Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

  A slithering, rippling ex-vagination brought an orgasmic sense of release and relief. The water in the trough crimsoned with afterbirth. Her swollen midriff deflated.

  The blue and gold eel stretched nearly as long as Tansy was tall. Thick around as her wrist. Its black eyes gleamed with intelligence. Twisting lithely in its limited compass, it tested its newborn muscles, visibly exulting in its power and gracefulness.

  “Your child. You must take good care of him and fulfill his every wish. By doing so, you will come to where you need to be.”

  The eel reared six inches of its head out of the water.

  “Mother,” it piped, in a lilting voice like the notes of a flute, “I am so happy to meet you again at last.”

  The sharp pebbles and grit beneath her feet scored shallow cuts in her bare soles. The pitch-smeared canvas bag dragged on its single shoulder strap, slapping against her hip with every step, sloshing out irreplaceable driblets of water. She changed the bag from one side to another at intervals, but this resulted only in distributing the pain evenly. Her throat was parched.

  Mercator held her hand as they walked, but could not assume the burden of carrying her child.

  Not that she had ever asked him to.

  Tansy had named the eel Plum Sun for his two-toned skin.

  “How much farther? I feel as if we’ve been walking for years.”

  “Not too many more miles. But I fear the last few are the hardest. And I’ll have to leave you, Sister.”

  “Must you really?”

  “It’s ordained. And I could not help you in what comes next.”

  Tansy recalled the dull, laborious months in their tiny apartment, which now seemed like paradise. “Will I ever see you again?”

  “You already have.”

  The foothills gave way to a crumbling talus slope that formed the skirts of the cloud-piercing mountain, bold and brutish as a soldier. But the mountain showed some charity. Cold rivulets clear as diamonds afforded a chance to wash her abused feet, slake her thirst, and replenish Plum Sun’s carrier. Overhead, a small school of sharks and pilot fish moved through the skies.

  “Thank you, Mother. All your exertions on my behalf will be repaid a thousandfold.”

  Tansy set one scarred foot upon the slope, then another. Mercator remained behind.

  “This is where we must part?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good-bye, Uncle. I appreciated your companionship.”

  “Farewell, Plum Sun. Farewell, Sister.”

  A hundred yards up the precipitous slope, bent almost double to maintain her balance, Tansy looked back.

  Some trick of distance or atmosphere made Mercator resemble a squat bearded gnome in shabby clothes.

  The razored crags and ledges by which Tansy ascended the upper reaches of the mountains tormented her hands as much as the rubble of the endless plain had gashed her feet. The weight of Plum Sun in his sodden pouch threatened to loosen her every handhold. Her bare toes scrabbled at minute ridges.

  Once, falling, she was saved by a pod of dolphins. The creatures buoyed her up till she could regain her grip.

  After that incident, Tansy redoubled her vigilance and efforts. But she knew she was drawing on a shallow well.

  “Wake up, Mother. Please, wake up.”

  Tansy sat with her back against a large cold boulder. The carrier holding Plum Sun rested on its oblate bottom upright by her side. Out of the bag protruded the blue-and-gold head of the eel. Somehow its limited expression conveyed encouragement.

  Tansy brought her hand up to her face and smeared blood across her visage in an attempt to clear the cobwebs from her vision.

  “Are we—are we where we need to be?”

  “Almost. The Fountain of Flames is just ahead.”

  Weariness like lead in her bones. Struggling to her feet. Trudging ahead up a mild slope. Through a tall defile whose tight blank walls resembled the chute through which cattle were led to slaughter. Fossils embedded in the walls mocked her persistence. The distinctive shadow of a circling manta ray overhead came and went.

  A broad plateau of roughly an acre in extent. Pillared in the middle on a rude slate hearth: a thick whistling column of green fire, sourceless, inexhaustible, braided of a thousand viridescent shades. Around the Fountain of Flames, the tumbled columns of some long-extinct fane.

  “You must place me in the flame, Mother.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “Not at all. Nor will you be harmed. Trust me.”

  If the green flame gave off heat, it was not the heat of a normal fire. Tansy approached warily. Closed her eyes for the final few yards.

  A sensation as of silken threads infiltrating her blood vessels informed her that she was fully engulfed.

  She tipped out Plum Sun into the flames, then backed away, out of the fiery column.

  The eel lashed back and forth within the fires, but did not crisp or wail, but rather became engorged, priapic.

  Big as a house, Plum Sun occulted or had completely absorbed the fires that had ennobled him. He seemed at ease in the air.

  “Step closer, Mother.”

  Tansy obeyed.

  Plum Sun’s mouth a needled, ribbed cavern.

  The hundred hands of invisible currents pulled her inside her son’s gullet.

  Blackness, acid reek, hot fluids laving her.

  Dissolution, assimilation into the flesh of her child.

  Tansy looked out through Plum Sun’s eyes, felt his/her hermaphroditic body slip through gill-freshening darkling estuarial waters, sensed electrical impulses through novel organs of perception.

  More of her kind fed below, drab cousins. She dropped swiftly through the waters to claim her share.

  A woman’s corpse provided the banquet, its clothing shredded. Dozens of eels tailed off the rotting body like flowers from a garden plot. Half-eaten already, disintegrating, drifting like a seedling on the marine winds, the woman’s body reminded Tansy of someone close to her.

  Plum Sun joined the feast.

  The net took them unawares as they gorged, too busy incorporating the woman’s substance into themselves to heed the surface predators.

  Up, up, into the cruel air.

  Confinement in a narrow bucket.

  Speech vibrating the interface between air and liquid. Plum Sun understands.

  “Have a dekko then, child. C’mon, naught’ll happen to you.”

  On tiptoes to peer into the bucket.

  Tansy’s first impression: a single braided whip in constant coiling motion, a flux of silver and black. Then: separation into component parts: heads, eyes, bodies, flukes, gills.

  A bucket of writhing eels, sinuous, muscled, constrained.

  Their weavings seem to scribe watery ideograms in perpetual flicker, transiting from one half-perceived meaning to another.

  And at random moments, as their serpentine bodies open a clear view to the bottom of the bucket, millisecond impressions of something piebald, gold and blue, beneath them. Like a queen or king guarded by courtiers. A sport or mutant brother to the mundane sea-snakes …?

  Tansy finds the bizarre sight of so much life compacted into such a small compass soothing somehow. Feels herself composed of similar perpetually coiling energies, her DNA lashing like eels at the heart of each cell. Energies that offer new configurations of possibility every millisecond.

  Comes down off her tiptoes. Gazes at the proprietor of the eel-pie stall. The man winks at her, a wink conveying centuries of complicity.

  “You’ll be needing this meal now, then?”

  Places her hand gently on her own stomach.

  “No, not now, thank you. I’m already quite full.”

  Recently I had the pleasure of contributing critical commentary to a lush new art book, Todd Schorr’s Dreamland (Last Gasp, 2004). Schorr’s paintings all possess great narrative and allegorical drive, and I found myself spinning stories in my head around each canvas, little vignettes that intersected with Schorr’
s artwork at odd angles. These are those stories, their titles taken from Schorr’s canvases. I hope my pieces resonate, even without the inspirational artwork beside them, and that they motivate readers to search out Schorr’s otherworldly art.

  My thanks also to Harlan Ellison and Michael Swanwick for their pioneering work in the field of literary miniaturization.

  The Farthest Schorr

  1.

  THE HUNTER-GATHERER

  The hominid named Gra had to chew the skins for several days to get them supple enough to form the sack. His big blunt teeth and wide parabola of jaw began to ache. But he persisted. No effort could be spared for the all-important hunt, the first of its kind. Fashioning the bone sewing needle occupied another half of a day, as did cleaning the animal intestines to form thread. During this period he subsisted on carrion, too preoccupied to track new game. He grew sick from the tainted meat. His mate, Reh, brought him some of the fleshy stalks that grew in the swamp, a plant that had cured his distress once before. But finally, after all the work and illness, he was ready.

  Warily, he approached the site where the odd, unclean strangers in their outlandishly textured furs had once camped, before vanishing in a whirlpool of shimmering air. They had scattered debris over a wide area before leaving, and the bright colors and half-recognizable shapes of the abandoned objects hypnotized him. The slick surfaces of the figurines that resembled his fellow tribespeople in the oddest, most disturbing ways seemed to impart knowledge through Gra’s skin. One by one, he began to pick up the objects and place them in his sack, his muscle-corded arms, veins in bas-relief, almost too powerful for the delicate task assigned them.

  By midday he was feeling faint, possibly from the lingering effects of the bad meat, but also possibly from the collective mojo of his prizes. And then, as he stooped for one last trophy, dizziness washed over him. The air swirled in chromatic pinwheels similar to the whirlpool that had taken the strangers away. Two of the figures—a black and red mouse and a pregnantly voluptuous woman with a beehive for a head—came to life atop a pedestal of untainted fresh kill; orchestrated noises unlike any he had ever heard filled his ears. Something never before felt was born inside him. Gra fell to his knees—to pray.

  And how much will you be contributing today to the fund for new stained glass windows, Mr. Jones?

  2.

  SUGAR SHAKES

  The pentagram was outlined in Kool-Aid powder. The candles were stacks of pierced Necco wafers with licorice-whip wicks. The sacrifice was a beheaded chocolate Easter bunny. Solid, not hollow.

  Little Kenny Firazzy was ready to invoke his own peculiar demons.

  Butt-naked, smeared with strawberry syrup, a necklace of candy skulls draped across his bony, ten-year-old chest, Kenny began to chant the evil invocation he had learned from collecting enough Bazooka bubble gum comics.

  “Skittles and Kit-Kats and hyperglycemia! Gummis and Starbursts and sweets that are dreamier!”

  The chant took a full five minutes to recite. But when he finished, Kenny knew he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

  Confined in the pentagram, three demons hovered: Cottonwisp, Bad Apple, and Beninjeri. Vainly did they writhe to be free, uttering seductive promises and lies. Their tails lashed, their fluids oozed, their worm-tongues flickered. But Kenny had been too smart for their wiles. They were trapped, and forced to accept his commands.

  “Listen, you three,” Kenny ordered, “I wanna have all the worlds sweet stuff, all the time, anytime I want it! And for starters, I’ll take a nice big serving of chocolate milk.”

  “Your wish,” hissed the three demons, “is our command.”

  A bioengineered cow crashed through the roof, landed on Kenny, and squashed him flatter than a fruit roll-up. Chocolate milk dribbled from its teats. The pentagram dispersed upon impact, and the demons were freed.

  They went straight back to their home in the innermost circle of sugar hell: Hershey, Pennsylvania.

  3.

  THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL TAUNG BABY

  The aliens picked Lena Wilkinson up in 1951, right in the middle of a photo session with Irving Klaw—a flock of horrible little creatures with heads like partially deflated, mushroom-textured balloons, riding in glittery Formica saucers. They couldn’t fit her lingerie-clad form into any of their tiny, one-alien cruisers, of course, so they enveloped her in some kind of translucent protective protoplasm, zapped Klaw and his crew with their amnesia ray, and towed Lena off with gravity waves behind their mini-fleet as they soared out into space.

  That envelope of protoplasm eventually became her only friend.

  The trip across the light-years involved passage down an infinite helical tunnel tinted a bilious yellow-green and studded at intervals with slate-colored exit portals. The fleet eventually dove down one exit and emerged above a hospitable planet, and that is where they dumped Lena.

  The protoplasm shivered off her and coalesced into a small bulbous luminescent starfish-shaped entity.

  “Lena, I’m your new companion, Rollo. Follow me to your new home. We have a lot of learning and fucking to do.”

  Still clad only in underwear and stockings and heels, and dazed from her swift abduction and transport, Lena could only dully obey.

  For the past fifty years, Lena has indeed learned and fucked a lot. She has not aged. Although it is not visibly different, her head sometimes feels as if it has swelled ten times in size. And her fruitful loins have disgorged dozens of alien babies, the result of her congress with a host of unimaginable creatures. Naked mole rats, exoskeletal ghouls, giant blue rabbits—Lena dreams that someday one of her babies—all of whom were taken away by her original captors shortly after weaning—will return to rescue her and return her to a planet she only vaguely recalls.

  Idly, she wonders what Klaw is paying for a photo session these days.

  4.

  A GOOBER AND A TUBER IN AN EXCHANGE OF FISTICUFFS

  Midge was doing plenty all right for herself. A gal with nothing much to get by on except for her va-va-voom figure and an enigmatic blank gaze that certain joes found sexy, she had come out of the worst kind of poverty and landed in the lap of luxury. Not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier, she nonetheless knew when she had a good thing going.

  And this affair with Skippy Goober was one helluva sweet deal.

  Oh, sure, he had his drawbacks and failings and quirks, like anything in trousers. The only position he liked for screwing was doggie-style. Claimed he had a hard time getting up off his back once he was down, and his skinny little legs always collapsed when he tried boring old missionary style. And his body odor—whew! Even deodorant failed to hide that earthy scent. But worst of all was his temper. Once Skippy wrapped himself around a few drinks—mai tais were his favorite—he could be as brutal and mean as Senator McCarthy looking for Reds. Still, he had never yet hit Midge—she had told him she’d knife him while he slept if he ever laid a hand on her—and he did take her out to the nicest places.

  Like tonight, at the Brown Derby, with all the swells and stars admiring Midge’s cleavage. Heaven on earth.

  Until Argus Toober showed up.

  Toober was Goober’s rival in the rackets. They hated each other like North Korea hated South Korea. And now that idiot maitre d’ was seating Toober right next to Midge and her man!

  Goober growled and hefted his sword-cane. Midge sighed and surreptitiously checked her purse for her mad money. Looked like she’d be going home alone. No playing with Goober’s stalk and peanuts tonight.

  5.

  VARIATIONS IN KITSCH

  The anonymous respirator-wearing worker tending the giant bubbling vat of lava-lamp fluid leaned over just a bit too far. Out of his shirt pocket fell a small, curious pebble he had picked up on the way to work that morning. That pebble was, in fact, the remnant of a thousand-ton meteorite from beyond the Horsehead Nebula, all that had survived the burning passage through Earth’s atmosphere, and it possessed uncanny properties.


  The lamps filled with the contaminated fluid were shipped around the nation.

  One went to Kaarlo Krisp, a Broadway set designer who lived in a Greenwich Village apartment surrounded by all the nostalgic icons of his youth, acquired through assiduous collecting.

  Kaarlo tripped while carrying the lava lamp upstairs and dropped it, opening a hairline crack in its vessel. Nervously running his finger around the glass, Kaarlo simultaneously cut himself and absorbed some of the alien fluid into his cut.

  During the next ten hours Kaarlo experienced a trip like no other human had ever undergone. He journeyed to a world where cavemen manned a NASA-style Mission Control, and another where tubby porkers bowled an infinite succession of perfect games. The ménage à trois with Sheena Queen of the Jungle and the Fujiyama Mama brought a tear to his eye. He was just getting used to the constantly shifting scenery and characters when a small crocodile wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a sombrero materialized and said, “Hey, kid, is your ticket punched?”

  “No,” Kaarlo replied.

  Despite its diminutive size, the crocodile conductor had no difficulty in getting the prongs of his punch into Kaarlo’s ears, or in squeezing real hard.

  6.

  THE MARTIAN LABORATORY

  Pooja was a big standard poodle. But not a show dog, by any means. Abandoned by her owner, Pooja had been for many years a rough-and- tumble denizen of alleys and abandoned buildings, waste lots and under-the-bridge encampments. From time to time she had taken up with a human, a bum or a bindlestiff. But always Pooja’s willfulness and desire for independence had led to a parting of ways.

  Pooja was no one’s bitch.

  Today Pooja was nosing around a warehouse that boasted an odd veil of odors, smells of exotic chemicals and foreign meat. The latter scent promised to assuage the rumbling of her empty stomach, so Pooja persisted in seeking entrance to the warehouse. Eventually she found a loose sheet of plywood covering a busted basement window and wormed her way inside.