FSF, August-September 2009

by Spilogale, Inc

  Diocletian is low born, very low born. The rumor is that his father was a freedman, a mere scribe. Diocletian became an emperor because the army made him one by acclamation. I had made him a plebe before his guests. Now I just needed to turn the full force of his fury against me.

  "I'm your real enemy, Imperator. I brought an entire city to the one true god."

  * * * *

  The Patrician paused, and seemed to be looking at something far away and long ago. “Within the hour I was condemned."

  The Centurion reached out, and briefly gripped the Patrician's shoulder. “You are a good man."

  "Despite backstabbing, lying, and taking bribes?” the Patrician said.

  "Isn't that just being a good Roman?” the Centurion countered, and they shared a quiet laugh. The torches guttered and hissed, and the Centurion shuddered. In a few hours he would know his fate. “You are also a brave man."

  The Patrician stood. “As are you. And now it's time to make certain you win today.” He held out a hand. The Centurion grasp his wrist, and was pulled to his feet. “But if I do this thing, you must make a vow."

  "What? Another one?"

  The Patrician nodded.

  "All right, what is it?"

  "You must seek out my slave.” The Patrician paused, and unhooked the strange buckle from his belt. “And give this,” he gestured with the buckle, “to him. Only to him. He will be waiting by the north gate. You remember my description?” The Centurion nodded. “Good."

  He clapped the Centurion on the shoulder, and moved quietly toward the sleeping criminals. The Centurion kept pace with him, wondering what he was going to do. Throttle them all while they slept?

  The Christians were huddled together. Some of them still had their hands folded even while they slept. The Centurion reflected on that level of dedication. And decided they were fools. If the tale the Patrician had told was true, there were no gods.

  Perversely it made the Centurion feel better. It would explain why, despite all the sacrifices he'd made to the gods over the years, he had never been rich. Instead he'd been reduced to stealing, and now found himself in this dungeon. But of course the Patrician's tale was just that—a tale.

  The Patrician stopped near a clot of sleeping men. He took the buckle in his right hand, and laid his left hand against its base, and pulled his hands apart. A dark, black blade appeared from the base of the buckle. The Centurion clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle the cry of shock and fear. It felt like he was being shaken from the inside, and there was a sound like the deep chords of a water organ. The Centurion had heard one once at the Colosseum on his one and only trip to Rome.

  A few people stirred at the sound, but most were sleeping the deep sleep of hopelessness and exhaustion. The Patrician laid the flat of the blade on one man's thigh, on another's shoulder, on a third's arm. They all began to twitch and writhe like men with morbus caducus, the falling sickness. He moved quickly through the dungeon touching anyone who looked like a fighter with this magic weapon. People began to wake. A woman screamed at the sight of the convulsing men.

  The Patrician quickly tossed the sword from his right hand to his left, and in midair, between one hand and the other, the blade vanished. He grabbed the Centurion by the shoulder and pulled him away, retreating until their backs rested against the cut stone.

  "There,” the Patrician whispered. “That should give you the advantage. It will take them hours to recover from the shock."

  "What did you do to them?"

  "It would take too long to explain.” He glanced up at a slit high in the wall where pale sunlight was seeping through. “And I have no more time.” He began to thread the hilt of the magic sword back onto his belt.

  "Hey, don't do that! I'm going to fight with that!” the Centurion cried.

  "I doubt it. You probably have the magic in your blood. I don't, so I can use the sword."

  "Doesn't hurt to check. I might be unique too,” the Centurion argued.

  The Patrician shrugged, and handed over the hilt. The Centurion inspected it, but there seemed to be no lever to summon the blade. The Centurion repeated the motion the Patrician had made, but nothing happened. The futile tries continued until the Patrician finally lifted the hilt from his hands.

  "It would have been too much to hope that you could replace me. Just remember your promise; give it into Scientius's hands. Only his hands.” He finished hooking it back onto the belt, and clasped the belt around the Centurion's waist. “Even without the blade, it's a potent weapon. It will protect you. You will win. You can't be defeated."

  They turned at the sound of the bolts being thrown. “Why don't you use it?” the Centurion asked. “You could escape from here."

  The great wood-and-iron-wrapped doors creaked open. The light was blinding, and the guards mere shadows against the glare. “The Emperor would be wroth. He has come today specifically to see me die. If I escape that fate, he will kill my mother.” The Patrician gripped the Centurion's forearms once more. “Remember your promises. Give the sword to Scientius. And tell my mother I love her."

  He walked forward to meet the guards. His back was erect and there was no hesitation in his steps.

  "Wait!” the Centurion called. The Patrician paused and looked back. “What's your name?” the Centurion cried.

  "Georgius,” he said, and disappeared into the light.

  Short Story: HUNCHSTER by Matthew Hughes

  Matt Hughes reports that Hespira, the third novel featuring Henghis Hapthorn (a character familiar to many of our readers), is due out in September.

  This new story is not set in the Penultimate Earth where the majority of his tales occur, but it should be no less entertaining for being set in our world.

  You'd think I'd remember the kid's name, but I never could. One of those “J” names that suddenly got popular back in the eighties, Jared, or Jeremiah, might even have been Jedediah. Doesn't matter now. We mostly just called him “the kid in Lee's basement,” except when he'd join us for Saturday night poker in Lee's garage. Then he liked us to call him “the Hunchster."

  That was on account of the way he played. I mean, there are two ways to go with seven-card stud. You can either play the cards, look at what's in your hand and on the table, and figure the odds you'll get that fifth spade or that third queen. Or you can play the players, where you not only watch for the tells but read the personalities, so you know if a guy's got the balls to try running a bluff past you or if he's sharp enough to know when you're faking it with a busted straight.

  The Hunchster, though, he had his own way of playing. He didn't look around the table at the cards, didn't look at the players. “I get hunches,” he said, the first time I asked him what was going on. He was raking in another heap of nickels, dimes, and quarters from the middle of Lee's old Formica-topped table out in the garage where we played most Saturday nights. We used to play in Lee's basement, until he put in the extra plumbing and started renting out the room.

  If you're any kind of poker player, what I just put down here tells you something about Lee, and about the rest of us. We played for nickels, dimes, and quarters because that's all we could afford. And the reason Lee let this kind of weird-looking stranger live in his house was because the kid got a disability check every month. His dependable rent made up for the tips Lee didn't get when he drove people from the bus depot out to the IncarcerCorp prison so they could visit their inmate relatives. Most of them couldn't really afford the taxi fare, but it was a long walk out of town and the bus only ran twice a day.

  Mitch and I, we were better off than Lee, but only just. IncarcerCorp paid three bucks an hour over minimum wage. No benefits, but the work was full-time and you could live on the wages—just hope you never got sick. Also, a prison generates a lot of other jobs, even when the outfit that runs it is so cheap it makes the inmates do their own laundry and swamp out the cell blocks. So, all our wives worked part-time for minimum wage in the kitchens, or in the in-house hospital—agai
n, no benefits—and our families had enough to get by on. Just enough to keep the town alive.

  But at least we had jobs and could count on keeping them. After what had happened with United PressForm and the Breithertz Institute, that was a big deal. We used to tell each other, “At least nobody's going to put crime out of business."

  * * * *

  Stan and Ron were the other regulars at the table Saturday nights. Sometimes, they brought Ron's friend Dooley. None of them had been taken on when IncarcerCorp held its big hiring fair, but they got jobs with a wholesaler that supplied the prison with everything from dungarees to macaroni. Stan and Dooley drove truck and Ron operated a forklift in the warehouse. Word was that IncarcerCorp and the wholesaler were both owned by the same investment syndicate that was headquartered in the Bahamas or somewhere. Nobody was a hundred percent sure, but so what? Paying the mortgage and sending the kids to school—that was what mattered.

  Now, with me telling you all this, you're maybe thinking that my mind is wandering, why don't I follow through on where I started: the kid in Lee's basement and his peculiar way of playing poker? But it all ties in.

  "You're saying you just play hunches?” I said, that first time, while he sorted the nickels, dimes, and quarters into stacks and Stan dealt the first two down cards and one on deck for the next round.

  He looked up at me. Actually, no—he never really looked at anybody. He'd look in your direction, sure, but never eye-to-eye. Instead he'd lock onto your nose, or your shoulder, or your forehead. And there was never anything to read in his eyes. He only used them for seeing.

  "I am an intuitive,” he said. I remember the word because I used it right away, asking him, “What the heck is an intuitive?"

  I should've known better. You asked this kid a question, you were going to get an answer. In spades. I didn't understand half of what he said, stuff about lateral connections and something that sounded like “snapses.” Then he was talking about a “brokers area,” which for a while I thought was somewhere around Corpus Cristi, except it turned out he was talking about some other place with a name like Corpus Clothes-um. Then he said they were parts of the brain, and his brain didn't work the way other people's did.

  Lee told me later that the reason the kid got that monthly disability check was that he had a brain disease called Ass-burgers. I waited for the punch line, but he said it was a real disease, though it wasn't catching. Wayne Breithertz, who'd brought the kid over when they were all packing to leave, told Lee about it. The kid was a little strange, but harmless. And he had nowhere else to go.

  So we're back to the poker table. Stan dealt out the first three cards and said, “Hunchster, your bet,” and just like that the kid stopped talking about brains. Right in the middle of a sentence. He picked up his hole cards, stared at them for a second, then put them down. He didn't look at anybody or at any of the cards on deck. Just pushed a quarter out toward the antes. A quarter was the maximum bet until all the cards had been dealt.

  "Hunch?” I said.

  He didn't look at me, just kept his peculiar eyes on his hole cards. “Uh huh,” he said.

  I had a pair of sevens in the hole and a king showing, but I flipped the king over and shoved it and the sevens away from me. “Fold,” I said.

  * * * *

  The kid was in Lee's basement because he got left behind when the Breithertz Institute folded. Wayne Breithertz was the nerdiest nerd our local high school ever produced. After eleventh grade he went off to some big college back east and next we heard of him he'd turned into one of those ten-day tycoons who made a pile off the dot-com bubble. Old Wayne had come up with some bright idea that everybody thought was going to change the world.

  Until it didn't.

  But for a while the money was flowing, and he was our local hero because he came back home and bought up the old UPF factory. He spent about a half a gazillion dollars turning it into some kind of research center.

  You may not know the name United PressForm. But turn over the tinfoil plate next time you take a frozen pie out of the freezer, or the tray that holds a TV dinner. You'll probably see UPF stamped into the bottom. Their plant on Becker Road used to supply half the pie-and-TV-dinner makers west of the Mississippi. Another UPF factory in New Jersey supplied most of the east. My old man signed on with the company in 1953 when he came home from Korea and spent his whole working life in that building. Most of our dads did. After high school, so did me and Lee and the rest of us. UPF provided half the jobs in town.

  Until it didn't.

  In 1995, the company packed up the whole shebang and moved to Nogales. That's when we found out our dads wouldn't be getting any more pension checks—the directors had spent their money and everybody else's. Nobody can tell me that wasn't the bad news that brought on the heart attack and killed the old man.

  But then Wayne came home, bought the vacant plant cheap, and remade it into some kind of combination open-plan office and supergeek playground. He brought in some pretty strange people, of which the Hunchster was by no means the strangest. We didn't know what all those newcomers were doing out there, but they had plenty of money to spend on everything from fancy coffees in paper cups to an even fancier condo development around a man-made lake that Wayne had dug out of what used to be pasture land south of town. And we all had jobs again, making sure the nerds stayed happy.

  Until we didn't.

  In 2001, the stock market yanked the rug out from under the Breithertz Institute. Trucks rolled in and hauled away all the computers and video game machines to sell at ten cents on the dollar. The condos emptied out and stayed empty. Last I heard, Wayne was teaching business math at some community college in Wisconsin. His collection of geeks went to wherever geeks go. Except for the Hunchster, who moved into Lee's basement along with a trunkload of electronic gear he'd built himself. Wayne said it would have just gone to the dump.

  * * * *

  Ask the kid what he was doing down there all day, you'd get an answer. Not that it made a whole lot of sense. He had some theory involving string. He was interested in “where new treenos went” and how they got there. “Temporary recapture,” I thought he said once.

  "Temporary recapture of what?” I said. The words had caught my interest because it was a week after the IncarcerCorp job fair and I'd been accepted for training as a guard. They'd already broken ground for the main block.

  "Not temporary,” he said, “temporal. Temporal recapture."

  As if that explained it all.

  * * * *

  Then came another Saturday night and we were setting up in the garage: beer and taco chips and salsa. Lee went to the door at the side of the house that led down to the basement and asked the kid if he was going to play. I heard him call a second time, then he came into the garage and said, “He don't answer."

  "He home?” I said.

  "He's always home.” He paused, then said, “Some weird noises down there."

  I was going to say, “What else is new?” but just then Ron came in and spoke over me, saying Dooley wasn't coming. Five was not enough for a decent game. I said, “We need the kid."

  By now Lee had sat down and was breaking out the red, white, and blue plastic chips. “So go get him,” he said.

  I went out of the garage and over to the basement entrance, down a half-dozen steps. The inner door was ajar. I rapped on it but got no answer. There was a combination humming-hissing sound coming from the basement suite, getting louder then softer, louder then softer. I pushed open the door.

  The kid was sitting on a kitchen chair with his back to me, hunched over a table that was covered with all kinds of electronics and computer gear, connected by a mess of cables and wires. That's where the humming and hissing were coming from. In front of him was a wide-screen monitor and he was staring into it while reaching out with one hand to a control panel of knobs and switches that was off to one side. He'd turn one knob then try another, his eyes never leaving the screen.

  I moved up b
ehind him. The image on the monitor was distorted and grainy. He reached for another knob and twiddled it, and suddenly the shot came into focus. The colors were washed out but I recognized it: Lee's driveway, just outside, and the Ryder house across the street.

  There was something funny about the picture, though it took me a few seconds to put my finger on it. Parked in front of the house was Jeff Ryder's old red El Camino, which he'd smashed up and sent to the wrecker's sometime back in the early eighties.

  "What is this?” I said.

  The kid didn't turn. “What I've been working on. Temporal recapture.” He pointed to a readout at the bottom right corner of the screen. It said: 05-24-1981 followed by a clock that was running in hours, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second. Running backward. As I watched, Jeff came out of the house—he was walking backward—but this was Jeff without a pot belly and with way more hair than when I'd seen him yesterday. He got into the El Camino. A few seconds later, it drove away, in reverse.

  "What am I looking at?” I said.

  He turned toward me, looked at my IncarcerCorp belt buckle. “The past."

  I took a deep breath. “A time machine?"

  "But just for looking. Maybe hearing, too. I need to work on that.” He turned back to the equipment, adjusted another knob, the screen blurred then cleared, and I was seeing a farmer's field. Now the readout said: 04-15-1902. Into the frame, walking backward, came a man, then a plow, then a mule. “I also need to miniaturize the components and work out a better power source. Then you could take it anywhere."

  I felt a hollowness in my chest, like the time I was at a party and tried breathing helium. “You could take it any place and see what happened there, anytime in the past?"

  "Maybe not anytime. Probably not back to dinosaur times.” He twiddled the knob again. Now there was nothing but prairie. I didn't bother looking at the date. I was too busy thinking.

  And what I was thinking was, Jeez, not again.