The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  Calamari Curls was having Talent Nite. The Early Bird specials were served, and senior diners went shuffling back to their singlewides, eager to leave before the Goddamned rock and roll started. Young families with toddlers dined and hurried back to their motels, unwilling to expose little ears to amplified sound.

  Five pimply boys set up their sound equipment on the dais in the corner. They were the sons of tractor salesmen and propane magnates; let their names be forgotten. The front man tossed his hair back from his eyes, looked around at the tables crowded with chattering diners, and said in all adolescent sullenness:

  “Hi. We’re the Maggots, and we’re here to shake you up a little.”

  His bassman leaped out and played the opening of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with painful slowness, the drummer boy joined in clunk-clunk-clunk, and the front man leaned forward to the mike and in a hoarse scream told the audience about his woes. The audience continued biting the tails off shrimp, sucking down frozen strawberry margaritas and picking at Kona Coffee California Cheesecake.

  When the music ended, they applauded politely. The front man looked as though he’d like to kill them all. He wiped sweat from his brow, had a gulp of water.

  Betty Step-in-Time wheeled his bicycle up to the door.

  “We’re going to do another classic,” said the front man. “Okay?”

  Ka-chunk! went the drums. The keyboardist and the lead guitarist started very nearly in sync: Da da da. Dada. DA DA DA. Dada.

  “Oh Lou-ah Lou-ah-eh, ohhhh baby nagatcha go waygadda go!” shouted the front man.

  Betty Step-in-Time dismounted. Just outside the restaurant’s threshold, he began to dance. It began in time with the music, a modest little kickstep. A few diners looked, pointed and laughed.

  “Nah nah nah nah asaya Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whooa babeh saya whaygachago!”

  Betty’s kickstep increased its arc, to something approaching can-can immodesty. He threw his arms up as he kicked, rolling his head, closing his eyes in abandon. A diner sitting near the door fished around in pockets for a dollar bill, but saw no hat in which to put it.

  “Ah-nye, ah-dah, ah ron withchoo, ah dinkabobsa gonstalee!” cried the front man. Betty began to undulate, and it seemed a tremor ran through the floor of the building. A tableful of German tourists jumped to their feet, alarmed, but their native companion didn’t even stop eating.

  “Just an aftershock,” he said calmly. “No big deal.”

  “Ah rag saga leely, badoom badoom, wha wah badoo, jaga babee!”

  Betty began to dance what looked like the Swim, but so fast his arms and legs blurred the air. The lights dimmed, took on a greenish cast.

  “Who’s playing with the damn rheostat?” the manager wanted to know.

  “Ayah ha Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, whoa ba-bah shongo waygatchago!”

  Sweat began to pour from Betty’s face and limbs, as his body began to churn in a manner that evoked ancient bacchanals, feverish and suggestive. The green quality of the light intensified. Several diners looked down at their plates of clam strips or chimichangas and stopped eating, suddenly nauseous.

  “Ya ya ya ya ah-sha-da Lou-ah Lou-ah he, Nyarlathotep bay-bah weygago!” sang the front man, and he was sweating too, and—so it seemed—dwindling under the green light, and the carefully torn edges of his black raiment began to fray into rags, patterned with shining mold.

  Betty’s hips gyrated, his little sailor hat flew off, and every curl on his head was dripping with St. Elmo’s fire. Several diners vomited where they sat. Others rose in a half-crouch, desperate to find the lavatory doors marked Beach Bums and Beach Bunnies. Half of them collapsed before they made it. They slipped, stumbled and fell in the pools of seawater that were condensing out of the air, running down the walls.

  “Ah Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” wailed the white-eyed thing the front man had become, and his band raised reed flutes to their gills and piped a melody to make human ears bleed, and the mortal diners rose and fought to get out the windows, for Betty was flinging handfuls of seaweed in toward them, and black incense.

  The pink and turquoise linoleum tiles by the bandstand popped upward, scattered like hellish confetti, as a green-glowing gas of all corruption hissed forth, lighting in blue flames when it met the air, followed by a gush of black water from the forgotten pool below. The first of the black tentacles probed up through the widening crack in the floor.

  Betty sprang backward, grabbed up his sailor hat, leaped on his pink bicycle and pedaled away as fast as he could go, vanishing down the misty darkness of Alder Street.

  The neon olive had become an eye, swiveling uncertainly but with malevolence, in a narrow scarlet face.

  Watching from across the street, Mr. Bright laughed until the tears poured from his eyes, and slapped the arms of his wheelchair. He raised his bourbon bottle in salute as Calamari Curls began its warping, strobing, moist descent through the dimensions.

  ***

  He was opening a new bottle by the time gray dawn came, as the last of the fire engines and ambulances pulled away. Tom Avila stood in the middle of the street, in gloomy conference with the pastor of St. Mark’s, the priest from Mission San Emidio, and even the rabbi from Temple Beth-El, who had driven in his pajamas all the way over from Hooper City.

  Holy water, prayer and police tape had done all they could do; the glowing green miasma was dissipating at last, and the walls and windows of Calamari Curls had begun to appear again in ghostly outline. Even now, however, it was obvious that their proper geometry could never be restored.

  Tom shook hands with the gentlemen of God and they departed to their respective cars. He stood alone in the street a while, regarding the mess; then he noticed Mr. Bright, who waved cheerfully from behind his window. Tom’s eyes narrowed. He came stalking over. Mr. Bright let him in.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you, Peg?” the mayor demanded.

  “Me? How the hell could I of? I just been sitting here watching the show,” said Mr. Bright. “I ain’t going to say I didn’t enjoy it, neither. Guess nobody’s going to raise no rents around here for a while!”

  “God damn it, Peg! Now we’ve got us another vortex into a lost dimension, smack in the middle of town this time!” said the mayor in exasperation. “What are we going to do?”

  “Beats me,” said Mr. Bright, grinning as he offered him the bourbon bottle.

  ***

  But the present became the past, as it will, and people never forget so easily as when they want to forget. The wreck of Calamari Curls became invisible, as passers-by tuned it out of their consciousness. The green olive blinked no more.

  Mr. Bright found that the black things that mewled and gibbered around the garbage cans at night could be easily dispatched with a cast-iron skillet well aimed. His customers came back, hesitant and shamefaced. He was content.

  And mellowing in his world view too; for he no longer scowled nor spat in the direction of Betty Step-in-Time when he passed him on the pier, but nodded affably, and once was even heard to remark that it took all kinds of folks to make a world, and you really shouldn’t judge folks without you get to know them.

  Maelstrom

  Mr. Morton was a wealthy man. He hated it.

  For one thing, he wasn’t accustomed to having money. During most of his life he had been institutionalized, having been diagnosed as an Eccentric at the age of ten. But when the British Arean Company had needed settlers for Mars, the Winksley Hospital for the Psychologically Suspect had obligingly shipped most of its better-compensated inmates off to assist in the colonization efforts.

  Mr. Morton had liked going to Mars. For a while he had actually been paid a modest salary by the BAC. Eccentric though he was, he was nevertheless quite brilliant at designing and fabricating precast concrete shelters, a fact that would have surprised anyone who hadn’t seen the endless model villages he’d built on various tabletops in Ward Ten, back on Earth. The k
nowledge that he was earning his own keep as well as doing his bit to help terraforming along had built up his self-esteem.

  When the economic bubble that had buoyed up the BAC burst, Mr. Morton had been summarily made Redundant. Redundant was nearly as bad as Eccentric. He was unable to afford a ticket back to Earth and might well have become an oxygen-starved mendicant sleeping in the Tubes, had he not found employment as a waiter at the Empress of Mars tavern. Here Mr. Morton had room, board and oxygen, if not a salary, in surroundings so reminiscent of dear old Winksley Hospital for the Psychologically Suspect that he felt quite at home.

  Then his employer, known as Mother Griffith by her patrons, had had a run of extraordinary luck that had resulted in making her the richest woman on the planet. Farewell to the carefree days of Mr. Morton’s poverty! Mother Griffith set him up in business as a contractor and architect.

  She now owned the entirety of Mons Olympus, and leased out lots to commercial tenants with the dream of building a grand new city on Mars. Areco, the immense corporation owning the rest of the planet, busily devised laws, permit fees and taxes to hinder her as much as it was able. But by bankrolling Mr. Morton’s firm, Mother Griffith found she was able to evade neatly several miles of red tape and avoid a small fortune in penalties.

  All Mr. Morton was now obliged to do was sit at a drafting terminal and design buildings and, now and then, suit up and wander Outside to look at a construction site where laborers actually hired and directed by Mother Griffith were busily pouring the peculiarly salmon-pink concrete of Mars.

  For a brief period Mr. Morton had enjoyed the contemplation of his bank account. He had enjoyed being able to afford his very own Outside gear at last, with the knowledge that he’d never have to improvise an air filter out of an old sock again. His indoor raiment was all of the best, and in the sable hues he preferred. And oh, what downloads of forbidden books the black market in literature had to offer, to a man of his economic status!

  And yet, the more he kept company with Mssrs. Poe, Dumas, Verne, King and Lovecraft, the greater grew his sense of overwhelming melancholy. His position as a newly prosperous bourgeois seemed distasteful to him, a betrayal of all that was artistic and romantic in his soul.

  “Stop moping,” Mother Griffith told him. “Bloody hell, man, the Goddess gifts you with obscene amounts of cash, and you can’t think of more to do with it than buy some fusty old words? You’re making a city with your own two hands, in pixels anyway. There’s power for you! You want artistic, is it? Stick up some artistic buildings. Cornices and gingerbread and whatnot. I don’t care how they look.”

  Mr. Morton retired to his drafting terminal in high dudgeon and plotted out an entire city block in Neogothic Rococo. Factoring in Martian gravity, he realized he could make his elaborate spires and towers even more soaring, even more delicate and dreamlike. A few equations gave him breathtaking results. So for a while he was almost happy, designing a Municipal Waste Treatment Plant of ethereal loveliness.

  And, just here above, where its gargoyles might greet both sunset and dawn, would rise…the Edgar Allan Poe Center for the Performing Arts!

  Mr. Morton leaned back from his console, dumbfounded. Here was a worthy use for vulgar riches.

  ***

  When the last of the concrete forms had been taken away, when all the fabulously expensive black walnut interiors shipped up from Earth had been installed, Mr. Morton’s theater was a sight to behold. Even the shaven-headed members of the Martian Agricultural Collective, notorious for their philistinism, suited up and hiked the slope to stare at it.

  For one thing, dye had been added to the concrete, so the whole thing was an inky purple. Not only gargoyles but statues of the great poets and dramatists, floral roundels, bosses, shields, crests and every other ornamental folly Mr. Morton had been able to imagine covered most of its gloomy exterior, and a great deal of the interior too. On Earth, it would have crumbled under the weight of gravity and public opinion. Here on Mars it stood free, a cathedral to pure weirdness.

  Within, it had been fitted up with a genuine old-fashioned proscenium stage. Swags of black velvet concealed the very latest in holoprojectors, but Mr. Morton had hopes of using that vulgar modern entertainment seldom.

  “But that’s what people want to see,” said Mother Griffith in dismay.

  “Only because they’ve never known anything better,” said Mr. Morton. “I shall revive Theater as an art, here in this primitive place!”

  He thought it might be nice to begin with the ancient Greeks, and so he put a word in his black marketeer’s ear about it. A week later that useful gentleman sent him a download containing the surviving works of Aristo-phanes. Mr. Morton read them eagerly, and was horrified. Had he ever truly

  understood the meaning of vulgarity before now?

  He was not at a loss for long. Mr. Morton decided that he would write the EAPCPA’s repertory himself; and what better way to open its first season than with adaptations of every single one of Poe’s works?

  ***

  “You’re putting on The Descent into the Maelstrom?” shouted Mother Griffith. “But it’s just two men in a boat going down a giant plug hole!”

  “It is a meditation on the grandeur and horror of Nature,” said Mr. Morton, a little stiffly.

  “But how on earth will you stage such a thing?”

  “I had envisioned a dramatic reading,” said Mr. Morton.

  “Oh, that’ll have them standing in the aisles,” said Mother Griffith. “Look you, Mr. Morton, not to intrude on your artistic sensibilities or anything, but mightn’t you just think about giving ’em at least one of those sol-et-lumiere shows so they have something to look at? For if the miners and haulers feel they haven’t had their tickets’ worth of entertainment, they’re liable to tear their seats loose and start swinging with ’em, see, this being a frontier and all.”

  Mr. Morton stormed off in a sulk, but on sober reflection decided that to ignore the visual aspect of performance was, perhaps, a little risky. He drafted another script, in which the Maelstrom itself would be presented by dancers, and each unfortunate mariner had a stylized lament before meeting his respective fate.

  “They want a thrilling spectacle?” he said aloud, as he read it over. “Here it is!”

  Fearful as he was to commit the purity of his script to human actors, Mr. Morton liked even less the idea of machine-generated ones. He decided to hold auditions.

  ***

  The interior of Mr. Morton’s theater, while richly furnished, was quite a bit smaller than its remarkable exterior (Air being a utility on Mars, living places tended to conserve its volume). Mr. Morton preferred to think of the result as an intimate performance venue. Seating capacity was thirty persons. Mr. Morton sat in the back row now, watching as Mona Griffith stepped from the wings.

  “Hi, Mr. Morton!” said Mona.

  “Hello, Mona.” Mr. Morton shifted uncomfortably. Mona was the youngest of Mother Griffith’s daughters. She was carrying a SoundBox 3000 unit. She set it on the floor and switched it on. Slinky and suggestive music oozed forth. Mr. Morton’s knuckles turned white.

  “Mona, you’re not going to do a striptease, are you?” he inquired.

  “Well—yes,” said Mona, in the act of unbuckling her collar.

  “Mona, you know how your mother feels about that,” said Mr. Morton. He himself knew quite well; he had known Mona since she’d been ten. “In any case, I’m auditioning for a play, not a—a burlesque review!”

  “I’m of age now, aren’t I?” said Mona defiantly. “And anyway, this isn’t just a striptease. It’s very intellectual. I’m reciting as I’m stripping, see?”

  “Tell me you’re not stripping to Hamlet’s Soliloquy,” begged Mr. Morton.

  “Pft! As if! I’m doing General Klaar’s Lament from The Wars of the House of Klaar,” said Mona. “And I’ve got these really horrible-looking fake wounds painted in unexpected places, see, so as to create quite a striking effect. So it wouldn
’t be at all, um, what’s that word? Prurient?”

  “No, I don’t suppose it would be,” said Mr. Morton. “But—”

  They heard the warning klaxon announcing that the airlock had opened, and then the heavy tread of armored feet approaching the inner door. Boom. The inner door was kicked open, and a man in miners’ armor strode down the aisle toward Mona. He drew a disrupter pistol and shot the SoundBox 3000, which promptly fell silent.

  “Durk! You bastard!” shrieked Mona. The intruder marched up on stage, not even removing his mask. Mona kicked his shin viciously, forgetting that he was wearing Larlite greaves, and hopped backward clutching her foot at once. “My toe!”

  Her fiancé shoved his mask back and glared at her. “You promised me you wouldn’t do this,” he said.

  “You shot my SoundBox!”

  “But you promised me you wouldn’t do this!”

  “But you shot my SoundBox!”

  “Put your mask on. We’re going home!” said Durk, waving his pistol distractedly.

  “But you shot my SoundBox!”

  “Next,” said Mr. Morton, from underneath his seat.

  The next applicant waited until Durk and Mona had made their noisy exit before emerging from the wings.

  “Er…Hello, Alf,” said Mr. Morton.

  Alf was a hauler. Haulers drove Co2 freighters out on the High Road, the boulder-marked route that cut across the Outside wastes to the two poles. The mortality rate for haulers was high. Consequently most haulers had been recruited from Hospitals, because they tended to care less about that fact.

  Alf was able to face down cyclones, wandering dunes, flying boulders, starvation and thirst without turning a hair, but he was sweating now as he peered out toward the empty seats.

  “Erm,” he said.