Huang is silent a long, thoughtful moment. Then: “Money completes everything, spaceman.” He nods once before walking away.
It is difficult to threaten a man such as myself with no family, no friends, and no future. That must be a strange lesson for Huang.
I drift back to the latticed window. He is in the alley speaking to the empty air — an otic cell bead. A man like Huang wouldn’t have an implant. The dogs are quiet until he steps back into the blue Mercedes. They begin barking and wailing as the car slides away silent as dustfall.
It is then that I realize that the dog pack are holograms, an extension of the car itself.
Until humans went into the Deep Dark, we never knew how kindly Earth truly was. A man standing on earthquake-raddled ground in the midst of the most violent hurricane is as safe as babe-in-arms compared to any moment of life in hard vacuum. The smallest five-jiǎo pressure seal, procured low bid and installed by a bored maintech with a hangover, could fail and bring with it rapid, painful death.
The risk changes people, in ways most of them never realize. Friendships and hatreds are held equally close. Total strangers will share their last half-liter of air to keep one another alive just a little longer, in case rescue should show. Premeditated murder is almost unknown in the Deep Dark, though manslaughter is sadly common. Any fight can kill, even if just by diverting someone’s attention away from the environmentals at a critical moment.
So people find value in one another that was never been foreseen back on Earth. Only the managers and executives who work in the rock ports and colonies have kept the old, human habits of us-and-them, scheming, assassination of both character and body.
The question on my mind was whether it was an old enemy come for me, or someone from the Ceres Minerals Resources corporate hierarchy. Even setting aside the incalculable damage to our understanding of history, in ensuring the loss of the first verifiable nonhuman artifact, I’d also been the proximate cause of what many people chose to view as the loss of a billion tai kong yuan. Certain managers who would have preferred to exchange their white collars for bank accounts deeper than generations had taken my actions very badly.
Another Belt miner might have yanked my oxygen valve out of sheer, maddened frustration, but it took an angry salaryman to truly plot my ruin in a spreadsheet while smiling slowly. Here in Huang’s steel embrace I thought I’d managed my own ruin quite nicely. Yet someone was offering good money for me.
Oddly, Huang had made it all but my choice. Or seemed to, at any rate. Which implied he saw this inquiry as a matter of honor. Huang, like all his kind, was quite elastic in his reasoning about money, at least so long as it kept flowing, but implacable when it came to his notions of honor.
Even my honor, it would seem.
All of this was a very thin thread of logic from which to dangle. I could just keep painting shards until any one of several things killed me — radiation sickness, cancer, the old cook. Or I could tell Huang to break the deal he and I had made, and pass me back out of this house alive.
Given how much trouble I’d taken in order to surrender all control, there was something strangely alluring about being offered back the chitty on my life.
That night when the cook brought me the tea, I poured some into the tiny cup with no handles. He gave me a long, slow stare. “You go out?”
“With Mr. Huang, yes,” I told him.
The cook grunted, then withdrew to the kitchen.
The tea was so bitter that for a moment I wondered if he’d brewed it with rat poison. Even as this thought faded, the cook came back with a second cup and poured it out for himself. He sat down opposite me, something else he’d never done. Then he drew a small mesh bag on a chain out from inside his grubby white t-shirt.
“See this, ah.” He tugged open the top of the bag. Out tumbled one of my little blue caltrop fragments. I could almost see it spark in his hand.
“You shouldn’t be holding that.”
The cook hefted the mesh bag. “Lead. No sick.”
I reached out and took the caltrop arm. It was just that, a single arm broken off below the body. I fancied it was warm to my touch. It was certainly very, very blue.
“Why?” I asked him.
He looked up at the ceiling and spread one hand in a slow wave, as if to indicate the limitless stars in the Deep Dark far above our heads. “We too small. World too big. This — ” He shook his bag “ — this time price.”
I tried to unravel the fractured English. “Time price?”
The cook nodded vigorously. “You buy time for everyone, everything.”
I sipped my tea and thought about what he’d told me. I’d been out in the Deep Dark. I’d touched the sky that wraps the world round, past the blue and into the black.
“Blue,” he said, interrupting my chain of thought. “We come from sea, we go to sky. Blue to blue, ah?”
Blue to blue. Life had crawled from the ocean’s blue waters to eventually climb past the wide blue sky. With luck, we’d carry forward to the dying blue at the end of time.
“Time,” I said, trying the word in my mouth. “Do you mean the future?”
The cook nodded vigorously. “Future, ah.”
Once I’d finished eating the magnificent duck he’d prepared, I trudged back to my workroom. I’d already bargained away almost all of my time, but I could create time for others, in glowing blue fragments. It didn’t matter who was looking for me. Huang would do as he pleased. My sins were so great they could never be washed away, not even in a radioactive rain.
I could spend what time was left to me bringing people like the old cook a little closer to heaven, one shard after another.
About the Author
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2010 books are Pinion from Tor Books, The Baby Killers from PS Publishing, and The Sky That Wraps from Subterranean Press. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.
Teeth
Stephen Dedman
The little oblong box was made of ebony: I had to give Klein credit for a sense of irony, and possibly his knowledge of the genre. I stared at the glistening white lumps of ivory inside, and shook my head. “Beautifully preserved, aren’t they?” said Klein.
“Suspiciously,” I growled. “How sure are you of their provenance?”
He made a see-sawing gesture. He’d never had the looks or the range to make it as an actor (though that hadn’t stopped him trying), but he was a pretty good salesman. He worked for a well-known theatrical agency, mostly getting people the stuff that they wanted that couldn’t be written into their contracts. “They came from Temple’s collection. Before that, I have my doubts,” he admitted, “but he could hardly have asked for documentation. Body-snatchers didn’t go in for paperwork.”
“So you expect me trust you? Or am I supposed to try extracting some DNA?”
Klein smiled. “You could, I suppose, if you had anything for comparison... but you’ll have to buy them first.” He closed the little casket with an audible snap. “I’m not giving away free samples here. And if you look up the records, you’ll find that when they disinterred Poe’s corpse in 1875, the sexton noted that while the skeleton was in near-perfect condition, the top teeth had been dislodged from the skull.”
I knew the story, of course. In 1873, the philanthropist George Childs had been persuaded that Edgar deserved a better monument than an overgrown grave in the Poe family plot, and paid for a new memorial. “So who collected these? The sexton?”
“Maybe, or one of the gravediggers. You could still sell teeth back then, to be made into dentures: maybe he meant to do that, or maybe he realized how valuable they were... anyway, one of Childs’ servants found them in his collection after his death in 1894, or so the story goes, and sold them to Jules Verne. After that, the trail i
s easier to follow, though they were always sold in secret. Temple bought them some time in the 1980s.”
I tried to look unimpressed, and refilled my glass with Amontillado, leaving his empty. “What’s in the other box?”
Klein’s smile became a grin, and he opened the second ebon casket with a conjurer’s flourish. These teeth had been set into dentures in a wire frame, though the work was obviously primitive. “Don’t touch,” he said, pulling the box away from me.
“Whose are these supposed to be?” I said, dryly. “His teeth when he was a boy?”
“His mother’s,” Klein gloated. “I don’t know whose dentures they were, but those are her original teeth.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Klein lost a minute fraction of his smugness. “The provenance on these is a little less reliable,” he admitted, “but the story is interesting. You remember Poe’s story ‘Berenice’?”
I may have sniffed: just because I make movies, doesn’t mean I can’t read. ‘Berenice’ is not Poe’s best story, and it’s most interesting for containing the seeds for ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘Ligeia’, as well as some disturbing autobiographical elements. The obsessive Egaeus is betrothed to his cousin Berenice, but only notices her beauty when he sees her in the haunted library where his mother had died. (Poe’s own mother, a beautiful actress, had died of tuberculosis when he was two: he married his cousin Virginia six months after ‘Berenice’ was published, and she died of tuberculosis several years later.) After Berenice dies, Egaeus breaks into her tomb and steals her most attractive feature, her teeth. When readers complained about the story, Poe actually apologized to the editor who published it, claiming that he’d written it on a bet that he “could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular” and allowing “that it approaches the very verge of bad taste” — which means it’s pretty tame by modern standards.
“In 1834,” Klein continued, “somebody approached Poe and offered to sell him these teeth, saying they were his mother’s. Poe may have believed them, or not, but he couldn’t meet their price, even though he’d just won a prize for ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’. He wrote ‘Berenice’ hoping to raise the money, but by the time he was paid for it, the seller had disappeared. Childs’ servant said he bought the teeth, and a letter from Poe describing the incident, from Lizzie Doten sometime in the 1870s, but the letter is lost. Of course, I can’t really prove any of this, but since you’re the biggest private collector of Poe memorabilia alive now that Temple is gone... and not exactly a premature burial, if I may say so...”
I smiled at that, involuntarily, and tried to hide it behind my glass, but I could tell that Klein had noticed. “So,” I said, as blandly as I could manage, “you’re asking me to pay out a quarter million based on the claims of a couple of grave-robbers, at least one thief, two fantasists — one of them the creator of a celebrated hoax — and a poet who claimed to be channeling the dead, and now a dealer in stolen artwork, and God knows how many fools and liars in between.”
Klein shrugged: he didn’t need to look around at the bookshelves, the bust of Pallas above the door or the mummy case in the corner to know how obsessed I was with Poe, horror’s patron sinner. “You must be used to that.”
He was right, of course — everybody in Hollywood lies constantly, if only to themselves — but that didn’t stop it sounding like an insult, and I hate being insulted. “You’ve seen them,” he continued, smirking. “Sleep on it, and decide for yourself, but don’t take too long. I can always find another buyer: do you want to spend the rest of your life wondering what you could have had?”
Poe said it better than I could, of course: And the evening closed in upon me thus — and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went — and the day again dawned — and the mists of a second night were now gathering around — and still I sat motionless in that solitary room — and still I sat buried in meditation — and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as with the most vivid and hideous distinctness it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber.
Of course, I didn’t spend all of that time motionless or meditating: I wasn’t able to sleep for long without dreaming of adding those teeth to my collection, but I made the effort. I remembered to eat, and wash, and while I didn’t need to leave the house, the phone and fax machine was never silent for very long: I had another two films in pre-production and one in post, so I had plenty to occupy my time if not my mind. But I kept returning to the library and staring at the treasures of my collection. The teeth, if I bought them, would have to go in the safe: if they were fake, then the fewer people who knew I had bought them and been fooled, the better. But if they were real, the idea of them belonging to someone else was unbearable.
I picked up a collection of Poe stories, and leafed through it, hoping he would give me an answer.
Klein was grinning again, or still, as he walked into my office at the studio on Friday night, opened his attaché case, and produced the boxes again. “I was sure you’d call,” he gloated.
“Sure enough that you didn’t try to sell them to anybody else?” I murmured.
He faltered slightly at that, but his insulting smirk returned as I handed him a glass. He gulped it down as though it were water, and I poured him another. “Yes,” he admitted. “I knew you could pay more, and sooner.”
I nodded, and opened the attaché case to show him the stacked banknotes, then snapped it shut again. “You have them?”
He opened his own case, removed the ebony caskets, and placed them on my desk. I looked inside both boxes, and nodded. “The old law of Hollywood: give ‘em what they want.” I drew a deep breath. “What do you want, Klein?”
“Well, I’d like to be paid,” he said dryly.
“You will be, I promise... but what do you do with your money? Do you collect anything?”
“No, not in the way you mean it. I mean, I like to have the best, but so does everybody, right?”
“The best of what?”
“The usual stuff. House, car, clothes... you know.”
“Anything you wouldn’t sell for a profit?”
“No, I guess not. Why?”
“So what really moves you is money?”
“Well, sure, same as everybody. So what?”
“Have you read much Poe, Klein? ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, perhaps? ‘Hop-Frog’? ‘The Conqueror Worm’?” Somehow, looking at his triumphant sneer brought that one instantly to mind. “‘The Premature Burial’?”
“I saw some of the films.”
“A poor substitute for the genuine article,” I said. “And a man in your line should be able to tell real from fake.” I pulled the small pistol from my pocket and pointed it at his stomach. “Take this, for example.”
His eyes widened. “What — ”
“This might just be a prop,” I said, “and if it is, then you can just grab that case and run out of here and tell people how you managed to take me for a quarter mill. But it might not be: sometimes it’s cheaper to buy the real thing than fake it.” I grabbed the case, and nodded at the door. “There’s something I want to show you.”
It was so satisfying him seeing him walk down the corridor, hands clasped behind his head, that I almost took pity on him — but if I did that, I’d be finished in Hollywood. I steered him towards the soundstage where the crew had reconstructed a used crematorium. I pressed the buttons to open the door, and another to start the burners. “For example,” I said, “is that fire really hot enough to actually destroy a body?”
Klein was sweating by now, and I doubted it was because of the flames. “If it helps, it would need to be about 1600 degrees not to leave any identifiable remains. But paper burns at a third of that.” And I threw the attaché case into the oven.
Klein squawked, then stared at me. “You’re crazy!”
“Crazy enough to throw away a quarter million on a whim? Maybe I am... but then, that’s not my money: it’
s yours. All you have to do is go and get it — but don’t take too long.”
He stared into the flames. “You’re bluffing. The money’s fake. Counterfeit. Copies. Whatever.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But to me, that money’s worth less than the possibility that these teeth are real. What’s it worth to you? Do you want to spend the rest of your life wondering what you could have had?”
He turned to look at me, hoping for some clue in my expression, then leapt into the flames. I pressed the button to close the door, and stood there for a few minutes half-hoping to hear a cry of “For the love of God, Montressor!” — but there was nothing but silence.
I waited for two hours, reading e-mails and script outlines on my Blackberry, before turning the flames off. When I returned to the studio on Monday, the oven had cooled down, and the crew was emptying it out.
Maybe I shouldn’t have gone down to the soundstage to watch them, but I had to make sure there was nothing left that could be identified, no tell-tale hearts or anything of that nature. Klein was right about the money, of course: most of it was fake, but he’d probably never had a chance to find out. Fortunately, nothing in the ashes resembled a banknote, or the attaché case. Just some small fragments of bone indistinguishable from the others we’d used to decorate some of the sets, and some lumps of molten metal that had once been his Rolex and his belt buckle.
One of the stage hands picked some white lumps out of the ashes, and looked at them curiously. Teeth. Human teeth. My heart grew sick, but then he tossed them into the bin with the other rubbish. I smiled to see them there, but my smile failed as the teeth seemed to form themselves back into Klein’s familiar smirk. Another shovel-full of ash landed on top of them, but I could still see them glistening there. I see them still.
About the Author
Stephen Dedman was exposed to the works of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe at an early age, and has never quite recovered. The author of four novels and more than 100 short stories published in an eclectic range of magazines and anthologies, he has won the Aurealis and Ditmar awards for short fiction and been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the BSFA Award, the Seiun Award, the Spectrum Award, the Sidewise Award and a sainthood.
Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 18 Page 2