Interzone #265 - July-August 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  On one occasion Azzel pointed the fossilized rag out to Tamara, trying to explain the immense power that this totem held over him, but she just shrugged and sharpened the focus on the projector that cast the image of the Presidential candidate, with the ineffable smirk of an engorged Buddha, upon the opposing wall.

  DISCUSSION

  Despite the light shed on the subject by our inquiry, the candidacy of Mr Trump remains highly enigmatic.

  Many aspects of his countenance, such as the resemblance of his nose to the feces of certain farm animals remarked upon by one of our test subjects, the deep folds of his jowls which another described as “a newly evolved excretory orifice which has become a matter of survival for the politically elite”, or the great overhanging cornice of his tawny-brown hair, which “oppresses from a distance, as if it jutting [from the screen] in a premeditated act of tele-projected strangulation”.

  The latter must be considered a remarkable innovation devised by Mr Trump, which thereby allows him to exert the extreme personal-space invasion tactics of Lyndon B. Johnson upon his (Mr Trump’s) audience at a considerable distance. The ability of this technique to scale the experience of personal (sexual) humiliation to large numbers of viewers should not be underestimated.

  Forbidden Geometries. Axxxl and Tamara labored deep into the night, transforming the derelict high-rise and its vast facade of pollution-frosted glass into the ultimate consummation of their fevered vision.

  When they had finished their preparations, their bodies sheened with sweat, they lay atop the granite table that dominated the executive boardroom. The cold stone jolted them with frissons of arousal whenever it contacted their simmering flesh.

  And then Axxxl realized something was wrong.

  No longer did the high-rise tremble.

  The heavy rumblings of the trucks had fallen silent.

  He looked up from the expansive flesh-dunes of Tamara’s body, and out the floor-to-ceiling windows beyond. The expressways and thoroughfares spreading out upon the vista before them were gridlock, an uninterrupted mass of taillights bleeding out like the vasculature of some vast robotic mind.

  And all of the gridlock led back to the high-rise, and the chaos unfolding at their feet.

  A double-tanker truck pressurized with liquefied natural gas had launched itself off of the cloverleaf.

  And from there straight into a flatbed hauling ass down the expressway with a 25-ton cask of highly radioactive waste riding upon its back.

  Even with the double-paned glass between him and the conflagration, the heat soon warmed Axxxl’s skin, and – superimposed upon Tamara’s caresses of the forbidden clefts and protuberances of his body – sent pleasant tingles down his spine.

  It had been a fortuitous development.

  As emergency vehicle sirens and helicopter blades thrashing the air filled the silent wake of the motionless trucks, Axxxl realized that every camera in the world was now focused on the spectacle below.

  And as they watched the panicked news feeds on Tamara’s laptop, in every shot the high-rise of the darkened Institute loomed like an enormous black tombstone in the background.

  Axxxl slipped back into his suit, knotted off the cerebral hemorrhage that was his necktie.

  And as Tamara hiked up her skirt, which hesitated all too briefly upon the mound of her pubis, Axxxl strode deep into the boardroom and switched on the first projector.

  CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

  Although our attempt to produce a comprehensive inventory of auto-erotic responses to Trump’s various face-states (scowl of derision, fecal nose, pop-eyes/masturbatory mouth-appliance, etc.) ultimately proved unsuccessful, the methodology we have pioneered and the novel responses already catalogued herein offers a noteworthy foundation for future probes of the candidacy of Mr Trump and related phenomena.

  It is hoped that such insights may be of considerable use to political theorists and the American public, if not the candidate himself – not to mention his many adversaries.

  For every truth there is a counter-argument, for every lie another denial, and we owe it to ourselves (and our way of government) to more thoroughly understand the impact of these auto-suggestions on the American psyche—

  No matter how disturbing the topography of our collective consciousness that emerges.

  Fusing Sequence. From the depths of the executive boardroom Axxxl aimed the high-lumen projector not inward, upon the walls of the Institute, but outward, at the film of pollution on the exterior of the floor-to-ceiling glass.

  A matte-like finish that constituted an ideal diffusion surface.

  The scene cast by the projector, an abstract swath of tawny-brown, resembled an extreme close up of an isolated hillock in rolling wheat fields.

  But there was something unnatural and deeply disturbing about this particular hillock’s geometry, as if it were an artificial construction of some ancient race of doomed mound-builders.

  And suddenly the entire hillside shifted, as if built on unstable ground.

  Axxxl nodded to Tamara. She walked over and kneeled in front of her laptop, bowing before it to place her hands on the keyboard, as if in worship of some obscene Mecca on the distant margins of Axxxl’s mind.

  Dropping into a command-line prompt, she keyed the fusing sequence.

  And as her black mood rings glistened, her expression dead serious, Dr de Pravern clacked on Enter with a manicured thumb.

  Satisfied with her handiwork, she swiped back over to the screen jammed with live news-feeds.

  Axxxl crouched beside her, held her close with an arm draped across her shoulders, to witness the defining moment of their creation.

  On the camera feeds, the dark windows of the Institute hovering in the background lit up one by one. A jilted eye, a fragment of jaw, a cavernous nasal septum concentrated somewhere near about the middle of the 72nd floor.

  The vision of the candidate, tiled together from the projections shining forth from every vacant office on the Institute’s top thirty-six floors, materialized on Tamara’s laptop.

  And across every satellite feed chattering through the atmosphere of the planet, every undersea cable girding the oceanic rifts that were tearing the Earth apart, and – ultimately – upon every television screen the whole world over:

  The Colossus of Trump presided over the holocaust below.

  ***

  Mr Hinckley – although unavailable for comment due to lingering side-effects of enhanced interrogation – has been confirmed by quasi-officials of law enforcement to be a legal citizen of the United States of America, a nation-state alleged to be symbolic of freedom.

  This despite a well-documented penchant for vast border-walls, demonization of the honorable and sublime Muslim faith, and off-shore confinement of individuals in centers of indefinite detention as advocated by certain prominent political figures, who need not be invoked by name here.

  Preliminary investigations have revealed that Mr Hinckley maintains a website, kenhinckley.wordpress.com, which documents hundreds of ‘scientific papers’ and ‘patents’, leading inevitably to the conclusion (if by no evidence beyond their sheer plenitude) that these must represent the unfortunate confabulations of a diseased mind, despite their apparent acceptance into the scientific canon. Upon download and laser-printing, a distinct stench of diesel fumes was also noted.

  That Mr Hinckley furthermore claims to be a ‘writer’, having previously published made-up stories in venues such as Nature Futures, Penumbra, and Fiction River: Time Streams, merely confirms that he is a highly dangerous (if not insane) individual. Pick-up basketball players frequenting local gymnasiums also report that his three-point shot is known to be exceptionally lethal.

  However, under extended questioning which was not thought to involve sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and/or (prolonged) exposure to temperature extremes, Mr Hinckley did admit that the ‘story’ in the present so-called ‘magazine’ known as Interzone may not be so much about Mr Trump as it is about the
triumvirate formed by the Presidential candidate, his audience (perhaps best exemplified by certain widely suppressed elements of middle-American white culture, though of course not exclusively so), and the media.

  It is this bizarre love triangle which makes a pornography of events such as 9/11, the Syrian refugee crisis, and even now the horrific Orlando shootings. The end-state of this inspiraling and self-obsessed cycle, perhaps to be capped ultimately by the election of Mr Trump to the highest office of the most powerful nation on Earth, forms an exercise in logical reduction best left to the reader.

  Or, as the recent decision to exit the European Union would indicate – effectively a choice for the United Kingdom to construct its own Wall of Trump, perhaps one day to be decorated by celebratory graffiti-murals, at a Cyclopean scale, of the Presidential candidate himself – such an exercise would be pointless because it has already reached its logical conclusion.

  COMING SOON TO INTERZONE

  ‘The End of Hope Street’

  a novelette by Malcolm Devlin

  ‘The Apologists’

  Tade Thompson

  ‘Extraterrestrial Folk Metal Fusion’

  Georgina Bruce

  and much, much more

  issue #266 is published in September

  THE INSIDE-OUT

  ANDREW KOZMA

  illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

  Anarchy told me about the abandoned ghetto because it knew I’d find it impossible to resist, which is what led us to take the subway to the Bright Hem. As with so much of the new home the Topoi designed for us, the subway was supposed to make humans feel like we were back on Earth, but perhaps because Spiders like Anarchy can find a comfortable seat in a crowded car just as easily as I can, it doesn’t. The subway was full of graffiti, just like on Earth, but here it was in a dozen other languages. Non-human languages. Hell, they could’ve been children’s drawings for all I knew, because all I knew was that I knew very little about humanity’s new home IO, the Inside-Out, the Dyson sphere the Topoi engineered as their home.

  In the subway car, I sat next to Anarchy underneath a drawing of a white-picket fence topped with heads, trying not to stare at the Pinworms, the Hermit Crabs, the Burning Trashcans, the Lampposts, all the aliens riding the subway and staring at us, the new kids on the block. At each stop, we were joined by more of our fellow explorers – the Unknown Knowns, we called ourselves – all of us, except Anarchy, perhaps, equally aware of our ignorance. Bjorn Bjorn, a tall blonde woman dressed in the crispest of traveling clothes. Artemisia Chronis, dark-haired and small, her stare a burning match on your skin. The red-haired fraternal twins, Roam and Return, one as hefty as a bear with hair and beard to match, the other as bland and colorless as an IRS agent.

  We each had our own reasons for exploring our new world, when most people hugged their little piece of Topoi-fabricated home as though our translation across hundreds of thousands of light years could be ignored like a salesman’s knock at the door. Artemisia used the new vistas in her paintings and sculptures. Bjorn was an astrophysicist – or had been back on Earth – and now she was one of the few scientists who hadn’t given up on her studies. Roam and Return were thrill-seekers, plain and simple. Anarchy was a Spider, which meant it was an enigma, its smooth, graffitied shell emotionless as a cue ball. And I explored because I knew that’s what Bee would be doing if she were stuck in this madhouse with me.

  “Where we going, Jamon?” Return finally asked, speaking around mouthfuls of jugfruit. “Are we jumping down another Hole? Burying our heads in another Sandpit? Breaking into a Ledge Factory?”

  All eyes turned to me. Even Anarchy tilted its sphere closer to my face, despite the fact that it was the one who told me about the ghetto in the first place. The Unknown Knowns trusted me so much they’d come along without question. Well, it was either trust or the desperate desire to do something other than wait for their tired cells to replicate themselves into oblivion.

  “Anarchy says there’s an abandoned ghetto on the edge of our little portion of IO. Thought it’d be worth it to jump in, see what we can find. Anarchy’s never been there. Apparently, the Spiders leave it alone.”

  “Why?” Artemesia asked, her voice a lead weight.

  “Spiders are more interested in living cultures than dead ones?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not as if this tin can speaks English.”

  “You mean ‘human’,” Return said. He began to clean under his nails with a worn pocketknife, obviously from Earth. I couldn’t help staring. The faux-wood handle was chipped to show white plastic beneath. Scratches on the blade broke up the light so that the metal looked like a field of snow.

  “An abandoned ghetto.” Roam smiled through his thicket of beard. “Hope no one’s afraid of ghosts?”

  “Why should we be?” Bjorn said. “We’re ghosts ourselves.”

  Artemisia shook her head. “No, we’re the opposite of ghosts. Alive, but stuck living in the shell of our former world.”

  That shut everyone up, even Return. I watched him finish cleaning his nails, desperately wanting to hold the pocketknife but afraid to ask. Some people woke on IO with parts of their life from Earth, wallets and loose change, paperclips and ballpoint pens, a dozen pairs of shoes. Since everything else was provided by the Topoi, these authentic artifacts were the only real economy we had. Safe in my pocket was the only evidence I had of my life back on Earth: a picture of Bee.

  It wasn’t a snapshot from our wedding. It wasn’t romantic at all. I had her old student ID, an eighteen-year-old her looking through time at a man she hadn’t even met yet.

  Anarchy tapped out a quick message on the floor between us. “What ghost?”

  “It’s empty,” I said. “It’s an emptiness.”

  We left the subway at California Dreamin’ Station and trekked into the edge of the human ghetto: the Bright Hem. It was crafted to look like the forests of Oregon in some places, like the steppes of Africa in others, every wilderness on Earth represented. There was always something unreal about these areas. We knew that the land we were seeing wasn’t Earth’s, but there was something else off, a fierce vividness to the colors, the perfection of every blade of grass.

  This section of the Bright Hem looked like Central Park. Not a wilderness, per se, but the Topoi had trouble understanding the details of lesser creatures. Near the station sat a Librarian, its chest full of bright green Ledge. Its giant crab-like head turned to follow us as we passed by. Surrounding the Librarian were dozens of people Booking, frozen in the position they held when the Ledge absorbed their brains into the sucking whirlpool that was the Galactic Archive.

  Roam and Return stacked a few Books in compromising positions. Bjorn and even Artemisia laughed, but I couldn’t. I’d done Ledge. In a few hours or days the Books would wake, their limbs sore, their stomachs aching for food, without a clue as to where they were or what they’d been doing. They’d see the Librarian, and they’d go back to it with their hands outstretched confident that even if they knew nothing at the moment, the answers were in that little green pill.

  I headed into the Bright Hem, the False Sky turning dark with late afternoon, the beginnings of familiar Earth-bound constellations coming out, the artificial lights a stage set for humanity’s own personal passion play.

  “Daylight’s a wasting,” I called out to my fellow explorers, confident they’d follow.

  But there was no daylight wasting, and no daylight. At the edges of the ghetto, the False Sky was kept from complete darkness by the light from IO’s sun, and the further we walked into the Bright Hem the brighter the world grew. Under the cloak of thick-leaved trees, light pooled around us as though the ground itself were glowing.

  Anarchy sped ahead into the greenery, its eight telescoping legs a whir of motion. I heard heavy footsteps and then Roam was there beside me, his breath heavy. “I’m sorry, man, about the Books. I know you Ledged, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I just thought it would be funny, lighten the moo
d, you know. I just, I didn’t think I—”

  The rush of words faltered as we broke from the trees. Above us hung IO’s real sun, a white-hot drop of molten gold. Something fell loose in my chest. Roam’s eyes grew wide as fists. As each of the others came into the open, they were paralyzed as though staring into the face of God. In a way we were. Somewhere up there, either on one of the floating platforms closer to the sun, or on the surface of IO that stretched away all around us, the Topoi lived, the gods of this world, the careless creators.

  I’d seen IO’s sun before. Months into my initial wandering, after I tried to drown myself in Ledge but before I’d founded the Unknown Knowns, I wandered the Bright Hem far on the other side of the human ghetto. I stayed out from under the False Sky for days under that true sunlight. My despair and bitterness didn’t leave me, but they were bleached under that imperious glare into something new.

  I hurried ahead to let the others be. Everyone deserves privacy when their world upends.

  I caught up with Anarchy where the Bright Hem ended, passing through a skein of trees to reach the edge of a street of crushed coral. To either side of the street two-story polyps and anemones waved gently in the non-existent breeze. I sat down to take it all in. The view was perfect, the local houses, the high rises further out piled out of individual globes like crayfish chimneys, and everything colored in soft pastels. Even Anarchy’s metal body didn’t prevent the ghetto from looking like a postcard.

  The air was salty, redolent of the ocean. Unlike the human ghetto, where the sound of people and life was so thick you could never escape it, here there was only silence. Then Anarchy stepped onto the coral street and that perfect silence burst like a bubble under the crunching of its metal legs.

  I’d seen alien cities and the wonders that lay in wait beyond the human ghetto’s borders in the offices of the Social Workers, but those were pictures. And I’d seen aliens, too, of course, playing tourist in the human ghetto. But in the midst of all that humanity my subconscious began to see those aliens as people in costumes, not as evidence that humanity was just a speck of dust in the universe’s grand ballroom. And now this ghetto and all those who lived in it, they weren’t even dust.