400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “I am Science,” said the book.

  The room seemed to recede. The anxious voices of his familiar volumes were muffled by the thunder of blood in his ears.

  “Science,” he repeated. “Yes, I’ve heard of you now and then But my magical friends have kept you well hid, haven't they?"

  “For your own good!” cried a flapping ephemeris.

  “I’ve had enough of your judgments,” he told his library. “I’ll come to my own opinions from now on.”

  “Excellent," said the slender book. “Let me show you my world.”

  His eyes darkened. “Not another dimension, I hope, not another fantastic door into dreams. I’ve had enough of worlds within worlds, I’m warning you.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It is this world, but transmuted, purged of magic. Imagine the sameness of day after day. Imagine that the living will die and stay dead.”

  “Stay dead? Impossible.”

  “Let me show you, Rotcod. Let us take a walk.”

  “No, Rotcod, no!” cried his old books, but he scarcely heard them now. He twisted the mummified fist of a doorknob and let himself out, flinching instinctively from the golden sunlight that always awaited him, unless the air was full of moonlight or starshine. But today, strangely, the light seemed thin and insubstantial; it hardly warmed his black-clad arms.

  “Too late, too late,” wailed the volumes in his house. The door just managed to slam itself shut.

  A feverish breeze blew through the iron hedge. Rotcod tucked the black book under his arm, where he could listen to its dry ruminations as he walked. The grass, he noticed, no longer looked as relentlessly green as was common, and here and there he noted scraps and twisted bits of metal among the wildflowers.

  “You sense my power already,” said the book approvingly. “I can see that you will be an excellent student.”

  “What is this I see around me? These stray fragments of . . . I know not the word.”

  “Trash."

  Rotcod shivered at the wrongness of the sound, so lacking in the mellifluous quality he had come to associate with everything in his world.

  Normally his ears would have picked up the laughter of fairies at a great distance; they were always troubling his concentration. But today he could hardly hear them. Accordingly, they found him first, surprising him before he had reached their favorite glade. With a cascade of laughter, they sprang into being from trees and boulders, forming a ring around him. He had the impression that they were transparent, that the forest itself was a crude painting done on glass with watery pigments. Only the book seemed real.

  “Hello, Rotcod!” the nearest fairy girl said She was tiny and blonde, with flowers decked in her hair, and she seemed intent on hugging him around the knees. “You’ve come to play with us, haven’t you?”

  The book chuckled. "Go ahead.”

  Rotcod stooped and brushed his fingers through the child’s hair, scattering petals that fell like drops of lead and singed the grass. She screamed and backed away from him, her voice hardly reaching his ears. He wasn’t sure if she was delighted or in agony; with fairies, it was hard to tell. She went kicking away from him, gray in the face, stumbling over roots and rocks, and finally she sprawled backward, there to lie unmoving while her face grew blacker and blacker. Suddenly the forest looked real again, more solid than ever. The voices of the other fairies sounded sharp as they gathered around their companion.

  “What are you doing, Kalessa? You’re not breathing.”

  “I don’t believe it," said Rotcod. “She is dead."

  They looked at him in astonishment.

  “Dead,” said one.

  It was a word they knew from myths; none of them seemed to remember quite what it meant. To Rotcod it had suddenly ceased being an abstraction. He noticed that around the little blonde corpse were stray bits of string, wads of dirty paper, more trash. He turned on his heel and strode off toward home, holding the book open with both hands, conversing loudly as he went.

  “I thought it was a fable,” he exclaimed. “But now I have seen it with my own eyes. Death—imagine! Then what of the other things I’ve thought incredible?”

  “They can all be yours.”

  “What of disease? Is there truly such a thing?”

  “There can be, yes.”

  A bird toppled from its perch in a branch overhead. Its eyes were drops of blood. He paused to watch as worms humped from the ground and began to devour it. But they, too, broke out in blood and began to fester where they crawled.

  “Incredible,” he said.

  “And it will spread.”

  He hurried on, spying his cottage. The iron hedge around the pond had begun to rust; the thorns looked poisonous to man and fairy alike. His house had also changed. The roof sat squarely atop the walls; the place no longer sagged or glowered, but simply inhabited space like any little box. He was surprised to see an identical dwelling in the middle of the Merry Meadow, and another beyond that. A great deal of building was underway; huge vehicles lumbered about, scraping the uneven earth into uniformity. They moved with none of the grace of the fairies’ floating boats, and they spouted dense black smoke. Two monsters collided and the drivers sprang out, cursing so vehemently that Rotcod expected the ground to open beneath them. Instead, they drew expandable tubes, aimed them at one another, and each dropped dead to the grass. He studied their deaths for some time, wondering how quickly this new twist would lose its novelty.

  In a thoughtful mood, Rotcod entered his house and found it much changed in his absence. There were no dark corners, no books to berate him or offer opinions for his consideration. He set the black pamphlet on a polished counter and moved through the rooms, shading his eyes from the glaring light that emanated from the ceilings. He felt lost, uncertain of which furniture was meant for sitting or sleeping on.

  He returned at last to the black book. “What is all this?” he asked.

  The book did not reply. He thought that it might be formulating an explanation, but gradually he realized that it was simply inert. Its characters did not glow or try to catch his eyes. When it remained mute, he attempted to read it. Every page was covered with instructions printed in numerical order, but meaningless despite the arrangement.

  “What is a capacitor?” he asked "Where is Slot A?”

  The volume defied both his eye and his intellect until he closed it and set it down carefully. He was afraid to hurl it against the wall as he had so many other books. This one, in its quiet way, commanded his respect.

  Rotcod cast an eye heavenward and saw that gray vapor cloaked the sky beyond the tinted windows. Stepping outside, he found that it burned his lungs as well. The forest had been neatly cleared while he was indoors, and among the stumps the fairykids sat with forlorn expressions. When they saw him, they visibly brightened, recognizing their companion from the old world. They started toward him, and Rotcod could not keep himself from hurrying to meet them halfway. He had never thought he would welcome their company, but the sound of their laughter warmed him in an unfamiliar way. He hurried along the thorny barrier he had erected last night with a few choice syllables, thankful that the fairies had not changed. It was their way to face difficulties with grace and equanimity.

  Unfortunately, he stumbled in a pothole and rolled to the brown grass a moment before they reached him. He was thus unprepared when, still smiling, they drew their steel knives and fell upon him.

  * * *

  “Faust Forward” copyright 1987 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1987.

  NUTRIMANCER

  Imagine a TV dinner, baked to a crisp. Silver foil peeled back by the laser heat of a toaster oven. Charred clots of chicken stew, succotash, nameless dessert, further blurred by a microforest of recombinant mold like a diseased painter’s nightmare of verdigris.

  Fungoid cityscape.

  Metaphor stretched to the breaking point.
>
  Lunch.

  ONE: NEON SUSHI

  Someone had found a new use for an old fryboy. At the Lazy-Ate Gar & Krill, 6Pack was swabbing shrimp-racks with an 80-baud prosthetic dishrag when a Mongol stammer cut through the sleazy pinions of his hangover, sharp as a bitter mnemonic twist of Viennese coffee rinds tossed from a cathedral window into a turgid canal where rainbow trout drowned in petroleum jelly.

  "6Pack?" said the Mongol. “Want a new job?"

  He glanced up from the remnants of crustaceans curled like roseate spiral galaxies and saw:

  —Limpid pools of Asian eyeliner aswirl in a violaceous haze of pain and pastry crumbs.

  —Bank check skin with "Cash" spelled out on the lines of a furrowed brow.

  —Some pretty bodacious special effects.

  To his typographic implants it looked like this:

  _ _ _ _ _

  < >

  ++++++++++

  {—} {—}

  . .

  [====]

  ww

  oooooooooooooooooo

  wwwwwwwwwwwwwww

  <><> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

  > <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <

  ======================

  vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

  ***********************

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  6Pack scrabbled for a purchase on reality but found only the dishrag.

  "Man, that sweater hurts my eyes!"

  The Mongol stepped between 6Pack and the sushi counter "It’s pixel-implanted Angola wool, under hermeneutic control. Come with me or I will induce a convincing epileptic seizure by altering stripe frequency and then take you away in the guise of your doctor. "

  6Pack considered his options. A nearby heap of batter-fried squid tentacles quivered like golden-brown weaponry hauled from the ancient trenches of the sea. The Mongol tipped back the brass spittoon that served him as a hat, exposing an Oster ionized water-bazooka stitched among his Sukiyaki cornrows.

  "What do you want with me?"

  "Surely you can guess, fryboy. "

  "No one calls me that without hearing my story. You’ve gotta hear what happened, what th-they d-d-did to me!"

  "Now, now," said the Mongol. "Don’t cry. I’m listening."

  * * *

  It had all happened too fast for words.

  Whiz !

  Bang !

  Whirr—ee—rr—ee—rr—ee !

  Snip!

  Clunkata-clunkata-clunkata. . ..

  Prrrrang!

  "And when it was over, I woke up. The East Anglians had rewired my tastebuds." He waved at the racks full of squirming periwinkles, octopus eyes, mackerel intestines. "Now all this tastes horrible to me. I eat the finest chocolates from Brussels—" he cannot avoid the memory of the heavy matron who served him sourly from behind the polished glass counters, shoving a gift-wrapped box of buttercreams into his hands "—and it tastes like dirt."

  "If you eat dirt, does it taste like buttercreams?" asked the Mongol. "But no matter. I know your story. What if I told you that my employers can restore your tongue to its previous sensitivity?"

  6Pack sneered at him. “No one’s got the technology to unsplice my tongue, short of the EASA, who did the damage in the first place."

  The Mongol produced a 3D business card from some fold of his sweater and handed it to 6Pack:

  "I am a deaf-mute," it read.

  "Wrong card," the Mongol said, snatching it back and handing him another which spelled out in tiny blinking lights: EAST ANGLIAN SMORGASBORD AUTHORITY.

  "What’s the matter, fryboy? Swallow something you don’t like?"

  Hands trembling, seeing the future unfolding before him like an origami hors d’ouevre, 6Pack knelt to kiss the Mongol’s fingers. "I’ll do anything to have my palate restored," he pleaded. "Tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I’ll never confuse mayonnaise with Miracle Whip again."

  "You’re hired," said the Mongol and drew his hands away.

  The knuckles left a taste of Kentucky bluegrass on 6Pack’s lips.

  TWO: WIRED TO SHOP

  He was at the Grocery Boutique when his shopping cart’s guidance system failed. Narrowly averting disaster, he switched to manual and swerved past an oncoming cart. Heart pounding, he looked up apologetically at the other driver. That was when he saw her.

  A peach recomb-polyester scarf enshrouded permed and frosted curls. From platform heels of rich Corinthian vinyl, tiny blood-colored toenails oozed forth like delicate ornaments from a cake decorator. Rhinestone-rimmed videospex hid her eyes; her face was as sterile and empty as the corridors of General Hospital that held her attention.

  "Pardon me," 6Pack murmured.

  "Chet, you moron, she just went in the MRI room with Emilio!"

  He couldn’t help gazing into her cart as he passed.

  Sara Lee Weightless Cake

  Betty Crocker Astro-Cookies

  He remembered sitting in a Parisian cafe, the tip of his croissant immersed in a demitasse as a pathetic screech made him look up abruptly into a—

  Bird’s Eye Frozen Creamed Corn

  Instinctively, he shied from the selection, but somehow she sensed him and drifted nearer, like a platinum-blonde manta ray in the aquarium aisle. Her lips parted, gushing warm air that smelled like a stagnant wind coursing from all the demolished bakeries that had ever harbored starving mice. She smiled with green lips. A particle of biftek swayed like an electric eel, trapped between her teeth.

  "I’m Polly Pantry," she said. "Join me for lunch?"

  She caught his arm, pressed her mouth to his ear, and tickled the tiny waxen hairs with her tongue as she whispered, “Courtesy of EASA, 6Pack. You can’t refuse.”

  THREE: ZERO GEE WHIZ

  Menu.

  Foodstuffs.

  Out of the ovens of Earth they come tumbling, but in the radar ranges of the orbital kitchens there is no force that can cause a souffle to fall. Jaunts into shallow space for a nulldinner are common as dirt among the filthy rich. Even in his prime, 6Pack had not dined in space. Tonight he would remedy that.

  The Pixie Fat line, EASA’s Artificial Conscience Module, sang in 6Pack’s earreceiver as the shuttle pulled into the neat chrome pancreas called Waiter’s Heaven: "Shoofly pie and apple pan dowdy make your eyes light up and your tongue say howdy!"

  “I don’t understand why the EASA’s being so nice to me," 6Pack paravocalized. "First they give me back my sense of taste and now they’re treating me to dinner."

  "Sh," said the Fatline. "Incoming message from Polly."

  "Hi, 6Pack! Howrya doin’? You eat that sandwich I sent up with you?"

  "Sure did, Polly," he lied. "Tasty."

  Deviled ham on Wonder Bread. He hoped that the shuttle stewardess wouldn’t guess who’d clogged the flight toilet.

  "Okay, hon, when you get off that ship you’re to go straight to Chez Cosmique. The reservations are in your name, for a party of six. Tell them that you’re waiting for friends, then go ahead and order. Make them bring it right away."

  "When you are in trouble and you don’t know right from wrong, give a little—"

  "Shut up, Fatline, I’m talking! Now, 6Pack, I want you—"

  6Pack fiddled with the dial in his nostril and tuned out both of them. A six-course meal for six, he thought. Good thing he hadn’t eaten that sandwich.

  * * *

  "There’s salt in this creampuff, " he complained, after the last course had come and gone and dessert floated before him. The EASA had equipped him with a false gullet that compressed his meals and packed them into tiny blocks of bullion to be deposited one by one in his Swiss bank account. He had complained about everything Chez Cosmique served, while the staff milled about wishing that his supposed companions would come claim some of the food. 6Pack had eaten it all, and now—

  "I refuse to pay."

  The cafe grew hushed. Aristocrats with tame prairie dogs and live coelenterates embedded in their coiffeurs turned upon him the incredibly credibl
e eyes of luxury. The nearest, a thin old man wearing nothing but tightly laced black undergarments and a bonnet of jelly leaned close enough to whisper, "Are you a fryboy?"

  "What’s it to you?"

  "I am in need of a fryboy with exquisite discrimination and a hearty appetite."

  The manager slunk up to 6Pack’s nulltable, where the ruins of his feast lingered, untouched by waiters who had rightly guessed that there would be no gratuity forthcoming. Five cream-puffs floated in the diningspace, bouncing between invisible restraining fields with tiny detonations of powdered sugar at every impact.

  "Sir, have you a question about your bill?"

  "Yeah, you should be paying me to dispose of this garbage you call food."

  “But—but this is impossible. Perhaps there is something wrong with your tongue. Each item is carefully prepared and tasted by our chef. "

  "He’s a fake. Bring him in so that I can insult him to his face. Then you might make up for your incredible error by giving his job to me. "

  "Now don’t be so hard on the poor guy," said the Pixie Fatline.

  "My dear fellow," said the lean tycoon at the next table. "I have a position for a private chef. Besides, I own this establishment. You’d be wasted here."

  "That’s our man," said the Fatline. "Tempura-Hashbraun himself. "

  6Pack removed his seatbelt and drifted toward the aristocrat. "What’s it pay?"

  FOUR: THE STAYLITE RUNS

  "May I introduce my daughter?" said Tempura-Hashbraun, guiding 6Pack through an entryway. "Lady 3Bean, this is our new fryboy."

  She was both cat and canary, a hybrid of starving piranha and fat guppy, all sharp fangs and soft feathers. But there wasn’t time to ogle her or quiver in dread. The old man led him through the split-levelsatellite to the infokitchen. He had never seen anything like it. Never dreamed that such a thing could be. Imagine an oven designed by the old Dutch masters. Its rails and racks had been forged in the browheat of the oppressed masses, then plunged sizzling into the vast oceans of their driven sweat, while the Ternpura-Hashbrauns climbed their limp ladder of slaves to the stars. The dials blinded him with their intensity until the old man found the rheostat and turned them down.