Nebula Awards Showcase 2009
Page 30
Cultural wars were fought inside and outside the science fiction field (and the House of Commons) around Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds magazine and rankles still run deep in some quarters, but whole swaths of achievement in an interlinked but disparate selection of literary endeavors would literally not have been possible without the enthusiasms, energy, and quixotic determination of Michael Moorcock. He has always been a generous, bountiful creator, producing so much work personally but also inspiring and boosting other writers (he is a great rescuer of reputations) as tirelessly as he lambastes and ridicules those he feels represent a deadening, baneful influence (he is also a great foe of humbug and cant). His anthologies of forgotten, pre-Gernsback British science fiction (England Invaded, Before Armageddon ) are as important as Hugh Greene’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in preserving a rich literary landscape that was in danger of seeming like a monoculture—not least for rescuing Saki’s masterly novel When William Came from obscurity.
Others have written in disparate genres, and managed to straddle popular culture (i.e., science fiction and fantasy) and literary fiction (i.e., taken seriously and given prizes that don’t look like spaceships), but Moorcock invented the canny notion—later appropriated by Stephen King, Philip José Farmer, and others (I plead guilty)—of tying together everything he writes into what the other Mike in the New Worlds gang (M. John Harrison) called a “meta-series.” On a commercial level, and the author who dedicated The Steel Tsar to his creditors for making its writing necessary certainly understands the commercial realities of a life of letters, this encourages the readers who like one of the books to track down everything Moorcock has ever written as if they were jigsaw pieces that have to be bought individually. But there’s also a true egalitarianism to the approach that gives a “straight” (more properly, otherly crooked) novel like Mother London the engaging, stimulating, detailed readability of the best genre fiction while allowing for seriousness of intent, wryly self-deprecating humor, and graceful prose even in the most rapidly written and disposably published fantasy paperback. Graham Greene divided his work into “novels” and “entertainments”—it’s a fair bet you’ll derive more from the latter than the former these days—but Moorcock has never been so dismissive of his work or his readers, and you’d need a mosaic or crazy-paving to map out the separate subsets and variant approaches of everything he’s ever written. You’d be best advised just to read it all, and sort it out later.
“THE PLEASURE GARDEN OF FELIPE SAGITTARIUS”
As representative of the fiction that won
him the Grand Master Award, Michael Moorcock
has selected his short story
Michael Moorcock is a British writer and musician living in Texas, France, and Spain. The author of many literary novels and stories in practically every genre, he has won and been short-listed for many awards, including the Nebula, World Fantasy, Hugo, August Derleth, Booker, Whitbread, and Guardian Fiction Award. As a member of the prog-rock band Hawkwind he won a platinum disc. As editor of New Worlds he received an Arts Council of Great Britain Award and a BSFA Award. His journalism appears regularly in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, and Spectator . He has been compared, among others, to Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, James Joyce, Ian Fleming, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard. Moorcock’s most recent books include the short story collections The Life and Times of Jerry Cornelius, London Bone, and The Metatemporal Detective, in which the following story appears.
Visit Michael Moorcock online at www.multiverse.org.
Reality, I suggested, might be merely what each one
of us says it is. Does that idea make you feel lonely, Mr.
Cornelius?
LOBKOWITZ
Recollected Dialogues
The air was still and warm, the sun bright, and the sky blue above the ruins of Berlin as I clambered over piles of weed-covered brick and broken concrete on my way to investigate the murder of an unknown man in the garden of Police Chief Bismarck.
My name is Sam Begg, Metatemporal Investigator, and this job was going to be a tough one, I knew.
Don’t ask me the location or the date. I never bother to find out things like that. They only confuse me. With me it’s instinct, win or lose.
They’d given me all the information there was. The dead man had already had an autopsy. Nothing unusual about him except that he had paper disposable lungs. That pinned him down a little. The only place I knew of where they still used paper lungs was Rome. What was a Roman doing in Berlin? Why was he murdered in Police Chief Bismarck’s garden? He’d been strangled, that I’d been told. It wasn’t hard to strangle a man with paper lungs; it didn’t take long. But who and why were harder questions to answer right then.
It was a long way across the ruins to Bismarck’s place. Rubble stretched in all directions, and only here and there could you see a landmark—what was left of the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Brechtsmuseum, and a few other places like that.
I stopped to lean on the only remaining wall of a house, took off my jacket and loosened my tie, wiped my forehead and neck with my handkerchief, and lit a cheroot. The wall gave me some shade and I felt a little cooler by the time I was ready to get going again.
As I mounted a big heap of brick on which a lot of blue weeds grew I saw the Bismarck place ahead. Built of heavy, black-veined marble, in the kind of Valhalla/Olympus mixture they went in for, it was fronted by a smooth, green lawn and backed by a garden surrounded by such a high wall I only glimpsed the leaves of some of the foliage even though I was looking down on the place. The thick Grecian columns flanking the porch were topped by a baroque facade covered in bas-reliefs showing hairy men in horned helmets killing dragons and one another apparently indiscriminately.
I picked my way down to the lawn and walked across it, then up some steps until I reached the front door. It was big and heavy, bronze I guessed, with more bas-reliefs, this time of clean-shaven characters in ornate and complicated armour with two-handed swords and riding horses. Some had lances and axes. I pulled the bell and waited.
I had plenty of time to study the pictures before one of the doors swung open and an old man in a semi-military suit, holding himself straight by an effort, raised a white eyebrow at me.
I told him my name, and he let me in to a cool, dark hall full of the same kinds of armour the men outside had been wearing. He opened a door on the right and told me to wait. The room was all iron and leather—weapons on the walls and hide-covered furniture on the carpet. Thick velvet curtains were drawn back from the window, and I stood looking out over the quiet ruins, smoked another stick, popped the butt in a green pot, and put my jacket back on.
The old man came in again and I followed him out of that room, along the hall, up one flight of the wide stairs, and into a huge, less cluttered room where I found the guy I’d come to see.
He stood in the middle of the carpet. He was wearing a heavily ornamented helmet with a spike on the top, a deep blue uniform covered in badges, gold and black epaulettes, shiny jack-boots, and steel spurs. He looked about seventy and very tough. He had bushy grey eyebrows and a big, carefully combed moustache. As I came in he grunted and put one arm into a horizontal position, pointing at me.
“Herr Begg. I am Otto von Bismarck, Chief of Berlin’s police.”
I shook the hand. Actually it shook me, all over.
“Quite a turn up,” I said. “A murder in the garden of the man who’s supposed to prevent murders.”
His face must have been paralyzed or something because it didn’t move except when he spoke, and even then it didn’t move much.
“Quite so,” he said. “We were reluctant to call you in, of course. But I think this is your speciality. Devilish work.”
“Maybe. Is the body still here?”
“In the kitchen. The autopsy was performed here. Paper lungs—you know about that?”
“I know. Now, if I’ve got it right, you heard nothing in the night—”
“What time was this?”
“Time?”
“What did the clock say?”
“About two in the morning.”
“When was the body found?”
“About ten—the gardener discovered it in the vine grove.”
“Right—let’s look at the body and then talk to the gardener.”
He took me to the kitchen. One of the windows was opened on to a lush enclosure full of tall, brightly coloured shrubs of every possible shade. An intoxicating scent came from the garden. It made me feel horny. I turned to look at the corpse lying on a scrubbed deal table covered in a sheet.
I pulled back the sheet. The body was naked. It looked old but strong, deeply tanned. The head was big, and its most noticeable feature was the heavy grey moustache. The body wasn’t what it had been. First there were the marks of strangulation around the throat, as well as swelling on wrists, forearms, and legs which seemed to indicate that the victim had also been tied up recently. The whole of the front of the torso had been opened for the autopsy and whoever had stitched it up again hadn’t been too careful.
“What about clothes?” I asked the Police Chief.
Bismarck shook his head and pointed to a chair standing beside the table. “That was all we found.”
There was a pair of neatly folded paper lungs, a bit the worse for wear. The trouble with disposable lungs was that while you never had to worry about smoking or any of the other causes of lung disease, the lungs had to be changed regularly. This was expensive, particularly in Rome where there was no State-controlled Lung Service as there had been in most of the European City-States until a few years before the War when the longer lasting polythene lung had superseded the paper one. There was also a wrist-watch and a pair of red shoes with long, curling toes.
I picked up one of the shoes. Middle Eastern workmanship. I looked at the watch. It was heavy, old, tarnished, and Russian. The strap was new, pigskin, with “Made in England” stamped on it.
“I see why they called us,” I said.
“There were certain anachronisms,” Bismarck admitted.
“This gardener who found him, can I talk to him?”
Bismarck went to the window and called: “Felipe!”
The foliage seemed to fold back of its own volition, and a cadaverous dark-haired man came through it. He was tall, long faced, and pale. He held an elegant watering can in one hand. He was dressed in a dark green, high-collared shirt and matching trousers. I wondered if I had seen him somewhere.
We looked at one another through the window.
“This is my gardener, Felipe Sagittarius,” Bismarck said.
Sagittarius bowed, his eyes amused. Bismarck didn’t seem to notice.
“Can you let me see where you found the body?” I asked.
“Sure,” said Sagittarius.
“I shall wait here,” Bismarck told me as I went towards the kitchen door.
“Okay.” I stepped into the garden and let Sagittarius show me the way. Once again the shrubs seemed to part on their own.
The scent was still thick and erotic. Most of the plants had dark, fleshy leaves and flowers of deep reds, purples, and blues. Here and there were clusters of heavy yellow and pink.
The grass I was walking on felt like it crawled under my feet, and the weird shapes of the trunks and stems of the shrubs didn’t make me want to take a snooze in that garden.
“This is all your work is it, Sagittarius?” I asked.
He nodded and kept walking.
“Original,” I said. “Never seen one like it before.”
Sagittarius turned then and pointed a thumb behind him. “This is the place.”
We were standing in a little glade almost entirely surrounded by thick vines that curled about their trellises like snakes. On the far side of the glade I could see where some of the vines had been ripped and the trellis torn. I guessed there had been a fight. I still couldn’t work out why the victim had been untied before the murderer strangled him—it must have been before, or else there wouldn’t have been a fight. I checked the scene, but there were no clues. Through the place where the trellis was torn I saw a small summerhouse built to represent a Chinese pavilion, all red, yellow, and black lacquer with highlights picked out in gold. It didn’t fit with the architecture of the house.
“What’s that?” I asked the gardener.
“Nothing,” he said sulkily, evidently sorry I’d seen it.
“I’ll take a look at it anyway.”
He shrugged but did not offer to lead on. I moved between the trellises until I reached the pavilion. Sagittarius followed slowly. I took the short flight of wooden steps up to the verandah and tried the door. It opened. I walked in. There seemed to be only one room, a bedroom. The bed needed making, and it looked as if two people had left it in a hurry. There was a pair of nylons tucked half under the pillow and a pair of man’s underpants on the floor. The sheets were very white, the furnishings very oriental and rich.
Sagittarius was standing in the doorway.
“Your place?” I said.
“No.” He sounded offended. “The Police Chief’s.”
I grinned.
Sagittarius burst into rhapsody. “The languorous scents, the very menace of the plants, the heaviness in the air of the garden, must surely stir the blood of even the most ancient man. This is the only place he can relax. This is what I’m employed for.
“He gives me my head. I give him his pleasures. It’s my pleasure garden.”
“Has this,” I said, pointing to the bed, “anything to do with last night?”
“He was probably here when it happened, but I . . .” Sagittarius shook his head and I wondered if there was something he’d meant to imply that I’d missed.
I saw something on the floor, stooped, and picked it up. A pendant with the initials E.B. engraved on it in Gothic script.
“Who’s E.B.?” I said.
“Only the garden interests me, Herr Begg. I do not know who she is.”
I looked out at the weird garden. “Why does it interest you—what’s all this for? You’re not doing it to his orders, are you? You’re doing it for yourself.”
Sagittarius smiled bleakly. “You are astute.” He waved an arm at the warm foliage that seemed more reptilian than plant and more mammalian, in its own way, than either. “You know what I see out there? I see deep-sea canyons where lost submarines cruise through a silence of twilit green, threatened by the waving tentacles of predators, half-fish, half-plant, and watched by the eyes of long-dead mermen whose blood went to feed their young; where squids and rays fight in a graceful dance of death, clouds of black ink merging with clouds of red blood, drifting to the surface, sipped at by sharks in passing, where they will be seen by mariners leaning over the rails of their ships. Maddened, the mariners will fling themselves overboard to sail slowly towards those distant plant-creatures already feasting on the corpses of squid and ray. This is the world I can bring to the land—that is my ambition.”
He stared at me, paused, and said: “My skull—it’s like a monstrous fish bowl!”
I nipped back to the house to find Bismarck had returned to his room. He was sitting in a plush armchair, a hidden HiFi playing, of all things, a Ravel String Quartet.
“No Wagner?” I said and then: “Who’s E.B.?”
“Later,” he said. “My assistant will answer your questions for the moment. He should be waiting for you.”
There was a car parked outside the house—a battered Volkswagen containing a neatly uniformed man of below-average height. He had a small toothbrush moustache, a stray lock of black hair falling over his forehead, black gloves on his hands which gripped a military cane in his lap. When he saw me come out he smiled, said, “Aha,” and got briskly from the car to shake my hand with a slight bow.
“Adolf Hitler,” he said. “Capta
in of Uniformed Detectives in Precinct XII. Police Chief Bismarck has put me at your service.”
“Glad to hear it. Do you know much about him?”
Hitler opened the car door for me, and I got in. He went round the other side, slid into the driving seat.
“The Chief?” He shook his head. “He is somewhat remote. I do not know him well—there are several ranks between us. Usually my orders come from him indirectly. This time he chose to see me himself.”
“What were they, his orders, this time?”