“As long as he’s here anyway, Priestess,” he said, “it seems a shame to waste the opportunity.”
“No, I must keep my word,” said Valeria. “We will continue our battle when his legs have healed.”
“You know,” I said, “as long as we’re postponing it, we could pass the word to neighboring continents and sell tickets.”
“What’s a ticket?” asked Valeria.
“What’s a neighboring continent?” asked the guy with the knife.
Well, I could see that they were just a bunch of ignorant peasants, half of ‘em beautiful and half of ‘em ugly, and all of them badly in need of a god what could teach ‘em the ways of civilized societies. But before I could tell them why they were in serious need of me, Valeria ordered them all out, except for two nubile lesser priestesses what wasn’t wearing no more clothes than she herself was.
“On the off chance that you really are a god, you will stay here in the temple until you can walk again,” said Valeria. “I am leaving these two handmaidens to bring you food and tend to your wounds.”
“You ain’t staying your own self?” I asked.
I thunk she was gonna slap me again, but instead she just glared at me for a moment, then turned to the two girls.
“You know your duties,” she said. “But be very careful whenever you get within arm’s reach of him.”
“But isn’t he a god, High Priestess?” asked one of them.
“Possibly,” said Valeria. “But if so, then he is a dirty old god. You have been warned.”
Then she was gone.
I sat up and slung my feet over the side of the altar. “Well, ladies,” I said, “what’s for dinner?”
“Henry, if they catch him before sundown,” said the one on the left.
“Are you really a god?” asked the other one.
“Cross my heart and swear to myself I am,” I answered.
“What’s heaven like?”
“Funny you should ask,” I said. “I thunk we might just experience a little bit of it before we eat.”
“You can actually transport us to heaven?” she asked, all kind of wide-eyed and trusting.
“Sure can.”
“How?”
“Come on over here and I’ll show you,” I said.
About three seconds later she slapped my face.
“Don’t they teach you anything in priestess school besides sunbathing and face-slapping?” I asked, rubbing my cheek.
“Don’t they teach you gods anything besides pinching and grabbing?” she shot back.
“I was just practicing my rasslin’ holds,” I said.
“I know what you were practicing,” she said.
“Actually, it looked like fun,” said the other one. “And, well, if he really is a god, it’d be a shame to miss an opportunity to learn what lies ahead of us in heaven.”
“You know,” said the first one, “I never looked at it that way.”
“Sure,” said the other one. “And if he’s as clumsy as Henry, then we’ll know he’s a mortal and we’ll feed him to Bubbles.”
“No,” said the first. “The High Priestess says Bubbles is gaining too much weight. We’ll just chop him up into little pieces and feed him to the piranhas.”
“I don’t know,” said the other one. “Then they’ll want to be fed every day, and it won’t be safe to go swimming.” She paused for a moment, considering their options. “We could tie him up and put a bunch of hungry scorpions on his belly.”
The first one made a face. “I don’t like scorpions.”
“Rats, then,” suggested the other. Then she shook her head. “No, that won’t work. Bubbles has eaten most of the rats. I suppose we could make him swallow a bunch of marabunta and let them eat their way out.”
“Remember that Chinaman who wandered in here, delirious from fever, and kept raving about the Death of a Thousand Cuts?” said the first.
Well, the two of ‘em kept discussing the penalties for my potential failure in their delicate ladylike way for the next ten minutes, and got so wrapped up in it that they didn’t even notice that I’d climbed down off the altar and had made my way to a side door.
“All right,” announced one of ‘em at last. “We’re ready to be transported to heaven on a sea of sexual bliss.”
“Or else,” said the other ominously.
They may have said some more things, but by then I was running back down the hill I’d climbed when I first found the lost continent of Moo, and I didn’t slow down nor miss a step until I’d put quite a distance betwixt me and it.
I was mentally patting myself on the back for making good my escape when I felt a thumping somewhere between my shoulder blades. This struck me as kind of unusual. I knew I had a right powerful brain, but I didn’t know it was strong enough to translate mental pats into real ones, so I turned around and who should I find myself facing but Henry, who was covered by dirt and a bunch of cuts where he’d brushed by thorny bushes on his way out of Moo.
“I hate you!” he said. “You ruined the god business for both of us!”
“Maybe not,” I said. “There’s a couple of heavenly handmaidens in the temple that are just waiting to be transported on a wave of bliss, or maybe it was a sea of passion. Anyway, it was something wet, I’m pretty sure of that. Just go back up there after dark and they’ll think it’s me.”
“What the hell good will that do?” demanded Henry. “I see they ran you off too.”
“No, I run off on my own,” I said. “Believe me, there’s two beautiful naked priestess just dying for a little male companionship.”
“Really?” he said, his face brightening under the dirt and the beard.
“I give you my godly word on it,” I said. “Just make sure it’s dark when you get there, and it probably wouldn’t hurt none to lose your beard first, or at least convince ‘em it’s fast-growing since I didn’t have none when I took my leave of them a few hours ago.”
He stuck out his hand. As first I thunk he was looking for money, but then I realized it wasn’t palm up so I took it and we shook in friendship.
“I guess you ain’t all that bad a guy, as lying, backstabbing, claim-jumping bastards go,” said Henry.
“And you’re certainly better than the average greedy, uncouth, foul-smelling fiend from New Jersey,” I said.
So we parted friends after all, and I figured it was time to continue my quest for the perfect spot to build my tabernacle. I wandered across that huge cow pasture for almost a week, and finally I came to a little outpost made all of logs except for the parts that weren’t, and I walked in and made a beeline for the bar.
“What’ll it be, stranger?” said the bartender.
“Gimme a shot of your best whiskey and a chaser,” I told him.
“What kind of chaser?”
“Another whiskey,” I said.
“You’re new around here, ain’t you?” he said. “Where do you hail from?”
“I just arrived from the lost continent of Moo.”
He stared at me for a moment. “Funny,” he said. “You don’t look Mooish.”
“Tell me something, Brother,” I said. “Where’s the nearest civilized city what’s got an abundance of sinners, especially of the female persuasion, that’s in serious need of saving?”
“Well, you for a lot of choices,” he answered. “It’s getting close to carnival time in Rio off to the east, they say they just discovered emeralds up north in Equador, I hear tell they found some lost Inca city filled with gold and other trinkets off to the west in Peru, and the gauchos are having their annual round-up just south of here and there figures to be a lot of money at the other end of it, ready to buy a few million tons of beef, and where there’s money there’s almost always sinners.”
“True, true,” I agreed. “Thanks for your help, Brother.” I downed my drinks, had a few more, got my face slapped yet again when I thunk one of the ladies at the bar was looking lonely and lovelorn, and finally I wandered o
utside to watch the sunset.
I’d been guv a lot information about where to go next. Too much, you might say. So I did the only reasonable thing. I waited until the breeze died down, turned my left hand palm up, spat in it, then slapped my right hand down right hard, and decided that whichever the way the spit flew was the direction in which a passel of sinners would soon find themselves saved.
As my next narrative will show, it wasn’t near as easy as it figgered to be.
Review: Jack Knife and Map of Dreams
Jack Knife
By Virginia Baker (Jove/346 pages/$7.99)
MAP OF DREAMS
By M. Rickert (Golden Gryphon/310 pages/$24.95)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler
Half of this latest entry in my reviews for Subterranean falls under the “books I overlooked” category. Both of the titles are by women writers fairly new to the genre scene, and both of them are worthy of your attention. The first, Jack Knife, by Virginia Baker (a Writers of the Future grand prize winner for “Rachel’s Wedding”), is an entertaining but familiar twist on the Jack-the-Ripper mystery, which has gotten a lot of play in the SF and fantasy field, with TV shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5 making use of it, and writers as varied as Robert Bloch, Harlan Elllison, Alan Moore and Karl Alexander using it for fictional fodder. Like Alexander (whose book Time After Time was adapted to film), Baker makes use of time travel in her novel, resulting in something both formulaic and original.
The formulaic part comes in the premise: two time travelers, Sara Grant and David Eliot–Americans both–are hot on the trail of time-traveling, continuum-changing rogue Jonathan Avery. The rogue is none other than the scientist who invented the time-traveling machine. Miffed because he wasn’t chosen to be the first time traveler (fellow scientist Grant got that honor), Avery violates protocol, commits an act of violence that takes someone’s life, and heads back in time. Special Ops Agent Eliot accompanies Grant back to the late 19th Century to capture Avery before he can do something to seriously alter the future. Once they arrive in London, the pair discovers Avery may be linked to the Ripper murders in White Chapel. That’s the hackneyed, derivative part–and it’s a lot–of Baker’s debut. What elevates the tale to the level of an entertaining, worth-at-least one read, novel is Baker’s sure-handedness in drawing scenes and creating characters from 19th Century London, as well as offering up obscure facts and suspects in the age-old mystery that still fascinates most everyone. Good fun!
It’s a rarely admitted but sad fact: most reviewers (and editors, and writers, etc.) in the field don’t have time to read everything that’s published. Somehow, I managed to miss all of M. Rickert’s poetic and powerful stories being published in various genre magazines, but fortunately the always excellent Golden Gryphon Press managed to remedy that situation by publishing Map of Dreams. And although I managed to set aside Rickert’s 2006 debut for far too long, it kindly waited for me. Good thing, too, because Map of Dreams is a must-read collection of stories by a writer whose growing body of work already puts her among the finest of her generation–genre and mainstream writers alike. The title story alone is worth the price of entry. It deals so unerringly with the grief of a parent that even those of us who haven’t suffered such a horrendous loss know this is so (like a character says in The World According to Garp, another piece of fiction that dealt with loss, “It’s just so true”). After Annie Merchant’s daughter is shot and killed by a sniper in New York City, life as she knows it ceases to exist (any loving parent will relate to this notion). Fending off those good-natured but ultimately annoying attempts by others to help her resume life, Annie commits herself to the possibility–via a vaguely magical, vaguely scientific method (think quantum physics)–of finding her daughter in time and space. Her relentless pursuit brings her to an island just off of Australia–where an author who lost his wife to the same killer supposedly resides. Once there, Annie meets a man named Herrick (who has also suffered loss), as well as Daisy and O’ Toole, two people who seem to have stepped out of a parallel universe–or something far more unfathomable. It’s a tour-de-force that sounds the territory of grief and, to use the author’s words, succeeds in “measuring the height of sorrow, the rivered depths of despair.”
Heart-wrenching, funny, poetic and damn-near perfect in execution, “Map of Dreams” is a piece of fiction that grabs the reader by his or her emotions and doesn’t let go until every last drop of blood, sweat and tears has been wrung out. That’s just the first story! There are fifteen more extremely well-written stories in this collection, including “Cold Fire,” “Moorina of the Seals” and “The Harrowing,” every last one of them engaging, well-crafted works of fiction.
Pick up this collection by Rickert and prepared to be enthralled and entertained, moved and maddened. Then make sure to shelve it next to works by Harlan Ellison, Luisa Valenzuela, Connie Willis, Angela Carter and Lucius Shepard. Right where it belongs.
Review: Nebula Awards Showcase 2007 edited by Mike Resnick
(Roc/400 pages/$15.95, trade paper)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler
The annual Nebula Awards Showcase anthologies always have something interesting to offer up, and the 2007 edition of this stalwart sports some stories most likely familiar to avid genre readers—especially those by Kelly Link, “The Faery Handbag” and “Magic for Beginners,” winners for novelette and novella, respectively.
It’s no accident that Link won a double-shot of recognition for her writing last year. Her fiction is that good. What’s more, Link is representative of a new school of writer, one that brings the sensibilities of both genre and mainstream fiction to stories. For lack of a better description, Kelly Link’s fiction often comes off like a cross between Ray Bradbury, Raymond Carver and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “Magic For Beginners” is a bemused, slightly distant narrative (in an I got a great buzz from that beer/joint or whatever way) that follows the lives of Jeremy Mars (the son of a shop-lifting, semi-successful horror writer) and his teenage friends—Elizabeth, Talis and Karl—as well as a cult fantasy television show called “The Library” (which is reminiscent of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Twin Peaks” and half a dozen other strange but wonderful shows). Link intersperses the narrative of the show with the narrative of the teenage friends, so that reality and fantasy overlap (within her own fantasy tale, of course). The kids all lead fractured lives (dysfunctional parents, etc.) and eventually begin to feel as if they are, themselves, starring in a television show. The way Link blurs the line between fantasy and reality is indicative of anyone’s adolescent years—and not a few adult years as well—making a powerful statement about the nature of reality and fantasy, and the role entertainment plays in our everyday life.
Although her name may not yet be as well known as Link’s, and although her story didn’t win an award in the last Nebula round, Anne Harris has a distinctive voice and sensibility that—with persistence—could win her a strong following and mantle-full of shiny plaques and statues as well. “Still Life With Boobs” is one of the most outrageous, insightful and original works of fantasy to come down the pike in some time. The premise is simple, as is the narrative: a young woman given to seeking out her share of good times and pleasure awakens one morning to the realization that her boobs, George and Gracie (which her boyfriend, in a moment of whimsy, nicknamed), have been stepping out on their own. The visible scratches and “smears” of “less identifiable substances” is a dead giveaway to the betrayal by her breasts. And if her suspicions aren’t evidence enough, she awakens one night after dozing in front of the TV to find her mammary glands are gone—and tracks them down to a club where they are cavorting with all manner of “detached body parts.” Pretty soon, the errant boobs are even taking off in the middle of the daytime during dinner!
A startling well-balanced mix of erotica, slap-stick comedy and clever insightfulness on the American mindset toward sex—either puritanical or self-indulgent—“Still Life With Boobs” is a hilarious
and moving little fable reminiscent of the best writing of stalwarts like Connie Willis.
There are plenty of other solid, entertaining pieces in this anthology, including stories by James Patrick Kelly (“Men Are Trouble”) and Carol Emshwiller (“I Live With You”), nonfiction pieces on the state of the genre, and even an excerpt from the Nebula Award-winning novel of 2006, Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage.
Since Harlan Ellison was just added onto the distinguished list of Grand Masters that the Nebula Committee honors, author Barry N. Malzberg lobbied the editors of this edition to include an old, but still powerful, mainstream story—“The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie”—about an actress named Valerie Lone (based, it’s been said, on Veronica Lake), who’s Hollywood boat has long sailed, and the attempts by a couple of opportunists to make use of her in their film—on the premise that their efforts will rekindle her already dead career. The story’s structure gives it that much more oomph, and the tale of obsession and greed and self-serving is told in a noirish narrative well-suited to the story. It’s powerful stuff, and not a word of it is science fiction…or fantasy. But it’s also a fine reminder that the best writers in the field of SF& fantasy don’t pay attention boundaries, borders, streams or pigeonholes, preferring to blaze their own trails and look back in wonder when all is said and done.
Review: On the Road with Harlan Ellison volume 3
HARLAN ELLISON: ON THE ROAD WITH ELLISON: Volume Three
(Deep Shag Records/$17.99)
Reviewed by Dorman T. Shindler
For those of you who can’t get enough, here is this week’s mini-bonus review, covering the latest in an ongoing cavalcade of Harlan Ellison’s spoken word recordings.
For years, when anyone asked about his penning a biography–despite guaranteed bestsellerdom should he ever do so–Harlan Ellison replied he wasn’t interested, and that he’d already done so in his dozens of introductions and essays. Add to that his CDs produced by Deepshag. Each of the (so far) three volumes has contained between nine and fifteen tracks which are basically memoirs of the dirty life and times of Harlan Ellison. This time out, Ellison covers things like his two hour stint as an employee of Disney or the strange story of his attacking convention goers with a chandelier. Of course, very few orators–outside of Lenny Bruce or Mark Twain–could recount their own lives with such hilarity and perfect timing, but that, as Ellison would say, is another story.
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