tickle his readers by printing it under a headline like The Road-Agent Tole Again Boasts of His Infamous Crimes.