* * * *
Fast Forward 1, the edgier of the two anthologies, opens, appropriately enough, with a meditation on dreams and the forging of art, “YFL-500” by Robert Charles Wilson, in which a mediocre, marginal artist goes in search of the woman whose purloined dreams provided inspiration for his single fully realized piece. Wilson allows the reader's emerging perception of the narrative, quest to romance to exploitation, to mirror the protagonist's own shifting comprehension: “Gordo's heart did double beats as he tried to maintain his calm. This, after all, was what he had been seeking for so long. This, or some sense of his own authenticity."
Several names surface in both anthologies: Tony Ballantyne, Paul Di Filippo, Mike Resnick, Mary A. Turzillo, Stephen Baxter. With “No More Stories,” Baxter contributes what is essentially another take on his story “Last Contact” from Mann's anthology: quite a different tale, but one with much the same mood and theme, not to mention the same fine writing. This is a story written close to life and, I suspect, close to the author's heart, setting small lives against the cosmic backdrop. Like “YFL-500” it is also a meditation on the power of art, if not to transform, if not to help us understand, then at very least to help us truly experience our own lives and those of others.
"YFL-500” suggests that art may be finally little more than compulsive pattern-making; Justina Robson's “The Girl Hero's Mirror Says He's Not the One” suggests that the manner in which we live our lives may be, or could be, the same.
She is living in a Base Reality not unlike Prime, the original reality old Earthers used to share before Mappa Mundi, except it has fifty more shades of pink and no word for “hate.” Her reality is called Rose Tint, and it was the one relatively mild hacker virus she was glad to catch.
A. M. Dellamonica's “Time of the Snake” again takes up war as subject, in this case a civil war fostered by a truly foreign power. Aliens called Squids have occupied Earth, and two factions fight for home/human rule, the Friends of Liberation (Fiends, for short) and the Squid-sponsored Democratic Army (Dems, as in the Fiend slogan “It's Dems or us"). The story begins “My offworlder allies don't trust me.” Soon, with a sudden flipflop of plot, it becomes apparent that no one should: “Then she turns back to her work and I start down the ladder, leaving my friends and enemies together, locked in the endless dance of mutual annihilation.” As with “Third Person” from Mann's anthology, it's the details, the authenticity of scene, that make the story so effective. Even its plot reversal seems to serve a higher function than simple narrative contrivance; it seems at the very foundation of the story itself.
Ian McDonald's “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” revisits the AI- and contradiction-ridden future India of one of my favorite novels from last year, River of Gods, taking on combat robots, the nature of media-induced heroism, and the loss of idealism. Wars again, small and large.
"Jesus Christ, Reanimator” finds Ken MacLeod in James Morrow territory:
The Second Coming was something of a washout, if you remember. It lit up early-warning radar like a Christmas tree, of course, and the Israeli Air Force gave the heavenly host a respectable F-16 fighter escort to the ground, but that was when they were still treating it as a UFO incident. As soon as their sandals touched the dust, Jesus and the handful of bewildered Copts who'd been caught up to meet him in the air looked about for the armies of the Beast and the kings of the earth.
(Hint: Jesus doesn't do much better this time around.)
Among other standout stories of the twenty-one included in Fast Forward 1 are Di Filippo's wickedly wacky “Wikiworld” ("You probably remember my name from when I ran the country for three days"), John Meaney's gothic-for-our-time “Sideways from Now,” Elizabeth Bear's tender “The Something-Dreaming Game” about auto-asphyxiation and the efforts of a dying race not to be forgotten, resident genius Gene Wolfe's “The Hour of the Sheep,” and Paolo Bacigalupi's chilling sketch of the sacrifices parents make, “Small Offerings."
Even with its miniature hands and squinched face and little penis, it's nothing. Just a vessel for contaminants.... Just something to scour the fat cells of a woman who sits at the top of a poisoned food chain, and who wants to have a baby.
A new breed of original anthologies? Redesigned engines and fresh energies for science fiction as a genre? Too early to say. But one dares hope—right along with George Mann and Lou Anders. And meanwhile, we've thirty-seven excellent new stories.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Envoy Extraordinary by Albert E. Cowdrey
Albert Cowdrey knows a bit about how diplomacy works—he used to head the Conventional War Studies Branch at the US Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC. His new story shows that in addition to understanding diplomacy, he also has a keen understanding of how thing work throughout the galaxies and a gift for spinning out stories.
Blazing in the gold uniform of UNIDIP—the Universal Diplomatic Service—Vincent Khartoum emerged onto the pad of Malakatha's ugly little shuttleport.
A ragged serfboy followed, sweating under a small hillock of luggage.
Lined up at ramrod attention, an honor guard of gleaming bots presented nine-point-four impact weapons as Vincent lumbered past, pushing his broad bemedaled frontage before him like a galleon's prow. At the end of the file an armored limousine opened its multi-leaved passenger door like an unfolding chrysanthemum.
Vincent threw back his head and stared down his nose, a trick that made him seem even taller than his two-meters-one.
"Why,” he demanded, “must I endure the tedium of wheeled transport instead of the royal flyer with guardian drones that is my due?"
He spoke in a degenerate dialect called Low Vexish, the common language of Malakatha. In reply the driver—a black box—buzzed, “A temporary halt to air traffic has been ordered since a traitor attempted to bomb His Supremacy's palace."
"Why doesn't he get rid of his rebels, eh?"
"He will do so almost immediately. They are but a few malcontents. He will erase them with his frown. Most Honored Sir, pray honor this wretched slave by entering. We have before us a lengthy drive to the Zot."
Puffing and grumbling, Vincent did so. Like his gut, his rump was impressive, and took some time to settle among the purple faux-velour cushions. At last the massive door closed, and the motor purred into activity. As the car began to move, he was thinking: The Zot, the Zot—what did my infopacket say about the Zot?
Ah, yes. He remembered now. A vast marshland inhabited by giant leeches, carnivorous glongbars, poison-footed blids, and King Drax.
Why the monarch chose to hide from his subjects in the middle of a primeval swamp became clear as the scenery of Malakatha unfolded.
Roadside villages featured decaying huts, ragged peasants climbing around on garbage heaps, and impaled bodies gazing blindly at the sky like speared frogs. The fields grew crops only of gibbets and gallows, all occupied. The sole large buildings were prisons where bemedaled officers saluted the king's limo while grim-looking guards presented arms and chain gangs prostrated themselves.
Viewing the wretched scene, Vincent found himself thinking: Good Lord—this place is worse than Peoria!
* * * *
Though he concealed the fact as much as possible, he had indeed been born in Peoria, a big ramshackle city set like a navel ring in the middle of the Dark Continent of North America.
After the second-to-last war had erased all the Earth's capitals, places previously of little importance became vast centers of population: Sarajevo; Minsk; Moosejaw; Jongking; and Peoria. Vincent had been born thirty-six years ago to poor, hard-working parents who, along with 32,691 others, inhabited a huge tenement called the Peoria Honeycomb. Urine-fouled hallways, air shafts piled with rubbish to the third story, and perpetual smells of cooking SAPS (Stewed and Processed Scraps, the chief food of the poor) made life in the Honeycomb anything but sweet.
Amid these grim conditions the young Vincent had dreamed of freeing the oppressed. He disfigured his s
chool notebooks with drawings of himself bearing a sword in one hand (to liberate) and a torch in the other (to enlighten). In his high school's senior play he took the part of Macduff and enacted the final sword fight so vigorously that the boy impersonating the tyrant Macbeth required plastic surgery.
Then Vincent grew up. Like many another child of poverty, he embarked on a lifelong struggle to escape the company of the oppressed forever. On scholarship he entered the vast university center at Minsk, surviving the bitter Belarussian winters on a diet of SAPS and blini. After four years of struggle, he emerged with a Summa cum laude in History and Languages, copped a clerkship at UNIDIP, and moved to the lush African surroundings of New Great Zimbabwe, the Capital of All Humankind.
There he mastered both human and alien tongues, from Amharic to Low Vexish to Xlu. He studied the mysteries of Protocol until he knew exactly why an Assistant Deputy outranked a Deputy Assistant. He attended seminars on Deception, where he learned how to promise everything and nothing in the same breath. He joined a debating society and practiced the tricks of Rhetoric—often called the “science of flimflam"—on every possible occasion. He found a patron in Maxim Balabanov, the Second Secretary, became an Area Specialist in Most Remote Space, and began to win promotions—first to Deputy Assistant, then to Assistant Deputy.
By this time the idealistic schoolboy and the hard-working university student both had evaporated and been replaced by a portly, oldish young man noted for his glossy exterior and his profound ability to mask his true thoughts. He married an absolutely appropriate woman, a thin, elegant Franco-Cambodian whose very name (Marie-Elysée de Phnompenh) exuded an antique elegance. The couple rented a palazzo on an alley off the Souk and entertained to the limit of Vincent's now substantial salary.
Many a formal dinner gave him increasing gravitas—about ninety-nine kilos of it—and his personality evolved in tandem with his physical presence. At home he lost interest in sex and became pompous, stuffy, and exasperating, and Marie responded by starting an affair with (appropriately) a chargé d'affaires. But away from home, his career flourished.
He joined the diplomatic team that negotiated an end to the First Alien War, exhibiting to great effect his mastery of Xlu—a very difficult tongue with only one vowel (a sort of grunt, represented in textbooks by the letter u) but six hundred consonants, some of which he needed a prosthesis to enunciate. His combination of fluency, adept lying, and the sheer intimidation of his size (the average Xluan stood only 1.1 meters tall and weighed about twenty kilos) were credited with gaining many of the unfair advantages the human species reaped from the treaty.
By this time Peoria had sunk far beneath Vincent's mental horizon. He'd entirely ceased to communicate with his parents, or even to acknowledge that he had any. Whenever their neighbors in the Honeycomb asked his father what had happened to Little Vince, the old man would spit and reply, “We dunno and we duhwanna know."
By 10275 of the Absolute Calendar (which had replaced the myth-based calendars of the past) Vincent Khartoum felt ready for an ambassadorship. Imagine his astonishment and chagrin when he learned that he was to be dispatched (on a mere military transport) to negotiate with the contemptible tyrant of Malakatha!
* * * *
Second Secretary Balabanov was a grossly handsome man who wore a vast tawny wig like a lion's mane. His lifestyle was extravagant, his mind devious. He liked to say that Baron Talleyrand (Napoleon's foreign minister, who betrayed everybody and profited handsomely thereby) was the greatest man in history.
Balabanov aimed to become First Secretary, then arrange the death of some elderly Minister of State in order to take his place. He proclaimed over and over, to the point of tedium, that to succeed in life one had to plan ahead. Vincent found him both admirable (the man knew how to climb the bureaucratic ladder) and repugnant (he was such a piece of #ulupu-!pu, or “walking excrement” as a Xlu phrase pungently expressed it).
After delivering the bad news about Vincent's new appointment, Balabanov made an effort to butter up his subordinate.
"You will, of course, go to Malakatha as Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. ‘Plenipotentiary’ means you'll have full power,” he explained.
"I'm familiar with the term,” Vincent murmured, his face smooth and resolutely pleasant. Inwardly, he was raging.
"It's a nasty little rock, from all I've heard, and King Drax is a foul sort of creature. Well, it takes all kinds to make a galaxy."
"May I record that phrase?” Vincent asked. “Your Excellency's philosophical insight never ceases to astonish me."
"Save your brown-nosing for King Drax,” replied Balabanov severely. “You may need it. What he does on his own world is deplorable but no business of ours. However, we've learned that he's preparing a fleet of armed vessels to engage in piracy. What affects the spaceways—especially the exit of the trans-Aran wormhole, less than a microparsec from his lair—is our business."
"So I'm to negotiate the liquidation of his fleet. What can I offer in return?"
"Subsidies to fifty trillion sols if he agrees—war if he does not. As I said: full power. We trust your competence absolutely.” After a moment's thought he added, “Start by offering him forty and see what happens. And pick up a nice medal—say a Grand Order of the Plenum—from the heraldry office. If he's a good swine, award it to him."
Seductively he went on, “When you've brought this business to a successful conclusion, I've got a nice ambassadorship waiting for you. On a Xlu world, where your famous fluency can serve humanity best."
"Uu knu* !ulthth u} zwuq,” Vincent replied with a bow, knowing well that Balabanov didn't understand a word of Xlu. Considering what he was inviting the Second Secretary to do, that was just as well.
"You leave in fifteen days,” Balabanov finished. “You'll start out-processing at once.” Rising, he lifted one hand in farewell, declaring grandly, “Your return will be the signal for peace—or war."
As the door to Balabanov's palatial office whispered shut behind him, Vincent was wondering: Why don't I believe him?
Out-processing meant a tedious trek from one division of UNIDIP to another, getting his records checked and cleared in case he perished by some mishap in Deep Space.
He encountered all the usual annoyances. The Bursar found that he owed nineteen sols and a demilune because a line-item in his budget had been disallowed. The Chief Librarian at Infocenter charged him eleven lunes fine for failing to return a virtual-reality game called Sex All Possible Ways that he certainly hadn't charged out. In Medcheck, bots zapped him with sixteen different injections, leaving his shoulders and upper arms black and blue. “The disease environment of Malakatha is really quite exciting,” enthused the Chief Medical Officer, who then ordered an incipient hernia corrected even though Vincent protested that he felt fine.
For minor surgery, the operation was quite sufficiently annoying. The wound was glued, of course, so that Vincent had no stitches or staples to be removed, as in the dark ages of medicine. Still, he had to take painkillers for a week, and his tailor had to let out his uniforms in the waist and crotch before he again felt comfortable in them. While waiting, he visited the Heraldry Office and picked up a Grand Order of the Plenum. The medal was the size of a soup plate, with a golden chain and a jeweled clasp. It was so big and hung so low on the recipient that it was known unofficially as “the ninny protector."
"It's exactly the sort of thing the little toad ought to find irresistible,” said the Chief of Heraldry. “Just don't break the plastic envelope until you're ready for the presentation. The gold's only two microns thick, and it'll rub off if you look at it."
"In short,” groused Vincent, “I'm to cross Deep Space to present a fake medal to a sleazy tyrant as a reward for accepting an enormous bribe not to become a pirate."
"That's diplomacy,” shrugged the Chief of Heraldry.
Vincent's mood was not improved by his wife's obvious eagerness to see him go. “I'll help you pack,” was the limit
of Marie-Elysée's concern.
"Do you realize that I'm being sent to a miserable backwoods planet ruled by a homicidal maniac?” Vincent demanded.
"I'm sure it'll be terribly interesting,” she said, tossing his newly altered and ironed dress uniform all anyhow into a portmanteau. “Balabanov is very high on you."
"Balabanov is high only on Balabanov. I'm suspicious of this whole business. There's some deep, devious plot underway, I'm sure of it."
"My dear, that's the way things are at UNIDIP. It's a bottle of scorpions, as you very well know."
"'UNIDIP’ is a very undignified slang expression,” Vincent intoned in his most pompous manner.
"Even Balabanov uses it in unbuttoned moments,” Marie-Elysée replied, and Vincent was too concerned over the way she was wrinkling his dress uniform to wonder where she had seen Balabanov unbuttoned.
* * * *
Following an unsatisfactory departure, Vincent had to endure the crashing boredom of interstellar travel.
Traversing the Trans-Aran Wormhole turned out to be rather like taking the subway from Peoria to Minsk. Against the ports pressed ebon nothingness—an updated version of the ancient satirist Mark Twain's “firmament of black cats.” Vince, lying on a hard bunk in his stateroom, brooded: To think that idiots used to call this mankind's ultimate adventure!
The military unit traveling on the transport were replacements for the garrison guarding the wormhole's exit. The commander tried to keep his people busy, setting up a dense schedule of Lectures, Hand-to-Hand Combat, Happy Hours, and Orgy Groups to fill the timeless time on shipboard.
Vincent skipped most of these dubious pleasures, but did attend a lecture on New and Improved Weaponry. Here he learned about the wonderful progress being made in the technology of warfare: particle-beam generators, meson-bond disintegrators, and atomlasers were being deployed, along with a new munition called Obliterol that combined the convenience of plastic explosive with the punch of cold fusion. Sensing a bargaining chip in these fearsome weapons, Vincent hastily jotted the information down on the cuff of his left sleeve.
FSF, September 2007 Page 5
