Spring 2007

by Subterranean Press

  “I wish I could be of a more giving nature, but I fear this cannot be. Surely you must know the act of being eaten is both a painful and final thing, J’haan. That is, unless you believe the Pawnee god Suki-Pastaka’coli, who tells us we pass from the tract of digestion directly to the Big Whorehouse in the Sky. I am not a Pawnee person, though there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “What I believe, Retching Bison, Jr., is that you are stalling, hoping to catch me off guard as I prepare to render you senseless with a Car-oddie chop I learned from the great Chowlin master himself.”

  “I feel I can save you some humuliation, J’haan, by informing you I am a skilled student of the ancient Burmese art of bando boxing, a deadly form of combat based upon the motion of creatures from the animal world. Rendered senseless, as you say, is a most pleasant feeling, compared to a single blow from a bando dude.”

  “We are getting nowhere with this banter, Retching Bison, Jr. Let us take a fighting stance, and see who comes out as London Broil or some other fancy cut, and who does not.”

  “In all fairness, J’haan, there is one thing I feel I must tell you. In all your learned discourse about this strange link between your folk and mine, you have somehow failed to note that history and the moving picture point out that while eating crow is a familiar term—one that seems to strike your fancy as a gourmand treat—it is no more common than the fact that the Crow eat dog, and have, for centuries past. No offense, but it is quite a tasty dish, properly boiled to reduce the somewhat doggy odor that is common to your kind, cooked or not.”

  “This is true? You are certain of this? You are not simply making this up to throw me off my feed?”

  “No, J’haan, it is fact. Please know that your hunger has started my juices flowing as well. But, as you have been reasonably honest with me I feel I can do no less with you.”

  “Then, Retching Bison, Jr., we have reached a near impossible dilemma. It is much like that insidious horror, algebra: One factor cancels out the other, and we are left with nothing. It would be unnatural for either of us to partake of the other. Yet, my stomach is as dark and empty as the spaces-in-between the stars. My being cries out for sustenance, vittles, fast food, slow food, food of any sort. Grub, chow, groceries, grits. This untimely revelation of yours has left us without any lunch.”

  “Oh con-trair, mon dog. I am thinking it has not…

  ***

  “If you’re finished with that leg, you might pass it over here, J’haan. I am stuffed, but that looks mighty good.”

  “A bit stringy, friend of the Tzūn, but a little ketchup helps. I’ll have another bite of that heart, if you will, then I think a little nap.”

  “Excellent idea, friend of the Absaroka. And I must say, I find it somewhat amazing that your folk and mine have non foolish prejudices where food is concerned.”

  “Indeed. Innards or outards, it’s all the same to me. But do answer me this, old fellow. Though I know little of Earthly customs, I find it amazing your hotels do not appear to mind a fire in their rooms.”

  “Actually, they do.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “If you’d like, I will share this last bit of lung with you. It’s quite good.”

  “As they say among my people, organs are where it’s at.”

  “I can see that this is so. From now on, you will be known far and wide in the Crow Nation as Liver Eatin’ Jahaan-Tzūn!”

  “Indeed, Junior, I would be proud to bear this title.”

  —For Terry Bison

  Fiction: Jude Confronts Global Warming by Joe Hill

  Georgia was in the music library, knitting little silver skulls on a shawl, and listening to the radio, when Jude wandered into the room.

  “…3,000 scientists signed the strongest statement yet on the subject of global warming,” said the newsman. “The letter paints a dark picture of the earth’s future, warning that melting ice caps, super hurricanes, and coastal flooding are inevitable if the global community doesn’t act decisively to address climate change. Concerned consumers are advised to consider lowering their energy consumption, and to look at alternative energy cars…”

  Jude flipped the radio over to FUM. They were playing Soundgarden, Black Hole Sun. Jude turned it up.

  “What the fuck you do that for?” Georgia said, and chucked a sewing needle at the back of his head. It bounced off his shoulders. Jude ignored it. “I was listening to that, asshole.”

  “Now you’re listening to this,” Jude said.

  “You’re such a dick.”

  “Oh hell,” he said, turning back toward her. “They were wetting themselves over global cooling, twenty years ago. Remember that? No, probably not. Big Bird didn’t talk much environmental science.”

  She threw the other sewing needle at him. He ducked, stuck an arm up to protect his face. The needle glanced off his wrist. By the time he looked up over his arm, she had huffed out.

  Jude followed her into the kitchen. She bent into the fridge, to paw out a bottle of that cranberry red stuff she drank now, one of her wine coolers. To Jude, it tasted like Kool-Aid, as prepared by the Rev. Jim Jones.

  “It’s a crock,” Jude said. “Nobody knows.”

  “Everybody knows,” she said. “There’s data that shows the earth’s temperature has been rising every year for the last fifty years. No one argues that.”

  He had to clamp down on a laugh. It was always funny to him, when Georgia used words like data. He was maybe not entirely successful at disguising his amusement, because she threw the cap of her wine cooler at him.

  “Will you stop throwing shit at me?” he said.

  She turned away on her heel, glared back into the open fridge for something to munch on. Her lips were moving, as she whispered angrily to herself. He caught just a word here and there: fuck; Jude; ignoramus.

  He eased around the chopping block, slipped up behind her, and put his arms around her waist, clasping her body to his. At the same time he peered over her shoulder into the refrigerator. Nothing to drink except those fucking wine coolers.

  “C’mon. I hate when we fight about stupid shit,” he said, and slid his hands up to give her melons a squeeze.

  “It isn’t stupid shit,” she said, elbowing him off her, and wheeling around, her eyes giving him the old death ray. “Take a look at your cars. Why you got to drive everywhere in those shitty gas guzzling old cars of yours? Just because they make you feel like a badass? First it was the Mustang, then it was the Charger. They both get about three miles to the gallon, and when people are stuck behind us in traffic, you can see ‘em turning black in the face from breathing your exhaust. You ever thought about taking yourself out and buying a nice responsible hybrid—one of those superlow emissions vehicles that get such great mileage?”

  “I was thinking about taking myself out to get some beer,” he said, and burped in her face. “Oops, sorry—runaway emissions.”

  She punched him in the chest, gave him the finger, and told him to eat shit, roughly all at the same time. He turned away, laughing, grabbed his black duster off the back of a chair.

  “The people who drive hybrids look like weenies,” he said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead.”

  He left her in the kitchen, and cut through Danny’s old office, headed for the driveway. Jude opened the side door, shaking his head, and stepped out into the Atlantic Ocean.

  He hadn’t expected it to be there—the ocean hadn’t been waiting outside the front door yesterday—and he sank straight down, his motorcycle boots filling with icy seawater.

  “Blub,” he said. A jellyfish moved past him in pulses. He turned to go back inside, but the currents already had him, and he was rolled away through dark water. The hubcap of his Dodge Charger sailed by. Shit, he thought, the Charger. It had to be underwater too. The engine, the leather upholstery, the custom radio system…the whole thing was probably fucked.

  Then Jude drowned.

  Fiction: Missile Gap by Charles Stross

  It�
��s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.

  Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn’t talking. Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go where New Soviet Man has not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert, beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face with humanity’s worst fear…

  You can order a copy of Missle Gap by Charles Stross here at the SubPress site, or here at Amazon.com.

  From Booklist: “With the dazzling success of his last two novels, including the Hugo-nominated Accelerando (2005), Stross is rapidly establishing himself as one of the preeminent masters of hard sf. Here he takes a breather from weightier fare with a bizarre, nevertheless brilliant alternate-history novella featuring a protracted U.S.-Soviet cold war…Once again, Stross sets the bar high for his colleagues, should they be feeling competitive, in this mind-bending, intriguing yarn.”

  From Publishers Weekly: “The result is a blend of 1900s H.G. Wells and 1970s propaganda, updated for the 21st century in the clear, chilly and fashionably cynical style that lets Stross get away with premises that would be absurdly cheesy in anyone else’s hands.”

  From Green Man Review: ”There are some pretty creepy moments here including one that remminded me of the Cthulhu mythos. Or possibly the Pod People. Really. Truly. And the ending was a proper surprise, as I wasn’t sure how Stross would wrap it up. Indeed that’s the gold standard for good storytelling for me — interesting characters in a plausibe setting (no how farfetched it seems at first glance) with an ending that I wasn’t expecting. Bravo Stross!”

  Chapter One: Bomb scare

  Gregor is feeding pigeons down in the park when the sirens go off.

  A stoop-shouldered forty-something male in a dark suit, pale-skinned and thin, he pays no attention at first: the birds hold his attention. He stands at the side of a tarmac path, surrounded by damp grass that appears to have been sprayed with concrete dust, and digs into the outer pocket of his raincoat for a final handful of stale bread-crumbs. Filthy, soot-blackened city pigeons with malformed feet jostle with plump white-collared wood pigeons, pecking and lunging for morsels. Gregor doesn’t smile. What to him is a handful of stale bread, is a deadly business for the birds: a matter of survival. The avian struggle for survival runs parallel to the human condition, he ponders. It’s all a matter of limited resources and critical positioning. Of intervention by agencies beyond their bird-brained understanding, dropping treats for them to fight over. Then the air raid sirens start up.

  The pigeons scatter for the treetops with a clatter of wings. Gregor straightens and looks round. It’s not just one siren, and not just a test: a policeman is pedaling his bicycle along the path towards him, waving one-handed. “You there! Take cover!”

  Gregor turns and presents his identity card. “Where is the nearest shelter?”

  The constable points towards a public convenience thirty yards away. “The basement there. If you can’t make it inside, you’ll have to take cover behind the east wall–if you’re caught in the open, just duck and cover in the nearest low spot. Now go!” The cop hops back on his black boneshaker and is off down the footpath before Gregor can frame a reply. Shaking his head, he walks towards the public toilet and goes inside.

  It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly the ineffable will constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.

  A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners sit on the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance, eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.

  Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small-talk, verbal primate grooming: “Does it happen often?”

  The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the communists. Taking in the copy of The Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie he’ll have realized what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often to visit the front line, eh?”

  “I am here in this bunker with you,” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down on the bench opposite the businessman gingerly. “Cigarette?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic peace-offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for world war four, or just a trailer.

  A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all-clear these days. The Soviet bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out, I say!”

  Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread-crumbs and ferry the contents of his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.

  Chapter Two: Voyage

  It’s a moonless night and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the reddish-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.

  Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi, astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course it first stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship–Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the UN as he shouted “we will bury you!”–and the flat earth daydream that followed, shattering history and plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.)

  But back to the here-and-now: she’s sitting on the deck of an elderly ocean liner on her way from somewhere to nowhere, and she’s annoyed because Bob is getting drunk with the F-deck boys aga
in and eating into their precious grubstake. It’s too dark to read the ship’s daily news sheet (mimeographed blurry headlines from a world already fading into the ship’s wake), it’ll be at least two weeks before their next landfall (a refueling depot somewhere in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration surveyors–in a fit of uncharacteristic wit–named the Nether Ocean), and she’s half out of her skull with boredom.

  When they signed up for the Emigration Board tickets Bob had joked: “A six month cruise? After a vacation like that we’ll be happy to get back to work!”–but somehow the sheer immensity of it all didn’t sink in until the fourth week out of sight of land. In those four weeks they’d crawled an expanse of ocean wider than the Pacific, pausing to refuel twice from huge rust-colored barges: and still they were only a sixth of the way to Continent F-204, New Iowa, immersed like the ultimate non-sequitur in the ocean that replaced the world’s horizons on October 2, 1962. Two weeks later they passed The Radiators. The Radiators thrust from the oceanic depths to the stratosphere, Everest-high black fins finger-combing the watery currents. Beyond them the tropical heat of the Pacific gave way to the sub-arctic chill of the Nether Ocean. Sailing between them, the ship was reduced to the proportions of a cockroach crawling along a canyon between skyscrapers. Maddy had taken one look at these guardians of the interplanetary ocean, shuddered, and retreated into their cramped room for the two days it took to sail out from between the slabs.