Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  “Now!” Vera screamed. “Cover him now!”

  Cairo seemed frozen. The lizard began to lower the bowl. The cries of the lizard army reached a feverish climax. And suddenly Cairo moved.

  His hands flew free of the golden manacles as he caught the golden bowl from underneath and sent its contents arcing backward through the air. The thick liquid seemed to cohere and hang suspended as a single transparent mass in the bright green light for an eternity. Then it fell, covering Vera Rosenberg from head to foot.

  “No!” Vera shrieked. “No! This cannot be! I have a destiny!”

  Cairo froze momentarily, shocked by what he had inadvertently done. Then he shook himself and began to move again. In a second he released his feet, and in another he freed Mrs. Lockhart. In another he wrenched a spear from the hands of one of the stunned lizard soldiers and scrambled onto the altar that held the mining lamp.

  “Kill them!” Vera demanded as Cairo drew back his arm. “Cairo, you’re a fool. You’re outnumbered thousands to one. My servants will tear you limb from limb for what you’ve done to me!”

  “There is no antidote, then?” Cairo asked softly.

  “None!”

  “Then I am sorry,” Cairo said. “It was not my intent that the fluid fall on you. As to your subjects...they will have to find us before they can kill us.”

  With that he turned and hurled the spear upward with all his strength.

  It sailed straight and true toward the small green sun overhead, and when it struck, the sphere imploded with a crack, a brief flash of green fog, and a rain of glass fragments.

  The huge cavern was plunged into night. For a moment the beam of the miner’s lamp revealed Mrs. Lockhart extending her hand toward Cairo and then the darkness closed again over the panic and chaos that reigned in the tunnels of the lizard men.

  Gasping for breath, Mrs. Lockhart sank to the floor of the tunnel, then reached down and pulled Cairo up the last of the stairs they had descended only hours before. Cairo collapsed beside her, panting heavily.

  “That,” Mrs. Lockhart said between breaths, “was a horrific risk you took, exploding that lamp. It could have ignited the gasses and finished us then and there.”

  “We would have been no more dead,” Cairo returned, equally exhausted, “than we would have been otherwise. I could only hope they couldn’t track us by smell.”

  “A safe wager. If their senses were so acute, they would have known about the methane.”

  Cairo turned on the miner’s lamp and examined his wrist-watch. “I fear that I may have underestimated the danger of that methane. It’s been more than half an hour since Vera Rosenberg was doused in the Blood of the Green Lion and—”

  As if in answer, a muffled explosion shook the floor underneath them. Instead of dying out, the noise seemed to grow. “Cairo,” Mrs. Lockhart said, pointing down the stairs they had just climbed. The green glow was gone, replaced by the hellish orange of an inferno. “Run!”

  They lunged to their feet and sprinted for the entrance to the tunnel. The walls were shaking now, and dirt and small rocks clattered around them and filled the air with dust.

  “How much farther?” Mrs. Lockhart gasped. “I can feel the heat...”

  “There!” Cairo exclaimed, as a wall materialized out of the fog of dirt and rubble. He flung himself at it, fumbling for a catch. “It must be here!”

  “Patience,” Mrs. Lockhart said with forced calm. Her voice was barely audible above the roar as one chamber after another ignited below them. “Let it find you...”

  More quietly still she said, “And let it be soon...”

  “I have it!” Cairo cried, and the wall opened to reveal the pedestrian tunnel beneath Alameda Street. He pulled Mrs. Lockhart through the opening, went to the mechanism on the outer side with sure fingers, and the wall slid closed as the very air behind it exploded into a blinding yellow fireball.

  In the bright Los Angeles sunshine they sat on a park bench and watched the ordinary citizens of Los Angeles buying lunch from the vendors on Olvera Street. Cairo’s shirt and trousers were in shreds, and the skin beneath was a mass of bruises and lacerations. Mrs. Lockhart had fared little better; her black hair was caked with dust and she wore the remains of Cairo’s jacket to cover the damage to her gown.

  “The thing that most frightens me,” Cairo said, “is the knowledge that some of those lizard creatures doubtless escaped. If what Vera Rosenberg said is true, their rapid evolution could allow them to become more humanoid in the space of a few generations. In our lifetimes there could be lizard men walking among us undetected.”

  “What is it that you’re afraid of?” Mrs. Lockhart asked. “That cold-blooded, repugnant creatures might gain control of the film industry? How would we know the difference?”

  “You make light of it, but the knowledge that was lost today—for good or ill—can never be recovered.”

  “Knowledge is not always the highest good,” Mrs. Lockhart said, turning to follow the progress of an early summer breeze through the trees in the park.

  “Really? If Rosenberg were alive, what would you have told him about his daughter?”

  “I would merely have said that she died in an unfortunate accident, while exploring the tunnels under the city.”

  “After the way he exploited her throughout her childhood?”

  “His cruelty would not justify lack of compassion on my part.” Her eyes seemed to lose their focus. “It would be ... less than human, somehow.”

  A small green lizard, no longer than Cairo’s hand, had crawled out onto the sidewalk to sun itself. As Cairo watched, it darted toward the busy street, hesitating a few inches from Cairo’s right shoe.

  “I suppose you’re right, as always, Mrs. Lockhart.”

  She blinked, brushed at the front of her borrowed jacket, and instantly recovered her composure. “Of course I am,” she said. “And as it’s already past one o’clock in the afternoon, may I suggest we be on our way? We have an engagement in San Diego this evening.”

  “Indeed,” Cairo answered. As he rose, he nudged the lizard gently with his foot and sent it scampering back into the safety of the bushes. “Indeed, Mrs. Lockhart,” he laughed, “lead on.”

  Author’s Notes

  This book is the brainchild of Bill Schafer, publisher of Subterranean Press. In keeping with our plan to reissue my novels in definitive editions, he urged me to do a definitive collection of my short fiction—everything I wanted to preserve (plus a few). Bill is a writer’s dream, because he loves books and he publishes from his heart. I am more grateful than I can say for his support.

  While I’m at it, I’d like to thank Karen Joy Fowler, one of the best writers in the world, for writing the most perfect introduction I could ever have. Big thanks to all the editors who first published these pieces, especially my friend Joe R. Lansdale, who in his guise as anthology editor nagged and pestered and annoyed me into writing my favorite stories in this book. Richard Butner read most of these stories from 1987 on in draft form and offered great insight and suggestions. Arthur Hoffman was there from before the beginning, with unflagging enthusiasm, friendship, and great bass playing. And my partner, Orla Swift, has helped nurture this book as she has nurtured me.

  I went back and forth on the idea of writing notes for the individual stories, and finally decided to do it because I like reading them in other people’s collections. Be warned that I cribbed from the notes I’d written for previous collections, from my autobiographical essay, and from notes on my Fiction Liberation Front website (www.fictionliberationfront.net).

  PERFIDIA

  I was hugely flattered when Steve Erickson asked me to write something for his literary magazine, Black Clock, in the fall of 2003. He was doing a theme issue on Lost Music, and he thought of me because of Glimpses. Off the top of my head I pitched him a story about the mystery of Glenn Miller’s death. I had a book called Millergate by David Graham Wright that I had skimmed years before, and I returned to it f
or most of my background information. Then I went to Paris with Orla for research (our first trip together), with no real idea of what the story was going to look like. Orla’s love for flea markets provided the key.

  I threw in a reference to Dachau at the beginning of the first draft, not knowing where I was going with it. It was a bit of background I had appropriated from a friend’s father who would talk at length about everything he did in the war except his part in liberating Dachau. Then Orla told me about hearing Paul Fussell on NPR, and his World War II history, The Boys’ Crusade, provided the final puzzle piece.

  It’s an amazing feeling to watch a series of coincidences come to feel like the hand of the inevitable.

  STUFF OF DREAMS

  I wrote this in late 1979, shortly after moving to Austin. It’s really a collaboration with John Swann, who’d been a few years behind me in high school, and was living at the time in the big house in front of my garage apartment. He was in pharmacy school, and he provided me with all the background color on med school, the slang, the routines, and, of course, the drugs. It was his idea that the drug would be a virus—all the cool reverse transcriptase stuff is his. Later he would provide invaluable support on my novel Deserted Cities of the Heart, which features a peculiar psychotropic mushroom. And a few years after that, John was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm that killed him after a long and painful struggle. I miss his friendship, his creativity, and his great generosity.

  When I nervously showed the story to Lisa Tuttle, a fellow Austin writer whose work still dazzles me, she said, “Ed Ferman will buy this.” I didn’t believe her; Ferman was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the most literary of the SF magazines, and I had thus far failed to impress him. But Lisa was right, and this became my first major SF sale.

  My only real regret about the piece is the names of the characters: Matheson after Richard Matheson, a hero of mine since childhood, and Blake after the poet. I suppose I thought I was being clever.

  This is one of the few stories of mine that my father ever read. His one comment was, “No medical student would ever take drugs!”

  THE WAR AT HOME

  Shawna McCarthy, then editor of Asimov’s, said something to me in 1983 about the need for a reimagined SF short-short story, getting away from the contrived twist endings of the pulp days. In fact, Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann had already done it in a beautiful piece of weirdness called “Slow Dancing with Jesus.” That story was somewhere in the back of my mind when I put a nightmare I had about Vietnam together with the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre and came up with what would be my most anthologized story, and the one that got me into the Norton Book of SF.

  STRAWS

  I hate the fact that I have to support my writing habit with a day job, and every once in a while I let out a cri du coeur like this one.

  NINE HARD QUESTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

  This started with the idea that aliens in SF stories so often turn out to be disappointingly human. I wondered if I could write some aliens that were both incomprehensible and yet weirdly consistent.

  I had the crazy idea that this was going to be the story to break me into the best-of-the-year anthologies and win me award nominations. What was I thinking? SF fans and flying saucer nuts are mortal enemies. And this is hardly a feel-good tale. It did, however, get me a great postcard from John Kessel, whom I’d met the year before at the Chicago World SF Convention, and whose work I admired greatly (and continue to admire, now that we live in the same town and have dinner together as often as we can manage).

  WHITE CITY

  One of the great injustices in this country is that when people think “inventor,” they think “Thomas Edison,” even though Edison stole more than he invented and was dead wrong about electricity. He staked his reputation on direct current, and it was Nikola Tesla’s alternating current that won the day. But Edison was the better self-publicist, and Tesla was a strange and distant man, whose most amazing experiments only worked when he performed them, making him too much akin to a magician for science to be comfortable with him. The details of this story come from Margaret Cheney’s biography, Tesla: Man Out of Time, including the invention at the center of it, one that the real Tesla never quite got around to finishing.

  PRIMES

  Like many of my stories, this started with me stuck in traffic. It seemed like twice as many cars as I had ever seen on I-40 before, and I started to wonder what it would mean if that were literally true. About that time (5:44), the truck with the number 544 painted on the side passed me, and I figured it had to be a sign—though I still don’t know of what.

  I thought this was going to be a story about overpopulation, but once I started writing it, it turned out to be about racism. I dug deep into some of my worst fears here, and it is still painful for me to read it.

  THE LONG RIDE OUT

  I wrote the first version of this in 1976. As there was only one market for Western short fiction at the time, I threw in a mystery element to increase my odds of finding a home for it. The mystery magazines passed, and Far West magazine sent it back completely copy-edited for publication (in green felt tip pen), with a form rejection slip that said it “duplicated” material already in their files. This was before the days of decent photocopies, so it was the original that they callously ruined. It’s a wonder writers survive this kind of constant, pig-headed abuse. Actually a lot of us don’t.

  As an exercise, I spent a few weeks in the early 1980s expanding it into a full-length “adult western” novel. This was when I was still trying to sell a novel, any novel, to anybody. This proved not to be that sale.

  I wasn’t willing to give up on it, though, and I did some minor clean-up on the short story version in 1993 and sent it around again, still with no luck. That’s the version that appears here.

  My initial idea was to do a twist on the innocent homesteader vs. greedy rancher scenario, and I turned up some loopholes in the Homestead Act to drive the plot. The name “Marlin” was meant to suggest “Marlowe” as much as it possibly could, and Wallace was named for Bill Wallace, one of the best writers in Austin in the 1980s. Bill is one of the ones who gave up trying to get published rather than put up with the insults, and it’s a loss to us all. We’ll see Bill again later in “The Circle.”

  SITCOM

  If you didn’t immediately know that this story was about The Brady Bunch, you may be as old as I am. It all started when one of my students at the Clarion West writer’s workshop in Seattle in the summer of 1990 turned in an extended Brady Bunch inside joke that went completely over my head. I’d heard the name but never seen the show. In the ensuing discussion everyone agreed the show was awful, but they also admitted they had all watched it and that it had powerful iconic status in their memories. When I started toying with the idea of writing about it, I was amazed to discover that I couldn’t actually see the show anywhere—it was not in syndication at that point, and these were the dark days before everything in the world was on DVD. The harder I looked, the less there was visible, yet everyone somehow knew everything about it. I started to get a really creepy feeling. Once I combined that with my less than charitable feelings toward US network TV in the first place (see “Stompin’ at the Savoy”), I was ready to write.

  THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA

  Bill Schafer asked me to write an original story for the book that he could premiere in his Subterranean on-line magazine. I had nothing whatsoever in mind at the time, but within a week this idea showed up at the door, suitcase in hand.

  I’ve been doing research for a couple of years now on the “Dirty War” in Argentina, an era of savage repression by the military dictatorship that ruled between 1976 and 1983. That had led me to an amazing book of interviews with the people who were actually involved with many of the key events in Argentine history between 1955 and 1983, Lo Pasado Pensado (roughly, “Considering the Past”), put together by the immensely popular historian Felix Pigna. One sect
ion of the book contains interviews with people who were there in 1967 when Che was captured and executed by the Bolivian army (with lots of help from the CIA). That was where I first heard of Che’s dreams of returning to his homeland of Argentina to lead a revolution there.

  I had always been troubled by Che’s image—on the one hand a doctor and a humanitarian, on the other a violent revolutionary and a ruthless killer. I smelled a story, and it took me to Jon Lee Anderson’s massive biography, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, among other sources. I came away even more ambivalent.

  My story departs from historical reality when Tania avoids the ambush that killed her in our reality, and thus is able to save Che. All the characters, names, places, and revolutionary movements I mention are real and historical, with the exception of Veronique—and she is based on a woman Orla and I saw on Calle Defensa in Buenos Aires. (Orla figured out, after I’d decided to use the character in the story, exactly what she was playing and singing.) Che’s last words in the story are those attributed to him in Bolivia, though of course the context is different (and the translation my own).

  Special thanks to Heather Craige for the insight on Che’s executions, and to Carol Stevens for the discussions on capital punishment. The interview format is an homage to Pigna’s wonderful book.

  HIS GIRLFRIEND’S DOG

  This story was inspired by the spare, reverberating fictions of Lydia Davis in her collection Break It Down, and by Lisa Tuttle’s dog, Quilla June. It was first published as a postcard insert in the independent magazine New Pathways. It makes me happy to think that someone might have torn it out and mailed it to a friend somewhere.