Figures ran toward us but I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and hugged her tight. “I sure missed you,” I said. “I thought—” Emotion closed my throat. I wanted to say, I thought you forgot about me.
“Get away from the strange man, honey,” my wife said.
My wife stood over us, hands on hips. Behind her, the Facsimile charged across the lawn. He was followed by my mother-in-law, gliding along in a green, diaphanous gown that belonged to no identifiable time period. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d inserted herself into the party.
My daughter pulled away from the hug. “He’s not strange, he’s Daddy,” she said matter-of-factly.
The False Husband swept up my daughter in his arms. He said to my wife, “Do you know this guy?” He didn’t recognize me. He had no recollection of my hands pulling a wire across his trachea.
My mother-in-law seemed amused. The other party guests craned their necks to see.
“He’s…” My wife summoned a lie. “I know him from the Parent Teacher Association. His son is in second grade.”
I opened my mouth to speak, and she flicked a hand at me. Suddenly I was gasping for air, unable to speak.
“Go back to the party, dear,” my wife said to my alter ego. “You too, Mother.”
I lunged for my daughter. The New Dick drew back and I seized on his double-knit sport shirt. My daughter reached for me—for me!—and I put out a hand to her.
My wife yelled, “Enough!”
A wind with teeth sliced into me. The void sucked me backward. The world disappeared—
And then I was on the ground again, kneeling in the mulch.
My wife looked shocked. She aimed a sharp look at her mother, who put up her hands and said, “Don’t look at me.”
“Would you two cut it out?” the Replicant said. He thought one of them was doing this, popping me in and out of the world like a jack-in-the-box. And how much had the guests seen?
“Take her inside,” my wife said in a flat, ancient voice. She is old, my wife. Centuries old. I’ve never gotten her to tell me her true age. Or her mother’s.
He hesitated, then turned toward the house. My daughter said, “Daddy!”
My wife pointed at me. “Don’t move.” The command pinned me in place.
My mother-in-law clapped her hands. “Well! I’ll go take care of the guests while you two catch up.” She followed the Xerox and my daughter, who wailed all the way into the house.
“You’ve done it again,” my wife said.
“Another dinner party ruined. Just like old times.” I nodded toward the house. “So him. The Substitute.” I smiled tightly. “Is that what you wanted? Taller? Better hair?”
She regarded me for a long moment. “He does have better hair. But no one kept a part as straight as you.”
“Damn straight.”
She almost smiled. I pressed my advantage. “We can try again,” I said. “I’ve learned some important things about myself during this whole experience.”
“Have you,” she said.
“Yes!” I tried to think of what I’d learned. That I could kill, if necessary. That I could fight for what was mine. However, my ad-man instincts told me that neither of those were what she wanted to hear.
I reached into my pocket and brought out the yellow plastic bottle. “I don’t need these, for one.” I threw the bottle to her, and she caught it. She glanced at it, seemed ready to drop it, then held it up to the moonlight.
“Just send what’s-his-face back to where he came from,” I said. “We’ll pick up where we—what are you doing?”
She had opened the bottle. She shook a couple of pills into her hand, squinted at them, and then popped them into her mouth.
“I don’t think you should do that,” I said.
“Candy,” she said.
“What?”
“The little mints we keep by the front door.” She tilted her head. “That’s odd.”
“I don’t know how—that’s not what—” A spasm wrenched my back. I almost fell, then caught myself. The pills were fake? How could that be?
She dropped the bottle to the ground. “It’s time to go.”
I held up a hand. “All I’m asking for is a chance. If not for me, then for our daughter.”
“Our daughter?” She stepped forward, and the shadow of the tree fell across her face. “Our daughter?” Her hands moved, making subtle shapes out of the dark. That old black magic.
“Please, honey—”
“I’m tired of ‘honey’ and ‘dear.’ From both of you. In fact, I’m beginning to rethink this whole project.”
Had she ever loved me? Once I thought we’d been happy, as happy as anyone else. We’d kissed goodbye every morning and made love twice a week—Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. We’d renovated a kitchen together.
But now? Now I was nothing to her.
I forced myself to straighten. “I’ll come back,” I said. “I always come back.”
“Not this time.” Her fingers twisted, and I was gone.
* * *
Here is a secret that every man tries to forget: We are made from women, by women, for women. Theirs is the first touch we feel, and we carry that imprint upon our hearts for the rest of our lives. Later we fall in love, and the most beautiful woman in the world tells us that our children will also be beautiful and strong. Then a daughter is born, and we are possessed all over again.
A mortal man doesn’t stand a chance.
* * *
I awoke in snow. I wasn’t cold, but I was sure that I’d lain there for some time, the drift covering me. I sat up. Crystals dropped into my collar and burned down my neck. Above me, the branches of the arborvitaes were laden with snow. The sky was dark, the air clear and clean. I still couldn’t feel the cold. I should have been worried about frostbite, but the thought didn’t occur to me.
I got to my feet, brushed the snow from my pants and sleeves. Perhaps a foot of new snow lay on the ground, a smooth, unbroken expanse glowing faint blue in the moonlight. The only mar in the surface was the man-shaped hole I’d climbed out of.
Something lay at the bottom of it. I crouched, and pulled it up. It was a shoe box, crumpled by my weight and weather and years underground. I peeled off the lid.
Inside lay a little doll made out of blue and green sticks—plastic swizzle sticks like the kind we used to keep on the credenza—and a construction paper face that wore a blue crayon smile. A swatch of wool cloth was taped to the front of him with a fat wad of masking tape. I picked him up, and the cloth fell off. The box had been out here for a long time.
I turned him between my thumb and index finger. The torso was crimped. I ran my fingers along the stick, straightening him out.
The other contents of the box were an old container of Brylcreem, the Cross pen I used to keep in my front pocket, and a yellow prescription bottle. The mints had turned the inside dusty.
“Hello, Dad.”
And there she was. Almost as tall as her mother, wearing a miniskirt that was ridiculous for the weather, and a little green waist-length jacket with a fur collar. She stood with her hands jammed in the pockets. Because of the cold, or was she nervous?
I was too stunned to speak at first. I guessed her age to be fourteen or fifteen. But of course I recognized her immediately. I would recognize her anywhere. Any when.
She said, “I’m so sorry.”
I jumped to my feet. “Oh, honey, no. What do you have to be sorry for?”
She stood on the other side of the boundary of trees. The house was dark behind her. I walked toward her, my feet punching awkwardly through the snow. I had the absurd idea that I would spook her. I stopped myself just shy of the border.
“I forgot how to do it,” she said. “After the party? Mom put a stop to it. I was so little, I didn’t know what I was doing, or how I could get around her. Even with the doll. And later, when I wanted to—”
She was crying. I strode across border of the property and
nothing stopped me, no force field, no curse. “It’s okay, sweetie,” I said. “You did great.” I wanted to wipe the tears from her cheeks. But I’d never been the father of a teenage girl. I didn’t know what was appropriate. “Look at me—I’m here.”
She shook her head. “When I tried to bring you back again, I’d—I’d forgotten what you looked like.” She was so upset to admit that. “She didn’t keep any pictures of you. Just of—”
She stopped herself, out of deference to my feelings. She noticed me glance toward the house and said, “Don’t worry. He doesn’t live there. Mom and I don’t live there anymore either.”
“He’s gone?”
She heard the lift in my voice. I’m embarrassed about that.
She said, “He’s not a bad person. He was a good father.”
I nodded. “I’m glad to hear that.” And I meant it.
“Anyway, Mom’s kind of had enough of the whole husband thing.” She laughed apologetically, then wiped at her cheek with the backs of her fingers, a gesture so grown-up and ladylike. “We move around a lot now. Wherever’s interesting.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Seeing the world.”
We lapsed into silence. What to say, after such an absence?
“They’re expecting me back,” she said.
“Sure. I understand.”
“I’m not very good at this,” she said. She moved her fingers, and suddenly they held a man’s leather wallet. “There’s money in there. I didn’t try credit cards—those are tricky.”
I took it from her and opened it. The New York driver’s license in the plastic window showed my face.
“You can’t use your old name,” she said. “He’s still got that. But I tried to pick something nice.”
“It’s… manly.” I smiled.
“I can change it,” she said, worried.
“Names don’t matter,” I said. “It isn’t names that make us real.”
LAVIE TIDHAR
THE RED MENACE
When I was asked to do a story for Mash Up it didn’t take me long to settle on Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. It has such a great opening line! Such a sense of… menace. I used to go to the Red Lion pub in Soho, in London, where Karl Marx worked in an upstairs room, and later did his drinking. I grew up on a kibbutz – my grandfather was a socialist. I tried to picture him in a different life, one where world history took a slightly different turn…
I went past a demonstration the other day, by the Bank of England, with people wearing those V for Vendetta masks. It seems to me the stuff Marx was talking about then is still relevant to us now. Maybe with some added weird SF stuff! So here it is, the story – “The Red Menace.” We start in London, and the year is 1936…
THE RED MENACE
BY LAVIE TIDHAR
1.
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING EUROPE – THE SPECTRE OF COMMUNISM. I was staring at the headline in the Daily Express, so often repeated in those days, reading as I walked. The City of London, in autumn. A cold wind. I had pulled up the collar of my coat higher around my neck but it did not help the chill. The wind snatched at the newspaper, trying to tear it from my grasp. The same old thing in the paper: the insurgents, sabotage of French ships in Marseilles, a terrorist attack in the heart of Krakow, and the continuing battle in Russia as the rebels approached ever closer to Moscow. On the same page, the Express reported on Jesse Owens winning the one-hundred-metre race in the Berlin Olympics and of American aviator Amelia Earhart’s plans for a round-the-world flight. I was on Old Jewry, coming around the corner. A flock of pigeons, startled perhaps by my approach, flew into the air in a cloud of grey wings as I came to the hulking architectural tome that was the Bank of England. The sky was a faint blue streaked with grey clouds. This was when I first met her, and saw the unearthly spectre firsthand.
* * *
My name is Mathieu Heisikovitz, of the Heisikovitzes of Transylvania. I had come to London in 1931 to study medicine, yet unbeknown to my parents had soon abandoned my studies at the School of Tropical Medicine in favour of the semi-existence of a student of literature at University College of London, supplementing my income by teaching languages as a private tutor. Though naturally I kept company with the other students at the university, many of them radicals of various stripes, I was not myself a particularly political person. The continuing war between the House of Romanov and the communist insurgents left me, on the whole, indifferent, as did my own people’s nationalistic aspirations in Palestine. The stories told in the popular press, of the communists, I naturally found exciting yet outlandish. Could anyone really accept H.G. Wells’ The Space Machine as a factual account? The truth is that I was happy as I was, living in one of the greatest cities on Earth, in what would always seem to me, later on, as a Golden Age; yet any childhood, it seems to me now, must sooner or later come to an end.
On that day, as I was coming round the corner from Old Jewry, the wind picked up even more and, at long last, had managed to snatch the newspaper from my hands. I could only stand and watch, helplessly, as it tore and tumbled through the air, like a great big bird made of ink and wood pulp. I watched it soar in the wind, rising higher and higher into a sky like a pummeled bare-knuckle boxer’s face. The Bank of England was before me, vast columns rising to support its facade, which bore the legend ANNO ELIZABETHAE and ANNO VICTORIAE and above it carved figures in a shape like a Napoleon hat. For a moment, the air seemed perfectly still. It tasted as if it were going to rain, a slight electric shock on the tongue. It was heavy with humidity. Then I heard a shout. A passer-by, someone strolling by on that day; it must have been a Saturday or a Sunday, I no longer recall. ‘Look!’ he shouted. ‘Look at the sky!’
As though in response, in some strange synchronicity, there was a rumble of thunder. The sound exploded, caught between the buildings of the Royal Exchange circus, magnified like the blast of a bomb. I looked up at the sky. There had been no lightning to precede the thunder. The clouds had amassed over the bank, creating an impregnable wall. Amidst the grey, new colours began to bloom: the purples and lilacs of a heliotrope, the scarlet and blood of rose, the vibrant blue of a forget-me-not. An unearthly glow seemed to penetrate from behind the clouds, and I felt a sudden rise in temperature, a heat as of another sun. Then the clouds seemed to part, like lips, or a wound, and I could see the flash of lightning, like jagged teeth, inside that mouth. The air was hot, oppressively heavy. There was a silence, and I became aware of my fellow passers-by standing still, like myself, all watching the skies. Then there was a second, enormous crash of thunder and the gap in the sky seemed to expand and a red tongue of smoke or flame burst out and licked at the ground before the bank. I heard people shouting and was myself startled into movement, stepping back as though I had encountered a bomb. Then as if it had all been a dream, a hallucination of some sort, the colours were sucked into the sky, the wound in the clouds closed with impossible speed, and the quality of light changed. In moments, the temperature dropped, making me shiver. The light dimmed, and the sky was once again a uniform London grey.
In the place where that red tongue touched, there stood a group of people. They had not been there a moment before.
For a moment, they seemed to be frozen. Then they unfurled, moving with graceful, liquid motions. I heard gasps from the other onlookers. There were around ten people there, moving quickly, with purpose. Some climbed up the stairs to the entrance of the bank. Some went towards us, the watchers, while one, unfurling a flag, climbed up to the Duke of Wellington’s statue and stood there, tall and proud, waving his banner in the cold air.
The flag was white. On it, it bore one large red star, shocking in its presence, here, at the heart of the City of London.
The red star of communism.
The red star of the world called Mir.
‘Communists!’ I heard the cry. ‘Insurgents!’The crowd was swelling up. A mixture of horror and curiosity, Londoners drawn to anything out of the ordinary, the promise of s
treet theatre, no matter how dangerous. I watched in fascination, unable to withdraw despite knowing that this could not end well. The – insurgents? radicals? – spread out as if planning to somehow occupy the front of the Bank of England. They all wore Lenin masks, smooth ivory oval shapes decorated with the distinct, carefully cultivated demon-like beard and moustache of the man who had led the first expedition to Mir nearly twenty years before.
‘Workers of the world, unite!’ the man straddling the Duke of Wellington statue shouted. ‘You have nothing to lose but your shackles!’
There were boos and a couple of cheers. Clearly, the communists had some covert sympathisers even in the Square Mile. Two of the masked apparitions unfurled a large banner and tied it to the bank’s columns. Eat the Rich, it said. I noticed one of the two Leninistas on high; for a moment, the mask slipped and a cascade of long, dark hair fell down over slim shoulders. A woman, I realised. A shrill whistle cut through the air and I heard running footsteps approaching.
Someone had summoned the police.
I was shoved from behind and stumbled as burly officers pushed through the crowd. They were traditional bobbies, I saw with relief. They stood for a moment between us and the demonstrators, a human wall, before moving on the masked protesters with single-minded determination, swinging their billy clubs in their hands. The protesters moved as one, in the same fluid, graceful way they had. As if they were used to a heavier world, I suddenly thought. Co-ordinated, they moved to evade the policemen.
‘Go get them!’ someone shouted.
‘Pigs!’ someone else shouted. For a moment, I thought that the spectators would begin to fight amongst themselves. I was trapped in a mass of heaving bodies, pushed this way and that, towards the bank’s entrance, towards the impending confrontation between the protesters and the bobbies. I began to fight back, to push when I was pushed, to try to escape. The mood, almost jubilant a moment before, had turned ugly. At last, I was almost away from the sway of the crowd. I raised my eyes and looked over their heads and what I saw made my chest constrict painfully in fear.
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