Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  “Well a bunch of those big shite-hawk things are winging along the valley. It looks like a migration. Maybe they’re trying to scare them away.”

  “Keep watching, Liz. I’m pretty much done here. It’s time for me to make contact.”

  In the seat in front of Julia, Pak was loosening the straps that held her in place, pulling her drogue from its pouch. She was getting ready to jump. Julia forced herself to push her foot firmly against the yaw bar to slow the spin, relaxed her death grip on the pitch and roll stick and eased it forwards. At once the stalled wing began to fly again. They were in a steep dive. The rush of wind against her face told the young flier the skysail was close to the speed at which it could come apart. Gently she eased out of the dive. Treetops shot by in a blur, only just beneath the craft. She pulled back as hard as she dared, trading speed for height, getting heavy in her seat, zooming upwards until the tell-tale buffeting of chaotic air over the tail told her there was no more momentum to be had without stalling again. She pushed the craft over into a shallow glide. They were barely a quarter kayem above the ground and the startled griffin was nowhere in sight. Pak waved the folded drogue above her head. The gesture meant “look how close you came to making me jump, you moron.” She stuffed it back into her belt pouch. Julia knew they were too low for bailing. It was up to her to keep them in the air.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply, trying to relax. She juggled with the pitch angle until Pak’s ears were level with the horizon in front of her. The screaming of wind settled to a steady whoosh as the skysail slowed to what she hoped was the speed at which it would achieve its flattest glide. She made a wide turn to the left, toward home. Remembering all that she had been taught, she balanced her bank angle with just a little rudder and elevator. The small piece of yarn on the mica windshield blew straight up, showing she wasn’t wasting height by slipping or skidding. She knew there were but two or three minutes to find some lift or else they would face a hazardous landing amid the scrub below. The sky that had seemed to be bubbling with columns of rising air only moments before, now looked ominous. Julia had managed to find herself under a big dirty gray mass of cloud amid an otherwise perfect hunting sky. In the distance, skysails wheeled among griffins, in bright sunlight under fluffy white cumulus. All around her was overcast. That meant the supply of thermal lift could very soon stop.

  Suddenly she felt the skysail pitch down a little, giving a jolt to her stomach. She had flown into a patch of sinking air and was rapidly losing the little margin of height that remained to her. After a split second of panic and against all instinct, learning triumphed. She pushed the stick forward, urging the skysail to fly faster through the downdraft to conserve her height as best she could. After a moment, Julia felt the craft wander into a gentle roll to the left. At once she pushed the stick firmly the other way, forcing the right wing down and into a clockwise turn. She hardly dared breathe as the skysail entered a pocket of turbulent air. After two or three turns she felt they were just maintaining their altitude. She flew straight for a couple of seconds and then banked hard over into a steep right turn. And she caught it! Her stomach lurched as the skysail entered a swiftly rising thermal. She held the steep turn, even as the thermal tried to throw them out. The turbulent air rocked and shook the puny glider, until Julia began to feel nauseous, but she rode the rising air with determination. Pak waved her arms over her head and gave a great ululating yell like a victorious hunter. The ground below them receded to a more comfortable distance. They rose until the cloud base threatened to engulf them, as they flew through wisps and streamers of vapor. Pak pointed out to their right and Julia saw the landing field atop the valley side in brilliant sunshine two or three kayems away. She rolled out, lowered the nose and headed directly for home.

  By the time the skysail had slid to a dusty halt on the ground, she was exhausted. The craft dropped one wing onto the dirt and rested there at an angle. Julia sat breathing heavily, her mind in a daze. Pak unstrapped herself and jumped out, turning to face her, clenched fists resting on her hips. Julia began to mumble an apology. The older woman spat a brown wad of chewed capra root onto the ground and grinned at her, baring blackened broken teeth. Then she leaned into the cockpit and kissed Julia hard, laughing into her astonished open mouth.

  “But I nearly killed us!”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I undershot the target. You didn’t even get to cast your harpoon. The others are out hunting and we are right back here with nothing!”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “My first hunt and no kill!”

  “Hey, you brought us home alive. That means we can hunt again tomorrow.”

  Pak leaned over and threatened to kiss her again. She laughed as Julia recoiled in confusion. Pak slapped her firmly, and yet playfully, on the back of the head and ran off toward the village.

  Julia sat alone in the skysail for a long time, watching griffins and hunters whirling in the far distance. A chute blossomed as a harpooner descended to tackle a downed prey. Plumes of smoke were beginning to rise from distant signal fires, marking kill sites for the villagers, who would trek out to help the harpooners butcher and bring home the meat. Presently she heard light footfalls behind her. An orange clad figure crept under the high wing of the skysail and alongside the cockpit. It must be old Miles, come to taunt her for her failure. She turned her head.

  It wasn’t Miles, though the man wore the same type of clothes and a red gourd upon his head. He looked a little like Miles, but younger, and although he was certainly an adult, his face had no tattoos. He knelt beside the skysail and placed a hand on the edge of the cockpit. The man looked at her silently for a long moment. His eyes were wet with tears.

  “My name is Jack,” the man said. “You look a lot like a girl I used to know. Her name was Kathleen.”

  Vermilion Dreams: The Complete Works of Bram Jameson

  Claude Lalumière

  1. Pirates to Nowhere (1961)

  In Pirates to Nowhere, a group of seven plunderers invade Venera, seeking its lucrative stores of vermilion, the euphoria-inducing spice manufactured from a plant that reputedly grows nowhere but in the soil of Vermilion Gardens, an inner borough of the archipelagean city-state. The vermilion plant has never been successfully smuggled out of Venera.

  No outsider knows, exactly, how to locate Vermilion Gardens, never mind how to recognize the plant or even find the building (or buildings) where the precious stores are kept. One of the pirates, a Canadian named Bram Jameson, who may or may not be the same person as the book’s author, boasts of having been in Venera as a child. The captain is counting on Jameson’s memory to guide them all to riches.

  To the pirates’ surprise, no one opposes them; in fact, at first, Venera appears deserted. The would-be thieves almost immediately lose their way in the unfamiliar streets of Venera, their poorly laid plans in shambles. The five men who comprise the rest of the crew blame both the captain and Jameson for this failure. The ensuing mutiny causes Jameson to be separated from his fellow criminals. He tries in vain to retrace his steps, to find the harbor where their ship set anchor. But, as he navigates the streets of Venera, his sense of direction fails him. He loses himself in this alien cityscape, so unlike any other metropolis on Earth and so unlike his memories of it. He loses sight of the sea and cannot locate any of the aquatic vias that so famously serve as Venera’s main thoroughfares. Instead, he is caught in a maze of claustrophobic, cobblestone streets that zigzag through the geometrically confusing architecture of Venera. Often, he can barely see the sky through the overhanging maze of passageways, balconies, arches, bridges, and vegetation. For days on end, the vegetation grows so dense that he comes to forget that he is in a city at all, believing himself lost in a labyrinthine primeval forest. Eventually, albeit temporarily, the jungle becomes more recognizably urban, although the bizarre geometry confuses his sense o
f logic and, even, of self. Throughout his journey, Jameson encounters visionaries, prophets, lunatics, sadomasochists, holy whores, defective automata, and deformed doppelgangers of his former crewmates.

  Time ceases to have any meaning for Jameson. Eventually, he wends his way into a garden. Cubist paintings hang from trees. The paintings are all different, but each of them is a stylized, distorted closeup of someone’s face, perhaps his own. Each in turn, the cubist heads spring to life, asking Jameson a series of surrealist riddles too arcane for Jameson to answer.

  He ventures deeper into the garden. A path leads him to the edge of a whirlpool made of light. The book ends mid-sentence as the hero descends into the luminous whirlpool.

  2. The Great Disasters (1964)

  Starting in 1965, the U. S. paperback house Full Deck Books planned to release Bram Jameson’s gargantuan opus The Great Disasters as a series of four slim mass-market paperbacks. They published the first three as A World of Ice, A World of Fire, and The Great Flood — and had advertised the fourth, The New World. However, assaulted by lawsuits claiming that most of their line consisted of pirated editions, including sometimes furtively reprinting other publishers’ books by simply changing titles and names of authors, Full Deck Books ceased operations before the series’ final installment could hit bookshops. Presumably, the shady U. S. publisher never actually acquired the rights to The Great Disasters from Jameson or Vermilion Press, which, aside from that one aberration, remains the sole source of the author’s books.

  The original one-volume edition of The Great Disasters sports a cover illustration by the renowned Jake Kurtz, the prolific New York cartoonist who created comics classics such as The Internationalist, The Preservers, The Last Boy, Dinosaurs on the Moon, Destroyer of Worlds, and many others. The cover is split in four quarters, with a title box in the middle. Each vignette illustrates, respectively, one of the book’s four sections.

  The expression “The Great Disasters” usually refers to the apocalyptic hysteria of 1961, when worldwide civilization — capitalist, communist, and preindustrial — was convinced its end was imminent, first by ice, then by fire, and finally by water. Although people who were alive at the time claim to remember the mini Ice Age, the scorching droughts, and the great floods that successively afflicted the entire world, and certainly newspaper headlines and magazine covers from that era confirm these memories, current scientific studies point to the whole thing being a hoax — or a strange, shared fever dream — as no quantifiable evidence of any of these phenomena remains. Perhaps worldwide anxiety in that tense Cold War era had reached such a pitch that humanity collectively imagined these primal disasters as a way to cope with the looming threat of nuclear war and the consequent destruction of civilization?

  Indeed, The Great Disasters concerns itself with this epochal moment in world history. This time around, Jameson is not a pirate but an aviator who made his fortune as a vermilion merchant and now zips around the world at the helm of his solar-powered jet in search of adventure. The book is separated into four sections: Ice, Fire, Water, and the baffling conclusion, The New World.

  At the start of Ice, our intrepid adventurer witnesses a clandestine bomb test in the arctic. There is no violent explosion as such, but concentric waves of energy emanate from ground zero, forcing the aviator to crash his airplane in the snow. The damage to the aircraft is minor. While Jameson repairs his jet, a group of five scientists surrounds him, and, at gunpoint, they take him prisoner.

  The scientists mean to lead him to their headquarters, but they lose their way in the arctic desert (the astute reader will notice a recurring theme). They explain to Jameson that their bomb test has inadvertently set in motion a rapid ice age and that within a few months the entire planet will be covered in ice, possibly ending all life. Soon, they forget their weapons and begin treating Jameson as one of their own. Jameson himself forgets his own past, his identity, and the group increasingly behaves like a hive mind.

  The hive mind eventually reaches the rogue scientists’ arctic lair. For the next ten or so pages, the action is described in a series of geometric tableaux, dense with allegory and challenging to decipher. Gradually, this virtuoso narration segues into a more conventional style, with Jameson, triumphant and individuality regained, flying his aircraft over a retreating ice age.

  Both Fire and Water follow a plot structure similar to that of Ice, each time with Jameson the aviator accidentally encountering a quintet of scientists responsible for the disaster, and each time seeing him involved, always in a similarly allegorical fashion, in saving the world from its latest armageddon. Could these adventures detail the true, secret history of that apocalyptic year? Perhaps — although part four, The New World, veers off into obvious fantasy.

  The New World, which is itself longer than the three other sections combined, opens with Jameson flying over the receding floodwaters, providing clear continuity from the previous section, Water. Jameson spots an unfamiliar land formation and directs his plane toward it. Reaching his destination, Jameson wonders if he has discovered a new continent. Unfamiliar cityscapes appear in the distance. Intrigued by this mystery, Jameson lands his plane in a field and sets off on foot. In this strange land, Jameson encounters tribes, settlements, villages, and even cities populated by humanoid animals, but the species do not intermingle, save for trade or war.

  The various animal species all possess the power of speech, and, even more startling, they all speak a recognizable human language: English, French, Italian, Japanese, German, Arabic, etc. (In the text, all the foreign dialogue is rendered in the original language, with no translation.)

  But Jameson soon discovers that he has lost his own ability to speak. He can now vocalize nothing more than grunts and moans. Typically, he has lost his bearings and can no longer locate his airplane.

  He sees few other humans; like him, none of them can speak. They are slaves to the most privileged animals. The dominant animals recognize that Jameson is different from their servants; invariably, the animals treat him as a guest.

  This long section is marked by Jameson’s predilection for repetition. Every encounter unfolds in a similar manner: as dawn breaks, Jameson wanders into the territory of a new species; he meets a guide who escorts him; Jameson is witness to activities and conflicts whose nature he barely understands; as night falls, he is invited to a ceremony; there, before Jameson’s eyes, a human slave is ritually slaughtered — although the specifics of the ritual differs from species to species, even the herbivorous animals perform this act for Jameson’s benefit — and the meat is offered to him. Always, he refuses to eat the human flesh; he is then cast out. He wanders until he encounters the next group.

  Eventually, in a city of cats, the ritual is preceded by the intake of vermilion. When the meat is offered to him, the intoxicated Jameson enthusiastically agrees to consume the flesh before him. The sacred food is delicious. Once Jameson has chewed and swallowed, the mayor of the cat city says, “Now, speak your name.”

  The novel ends with the hero saying, “My name is Bram Jameson.”

  3. Why I Want to Love (1969)

  Why I Want to Love is a difficult, experimental book. Here, the author eschews such writerly conventions as chapters, paragraph breaks, sentences, and punctuation. For the entirety of its four hundred and seventy-five pages, Why I Want to Love consists of one uninterrupted string of words. Set entirely in Venera, this book, unlike Jameson’s first two releases, is narrated in the first person, although, paradoxically, the protagonist and narrator is never explicitly identified as Jameson and remains nameless — at least in the text itself. The introduction by Lee Williams, who also appears as a character in the narrative, namechecks Jameson as the narrator and claims that Jameson’s text is the real, accurate, and uncensored record of life in Venera, circa 1967. Jameson’s text is vague on personal details, but the Williams intro mentions Jameson’s Venera mansion, with
its throngs of naked, young, beautiful sycophants, both male and female, as eager to sample Jameson’s stores of vermilion as they were willing to give their bodies to whoever desired them.

  In the 1950s, Williams was better known as the international gun-toting costumed vigilante Interzone. After the tragic death of his wife and crimefighting partner, the archer Arrowsnake, he reportedly retired to Venera, although this has never been officially confirmed. Why I Want to Love is the only document authenticating this rumor.

  This is the first time a Jameson book is explicitly touted as nonfiction, but that claim is suspect. For one thing, despite the well-documented sexual openness of the late 1960s, especially in Venera, legendarily notorious for its history of unbridled promiscuity, the story — a nonstop hedonistic display of sexual excess, perversity, and depravity described in bluntly explicit anatomical detail — stretches credibility. For another, it’s hard to believe in the parade of celebrities the three protagonists (the narrator; the now homosexual Williams; and a shockingly teenage Tito Bronze, who already displays the enthusiasm for spanking female derrières that made his later films so scandalous) encounter on their orgiastic odyssey: Ronald Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Richard Nixon, Doris Day, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Orson Welles, Ringo Starr, Jayne Mansfield, Fred MacMurray, Federico Fellini, Nico, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Ursula Andress, Serge Gainsbourg, Brigitte Bardot, Pablo Picasso, Diana Rigg…

  Perhaps Jameson (and Williams) really do remember the events as described, regardless of what actually occurred. Both the Williams intro and the Jameson text mention that the three protagonists were at the time constantly under the influence of vermilion, in a state of perpetual imaginative euphoria that would certainly lend itself to hallucinatory experiences. As some studies have shown (see, for example, Jasmine Cockney’s 1974 counterculture bestseller, The Vermilion Fix, published by Albion Pulp Press), it is possible, although not definitely proven, that prolonged communal consumption of vermilion can produce shared hallucinations. And if that is the case, then Why I Want to Love might be simultaneously memoir and fiction.