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www.fsfmag.com
Copyright ©2010 by Spilogale, Inc.
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THE MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
July/August * 61st Year of Publication
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NOVELETS
ADVANCES IN MODERN CHEMOTHERAPY by Michael Alexander
THE REVEL by John Langan
MISTER SWEETPANTS AND THE LIVING DEAD by Albert E. Cowdrey
PINING TO BE HUMAN by Richard Bowes
THE LOST ELEPHANTS OF KENYISHA by Ken Altabef
THE PRECEDENT by Sean McMullen
SHORT STORIES
RECROSSING THE STYX by Ian R. MacLeod
BROTHERS OF THE RIVER by Rick Norwood
THE TALE OF NAMELESS CHAMELEON by Brenda Carre
EPIDAPHELES AND THE INADEQUATELY ENRAGED DEMON by Ramsey Shehadeh
INTRODUCTION TO JOYOUS COOKING, 200TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION by Heather Lindsley
POEMS
PHYSICS by Annabelle Beaver
DEPARTMENTS
EDITORIAL by Gordon Van Gelder
BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint
BOOKS by James Sallis
PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: COUCH SURFING WITH MICKEY AND JUDY by Paul Di Filippo
FILMS: ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE by Lucius Shepard
COMING ATTRACTIONS
SCIENCE: HOW LOW CAN YOU GO by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy
CURIOSITIES by David Langford
Cartoons: M. Nadler, Arthur Masear, S. Harris.
COVER BY THOMAS CANTY
GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher
KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor
STEPHEN L. MAZUR, Assistant Editor LISA ROGERS, Assistant Editor
HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 119, No. 1 & 2, Whole No. 690, July/August 2010. Published bimonthly by Spilogale, Inc. at $6.50 per copy. Annual subscription $39.00; $49.00 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, 105 Leonard St., Jersey City, NJ 07307. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2010 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.
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GENERAL AND EDITORIAL OFFICE: PO BOX 3447, HOBOKEN, NJ 07030
www.fandsf.com
CONTENTS
Department: EDITORIAL by Gordon Van Gelder
Short Story: RECROSSING THE STYX by Ian R. MacLeod
Department: BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint
Department: BOOKS by James Sallis
Novelet: ADVANCES IN MODERN CHEMOTHERAPY by Michael Alexander
Short Story: Brothers of the River by Rick Norwood
Novelet: THE REVEL by John Langan
Short Story: THE TALE OF NAMELESS CHAMELEON by Brenda Carre
Poetry: PHYSICS by Annabelle Beaver
Novelet: MISTER SWEETPANTS AND THE LIVING DEAD by Albert E. Cowdrey
Department: PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS: COUCH SURFING WITH MICKEY AND JUDY by Paul Di Filippo
Novelet: PINING TO BE HUMAN by Richard Bowes
Department: FILMS: ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE by Lucius Shepard
Short Story: EPIDAPHELES AND THE INADEQUATELY ENRAGED DEMON by Ramsey Shehadeh
Novelet: THE LOST ELEPHANTS OF KENYISHA by Ken Altabef
Department: SCIENCE: HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? by Paul Doherty & Pat Murphy
Short Story: INTRODUCTION TO JOYOUS COOKING, 200TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION by Heather Lindsley
Novelet: THE PRECEDENT by Sean McMullen
Department: FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE
Department: CURIOSITIES: BUT FOR BUNTER, by David Hughes (1985)
Department: COMING ATTRACTIONS
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Department: EDITORIAL by Gordon Van Gelder
Regular readers of F&SF might have noticed that I've grown skeptical about the internet as a publishing medium. Much as I love the convenience of online communication, I just don't find the experience of reading fiction online to my taste.
Nonetheless, we've got a couple of online items to note:
The first is that we're trying an audio edition of F&SF again. (We had one briefly about seven years ago.) We've teamed up with the folks at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic and we're running a test by selling one issue at www.fandsfaudio.com. If the results are good, we'll begin publishing audio editions regularly—and we'll make them available on CD also, but the test issue has to be done online. If you know anyone who likes science fiction in audio form, be sure to let them know about this test issue.
The other recent online news is that for folks who do like to read fiction online, we've begun reprinting one story from each issue online at www.suvudu.com. F&SF readers ought to check out this Website—there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there.
—GVG
[Back to Table of Contents]
Short Story: RECROSSING THE STYX by Ian R. MacLeod
Ian MacLeod is the author of The Light Ages, The Summer Isles, and several other novels and collections. His most recent collection, Journeys, is due out this summer and a new novel, Wake Up and Dream, is slated for publication in the fall. (There's an extract from the novel online at www.ianrmacleod.com. Make sure to put the “r” in that URL unless you're looking for a whisky distiller.)
Regarding this new story, Mr. MacLeod says only that he has yet to take a cruise holiday.
Welcome aboard the Glorious Nomad, all 450,000 nuclear-powered tons of her. She is literally a small country in her own right, with her own armed services, laws, and currency. But for all her modernity, life afloat remains old-fashioned. There are the traditional fast-food outlets, themed restaurants, colored fountains, street entertainers, and even a barber's shop staffed by a charmingly impromptu quartet. There are trained armies of chefs, litter collectors, pooper-scoopers, and maintenance engineers. Firework displays are held each evening on the main central deck above the Happy Trillionaire Casino, weather permitting. It's easy to understand why those who can afford her tariffs carry on cruising until—and then long after—death.
Wandering the decks in his lilac-stripe crew blazer, resident tour host Frank Onions never paid much attention to the news reports he saw in magazines left glowing over the arms of sun loungers. Still, he knew that dying was no longer the big deal it had once been. Death, it had turned out, was the answer to many of the problems of old age. With your weakening heart stopped, with your failing body eviscerated and your memory uploaded and your organs renewed, you were free to shuffle around on your titanium hips for another few decades. And, after that, you could book in for the same procedure again. And again. There were, admittedly, some quibbles about whether the post-living were still technically the same people they had once been. But, working as Frank did in an industry that relied heavily on the post-centenarian trade, it would have been churlish to complain.
It seemed like there were more corpses than ever as he led the morning excursion to the ruins of Knossos in Crete, with the Glorious Nomad anchored off what remained of the
city of Heraklion. At least fourteen out of the forty-two heads he counted on the tour bus looked to be dead. Make that double, if you included their minders. The easiest way to tell the dead apart from the living was by a quick glance at their wigs and toupees. Not that the living oldies didn't favor such things as well, but the dead were uniformly bald—hair, like skin, seemed to be something the scientists hadn't fully got the knack of replacing—and had a particularly bilious taste in rugware. The lines of bus seats Frank faced sprouted Elvis coxcombs, dyed punky tufts, and Motown beehives. The dead loved to wear big sunglasses as well. They shunned the light, like the vampires they somewhat resembled, and favored loose-fitting clothes in unlikely combinations of manmade fabrics. Even the men put on too much makeup to disguise their pasty skins. As the tour bus climbed toward the day's cultural destination and Frank took the mike and kicked into his spiel about Theseus and the Minotaur, a mixed smell of corrupted flesh, facecream, and something like formaldehyde wafted over him.
The September sun wasn't particularly harsh as Frank, Glorious Nomad lollipop in raised right hand, guided his shuffling bunch from site to stairlift to moving walkway. Here is the priest-king fresco and here is the throne room and here is the world's first flush toilet. The only other tour group was from the Happy Minstrel, another big cruise vessel berthed at the old American naval base at Souda Bay. As the two slow streams shuffled and mingled in their frail efforts to be first to the souvenir shop, Frank couldn't help but worry that he was going to end up with some of the wrong guests. Then, as he watched them some more—so frail, so goddamn pointless in their eagerness to spend the money they'd earned back in their discarded lives as accountants from Idaho or lawyers from Stockholm or plant-hire salesmen from Wolverhampton—he wondered if it would matter.
He corralled what looked like the right specimens back on the bus without further incident, and they headed on toward what today's itinerary described as A Typical Cretan Fishing Village. The whole place looked convincing enough if you ignored the concrete berms erected as protection against the rising seas, and the local villagers did local villager as well as anyone who had to put on the same act day after day reasonably could.
Afterward, Frank sat under an olive tree in what passed for the harborfront taverna, took a screen out from his back pocket, and pretended to read. The waiter brought him stuffed olives, decent black decaf, and a plate of warm pita bread. It was hard, sometimes, to complain.
"Mind if we join you?"
Frank suppressed a scowl and put away his screen. Then, as he looked up, his contractual smile became genuine.
"Sure, sure. It would be a pleasure."
She was wearing a strappy sundress made of some kind of fabric that twinkled and changed with the dappling light. So did her bare golden shoulders. So did her golden hair.
"I'm Frank Onions."
"Yes...” There was a curious intensity to her gaze, which was also golden. “...We know.” She raked back a chair. Then another. And beckoned.
Damn. Not just her. Although Frank supposed that was to be expected; apart from crew, the only young people you found on board ships like the Glorious Nomad were minders. The dead man who shuffled up was a sorry case indeed. His toupee was a kind of silver James Dean duck's arse, but it was wildly askew. So were the sunglasses, and the tongue that emerged from between ridiculously rouged lips in concentration at the act of sitting looked like a hunk of spoiled liver.
"Oh, I'm Dottie Hastings, by the way. This is Warren."
As this Dottie-vision leaned to restraighten the rug and sunglasses, the dead man slurred something that Frank took to be hello.
"Well....” She returned her gaze to Frank. “We really enjoyed your tour and talk this morning. What can we get you? A carafe of retsina? Some ouzo?"
Much though he'd have loved to agree with anything Dottie suggested, Frank shook his head. “I really don't drink that kind of stuff.... Not that I have a problem with it...,” he felt compelled to add. “I just like to take care of myself."
"Oh yes.” Frank could feel—literally feel—Dottie's gaze as it traveled over him. “I can see. You work out?"
"Well. A bit. There's not much else to do in time off when you're crew."
She made a wry smile. “So. About that drink. Maybe some more coffee? I'm guessing decaf, right?"
Dottie, he noticed, settled for a small ouzo, although the Warren thing restricted himself to orange juice, a considerable amount of which she then had to mop up from around his wizened neck. There was a strange and unminderly tenderness about her gestures that he found almost touching. Lovely though she was, Frank found it hard to watch.
"You do realize,” she said, balling up paper napkins, “that most of the stories you told us about Knossos are pure myth?"
Frank spluttered into his coffee. But Dottie was smiling at him in a mischievous way, and her mouth had gone slightly crooked. Then the knowing smile became a chuckle, and he had to join in. After all, so much of what they'd just been religiously inspecting—the pillars, the frescos, the bull's horns—had been erected by Arthur Evans a couple of hundred years before in a misguided attempt to recreate how he thought Knossos should have been. But Evans got most of it wrong. He was even wrong about the actual name. Frank never normally bothered to spoil his tales of myths and Minotaurs with anything resembling the truth, but, as Warren drooled and he and Dottie chatted, vague memories of the enthusiasm that had once driven him to study ancient history returned.
Dottie wasn't just impossibly beautiful. She was impossibly smart. She even knew about Wunderlich, whose theory that the whole of Knossos was in fact a vast mausoleum was a particular favorite of his. By the time they needed to return to the tour bus to view the famous statue of the bare-breasted woman holding those snakes—now also known to be a modern fake—Frank was already close to something resembling love. Or, at least, serious attachment. There was something about her. Something, especially, about that golden gaze. There was both a playful darkness and a serene innocence somewhere in there that he just couldn't fathom. It was like looking down at two coins flashing up at you from some cool, deep river. Dottie wasn't just clever and beautiful. She was unique.
"Well....” He stood up, as dizzy as if he'd been the one knocking back the ouzo. “Those treasures won't get looked at on their own."
"No. Of course.” A poem of golden flesh and shifting sundress, she, too, arose. Then she leaned to help the Warren-thing, and for all his disgust at what she was doing, Frank couldn't help but admire the way the tips of her breasts shifted against her dress. “I'm really looking forward to this afternoon. I mean....” After a little effort, Warren was also standing, or at least leaning against her. His mouth lolled. His toupee had gone topsy-turvy again, and the skin revealed beneath looked like a gray, half-deflated balloon. “We both are.” Dottie smiled that lovely lopsided grin again. “Me and my husband, Warren."
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Minders were always an odd sort, even if they did make up the majority of Frank's shipboard conquests. But Dottie was different. Dottie was something else. Dottie was alive in ways that those poor sods who simply got paid for doing what they did never were. But married? You sometimes encountered couples, it was true, who'd crossed the so-called bereavement barrier together. Then there were the gold-diggers: pneumatic blondes (why were they always blonde?) bearing not particularly enigmatic smiles as they pushed around some relic in a gold-plated wheelchair. But nowadays your typical oil billionaire simply accepted the inevitable, died, and got himself resurrected. Then he just carried on pretty much as before. That was the whole point.
Frank Onions lay down in his accommodation tube that night with a prickly sense of dislocation. Just exactly where was he going with his life—living down in these crew decks, deep, deep below the Glorious Nomad's waterline where the only space you could call your own was so small you could barely move? It might not seem so up among the parks and shopping malls, but down here there was never any doubt that you were at se
a. Heavy smells of oil and bilge competed with the pervasive human auras of spoiled food, old socks, and vomit. It was funny, really, although not in any particularly ha-ha way, how all the progress of modern technology should have come to this: a hive-like construct in which you shut yourself like a pupa preparing to hatch. No wonder he wasted his time in the crew gym working his body into some approximation of tiredness, or occupied what little was left after that hunting the next easy lay. No wonder none of the ship's many attractions held the slightest interest for him. No wonder he couldn't sleep.
All he could think of was Dottie. Dottie standing. Dottie seated. Dottie smiling her lopsided smile. The sway of her breasts against that prismatic fabric. Then Frank thought, even though he desperately didn't want to, of what Dottie might be doing right now with that zombie husband of hers. Mere sex between them didn't seem very likely, but mopping up food and levering withered limbs in and out of stairlifts was merely the tip of the iceberg of the tasks minders were required to perform. The thing about being dead was that blood, nerve cells, and tissue, even when newly cloned, were susceptible to fresh corruption, and thus needed constant renewal and replacement. To earn their salaries, minders didn't just give up a few years of their lives. After being pumped full of immunosuppressants, they were expected to donate their body fluids and tissue to their hosts on a regular basis. Many even sprouted the goiter-like growths of new replacement organs.
Frank tossed. Frank turned. Frank saw throbbing tubes, half flesh, half rubber, emerging from unimaginable orifices. Then he felt the rush of the sea beneath the Glorious Nomad's great hull as she plowed on across the Mediterranean. And he saw Dottie rising shining and complete from its waters like some new maritime goddess.
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As the Glorious Nomad zigzagged across the Aegean from the medieval citadel of Rhodes to the holy island of Patmos, Frank Onions kept seeing Dottie Hastings even when she wasn't there. A glint of her hair amid the trinkets in the backstreets of Skyros. A flash of her shadowed thighs across the golden dunes of Evvoia. He felt like a cat in heat, like an angel on drugs. He felt like he was back in the old times that had never existed.
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