Emperor of Gondwanaland

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Is there, um, a restroom I could avail myself of first.”

  “Certainly. Here’s the key. Left down that corridor.”

  Carrying the sacred key. Almost as if he works here. At the firm which ignored all his suggestions. For the cover of Cosmocopia. And instead of Whelan or Eggleton. He got the defiantly pastel work of Murrell Peurifoy. Whose oeuvre consists almost entirely of covers for humorous fantasy novels. And the image Peurifoy supplied for the eponymous device of Corso’s book. Looked like a hybrid of a juicer, the postmodern VW Bug, and a penile-extension pump.

  Through the limited-access door. Into the uttermost stall. Hanging satchel from a coat hook. Gratefully dropping one’s trousers and boxers. Taking a seat. Peristaltic relief. Still blessedly easy to obtain. Unlike the mental variety.

  Additional patrons entering noisily. A familiar voice and an unknown one. Wankel himself the former. Jovial banter above hardy plashing of piss.

  “So you’re meeting with Corso Fairly Fried. What’s his story these days.”

  “Pathetic case. Fair amount of talent. But he’s gotten too deep into this whole mythos of the genre thing. Thinks SF is some kind of mystical calling. Instead of just another job. Imagines he’s writing for a fraternity of supermen. Instead of a bunch of dorky, overintelligent fifteen-year-olds.”

  Laughter from the unidentified interlocutor. “Jesus! Can’t he see it’s all interchangeable. Mysteries, techno-thrillers, westerns. Just a load of identical crap. Well, I know one thing. I won’t make that mistake. I’m not getting trapped in this dead-end field. Another year or two and I’m outta here. I’ve already got some feelers out at Maxim.”

  Zippers laddering upward. “Maxim, huh. Must meet a lot of beautiful women there.”

  “You bet.”

  Sounds of hand washing. Departure. And a sob betokening black desolation in the farthermost stall.

  Corso Fairly Fried. His public image. Known to everyone but oneself. Passion and dedication to one’s chosen field. Derided and cast aside. One’s motivation laughable. If not predicated strictly on commercialism. Not to mention exclusion of any artistic striving. To build upon the work of past heroes. Giants of the medium. Who no doubt received similar treatment. From their own traitorous editors.

  And how will he face Wankel now. Without spitting in his eye. Or punching same. But he of course cannot. For Multrum would rend his impetuous and violent client into bite-sized pieces. To be shared with the other velociraptors. Corso’s only choice. To swallow his shame. And carry on.

  Back to the receptionist. Return the key. Into Wankel’s sanctum.

  Roger Wankel standing by a table near the window. View of steel and glass canyons. Assaultive in their uncaring facades. Birds in flight. Boyish shock of tawny hair angling across the editor’s wide brow. Close-set eyes. Nose and lips chosen from a child’s catalogue of facial features then misplaced in an adult facial template. Sorting through a stack of cover proofs. Perhaps Peurifoy already engaged to limn The Black-Hole Gun. If so, one has only a dual question. Is that window shatterproof. And how far to the ground.

  “Corso! A real pleasure to see you! How’s Ginny doing.”

  “You must mean Jenny. She’s fine.” Unspoken of course. That she is fine with someone else.

  “Great, great. Now I assume you’re here to talk about the extension. Never thought it would get approved. But Multrum’s one tough negotiator. You’re lucky to have him on your team.”

  “Yes. He has a thick hide.”

  “True, true. Now what can you share with me to convince me you’ve got a handle on this project.”

  Restraining oneself from “sharing” venomous accusations. Of venality and double-dealing. Instead babbling in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. About likely plot developments. Which might occur. To Corso’s protagonist. Russ Radikans. Owner of the Black-Hole Gun. Ancient artifact of a vanished race. The Acheropyte. And Russ’s lover. Zulma Nautch. Starship pilot. Of the Growler. Zulma’s evil clone sister. Zinza, deadly assassin. And so forth. With Wankel taking it all in. And nodding sagely. The hypocritical bastard.

  A knock at the office door. Which Wankel ignores. But a workman enters regardless. Mustache, dirty brown coveralls, hammer hanging from a loop, work gloves tucked in a back pocket. And without a word. The man begins to dismantle one of the office walls. Using a putty knife. To peel sheets of thin substance away. Not plaster or particleboard, but a resinous veneer. To reveal not girders and joists. But rather the raw blue air several dozen stories up. A breeze strokes Corso’s cheek.

  Corso flummoxed into silence. Wankel confused. But only by his author’s hesitation. “Go on, I’m listening.” So that Corso realizes. This is another hallucination. And he tries to continue. Tries to embrace the unpredictable unreality of his senses.

  Now several more workman arrive. All twins to the first. A busy horde of disassemblers. They fall to aiding the original in deconstructing the walls. Until soon Corso and Wankel sit at the top of a lofty naked pillar. A few square feet of carpeted floor. Exposed on all sides. To Manhattan’s brutal scrutiny. Since the rest of the office has inexplicably vanished. A stage set struck. By the Hidden Puppet Masters. Who intend to decimate. Corso’s solipsistic self.

  Breezes riffle Corso’s hair. He cannot go on. Because of the actions of one workman. Who has stepped confidently off the pillar. And now climbs the sky itself. As if the air were a gentle blue slope. He heads for the sun. And as he approaches the orb he does not shrink. But rather puts the “sun” into its true scale. A disk as big as a hubcap. And donning his gloves. The workman begins to unscrew the sun.

  At the same time other workman have shut down Wankel. Employing a switch at the back of his neck. Corso’s enduring suspicions of the existence of some such switch now validated. And they pick up the editor’s chair with him in it. And tip it upside down. But Wankel remains attached. Grinning moronically.

  And then as the sun is finally completely unthreaded from its socket descends the ultimate darkness.

  As if Russ Radikans

  just employed his

  Black-Hole Gun

  on his very Creator.

  “Corso, my boy. Wake up!”

  That plummy voice. Steeped in all the luxuries of a cozy life. So familiar. From a credit card commercial. And one for Saturn automobiles. And many a convention panel. Not to mention the occasional phone conversation. In the nighted hours. When despair crept up. On the protégé. And he dialed the mentor’s home phone. A number millions of fans would have killed for. One such being the vanished younger Corso himself. And even now when one is accorded one’s own small professional stature. Still half disbelieving. One has been granted such a high privilege.

  Corso unshutters his eyes. He is recumbent. Half naked. Atop a wheeled stretcher. Shielded by dirty curtains on rings. From the pitiful and pitying gazes of. fellow sufferers. Evidently in a hospital emergency room. And by his side sits Malachi Stiltjack.

  Stiltjack wears an expensive charcoal suit. Many yards of Italian fabric girdling his extensive acreage. Of a finer cut even than Multrum’s. Vest. Watch chain. Other dandyish accoutrements. Silver hair razor-cut and styled to perfection. His middle-aged shiny pontifical face beaming. Presumably at Corso’s reattainment of consciousness.

  “What—what happened to me.”

  “You passed out in your editor’s office. Bad show, my boy. Many of us have longed for such an escape, but it’s pure cowardice to make such a melodramatic exit. Reflects poorly on your endurance and stamina. How could you handle a multicity book tour if one little bout of tedium causes you to crumple like an empty potato-chip packet. So they’ll ask. In any case, an ambulance rushed you here. I tracked you down when you failed to meet me.”

  “Oh, Christ, Wankel will put me at the top of his shit list now for sure.”

  Wry expression on Stiltjack’s face. “And you weren’t there already.”

  Corso chagrined. “You know then about me missing my deadlines.”


  “But who doesn’t. Locus even did a sidebar on your predicament in the December issue. Didn’t you see it then.”

  “I let my subscription lapse. Money was tight. And reading Locus just makes me nervous. All those big-money deals, all those brilliant, joyous, glad-handing professionals. How does it all relate to the actual dreaming—”

  “Come now, Corso, you should know better than to believe all that printed hyperbole. None of us is ever really secure. Most writers just put up a good front.”

  An ungenerous feeling of anger and envy at his friend. “Easy enough for you to say, Malachi, with your castle and contracts and—and concubines!”

  The padrone unoffended by the peon’s eruption. Magnanimous and solicitous from on high. “Now, now, Corso, such resentment ill becomes you. But I understand completely that it’s your creative blockage talking. That’s the crux of your trouble. Not your material circumstances. Or your wife’s desertion.”

  A wail of despair. “My God, has Locus run a sidebar on that, too!”

  “Not at all. But the grapevine—”

  “Do my goddamn peers ever stop gossiping long enough to collect their awards.”

  “Let’s put aside the all-too-human deficiencies of our comrades for the moment, Corso, and consider my diagnosis. Think a minute. If I were the one suffering the blockage, would all my money and possessions make me feel one whit happier. Of course not. Same thing with one’s physical health. Psychological or somatic, an easy and natural functioning is the one essential to your peace of mind. Clear up your creative logjam, and you’ll be back on top of the world.”

  “An easy prescription. But hard to administer to oneself.”

  “Let’s work on it together a little longer. It’s not that late in the evening. We can still have dinner. But first we need to get you discharged.”

  Doctor summoned. Corso reluctantly given a clean bill of health. Possibly a small case of food poisoning adduced. From Papoon Skloot’s. Spoiled coelacanth in the prehistoric kitchen. Which would serve all the egregiously wealthy diners right. Bidden by a surly yet attractive red-haired nurse to dress oneself. Nurse not lingering to peek at Corso’s neglected manhood. As half fantasized. By a lonely and too-little-of-late-fondled professional daydreamer. And soon out on the twilit streets.

  Stiltjack swinging a cane with a golden grip. Casting a radiant appreciative gaze at the whole wide world. Scurrying business drones. Sweaty delivery persons. Idling teenagers. A cherry for his picking. Or kicking. Should any viciously magisterial whim overtake him. Droit du seigneur. My mundane subjects. Corso striding silently alongside. Certain that if any pigeon shits. The excrement will hit the one who presents the most abject target.

  “Now then, tell me about your problems, lad.”

  Corso complies. Recounts his disenchantment with the work. Displacement of tropes into real life. And the fugue states. And even as he describes his disease. He nervously awaits another strike. But nothing. Yet Corso’s sigh of relief is undone. By Stiltjack’s next words.

  “So you’ve got the dicky fits. I thought they wouldn’t have hit you for another few years yet. But they do occur in direct proportion to one’s talents. So I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  Corso simultaneously flattered and alarmed. “The dicky fits.”

  “Named after you-know-who, of course. Our patron saint.”

  “But you mean to say—”

  “That I’ve had them, too. But of course! Every cold stone writer of science fiction goes through them at one point or another. Most come out the other side. But of course a few don’t. With luck you won’t be numbered among the latter.”

  “It’s an occupational disease then.”

  “Oh it’s not a disease. It’s a privileged glimpse of reality.”

  Corso stops. “What are you saying, Malachi.”

  “Aren’t you listening to me. You’ve been vouchsafed a vision. Of the plastic, unstable nature of reality. The illusory character of the entire cosmos. It’s the god’s-eye perspective. Conceptual breakthrough time.”

  Corso’s tone sneering. “And I suppose then that you’ve benefited immensely from these visions. Maybe even learned how to become a deity yourself. Maybe I’m just a character in one of your fictions.”

  “Well, yes, I have become rather a demigod. As to who created whom, or whether we’re both figments of some larger entity—well, the jury is still out.”

  “I would appreciate some disproof of your insanity.”

  “Naturally. How’s this.”

  The surging pedestrian crowd freezes in place. And the traffic, too. On the sidewalk appear Sharon Walpole, Clive Multrum, and Roger Wankel. In their standard configurations. But then each morphs to his or her abnormal state. Walpole’s prosthetic lobster claw. Multrum’s reptilian guise. Wankel’s android fixity. Corso approaches the marmoreal figures. Pokes them. Turns to Stiltjack.

  “Satisfied now. Or shall I trot out Jenny and her new beau. I believe they’re attending a car show in Duluth at the moment. I could bring onstage that derelict from Penn Station as well. His name, by the way, is Arthur Pearty. A fascinating fellow once you really get to know him.”

  “No. Not necessary. Just send these—these specters away.”

  The editors and agent vanish. Life resumes. Stiltjack moves blithely onward. Corso numbly following. The world’s deceptive insubstantiality now confirmed. A thin shambles. A picture painted on rice paper. Corso sick to his stomach.

  “It’s best not to cause such large-scale disruptions. The universe, whatever it is, is not our toy. We did not create it. We do not run the hourly shadow-show. We are unaware of the ultimate rationale for its existence. But a small tweak here and there. Aimed at personal betterment. Such little perquisites are permitted those of us who have come out the other side of the dicky fits.”

  “But, but—but even if you decide to go on living, how can you continue to write science fiction! In the face of such knowledge.”

  Malachi pausing. To signal importance of his words. “Well, as to motivation, now, Corso, it’s all a question of whose imagination is superior, isn’t it. Weird as the universe is when you finally comprehend it, a trained mind such as yours or mine demands that our own imagination be even more potent in its conceptions. If you’re a real science fiction writer, that is. Now why don’t we go enjoy a fine meal. I can guarantee that we won’t be interrupted.”

  And Corso laughs

  loud enough to cause strangers

  to gape

  for his appetite

  is suddenly prodigious

  and not just for food.

  For Horselover Fat, Jonathan Herovit, and, of course, the Ginger Man.

  Thorn Metyger is quietly, diabolically insane. Oh, you’d never know it just by meeting him. He presents a demure, affable face to the world. But I ask you this: What kind of fellow could write transgressive tomes on such topics as the history of opium and the history of the electric chair, as well as the landmark posthorror novel, Big Gurl, and then go on to write authentically affecting young-adult novels, under a pen name meant to spare wandering teens from discovering his Mr. Hyde half? Only someone with a massive alien brain whose neurons do not fire in conventional sequences.

  When I tell you that Thom also invented the figure of the Hypmogoo- goopizin’ Man, the protagonist of the story that follows, you’ll have no choice but to acknowledge that Mr. Metzger does not inhabit the same continuum as the rest of us.

  The Curious Inventions of Mr. H

  1. 7000 b.c.

  Setting out from their village one bright dawn for the day’s hunt, the barefoot tribesmen were half asleep. They scratched under their gamy furs, farted, belched, poked each other with the butt-ends of their spears. One loosed a practice arrow at a rabbit, missed, and was pummeled by the leader, a hulking male with arms the size of elk haunches. Hooting and laughing, the hunters trouped with maximum disorganization into the woods.

  In a familiar clearing not far from their setrlement,
they came to an unplanned halt. Clustering closer together, they gaped with astonishment at a disconcerting sight.

  Across the patch of open grassy ground stood a stranger. Big as their leader, the newcomer was oddly attired. Instead of a single drape of clumsily sutured hide, he wore multiple pieces of clothing: a fur-trimmed top that covered his arms and back and shoulders but left his chest bare, tapered leggings, and tasseled square-toed foot coverings. Atop his head perched a wide, peaked, shade-making device of some sort. The stranger’s skin was dark, the color of sooty fire-scorched hearthstone, something never seen before. But the man’s weirdest, most disagreeable feature was his left eye, an enormously protruding, arterially crimsoned orb of commanding magnificence and eerie mana.

  Now the stranger called brashly out, in the villagers’ own tongue, “Gen-tuhl-men! Heads up! This is your big day!”

  He moved across the clearing, simultaneously reaching behind his back. Miraculously, he produced from behind himself an object much bigger than he could have hidden with his body.

  Whispering among themselves as the black man approached, the tribesmen nervously divided their attention between the man and his out-held offering. The object, its like never before seen, was plainly artificial. Constructed of wood, it had no edges, as if it were some sort of miraculously flattened egg. In its center was a hole.

  The newcomer was quickly upon them. Up close, he brandished the wooden thing proudly, as if it were a new child or freshly killed game. In a loud voice, he said, “Friends, will you kindly lookee here! What we got here is, we got a wheel. Can you say that?”

  Several of the hunters obediently repeated the strange word. Their chief, however, only grunted his growing disapproval.

  “Now I know you’re all asking yourself, what’s a wheel do? What’s it good for? How’s it gonna put a slab of cave bear on my table? Well, there’s hardly anything a wheel can’t do! But I don’t expect you to take my word for it. I’ll be happy to demonstrate this little charmer for y’all. Completely free, no charge of any kind, except whatever your generous hearts might be inclined to offer by way of minor recompense for my valuable time. So let’s forget all your half-ass chasing and jabbing plans for today. We’ll run your posse back to your crib, and I’ll put this baby through its paces. Believe me, you won’t regret one minute of this lucky day.”