by Pratt, Tim
“You have quite a memory,” the Regent said.
“I drank the blood of an elephant once,” Howlaa said, and I almost laughed. “Since I wasn’t sure the killer was a dream-thing, I came back here to inquire further.”
“We should talk in the hall,” the Regent said abruptly. “Vibrations disturb the engine.” Indeed, the vestigial wings were flickering, weakly, and we left the room. Once in the hall, the Regent said, “How do you intend to proceed?”
“When the killer appears again, I’ll grab him, and when he sweeps me back to the human world with him again... well, I think it’s safe to assume that the dangerous dreamer will be somewhere in the general vicinity of the place where I land. I’ll simply kill everyone within a mile or so. It will take time, but I have some forms that are suited to the task.”
I was stunned. I knew Howlaa was lying. Zie knew very well who the dreamer was, and had shown no inclination to kill him. So what was zie planning?
“Very good,” the Regent said. “But if you mention a word about the contents of that room, I’ll have you flayed into your component atoms. Understood?”
“The authorities appreciate your cooperation,” Howlaa said. The Regent sniffed and walked away.
“Come, Wisp. Back to our eternal vigilance.”
“Back to the bar, you mean.”
“Just so.” Howlaa grimaced, touching zir stomach. “Shit,” zie said. “I’ve got a pain in my gut.”
“Are you all right?”
“Probably something I ate in another form, that doesn’t agree with this one. I’ll be all right.” Zie shivered, stretched, and became the questing beast. We traveled.
***
I tried to get some sense out of Howlaa at the bar, before zie drank too many red bulldozers, primal screams, and gravity wells to maintain a coherent conversation. I slipped a tendril into zir mind and said, “What is your plan?”
“Assume what I told the Regent is true,” Howlaa said, smiling at the human bartender, who looked appreciatively at zir human breasts as she mixed drinks. “If things work out, it won’t matter, but if things go badly, you’ll need all the plausible deniability you can get. No reason for you to go down with me if I fail. This way you can honestly claim ignorance of my plans.”
“You want to protect me from getting in trouble with the Regent?” I said, almost touched.
Zie laughed aloud and gulped a fizzing reddish concoction. “No, Wisp. But on the off chance that they imprison me instead of putting me to death, I don’t want to be stuck in a cell with you forever.”
After that, zie wouldn’t talk to me at all, but had fun as only Howlaa on the eve of zir potential death can.
Zie vomited more often than usual, though.
***
A day passed, and Howlaa was sober and bored at home, playing five-deck solitaire while I made desultory suggestions, before the fat man reappeared. The singing gem keened at midday. Howlaa cocked zir head, taking information from the gem.
Zie became the questing beast, and we were away.
This time we landed in the city center. The fat man sat on the obsidian steps of the Courthouse of Lesser Infractions, face turned up to the sun, smiling up at the light. He held a golden scythe across his knees, and blood and bodies lay strewn all over the steps around him, many wearing the star-patterned robes of magisters.
Howlaa did not hesitate, but traveled again, this time appearing directly in front of the fat man. Zie lashed out with barely visible hooked appendages and grasped the fat man. Then Howlaa traveled again. We reappeared in the racing precinct, startling the spectators and scattering the thoroughbred chimeras. The fat man struggled in the hoof-churned mud, his weapon gone.
I had barely overcome my disorientation before Howlaa traveled again. I knew it was Howlaa controlling the movement, for the sensation was quite different from the swirling transcendence that came when the fat man dragged us to that other world. This time we appeared in another populated area, the vaulted gray halls of the Chapel of Blessed Increase in the monastic quarter. We flickered again, Howlaa and the fat man still locked in struggle, and flashed briefly through another dozen places around the city, all filled with startled citizens—in the adder’s pit, the ladder to the stars, the moss forest, the monster farm, the glass park, the burning island. We even passed through the Regent’s inner chamber, briefly, though he was not there, and through other rooms in the palace, courtrooms, dungeons, and chambers of government. There was a fair amount of incidental damage in many of these instances, as the fat man rolled around, kicked, and thrashed.
Then we appeared in the dream engine’s chamber, and everything in my full-circle visual field wobbled and ran, either as an aftereffect of all that spatial violation, or because bringing a dream into such proximity with the dream engine set up unstable resonances.
Howlaa and the fat man thrashed right into the pulsing royal orphan in its tangle of wires. The orphan’s wings fluttered as it broke free from the mountings, and the ovoid body fell to the floor with a sick, liquid sound, like a piece of rotten fruit dropping onto pavement. The fat man broke free of Howlaa—though that wasn’t possible, so Howlaa must have let him go. He attacked Howlaa, who flickered and reappeared on the far side of the weakly pulsing royal orphan. The fat man roared and strode forward, a new weapon suddenly in his hand, a six-foot polearm covered in barbs and hooks. He tread on the royal orphan, which popped and deflated, a wet, ripe odor filling the room. The fat man swung at the unmoving Howlaa, but the weapon disappeared in mid-arc. The fat man stumbled, falling to one knee, then moaned and came apart. It was like seeing a shadow-sculpture dissolve at the wave of an artist’s hand, his substance darkening, becoming transparent, and finally melting away.
Howlaa became human, fell to zir knees, and shivered. “Feel sick,” zie said, grimacing.
I was terrified. The Regent might kill us for this. We’d stopped the fat man, yes, but at the cost of a royal orphan’s life. “We have to go, Howlaa,” I said. “Become the questing beast. I won’t try to stop you—let’s flee across the worlds. We have to get away.”
But Howlaa did not hear, for zie was vomiting now, violently, zir whole body heaving, red and milky white and translucent syrupy stuff coming from zir mouth, mingling with the ichor from the dead orphan on the floor.
The door opened. The Regent and two Nagalinda guards entered. “No!” the Regent cried. “No, no, no!” The guards seized Howlaa, who was still vomiting, and dragged zim away. I floated along inexorably behind. The Regent stayed, kneeling by the dead orphan, gently touching its unmoving rainbow wings.
***
“Feeling better, traitor?,” the Regent said. Howlaa sat, pale and still unwell, on a hard wooden bench before the Regent’s desk.
“A bit,” Howlaa said.
The Regent smiled. “You didn’t think I’d let you be the questing beast forever, did you? I couldn’t risk your escape. Wisp is one line of defense against that, but I felt another was needed, so I laced the blood with poison and bound their substances together. When the poison activated, your body expelled it, along with all the questing beast’s genetic material. You’ve lost the power to take that form.”
“I’ve never vomited up an entire shape before,” Howlaa said. “It was an unpleasant experience.”
“The first of many, for a traitor like you.”
“Regent,” I said. “As Howlaa’s witness, I must inform you that you are incorrect. Howlaa did not mean to harm the orphan. The fat man appeared and disappeared, and Howlaa and I were simply carried along with him. Surely there are others who can attest to that, testify that we appeared all over the city, fighting? Howlaa held on, hoping the fat man would fade and we would be taken to the world of the dreamer, but before that could happen... well. The dream engine was damaged.”
“The orphan was killed,” the Regent said. “You expect me to believe that, by coincidence, the last place Howlaa and the killer appeared was in that room?”
“We c
ould hardly appear anywhere after that, Regent, since the dream engine was destroyed, dissolving the fat man in the process.” I spoke respectfully. “Had that not happened, I cannot tell you where the fat man might have traveled next.”
“He was a lucid dreamer,” Howlaa said. “He’d learned to move around at will. He was trying to shake me off, bouncing all over the city.”
The Regent stared at Howlaa. “That orphan was the result of decades of research, cloning, cross-breeding—the pinnacle of the bloodline. With a bit of practice, it would have been the most powerful of the orphans, and this city would have flourished as never before. We would have entered an age of dreams.”
“It is a great loss, Regent,” Howlaa said. “And we certainly deserve no honor or glory for our work—I failed to kill the dreamer. He killed himself. But I did not kill the orphan, either. The fat man tread upon it.”
“Wisp,” the Regent said. “You affirm, on your honor as a witness, that this is true?”
My honor as a witness. My honor demanded that I respect Howlaa’s elegant solution, which had saved the city further murder and also destroyed the Regent’s wicked dream engine. I think the Regent misunderstood the oath he requested. “Yes,” I said.
“Get out of here, both of you,” he said. “There will be no bonus pay for this farce. No pay at all, in fact, until I decide to reinstate you to active duty.”
“As you say, Regent,” Howlaa and I said together, and took our leave.
***
“You lied for me, Wisp,” Howlaa said that night, reclining on zir heap of soft furs and coarse fabrics.
“I provided an interpretation that fit the objectively available facts,” I said.
“You knew I was the one dragging the killer around the city, not vice-versa.”
“So it seemed to me subjectively,” I said. “But if the Regent chose to access my memory and see things as I had seen them, there would be no such subjectivity, so it hardly seemed relevant to the discussion.”
“I owe you one, Wisp,” Howlaa said.
“I did what I thought best. We are partners.”
“No, you misunderstand. I owe you one, and I want you to take it, right now.” Zie held out zir hand.
After a moment, I understood. I drifted down to Howlaa’s body, and into it, taking over zir body. Howlaa did not resist, and the sensation was utterly different from the other times I had taken possession, when most of my attention went to fighting zir for control. I sank back in the furs and fabrics, shivering in ecstasy at the sensations on zir—on my—skin.
“The body is yours for the night,” Howlaa said in my—our—mind. “Do with it what you will.”
“Thank you.”
“You had the right of it,” Howlaa said. “We are partners. Finally, and for the first time, partners.”
I buried myself in furs, and reveled in the tactile experience until the exquisite, never-before-experienced sensation of drowsiness overtook me. I fell asleep in that body, and in sleep I dreamed my own dreams, the first dreams of my life. They were beautiful, and lush, and could not be stolen.
Story Notes
Story notes are self-indulgent, I know, but I’ve always loved back-and-front matter, introductions and conclusions and author’s notes, so it’s an indulgence I allow myself. I hope you find some pleasure in them too.
Hart and Boot
I’ve always been fascinated by the Old West, especially the way it was mythologized even as it was happening—people were living in a real, dirty, dangerous, lawless frontier, and those same people were writing dime novels set in the Wild West, telling idealized stories about justice, heroism, villainy, and revenge! “Hart and Boot” is a magical secret history in that same spirit. Pearl Hart and John (or Joe) Boot were real stagecoach robbers, and they were captured and imprisoned much as the story describes. I didn’t intentionally violate any known facts about their history, though I did streamline things a bit and take some liberties with chronology—Pearl’s backstory, in particular, is rather more complex than the way I described it, and I encourage interested readers to research her further. The fact that there are conflicting histories about Pearl Hart made my work easier, because faced with two or three versions of the same story, I chose whichever best served the story’s needs. My version of John Boot is a tulpa—a being created from imagination and willpower—though that word never appears in the story, since it’s not a term Pearl would have been likely to know. This story was chosen to appear in The Best American Short Stories: 2005. I thank editor Michael Chabon for selecting the story (and significantly raising my writerly profile in the process).
***
Life in Stone
I have an acknowledged but conflicted fascination with badasses in literature. My friend Dawson (himself something of a badass) and I used to stage mental contests between our favorite literary, comic book, and cinematic badasses: Elric, Lan Mandragoran, Jules Winnfield, the Corinthian, Storm Shadow, Hap Collins & Leonard Pine, Hannibal Lecter... you get the idea. Not all heroes, not all villains, just “people with which you would not wish to fuck,” as we used to say. I’m frequently tempted to write about badasses of my own, but I try to be careful not to oversimplify, or to make them one-dimensional. Mr. Zealand is one such badass, and one of my own favorite characters. I like his weariness, his capability, his tragedy, his potential for redemption.
I wrote this story at the Hidden City writing workshop in Lake Tahoe, in 2004, a week-long retreat organized by the writers Susan Fry and Jae Brim. The first draft came out in a single afternoon, quite fast for me, which freed up the rest of the week for drinking, eating gourmet meals, hiking, and almost drowning after passing out in the hot tub. It is probably not necessary to note that I am, personally, not much of a badass.
***
Cup and Table
“Cup and Table” is one of those stories I thought about for years, though it was the characters, more than their journey, that I found most fascinating. Sigmund the addicted visionary; Carlsbad the reluctant monster; Carlotta and Ray, the despicable duo; and the enigmatic New Doctor. I always thought I would write a novel about those characters, or possibly a series of novels, but I could never get a handle on what the story should be, except that I knew it should be vast, and involve interlocking conspiracies, and secret societies, and physical and moral decay, and possibly my characters running through a booby-trapped temple full of poison arrows and flaming boulders. I wrote several scenes about them over the years, but none of them added up to anything substantial. When David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi put out the call for their Twenty Epics anthology—they wanted epic fantasy stories without the epic length—my thoughts immediately turned back to those characters. I realized that I could write a novel about them, and have it compressed into under 5,000 words, if I just left out most of the connective tissue. What I wound up with was an epic contemporary fantasy novel, smashed with a hammer, with only the brightest fragments picked up and made into a mosaic. I might return to these characters at greater length another time, though of necessity I’d have to set any stories about them before the events of “Cup and Table.” Because, since it’s an epic, at the end of the story the world is forever changed.
***
In a Glass Casket
I love writing about kids, and I try to do so without condescension, drawing as much as possible on my own memories of childhood. This story isn’t autobiographical in any literal sense, but it seems almost like autobiography in spirit—I see a lot of myself in Billy Cates, just trying to do the right thing, and afraid of everything going wrong.
***
Terrible Ones
I’m wary of writing about figures from Greek mythology—I wrote a lot of stories based on Greek myths when I was younger, and lately I’ve tried to diversify—but this story idea was irresistible, and the images of doddering old Furies and a Greek Chorus in bedsheet-togas were too tempting to pass up. Those ideas combined with some thoughts I was having about various permu
tations of the sex trade. My wife is a book buyer for an erotica catalogue, and San Francisco (just across the bay from where I live) has a boisterous and sprawling sex-positive and kinky community, so I’ve met various people in the business. There’s a certain kind of customer who has trouble ascertaining the dividing line between fantasy and reality, and that seemed like the sort of fatal flaw from which Greek tragedies are made. I tossed in a little Medea, stirred the pot, and out came “Terrible Ones.” My thanks to the members of the 2003 Rio Hondo Writers Workshop for their comments and critiques on this piece.
***
Romanticore
This is one of the stories I’m most proud of, and one of the most difficult to write. There are some stories where there’s so much to say that it’s better to say nothing at all, so I leave this one to speak for itself.
***
Living with the Harpy
Some people complain that the protagonist of this story is an idiot for choosing a mundane life over a magical one. I respectfully disagree. This story isn’t about the choice between the magical and the ordinary; it’s a story about being brave enough to let yourself get hurt in the pursuit of something potentially wonderful. But, mostly, it’s about how weird it would be to live with a harpy.
This story was one of my early experiments with telling a story solely through the use of connective tissue—showing the moments between dramatic scenes, rather than the dramatic scenes themselves, and letting the quiet interstitial moments resonate with things left unsaid. I used something of the same approach in “Cup and Table,” though in both instances there are some moments of real drama, because, at the end of the day, I love a good spectacle.
***
Komodo
I like tough female protagonists. I don’t know why; maybe because I was raised by tough women. The heroine of “Komodo” is probably too tough for her own good, though, and so this is a story about letting yourself be helped by your community. It’s also about Komodo dragons and guys who are cavalier assholes.
