He was hard at it and instead of being relieved by my first weeks of freedom from his constant sulking—to say nothing of the fierce, judgmental attention I got back in the days when I was working well and he was bored—I was proud, but I was also a little bit scared.
The worst part was that where we used to print out every night and talk about what he'd done, now at night when Spud was done for the day he would slam the laptop shut with this don't-even-think-about-it glare. And do you know, he had the thing password-protected? I ask you, who taught him that? Either he was jealous of Storygrinder and afraid I'd siphon off a copy and get the jump on him, or he didn't want me finding out what his novel looked like.
What it looked like, it looked like it was a thousand pages long and I had to start wondering whether it was War and Peace he was writing, only with rhesus monkeys instead of Russians, or this century's answer to Gone with the Wind. Monkeys, you never know, and he wasn't tipping his hand. Naturally I'd started out with this thinking I would keep close tabs on him, of course he'd want me to print out so we could workshop what he was writing the way we did in the good old days, but I'd do it better this time around. Like, more praise for what he was doing, but definitely constructive criticism over cookies and cocoa like we used to do, late at night.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth is the ungrateful protege. The one time I tried to hook up his laptop to the printer cable, Spud latched on to me like that thing out of Alien and plastered his smelly body to my face. I went lunging around blindly with his legs in a stranglehold so tight that I couldn't breathe and his fists clamped on my ears. I had to stagger into the kitchen and duck my head in the dirty dishwater to make him let go. After that I had to make certain promises, like you do when you have to get somebody off your case because they're all up in your face.
I retreated to my corner and he stayed in his forever typing, typing, typing, and when I tried to make things better with a tactful smile or an inoffensive remark—even when I came at him with bananas and candy he would get all defensive and slam the laptop shut with that look. He was what you'd have to call vindictive, so after a while I backed off and tried my best to get back to Deranged All Over Town which will rival Bright Lights, Big City if I can ever get it back on track which, given what happened with the monkey's novel, gets harder and harder to do.
The little bastard sent it off to an agent without even telling me it was done.
I'd just as soon spare myself the details of what happened next, but since the monkey can't open bank accounts or deposit checks not to mention endorsing them convincingly, I've benefited a bit. Prada and Gucci everything, as Spud could care less about outfits and frankly, he's careless about his looks. A specially fitted car seat for our trips to public appearances and book signings, where he has generously allowed me to stand in for him. In fact, as far as the world knows it is I, Billy Masterton (that's the renowned W.B. Masterton, Pulitzer Prize-winning author) who did the deed. The monkey has nothing to complain about. He has his very own room in our Brooklyn townhouse and I bought him three computers loaded with Storygrinder in his own special work area that I've fitted out so he can write his miserable, best-selling potboilers three at a time for all I care. Between us, the monkey and I put James Patterson so far behind in the popularity sweepstakes that the man can put his entire staff to work 24/7 and still never catch up on any bestseller list. And if I get the money and the credit?
What Spud doesn't know, he doesn't have to know.
The trouble is, this whole mad success up to and including bestsellerdom, has me working day and night on the little bastard's behalf, which means that since it all hit the fan and sprayed money on us, my cherished Deranged All Over Town is advancing at the rate of one line a day, and I'm sad to say the line I finally manage is one I'm so pressured to complete that I don't get time or space in my head to think it through, which means first thing next morning, I have to delete.
Plus, Spud has me answering every single piece of his fan mail, sending thank-yous for those endless and insultingly expensive gifts and maintaining his pages on MySpace, where he has ten thousand friends, and on Facebook, where he has a mere eight thousand, although my carpals are seriously tunneled just from scrolling through the stuff, never mind the hours I spend virtually sitting in front of W.B. Masterton's virtual bookstore on Second Life.
And the monkey? I think he just finished this century's answer to The Brothers Karamazov, but with more sex and a lot more guilt. Where does he get off, thinking he knows anything about guilt? He, who smothered my brilliant career like an infant in its crib.
But what's killing me, if you want to know what kills me, is the blog. I don't get to see what the monkey writes until he posts it. I sneak looks at his printed works while I'm waiting for his platoons of fans to flood the auditorium where I am speaking, or for booksellers to unbar the doors to let the next wave of frantic admirers in, but that isn't enough. His work is pretty good, which, frankly, is depressing, but not half as depressing as discovering from one of these gooshy-eyed teenagers or inspired surfer dudes that the son of a bitch has been dissing me on his blog.
If you want to read what Spud says about me, go ahead and read it, you'll find more than you want to know about our relationship plastered in the pages at:
www.wbmastertonauthor.net
I only looked the once. After everything I've done for Spud, the software and the encouragement and the plush cover for his rotten car seat in the Beemer and the patent leather evening slippers because after he saw mine he wouldn't stop oook-oooking until I had some especially made for him; in spite of me buying him his very own organ grinder the ungrateful little bastard had the nerve to write this very day:
Those of you think I know the way to happiness might as well know that success isn't everything. You may think I am happy because of the American Book Award and all, but as long as I am the prisoner of a shitty writer, happiness is forever and eternally out of reach and if any of you care about me ever, you have to come to my house and GET ME OUT.
That to his eight million hits a day, forwarded to all their friends and acquaintances all over the English-speaking world!
Okay, if that's how it is, that's how it's going to be.
Well, if that's what he thinks of me . . .
I'll show him.
The ape's got four more novels banked in those computers, and even if I can't crack his passwords, he's already raking in so much that it's no skin off my butt if he crashes and bursts into flames, so, cool. I'm fixed for life. I don't want to hurt the monkey, really, and I won't hit him with a bill of particulars. I won't even do the gratifying thing and smash his head in with an axe.
Given the pillow, which I've soaked in chloroform, the little fucker won't feel a thing.
Copyright © 2010 Kit Reed
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Poetry: HUMAN POTENTIAL
by Geoffrey A. Landis
* * * *
* * * *
I had a girlfriend who said she could see auras,
Iambent fields of energy suffusing every human
all the colors from ruby through ultraviolet
—
(We all radiate about a hundred watts,
mostly in the infrared.
I doubt she could see it.)
—
But if
she really could see even a fraction
even a tiniest portion
of the energy inherent in every human,
Einstein's energy
—if we truly could reach our utmost potential—
her inner eye would be
not merely dazzled
but blinded.
—Geoffrey A. Landis
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Short Story: THE PEACOCK CLOAK
by Chris Beckett
Chris Beckett still lives in Cambridge, England, with his wife, their youngest daughter Nancy, and various animals
. His short story collection The Turing Test, which includes three stories that first appeared in Asimov's, won the Edge Hill Short Fiction award in 2009 (the only national UK award for short story collections). It beat out collections by several successful literary fiction authors—one of them a Booker Prize winner. The Turing Test is still available, as are his two US-published novels, Marcher and The Holy Machine. He has signed a two book deal with Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, and will shortly be moving to part-time work so that he will have more time for writing. You can check out Chris's new website at www.chris-beckett.com. In his latest story for us, the creator of a simulated reality must wrest his world back from the man who wears . . .
Up to that moment nothing much had been moving in that mountain valley apart from grasshoppers and bees, and the stream playing peacefully by itself over its stony bed. But then Tawus was there in his famous cloak, its bright fabric still fizzing and sparking from the prodigious leap, its hundred eyes, black, green, and gold, restlessly assaying the scene. Tawus had arrived, and, as always, everything else was dimmed and diminished by his presence.
“This world was well made,” Tawus said to himself with his accustomed mixture of jealousy and pride.
He savored the scent of lavender and thyme, the creaking of grasshoppers, the gurgling of the stream.
“Every detail works,” he said, noticing a fat bumblebee, spattered with yellow pollen, launching herself into flight from a pink cistus flower. Passing the small hard object he carried in his left hand to his right, Tawus stooped to take the flower stem between his left forefinger and thumb. “Every molecule, every speck of dust.”
But then, painfully and vividly, and in a way that had not happened for some time, he was reminded of the early days, the beginning, when, on the far side of this universe, he and the Six awoke and found themselves in another garden wilderness ringed, like this one, by mountains.
Back then things had felt very different. Tawus had known what Fabbro knew, had felt what Fabbro felt. His purposes had been Fabbro's purposes, and all his memories were from Fabbro's world, a world within which the created universe of Esperine was like a child's plaything, a scene carved into an ivory ball (albeit carved so exquisitely that its trees could sway in the wind and lose their leaves in autumn, its creatures live and die). Of course he had known quite well he was a copy of Fabbro and not Fabbro himself, but he was an exact copy, down to the smallest particle, the smallest thought, identical in every way except that he had been rendered in the stuff of Esperine, so that he could inhabit Fabbro's creation on Fabbro's behalf. He was a creation as Esperine was, but he could remember creating himself, just as he could remember creating Esperine, inside the device that Fabbro called Constructive Thought. Back then, Tawus had thought of Fabbro not as “he” and “him” but as “I” and “me.”
And how beautiful this world had seemed then, how simple, how unsullied, how full of opportunities, how free of the ties and regrets and complications that had hemmed in the life of Fabbro in the world outside.
Tawus released the pink flower, let it spring back among its hundred bright fellows, and stood up straight, returning the small object from his right hand to his dominant left. Then, with his quick grey eyes, he glanced back down the path, and up at the rocky ridges on either side. The peacock eyes looked with him, sampling every part of the visible and invisible spectrum.
“No, Tawus, you are not observed,” whispered the cloak, using the silent code with which it spoke to him through his skin.
“Not observed, perhaps,” said Tawus, “but certainly expected.”
Now he turned southward, toward the head of the valley, and began to walk. His strides were quick and determined but his thoughts less so. The gentle scents and sounds of the mountain valley continued to stir up troublingly vivid memories from the other end of time. He recalled watching the Six wake up, his three brothers and three sisters. They were also made in the likeness of Fabbro but they were, so to speak, reflections of him in mirrors with curved surfaces or different colored glass, so that they were different from the original and from each other. Tawus remembered their eyes opening—his brother Balthazar first and then his sister Cassandra—and he remembered their spreading smiles as they looked around and simultaneously saw and remembered where they were, in this exquisite, benign, and yet to be explored world, released for ever from the cares and complications of Fabbro's life and from the baleful history of the vast and vacant universe in which Fabbro was born.
They had been strangely shy of each other at first, even though they shared the same memories, the same history, and the same sole parent. The three sisters in particular, in spite of Fabbro's androgynous and protean nature, felt exposed and uneasy in their unfamiliar bodies. But even the men were uncomfortable in their new skins. All seven were trying to decide who they were. It had been a kind of adolescence. All had felt awkward, all had been absurdly optimistic about what they could achieve. They had made a pact with each other, for instance, that they would always work together and take decisions as a group. ("That didn't last,” Tawus now wryly observed, and then he remembered, with a momentary excruciating pang, the fate of Cassandra, his proud and stubborn sister.)
Having made their pact, all Seven had stridden out, laughing and talking all at once, under a warm sun not unlike this one, and on a path not unlike the one he was walking now, dressed so splendidly in his Peacock Cloak. He had no such cloak back then. They had been naked gods. They had begun to wrap themselves up only as they moved apart from one another: Cassandra in her Mirror Mantle, Jabreel in his Armor of Light, Balthazar in his Coat of Dreams . . . But the Peacock Cloak had been finest of all.
“I hear music,” the cloak now whispered to him.
Tawus stopped and listened. He could hear only the stream, the grasshoppers, and the bees. He shrugged.
“Hospitable of him, to lay on music to greet us.”
“Just a peasant flute, a flute and goat bells.”
“Probably shepherds up in the hills somewhere,” said Tawus, resuming his stride.
He remembered how the seven of them came to their first human village, a village whose hundred simple people imagined that they had always lived there, tending their cattle and their sheep, and had no inkling that only a few hours before, they and their memories had been brought into being all at once by their creator Fabbro within the circuits of Constructive Thought, along with a thousand similar groups scattered over the planets of Esperine: the final touch, the final detail, in the world builder's ivory ball.
“The surprise on their faces!” Tawus murmured to himself, and smiled. “To see these seven tall naked figures striding down through their pastures.”
“You are tense,” observed his cloak. “You are distracting yourself with thoughts of things elsewhere and long ago.”
“So I am,” agreed Tawus, in the same silent code. “I am not keen to think about my destination.”
He looked down at the object he carried in his hand, smooth and white and intricate, like a polished shell. It was a gun of sorts, a weapon of his own devising. It did not fire bullets but was utterly deadly, for, within a confined area, it was capable of unraveling the laws that defined Esperine itself and, in that way, reducing form to pure chaos.
“Give me a pocket to put this in,” Tawus said.
At once the cloak opened itself up to receive the gun, and then sealed itself again when Tawus had withdrawn his hand.
“The cloak can aim and shoot for me, in any case,” Tawus said to himself.
And the cloak's eyes winked, green and gold and black.
* * * *
The valley turned a corner. There was an outcrop of harder rock. As he came round it, Tawus heard the music that his cloak, with its finely tuned senses, had detected some way back: a fluted melody, inexpertly played, and an arrhythmic jangling of crudely made bells. Up ahead of him three young children were minding a flock of sheep and goats, sheltering by a little patch of trees at a spot where
a tributary brook cascaded into the main stream. A girl of nine or ten was playing panpipes. In front of her on a large stone, as if in the two-seat auditorium of a miniature theater, two smaller children sat side by side: a boy of five or so and a little girl of three, cradling a lamb that lay across both their laps. The jangling bells hung from the necks of the grazing beasts. Seeing Tawus, the girl laid down her pipes and the two smaller children hastily set their lamb on the ground, stood up, and moved quickly to stand on each side of their sister with their hands in hers. All three stared at Tawus with wide unsmiling eyes. And then, as he drew near, they ran forward and kissed his hand, first the older girl, then the boy, and finally the little three-year-old whose baby lips left a cool patch of moistness on his skin.
“Your face is familiar to them,” the cloak silently observed. “They think they know you from before.”
“As we might predict,” said Tawus. “But you they have never seen.”
The children were astounded by a fabric on which the patterns were in constant motion, and by the animated peacock eyes. The smallest child reached out a grubby finger to touch the magical cloth.
“No, Thomas!” her sister scolded, slapping the child's hand away. “Leave the gentleman's coat alone.”
“No harm,” Tawus said gruffly, patting the tiny girl on the head.
And the cloak shook off the fragments of snot and dust that the child's fingers had left behind.
Ten minutes later Tawus turned and looked back at them. They were little more than dots in the mountain landscape but he could see that they were still watching him, still standing and holding hands. Around them, unheeded, the sheep grazed with the goats.
Suddenly, Tawus was vividly reminded of three other children he had once seen, about the same ages as these. He had hardly given them a thought at the time, but now he vividly remembered them: the younger two huddled against their sister, all three staring with white faces as Tawus and his army rolled through their burning village, their home in ruins behind them. It had been in a flat watery country called Meadow Lee. From his vantage point in the turret of a tank, Tawus could see its verdant water meadows stretching away for miles. Across the whole expanse of it were burning buildings and columns of dirty smoke that were gradually staining the wide blue sky a glowering oily yellow.
Asimov's SF, June 2010 Page 8
