Bob can feel himself shriveling, looking at her. “How can you do this?”
“I can be whatever I want here,” Jacky says. “How often can you say you have that choice? Back out there, would you fuck a man?”
“No,” he admits. “Would I be fucking a man?”
“Maybe. What’s inside the box? Me. And I could be a pussy, or I could be a pistol.” She leans forward until her face is inches from Bob’s. Her breath is warm against his lips, “Either way, I’ll be the best fuck you’ve ever had.”
“All—” Bob stops and clears his throat. “Can we go upstairs now?”
Jacky leads him up a broad flight of stairs lavishly ornamented with statuary depicting fauns and satyrs being ravished by nymphs—or is it the other way around? Bob’s looking at Jacky, cannot wait to pull aside that coat and do whatever it is they’re about to do. Jacky keeps moving up the stairs, pulling him along by the fur that he is trying to pull off Jacky.
He pulls Jacky close at the door to a room, kissing hard, Jacky’s body pressed against him, the flatness of chest and silky skin stretched over hard muscle, a hand sliding under his belt flat-palmed against his belly, moving down until his rigid cock throbs. Bob fumbles the door open and they cascade into a room that might be red or might be honey-colored. They pull apart for a second. Jacky drops the fur coat. At the sight of the body Bob hesitates again.
“What’s wrong?” Jacky says, moving to stand chest to chest with him. Jacky is just his height.
“I just wish I knew what you are, that’s all.”
Jacky laughs once, a low bark. “Except you never do know. You only think you do.”
The bus accelerates until Bob can see around it. The box from the post office lies in his lap, its flaps folded closed. Rain’s smearing the windshield. Bob adjusts the timer and turns on the headlights before he remembers the whorehouse. The bar that kept changing, Jacky and that strange conversation, and the room—So which was she—he?
Bob’s most of the way to Brighton Beach before he figures it out. The Box is closed, after all.
Copyright © 1993 by Kij Johnson
**********
Nick DiChario is a multiple Hugo nominee, a Campbell nominee, and a
World Fantasy Award nominee. He is the author of two novels.
CREATOR OF THE COSMOS
JOB INTERVIEW TODAY
by Nick DiChario
He entered a sun-white room. The furniture was lean and silvery, the walls made of satin steel. A faint smell of clean, crystalline air tickled his nose. An alien—tall, pale, slick, lean, bipedal, female—came in and seated herself at the desk. She did not speak, but adjusted her long white robe and stared at him with her three vermillion eyes.
He walked over and sat opposite her as if it was expected of him, although he had no idea how he could have known such a thing. He glanced at himself in the glazed steel panels behind the alien’s desk. He had a bushy scrub of black hair. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and sandals, the strap on his left sandal hung unfastened, and his knapsack lay tattered at his feet. He didn’t recognize himself, although he thought he looked like a human.
“Can you tell me why you’re here?” asked the alien. Her voice held the tight, musical crispness of a violin.
“No,” he said. Truthfully. But then he thought about it. “Wait. I was walking along the street outside and saw the sign in front of the building: Creator of the Cosmos Job Interview Today. Come Inside.”
“So you thought you would just sashay in and have an interview, is that it?”
He shrugged. “I guess so. Something like that. When I saw the sign, I thought, for some reason, the message was meant for me.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Her wide, flat ears moved slightly, like palm fronds in the wind. “You say that as if you’re pretty sure of yourself. Are you?”
He scratched at his curly bush of hair. “Now I get it. This is all part of the job interview, right?”
She sniffed through a single, flat nostril on the side of her left cheek, feigning boredom. “If you say so. Do you say so?”
“Sure,” he said. “I say so.”
“Okay, so, according to you, the sign was put out there specifically for you, and this line of questioning is all part of the job interview. Tell me why I should care. What makes you Creator of the Cosmos material?”
The woman’s tone was casual but challenging. She leaned forward and placed her elbows on the desk. Her two arms were as long as her body, which gave her the somewhat imposing look of a giant mantis.
He sat back and crossed his legs, picked at the hole in the knee of his jeans, started to say something, glanced around, stood up, walked slowly from here to there and back again with his hands clasped behind his back. Thinking. Trying to remember. As he walked, he could hear the faintest snick of gears, the moto-robo-electronic zizzing of invisible mechanics in the room around him. Where was he? Who was he? Why was he? He had no idea.
“Where’s the door?” he asked.
“What door?”
“I’m sure I came in through a door. Didn’t I?”
“You say that as if it’s important there is a door.”
“Yes. It’s important. Very important. I need to go in and out of it, don’t I?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But it seems important.” He walked a bit more, the floor illuminating his soft footfalls, lighting his steps from underneath. He wasn’t sure if his feet were telling the floor where to light, or if the floor was telling his feet where to walk. It was an odd sensation. “Wait. Something’s coming to me. A memory. I’m meant to go in and out. I’m meant to do it, aren’t I?”
“Meant? Are you sure that’s the right word?”
“No. Not one hundred percent.”
“Okay, let’s start with something a little simpler, then, shall we? Do you know where you came from?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
The alien’s expression seemed indifferent, but she sat up straight, as if her body had taken an interest. “Excellent. So far you’re doing very well. Incredibly well.”
“You mean with the interview?” He perched on the edge of the chair. “Hold on. I remember something else. About the questions and answers. This isn’t the first time I’ve interviewed, is it? No, of course not. I come in. I ask questions. And then…I remember what’s important…and I go out again, right?”
“Why?” she asked, an anticipatory tremor in her voice. “What is it that’s so important that you have to remember? What’s the point of the interview? Why do you have to answer questions at all and go in and out of the room?”
“Because…that’s the way I am…designed…‘designed’ is the right word…not meant.”
The woman’s eyes came alive with encouragement. “Yes. Go on.”
“Well, something makes me think that for everything to work in the cosmos…all the planets, the galaxies, the universes, the life…this interview has to take place to help me remember…so that I can go out and forget again…and somehow the remembering and forgetting is integral to the life cycle…without me knowing how or why…without anyone knowing how or why…the cosmos are reborn…” That didn’t exactly make sense to him, but there it was, he’d said it, and it felt right.
The alien gripped the edge of the desk and pulled herself forward. “Yes? Yes? Go on. You’re doing very well. Incredibly well. There is just one question and answer that you have to remember now. Just one. What is it?”
He jumped to his feet as soon as the question popped into his head. “Who is the Creator of the Cosmos?”
“Yes! And the answer?”
“I am the Creator of the Cosmos! Me! Already! Right now! I created everything! It was me! Me!”
“Ahhh,” she said. “Ahhh. Rebirth.” She released all the tension in her body and slumped back in her chair. “Ahhhhh.
”
He knew the interview was over now. He bent down and lifted the knapsack, walked toward the wall. A hidden door slid open in front of him right where he knew it would be.
Outside there were two bold suns overhead, red clouds, azure skies, gold mountains, black space. A gust of wind threw back his mop of hair. The music of the world rose up around him. A pterodactyl screeched, sky ships roared, an elephant trumpeted, billions of humans and aliens died while billions more were born, stars burned out and fell from space, and new ones flared to life across an infinite canvas of galaxies.
He closed his eyes and breathed it in. Yes, the Creator breathed it all in, and then breathed it all out again.
The alien rushed over and kneeled before him, pulled the loose strap on his sandal and snugged it in place, lowered herself to her hands and knees and kissed his feet. “Until the morrow,” she said.
“Is that how it works?” he asked. “Every day? We have to go through this every single day for the cosmos to work? Is that the way I wanted it? Is that the way I set it up? Why? Why did I do it this way? It makes no sense.”
“Exactly,” said the woman, waving to him as the door slid shut between them.
“Wait! I have one last question. How long is a day? How long—”
But it was too late. She was gone. How frustrating! He was already beginning to forget.
He turned around to face the cosmos.
Strange, he thought. Wasn’t there a sign here just a moment ago? Something about a job interview?
Original (First) Publication
Copyright © 2013 by Nick DiChario
**********
Views expressed by guest or resident
columnists are entirely their own.
FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT
by Barry Malzberg
Barry N. Malzberg won the very first Campbell Memorial Award, and is a multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 books.
The Carlin Effect
In a late-life routine on our country’s politics, George Carlin was neither encouraging nor optimistic. Lobbies, kickbacks, celebrity television, press conferences, security barriers, manipulative lies. Pseudo-gemeinschaft all the way. “It’s a big f—-ing club,” Carlin observed. “And you’re not in it.” (Characteristic of Carlin’s integrity, he didn’t say “We’re not in it.” That would have been Just Folks Common Guy Posturing, which is the property of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.) This made me think of science fiction (all roads lead to Rome) and how profoundly that remark might apply to our own lovable field. It’s a big club all right.
And a lot of you are not in it.
Count me—unlike Carlin—in that number. Once I was on the margins of that club myself, mentored early by Harry Harrison, helped no little by my employment at Scott Meredith’s Agency, and I was able to use factors like this to get attention paid to my work and even publish a good deal of it…but age withereth, custom stales, and I think of myself as an ex-member. My get-up-and-go just got up and went. My badge was taken, my credentials expired, and if I were to appear at a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America annual Editors’ Reception in October I would not know 90% of the writers and editors attending, and reciprocally they would not know me. A shadowy figure, an Edward Wellen or Stanton E. Coblentz of this modern era, I might be able to find a codger or two in a corner and retreat with them into murmurs of Jakobbson’s early seventies massacre of manuscripts at Galaxy or Horace Gold’s even more brutal misprision twenty years before that. We would if our voices became too loud intercept a pitying glance here or there. But re-admission to the club? We would not receive even a pitying stare.
It’s a big club all right, and most of you are not in it. I am not in it anymore either if that makes you feel any better, but the history is definitive. Harlan Ellison wrote in the sixties in one of his Dangerous Visions story introductions that almost every writer who sells even one story finds that she is almost instantly known and categorized and somehow placed in the lexicon. Tiptree and Cordwainer Smith notwithstanding (and they did not have to contend with the Web, with Google, with Facebook, with YouTube), it was almost impossible to slip into print incognito, without personal detail. Sure the field was a lot smaller almost fifty years ago. But the intimacy, the social network, has merely expanded. The difference now is one of degree rather than kind. The fundamental rules still apply as time goes by. Science fiction—to which that twenty-ton elephantine beast fantasy has become its dominant and controlling companion—is a network of spavined relationships, scraps of shared (and often libelous) history and relationships which obsessively include but are hardly limited to the sexual. That science fiction conventions in the old days were a forest of sexual opportunity was one of the great foma, and perceived by many as one of the principal advantages of club membership. (I am an old guy now and can tell you nothing about the current situation, but I am free to carry inference and so are you.)
It is fun being in a big f—-ing club as Newt Gingrich or Sean Hannity could attest, but in relation at least to our outcast field which was founded and reached greatness as a despised outsider literature…well, it can lead to problems. This is an outsider literature, transgressive or visionary at its best, sullen and idiosyncratic at its worst, and it was founded upon the emotional isolation of young readers who might have looked to the stars because the schoolyard was a kind of hell. The outsiders and isolates found themselves creating and managing a big fing club, of course, but being part of such a club is not likely to foster or impel the dreams of anger, the yearning of desire which was instrumentally at the heart of science fiction. (Remember your Bradbury.)
At the Readercon some years ago, I saw X for the first time since the last Readercon (he had been a regular for some years), and asked him how he was doing. Glad to see him, etc. X, a scientist, successful in academia and research, had come to science fiction writing later in life than most of us, he had attended one of the important workshops and almost immediately found himself able to sell short stories to the major markets in quantity. In a few years he had managed to accumulate more than two dozen sales, had his name on magazine covers and so on. “Not sure how I am doing,” X said. “Frankly, I don’t even know if I should be here.”
“The problem is this,” he continued, “I am on the verge of becoming part of the inner circle now, hanging out with the pros here, making a name on panels, learning the personal histories, hearing the gossip. The problem, I am afraid, is that I am losing the very isolation which formed me as a writer, which made me want to write. How can I be one of the members here and retain the sense of exclusion, the anger, the loneliness, which were the basis of my ambition to be a writer? I just don’t feel comfortable hanging around here anymore. I don’t think it is doing me any good as a writer.”
Well, many would disagree. Many of us were brought here, encouraged, directed and eventually adopted by the Harry Harrisons of the world we wanted to join. But one has to ask: How much did being part of that big f—-ing club help Walter Miller? How much did it help Phil Klass, who knew everyone and hung out everywhere, and who, in the last forty years of his life (he had fled to academia in the mid-sixties), produced four published short stories? How much did being “Science Fiction’s Little Mother” help Judith Merril, who was washed up as a writer before she was forty, and who fled to Canada and community-founding at the age of 45? How much did being a charter, an originating member of the club, help Cyril Kornbluth, whose ambition in the last years before his death (at 35) was to write no more science fiction? What did these people know and when did they know it?
When for that matter did I know it? When did I find myself thinking more about my relative position and opportunities in science fiction than I did about writing it? When did so many of us become science fiction’s counterpart to the late Harold Brodkey (1930-1996) who told New York Magazine that before he began working on his endless novel The Runaway Soul (delivered twenty years later than the contr
act date) he would spend two morning hours on the telephone, “Checking my position in the community.”?
All topics for thought and discussion. There will be a short quiz at our next club meeting in the secret anteroom. In the meantime I propose them for consideration. And greet my three or four readers. You are all invited to a Secret Meeting. Write (not tweet) for details. No, I will not give contact information. If you have to ask, you’re not a potential member.
**********
“Just a Second” is Lou Berger’s second professional sale.
We predict that you’ll be hearing a lot more from him.
JUST A SECOND
by Lou J. Berger
There are biological bastards, who are forgivable, and then there are bastards like Frederick Thomas.
The bell over the shop door jangled as he walked in. He glanced at his watch, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior of the store. It was 8:30 in the morning and he didn’t want to be late for his
9 o’clock meeting. He didn’t want to be early either. This place would be the perfect spot to kill a few minutes.
It was a store he’d passed hundreds of times in the past, never giving it much thought. A sign in the window, facing the street, encouraged customers to “Buy a Second!” Over the course of years, the sign had never changed. He had no idea what it could possibly mean.
A fat orange-and-black cat lay asleep on a red plush pillow set in a low, wicker basket, a shaft of sunlight warming it, dust sparkling and dancing around like gnats. A musty smell filled the air, partially obscured by a teapot bubbling jasmine-scented steam on a low counter.
The store was some sort of a curio shop, Frederick decided, with incense, small statues of dragons clutching faceted crystal balls and candles filling the walls and shelves. A shelf near the back of the store held many dusty books. Some were arranged neatly, others stacked in a haphazard fashion.
Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 1 March 2013 Page 5