Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  Right in my ear. Hot meat breath snores, right in my ear. For all the gods’ sakes.

  I fetched up next to a marble fountain, cherubs pissing clear water into a broad white bowl. Glancing back over my shoulder, I decided I’d run — sorry, strode — far enough. I looked around.

  Marble columns vined with ivy marched away down the sides of the dusty trail. High, wispy clouds skimmed across the blue, blue sky. All of it fiction, of course, a great lie perpetuated by sheer force of will. Because who’s got more force of will than a god? No one, baby, except maybe another god. Or, you know, all of them.

  The fountain burbled and gurgled. It sounded like joy. I took a golden chalice from the collection adorning the fountain’s wide rim. I held it under the running water, let it fill, then wished for wine. I took a sip and spat it out. “Fuck,” I said.

  “What?” said my ferret, his voice drowsy.

  “Fucking arak.” I threw the goblet away. “I hate anise.”

  He yawned and stretched, his little paws kneading my shoulders. “Why’d you ask for it then?”

  “I didn’t.” It’s not easy being a trickster sometimes. You can’t turn it off. You’ll even play tricks on yourself.

  “Hey,” my ferret said, snapping to attention and pointing like a hunting dog with his tiny black nose, “is that Baldr?”

  “No,” I said, “can’t be, that lot took the easy way out.” I squinted against the glare anyway.

  “Yeah.” He lay down on my shoulders and sighed, contented beyond measure. His breath still stank of raw meat. “Sure looks like him, though.”

  It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. Baldr and the rest of the noble northern pantheon had bit it a long time ago, back when there were still stars and the whorls of galaxies, back when there was still an Earth, back when there was still a reason for we gods to exist.

  But that was a long time ago, a trillion years or maybe a trillion trillion years ago. Eternity is damned long and it feels even longer when you’re trapped with a bunch of crusty old sons of bitches that gnaw evermore at the puzzles of who came first and what are we and why are we here.

  This party goes ever on, knots of gods drinking wine and mead, milk and blood from golden chalices, discussing all the irrelevant ouroboros questions, and meanwhile the universe falls ever deeper into the grand pit of entropic decay. Planets, flung free of their stars, have disintegrated in the yawning interstellar, intergalactic dark. The stars, in their turn, ran down and fell apart; the stellar nurseries having flown apart in the gaping maw of the third law of thermodynamics, no new stars were born to replace them. Even atoms are no more; protons and neutrons have decayed.

  Some infinite time ago, on its trillionth birthday, the human race wrote itself into the interstices between the physical constants of the universe, and disappeared. We gods don’t know why. Perhaps they did it hoping to emerge someday, in a bright and distant future; perhaps it was a sublime form of racial suicide.

  Outside this unending party, all is dark, darker than the grave. The only sound is the X-ray hiss of black holes, devouring the last stray leptons and quarks, crushing them into nothingness. And even when the black holes are gone, evaporated, died of hunger after quintillions of years, this party may linger yet, because it’s made of gods’ dreams, far stronger than pathetic energy and slipshod matter.

  This grand palace of the imagination floats on the cooling corpse of the universe like an algal bloom on a long-lost lake, ignoring the fact of its own impossibility, maintained by the boundless wills of the gods herein assembled. It’s a beautiful place, gorgeous beyond comprehension. Great forests of oak and spruce, redwood and aspen reach for the sky, their leaves shivering and whispering in the breezes. Ionic and Doric columns stand in soldier’s ranks, and fawns and nymphs dart back and forth among them, racing each other for the pure sweet joy of it. A great stepped pyramid, its angles softened by a two-cubit-thick carpet of green moss, waits at the heart of a jungle filled with the cries and songs of macaws, pumas, birds-of-paradise. Golden fountains everywhere dispense whatever ambrosia your heart might desire. It’s the perfect amalgam of any and all of the cultures of human faith, an ecosystem of mythemes and all their attendant imagery.

  Existing here is about as dull as watching shit dry in the sun, let me tell you.

  I went fishing.

  There are lakes here, broad flat reaches of water, mirror-still, where you can see clear to the bottom even at the deepest point. I wished a canoe into existence on the rocky verge of one of these lakes, checked it carefully for leaks — you can’t be too careful when you’re a trickster — then dreamt a paddle into my hands and pushed off. My ferret woke briefly from his doze, looked around at all the water, muttered “Again?”, and went back to sleep. He loves fish, but he hates fishing.

  I rowed till I could see the fish darting hither and thither, maybe twenty feet below me. I set the paddle down on the curved floor of the canoe and waited.

  After a while, a handful of fish swam nearer the surface. I watched and waited. One of them, a big jackfish, broke the surface with his head and gills.

  “Hello, Fox,” he said.

  “Hullo, brother pike,” I replied.

  “So what’s new?”

  “Well, there’s a bunch of old fogeys goin’ on and on about the chicken and the egg on shore,” I said. “Care to see?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “I set one old fucker’s robe on fire.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “C’mon, hop up into the boat. I’ll give you a better view.”

  “I’m not falling for that one, trickster,” said the fish. Fish can’t frown, but I’m pretty sure if they could, he would have frowned at me. “I’ll hop into the boat, you’ll brain me and cook me, and I’ll end up swimming out of your foul ass, in pieces. Not this fish, old son.”

  “You don’t trust me?” I said, putting on a sad face.

  “Not as far as I can—” Those were very nearly his last words, because while he was speaking I lunged into the water and grabbed him by his gills, hooking my fingers deep inside. His eyes got big, and he croaked “Fuck you, Fox,” and those truly were his last words.

  My ferret woke up when I dropped the fish into the bottom of the canoe. He sniffed the air, then took a deep breath, savoring the odor. “Got one, did you?”

  “Yes,” I said, picking up the paddle. “Don’t eat any till we get back to shore.”

  She came walking barefoot down the beach as I cooked my share of the fish over a fire I’d built from the chopped-up wreckage of the canoe. She wore a plain dress of pale silk that brushed her ankles. Her toenails, fingernails, and lips were painted the color of blood.

  My ferret chewed his fish head in my ear, wet smacking noises and the crunching of bones. I’ve learned to ignore it over the past few eternities. He looked up at her, and said, “Who’s she?”

  “I’m not sure.” There are an awful lot of gods and goddesses around here, and most of them don’t like me and my kind. Tricksters get on a lot of nerves. It’s a gift.

  This goddess arrived at fireside and, saying nothing, sat next to me. I gave the spit that impaled the pickerel a quarter-turn. My ferret finished chewing, swallowed, and said, “You got a name?”

  I said, “Ignore him. He’s got about the worst manners in this place.”

  She said, “Do you have a name, little fur?”

  I said, before the ferret could speak, “He’s Weasel, and I’m Fox.”

  “Ferret,” muttered the ferret, “it’s Ferret, not Weasel…”

  She laughed. “Some called me Moon, in my day,” she said. Her eyes were bright green, like jade in the sun. “I’ve met your kind before, Fox. I don’t believe I should quite trust you, should I?”

  I gave her my broadest, most charming smile. “Care for some
fish?”

  After we ate, we went for a walk. She led, I followed, and my ferret dozed. He sleeps a lot, these days. I can understand.

  We came to a fountain, and each of us took a chalice. I could hear a faint sound, like distant thunder, but more regular. We dipped our goblets into the running water, made our wishes, and drank. Mine tasted like mints and chocolate, which was unfortunate, since I’d wished for beer. Hers left red stains on her teeth. I couldn’t tell if it was from wine or blood.

  We kept walking, toward the thunder-sound. After a while, I realized it wasn’t thunder; it was a drumbeat.

  The ground under our feet grew spongy, and great shaggy trees arched over us, shading us from the sun. The drumming was hypnotic, a thudding sound that called my body to dance. Moon felt it too, I think; her steps became more rhythmic, more dance-like. Together we danced into the heart of the forest.

  We came to a graveyard, a decoration surely, with canted headstones and tilted marble crosses furred with moss, their epitaphs weathered into illegibility. Kudzu climbed the trees, strangling them, and vines hung everywhere. In the shadows and the shades, Loa danced their crazy dances, their Creole chants shivering on top of the drumbeat.

  We found a bench at the edge of the empty boneyard and watched them for a while. Someone had set a bouquet of fresh flowers on one of the nearby graves: stargazer lilies, frail orchids, baby’s breath, a spray of roses in a shade of red so dark they looked almost black. We sat, saying nothing, letting the rhythms of the dance and the spicy honey smell of the stargazers envelop us. Her bare shoulder was cold against my skin.

  One song ended, and another began, a paean on sex and rapture.

  Moon said, “Why are we here?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said, standing. “Not you too.” My ferret woke up, but kept his peace. I think I startled him with my vehemence.

  “Hear me out, Fox,” she said. Her eyes implored me.

  “No, seriously,” I said. “I am sick and fucking tired of hearing everyone here noodle around that fucking question like it’s the only thing of any importance in all the god-damned universe. If I have to—”

  She shut me up by standing next to me, laying her fingertip on my lips, and whispering, “Fox, shut up.” She sat back down and patted the bench next to her. I stood my ground, glaring at her. The tips of my ears burned.

  In the shadows, the drumming and the songs went on, the Loa ignoring us. Perhaps they hadn’t even noticed my outburst. They’ve always been a little different.

  Moon said, “It’s the only question that bears asking, Fox. It’s a question that no one out there” —she waved an arm to indicate our backtrail, the elder gods with their togas and their Doric columns and olive boughs— “seems willing to seek a true answer for.”

  One of the dancers darted toward us, hissed “Damballah Wedo vous regarde!” and retreated again to the shade of one of the great trees.

  “But I have an answer,” she said, ignoring the interruption like it hadn’t even happened. “One that’s so simple and so obvious, it seems, that no other has come upon it in all the millennia that we’ve been here at the party.”

  I looked at her, glared at her, really, and waited.

  “We’re gods, aren’t we?” she said. “We’re meant to create.” She smiled at me, and stood up again. “So let’s create.”

  She shrugged her shoulders, and her dress slipped off them, slithered down her pale body, and pooled at her feet. She stepped one foot out of it, and with the other kicked it away in among the headstones. Like all proper goddesses she wore nothing underneath.

  Taking his cue to leave, my ferret bounded away, deeper into the graveyard, pursuing some small animal.

  “Are you coming?” she said.

  Nobody had to tell me twice.

  She smelled like earth and rain. Her lips tasted like blood, her tongue fought like a snake. When I slid inside her she clenched me with muscles I didn’t know existed.

  She fucked like a thunderstorm. She bit and scratched and howled like an animal. I did too. I roared like a bear, and she roared like a lioness, almost at the same time.

  And then she pushed me off of her and sat up and said, “Like that. Just like that.”

  I couldn’t smell the grave flowers anymore. All there was to smell was the musk of raw god sex.

  In a lull in the drumbeat, I heard my ferret say, “So I take it you two are done, then?”

  Moon’s belly swelled as we walked back. Even over the span of a couple of hours, the change was noticeable. By the time we returned to the stony beach where we’d met, it was time: her water broke, staining the smooth pebbles underfoot.

  She gave birth to a brand-new universe, a fledgling bubble of light and heat and space-time. We named it, blessed it, and sent it on its way, out past the event-horizon curve of the endless party, into the heat-death nothingness beyond.

  And later, when one of the elder gods asked me which came first, I grinned and said, “I did, but not by much.”

  Destiny Lives in the Tattoo’s Needle

  Suzanne Church

  I dropped from the airship like a rock, praying for my chute to open.

  It did.

  The landing jolted me from ankle to jaw, but I remembered my training and hit the ground without snapping any bones.

  The enemy was out there, searching for anyone who had survived the wreck, and filling me with the dread that follows a man in war. Especially a Thinker, like me, for whom torture might be worth the effort.

  I inhaled as I scanned around. Tall grasses brushed at my thighs. I had absorbed data on the sage grass that grew in this part of Pacifica, a grass that not even goats would eat. The smell was heady, like moldy bark, and I tore off a piece and sipped at the end.

  Bile rising, the bitterness spoke volumes on the intellectual brilliance of goats.

  To my left, the remnants of a wooden fence lay crumbled along the base of a rolling hill. On the other side, the wild grass looked a little different, more like an intentional crop, though it was overrun with weeds and bushes. I headed for the densest patch, hoping to find some dandelion leaves.

  On closer inspection, the fence wasn’t rotten so much as carefully broken to appear worn. I climbed over and dropped to all fours. By moonlight, I clawed at a clump of dandelions, brushing the dirt away before I munched on the leaves. The roots looked like carrots so I took a bite. Though bitter, they didn’t engage my gag reflex like the sage grass had, so I ate two and saved a bunch for later.

  I crawled up the hill and, from the crest, a vista opened up before me. The amber hue of the downed airship caught my attention. Remembering the last course I’d plotted before the ship lost containment, and using the stars, I determined the crash site was north of me. The remains burned bright enough to build a partial day-bubble in the darkness. It called men with weapons like moths to a porch light.

  I could see them, some on foot and some on troop transports, gathering around the edges of the wreckage. Worse, the unmistakable hands-in-the-air gestures of prisoners added their dejected silhouettes to the crowd.

  Damn.

  They’d be searching for me. I carried a plethora of secrets, though not on paper. Every airship had a Thinker. We were worth more in a war than ammunition, more than any grunt or officer for that matter.

  Back to crawling, with my rear a little closer to the ground, I headed down the hill, putting some land in the line of sight between the ship and my position. The fence followed a crooked line all the way to the next ridge and beyond. My instincts told me to ditch the field and go my own way, because where there were fences, there were people loyal to the Pacificers. But the wooden construct’s clever design spoke to me. Dandelions, sage grass, and grain in beautiful randomness; no simple farmer would build such a marvel.

  Past the second rid
ge, the fence took a sharp turn to the south and ended at a pile of rocks arranged to conceal an opening.

  My nerves turned the corner from worried to hyper-alert while my Thinker curiosity drove me forward. I felt more exposed than I had on the high ridge. I might as well have shouted, “I’m an Atlanticer. Come and take me. Free torture material, no waiting!” Yet I kept on crawling.

  I paused to slow my breathing. I counted ten inhales before movement near the rocks caught my eye. The guy had a bow pointed at me, making me wonder if I had hopped dimensions to a land where guns and grenades didn’t win all the playground fights. On my knees, I raised both hands, hoping I wouldn’t learn what it felt like to have a shaft of wood sticking out of me.

  “I’m unarmed,” I said.

  He didn’t speak. But I could hear the squeak of the bow bending.

  “I’m not what you think.”

  Then the twang of release sounded, followed closely by the thump of wood sinking into the dirt less than a meter away.

  I waved my arms in the sky. “Okay, maybe I am, but could we calm it down?” I threw the dandelion roots to the ground, to prove my good intentions. “I didn’t mean to steal. I was hungry, is all. And I thought them only weeds.”

  Escape scenarios flowed through my mind like water over falls. Still kneeling, I put both hands behind my head, and said, “Those soldiers by the wreck would give you five, maybe six hundred standards for a find like me, delivered alive.”

  I could hear the man pulling back the bow again. I waited for the twang but it didn’t come. Finally, he left the security of the rocks, bow drawn in front of him, and moved out of the shadows into the moonlight. He wore a cape, the hood covering his face with a grim-reaper-meets-black-hole pit of nothing.

  “Don’t move,” he said, though the voice wasn’t low or masculine. Either he was a kid, or the woodsman-reaper was a woman. “The next one’s aimed at your heart.”

  Yep, he was definitely a she. “I believe you.” I kept to my knees, my hands still on my head. I wasn’t sure if she could see my face, as the moon was behind me, so I turned a bit to the left, revealing the tattoo on my right cheek.