FSF, December 2007

by Spilogale, Inc

  It went two places.

  To Carl Marsalis, the Black Man of the title, a genetically modified human known, in Morgan's future, as a variant thirteen. Created to be a soldier and raised to become a sociopath, Marsalis, like all variant thirteens, was given a choice when the war was over: Ship out to Mars or live on Earth in quarantine in a concentration camp. He shipped out to Mars.

  And won a lottery back. He's now employed by UNGLA, the future United Nations, and he's sent to track down rogue variant thirteens, and either turn them over to the aforementioned camps, or, more often the outcome, kill them.

  It's a living.

  But his living in Jesusland—or the United Republic—is about to be cut short by a sting operation, and he winds up in jail. This doesn't have a lot to do with the book's opening. There is an investigation into a shuttle that's landed in the water. The shuttle is the property of COLIN, and the COLIN investigative team, Tom Norton and Sevgi Ertekin, have come to look at the scene of the slaughter.

  Sevgi, aware that there are malfunctions with the capsules that are supposed to keep travelers in deep sleep for the length of a very long and very tedious voyage, takes one look at the data, and very clearly points out that the cannibalism is not necessarily the act of a crazed lunatic—someone woke up, and someone needed to eat. He chose the only edible or harvestable food on the ship.

  Okay, I admit by this point, the intellectual triggers had fired, and while I was still reading the book with a sense of curiosity about what Morgan was doing with his beginnings, I was probably now committed to at least finishing the novel. I also thought, “If Morgan stripped out the SFnal elements of this book, he'd make a million dollars writing high tech thrillers.” (I was totally wrong. He can't strip them out; the characters are a product of their context, and it's wed to those elements.)

  The novel draws Sevgi and Marsalis together because the perpetrator of a series of crimes that are also being investigated is a variant thirteen.

  All of the elements of the book are related. Marsalis intends to take a flyer when they drag him out of jail and onto the job. He doesn't intend to get involved with the COLIN investigation, because once he's out of Florida and in the Rim States, UNGLA has greater authority, and he can get himself picked up and returned to what passes for home.

  But ... he doesn't. He starts to play at investigating because Sevgi knows he doesn't intend to stick around, and he's curious. He asks to see VR footage of the crime scene of one of the murders, and as he's walked through the reconstruction of probable events, he calls a halt and tells them what he's pretty certain happened—but it's not the same as their reconstruction, except that both versions end in the death of the victim.

  And somewhere in the tangle of interaction between Sevgi and Marsalis, I got lost—in a good way. I started to care about the characters, to see them as people, and more important, to see them as people that, against expectation, I really cared about. Somewhere in the middle of the book the switch flipped and I could not put the book down until I'd finished it. And started it again. And finished it again.

  I adored this book. It made me wince several times, it made me laugh out loud at least three times, it made me weep, and it surprised me. It was not a light read, and I think some people will have problems with the level of violence, but Morgan can be surprising in his subtlety—possibly because on the surface, there isn't any.

  I started writing this review with an eye to all the slightly more academic things that make it good—structure, writing, pacing, world-building. But in this particular case, while all those things are true, they're almost an excuse for liking the book, so I took them all out and that left me with my reactions, reading it.

  This is the first Richard K. Morgan novel I've read, but it definitely won't be the last—because I read for character, and he understands people. I think in some grudging way, given the cynicism of his universe, he even likes them, and when all is said and done, I will read anything if you can make me care about the characters.

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  Stray by Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert

  Ben Rosenbaum reports that in addition to a forthcoming collection of short stories (as yet untitled, but due out in May), he has also had a big part in an art project called “Anthroptic,” which will open in New York City on October 13 (more information should be available at thepresentgroup.com/info/)

  David Ackert is an actor who also worked on “Anthroptic.” His other work includes the films Suckers and Cool Crime, a short film entitled Blue Plate that he also produced, and parts on television shows such as CSI: Miami and JAG. He is currently producing and appearing in a documentary entitled Voices of Uganda.

  Their first collaboration is a subtle and potent story that reads like it may be the start of a larger work.

  She'd found him by the side of the road: Ivan, who had been prince of the immortals, lying in the long grass. Ivan, against whose knees weeping kings had laid their cheeks; who had collected popes, khans, prophets, martyrs, minstrels, whores, revolutionaries, poets, anarchists, and industrial magnates; who could send armies into the sea with a movement of his hand.

  She'd stopped her Model T where he lay by the side of the road. He was shell-shocked, marooned at the end of one kind of life, an empty carapace, soul-dry. There were a million drifters and Okies and ruined men cluttering the gutters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's America; and Muriel had taken him for a white man at first. Colored doctor's daughter stopping for what looked like a white hobo; the wild danger of that. On that improbable fulcrum, his life had turned.

  He'd told her what he was. She was a mortal; of course she was afraid. But she'd listened; and at the end of that long, mad tale, she'd gotten up from her cedar kitchen table, cleared the teacups, washed them in the sink and dried her hands.

  "I believe you,” she'd said, and some strange sweet leviathan had moved through the dark water within him. He'd studied the grain of the polished cedar wood, not meeting her eyes. She was like a glass he was afraid of dropping. But even without looking, every creak of the floorboards, every clink of the dishes told him: stay.

  * * * *

  The wedding had been a long Sunday in June. The church was bright, with thick white paint over the boards. It seated forty, squeezed together on pine benches—two rows of out-of-town relatives and Muriel's father's old patients had to stand in the back. There was potato salad and coleslaw and grits and greens on the benches outside. The rich smell of the barbecue, the smoke from the grill. Mosquitoes dancing in the afternoon light.

  Muriel smiling and crying and laughing. With Muriel set into the center of his world like a jewel, Ivan was home; when she touched his hand, his enemies became God's wounded children, his centuries of pain and crime a fireside tale to wonder at. In her embrace, Ivan's bitter knowledge was refuted. He was a fool in a garden.

  Without her, the world was a desert of evil beings.

  And he was full of fear—full of fear, that she would go.

  Aunt Gertrude was saying, “No no no, the Monroes, from the other side of the family, you know—I think they out in Kansas. Very respectable. Well let me tell you this, child—I knew that man was perfect for Muriel before she told me he was family. The moment I laid eyes...."

  The women fluttered about Ivan and fussed at him. The men tried out their jokes and stories on him. He nodded and laughed, and watched what their bodies told each other. Yes, he was an out-of-towner, strange, his past unknown; drifter, some said, the kind you want to keep on moving past your town. But that kind settled down sometimes—now look how hard he worked at the mill, when there was work. And she was so happy, look how happy she was. And you know that's what Muriel needed to be satisfied: someone with an air of strangeness, like this green-eyed ageless second cousin who had probably been in the Great War.

  And he hadn't pulled any of his puppeteer's strings. Not one. All on their own, they had chosen him.

  Except Li'l Wallace.

  Li'l
Wallace was polite. He complimented Muriel's dress and he told the men the one about the sailor and the Dutchman. But to Ivan, the man's thoughts were as loud as a siren: How had this stranger, this high yellow “second cousin” with city manners and slippery ways, won Muriel? Li'l Wallace was strong and good-looking and a steady day-shift man at the mill, and he was from around here. Sure, he was dark, but he couldn't believe all Muriel wanted was a light-skinned man! After ten years of patient and chivalrous wooing, he had a right to the heart of the doctor's daughter. He couldn't fathom how the stranger had gotten by him.

  All through the reception, Li'l Wallace's eyes tracked across Ivan's face, hands, clothes, looking for a weakness. Ivan squirmed. It would be so easy: to shift the cadence of his voice to match Li'l Wallace's; to hold his shoulders in a certain way that would remind Li'l Wallace of his dead brother; to be silent at the right moment, then say the words Li'l Wallace was thinking; so that Li'l Wallace would feel suddenly an unreasonable rush of affection for him, would grin, shake his head ruefully, give up his desire for Muriel and love Ivan.

  Ivan felt like a cripple. Like a man trying to feed himself with a fork held in his toes. And he was afraid. Eventually, Li'l Wallace would find something out of place. What if he found out enough to hate and fear Ivan? To turn these people against him? Part of Ivan seethed with rage that any human would look at him with those suspicious eyes. How good it would feel to turn that resentment and suspicion, in an instant, to adoration.

  But if Ivan was going to be human, to be here, he would have to leave the puppeteer's strings alone.

  Ivan had been sitting on a picnic bench in the churchyard, smearing his last piece of cornbread into the cooling dabs of gravy, when Li'l Wallace approached.

  "You smoke?"

  Ivan blinked up at him. What was this? “I have,” he said. He watched the resentment and mistrust brewing in the mortal, calculating its trajectory, aching to banish it.

  "Good,” Li'l Wallace said, and pressed something small, square, and cold into Ivan's hand. Then nodded, and walked away.

  Ivan looked at the lighter. And up at Li'l Wallace's retreating back, and in it, the decision, simple and sweet: that Muriel deserved to be happy.

  A shiver raced through Ivan's body. He thought: this human has surprised me. This human has surprised me! Ivan's heart beat large within him and he looked up at Muriel in her white dress, swinging a niece in slow circles in the air. How can this be?

  And then Ivan answered himself: because in ten thousand years, this is what you have never seen: what happens, what they choose, if only you leave them alone.

  * * * *

  There were moments when he suddenly felt lost in this new life. Sitting by the pond with Li'l Wallace, a checkerboard between them, throwing bread to the ducks, his heart would abruptly begin to race and he would think, what am I doing here? I am wasting time, there is something terribly important I must do, and first of all I must take this human—make sure he is mine, under my control, safe. He'd squeeze his eyes shut and wait for the feeling to pass.

  Or he'd be in a church pew singing David's psalms and be overcome with a memory: walking through a walled city to the court of a hill-country half-nomad potentate, asses braying in the evening, a crowd of slaves falling onto their bellies before him. Scowling at the princes and lords in disgust—this one too passive, this one low and mean, this one dissolute, none of them souls he'd want pressed close to him. And then turning to see the hard eyes and wild grin of the minstrel boy sitting in the corner with a harp in his goatherd's hands. Thinking: ah, yes. You. On you I will build an empire, and a path to God. Whatever you were before, now you are mine; now you are the arrow that pierces Heaven. And seeing the yearning begin in the boy's eyes, the yearning that would never end, that only Ivan could fulfill.

  And in the middle of the mill floor, a fifty-pound sack of flour on one shoulder, Ivan would stop, remembering the shadow the roach cast. After he'd feasted on a hundred centuries of human devotion and need, when he was full of power and empty of fear, he'd forced his way past the Last Door of Dream. And beyond the door, where he'd expected answers and angels—in that terrible light, he'd seen a roach skittering across a wall. And he'd known that that automaton, that empty dead machine creeping on and on and on over the bodies of the dead—that insect was Ivan.

  He'd burned his castle. Burned his library of relics—the jade knife that killed this one, the lock of that one's hair. Abandoned his living prizes to madness. He'd vanished into a Europe descending into hell: walked through fields of corpses amidst the whistling of shells, on dusty roads by the tinkling and bleating of starving goats. Stared at the blue walls of the sanitorium, seeing the eyes of all those he'd taken. A wall of eyes in darkness. Years that were all one long moment of terror and rage and shame, before he'd crossed the Atlantic.

  Now, when it came upon him, he shouldered the bag and moved his feet. One, then the other. Watched the men at their work of stacking, looked at each one, whispering their names. That's Henry. That's Roy. That's Li'l Wallace. Thought of Muriel waiting at home. Of ham and collard greens. Coffee. Checkers. Lucky Strikes.

  The eyes still watched him, from their wall.

  * * * *

  Ivan loved positioning the checkers, sacrificing one to save another, cornering, crowning, collecting. He loved pretending to make a stupid mistake, giving his last piece to Li'l Wallace with a show of effort and disappointment. And if Ivan kept his eyes carefully on the ducks in the pond and hummed a song from the radio silently to himself, sometimes he could distract himself enough that Li'l Wallace's moves would actually surprise him.

  The sun was touching the horizon now. Li'l Wallace finished his smoke and handed the lighter back to Ivan. “How's married life?"

  "Can't complain,” Ivan said, and looked over at Li'l Wallace. The question was guileless, friendly. But Ivan felt uneasy.

  "I guess y'all gon’ be working on children now,” Li'l Wallace said with an easy smile, his eyes on the lake.

  Blood rushed to Ivan's face and he turned away. He closed his eyes and remembered Muriel crying in the kitchen. “Shush,” she'd said, pushing him away, “shush, Ivan, yes, I knew, I know what life I chose, now you just let me be, you let me be.” Her cheeks glistening, the bedroom door slamming. (And he could make her laugh again, make her happy again, instantly, so easily! He'd closed his eyes, knowing where that road led: a madman in an empty palace, a lock of hair in a ribbon, burning.)

  Ivan heard Li'l Wallace shift in his chair.

  So there you are, you bastard, Ivan thought. You were right all along. You are the right one for Muriel. You could have given her a real life, a real family. I can only give her a parody.

  He opened his eyes and saw, in Li'l Wallace's, only compassion.

  And that was too much for Ivan to bear. He pushed himself out of his chair and headed for the woods. Li'l Wallace said something; Ivan kept walking. He didn't speak, he didn't gesture. He didn't trust what he might do to Li'l Wallace if he did.

  Ivan pissed against a tree, buttoned up, and walked deeper into the woods, toward the abandoned graveyard at its heart. He slowed his heartbeat and watched the shadows among the leaves. Then, at the graveyard's edge, he saw the girl.

  She had dirty blonde hair and wore a dress stitched from old calico rags. She was about eleven years old. She knelt in the dirt, her eyes closed, framed in the sun's last light filtering green through the trees. She was praying. Her lips moved, clumsy, honest. There were tears on her cheeks.

  Ivan felt her prayer, like a beam piercing through the veil. That veil that had been like a wall of stone for him, that door he had opened at such cost, was like a cobweb to her. She was whispering in God's ear.

  Ivan shifted his posture to become a white man, made himself calm, comforting. He knelt by her and put his hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes but she was not startled. She smiled at him.

  "I'm Ivan. What's your name?"

  "Sarah,” said the girl.
/>   She bit her lip. The question she was expecting was, what are you doing out in these woods alone? Instead he asked: “What are you praying for?"

  Sarah drew in a deep and shuddering breath, but she didn't cry. “I live with my sick grandma. When she dies, I'll be alone. Ain't nobody else to take me in. But I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. God's gonna’ send someone."

  Ivan stroked his hand across her hair. This girl's eyes were a speckled blue. And yet their shape was so familiar. Where had he seen them before? He wondered if a little manipulation in a good cause might be permitted him. Surely he could arrange for a family of whites to take her in. Maybe he would ask Muriel to bend their rules. Maybe—

  There was a crunch of boots on leaves in the forest behind him. “Ivan?” Li'l Wallace said.

  Ivan jumped up. Damn, damn, he'd been lost in the little girl's eyes. Sarah looked wildly around. Li'l Wallace stared at them and frowned. They were both looking at him, and there was no time.

  Maybe he could have crafted a way to look that would have set them both at ease. In the old days, when he was powerful. But he was so tired now, and he couldn't risk losing his new home. So he looked as Li'l Wallace expected him to—Negro.

  The girl screamed.

  "Oh my God!” she shouted. She stumbled back against a gravestone and grabbed at her hair where Ivan had touched it. “You're a nigger! Oh my God, no, you're gonna—"

  Li'l Wallace hissed in breath, and in it Ivan heard their future. The girl running, crying, found on the road, her imagination feverish. Torches. Guns. Dogs. Crosses of fire. Li'l Wallace's feet kicking in the air, kicking, finding no purchase, nowhere to stand.

  Sarah drew another breath to scream and—

  Ivan took her.

  She ran to him and collapsed into his arms, buried her face against his stomach, sobbing. Ivan lifted her up gently, nestled her face against his neck.