In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  Lie down in bogs, wake up with fees. Trent had ended his unhappy sojourn in the land of the games without copyright or royalties, footloose into the barrens. But we have our daughter, dear. The occasional classes he taught, the magazine articles and the tiny fellowship, offered no visible path back to the realm where word and image alike danced in the flux of Aye and Nought. But what you do is valued, and I love you. An old colleague had offered the chance to beta-test and Trent had obliged, poor hopeful fool, been sucked in and spat out. Write something about ancient Sumer. Your banishing Eden beguiles then betrays you, leaving you stunned with grief, lost to truer pleasures, deaf to your lover’s cry. It is the fracture of the unmalleable heart, the oldest story in the world.

  It is Christmas Day, “a celebration of great antiquity,” as the great man once put it. Dinner with Leslie’s sister in Riverside Heights, their first trip to Manhattan since summer. Megan balks at going (she has heard some report of a possible “terrorist attack” over the holidays), and must be reassured that Caroline lives on the other end of the island from Ground Zero. Despite Christmas carols on the car radio and a half hour of The Two Towers on tape, she is moody and withdrawn.

  “Are you still reading Odile?” Leslie asks, seeing the book resting in Trent’s lap.

  Trent picks up the book, studies a passage, then translates rapidly. “‘For years I have deluded myself and lived my life in complete error. I thought I was a mathematician. I now realize that I am not even an amateur. I am nothing at all: I know nothing, understand nothing. It’s terrible but that’s how it is. And do you know what I was capable of, what I used to do? Calculation upon calculation, out of sight, out of breath, without purpose or end, and most often completely absurd. I gorged myself on figures; they capered before me until my head spun. And I took that to be mathematics!’”

  Leslie glances sidelong at him; she isn’t sure if this is the point where Trent had stopped reading or a passage he had marked. “So is the novel both an iliad and an odyssey?” she asks carefully.

  “Not that I can tell. I asked an old classmate, who wrote back last night: he says that the novel was written years before Queneau published that theory, and that the title was likelier a play on ‘Idyll’ and ‘Odalisque.’”

  “Oh.” Leslie frowns. “Academics exchange email on Christmas Eve?”

  “Why not? And now I can’t remember where I read that claim—probably online.”

  “Did you search for the site?”

  “Can’t find it now.”

  Leslie gets her brooding family to the apartment of her sister, whose husband speaks with zest about the coming assault on Iraq. Caroline and Megan exchange whispers about presents in the kitchen, while Trent politely declines to be baited. Kubrick’s film, sound muted, plays on the DVD; Leslie can see the second monolith tumbling in space. Sipping her whiskeyed eggnog, she thinks about 2002, the first year in a while that doesn’t sound science-fictional.

  On the third day Lugalkitun rode out to survey the damage, striding angrily through the village that had been destroyed when the battle overran its intended ground. Vultures took wing at his approach, though with insolent slowness, and a feral dog fled yelping after he shied a rock into its flank.

  Beside the fields of an outlying farm he regarded the body of a girl, sufficiently well attired to be of the owner’s family. Her clothing had been disturbed, either before or after death, and the king turned away, scowling. If the enemy had enjoyed the leisure for such diversions, they would also have paused to contaminate the wells.

  Caroline asks Trent about a news item that appeared a few days ago announcing that a quantum computer, primitive but genuine, had successfully factored a number by using switches comprising individual atoms, which could represent 0 and 1 simultaneously. Is this still digital? she wonders. Trent, who was examining his gift—a new hardcover edition of the great man’s Cities in Flight—offers a wintry smile and tells her that the spooky realm of quantum physics will make software designers feel like the last generation of engineers to devote their careers to zeppelin technology.

  They go outside, mid-November weather of the warmest Christmas in memory. Down the street a circle of older women are singing, some of them wearing choir robes. A wind off the river blows the sound away, and Megan, looking anxiously upward, does not see them.

  Near the burned house he came upon a toy cart, intact among so much rubble. Its chicken head stared as though astonished to find itself upended, and the king righted it with the tip of his boot. He had seen such contrivances before, and they vexed him. Miniature oxcarts and chariots he could understand, they were copies for children; but the wheeled chicken possessed no original—it stood for something that didn’t exist. Set one beside a proper boy’s clay chariot and you irresistibly saw both at full size, the huge head absurd in a way that somehow spilled onto the chariot.

  The toy’s wheels, amazingly, were unbroken: it rolled backward from his pettish kick. It never occurred to Lugalkitun to crush it; a shadow cast by nothing is best left undisturbed. He looked at the ruins about him, pouring smoke into and summoning beasts out of the open sky. Neither emptiness above nor crowding below concerned him; his brown gaze ranged flat about his own realm, imagining retribution in full measure, cities aflame, their people in flight across the hard playing ground of The Land.

  The wind shifts, and the last strains of melody—a gospel hymn—reach them. “Let’s go listen,” says Caroline, taking her niece by the hand. By the time they cross the intersection the choir is singing again, in a mournful, swelling contralto that courses through Leslie like vibrations from a church organ.

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To make the wounded whole;

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To heal the sin-sick soul.

  Megan begins to cry. “I don’t want a bomb,” she sniffles, pressing her face against her mother’s side.

  Leslie and Trent exchange bewildered expressions. The notes soar into the air, fading with distance. Leslie pats Megan’s shoulder, feeling wet warmth soak through her sweater. My daughter is not well, she thinks, deeply disordering words. Their wrongness reaches through her, and she tells herself furiously not to cry, that composure will calm her child. But the stone of resolve begins to crack, and two beads of moisture seep through, welling to spill free—their path will trace the surest route—and carve twin channels down her face.

  —August 2001–July 2002

  James Morrow is best known for the Godhead Trilogy, which includes Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and The Eternal Footman. He is a literary science fiction writer whose work has garnered him World Fantasy and Nebula awards as well as a Golden Eagle for his short film “Children of the Morning.” His most recent novel, Galapagos Regained, is out from St. Martin’s Press.

  “Apologue” is a fable about both American power and Hollywood threats to the same. Here we see the old monsters defanged in the face of the attacks of 9/11 and we get a hint at how even these old celluloid nightmares might help us heal.

  APOLOGUE

  James Morrow

  The instant they heard the news, the three of them knew they had to do something, and so, joints complaining, ligaments protesting, they limped out of the retirement home, went down to the river, swam across, and climbed onto the wounded island.

  They’d always looked out for each other in times gone by, and this day was no different. The ape placed a gentle paw on the rhedosaur’s neck, keeping the half-blind prehistoric beast from stepping on cars and bumping into skyscrapers. The mutant lizard helped the incontinent ape remove his disposable undergarments and replace them with a dry pair. The rhedosaur reminded the mutant lizard to take her Prozac.

  Before them lay the maimed and smoking city. It was a nightmare, a war zone, a surrealistic obscenity. It was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  “Maybe they won’t understand,” said the rhedosaur. “They’ll look at me, and all they’ll see is a berserk reptile munching on the Coney Isl
and roller coaster.” He fixed his clouded gaze on the ape. “And you’ll always be the one who shimmied up the Empire State Building and swatted at the biplanes.”

  “And then, of course, there was the time I rampaged through the Fulton Fish Market and laid my eggs in Madison Square Garden,” said the mutant lizard.

  “People are smarter than that,” said the ape. “They know the difference between fantasy and reality.”

  “Some people do, yes,” said the rhedosaur. “Some do.”

  The Italian mayor approached them at full stride, exhausted but resolute, his body swathed in an epidermis of ash. At his side walked a dazed Latino firefighter and a bewildered police officer of African descent.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” said the mayor, giving the mutant lizard an affectionate pat on the shin.

  “You have every right to feel ambivalent toward us,” said the rhedosaur.

  “The past is not important,” said the mayor.

  “You came in good faith,” said the police officer, attempting without success to smile.

  “Actions speak louder than special effects,” said the firefighter, staring upward at the gargantuan visitors.

  Tears of remorse rolled from the ape’s immense brown eyes. The stench filling his nostrils was irreducible, but he knew that it included many varieties of plastic and also human flesh. “Still, we can’t help feeling ashamed.”

  “Today there is neither furred nor smooth in New York,” said the mayor. “There is neither scaled nor pored, black nor white, Asian nor Occidental, Jew nor Muslim. Today there are only victims and helpers.”

  “Amen,” said the police officer.

  “I think it’s clear what needs doing,” said the firefighter.

  “Perfectly clear.” The mutant lizard sucked a mass of rubble into her lantern-jawed mouth.

  “Clear as glass.” Despite his failing vision, the rhedosaur could see that the East River Savings Bank was in trouble. He set his back against the structure, shoring it up with his mighty spine.

  The ape said nothing but instead rested his paw in the middle of Cortlandt Street, allowing a crowd of the bereaved to climb onto his palm. Their shoes and boots tickled his skin. He curled his fingers into a protective matrix then shuffled south, soon entering Battery Park. He sat on the grass, stared toward Liberty Island, raised his arm, and, drawing the humans to his chest, held them against the warmth of his massive heart.

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Pipeline” by Brian Aldiss. © 2005 Brian Aldiss. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2005. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “There’s a Hole in the City” by Richard Bowes. © 2005 Richard Bowes. Originally published at SciFi.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Until Forgiveness Comes” by K. Tempest Bradford. © 2008 K. Tempest Bradford. Originally published in Strange Horizons. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Excerpt from Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow. © 2008 Cory Doctorow. Originally published by Tor Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Giliad” by Gregory Feeley © 2004 Gregory Feeley. Originally published in the anthology The First Heroes. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Out of My Sight, Out of My Mind” by David Friedman. © 2015 David Friedman. Original to this anthology.

  “Closing Time” by Jack Ketchum. Originally published in Peaceable Kingdom. © 2003 Jack Ketchum. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Last Apollo Mission” by Douglas Lain. © 2011 Douglas Lain. Originally published in Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Retribution” by Tim Marquitz. © 2015 Tim Marquitz. Original to this anthology.

  “Our Lady of Toledo Transmission” by Rob McCleary. © 2015 Rob McCleary. Original to this anthology.

  “Apologue” by James Morrow. © 2001 James Morrow. Originally published in The New York Review of Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Beautiful Stuff” by Susan Palwick. © 2008 Susan Palwick. Originally published in the anthology The Living Dead. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Unexpected Outcomes” by Tim Pratt. © 2009 Tim Pratt. Originally published in Interzone. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson. © 2015 Kelly Robson. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Beyond the Flags” by Kris Saknussemm. © 2015 Kris Saknussemm. Original to this anthology.

  “Excerpt from The Zenith Angle” by Bruce Sterling. © 2004 Bruce Sterling. Originally published by Ballantine Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Goat Variations,” by Jeff VanderMeer. © 2010 Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published in The Third Bear. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “My Eyes Your Ears” by Ray Vukcevich. © 2010 Ray Vukcevich. Originally published in Boarding Instructions. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Douglas Lain is a novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in various magazines including Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His debut novel, Billy Moon, was published by Tor and was selected as the debut fantasy novel of the month by Library Journal in 2013. After the Saucers Landed is his second novel.

  Lain is the publisher of Zero Books, which specializes in philosophy and political theory, and hosts the Zero Squared podcast, interviewing a wide range of fascinating, engaging people with insights for the new millennium: philosophers, mystics, economists, and a diverse group of fiction writers. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.