The girl was breathing hard, shuddering, as if lowering herself into a hot bath. Blood dripped onto her skirt. Doss sat next to her. The paisley chair creaked beneath his slender trachodonic frame.
“This isn’t your fault, Sally.” Doss called across the Foyer. “I was going to kill and eat these tubegirls, no matter what.”
I sat on the floor with my back to the wall, whiz-spinning his Nagant’s seven-round cylinder like a Buddhist prayer wheel, chanting “Sun, Sun, Sun,” because he was Sun and the world was Sun; and this is how a Goat goes down: crying now, laughing later, and up to God with a hairful of brain.
“Paula, hey, Paula, you still with me? Hang in there.” Doss tapped her shoulder with a clawed finger. “Looks like I’m about to lose my Goat. Her alliterations got on my nerves, but I’ll miss her. She was fun.”
I could really feel it now, the slow psychic churn of the House of Fiction’s cold-press story engine, ten stories down, sealed in an armored basement; a bundle of fifty-ton magnetic cylinders, bound together like the fasces of a God, rolling and rolling as they have since the Krieg; generating new mystery stories, new songs, new inspirations that percolate up, up through the mineral-slab floors, ready to be telepathically received and given form by all six tubesisters. Paula and the Case of Crystal Cabinet for the Old World kids. Paula and the Pangloss Lover for Mom. And Paula in Svetlana’s Banya for Dad. Pre-Krieg Sugar Theater at its finest.
“My Sally and I met on the Plateau. I had just finished up a feud with my hatch-brother Nolat-18; and, man, Paula, you should’ve seen it: Nolat and I tore up Colorado with psychic combat and ass-grassing genocide tech; you know, the good shit, from the Old days, like Westinghouse needles, Psychoid ring cookers, Golem kennels, and Szilard satchels. Lots and lots of collateral. Whole survivor communities vaped; whole villages mindjacked, forced to pick a side. Fucking crazy. I died at least once. Follow me so far, Paula?”
But the last Paula did not answer. Her eyes were closed. Along the rim of her hat, her psyche manifested as a music-box carousel of phantom blue ponies--a dying tubegirl’s calliope dream.
I spun the revolver’s cylinder one final time, riding the roulette, betting on one in seven. I fucked up. Fucked up bad. Got played. Again. Tired of being this way, he said. The warlordism, the sibling rivalry--it just never stops, he said. You’re special, Sally, different. Help me.
When he told me that, I had 40cc’s of synthetic curare poised over a vein, ready to take the dark exit. I was done, burned out. The satchel-killing of Chattanooga was the last straw. But he was smooth, talking about wanting to do something positive, constructive, archeological, even; and, wow, he could become a role model for his hatch-brothers, proving that even Salamanders can evolve. Think of the lives that could be saved!
“If you help me find a living House of Fiction, I’ll swear off violence. Cold turkey. Promise. What do you say? It’ll be fun. We’ll take in a show.”
Gran wanted me to live. That’s what I told myself. I put down the needle and played amateur Quatermain for months, trading in maps, clues, dream diaries, and artifacts with survivor tribes all over North America. We dug and drilled and cracked open lost Houses of Fiction, and you know what we found? Nothing. Not a Yeoric skull to say alas, not a Gatsby suit to wipe an ass. Thespian budding tubes, story engines, the sets, the props--gone, looted, everything, down to the last copper wire. Except for Vancouver BC. This House was alive. Impossible. Pristine.
And guess what? My Salamander kept his promise. Until today, he was a lamb.
But they knew. The moment we popped the airlock, these cloistered tubegirls recognized the enemy, the devourer, his intentions, and they fought him to the death with a few working stage props, and that’s it, nothing sharper.
Paula Romer--legendary heroine of six novels, twelve moving pictures, and eighty-four wireless broadcasts. The Old World loved her enough, the fictional girl detective--solver of Sugar mysteries, finder of lost doubloons--to bud her in six Thespian tubes, to make each fictional version real, and give these clones a House, a place where people could escape and pretend that the increasing stockpiles of genocide tech were just shadows, illusions, and that everything was going to be fine.
“You were good, Sally.” Doss said. “You kept me wintry during the Boulder peace talks. Even Nolat was impressed. His Sally was never that ready with joke, a song, or a doob soaked in hash oil. Damn, you even hid my satchels when I felt like nuking Greeley. Again.”
The molecules of the Foyer’s northern wall blurred and agitated like a shook hourglass before becoming transparent, revealing the Vancouver Krater, a parabolic melt scar, two miles across, half a mile deep, Aricebo smooth and black glassy. The House of Fiction sat perched on the Krater’s southern lip.
“But, come on: you’re washed up. Out to pasture. I mean, look at that. Not at me, there, look--.” The lake at the bottom of the Krater was a mirror. No wind ripples, no geese, no otter. I felt Doss-20’s mind skip like a flat rock over the surface, as if the water was a socket-locked psyche, because it was the tomb of a half-million Vancouver ghosts.
“Old World Krieg.” The Salamander’s tail formed a question mark and gestured toward the abyss. “Disgusting, isn’t it? But not to a tubegirl: she can take it.”
Holographic archive footage danced in the air, showing a two-warhead salvo. A Prime Matter Conversion Bomb had cored Vancouver first, scooping out the center, but the second strike, a 10-K Lemming Field, was the real atrocity that generated a human river, a city of puppet-strung survivors. Their death instincts triggered, they stampeded toward the molten Krater; and, there, right there, people ran, rode, and pushed wheelchairs and hospital gurneys to the edge, where the river became a human waterfall as Vancouver poured in without hesitation, smiling, laughing--falling.
The Nagant’s muzzle clacked against my teeth. I cocked the hammer all the way back. This is it. Pull the trigger. Sever the Sun.
The last Paula’s eyes were still closed; her carousel horses were slowing, like a music box winding down. She saw it happen, didn’t she? These tubesisters saw Vancouver die, and the next day, they put on a Paula Romer show, even for an empty House and a murdered city. The story engine spun out sentimental cotton candy, decade after decade. The tubegirls listened and obeyed.
Got it all figured out, don’t you, Doss? Gonna chow these six and rebud a new batch with red hair and new scripts--a new and improved “Sally Romer;” and, oh, how your hatch-brothers will come grovelling for their very own tube-grown Goat. Or they might bust in, shooting. Either’s fine with you, isn’t it? Bastard.
The Nagant was only a .32, but its muzzle seemed as wide as the Sun. What is the Sol Black? It has no mass, yet it pulls; it has no light, yet it calls. They say it blossomed over New England during the first salvos of the worldwide Krieg. The Old sun still rises and sets. The Black Sun remains unmoved.
“Sally, before you go, you got any advice for your replacement? Something she should know?” Doss smiled, unsheathing a wide-bellied Schrade skinner. Paula’s soul ponies whinnied in terror. Then they faded. She was gone.
My eyes narrowed to slits. Fingernails dug into my palms, because this is a Sun day: a time for alliteration, for cruel sagas of the Sol Niger, for Krieg, for terror, for fetus jars, for crucified carpenters, for Nausicaa to see a man naked and salty, washed up on the motherfucking beach!
I pulled the trigger and shot my Salamander between the eyes. The echo rolled through the Foyer.
“Ow,” He said, holding his hands to his head, as if he had just bumped into a door. “I deserved that.”
His flesh was wax-melting, healing, but I was already moving. Doss-20’s drum-fed Thompson was lying on the floor. I scooped it up and began working him over, head to toe, ratatat, like a typewriter, until the piece stovepiped. I was deafened; he was bloody, shredded, going down on one knee, as if proposing marriage. Rick-rack. I cleared the breach--tapping and racking--but he formed a psychoplasmic wall, and the .45 rounds plopped into the S
ulphuric jelly, turning it white with hydrostatic shock.
An invisible voice told me to dodge left, now, and I did. Doss retaliated. A scorpion tail of psychoplasm arced over the wall and stabbed down, singing my hair, scorching the floor. I was not alone. The Foyer was filled with ghosts--men, women, gods, monsters, things--who had seen the Black Sun and they were telling me, guiding me, screaming in my face, call it down, motherfucker; call it down, down, down. Call down the Sun, and so I did. Cut his carotid, right there, like that. Fight. Arm-bar him, break the wrist; climb the body for the choke. Fight. Call it down. Watch the tail. Duck. Fade. Easy, easy. Call it down.
A ghost woman with a bronze spear and helmet touched my cheek; and, for a moment, I thought I was a white eagle, sent by Zeus, to punish and devour the liver of a naked titan. I tore into Doss-20’s belly with my teeth.
“Jeez, Sally, that fucking hurts. Got any morphine on you? Vicodin? No?”
Like a stage magician revealing a bouquet of flowers, Doss pulled a potato masher, a Stielhandgranate, from his sleeve. He yanked the ignition cord with his teeth and threw the stick grenade against the wall. It rolled back toward us. Time seemed to slow.
He then shot me twice with a .22 Colt glass-barrel Pinger. The double-tap discharge was no louder than a rock thrown against a pillow; but I didn’t care because I was calling it down, the Sun--the Black Sun--and I saw it, the truth: the Sun was the second Face of God, the One that hates us, the One that loves death.
“I’m proud of you, Sally. Appeasing me got you nowhere.”
My white dress was red, slopping, sticky. The marble floor was slippery with blood, his and mine. I swept him off his clawed feet, pulling him toward me, log-rolling him as we fell, so that I was pinned underneath. I curled up. He smelled of Sulphur. I tasted meat. The grenade exploded, starbursting us with a thousand fangs of wood, glass, and metal; and Doss was laughing, screaming in German: Mehr Licht, meine Goethe! Mehr Licht!
More light, my Goethe. More light.
The Salish tribe to the south calls the Vancouver Krater the Tear of God. Around their campfires, as they mend their nets, old scouts speak in hushed tones of the Krater, the House, and Vancouver--the Suicide City. The old men warn the young against six women with the same face and the seventh, who is shaved bald. If you see them, the elders say, be careful. They have gone beyond the Sol Black.
Actually, we’re quite nice. Whenever the Roma sisters and I fish by the river, we wave at any passing canoes, but the Salish boys always look away, as if blushing, and paddle fast. Maybe the Dalmatian head in the jar freaks them out. I dunno.
Sometimes, when I doze in a hammock on the House roof, I dream of a library with galaxy-high stacks; and I see them, too, the librarians: 100 billion ghosts--the living, the unborn, and the dead--scurrying about the lower shelves, sorting and categorizing scrolls, cylinder books, and wire spools; but always, always, shielding their astral eyes from the Black Sun that peeps from in-between each missing text. Perhaps someday, as the librarians climb higher, adding more, discovering, they’ll find a loving pattern, and all of this will make sense.
Sometimes I see Doss-20’s hatch-brothers in the library.
Sometimes I see him, squatting there like Fuseli’s nightmare imp. This is where his soul waits--in the Akashic Record, the repository of all knowledge--probing for a budding tube with weak firewalls, so that what was once 20 can become 21.
But not in my House. Never. I’m no Ibsen: I have no healing fictions, no Wild Duck.
The last time I saw Doss, he waved at me from a high shelf.
My name is Magdalene. I didn’t wave back.
THE END
CHILDREN OF 2016 by Sara Green
Sandra Watkins stared across the table. The man she looked at is fifteen years older than she was. His face was worn, but bright considering the circumstances. His smile was eager and yet cautious. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s not every day a son sees his mother in her youth—her supposed prime—the jean size she’ll always wish she could get back to.
“They told us, you all would come to visit,” she said, shaking as she pushed her coffee mug back and forth on the table. It was a habit of hers, and her supposed son followed the cups every move.
“Where’s dad?” he asked.
Sandra smiled and looked down at the remnants of steam rising from the mug. She half-choked, half-chuckled. “Haven’t met him yet, I guess.”
“You must,” he said, looking frightened. Then he corrected himself. “No you will. This had to have already happened. That’s how time travel works. I can’t change anything.”
Oh, right. Sandra Watkins wasn’t allowed to doubt it. The whole world had acknowledged this phenomenon. Still, she couldn’t grasp it—time travel.
“Is that what all you have done?”
It was her son’s turn to look away. Sandra had known his name the moment he heard they had arrived. She almost knew it was going to be one her offspring in the list released. But she knew which name to look for. His name was George, after her father.
“I don’t know what has happened. We’re all just as shocked as you are. Somehow we all…” George shrugged and forced a smile that was equal parts of an excuse and a plea for answers.
Sandra had watched the news that night, seen the hurricane downgraded to a tropical storm and then watched as dark figures moved in the background. The reporters babbled on about the storm, growing frustrated as their cameramen all wandered off, and zoomed in behind them. Sandra watched as they played the video of what were at the time thought to be thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants storming the beach. They came from the ocean, so it made sense to news pundits.
But they all had the same story. They all claimed they had been born in 2016, stating in a mere four months from now. George was born in July, Almost 11 months to the day. It took George a month to find Sandra, but already pregnancies were lining up with many of the visitors’ claims, and DNA testing matched the father and the mother and was even identical to the baby growing inside.
The world had to accept it. It was inevitable. Something had happened. That’s the best anyone could tell anyone. God’s will was the most popular, while scientist wrapped their heads around the idea of interloping timelines and wormholes and tachyons.
The government didn’t have a chance to keep it under wraps. And most people still didn’t believe/had more concerning matters like soap operas, celebrity lifestyles and drama on social media to attend to. Most decent folk had left it out of pleasant conversation—unless of course you were one of the ones who was to be a parent. Then it was the only thing on your mind.
Sandra’s Internet search history would reveal her obsession. She read Einstein’s theory of relativity and proposed that maybe time in the future suffered a sudden shock and it who was she kidding. She couldn’t explain it either. Her father had a saying for moments like these, he would say, ‘Fuck it.’ That is if he were still alive. That’s what Sandra wished she could say/think/do.
Sandra was not pregnant yet. She knew it wasn’t possible but had tested herself anyways when she heard George would be coming. More than anything she wanted to know who George’s father was. She had trouble as of late finding the perfect match. Her friends had lined her up on dating sites and horrid blind dates but they never went anywhere. Her last date was with a man who actually couldn’t speak English. Though it took Sandra several hours on their date to realize he only had one response to something he didn’t understand, “That sounds reasonable.”
The man had seemed so agreeable and his accent was sexy but it turned out all he was doing was smiling and nodding, like most the men she dated.
She still slept with him. But thankfully, she still had time before George’s seed would be planted. So she thought, that sounds reasonable, and moved forward to past flames she might rekindle with, she even fantasized about the men she’s read about in fantasy literature. She couldn’t help but hope for the most romantic whirlwind and whimsical romance.
But here was George, sitting across from her, eyes full of love for his mother. Proof that sometime real soon Sandra was due to get laid.
Then he told her the father’s name.
“Where’s my father… Wade?” He asked. His eyes had already searched her fingers for a wedding band. She had sensed that and had taken to shielding them with her coffee cup.
Sandra wasn’t quite sure how to respond and as was always the case when she knew she should take more time to consider a response, she blurted out the truth.
“I don’t know any Wade currently.” The shame of telling her grown up but not yet born son that he was likely the catalyst for a shot gun wedding emptied her and she took a large gulp of the lukewarm coffee.
“Oh.”
It was a soft response, one that linked to something physical rather than any thought.
Sandra wanted the conversation to change. She’d never met a Wade in her entire life. She could probably go out on town for a month straight hooking up with every single guy and never meeting a ‘Wade’.
“Are you allowed to tell me about you? What do you do in the future? Are you married? Any children?” Sandra sputtered like a push mower needing one more pull to get started.
“When we arrived they took us in, we were schooled on ethics and what we were allowed to say. There were too many of us and too many witnesses to leave us cooped up on the government dime. I don’t know what they’ll do with us once they figure out what they need to. But I will tell you this, Mom, you and dad have always made me very happy.”
Sandra found a lump in her throat. It weighed down the smile that should’ve soared.
“But you told them, didn’t you? They all know what happens in the future now don’t they? They’re probably going to buy shares in the stock market and bet on sports teams and…”
George nodded. “A few slips might’ve been made, but I think we all quickly understood that more than anything, we wanted the opportunity to meet out parents. We only told them enough to grant us our leave.”
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