The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  I bought them.

  In a box of crappy plastic Little Ponies and Barbies and Care Bears, I found a leather Indian headdress, a wooden bow-and-arrow set, and a fringed buckskin vest. Craphound was still buttering up the leather books’ owner. I bought them quick, for five bucks.

  “Those are beautiful,” a voice said at my elbow. I turned around and smiled at the snappy dresser who’d bought the uke at the Secret Boutique. He’d gone casual for the weekend, in an expensive, L.L. Bean button-down way.

  “Aren’t they, though.”

  “You sell them on Queen Street? Your finds, I mean?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes at auction. How’s the uke?”

  “Oh, I got it all tuned up,” he said, and smiled the same smile he’d given me when he’d taken hold of it at Goodwill. “I can play ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ on it.” He looked at his feet. “Silly, huh?”

  “Not at all. You’re into cowboy things, huh?” As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was “Billy the Kid,” the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.

  “Just trying to relive a piece of my childhood, I guess. I’m Scott,” he said, extending his hand.

  Scott? I thought wildly. Maybe it’s his middle name? “I’m Jerry.”

  The Upper Canada Brewing Company sale has many things going for it, including a beer garden where you can sample their wares and get a good barbecue burger. We gently gravitated to it, looking over the tables as we went.

  “You’re a pro, right?” he asked after we had plastic cups of beer.

  “You could say that.”

  “I’m an amateur. A rank amateur. Any words of wisdom?”

  I laughed and drank some beer, lit a cigarette. “There’s no secret to it, I think. Just diligence: you’ve got to go out every chance you get, or you’ll miss the big score.”

  He chuckled. “I hear that. Sometimes, I’ll be sitting in my office, and I’ll just know that they’re putting out a piece of pure gold at the Goodwill and that someone else will get to it before my lunch. I get so wound up, I’m no good until I go down there and hunt for it. I guess I’m hooked, eh?”

  “Cheaper than some other kinds of addictions.”

  “I guess so. About that Indian stuff—what do you figure you’d get for it at a Queen Street boutique?”

  I looked him in the eye. He may have been something high-powered and cool and collected in his natural environment, but just then, he was as eager and nervous as a kitchen-table poker player at a high-stakes game.

  “Maybe fifty bucks,” I said.

  “Fifty, huh?” he asked.

  “About that,” I said.

  “Once it sold,” he said.

  “There is that,” I said.

  “Might take a month, might take a year,” he said.

  “Might take a day,” I said.

  “It might, it might.” He finished his beer. “I don’t suppose you’d take forty?”

  I’d paid five for it, not ten minutes before. It looked like it would fit Craphound, who, after all, was wearing Scott/Billy’s own boyhood treasures as we spoke. You don’t make a living by feeling guilty over 800 percent markups. Still, I’d angered the fates, and needed to redeem myself.

  “Make it five,” I said.

  He started to say something, then closed his mouth and gave me a look of thanks. He took a five out of his wallet and handed it to me. I pulled the vest and bow and headdress out of my duffel.

  He walked back to a shiny black Jeep with gold detail work, parked next to Craphound’s van. Craphound was building onto the Lego body, and the hood had a miniature Lego town attached to it.

  Craphound looked around as he passed, and leaned forward, peering with undisguised interest at the booty. I grimaced and finished my beer.

  —

  I met Scott/Billy three times more at the Secret Boutique that week.

  He was a lawyer, who specialised in alien-technology patents. He had a practice on Bay Street, with two partners, and despite his youth, he was the senior man.

  I didn’t let on that I knew about Billy the Kid and his mother in the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary. But I felt a bond with him, as though we shared an unspoken secret. I pulled any cowboy finds for him, and he developed a pretty good eye for what I was after and returned the favour.

  The fates were with me again, and no two ways about it. I took home a ratty old Oriental rug that on closer inspection was a nineteenth-century hand-knotted Persian; an upholstered Turkish footstool; a collection of hand-painted silk Hawaiiana pillows and a carved meerschaum pipe. Scott/Billy found the last for me, and it cost me two dollars. I knew a collector who would pay thirty in an eye-blink, and from then on, as far as I was concerned, Scott/Billy was a fellow craphound.

  “You going to the auction tomorrow night?” I asked him at the checkout line.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” he said. He’d barely been able to contain his excitement when I told him about the Thursday night auctions and the bargains to be had there. He sure had the bug.

  “Want to get together for dinner beforehand? The Rotterdam’s got a good patio.”

  He did, and we did, and I had a glass of framboise that packed a hell of a kick and tasted like fizzy raspberry lemonade, and doorstopper fries and a club sandwich.

  I had my nose in my glass when he kicked my ankle under the table. “Look at that!”

  It was Craphound in his van, cruising for a parking spot. The Lego village had been joined by a whole postmodern spaceport on the roof, with a red-and-blue castle, a football-sized flying saucer, and a clown’s head with blinking eyes.

  I went back to my drink and tried to get my appetite back.

  “Was that an extee driving?”

  “Yeah. Used to be a friend of mine.”

  “He’s a picker?”

  “Uh-huh.” I turned back to my fries and tried to kill the subject.

  “Do you know how he made his stake?”

  “The chlorophyll thing, in Saudi Arabia.”

  “Sweet!” he said. “Very sweet. I’ve got a client who’s got some secondary patents from that one. What’s he go after?”

  “Oh, pretty much everything,” I said, resigning myself to discussing the topic after all. “But lately, the same as you—cowboys and Injuns.”

  He laughed and smacked his knee. “Well, what do you know? What could he possibly want with the stuff?”

  “What do they want with any of it? He got started one day when we were cruising the Muskokas,” I said carefully, watching his face. “Found a trunk of old cowboy things at a rummage sale. East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary.” I waited for him to shout or startle. He didn’t.

  “Yeah? A good find, I guess. Wish I’d made it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I took a bite of my sandwich.

  Scott continued. “I think about what they get out of it a lot. There’s nothing we have here that they couldn’t make for themselves. I mean, if they picked up and left today, we’d still be making sense of everything they gave us in a hundred years. You know, I just closed a deal for a biochemical computer that’s no-shit ten thousand times faster than anything we’ve built out of silicon. You know what the extee took in trade? Title to a defunct fairground outside of Calgary—they shut it down ten years ago because the midway was too unsafe to ride. Doesn’t that beat all? This thing is worth a billion dollars right out of the gate, I mean, within twenty-four hours of the deal closing, the seller can turn it into the GDP of Bolivia. For a crummy real-estate dog that you couldn’t get five grand for!”

  It always shocked me when Billy/Scott talked about his job—it was easy to forget that he was a high-powered lawyer when we were jawing and fooling around like old craphounds. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t Billy the Kid; I couldn’t think of any reason for him to be playing it all so close to his chest.

  “What the hell is som
e extee going to do with a fairground?”

  —

  Craphound got a free Coke from Lisa at the check-in when he made his appearance. He bid high, but shrewdly, and never pulled ten-thousand-dollar stunts. The bidders were wandering the floor, previewing that week’s stock, and making notes to themselves.

  I rooted through a box-lot full of old tins, and found one with a buckaroo at the Calgary Stampede, riding a bucking bronc. I picked it up and stood to inspect it. Craphound was behind me.

  “Nice piece, huh?” I said to him.

  “I like it very much,” Craphound said, and I felt my cheeks flush.

  “You’re going to have some competition tonight, I think,” I said, and nodded at Scott/Billy. “I think he’s Billy; the one whose mother sold us—you—the cowboy trunk.”

  “Really?” Craphound said, and it felt like we were partners again, scoping out the competition. Suddenly I felt a knife of shame, like I was betraying Scott/Billy somehow. I took a step back.

  “Jerry, I am very sorry that we argued.”

  I sighed out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding in. “Me, too.”

  “They’re starting the bidding. May I sit with you?”

  And so the three of us sat together, and Craphound shook Scott/Billy’s hand and the auctioneer started into his harangue.

  It was a night for unusual occurrences. I bid on a piece, something I told myself I’d never do. It was a set of four matched Li’l Orphan Annie Ovaltine glasses, like Grandma’s had been, and seeing them in the auctioneer’s hand took me right back to her kitchen, and endless afternoons passed with my colouring books and weird old-lady hard candies and Liberace albums playing in the living room.

  “Ten,” I said, opening the bidding.

  “I got ten, ten, ten, I got ten, who’ll say twenty, who’ll say twenty, twenty for the four.”

  Craphound waved his bidding card, and I jumped as if I’d been stung.

  “I got twenty from the space cowboy, I got twenty, sir will you say thirty?”

  I waved my card.

  “That’s thirty to you sir.”

  “Forty,” Craphound said.

  “Fifty,” I said even before the auctioneer could point back to me. An old pro, he settled back and let us do the work.

  “One hundred,” Craphound said.

  “One fifty,” I said.

  The room was perfectly silent. I thought about my overextended MasterCard, and wondered if Scott/Billy would give me a loan.

  “Two hundred,” Craphound said.

  Fine, I thought. Pay two hundred for those. I can get a set on Queen Street for thirty bucks.

  The auctioneer turned to me. “The bidding stands at two. Will you say two ten, sir?”

  I shook my head. The auctioneer paused a long moment, letting me sweat over the decision to bow out.

  “I have two—do I have any other bids from the floor? Any other bids? Sold, two hundred dollars, to number fifty-seven.” An attendant brought Craphound the glasses. He took them and tucked them under his seat.

  —

  I was fuming when we left. Craphound was at my elbow. I wanted to punch him—I’d never punched anyone in my life, but I wanted to punch him.

  We entered the cool night air and I sucked in several lungfuls before lighting a cigarette.

  “Jerry,” Craphound said.

  I stopped, but didn’t look at him. I watched the taxis pull in and out of the garage next door instead.

  “Jerry, my friend,” Craphound said.

  “What?” I said, loud enough to startle myself. Scott, beside me, jerked as well.

  “We’re going. I wanted to say good-bye, and to give you some things that I won’t be taking with me.”

  “What?” I said again, Scott just a beat behind me.

  “My people—we’re going. It has been decided. We’ve gotten what we came for.”

  Without another word, he set off towards his van. We followed along behind, shell-shocked.

  Craphound’s exoskeleton executed another macro and slid the panel door aside, revealing the cowboy trunk.

  “I wanted to give you this. I will keep the glasses.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You’re all leaving?” Scott asked, with a note of urgency.

  “It has been decided. We’ll go over the next twenty-four hours.”

  “But why?” Scott said, sounding almost petulant.

  “It’s not something that I can easily explain. As you must know, the things we gave you were trinkets to us—almost worthless. We traded them for something that was almost worthless to you—a fair trade, you’ll agree—but it’s time to move on.”

  Craphound handed me the cowboy trunk. Holding it, I smelled the lubricant from his exoskeleton and the smell of the attic it had been mummified in before making its way into his hands. I felt like I almost understood.

  “This is for me,” I said slowly, and Craphound nodded encouragingly. “This is for me, and you’re keeping the glasses. And I’ll look at this and feel…”

  “You understand,” Craphound said, looking somehow relieved.

  And I did. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and six-guns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month’s rent on four glasses so that he could remember his grandma’s kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.

  “You’re craphounds!” I said. “All of you!”

  Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and clapped my hands.

  —

  Scott recovered from his shock by spending the night at his office, crunching numbers, talking on the phone, and generally getting while the getting was good. He had an edge—no one else knew that they were going.

  He went pro later that week, opened a chi-chi boutique on Queen Street, and hired me on as chief picker and factum factotum.

  Scott was not Billy the Kid. Just another Bay Street shyster with a cowboy jones. From the way they come down and spend, there must be a million of them.

  Our draw in the window is a beautiful mannequin I found, straight out of the fifties, a little boy we call the Beaver. He dresses in chaps and a sheriff’s badge and six-guns and a miniature Stetson and cowboy boots with worn spurs, and rests one foot on a beautiful miniature steamer trunk whose leather is worked with cowboy motifs.

  He’s not for sale at any price.

  The Slynx

  TATYANA TOLSTAYA

  Translated by Jamey Gambrell

  Tatyana Tolstaya (1951– ) is a Russian writer and essayist born in Leningrad to a family of writers, including Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. Alexei’s wife, Natalia Krandievskaya, was an important poet, and Tatyana’s maternal grandfather, Mikhail Lozinsky, was a literary translator. Tatyana received a degree in classics at Leningrad State University and went to work for a Moscow publishing house shortly after that. Her first short story, “On a Golden Porch,” was published in Avrora magazine in 1983, which launched her literary career. Her first story collection established her as one of the foremost writers of the Gorbachev era.

  Tolstaya spent much of the 1980s and 1990s living in the United States, teaching at various universities. Her work has been well received in the US, and the critically acclaimed Austin indie rock band Okkervil River took their name from one of her short stories. Her writing is varied, ranging from nonfiction to the dystopian science fiction novel excerpted here, The Slynx (2000 in Russia; New York Review of Books Classics English-language edition 2007). Known for her acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life, Tolstaya has also been the cohost of the Russian cultural interview television program School for Scandal.

  The Slynx is a riotous joy of a novel, spinning a tale of a postapocalyptic future Russia that is rife with satirical jabs at local absurdities of geopolitics and elements of folklore. Its deft storytelling and rampant imagination set it apart from many postapocalypti
c novels and place it firmly in the tradition of Russian literature established by Gogol, Bulgakov, and Bely. In some sense, too, The Slynx seems a natural successor to the dystopic situation set out in Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City” (1918), also reprinted in this volume.

  In The Slynx, civilization ended two hundred years ago in an event known as the Blast. The character Benedikt makes the best of a bad situation as he survives by transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. By the terms of Tolstaya’s chaotic future, Benedikt is even thriving—for example, he is mutation-free, with no extra fingers, gills, or cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids like some people. Nor is he a half-human Degenerator, harnessed to a troika. Part weird, original post-Collapse novel and part a testimony to the power of words, The Slynx follows Benedikt on a quest to maintain and preserve the culture of Russia against dangers both internal and external. The first chapter, included here, exemplifies the manic energy and originality of the novel while also being a more or less self-contained story.

  THE SLYNX

  Tatyana Tolstaya

  Translated by Jamey Gambrell

  Benedikt pulled on his felt boots, stomped his feet to get the fit right, checked the damper on the stove, brushed the bread crumbs onto the floor—for the mice—wedged a rag in the window to keep out the cold, stepped out the door, and breathed the pure, frosty air in through his nostrils. Ah, what a day! The night’s storm had passed, the snow gleamed all white and fancy, the sky was turning blue, and the high elfir trees stood still. Black rabbits flitted from treetop to treetop. Benedikt stood squinting, his reddish beard tilted upward, watching the rabbits. If only he could down a couple—for a new cap. But he didn’t have a stone.

  It would be nice to have the meat, too. Mice, mice, and more mice—he was fed up with them.

  Give black rabbit meat a good soaking, bring it to boil seven times, set it in the sun for a week or two, then steam it in the oven—and it won’t kill you.

  That is, if you catch a female. Because the male, boiled or not, it doesn’t matter. People didn’t used to know this, they were hungry and ate the males too. But now they know: if you eat the males you’ll be stuck with a wheezing and a gurgling in your chest the rest of your life. Your legs will wither. Thick black hairs will grow like crazy out of your ears and you’ll stink to high heaven.