by Anthology
“How much money did you inherit from daddy?” she said, sneering. “You think you hit a homerun in life, without admitting you were born on third base.”
Greenburg slammed his fist on the table. “I won’t be lectured by some trailer park slut.”
The restaurant’s steady conversational hum died. Jenna didn’t want to make a scene. She despised the man, but he had leverage. If this interview spiraled out of control, she’d lose her job. So she reached across the table and touched his hand. “Mr. Greenburg, I think we started on the wrong foot. Let’s try again. How can I help you?”
“You’ll show me a draft of your article before it’s published.”
“And if I do?”
“I’ll publish it in all my syndicated newspapers, which have a combined reach greater than that of The New York Times. I’ll also give you a job at one of my media companies.”
“I see,” Jenna said. She’d have a future, all for the low, low price of her integrity. “And if I don’t write the article?”
He smiled. “As I said, being poor is a choice.”
She nodded. “I’ll show you a draft once I have one,” she lied.
Greenburg raised his glass of Dom. Romane Conti. “Here’s to an enjoyable evening.”
***
Jenna couldn’t explain why she’d lured Greenburg to the shed. It was instinct. Lubricated by wine, she’d told him about her other story.
Capitalizing on his well-publicized urges, she’d suggested they go to Chandler’s Hollow. Her logical mind had screamed, “No!” but something darker compelled her.
She stood with him before the shed. A strange energy in the air made her skin tingle. A waning gibbous moon’s fading light seeped through the warped branches of mangled trees.
His rough, craggy hand grabbed her bottom. Hungry, Jenna didn’t react.
“Ha, ha,” he said, slurring his words. “This story is even less credible than your hit piece on me.”
Like the moon above, her eyesight waned, her vision blurring into a honeycomb. Despite having a full stomach, an insatiable appetite raged inside her.
A field of carapaces shimmered around the shed.
“What kind of a sick joke is this?” Greenburg said in an indignant tone.
She became one of them. His eyes widened. Her geniculate antennae curled around his head. He stank of fear.
Greenburg ran.
She was human again. Dumbfounded, she tried to make sense of what had happened. Then she recalled Rosen’s theory about two realities in superposition. What if two organisms could also coexist in a state of superposition?
The world changed again, transforming her into a ravenous thing, a thing that was neither here nor there, but existing simultaneously in both realms. Her brood burst forth from the shed, flooding the countryside like a locust swarm. Their hunger and their desire to propagate mirrored her own.
His scent fresh on her antennae, she chased Greenburg through the woods to his limo. Wheels squealing, it sped off.
She trundled forward, but her tentacles couldn’t propel her fast enough to reach her quarry.
Lights.
A black Bronco surged past. Greenburg’s limo screeched to a halt as a second Bronco blocked its path.
He scrambled out of his vehicle. A shot rang out. He fell. Two shadows descended on him. She slithered closer along the black sludge her new world had superimposed on the old. Her twin proboscises slavered for meat.
Daisy and a second woman held Greenburg against a Bronco. The scent of his bloodied shoulder only made Jenna hungrier.
“We live to serve the brood queen,” they said.
Greenburg’s eyes widened, and he sobbed. “Please. Don’t let me die here. Please.”
But in this new world, she was predator and he was prey.
Jenna devoured him.
Then she comforted her drones, promising to clone more human females to guard the gateway during the time between.
Holly Heisey
http://hollyheisey.com
The Monastery of the Parallels(Short story)
by Holly Heisey
Originally published by Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show in July 2015
Johan Mercio emphatically did not think about the invitation in the inner pocket of his evening jacket, thick and heavy and anonymous. Instead, he adjusted the feathered plume on his hat and sauntered his way through the crowded ballroom of the palace of Venton, wine glass in hand.
He spotted the Minister of National History in all his civil service-medaled glory. Maybe the invitation wasn’t so anonymous. The minister might have finally agreed to listen to his theories on the impact of the Victorious War.
Johan raised his glass, but the minister gave him a flat stare and turned to resume his own conversation. Of course the invitation wasn’t from the minister.
He noted, as he wove through various groups of nobles, three figures in bright reds and tangerines and golds, their veils draped to show only their eyes. Monks from the Monastery of the Parallels were not forbidden from any gathering, per the laws of the Accords of the Parallels, but they were given wide berth. Two made eye contact with him, and the invitation in his pocket began to feel heavier. He drained his glass of wine and prayed to all of the gods that the Monastery hadn’t gotten hold of his theories and decided to meddle. He took his cue from everyone else and pointedly ignored the monks.
While Johan was nursing the last of his third glass and trying to find a group he had not yet approached, the crowds began to push back. The ballroom hummed as people turned toward the south entrance.
Johan watched over most of the heads as a man as tall and swarthy as himself, his face all planes and sharp edges, parted the crowds with the inevitability of a ship breaking water. Not the prince or one of the dukes, not anyone he recognized. The man’s gaze locked on Johan and stayed there.
The wine glass shook in Johan’s hand. He glanced around, but yes, the man was looking at him. His ears began to rush and his hands and face numbed with a static that leaned toward pain. He felt with a gut-certainty that he knew this man, but he had never seen him before.
“Are you Johan Mercio?”
The man had a strange accent, slurred about the edges, and his voice was compressed as if he was used to bellowing.
Johan surveyed the man’s rigid posture, the left arm slightly bowed where he might normally prop a helmet. Fine scars etched his chin and brow. This man had to be a general.
“Marcus Kato.” Kato gave a stiff nod. “I have come to aid you in your work.”
And then the invitation in Johan’s pocket made sense. He had asked the minister many times for the aid of a general. He’d known he’d never get it, but he asked anyway. Johan eyed where he’d last seen the minister, but only saw the smirking, tittering nobles.
He took in a sharp breath of sweat and clashing perfumes.
A scandal. The minister had invited him to a scandal, his own. It was a blatant attempt to discredit his name and cast doubt on his theories. Kato was no more a general than he was.
Johan made a curt bow. “If you are to help me in my work, be in my office tomorrow morning by seven. We can discuss matters then.”
Kato’s eyes narrowed.
The numbness in Johan’s hands increased, and though he told himself it was nerves, his gut tightened with a deeper dread. Kato was too familiar. He could have been one of Johan’s brothers, or his father even, with the gray salting Kato’s dark, bristly hair.
Color rustled in the crowd, the orange robe and veil of one of the monks from the Monastery of the Parallels. His heart jumped to his throat. If the monks were here, and this Kato looked so much like himself…?
He shoved that thought and everything that went with it away from him. His breathing slowed again.
“I will be there,” Kato said. “In the morning.”
***
Marcus Kato paced the edges of the Monastery viewing room, rousing dust from the silk-draped walls
and flaring the sage-burning braziers.
“That man is not me,” he said.
Li Sha sat on a cushion by her waist-high viewing crystal, which was dormant now, thank God. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she watched him with sapphire eyes through the orange folds of her veil. She was entirely too calm.
“He looks nothing like me,” Kato growled. “He is younger. He is—” He jerked his hand toward his head. Johan Mercio wore that ridiculous purple-feathered hat and had enough oil in his fussy curls to grease a carriage. “I asked you for help to stop my wars, and of all the kings and generals—or, God forbid, philosophers—you could have sent me to, you sent me to a historian! Damn you, monk, how is that supposed to help anything!” He stopped in front of Li Sha.
Violet-uniformed guards at the viewing room doors shifted, their hands coming to rest on the hilts of their sabers.
Li Sha motioned to her viewing crystal. “I have watched your armies devour whole nations. Surely you can handle one historian.”
But how could one historian find answers where he himself could not?
“It is nearing the end of winter in my parallel,” Kato said. “My commanders are already preparing my next campaign. My king will not take kindly to my absence. I need answers now.”
She glared up at him. She and the monks had sent him requests and summons and pleas to come to them, to change his ways, for the entire twelve years of his campaigns.
“Ten days,” Li Sha said. “You can spare ten days. Learn from Johan Mercio what he has to teach you. There is more to that man than you wish to see.”
Kato did not wish to see that man at all.
“Trust me,” Li Sha said. “And trust yourself.”
Kato grunted. He thought of his armies, spread now over too many former kingdoms and still swelling in numbers. There would be more campaigns, more bodies sprawled across bloody fields. And bodies laid out in the cities and the towns, not all of them soldiers.
But he could not break his oaths to his king. He had come to the Monastery because it was his last hope, his last option to end the bloodshed.
“Ten days,” Kato said.
***
Dawn blushed the sky over the scrolled spires of the ministry building when Johan turned the key in his office door and stepped inside. His head felt like it had been used for drum practice, courtesy of too much wine at the reception, but he had a bottle of seltzer in his desk for just such occasions. He closed the door and began the process of shrugging out of his tight-fitting jacket. Then he stopped.
Marcus Kato sat behind Johan’s desk.
“Gods above. How did you get in here?”
Kato stood and squeezed around the side of the desk. “Forgive me for startling you. The duty guard let me in.”
Johan brushed past Kato, the sense of a gong ringing in his head when their sleeves brushed. He shivered and barricaded himself behind the safety of his desk, straightening the stacks of files and books that Kato had mussed in passing.
Kato handed across a small portfolio. The leather smelled fresh. “My credentials.”
Kato loomed over him, and Johan blinked hard to focus on the writing inside the portfolio. It was an official document, granting one Marcus Kato permission to reside in Venton and to work as a consultant in the Ministry of National History. Johan peered at the seal, with the High Minister’s signature mix of gold and bronze flakes.
“How can I be of use to you, sir?” Kato’s words were clipped, his posture stiff.
“I—” Johan fluttered his hands. The man was a legitimate general. A general-in-exile perhaps? What was the minister playing at?
“You could best help me, sir, by offering a blind analysis.” He gathered books and folders from his desk. “There is a study room across the hall and to the left, I am sure it will suit your needs. If you can read these and provide a summary of the reports, that would be a start.”
Kato glanced at the stack, then tucked it under his arm in military dispatch fashion. “If that is all?”
Johan watched him leave. He hadn’t quite believed Kato would take the stack.
He yanked open his desk drawer and drained the bottle of seltzer.
***
Marcus Kato shoved another heap of papers aside and rubbed at his eyes. He had scribes for this sort of work. There were books and ledgers and supply tallies and after-action reports. All of them made a picture of a fairly routine, if ultimately victorious, war of conquest. There was nothing here that could help him end his own wars.
He’d sat in this closet of a room, with its chairs that cramped his back and flattened his ass, for four days now. He’d given Li Sha ten; six more would make no difference.
Kato scraped back from the table. He stepped into the hall and paused. Johan’s office door stood open and the voices within escalated to shouts.
“You have put forth this opinion enough, Mercio, enough I say! You would make our kings to be villains, and have us tear down the statues of our revered generals? It is a malicious lie. If you dare to place another report on my desk with the intent to undermine our proud nation, you will be through here! Your father’s wealth cannot shield you, sir.”
The minister stormed out and Kato jumped back, shutting the door. He waited until the minister’s bellow had faded down the hall, then squared himself and strode to Johan’s office.
Johan sat very still behind his desk, his face unnaturally calm. By God, forget the curls and the lace, in that moment Johan looked too much like himself.
Kato pointed in the direction the minister had gone. “What was that about?”
Johan’s mouth edged tight. “That is a man who is scared of the truth.”
“And what is the truth, Master Mercio?”
Johan’s eyes lit like coals fanned to flame.
“You have read the reports of this war, our Victorious War as we call it, fought two hundred years ago. It is what has defined Venton, it is part of our national pride,” he spat that in the pompous tone of the minister, “to have unified so many smaller states into this grand and peaceful nation.”
Johan cut the air with his hand. “It is a lie. We glorify our conquering generals, we praise them for bringing the surrounding kingdoms into enlightenment. But these men tore into lands that were at peace with them, ravaging farms and estates and villages, killing tens of thousands of soldiers and as many or more civilians. What Venton is today was won by greed and blood.”
“It was a war,” Kato said evenly. “Yes, I have seen your reports. There are always casualties in war. Your country is stable. There aren’t soldiers in the streets, there aren’t people going hungry—”
“There are more poor in this city than there have ever been,” Johan said. “We pretend not to see them. We keep them out of our wealthy districts, and they starve in their hovels. I go to them, and they believe me when I say that it was Venton’s greed that got them there—” Johan clamped his mouth shut.
Kato eyed Johan warily. “There are poor in every city. Starvation is hardly new.”
Johan shoved a paper across to Kato. “Here. Read this. You haven’t seen this one yet.”
Kato took the sheet of parchment and scanned the text. It was part of an eyewitness account of a battle to take a city. The witness saw three street children, none more than eight years old, cut down by Ventonese soldiers when they tried to attack them with knives and sticks. Brave lads.
“And this one.”
The next was an accounting of supplies gained from the forced taking of an enemy lord’s estate. A footnote listed the weaponry and goods taken from the dead, among them a double handful of dresses and shoes that could only have come from women and children.
Kato handed both back. He had seen such reports before. Most of these matters were handled on a lower level, but if the event was significant enough, the report made it into his hands.
“I have never liked it,” he said, “but it is simply a part of war.”
Johan shook his head and hi
s lips pressed tighter. “My family gained our wealth through the trading of such stolen goods. We were only small merchants in Tentek, but then we saw the opportunity for profit and joined with the Ventonese. We rose quickly. We sold out our people.”
Ah, then it was personal. Kato had dealt with plenty of junior officers, and even some of his field generals, who came to him at one time or another in a lathered moral rage. He’d heard them out, and then pointed them, slowly but surely, to the reasons why they were men of war. To their duties to their oaths, to their king and their country.
“Master Mercio,” Kato said, “I understand. But this guilt is not yours, you did not do these things yourself—”
“Yes, but I still profit from them! We all do, and this blindness is tearing apart our humanity—”
Kato held up his hand. “What has happened is in the past. Your government is stable, and I will hazard that it is stronger now than it ever was before the war that united it. You have a duty to maintain that stability—”
“I have a duty—”
Johan stood, his face red and blotchy. “Leave.”
Kato hesitated, then bowed and left the office.
***
The next day, Kato went straight to the study room. He went through the stacks of books and ledgers again and began a new report.
Venton’s Victorious War had stabilized the nations in this region, had vastly improved the lifestyles and lifespans of the inhabitants, and had even improved morale and brought in new relations and trade with foreign powers. None of this would have been possible if Venton had not taken the initiative two hundred years before. He had to make Johan see this before the man got himself hanged.
Kato left that evening satisfied he would have a full report the next day. He walked down clean, cobbled streets and breathed in the musk of horse and cinnamon of pastry vendors on the street corners.
Around him, street lamps flared to life, then settled to a warm glow. Houses rich in scrollwork spilled light through many windows, their inhabitants moving to a leisurely dance. A carriage pulled up to one entrance and spilled out laughing, glittering young people.