Snap to, dipshit!
The tall grass behind Rathford and Sunn began to shift and sway. Fake ears with white fabric in their centers bounced up and down. It was Charv, clad in his familiar kangaroo suite, and behind him trotted Ragma guised as a black dog. The two alien law officers paused just within the cover of the tall grass and watched Rathford and Sunn as they studied me.
Ragma inched forward, like he was stalking an unseen prey. When he broke into a full out run, I closed my eyes tight.
*
Time.
Fragments, pieces, bits…Time.
Epiphany in Black & Light, Scenario in Green, Gold, Purple & Gray…
Speicus nudged me. I had no other explanation for why I choose the doorway I did. Just Fred being Fred, I guess. But was I Fred? Not really anymore. The worlds that saturate my mind don’t have star-stones, or Rhennius machines, but now they have Speicus, who is part of me, and who would record and report. My partner.
Glass beads on stained glass, angels falling, full of sorrow, yet I can see something there. Mists, written over with the blood of those I must deliver to the tall trees at the end of the path, through the doorway where some task, some sleight of hand must be turned down another way, stopping something that blue dogs and fat ladies would frown upon.
Are you there, Fred? asked Speicus.
“Yes. I’m a little twisted through right now. Up not up, and down not down. Shit like that.” I heard a tinkle that I thought was Speicus laughing. I hated the sound.
The doorways had a purpose. Even if their creators hadn’t anticipated the challenged races that may find them. Wasn’t I that race? Hadn’t the doorways been provided by my new bosses? Who were they, exactly? The US didn’t have that kind of power. How many layers up did it go? Hands upon hands, withering within a cloud of lies, a world lost to simple pleasantries, and wants. A world broken down to its bare essentials, where men feed on men?
Jesus, were you always so grim? asked Speicus.
Another downside to sharing a brain is that you never know when an idea, whether good or bad, was yours, or your partners. I had no doubts about who controlled my brain, but it was nice the way Speicus pretended I had some control. There are spaces between things that are so small I can feel the constant pressure of all the layers of time upon me, pushing my heart into that tiny space where there’s no room for anything else. Pain expanded across my body, and there were moments I thought I was done. Either dead, or lost within some netherworld that allowed me to watch myself, as controlled by Speicus, live on into forever, not looking back even once to see the lost life I’d left behind.
If there was anyway it could be different, said Speicus. You’re really better off this way. No? Speicus, having grown into me, had begun to develop what I thought of as the largest copyright infringement imaginable. Speicus was becoming a bigger wiseass than me. Using my weak material!
“Sure was different before I agreed to give up half the real estate in my head, Speicus.” I felt very lost.
Your brain? Half a pea is still just half a pea.
White lines of energy sizzled and popped through the air. One of my metal tooth fillings grew hot. Energy zapped the synapses of my brain, and then I was in the forest at the end of the path… but no, it wasn’t that forest…
The sun was falling, but the tower in the distance had legs of lightning shooting in every direction, the eerie light pushed away the fading sunlight and scorched the clods. Everything around me jerked, and I staggered, Speicus screamed something in my mind—right there in the front where it hurt.
Open your eyes!
I stepped over the threshold of the doorway and the world behind was sucked away, and my new world drove the air from my lungs. A kaleidoscope of dark brown, turned to green as I saw a frog sitting on turtle’s shell it lurched forward across the forest floor. Scrub pine and ash block my way. The light was fading. The day was fading. What lay before me was unclear.
But we must go, said Speicus.
I took one step. Then another. I didn’t know what was to come, but at least I had Speicus, and I had gone through the doorway. That usually led to something good. Going through a doorway, leaving one place, and entering a new place.
Coda
by Steve Perry
It was almost closing, Sam had already rung the bell, and only a few die-hards were there, finishing up the last of their beer before stumbling off to greet the dawn. He was wiping the bar when the man in red came in.
Sam’s smile was involuntary. It had been what? thirty, forty years? The clothes were of a conservative cut and style, much as he used to dress, even though the man in them wore a different body. The sword on his belt was not much more than a machete, though that was enough weapon to do any job to which he might turn his attention. Sam had never heard of anybody who was as good with a blade, and woe to any fool who tried to prove differently.
The body was young and fit, he probably hadn’t had it long, but his essence was unmistakable, if you could see into the spectrum as Sam could.
He found that he was inordinately pleased to see him.
The man walked to the bar, sat on the stool at the end so his back was to the wall and smiled.
“Binder of Demons,” he said.
Sam’s grin grew larger. “Deathgod.”
Yama gave him a tight-lipped grin. “Not in that business for a while.”
“You can change what you do, but not what you are,” Sam said.
“Sayeth the bartender who slew the demon Taraka like blowing out a candle; who destroyed all but one of the Mothers of the Terrible Glow.
“Dalissa sends her regards, by the way.”
Sam nodded.
Yama continued: “Sayeth the man running a pub who fomented revolution using a non-violent religion to defeat the gods themselves.”
“Well, yes,” Sam said. “With a little help from my friends.”
He drew two dark ales, set one of the heavy ceramic steins in front of Yama. He raised the other mug. “Old times,” he said.
Yama raised his mug, touched it to Sam’s. They drank.
“Pretty good beer.”
“My own recipe. Doesn’t travel well, but it’s not bad for draft. I call it ‘Dark Karma Ale.’”
“You’d have plenty of that.”
Both took another swallow.
Sam said, “I heard you left Khaipur and. . .had words with the Seven Lords of Komlat?”
Yama shrugged. “Not much of a discussion. We spoke, they disagreed. They came to regret that.”
“I bet.”
“Smoke? I have some aromatic shag you might like.”
Sam nodded. In a world where changing bodies was no more difficult than taking a nap, cancer wasn’t a worry. When the Wardens of Transfer took over from the Lords of Karma, the process became even easier. Hobble in old and ill, skip out a new man in almost no time.
Sam pulled out his pipe.
Yama came up with a carved briar with an amber stem, and a pouch of tobacco. Sam scooped some of the tobacco into his own pipe. “Moist.”
“Put a little slice of apple in it, keeps it from drying out.”
Sam tamped the tobacco down, found a match. He took a puff. “Excellent. Nice aroma.”
Yama lit his own bowl, drew smoke, exhaled it. It floated up to enwreath his head. “The Witches still send me a packet every now and then. They really didn’t like the Seven.”
The rest of the customers drifted out, saying farewells. Sam nodded at them.
When they were alone, Yama said, “How about Great-Souled Sam? Took me a while to find you. I thought you might have gone back into the Cloud.”
“I think about it from time to time, but there’s no hurry. It’s not going anywhere. And there always seems to be more work to be done here.”
“You would know about the Cloud.”
“Sayeth the man who dragged me back out of it.”
Both smiled through the tendrils of blue smoke.
; “How fares Lady Parvati?”
Sam said, “Passing well. She had some trouble a few years back, nothing major.”
“Not how I heard that story,”
Sam’s turn to shrug. “Well, you know how these things get amplified in the telling. Somebody wrote a novel about our adventures, did you hear?”
“I heard. I haven’t read it.”
“It’s not bad. Tends to the hyperbolic, though. We didn’t do half what the writer said we did, and it’s got a really awful pun in the middle of it. Awful.”
The two men smoked and drank without speaking for a time.
“You are wondering why I’m here,” Yama finally said.
“Thought had crossed my mind.”
“Well. For the last thirty-six years, I’ve run a little lab in the port of Koona. Become a real city since you and I were there, back in the day.”
“A lab. Working with. . .?”
“A little of this, a little of that.” He paused. “Mostly human neurology.”
“Ah.”
Sam waited.
“Took a while to train enough doctors who could find their asses with both hands, but eventually, we managed to do some decent hands-on research.”
Sam knew what that would have been, so he asked the next question: “And did you find a cure for it? Transfer-effect brain damage?”
If he was surprised by the question, he didn’t let on. “Not as such. Some wounds are beyond the best artificers ability to repair.”
“And that part you would know; however, I hear a ‘but’ in there.”
“You were always pretty quick. We didn’t find a cure here, but there is a place where such can be effected.”
Sam thought about it for a few seconds. “The Golden Cloud.”
Yama said, “Yes.”
The Bridge of the Gods, it was called, the bronze rainbow that encircled this world, where the red sun turned orange at noon. The place of bliss, as Sam knew, having spent some relative-eons there as self-perpetuating wavelengths when his atman had been projected into the magnetic field by the gods. They had thought it was better that he be there enjoying Nirvana than here, plotting revolution. Killing him outright would have made him a martyr, and they didn’t want that, either. Turned out that was just another in a long list of mistakes on their parts. They didn’t figure on Yama being able to retrieve him and reinstall him into the flesh again.
Being god and hubris tend to go together.
“You always had the touch when it came to machines.”
“It was the song of the universe that did the trick, I just provided the ride there and back.”
Yama pulled a gold pocket watch from his jacket and looked at it.
“That a local product?”
He held the watch up for Sam to see. “From Earth. Somebody found it in an attic somewhere. Cost a king’s ransom.”
“I don’t doubt that. You have an appointment, you need to check the time?”
“Yes, an appointment. Tell me, Sam, do you keep up your priest dues?”
Sam laughed. “I am known, among other things, as Lord Kalkin, Maitreya, Mahasamatman, and still considered in some circles as a legitimate avatar of the Buddha, though we both know that was a shuck. Still, nobody asks to see my membership card if I drop by the Purple Grove. Why do you ask?”
Death laughed, a thing Sam still found amazing. He had loosened up considerably since last they’d seen each other.
The door opened, and a fat man ambled in. Just behind him, another man who looked as if he had partied for a week and forgotten to sleep. Both of them grinned at Sam.
As I live and breathe, it’s Kubera and Krishna!
Behind Krishna, Ratri, who had partnered with Kubera decades ago. All in different bodies, but all starting to look as they eventually always did, as the bodies shaped themselves to fit the spirits that inhabited them. The essence was eternal, the bodies ephemeral, and flesh would morph to copy the fire.
The Lokapalas, all together again. It had been a while.
But the real jewel was the fourth person who passed through the door into Sam’s pub. A beautiful young woman whose essence shined like summer sun through an open window. As had the rest of them, she had worn many bodies and many names. She’d still been Madeleine, when she and Sam had been lovers, centuries ago; Mostly she was known as the Goddess Kali, though for a time, she had also been Brahma; she had been called Murga, and claimed by Yama as his daughter. She was never that. They had been married once, Yama Dharma and Kali, the two deathgods. That hadn’t ended so well.
Later, Kali, in her aspect as Brahma, had been mortally wounded at the Battle of Khaipur. Yama had tried to save her, using the body transfer machineries. There had been a problem, and a severe injury to Kali’s psyche during the transfer. She had lost who she was.
That was then. But now?
Sam’s smile was a large as it got.
“Hello, Sam,” the young woman said.
“Kali. Nice to have you back.”
“Good to be here. But I wouldn’t have minded staying where I spent some time.”
Sam nodded. He was one of two people in the room—in the world—who had reason to know that.
Yama said, “So, Sam, got time to perform a wedding?”
“Sure. When?”
“Now is good. It’s been a long engagement.”
Sam laughed.
Kali moved over to stand by Yama. She took his hand in hers.
A wedding. Two deathgods about to be joined by Buddha. What an interesting thing, life was.
Kubera said something, his voice so soft it was almost inaudible, but Sam caught it:
“The Lokapalas are never defeated.”
No, in the long run, they never were. . .
Nights in the Gardens of Blue Harbor
by Gerald Hausman
Roger rarely spoke of literary matters. But we always talked about metaphysics, and quite often, martial arts. Once he told me he had done battle with a daemon. When I asked, “Spiritual?” He said, “No, the kind of daemons I’ve written about.”
Another time he told me he’d moved a manuscript of his, metaphysically, from the bottom of a pile to the top. This was early in his career, he said. Usually his hand-written messages ran like this: “We did not know that the guinea pig—Cassiopeia—we’d acquired was pregnant. We walked out to the kitchen 5 nights ago to find she’d had 3 babies. (They’re born with full suits of fur, eyes open, & the ability to whistle & run around—which I guess we already said.) Anyway. . .”
Well, that was Roger. But one day in May 1995, he phoned to say that he’d had a curious dream. It was about a novel I should write. Before I could ask any questions he laid out the story on the phone. There were no specific details as to the events, but he was certain about the place where it had to happen: Jamaica. He then mentioned that James Bond as portrayed by Sean Connery should make several appearances, each of them dream-like. He also asked me to put in some other characters from the oldest Bond films, the ones shot in Jamaica in the 60s.
Roger described the main character: “He should be a writer with a problem, a quest. The quest is finding some kind of treasure.” Literary, sculptural, or perhaps a chest of gold? Roger said it could be any of those. He believed there should be a martial arts scene or two, perhaps something from long-ago. When I said, “How about Jamaican stick fighting?” and told him how it came from the time of Robin Hood, he said, “That’s good.” Then: “Maybe the guy is an older man, maybe a trifle lazy.” I hastened to ask if he should like ganja, and he said, “Sure, they have that in plentiful supply, don’t they?”
Roger’s brief outline was shelved. I guess I was saddened by his death to the point where I didn’t want to deal with that last phone conversation. All in all, I think I was waiting for a sign. I had that sign the other day, and so the story comes forward, and next, a bit later, I hope, the whole novel.
Chinkweed
Jed raised himself up from the old four-poster th
at once belonged to British playwright, Noel Coward.
He smiled, lit a cigarette. In Jamaica, Jed smoked Rothmans, in keeping with the British mood of the place, which was not so run down as it was haunted.
Duppy house, Jamaicans called it. Ghost house.
Jed took a drag, stared at the postcard-perfect coastline. The meeting place, over the years, of Errol Flynn, Ian Fleming, Katherine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, not to mention just up the road, Bob Marley. Anyone who was someone had stayed at Coward’s Blue Harbor.
His cell phone buzzed.
“Hell-oooh,” he crooned.
“And there you are!” Jed’s agent, Marcia.
Bad news when she called—lately. Perhaps because they’d broken up—recently. Fortunately, she was still his agent.
“What’s up?”
“Well, I don’t have good news,” she began.
“I’ll take bad then.”
“Well, Doubleday went cold on the book.”
“You said they loved it.”
“Phoebe loved it. But she left. Nadia got it then and was warming to it when I told her there might be a film option, then she lost her job and I had to deal with Maggie someone who doesn’t care for your kind of writing, or so she said.”
“So the deal’s off—what now?”
“Okay, so this may not be believable, but it might be bankable.”
“I’m listening. Better be. I’m broke. You’re the one who told me to fly down here and write three more chapters, just three. . .”
Marcia went on. “I have a client who’s writing a book about the London art scene circa 1940. This super-rich client is also the owner of Handsel & Bradley Gallery. The long and short is, he owns a sculpture. . . half a body. . . sculpted by Noel Coward. Ever hear of him?”
“Heard of him? I sleep in his bed!”
Marcia ignored the remark. “You find the missing half of that sculpture and there’ll be a fat reward, from which I’ll subtract my skinny commission, and you’ll get—”
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 12