Mash Up

by Gardner Dozois

  “You stole my people’s truth!” I screamed at him. “You are false! I wanted the true land again and my true kin!”

  “Truth? No two will ever agree what that is. We’re what the new people of this land want to remember, lass, the truth they want to see. They don’t even know your people are gone.”

  “But I know! You cannot take my past! You cannot take my people! I am the daughter of generations of Highlanders and I do not surrender!”

  “Then you will be the last,” the young man said icily. “If that is all you want to be. The people of the Lowlands feel nothing for Fingal and his Feinn, just as they know not any love for King Fergus or Ossian. New legends were needed to fill their hearts, and that is what we are.”

  I answered with heat to match his cold. “Better the last true Highlander than to be lost in a cloud-land built of the dreams and guilt of our enemies!”

  “You are a fool, lass. Men and women need dreams, for dreams guide them to greatness. Look around you!” The young man flung one arm wide. “The Highlands need legends as great as the land! Strong men and tall, and women beautiful and brave. Could true Highlanders ever have fitted such an epic? Could your rude hovels ever match the fantasies of a proud and noble peasantry that the new owners of this land need?”

  “And what of my people?” I asked, my voice breaking.

  “Your people, Mary Chisholm?” The young man shook his head. “In time their own scattered children will take us to heart, because those driven from this land lost everything. What did your father still believe in but cruel fate and certain failure? What could your mother still cling to for hope and pride?”

  “Do not name them!” I shouted. “They never gave up!” I felt the lie in my heart as I said it, but I would not admit to that lie, no, not if an angel came before me and demanded it. “I have not forgotten! I still believe! If struggle and pain is my lot, then that I will live with, for I swear before God that I will not accept this false heaven!”

  “Do not call on Him a third time or all will be lost to you,” the young man warned. “Lieutenant, you have been welcomed as well because you sought this place. This is what you longed to find in the Highlands and could not leave though you pretended to yourself to try. Do you wish to trade it for the grim battlefields of distant lands, to be maimed and die, when you could stay here and be among those who can fight forever, laugh, and lose nothing?”

  Lieutenant Calvert had risen to stand beside me, and now he shook his head. “I’m not a perfect man. Perhaps I did seek such a place as this, but not to linger while real life goes on outside it. I have a duty to my comrades. More, I believe that Mary Chisholm is right when she speaks of a duty to truth. This is a falsehood. No man should live in a fantasy world. To be inspired by such is one thing. But to be lost in it? I think that would be wrong, no matter how wonderful the fantasy.”

  The young man smiled, but now that smile held no trace of humor or warmth. I felt the smile an unearthly thing, born of such knowledge that children of men and women can never share. “Your bones will rest in the mud while we reside happy here in this dream for a thousand, thousand years, a dream better than anything those who once lived here ever knew. Men and women will follow that dream, and the world they will make of it will be a thing others look upon with envy. The Lowlanders and the English will carry that dream to lands far away and some yet unknown, where it will sustain them through hardship and give them pride no matter how hard their lives. What makes such a lie a wrong thing?”

  Lieutenant Calvert did not reply.

  For a moment, I did not know the answer either, but then it came to me. “For others that may be well enough. But for me to accept it, I must deny all those who came before me, deny those who gave me life and worked themselves to death trying to care for me, and deny them I will not. Dead they may be, but forgotten they will never be. Your dream may give hope to others. Well enough. Let them have their dreams. But the truth should be remembered as well, of who my people were and of the ills done to them!”

  To my surprise, Lieutenant Calvert reached to take my hand in his firm grasp. “You’re a fine memorial to your people, Mary Chisholm. It’s a shame we traded you all for sheep. Shall we deny this lie together?”

  The young man and everyone else continued to watch us, their faces cold and pale. The welcome and kindness had vanished, gone like the false front I had increasingly sensed it to be. The fire in the great hearth no longer gave heat, and I felt an edge of ice in the air. Even the colors around us seemed to have faded like a cloth left too long in the sun. “You are fools,” the young man said in a voice that already sounded distant, as if he spoke on a far-off snow-laden peak and his voice had been carried down a chill wind.

  Lieutenant Calvert nodded. “Yes. We are fools. It’s humanity’s curse, and perhaps also its hope. Even when truth is harsher than comfortable legend, sometimes we still seek that truth. Please say it for us both, Mary Chisholm.”

  I raised my chin, fearful to lose this wondrous place, yet thinking of my warrior ancestors and of the Feinn unwavering alongside Fingal at Sgorr nam Fiannaidh. “May God deny this falsehood, for I will not take it as my truth.”

  Between one eye blink and the next, the inn and everyone within it vanished. Lieutenant Calvert and I stood on a bare field of grass, the bleating of sheep clear in the distance. I knew without looking that up the slope the ruins of my old home would once again be there. Behind us, a bewildered neigh marked the presence of Lieutenant Calvert’s horse, who was looking around as if searching for the warm stable where it had been moments before. It had been night in the village, but a morning sun shone upon us in the empty meadow.

  Only one thing remained from the faery village, and that was the fine dress I wore. “Why did this not vanish as well?” I wondered, though grateful in truth to still be clothed with Lieutenant Calvert standing close by.

  He studied me in a manner that made me blush. “Perhaps you earned it, Mary. There are things you believe in even if you couldn’t accept that village, and I think the human dreams which gave form to those who exist there lead them to value our courage even as they scorn our frailties.”

  I ran one hand down the smooth fabric, so different from the rude garment I had come here wearing, thinking that I wished no gift of those who had displaced the old legends. But if those old beliefs still lived in me… “A gift from the Feinn? Could I call it that?”

  “You could. And it suits you well. Your outer seeming should be as fine as who you are inside, Mary Chisholm.”

  I felt myself blushing again and made no answer, only watching as Lieutenant Calvert saddled his horse. He did not mount, but walked beside me up the slope and to the road. I would have hesitated then, wondering where to go, but he held out his hand to me and so I stayed with him. After some time, we came upon a traveler going the other way, a Lowlander who gazed at us in surprise, as if less at our presence than at our garb.

  “Sir,” Lieutenant Calvert hailed him. “What news from the Crimea?”

  “Crimea?” The traveler sounded baffled.

  “The war. How goes the war?”

  The traveler looked from the lieutenant to me and then back again. “The war in the Crimea has been over for years now.”

  I could see Lieutenant Calvert brace himself before he spoke again. “Could you tell me today’s date, sir?”

  “April the twenty-first.”

  “And the year?”

  “The year?” the traveler asked in astonishment. “Eighteen sixty-one.”

  Calvert bade the man farewell, then spent a while looking at the road. “I’m going to have a lot to explain. Missing for seven years. My family is not without wealth or influence, but this will not be easy for even them to resolve. All the evidence I have is a horse which has clearly not aged another seven years, and while that will please our stable master, I doubt that the army will accept it as proof.” He sighed. “If all else fails I may have to find a home elsewhere, perhaps even in the wilds of
America.”

  He sounded sad and lost, then, and I wished I could bring him comfort. “But your family will be waiting and filled with joy to see you again. For my part, none cared that I was gone, and none will care that I have returned.” I felt tears starting and fought them off as I thought of all the years gone from me in faery. “I suppose I should be grateful. I never thought to look so young nearly seventy years after my birth. But there is no place for me now, young or old.” The Highlands kept fast the dreams of others and no place in the Lowlands would welcome a true Highlander.

  Lieutenant Calvert looked at me and smiled, a real smile, not the false good nature of the faery but a smile full of shared pain and life. “Mary Chisholm, would the last Highlander come with me to London? And wherever life takes me after that?”

  What right had I to accept such an offer? “I would shame you, sir.”

  “I think not. I ask you to be my wife, Mary.”

  “I am too far beneath you, sir!”

  “No. Your outer dress is as fine as any in London and I’d change nothing within you. Without you, without the courage of the last Highlander, I might have stayed there, lost in a dream. Not everyone would have denied the chance for such a paradise, Mary.”

  “It wasn’t even my falsehood,” I reminded him. “If I must live with untruths, let them be my own, but I will ever prefer truth.”

  I am proud and stubborn, yes, and perhaps I am also the fool the faery named me, but I saw a home in this man and a truth in his heart. I placed my hand in his again in answer to him, then we walked onward together, away from the Highlands where tales from the Lowlands had replaced our history just as the Lowland sheep had replaced the Highland people.

  My name is Mary Chisholm, I am the last, and no matter what may come, none shall make me forget who and what was once truly here.

  PAUL DI FILIPPO

  KAREN COXSWAIN, OR, DEATH AS SHE IS TRULY LIVED

  I’ve been writing professionally since 1977, with around thirty books to my credit. When I was approached by editor Gardner Dozois to take part in this fascinating project, I didn’t hesitate a moment, either to say yes or to jump at the selection of the first line from Twain’s Huck Finn. Twain has always been one of my favorite authors, and I believe, as Hemingway maintained, that Huck Finn is the true start of modern American literature. Another great admirer of Twain was the writer Philip José Farmer, an author I grew up enjoying. So I layered some of Farmer’s themes and tropes into my piece, as a homage to that seminal SF writer. Also, lately I’ve been watching a number of classic films about the afterlife, such as Heaven Can Wait and Here Comes Mr. Jordan, so my thoughts were trending in that direction. I hope you all have as much fun reading “Karen Coxswain, Or, Death As She Is Truly Lived” as I had writing it.

  KAREN COXSWAIN, OR, DEATH AS SHE IS TRULY LIVED

  BY PAUL DI FILIPPO

  You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. But of course I ain’t talking about that pile of YA puke we all got shoved at us in middle school back on Earth, sometime between our first boy band crush and our first sloppy blowjob. The sappy, corn-fed book that old Mark wrote in 1876. No, the Adventures I’m holding up as a not-totally-authentic introduction to my current life—afterlife, really—is the second one that Mark wrote—here in Hell, just a few years back.

  You see, at that time, I had taken a lover onboard the Ship of Shadows, my first infernal beau, and after our brief honeymoon our carryings-on soon escalated to such hysterical, fucked-up, window-smashing, curses-bellowing, biting, screaming, flailing, lowblow-throwing melees, followed by makeup sex nearly as destructive and outrageous, that I began to acquire a certain seamy reputation in all the cities we regularly visited, from Beetleburg to Crotchrot. Just imagine, said all the righteously and proudly damned infernal citizens, that nice Karen Coxswain, Captain of the Shadows, previously such a respectable gal, consorting with a lowlife yeti from Tibet, one who had been moreover the right-hand man and mystical advisor to none other than bloody Kublai Khan hisself, and who was plainly now such a bad influence on the previously serene and pleasant Captain. (Khan hisself doesn’t actually figure into my story, since he was then living in the city of Scuzzy Ashenhole about forty thousand miles away downriver, far from my stomping grounds.)

  What those scandalized citizens didn’t realize, however, was that I had never really been anything like a good girl, back when I was alive. Really, if they had thought about it for even a minute, why else would I’ve ended up in Hell? I had only appeared docile and meek and mild-mannered for the past ten years, since I had been taking that amount of time to more or less mentally adjust to my death and to process my feelings about my new role in the afterlife, the job of ferrying folks from one side of the Styx to t’other, and up and down its blasted, cindery, jizz-bespattered shores.

  I’ll never forget my entry interview with the Marquis Decarabia, when the stinking old goat (and he was at least half goat, for along with his naked, brick-red, totally ripped human upper half, big as a Cadillac Escalade SUV, went an actual billygoat-style bottom half, and he stunk of garlic, curry powder, lanolin, and Axe body spray) discovered that when I had been alive, I used to work on a shrimper running out of my hometown, Apalachicola, Florida, often taking the wheel when the Captain got loaded. The Virgin Berth, that woulda been, under Skipper Israel Shuby, a fine man, but with a weakness for Jägermeister.

  “Why, this is more than splendid!” boomed the Marquis, then belched like a thousand underwater gator-frightening swampgas farts in the deepest Everglades. “Sorry, just had a heavy lunch of banker entrails. Where was I? Oh, yes, your past maritime experience! We’re right this minute in need of a cross-Styx pilot, and with the first name of Karen, you’re practically destined from birth! We’ll get you your ‘papers’ and you’ll be on the water—if you can call that toxic sludge water—before a devil can shake his dick!”

  And then, just to illustrate matters, he peed all over me and disposed of the last few droplets across my wet face with a vigorous waggle of his pointy goat member. Luckily, the demon piss tasted just like Kool-Aid. Unluckily, it was the world’s worst flavor, Kickin’ Kiwi-Lime, endless pitchers of which had been forced on me as a child by a cruel Mama Maybellene at the Home, before the Kool-Aid honchos came to their senses and discontinued the raunchy flavor.

  So that’s how I found myself in my new Hellish job. As I say, it took some getting used to the notion that I was stuck here for all eternity, cruising these cursed waters under a smoldering sky or canopy or cavern roof that looked exactly like that kind of gray Corrections Department toilet paper made from one hundred percent re-re-recycled older toilet paper, which had then been used to clean up the butts of one million pureed-spinach-and-mashed-bananas-fed babies. But by the time I finally met my yeti man, I was pretty well accommodated to my new position, and ready to have me some fun.

  Did I mention yet that the old horny, hot-headed ’bominable called hisself Tom Sawyer? Yup, that he did. Turns out he had met up with Twain a century ago and become good friends with the writer, glomming onto all Twain’s books like Holy Scripture. Apparently, there was some kinda simpatico link between Twain’s brand of humor and the typical yeti way of looking at life. So whatever my hairy boyfriend’s original furriner Tibetan-Mongol name had been, he was now called Tom. And when I met up with him, he used all his borrowed downhome American wit and humor to sweep me plumb off my feet.

  And so as that beat-up old steamer, Ship of Shadows, with its boilers fired by the catalyzed and condensed screams of succubi, plied its slow way up and down its few thousand assigned miles of the Styx, delivering its motley passengers to such stops as Rat’s Alley, Bone Palace, Migraine Gulch, Toadlick, Culo de Sciacallo, Twitterville, Clayface, Vuht, and Hernia House, Tom and I conducted our intense bunk-busting affair that veered all over the emotional map, from whispered sweet-nothings to black eyes and bunged-up heads. When we weren’t
easing along like two June bugs riding a leaf, all goofy smiles and hand-holding, we just grated on each other like Democrats and Republicans, or weeds and Roundup. I acknowledge I was wound pretty tight and could be kinda demanding, a go-getter with ambitions—whatever that entailed in Hell. Whereas Tom was an easy-going slacker, interested mostly in getting plenty to eat (mostly stray dockside cats, watermelons, Twizzlers, and Rusty Humphries Ol’ Southern Style Beef Jerky, which I had introduced him to) and scratching his grapefruit-sized balls en route to a long nap. No way we coulda made a long-term go of our mutual thing, and I guess I knew it all along. If that sugar-tongued, Muppet-furred bastard hadn’t featured a bone inside his furry ten-inch cock, I woulda ditched him a year sooner than I eventually did.

  But by the time we did finally split, our shenanigans, as I hinted at, had become somewhat notorious along both banks of my route, and somewhat inland, toward the Debatable Territories and the Impossible Zone. And that’s when Twain decided to put the two of us, thinly disguised and grossly misrepresented, inside his new Adventures of Tom Sawyer. (And why the guy half of the romantic duo should’ve gotten star billing in the novel, I leave up to you to figure out. Men! If they didn’t hang together, we could hang them all separately!)

  Mark later confessed to me, half apologetically and all puppy-dog-eyed, that he had been in a bind. He was under contract to Hades House to turn in a new novel in less than a month (having frittered away over the course of the past year his advance of 100,000 chancres, mostly on hookers, cigars, and gambling at billiards), and he was just plumb-dry of ideas. That’s when he hit upon fictionalizing the relationship between Tom and me. I must admit, he did a good job, however sensationalized and gossipy it turned out, and he got a bestseller out of the novel, even making enough to gift me a few thousand chancres out of guilt when I needed the dough. (And I mostly always needed the dough.)