by Anna Tambour
Table of Contents
Introduction
Klokwerk's Heart- 1 -
- 2 -
The Eel
The Curse of Hyperica
Temptation of the Seven Scientists
The Afterlife at Seahorse Drive
The It and the Ecstasy
Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes
The Chosen
Stargazing
Kidnapped!
The Helford Deal
Me-Too
Crumpled Sheets and Death-Fluffies
Sweat, Joy, and Thunderation
Valley of the Sugars of Salt- 1 -
- 2 -
- 3 -
- 4 -
- 5 -
Catechismic Chaos
Dr. Babiram's Potentials
Exhibition
The Refloat of D'Urbe Isle
The Apple
The Rest Cure
The Magic Lino
Call me Omniscient
Bluebird Pie
Picking Blueberries
The Wages of Food-Play
Öm- 1 -
- 2 -
Footnotes
The Ocean in Kansas
Monterra's Deliciosa- 1 -
- 2 -
- 3 -
- 4 -
Literary Titan, Asher E. (huh?) Treat
Pearls
Publishing history
Roos at the beach
The Arms of Love and Death
Lorimer's Next
Cooks' Tricks Nix Sticks
Pococurante
The Onuspedia
The Purloined Tome
Wodehouse, Snails, and Dramatic Interest
About the author
Monterra's Deliciosa
& Other Tales &
Anna Tambour
Monterra's Deliciosa
& Other Tales &
More than 30 stories and poems from an author described by SF Site as "one of the most delightful, original, and varied new writers on hand".
A landmark collection of short fiction from a dazzling new talent. The stories range from sharp satire, through fairytale and tall tale, science fiction and fantasy, to passionate mainstream studies of life in modern Australia. Reading these stories, you quickly come to realise that you will be surprised, and surprised again.
Follow the seven scientists in search of a great theory, naturally enough (and it does seem natural in this author's hands) in a forest teeming with great theories; follow Werner, who creates intricate living machines while Gretina knits for the needy, a quite extraordinary love story where the everyday is always juxtaposed with the fantastic and real magic is never far from the surface. Flip from the whimsy of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels through the Cévennes as told by his donkey, to fears and a distorted sense of scale seen as only a child can see. Journey from a tough Australian farming community to a seaside retirement colony, to a 1970s alternative community, to rural Iowa and beyond.
Prepared to be unprepared. Be careful in here: there is an author at play within these pages. Anna Tambour is having fun with you and she has a wicked sense of humour.
Includes 17,000 words of bonus material.
Chosen in two categories (Collection and Novelette) in the Locus 2003 Recommended Reading List.
Published by infinity plus at Smashwords
www.infinityplus.co.uk/books
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© Anna Tambour 2003, 2011
cover © Anna Tambour
ISBN: 9781301050291
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.
Shorter edition first published by Prime Books September 2003
Wildside Press(September 1, 2003) Hardcover and Paperback
The moral right of Anna Tambour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
Electronic Version by Baen Books
Introduction
Somewhere deep in the Australian bush, surrounded by an extended family of cockatiels and koalas, wombats, kangaroos and fruit bats, there lives an author who writes miraculous little fabulations, each crammed with invention and insight and humour and above all a quirky difference that makes them quite unlike the work of any other. She tends these creations, breathes life into each one and lets them loose into a far-too-often-uncaring world.
These little gems, for all their vitality, cannot exist in a vacuum. Publishing is an industry, and a competitive one at that. In my own country alone (albeit at the opposite end of the world to the one where these stories are created), tens of thousands of new books are published every year; among them, so many talented voices are stifled, drowned out in the clamour. These voices need nurturing, they need attention — particularly the special ones, like that of our whimsical outback author.
Fortunately, Anna Tambour is starting to get that attention, quite deservedly so, and she is certain to get much more. Even in a crowded, clamorous throng, some voices stand out above the others — the loudest, for sure, but also those that are different, the ones with wit and wisdom, the ones that dare to surprise.
Anna Tambour's is one of the voices that stands out, and for all the best reasons.
~
I talked my way into writing the foreword to this volume on the strength of a handful of off-beat and quite brilliant stories Anna submitted to me for the infinity plus website. Now, having read all the contents of this collection, I have been struck over and over by a series of triumphs.
Much of the time, I have read with a smile on my face, not only for the wit these stories contain, but for the sheer audacity of the author. In many cases, I start reading and then find myself wondering how on earth she expects to get away with this premise or that. Describe them to a friend, as I did recently, and they often sound, to put it bluntly, quite silly. There's one about Robert Louis Stevenson's travels through the Cévennes which is told by his donkey; another about a magical piece of linoleum; and another which is a potted history of food, and God's distaste for our tastes, not forgetting His secret garden atop Everest... Yet, just as that how-could-she-try-this thought strikes, so it is dismissed by a twist, a turn, a feint, and you find yourself swallowed up in whichever strange conceit is currently being explored.
There is far too much in this collection to make it a worthwhile exercise to itemise its contents here, but I cannot go without dwelling on the many highlights.
Many of the stories contained here take the form of the traditional fairytale, although they are re-cast in a way that is distinctly Tambourian. "Temptation of the Seven Scientists" tells the stories of seven scientists in search of a Great Theory — naturally enough (and it does seem natural, in this author's hands), in a forest teeming with Great Theories. This tale charms with its sheer up-frontness, and its zestful toying with the reader. In "Klokwerk's Heart" Werner creates intricate living machines while Gretina knits for the needy. On the surface, this is quite an extraordinary love story, but in this author's work the everyday is always juxtaposed with the fantastic and real magic is never far from the surface
, deepening and questioning.
Quickly, you learn to expect to be surprised and then suprised again by these stories. "Crumpled Sheets and Death-Fluffies" flips and flops from a heartfelt portrait of a writer's existence, to intense horror and then wicked black humour. Roald Dahl: meet Anna Tambour. "The Apple" is a beautiful vignette taking the reader right back to what it is like to be a small child: the fears, the distorted sense of scale of what matters and what does not, again with that dark, dark sense of fun at play.
Anna writes about the natural world as only one with deep knowledge and understanding can do. "The Chosen" is a wonderful parable of human intervention in nature, as great multitudes worship the gods of unnatural selection and assisted migration, and the strong prepare to inherit the earth. "Valley of the Sugars of Salt" sets out as the straightforward tale of a man, successful in business but not in marriage, retreating to the country to grow gourmet and largely forgotten fruit. Inevitably, the story bucks and surprises and the ground shifts drastically beneath the reader as the orchard becomes something of a cooperative venture.
Some of these stories are almost straight pieces of fiction, but the author can never quite resist the opportunity to dig and twist, to subvert and surprise, to confound any expectations we might foolishly have. "The Afterlife at Seahorse Drive" is about as close to mainstream as we get, a stunning evocation of the upheaval of a big move into retirement, from a tough Australian farming community to an embryonic seaside idyll. "The Rest Cure" shows that our author can do moody and disturbingly intense, too, but always there comes that point where everything begins to shift. And in "Call me Omniscient", well ... how many authors would dare to tell a story from the viewpoint of a story-telling mode: the omniscient? You just can't do this sort of thing, and it certainly shouldn't work as well as it does in this quite ingenious and audacious story. "Picking Blueberries" is one of my absolute favourites, a superb portrait of an alternative community in the early 1970s, told with a child's-eye simplicity by a young resident. There's a novel here: it really is good.
The title piece and the longest story in the book, "Monterra's Deliciosa", is another true highlight, the story of a boy born into an Iowa farming family who is destined for an entirely different kind of life in which everyone makes the reckoning of what price is worth paying for the life you want to lead.
There: you should be prepared now. Prepared to be unprepared. Be careful in here. There is an author at play within these pages. Anna Tambour is having fun with you and she has a wicked sense of humour.
You have been warned.
Keith Brooke
Brightlingsea, May 2003
Klokwerk's Heart
- 1 -
Through the high window, a shaft of sharp summer evening sun fell into the silent room, pierced the openings in the skull, and threw its light out the other side to paint on the white wall the stark silhouette, crouching as always, of the pterodactyl. Its wide-open amused eyes and its incongruous smile always disturbed Werner, but not as much as the Volkswagen-sized raptor's towering companion, the tyrannosaur. Together, their forms on the wall resembled nothing so much as some malevolent master walking his dog on a rainy night.
It was 7:15 p.m., one hour and fifteen minutes into Werner's first round. All visitors had been shooed out the doors hours ago. Werner averted his eyes from master and dog, and scuttled on his soft-soled shoes through the faintest miasma of dust, out the doorway on the far side, to the small low-ceilinged room beyond. His breath came out in a small exhalation, but his shoulders were still curved in tension like the back of a wooden chair.
Holding his breath again without noticing the lack of oxygen, he stopped and wiped his hands on his uniform, startling himself as a thumb caught in his key bouquet, bringing a small but harsh jangle into the silence. He didn't look at his watch.
"Klokwerk," the other guards called him. Always exactly on time in his rounds, meticulous in every bit of his reporting. In twenty years at the museum, there had rarely been anything to report. The after-hours visitors had only ever been the odd wayward pigeons and occasional mouse and rat plagues in the kitchen. Both the flying and the scurrying invasions were always quickly ended by poisoning. As for rats gnawing the many life-like stuffed specimens, the reek of naphtha was so strong on several floors that many guards who thought of trying for this easy museum stint discarded the idea after a brief reconnaissance.
Across the box-hedged public square: the great art museum, the building of thrills. Only two years ago two alert public servants had wrangled down a lithely photogenic female would-be heister, and all the young ambitious guards now roamed those halls, all dreaming of the opportunity to catch their own thief, literally hanging from the skylight.
Here in the natural-history museum, though, no crowds of tourists ever mobbed the entrance. No plans were made to steal the ancient armadillo the size of a pony, the stuffed walrus watching the little boar so benignly for, what, a hundred years? The butterflies that gazed back at you from their wings, even the marvellous crystals in the Mineral Hall. None of them was worth what a square of canvas with paint could bring. Thus only the dregs of unambitious night guards ever took up posts in this haven of perpetual boredom. The halls reverberated with children's voices every weekend, but after the doors were closed for the night, only the barest skeleton of night-shift staff roamed the huge shadowy building, and only in the most meticulously unimaginative, patterned, and clockwork way.
~
Werner unbuttoned his guard jacket, then his blue regulation shirt. He spread the shirt open in a neat V down to his waist. Underneath, he wore an old but neatly patched vest, covered with a patchwork of idiosyncratic pockets, each closed with its own just-as-individual fastening.
He'd found the vest years ago in one of those shops that sells knives with deer-horn handles, rabbit's-foot picnic forks, skinning blades of lead-hued steel, whistles cast in the shapes of hounds. The shop was on his way to work, and as he walked the same route every day, by the second day that he noticed the vest in the window, he was burning with desire. He had no interest in the other things, or even in learning what the vest was for, but he knew it was right for him. It was the night when shops stayed open late, so he pushed open the bell-jangling door and bought the thing as soon as it was in his hands, without blinking at the price.
Since then, there had rarely been a day he had not worn it. Of course, this was the first time he had worn the vest somewhere other than at the big round table at home. The table where they companionably ate their meals, especially the feast Gretina made for their nightly 4 a.m. dinner. Never a can opened or a delicatessen visited would be good enough for her Werner, according to Gretina. Luscious liver soup, home-made blood sausage, her incomparable hasenpfeffer (spicy enough that they sneezed), spaetzle that were heavy and chewy as a man likes, cherry dumplings to make them both imagine a countryside that they had only ever visited in their imaginations. Everything was worth licking the plate, and Gretina made sure that they both did. "It makes you wild, Werner," she giggled, as he was always the most gentle, mild-mannered man.
After their dinner, when he had washed and wiped the dishes, and she had swept up any errant crumbs and removed the snowy tablecloth to replace it with green baize, they both took their projects to the table for their after-dinner day-dawning enjoyment, the final preparation being Werner taking his vest out of its drawer in the heavy wooden many-drawered cabinet and, with a muffled clank, putting it on.
Once Werner tried to calculate how many kilometres of wool Gretina had knitted, but lost count at her twelfth enthusiastic project. Not that he cared, for her clicking needles were the sound of home to him, and the look of satisfaction as she finished each piece was like the taste of her cherry dumplings to his soul.
And the projects? Too many to remember. Knitted scarves for Africans (did it get cold there? He wondered), hats for children who had undergone radiation therapy, blankets for refugees; now she was in the middle of a long project with lots a
nd lots of little things that looked like teapot cosies, but were jackets for penguins recovering from oil spill injury.
As her needles clicked, she watched Werner, seated across the grass-green circle from her. He worked with his tiny tools, dozens of them, to make incomprehensible objects. All small, smaller than her hand; all like nothing she had ever seen. They whirred, they pulsed, they pumped when he stuck tiny tubes in them. They crawled along the table till they fell into her lap as laughter filled the room. Silvery from Gretina, a lark's warble with delicate beauty to the trill, a sharp contrast to her plain dumpy features. A shy, quiet laugh from Werner, his thin face with its pockmarks suffused by the joy that love gives.
No two machines that Werner made looked alike. Try as he would, he could never convince Gretina that they were all, in fact, variations on a theme—machines of life.
Werner, on the other hand, had no trouble recognising a theme—well, two, really—in Gretina's projects: compassion for someone somewhere, and stars.
In everything she knitted, she placed stars somewhere in the pattern—in the design of the stitches or with contrasting colour, she made sure that there was at least one star in every item she made.
Why stars, he asked her once.
Her lips pursed in concentration. "I don't remember exactly to explain. A story from my mother. Stars shine upon you whether you see them or not... Something like that." She smiled a bit sheepishly. "And a penguin wearing a star seems happier."
The reason didn't make any sense to Werner, but the happiness did.
As to the compassion, they were both sad not to have had children. Gretina was allergic to cat and dog fur, and caged birds made them both shudder. So her excess love had to go somewhere. And it went into her busy needles knitting, knitting, while she watched her husband with awe as he cut steel with his precision drill with a smooth sound like slicing cheese, and a curl coming off crisp and pure as the peel of an apple.