Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 Read online

  Next, an unnatural pressure began to exert itself on the men, as if gravity had somehow tripled in intensity and they moved sluggishly with enormous effort up to the final landing where Monsieur Gris, an expression of terror on his features, was attempting to descend the stairs. Behind him, a ladder had been pulled down from the ceiling and now gave access to an open door in the roof.

  They were at last straggling the ladder to the roof. There, amongst the old chimneys and sloping leads, stood four people—a vicious-looking woman whose beauty was marred by a rodent snarl and a tonsured priest whom Lapointe immediately identified as Vautrin—otherwise known as Jacques Collin, but here disguised as the Abbé Carlos Herrera!

  Confronting Vautrin and his co-conspiratator Vera Pym were Zenith the albino and the Countess Una von Beck. All were armed—Vautrin with a rapier and Pym with a modern automatic pistol. Zenith carried his ebony sword-stick while Countess von Beck had raised a Smith and Wesson .45 revolver which she pointed at the snarling leader of the Vampyres.

  And, if this scene were not dramatic enough, there yawned behind Pym and Vautrin a strange, swirling gap in the very fabric of time and space which mumbled and cried and moved with a nervous bubbling intensity.

  "Sacred Heaven!” murmured Lapointe. “That is how they got here and that is how they intend to leave. They have ripped a rent through the multiverse. This is not a gateway in the usual sense. It is as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the supporting walls of Saint Peter's! Who knows what appalling damage they have created!"

  Then, suddenly, Vautrin had moved, his long, slender blade driving for Zenith's heart. But the albino's instincts were as sharp as always. Dodging the thrust, he drew his own rapier of black, vibrating steel which seemed to sing a song of its own. Mysterious scarlet runes ran up and down its length as if alive. He replied to Vautrin's thrust with one of his own.

  Parrying, Vautrin began to laugh—a hideous obscenity of sound which somehow seemed to blend with that awful light pouring through the rift in multiversal space their crude methods had created. “Your powers of deduction remain superb, Zenith, even if your taste in friends is not. She was indeed ‘La Torpille'. I thought I had driven her to self-destruction, but she failed me in the end. I struck her down, as you and the others have guessed, and then, to make sure the body was never discovered, and seen to be murdered, I employed the services of Madame Vera Pym here. She is an old colleague."

  Now Lapointe had drawn his revolver and was levelling it. “Stop, Monsieur Vautrin. In the name of France! In the name of the Law! Stop and put down your weapon. On your own admission, I arrest you for the murder of Mademoiselle Sarah Gobseck!"

  Again, Vautrin voiced that terrible laugh. “Prince Zoran, Commissaire Lapointe, your powers of deduction are impressive and I know I face two wonderful opponents, but you will not, I assure you, stop my escape. The multiverse herself will not permit it. And put up your weapons. You cannot kill me any more than I can kill you!” He used Zenith's given name, Zoran, which went with the title he had long-since renounced, almost challenging the albino to prove his humanity.

  Then, perhaps goaded by this, Zenith struck again, not once but twice, that black streak of ruby-coloured runes licking first at Vautrin's heart and then, as she raised her pistol to fire, at Vera Pym's.

  The woman also began to laugh now. Together, their hideous voices created a kind of resonance with the pulsing light and almost certainly kept the gateway open for them. Vera Pym was triumphant. “You see,” she shouted, “we are indestructible. You cannot take our lives in this universe, nor shall you be able to pursue us where we are going now!"

  And then, she stepped backwards into that howling vortex and vanished. In a moment, Vautrin, also smiling, followed her.

  For a sudden moment there was silence. Then came a noise, like a huge beast breathing. The roof was lit only by the full Moon and the stars. Lapointe felt the weight disappear from him and knew vast relief that circumstances had refused to make Zenith a murderer and Countess Una his accomplice, for then he would have been obliged to arrest them both.

  "We will find them,” he promised as the snoring vortex dwindled and disappeared. “And if we do not, I expect they will find us. Have no doubt, we shall be waiting for them.” He raised exhausted eyes to look upon a bleak, emotionless albino. “And you, Monsieur, are you satisfied you cannot be revenged on the likes of Vautrin?"

  "Oh, I fancy I have taken from him something he valued more than life,” said the albino, sheathing his black rapier with an air of finality. He shared a thin, secret smile with the Countess von Beck. “Now, if you'll forgive me, Monsieur le Commissaire, I will continue about my business while the night is young. We were planning to go dancing.” And, offering his arm to Countess Una, he walked insouciantly down the stairs and out of sight.

  "What on Earth did he mean?” LeBec wondered.

  Commissaire Lapointe was shaking his head like a man waking from a doze. He had heard about that black and crimson sword cane and believed he might have witnessed an action far more terrible, far more threatening to the civilisation he valued than any he had previously imagined.

  "God help him,” he whispered, half to himself, “and God help those from whom he steals..."

  Copyright © 2007 Michael Moorcock

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  EXVISIBLE—Carlos Hernandez

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

  * * * *

  Carlos Hernandez has made one previous appearance in Interzone. Since then, he's taken a new job as an English professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which means he can now take summers off—the local bars are bracing for impact. The publication of his co-written ludic cut-up of a novel, Abecedarium, is fast approaching (details will be available at chiasmusmedia.net soon).

  * * * *

  The day my father was reduced, the doctors and nurses couldn't get me out of his hospital room. But they sure didn't want to come in after me. They had been in this business a long time now; they had seen people in my state do just about everything and, all too often, they were the ones on the receiving end of this kind of temporary insanity. It wasn't their problem if I ruined my father's chance to be reduced. I had signed away my rights the same day my father was admitted. They had it all in writing.

  But I wasn't so deranged that I didn't know what was happening. I knew that if I didn't get out of there soon and let them do their work, my father would physically and irreversibly die. Of course, part of me wanted that. A big part. But the bigger, more socially-acceptable part of me felt that even though reduction isn't death, is infinitely better than death, it's still the end of something. Really, it's the end of almost everything. He wouldn't even have consciousness; all that would be left of him was a presence, a tortoise-like persistence without the complexities of human life to color it. And I wasn't done with him. I wanted him to be completely alive, responsive and responsible, an agent in the world. I mean, once he was reduced, how would I be able to take my revenge?

  But who was I kidding? All that was left of him by then was a head on a pillow. I should have thought of all of this three months ago, back before they started amputating everything from the neck down, preparing him to live without any kind of body at all. The choice, now, was between reduction or extinction. And that wasn't really a choice, despite what my id kept urging me to do.

  The door opened behind me, and in came Travis, the physician's assistant who had been with my father since he was admitted to Madison General. Travis had on what amounted to a translucent powder blue garbage bag with built-in arms and legs (it was important, once the reduction began, that the room be as germ-free as humanly possible) and a breathing apparatus like a fighter pilot's covering his face. It gave him an evil, insectival look. He had entered the room to keep me from making, from his perspective anyway, the biggest mistake of my life. He pantomimed how sorry he was for me—he had to pantomime, since
the breathing apparatus didn't allow him to talk to me—but he tapped his wrist to remind me that time was short, and then he pointed to the door to remind me of all the doctors and nurses who stood out there, waiting to come in and begin the procedure. I remember wondering to myself whether part of everyone's training in the hospital included lessons in mime.

  "I know,” I said to him. But I didn't move.

  Travis mimed again that we were running out of time. I could follow his line of sight to the brain monitors behind me, but there was no need to look. They were bleeping incessantly, a panicked tattoo of computer terror that could only mean one thing: imminent brain death. Travis mimed the regret I would feel if I didn't clear out right away, and that regret, he further mimed, would conjure the sort of pain that stays with you forever, even after you yourself have been reduced and are sitting on your grandchildren's mantle. He was a very good mime.

  "I know,” I said again. And began to cry. That did the trick—like I had finally found the right wire to cut on the bomb. Travis came over and put an arm on me; the blue garbage bag crunched noisily as he did so. After a few moments, I composed myself enough to vacuum the escaping tears back into my eye sockets and button my suit jacket and straighten with resolve. Then, with Travis's arm still on my shoulder, we resolutely walked out of the room.

  As soon as we made our exit, all of the blue garbage bags that had been waiting outside poured into Dad's room. Travis and I walked slowly to the waiting room. He guided me to an orange vinyl chair and gently pushed my shoulders until I sat. Then he freed himself from the garbage bag and mask. He had mask-hair, with odd, meringue-like peaks defying gravity all over his head, and he looked tired—his face was so swollen with sleeplessness it looked like it was trying to detach itself from his skull. But he looked a lot better when he smiled, and for my benefit he grinned a big, sincere grin. Then he took a seat next to me and put a hand on my knee and said, “Well, they've started. This is the beginning of the end. The hard part is over now."

  "Says you. It's not your dad being turned into a box in there."

  I was trying to sound nasty to cover up other things, but Travis saw right through me. He gave my knee an ironic squeeze and, with a gentle, almost oneiric voice, said, “It's not like you ever loved him."

  We looked at each other. Then I humphed. And then I said, “True. But what kills me is I never really got a chance to hate him."

  * * * *

  A lot of people have shrines in their homes for their reduced family members: walls, corners, even entire rooms dedicated to the partially departed. Some people are positively Chinese in the reverence they show their ancestors, and most people at least try to keep up appearances. At the minimum, most people provide tidy and tasteful spaces for family monstrances—the half-meter-long, elaborately carved wooden boxes that house all that remains of the dearly—and not-so-dearly—departed. Of course, what remains is, depending on your perspective, either everything that matters, or not very much at all: what remains of the reduced is exactly however much of the self can fit onto a hard drive. A quantum hard drive, to be fair—a top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, bleeding edge, future-is-now hard drive that is so complex no one in the world is exactly clear on how it works. Which is maybe why we're so willing to believe that it does.

  I used to look at the monstrances in other peoples’ homes and feel a little wistful, a little jealous. My mother and older brother were all the family I had, and, when each of them had to choose, neither of them chose to be reduced. My mother was resigned to death in that healthy, old-world way that has never expected much from medicine except huge bills and bad news. She said to me, “Oh, you've had enough of me already. The whole world has had enough of Flor Otero. What do you want me hanging around for? And anyway, I'd get claustrophobic in that little box. I need to stretch my bones a little, you know? How can anyone fit in those little things? I always feel sad when I look at those, like they just jam the deceased into these tiny coffins like canned ham, because there's not enough room in the world anymore to even die right. Ay, hijo, no!"

  My brother, on the other hand, was just broken, was simply done with life. “Maybe fifteen years ago, when I was happy,” he told me. “Maybe then I would've wanted it. I used to be a funny guy back then. Remember? It would've been a million laughs to keep me around, cracking jokes from some shelf and busting on whoever walked by, like those guys in the dunking cages at the carnival. But now? I'd just be a depressing sack of shit on the wall. Who'd want a guy like me to be exvisible? Oh, great, you get to penetrate the deep, hidden recesses of my being and find out that I'm a bitter misanthrope with nothing good to say about nobody. Look Juan: better just to cremate me.” He gave me a smile then that was the exact opposite of smiling. “Yeah, cremation. That seems more my speed these days."

  They were all the blood family I thought I had left to me, so I didn't think I'd ever have a monstrance or a reduction shrine in my home. Well, you can buy other peoples’ monstrances if you want them bad enough, the same way people buy uncut books by the pound to make their massive libraries look full. Some people get sick of being part of a family and want a clean break, a fresh start; sometimes the reduced were real sons of bitches who had the money to pay for the procedure, but who no one really wants to keep around; some people just suffer too much having the people they so dearly loved around in such a vitiated form. So, for whatever reason, some people sell off their related reduced, and collectors and interior decorators gobble them up. But that's not my style. So, up until three months ago, I thought the only way I'd be grieving the loss of my family was through the old-fashioned way: memory and absence. But then the father I'd never met before called to introduce himself and tell me he was dying.

  Reduction is expensive, takes months of preparation, and requires the body to be utterly destroyed in the process: so no one who belongs to a religion that requires the body to remain intact after death can be reduced. Dad didn't have religion, had come to terms with his pancreatic cancer, and, in his fanciful way, actually enjoyed the idea of not leaving a body behind. The only thing holding him back from reduction was the money.

  "I'm doing this for you,” he said to me the first time I met him. We met where everyone goes these days for first dates, white-collar drug deals and awkward encounters of every stripe: the neighborhood Lava Java. Before that sentence, we had been speaking in mmm-hmms and humphs and one-sentence declaratives, sipping our hypercharged lattes during every pause. Luckily, those lattes were huge. There was a lot of space to fill in our conversation.

  He didn't look like me, and he didn't look like my brother. He just looked old, like a generic white old man, like he could have been any white man's old man. But neither my brother nor I look white; we both take after my mother. And so everything about him screamed imposter; his last name was Fagin, for chrissakes. But the DNA tests checked out. I'd insisted on them before I would talk to him, I picked the lab and I paid for them, and so now I was bound by the results. This generic white man was my father. Science said so.

  But only by science's standards. “You're not doing this for me,” I said back to him, after staring a long time into my latte. “You've never done anything for me, ever. You didn't even exist in my world. You're doing this for yourself. Because you're scared to die, and you're broke, and you have nowhere else to turn. What most amazes me is that you had the gall to search me out at all. How did you think I would feel about you? I truly have no idea why you contacted me, or how you thought this would go."

  "I contacted you because I thought you might want to know your father before it was too late. I'm dying, you know."

  "I know. You told me already. But so what? I don't want to be cruel, but, really, you're nothing to me. Tens of thousands of people die every day, and I wish they didn't have to, I really do, I wish the world was a nicer place to everyone. But you know, that's just the way it goes. I'm not responsible for every death in the world. You are just one of the many billions of people who are goi
ng to die that aren't my responsibility. You aren't one of my people. You're nothing to me."

  "Oh, I'm something. You may not know it yet, but I am.” He had a penchant for making theatrical pronouncements; I'd talked to him for twenty minutes and already I knew this. “I'm your history, Juan. And every man needs his history."

  I put my latte down. “What a bunch of shit. What an utter load of crap. ‘Every man needs his history.’ You want to talk history? My history is that my piece of shit dad left my angel of a mom after impregnating her, but before he ever laid eyes on his second son. The end. The only other history I need from you I already have: the genetic tests I've gotten have told me what cancers and other congenital health risks I have thanks to your shitty genes. And that's it. All the rest is just fluff, just stories. Who cares if you were a used car salesman or ambassador to Finland or if your turn-ons include walks on the beach and French Symbolist poetry? Your history means nothing to me. They're like a form of entertainment or something. And you know what? I can't imagine there is a single thing that has happened to you that I would find entertaining."

  After a long silence, he said, “I actually was a used car salesman for a while."

  "Of course you were."

  "I made a mistake contacting you."

  "Of course you did. The latest in what I am sure is a very long line of them."

  He stood and paid and smiled one last time and left. I didn't smile back or shake his hand or even stand.

  Once he was gone, I grinned. Big. And then I laughed a little to myself. And then I laughed out loud and pumped both fists in the air and didn't care who was staring. I looked heavenward and said to my mom, “That was for you, Mami,” and then I looked to her right and said to my brother, “And you too Alex.” And then I ordered the richest chocolate cake they had at Lava Java. Best piece of cake I'd had in a long time.