“Wait just a minute, buddy,” came a hoarse little voice. “We had an agreement. You grant my wish.”
Sighing, Hal looked at the toad. “I told you, I can’t—”
“How do you know if you don’t know what it is?”
Trapped again. “What is it?”
“Kiss me.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m a pervert. Humor me. I won’t use my tongue.”
Hal knew it was another losing battle. He bent to pick up the toad.
“Don’t worry,” the toad said as he puckered. “You know the old saying: ‘kiss a toad and nothing worse will happen to you all day’.”
“Want to bet on that?” asked Hal, but he planted a small kiss on the toad’s mouth.
There was a flash of light and the toad was gone.
In its place was a woman. Compared to Catherine, she wasn’t beautiful. But she was pleasant enough to look at, especially since she was standing there stark, raving nude.
“You…you’re—”
“Miranda,” she said. “I don’t blame you for being confused. It’s hard to tell the sex of a toad. Could I borrow your cloak?”
Hal handed it to her at once. “Are you a princess?” he asked warily.
“God, no. I’m only a barmaid. A word of advice: wizards may be lousy tippers, but it’s not a good idea to complain about it too loudly.” She put on his cloak. “I hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Hal murmured.
“So will I,” said Miranda. She kissed him warmly on the lips. Hal found it a very pleasant reward. “That’s good. I guess we’re in love.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been eating flies for three years and you didn’t complain about my breath. If that isn’t a sign of true love, I don’t know what is.
Hal decided that, just possibly, Miranda was right.
“But if we’re going to keep seeing each other,” Miranda went on, “I’ll have to insist on one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“No more dragon slaying.”
“You have my word,” said Hal.
THE VENUS OF WILLENDORF
Deborah Walker
Her oolitic thighs rubbing together, shedding tiny flakes of stone onto the pavement, Jane made her slow progression along Tottenham Court Road. As she walked, cars slid to a halt, and men leapt out of the abandoned vehicles to join the throng that followed her. When she reached her destination, Jane raised her tiny hand. “Wait outside, my worshippers.”
The line of men erupted into a cacophony of agreement. Each man shouted loudly, desperate to be heard above the crowd.
“Oh course, my love. You can count on me.” Claude Shriven, the postman, was the first of Jane’s followers. When she’d opened the door, he’d fallen to his knees. “First class,” he’d whispered, his letters scattering like petals.
“I’ll wait unto the end of time,” shouted old Professor Ming, who’d managed to get to the front of the line by the merciless use of his mobility scooter. There was no foot that Ming wouldn’t roll over to get into Jane’s presence.
Further down the line Barry Travis asked his brother, “What did she say?”
“We’ve got to wait,” said Tony. How could he get closer? He needed to get closer. There were too many men, all pressing against him. But Tony felt great within this sea of testosterone. He felt the urge to sing, a nascent song forming in his brain: “Um-PAH, Um-PAH, Um-PAH.” He looked around, nodding frantically to his companions to take up the chant. He noticed that his wife had gone. It was probably for the best. She’d been following him, nagging him about something.
Barry, who’d always been a slow but deliberate thinker, shouted, “I will wait unto the end of time for you, Jane.”
“Hey, you’re just copying that bloke up front,” complained a small bloke wearing only a towel.
“Shut it.”
“Um-PAH, Um-PAH, Um-PAH. C’mon lads,” urged Tony.
Slowly the crowd took up the chant.
At the front of the line, Jane said. “Don’t touch the glass. Remember what happened in McDonalds?” Jeeze louise. She’d only nipped in for an After Eight McFlurry. Couldn’t a goddess get a treat without there being major property damage?
Further down the line Barry asked, “What did she say?”
“She said…”
“First class!” shouted Claude, the postman, right in Jane’s face.
Couldn’t he think of anything else to say? Maybe she ought to mix up the line. The first should be last—yes that sounded right. But later…after shopping. Jane hadn’t got a thing to wear. She just didn’t feel right being naked, although the men didn’t seem to mind.
THE GLASS DOORWAY SLID opened. Jane entered the Gap.
A women stood beside a stack of neatly folded denim. When she saw Jane her eyes rolled back into her sockets, as the magic undertook the necessary cognitive adjustment. “Urk.” she said.
Jane held a pair of jeans against her naked stomach. “I don’t understand these American sizes,” she said to the shop assistant, who’d recovered from the reality re-orientation. At least Jane could get some sense out of women. All she got out of men was praise. It was beginning to get on her nerves. Jane looked at the label on the jeans. “Fourteen-R, what’s that? Is that a size twelve?”
“It’s an English size ten, Miss.”
“Well, what size am I?”
“I guess you’re a size thirty-two,” said the shop assistant, casting her professional eye over Jane.
“Do you have any size thirty-twos in a dark, boot-cut style?” Boot-cut style jeans were so flattering,
“No, sorry, Miss.”
Jane sighed. No, of course they didn’t. They just didn’t think, did they? She was Venus, and she couldn’t even get a pair of jeans to fit her.
Of course, she’d been thinking of the Botticelli Venus when she’d sat with Sue and recited the ancient incantation. The long, red hair, blowing in the wind; the pale, opalescent body rising out of the open clam shell. So, it was a surprise when she’d been transformed into a somewhat earlier incarnation.
Jane glanced at her reflection in the mirror, transfixed for a moment by the sight of her stone head layered with its fist-sized beads. She hadn’t been expecting this. She wondered what Sue had been expecting.
Outside, her followers were making quite a racket. The men. Oh, the men. How many were following her now? She’d wanted to be worshipped, but not quite this much. Wasn’t there a way in which she could switch it off, be a goddess for most of the time, but normal when she fancied a rest? She was beginning to think that being worshipped wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Her worshippers were so, so…intense. It was embarrassing.
Still, a Venus is a Venus, and Jane really needed something to wear. Jane thanked the female shop assistant and went to find someone more suitable. She found a rather good-looking man, skinny, about her age, with dark eyes. He was just the type Jane would have gone for, before all this business. Daniel, his name tag announced. Jane watched as Daniel’s eyes rolled back in his sockets—it was a shame, really.
“Pray tell me.” Jane felt that this was a suitable form of speech for a goddess to address a worshipper. “Pray tell me, my man, where I might find suitable attire.” Jane waved her tiny, limestone arms. “In this your store,” she added for good measure.
Daniel gazed at her, drinking in the sight of her enormous stone breasts resting on a stomach that just kept on going. Her carved lusciousness overwhelmed him. The image of her, the vision of her naked folds of stone, speared straight into his soul, cutting though the civilised veneer, piercing the centre of his savagery. Daniel fell to his knees, mumbling ancient, prehistoric sounds. She was everything to him. She always was. Jane was his whole world.
Here we go again, thought Jane.
Daniel edged closer to grasp at Jane’s red ochre tinted, stone legs. He raised his eyes. He dared to look. His eyes re
sted on the delicate triangle between her legs. He swam through history to find the words for her. “I will make a garment for you. I will clothe you in the softest denim. I will pull the fabrics of the world apart for you, my love.” Daniel grabbed a pair of jeans from the racks and pulled at the seams. He tried and tried, the veins in his arms standing out in his effort. Rather nice arms, thought Jane. But alas, the cloth of Gap was too strong for his mortal hands. Daniel cast the jeans aside, moaning in despair. “I have failed you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jane. She’d decided to be a benevolent deity. “Evans is just down the street. They know how to dress a goddess.”
“And I’ll worship you,” said Daniel. His mundane tasks were forgotten. Now he had found the real purpose of his life, to love and serve this Venus.
“Join the queue, then,” said Jane, pointing to the men standing outside.
JANE BEGAN HER PONDEROUS walk, heading to Evans. She was pleased to see that Daniel had managed to get a place at the front. All around her, voices cried in exultation, “Um-PAH. Um-PAH. Um-PAH.” They’d gotten a drum from somewhere. And was that a trumpet? Jane walked to a glorious fanfare.
Oh well, she thought. Things could be worse. At least I’m human—sort of.
There was more than one type of Venus. Now, Sue was really going to have problems getting a pair of jeans to fit. Jane stopped her stately progression to wave to her friend, looking up into the sky where Sue shone in her glorious desperation.
LOVE THY NEIGHBORS
Ken Liu
McComber: Welcome to Live With McComber!
[As McComber speaks, a video plays for the audience: a pair of giant pandas lumber through the predawn light on an American suburban street. Gingerly, they pry open trashcans on the curb and pick through the contents.]
My fellow patriots, you’ve no doubt noticed some extraordinary changes around us the last few years: strange animals doing strange things.
[The video shifts to a manatee lazily swimming through murky water. A motorboat approaches on the surface, but the manatee puts on a sudden burst of speed by twirling its flippers like a pair of propellers and dodges out of the way at the last minute. It then spits into the faces of the startled passengers. The camera lingers on the smiling manatee.]
I’ve told you before my suspicion that these changes were the result of a conspiracy between the climate-change industrial complex and the environmental movement special interest lobby.
[Now the video shows a family of penguins waddling amongst Canadian geese next to a pond on the Boston Common. Children toss bits of bread to the birds but scatter and scream as the penguins chase after them.]
But the truth, my friends, the truth has turned out to be even stranger. My guest today is the man behind the shadowy organization that claims responsibility for these strange events: say hello to Kasper Filip, Founder and Executive Director of WikiGenes!
[Filip, a tall and gangly man with pale freckled skin and floppy hair, strides across the studio floor awkwardly. He’s too nervous to even look at the camera. But when he arrives at his seat, he seems to get a sudden burst of courage and stands up to give McComber an awkward, tight hug that lasts for several seconds.]
McComber: [utterly flummoxed] Okay, that was…sweaty. And I’ll leave it at that.
Filip: Sorry. I just think we should…uh…love each other more…you know…as fellow life-sparks on this great…great planet.
McComber: You’re a unique snowflake, aren’t you? So, what is WikiGenes?
Filip: Uh…we are a… non-profit. Volunteers…um…collaborate…to save endangered species by, by, uh, modifying their genes—
McComber: I think you’re a bunch of bio-terrorists! What in the world made you want to mess with animals?
Filip: I’ve always liked animals. Loved them, in fact. Just thinking about them calms me down. [Grins goofily.] Even back in college, in my tiny dorm room, I kept four cats, a pair of cockatoos, a saltwater aquarium, six rats, a sugar glider, two—
McComber: I pity your roommate.
Filip: One day, I was watching a nature show on TV with Caca—
McComber: Your girlfriend?
Filip: —my oldest cockatoo. The program said that with global warming, penguins were in trouble. Warmer seas meant less ice and fewer fish and shrimp for them to eat. Many chicks went hungry and died.
I felt so bad that I wanted to stop eating fish and donate my share to the penguins.
McComber: You should have moved to Antarctica. Would have saved all of us a lot of trouble, like that spitting manatee that flipped my boat.
Filip: And then Caca said, “Here! Here!” And I fed her a grape and a piece of the dinner roll I took from the cafeteria. She always ate whatever I ate.
McComber: Now I pity this poor bird. No animal deserves that.
Filip: So, that got me thinking: Caca can eat all sorts of food, not just special fish found in the Antarctic. Why don’t we modify the genes of the penguins so they can eat new foods and live in warmer places? That would save them.
I went online and asked for help. And that was the beginning of WikiGenes.
McComber: You’re messing with nature. Playing God!
Filip: We’ve been doing that since forever!
Think about it. Species that have adapted to us thrive: the cockroach, the rat, the raccoon, the cat and dog, cattle and sheep, banana, wheat, rice, potato, corn. These are the most successful species ever. They live wherever we live.
McComber: And you mean that literally. Didn’t your neighbors have you evicted because you kept—in their words, “a menagerie composed of skunks, raccoons, and rats”—in your apartment?
Filip: We were researching the adaptations that allowed them to live on our garbage. It was important work!
McComber: Yes, I’m sure the work smelled great, too.
Filip: Garbage eating is just one of many useful traits. Most species are endangered because they haven’t figured out how to live with us. We want to help by giving them the traits needed to move into our spaces.
McComber: I understand you’re not very popular among the environmentalists.
Filip: No, they probably hate us even more than you do.
McComber: That’s about the only reason I’ve been civil to you so far.
Filip: We don’t care much about their way of doing things. They just want to keep endangered species in dwindling parks and preserves, habitat islands like prisons. It’s only a matter of time before they all go extinct.
McComber: And your alternative is better?
Filip: I want to give all species a chance to thrive in our man-made world!
Take pandas. Unmodified, they were doomed. Their bamboo groves are threatened by farmers needing more land—and the Chinese have a lot of mouths to feed. Pandas are also terrible breeders.
So we figured out how to make pandas that have a lot more sex and that are much less picky about what they can eat. Now they roam all over the world.
Just look at these pictures I brought of some baby pandas.
McComber: [softening] I have to say, I never cared much for these fur balls, but those pictures are cute. [blustery again] But were you working in cooperation with the EPA? Did you get funding from the UN?
Filip: No! Of course not! Had we revealed our true purpose before we completed our work, every government in the world would have wanted to shut us down. If you want to get anything done, you don’t go to the government.
McComber: Amazingly, you and I agree on that point. People in this country have lost their frontier spirit, their gung-ho can-do. They think they need the government to take care of them, to approve every little thing—
Filip: Exactly, why do we need permission? Animals don’t need to ask some government bureaucrat for permission to have sex and recombine their DNA. That’s all we’re doing: DNA recombination.
McComber: But there are some negative consequences to what you’re doing, aren’t there?
Filip: Negative
? We’re saving cuddly and cute creatures! Who doesn’t like more pandas? Everyone loves pandas!
McComber: I think many of our callers feel differently. All right, you’re on.
First Caller: Hi, this is Mary from Waterford, Connecticut. I hate your mutant penguins. There’s a colony of them camped right outside my house, and they smell.
I’ve never seen such aggressive birds. My children can’t play in our yard anymore because they get pecked. You people need to be put in prison.
Filip: Mary, I’m sorry you feel that way. Maybe instead of feeling so entitled to your yard, you can try to make friends with the penguins? Try learning their language. I can recommend some good tapes made by the WikiGenes Foundation.
Second Caller: Hi, this is Eric Schneider from Glendale, California. Let me tell you, watch these giant pandas dig through garbage for a few weeks, and they don’t seem so cute any more. One of them has even started to steal the tomatoes from my wife’s garden. And that constant mating, right in the street!
I can’t wait till the governor declares panda hunting season.
McComber: Mr. Filip, you’re responsible for the terror of our suburbs: the omnivorous, sex-maniac panda.
Filip: You’re not looking at it the right way. Think about it, we used to have to go to a crowded zoo to see a panda, but now they live right next to us.
McComber: But they don’t belong next to us!
Filip: Well, that seems awfully narrow-minded of you. Who really belongs here? Aren’t we all immigrants?
McComber: Oh please! Just look at the number of panda sex tapes on YouTube. What kind of environment is this for a kid growing up in the suburbs when they can’t even walk to school without seeing pandas humping?
Filip: I’m pretty sure the kids aren’t the ones complaining.
McComber: Your speedy mutant manatees are attacking motorboats down in Florida—I have personally experienced this! And the amount of penguin poop that towns have to clean up is breaking their budgets. You can’t just ignore these issues.
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