“No.”
“Do you have a sense of expectation, of breakthrough and release from your dreads?”
“No.”
She stood up, pulling me with her, clasping both my hands.
“Come with me,” she said.
We had sexual relations in her bedroom, while things that might have been ectoplasmic snakes wriggled and crackled up the walls and across the ceiling, and fell down among the bedclothes, writhing, and changing from blue to green and back again.
11
To Free the Spirit from Its Cell
I went into his office.
Dirkmann sat behind his desk; he was not, as usual, slouched somewhere over it or along it.
He looked at me, then began taking off his shoulder holster, something I had never seen him without in all the years of working with him.
“Did you hear the news?” I asked. “They are going to try The Three on charges of being spies for both England and Japan?”
“I have heard the news,” he said.
“But England and Japan have been at war for two years! These charges are absurd!”
Dirkmann reached in his pocket and took out his badge and placed it on his desk atop the pistol.
“What are you doing?”
“I am making sure I don’t do anything rash,” he said.
Then he reached up and began pulling at his bad eye. He jerked out a long stringy thing. I started to look away. He moved his hand back and forth, and something resembling colloidon came out with a snap.
Both the eyes that looked back at me were perfectly good.
Only then did he lean back in his chair and put his boots up on his desk, throwing the rubbery stuff into the State-issue wastebasket.
“What is happening?” I asked.
“In just a moment, you should leave,” he said. “This will not be a popular place to be seen in. You’re a good secret cop. Keep your nose clean, and you’ll end up with some cushy job in a tourist town on the Baltic, keeping an eye on rich visitors, who are, of course, never the trouble.
“Be prepared to be reassigned—everyone still standing will be given other jobs. You’ll probably see Dresden again within five years—don’t get antsy or discouraged. There are much worse things than a working exile.”
“I want to keep working with you,” I said.
“Ha!” he laughed. “No you don’t.”
“You’re the best man who ever held this job.”
“Ah, Antonio. Sometimes being the best person for a job is the problem.”
“But . . .”
“Time to go. It’s near the close of business on a Friday. Worry only on late Fridays, and weekend nights,” he said.
I came to attention to salute him.
“Cut the crap,” he said. As I turned to go, he said, “Some things you don’t need to be a psychic to know.”
On my way past the painting on the mezzanine, a colonel and six men armed with carbines passed me, going the other way.
I walked through what was usually the beautiful city of Dresden on a gray day much like the one on which I’d gone to make my initial investigation at the Peoples’ Ministry of Culture. It seemed weeks ago, and yet was only a few days.
I watched the gas and new electrical lights come on in the State shops and cafés, and in the homes and private establishments. In the government offices, lights showed where people worked late, going about the government’s business.
Time to visit a restaurant, and have a hot chocolate, and contemplate this city where Comrade Wagner premiered Rienzi thirty-four years ago in those last days of monarchs and aristocrats—that lost world of privilege and class, and indifference to the common man, of which my family had been an example.
I sat bolt-upright in my bed, reaching for my pistol.
I had been almost asleep when the thought came to me, filling me with dread. I had a frisson and a horripilation and broke out in a cold sweat.
My automatic pistol was shaking in my hand. I put it down with a clatter beside my holster on the somnoe.
What if there had been no sightings of Wagner, of the other early leaders of the Revolution? What if it were part of some plot, some machination so vast I could not imagine it, by someone, some hand I could not fathom? It would have to be so immense no one person could see it whole. Its reason unknown, involving dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands. Why? Are enemies of the Revolution at work?
Was it easier to believe in ghosts and spirits, or some gigantic plot?
And then: Am I unknowingly part of it?
Then I remember the words of Dirkmann, and of Mrs. Woodhull.
It would seem to be—to believe in ghosts. Of a kind.
12
Earth Shall Rise on New Foundations
I have left a note on my night stand which explains nothing.
It will be 1800 hours. I will make my way slowly through this beautiful Revolutionary city in the light snowfall, to the Peoples’ Concert Hall, where the People are.
I shall take my seat in the great Hall, and we the audience shall settle down. Then Comrade Leader Eisenmann and his entourage will enter his State box, and we shall rise and applaud, and he will join in the applause, as what we are all expressing is not our enthusiasm for him, but what he represents, twenty-seven years of the Peoples’ Revolution.
Then after his entourage is seated, the lights will come down and the darkened orchestra will tune up, and then the lights will come up and dim again and Roeckel will come out to applause, and he will raise his baton.
And the curtain will open on four musicians and their instruments:
The twenty-five-year-old Franziska Marx will have her concertina.
Jean-Jacques Engels, child of Engels and either Mary Burns or her sister Lydia—opinions vary—will be on musical saw.
Friegedanke Wagner, adopted son of Minna Planer and Former Leader Wagner, also twenty-five, will be at the glass harmonica.
And August Roeckel III, six-year-old son of Roeckel the conductor, will be on ocarina.
And they will begin to play the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
The music will be ethereal.
Only when they finish will the audience rise to its feet and shout. By then I will be elsewhere in the Hall.
Underneath my civilian overcoat I will have on my dress uniform; I will have made my way to the leftward of the hallways leading to the State boxes, and checked my coat with the attendant there, as if I were late.
Everyone knows Comrade Leader Eisenmann attends every performance in the Peoples’ Hall; what they don’t know is that he always leaves after the first interval of whatever program is being presented.
I will wait in the corridor while the applause for the “Ode to Joy” dies down and the lights dim again, and the orchestra strikes up the “Wedding March” music from Lohengrin, and the ushers and soldiers in the hallway come to attention, and Eisenmann and his people leave the State box and come down the corridor toward me.
Perhaps his eyes will meet mine again as they had two days before; he will take me in and categorize me from long experience: security policeman, dress uniform, seen before, some report or other; or maybe more than that.
He will be near me, surrounded by people who would step in front of the Kolm Express if he told them to do so.
The music will swell as a door is opened somewhere.
My machine pistol is a comforting weight in my hat, which is under my arm.
His bodyguards will be fast.
I will be faster.
E. G. EISENMANN
1820–1876
COMRADE LEADER,
PEOPLES’ FEDERATED STATES
OF EUROPE 1854–1876
“Death to the Enemies of the
Peoples’ Revolution!”
AFTERWORD
I wrote this, as I told someone, so next school board election you’ll go down and vote the straight Trotsky ticket, and put Creation Science back in the superstitious garbage can where it belongs.
I’d wanted to write this for, oh, thirty years or so, since I’d first read about Wagner’s involvement in the Dresden Revolution of 1849 (like most things, the Germans were about a year behind the rest of Europe, which had exploded in 1848). I’d known from real life that Bakunin would be there—the quoted opinion of him in the story was said many times by many people during his peripatetic incendiary career.
I also knew it was going to be a damnably long story, and would take place later on in the world Wagner had created; essentially revolution contemplated in—well, not tranquility, but retrospect. And I didn’t have time to stop and do it, except for 50 years of notes.
Then along comes Golden Gryphon with the idea of a series of limited edition chapbooks, of novellas, in the early 00s. (I may be wrong, but I think only mine and one by Alastair Reynolds were published.)
I’d moved from Oso, Washington, back to Texas (Ft. Worth) in 2002, with this as my next project. I worked and worked for three months all fall, and I mailed this off after finding the last copy shop open on Christmas Eve afternoon—the rest had closed early—of 2002, and taking it across the strip mall and priority-mailing it to Golden Gryphon a few minutes before the post office closed.
They paid me a much-needed chunk of change for the edition rights on January 23, 2003, by which time I’d moved back to Austin, which I’d left 8 years before. It was published soon after. (There may still be a few copies left at Golden Gryphon.)
Writing these is one thing; you have a great sense of accomplishment. Then you do the donkey-work, proofing, ancillary matters which seem to never end. Then the work comes out and you get a new sense of self-worth.
This one was especially swell: not only had I finally done it after 50 years but they’d gotten Nicholas Jainschigg to do the front and back covers (more on Jainschigg see the afterword to “Fin de Cyclé”). I’d sent him drawings and photos for research while I was still writing the story. On the front cover was the appropriate 1849 Wagner in a Lenin pose in front of a hammer-and-sickle flag; on the back cover a painting inspired by Delacroix’ Liberty Leading The People (from the 1830 Paris revolution) only instead of Liberty, there was an opera Valkyrie with a spear.
Just perfect.
* * *
The epigraph to the novella is a sign some anonymous one hung around the neck of the statue of Lenin that’s in Fremont Peoples’ Park in Seattle: “Workers of the World—Sorry.”
Howard Waldrop titles available from Small Beer Press
HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: STORIES
Hardcover and ebook edition, 2013
10 new stories.
“What’s most rewarding in Mr. Waldrop’s best work is how he both shocks and entertains the reader. He likes to take the familiar — old films, fairy tales, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas — then give it an out-of-left-field twist. At least half the 10 tales in his new collection are prime eccentric Waldrop . . . as he mashes genres, kinks and knots timelines, alchemizing history into alternate history. In “The Wolf-man of Alcatraz,” the B prison movie rubs fur with the Wolf-man; “Kindermarchen” takes the tale of Hansel and Gretel and transforms it into a haunting fable of the Holocaust; and “The King of Where-I-Go” is a moving riff on time travel, the polio epidemic and sibling love.
“Among the most successful stories is “The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode In On),” an improbable confluence of vaudeville (two of the main characters perform in a horse suit) and the Arthurian Grail legend that manages to name-check Señor Wences, Thomas Pynchon, “King Kong” and more as Mr. Waldrop tells of the Ham Nag — “the best goddamned horse-suit act there ever was.” It’s certainly the best horse-suit-act story I’ve ever read.”—New York Times
HOWARD WHO?
First paperback and ebook editions.
13 stories, including “The Ugly Chickens.”
Introduction by George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire): “If this is your first taste of Howard, I envy you. Bet you can’t read just one.”
“Back in print after so many years, Howard Who? remains a terrific collection of short stories. There is nobody else alive writing stories as magnificently strange, deliriously inventive, and utterly wonderful as Howard Waldrop.”—Metrobeat
THINGS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME: Selected Short Fiction, 1980 – 2005
April 2014: First ebook edition.
Paperback available from Old Earth Books.
“The only problem with Things Will Never Be The Same is that it’s not nearly long enough. Sure, sure, it’s chock full of great stories by the best short fiction writer of his generation, modern classics like “The Ugly Chickens” and “Flying Saucer Rock n Roll” and “Heart of Whitenesse” and many more . . . but there are two or three times as many terrific Waldrop stories, equally good and sometimes even better, that have been left out for want of space. There’s only one solution. Read this book . . . and then go out and track down all of Waldrop’s other collections and read them too.”—George R. R. Martin
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Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 34