Fantasy

by Rich Horton

  Hello! I shouted down the mental corridor that led to his abode. Now would be an apt time to assist!

  Meanwhile, Therobar was speaking. “You’ll go into the vats, of course. I will create several versions of you, some comical, some pathetically freakish. I will make convincing Henghis Hapthorn facsimiles, but give them unpleasant compulsions, then send them out into society. Your reputation may suffer. Others will have the opportunity to outrun neropt foraging parties. I believe I’ll also recreate you in a feminine edition.” He smiled that smile that could make children scream. “Such fun.”

  The muted voice that had been rumbling in my ear now said, quite clearly, “Step aside.”

  I turned my head, wondering what my transformed integrator was up to, but the creature was huddled in a far corner of the cage nervously rubbing one hand over another. “Did you speak?” I said.

  “No, I did,” said the voice again, this time less quiet. “Now, get out of the way.”

  I experienced a novel sensation: I was shoved from within, not roughly but with decided firmness, as that part of me that I was accustomed to think of as fixed and immutable—my own mind—now found itself sharing my inner space with another partner. At the same time, the noxious itchings and shiftings among my inner parts faded to a normal quiescence.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “I’ve already waited years,” Therobar said, but I had not addressed him.

  “As have I,” said the voice in my head. “Now, move over before you get us both into even worse difficulty.”

  I acquiesced, and the moment I yielded I felt myself deftly nudged out of the way, as if I had been pressed into the passenger’s seat of a vehicle so that someone else could assume the controls. I saw my own hand come up before my face, the fingers opening and closing, though I was not moving them. “Good,” said the voice.

  I spoke to the voice’s owner as he spoke to me, silently within the confines of our shared cranium. “I know you,” I said. “You’re my indweller, the fellow at the other end of the dark passage, my intuitive colleague.”

  “Hush your chatter,” was the response. “I need to concentrate.”

  I subsided. Through our common eyes I saw that Turgut Thero­bar had produced his weapon again and was aiming it at us while Gharst opened the cage with a key the thaumaturge had given him. Across the room, Gevallion threw me a sheepish look and opened the hatch of one of his vats, releasing a wisp of malodorous vapor.

  As the cage door opened, I watched my hands come together in a particular way then spread wide into a precise configuration. I heard my voice speaking words that were vaguely recognizable from one of Baxandell’s books, the opening line of a cantrip known as Gamgripp’s Irrepressible Balloon, whose title had made me laugh when I was young man browsing through a book of spells. I did not laugh now as from my hands there emanated an expanding sphere of invisible force that pushed Therobar and Gharst away from me, lifting them over the work bench, then upward into the air until they were pressed against the far wall where it met the ceiling. Gevallion, seeing what was happening, tried to reach the door but was similarly caught and crushed against it.

  Therobar was clearly finding it hard to breathe against the pressure the spell exerted against his chest, but the symbols on his scalp had taken on a darker shade and I could see that his lips were framing syllables. I heard my voice speak again while my hands made motions that reminded me of a needle passing thread through cloth. The thaumaturge’s lips became sealed. “Faizul’s Stitch,” I said to my old partner, having recognized the spell.

  “Indeed,” was the reply.

  He directed our body out of the cage, faltering only a little before he mastered walking. The apparatus on the bench was unaffected by the balloon spell and he picked it up in our hands and ­examined it from several angles. Its components and manner of ­operation were not difficult to analyze.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  “It seems only fair.”

  He activated the device, reestablishing the swirling sphere. I was relieved to see the familiar eddies of my transdimensional colleague reappear. My other part made room for me so that I could ask the demon, “Are you well?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I lost only form. Essence was not affected.” He was silent for a moment and I recognized the pattern he assumed when something took his interest. “I see that the opposite is true for you.”

  “Indeed,” I said, “allow me to introduce…myself, I suppose.” I stepped aside and let the two of them make each other’s acquaintance.

  When the formalities were over, I voiced the obvious question: “Now what?”

  I felt a sense of my other self’s emotions, as one would feel warmth from a nearby fleshly body: he gave off an emanation of determined will, tempered by irony. “We must restore balance,” he said, using my voice so that the three prisoners could hear. “Pain has been given and must therefore be received. Also fear, humiliation and, of course, death for death.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “That much is obvious. But I meant ‘Now what?’ for you and me.”

  “Ah,” he said, this time within our shared skull. “We must reach an accommodation. At least temporarily.”

  “Why temporarily?” I asked, in the same unvoiced manner, then felt the answer flower in my mind in the way my intuitive other’s contributions had always done during the long years of our partnership.

  I digested his response then continued. “You are the part of me—us—that is better suited to an age reigned over by magic. As the change intensifies, I will fade until I become to you what you have always been to me, the dweller down the back corridor.”

  “Indeed,” was his response. “And from there you will provide me with analytical services that will complement and augment my leaps from instinct. It will be a happy collaboration.”

  “You will make me your integrator,” I complained.

  “My valued colleague,” he countered.

  I said nothing, but how could he fail to sense my reluctance to give up control of my life? His response was the mental equivalent of a snort. “What makes you think you ever had control?” he said.

  I was moved to argue, but then I saw the futility of being a house divided. “Stop putting things in my head,” I said.

  “I don’t believe I can,” he answered. “It is, after all, as much my head as yours.”

  My curiosity was piqued. “What was it like to live as you have lived, inside of me all of these years?”

  There was a pause, then the answer came. “Not uncomfortable, once you learn the ropes. Don’t fret,” he added, “the full transition may not be completed for years, even decades. We might live out our mutual life just as we are now.”

  “Hence the need for an accommodation,” I agreed. “Then let us wait for a quiet time and haggle it out.”

  He agreed and we turned our attention to the question of what to do with Therobar, Gevallion and Gharst.

  The demon was displaying silver, green and purple flashes as he said, “It would be a shame to waste the academician’s ability to create form without essence. I know of places in my continuum where such creations would command considerable value.”

  I had never inquired as to what constituted economics in the demon’s frame of reference, but my intuitive half leapt to the correct interpretation. “But if you took them into your keeping and put them to work,” he said, “would that not make you a peddler of smut?”

  The silver swooshes intensified, but the reply was studiedly bland in tone. “I would find some way to live with the opprobrium,” the demon said.

  We released Gevallion and Gharst into demonic custody. They could not go as they were into that other universe, where any word they uttered would immediately become reified, and it was an unsettling experience to watch the demon briskly edit their forms so that they could never speak again. But I hardened myself by remembering Yzmirl and how they must have dealt with her, and in a few moments the messy business was concluded. The two
were hauled, struggling and moaning, through the sphere. For good measure, the demon took their vats and apparatus as well, including the device of rods and coils from the work bench.

  When he was ready to depart, my old colleague lingered in the sphere, showing more purple and green shot through with silver. “I may not return for a while,” he said, “perhaps a long while. I will have much to occupy.”

  “I will miss our contests,” I said, “but in truth I am sure I will also be somewhat busy with all of this…”—I rolled my eyes—“accommodating.”

  And so we said our goodbyes and he withdrew, taking the sphere after him.

  “That leaves Turgut Therobar,” my inner companion said, this time aloud.

  “Indeed.” I let the magnate hear my voice as well. He remained squeezed against the far wall, his feet well clear of the floor. His eyes bulged and one cheek had acquired a rapid twitch.

  “Warhanny would welcome his company.”

  “Somehow, the Contemplarium does not seem a sufficient sanc­tion for the harm he has done.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Therobar made noises behind his sealed lips. We ignored them.

  * * * *

  Later that day, back in my work room, I contacted the Colonel Investigator. “Turgut Therobar has confessed to all the charges and specifications,” I said.

  Warhanny’s face, suspended in the air over my work table, took on the slightly less lugubrious aspect that I had come to recognize as his version of intense pleasure. “I will send for him,” he said.

  “Not necessary,” I said. “Convulsed by remorse for his ill deeds, he ran out onto Dimpfen Moor just as a neropt hunting pack was passing by. Nothing I could do would restrain him. They left some scraps of him if you require proof of his end.”

  “I will have them collected,” said Warhanny.

  “I must also file his last will and testament,” I said. “He left his entire estate to the charities he had always championed, except for generous bequests to his tenants, and an especial legacy for Bebe Allers, his final victim.”

  We agreed that that was only fair and Warhanny said that he would attend to the legalities. We disconnected.

  I regarded my integrator. It was still in the form of a catlike ape or perhaps an apelike cat. “And what about you?” I said. “With Baxan­dell’s books and the increasing strength of magic, we can probably restore you to what you were.”

  It narrowed its eyes in thought. “I have come to value having preferences,” it said. “And if the world is going to change, I will become a familiar sooner or later. Better to get a head start on it. Besides, I enjoyed the fruit at Turgut Therobar’s.”

  “We have none like it here,” I said. “It is prohibitively expensive.”

  It blinked and looked inward for a moment. “I’ve just ordered an ample supply,” it said.

  “I did not authorize the order.”

  “No,” it said, “you didn’t.”

  While I was considering my response, I received an unsolicited insight from my other half. It was in the form of a crude cartoon image.

  “That is not amusing,” I said.

  From the chuckles filling my head, I understood that he saw the situation from his own perspective.

  “I am not accustomed to being a figure of fun,” I said.

  The furry thing on the table chose that moment to let me know that, along with autonomic functions, it had acquired a particularly grating laugh.

  “Now whose expectations require adjustment?” it said.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  THEODORA GOSS’s chapbook, The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories, is currently available from Small Beer Press, and her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, is forthcoming from Prime Books. In 2004, she won a Rhysling Award for speculative poetry. Her short stories and poems have been published in Alchemy, Realms of Fantasy, Polyphony, Mythic Delirium, Flytrap, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, as well as in Strange Horizons, and reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens.

  Visit her website at: www.theodoragoss.com.

  GENE WOLFE is one of the grand masters of science fiction and fantasy. His most famous work is the five-volume Book of the New Sun. His most recent book is Soldier of Sidon.

  ERIC SCHALLER is a plant biologist who teaches in the Biology Department at Dartmouth College. He lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire with his wife Paulette Werger, a jeweler and metalsmith, where they keep company with two hedgehogs and a turtle. He has had work published in Sci Fiction, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 16, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the essential medical companion The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. Other work includes illustrations for Jeff VanderMeer’s collection City of Saints and Madmen.

  “Three Urban Folk Tales” was originally inspired by Italo Cal­vino’s collection of Italian folktales, but then run through the grinder of the Arabian Nights.

  ELIZABETH BEAR was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins and nearly named after Peregrine Took. These early experiences, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, sealed her fate. She became a writer of speculative fiction. “Wax” is the first of a series of stories set in or around the city of New Amsterdam, which is a New York that never was, in a world where magic works and the colonial process was far more fragmented and unsuccessful than in our own. The character of Abigail Irene Garrett is loosely inspired by the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Randall Garrett, as her name might tend to indicate.

  Elizabeth’s work has been nominated for the BSFA award, and she recieved the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer.

  PAUL DI FILIPPO lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his ­partner of thirty years, Deborah Newton, a calico cat named Penny Century, and a chocolate cocker spaniel named Brownie, the latter cog­no­men proving that even a writerly imagination must defer immutable reality sometimes.

  He says: “The title came first for ‘The Emperor of Gondwanaland.’ The story only crystalized once I stole the CV of a friend—suitably altered, of course—who worked for a drug industry magazine just as my protagonist does. I’m happy to report that my pal, Gil Roth, has not yet gone missing like my hero.”

  GEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of the short story collections Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and, most recently, In Persuasion Nation. He is also the author of the novella-length illustrated fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and the New York Times bestselling children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, (illustrated by Lane Smith), which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

  SAMANTHA HENDERSON lives in Southern California by way of Oregon, Illinois, Johannesburg and Oxford. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Chizine, Lone Star Stories, and The Fortean Bureau.

  GREGORY FEELEY is best known for his novellas and short novels, most recently last year’s Arabian Wine. His short fiction has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award, and been frequently reprinted in year’s best anthologies. “Fancy Bread,” one of his infrequent short stories, will be included in his forthcoming collection, Dissolving in Ayre.

  NEIL GAIMAN remains one of the major voices in American fantasy fiction, though his fame began with the Sandman comics series. His most recent work is Anansi Boys.

  JOE MURPHY lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska, with his wonderful wife, Veleta, his two airdales and three cats. A life-long reader, he was inspired to make a serious effort to write back in 1992. He’s been at it since then, wile also working as a youth counselor with adolescents. He has sold fiction to: A Horror A Day: 365 Scary Stories, Crafty Cat Crimes, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, and many others.

  SONYA TAAFFE has a confirmed addiction to myth, folklore, and dead languages. He
r poem “Matlacihuatl’s Gift” shared first place for the 2003 Rhysling Award.

  In her own words: “On the Blindside” originally appeared in Flytrap 4, for which I am eternally grateful to Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw. Some of the story’s influences are Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, Corn­ish folklore, and a post-rejection request for non-flash fiction, but otherwise it has no definite aetiology. I’ve since realized that the story provided a way for me to play around with some of the tropes of fantasy that I’d grown up reading—child protagonists, fantastic journeys, assumptions about the otherworld and our relationship to it—but as much as I’d like to claim credit, almost none of it deliberately.”

  In addition to authoring numerous short stories and several novels (including International Horror Guild Award winner, The 37th Mandala), MARC LAIDLAW wrote the hit videogames Half-Life and Half-Life 2. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Redmond, Washington.

  PAT CADIGAN was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Attending the University of Massachusetts on a scholarship, she eventually transferred to the University of Kansas where she received her degree. Pat was an editor and writer for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City for ten years before embarking on her careers as a fiction writer in 1987. Since that time her Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short stories have appeared in such magazines as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as numerous anthologies. She is the author of four novels, Mindplayers, Synners, Fools and Tea from an Empty Cup; and three short story collections, Patterns, Home by the Sea, and Dirty Work. Pat Cadigan moved to England in August 1996 and now lives in North London with her husband Chris Fowler and their cat, Calgary.

  PETER S. BEAGLE was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Woodlawn Cemetery, the inspiration for his first novel, A Fine And Private Place. He originally proclaimed he would be a writer when ten-years-old: subsequent events have proven him either prescient or even more stubborn than hitherto suspected. Today, thanks to classic works such as The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper’s Song, he is acknowledged as America’s greatest living fantasy author; and his dazzling abilities with language, characters, and magical storytelling have earned him many millions of fans around the world.