FSF, August-September 2009

by Spilogale, Inc

  Cindy's snout itches. She smiles and scratches it and stares with bright, feral eyes at the man in overalls watering the lawn outside. He sees her watching him, and smiles back. There's the smell of cut grass in his smile, and maybe a whiff of cow shit. She bares her teeth and glares at him until he turns away.

  Slowly, slowly, she moves toward the window. Her paw fumbles with the rusted lock. Frustrated, she tries her teeth. The window snaps open with a crack like the crack of a gun. Startled, she jumps. Pain shoots through her tail as it catches on the jagged sill, but she yanks the tail free and scampers across the wet grass. The man in overalls shouts.

  Cindy crouches under the bushes, peering out, eyes laughing. A young woman runs across the lawn toward the smelly man in overalls. His arm waves wildly in Cindy's direction. Behind them, a man in white bends over the windowsill. He holds up something red. Cindy grins. The pain in her tail is already gone.

  Hunkered down, she backs out of the bush and into the warm, dark woods, yipping a greeting to the chuckling foxes. Above the shocked and frozen humans, the spray from the sprinkler rises higher and higher and turns to snow.

  Novelet: ESOTERIC CITY by Bruce Sterling

  Bruce Sterling's most recent novel, The Caryatids, was published earlier this year. His addictive blog (at blog.wired.com/sterling) includes recent posts about telepathy, e-book readers, psychological warfare, and an effort to turn “spam” into wallpaper. And his most recent story, which we are pleased to present herewith, takes us to the city where Vermouth was born.

  Was that the anguished howl of a dying dog? Or just his belly rumbling?

  Cold dread nosed at the soul of Achille Occhietti. He rose and jabbed his blue-veined feet into his calfskin slippers.

  In the sumptuous hall beyond his bedroom, the ghost-light of midnight television flickered beneath his wife's door. Ofelia was snoring.

  Occhietti's eyes shrank in the radiant glare of his yawning fridge. During the evening's game, elated by the home team's victory over the hated Florentines, he'd glutted himself on baked walnuts, peppery breadsticks, and Alpine ricotta. Yes, there it lurked, that sleep-disturbing cheese: glabrous and skinless, richer than sin.

  The fridge thumped shut and the dimly shining metal showed Occhietti his own surprised reflection: groggy, jowly, balding. The hands that gripped the crystal cheese-plate were as heavy as a thief's.

  A blur rose behind Occhietti, echoing his own distorted image. He turned, plate in hand.

  A mystical smoke gushed straight up through Occhietti's floor. Rising, roiling, reeling, the cloud gathered earthly substance; it blackly stained the grout between his kitchen tiles.

  Occhietti's vaporous guest stank powerfully of frankincense, petroleum, and myrrh.

  Resignedly, Ochietti set the cheese plate on the sideboard. He flicked on the kitchen's halogen lights.

  In the shock of sudden illumination, Occhietti's mystic visitor took on a definitive substance. He was Djoser, an ancient Egyptian priest and engineer. Djoser had been dead for three thousand years.

  Flaking, brittle, and browned by the passing millennia, the mummy loomed at Ochietti's kitchen table, grasping at the checkered cloth with ancient fingers thin as macaroni. He opened his hollow-cheeked maw, and silently wagged the blackened tongue behind his time-stained ivories.

  Occhietti edged across the ranks of cabinets and retrieved a Venetian shot glass.

  Using a sharp little fruit knife, Ochietti opened the smaller vein in his left wrist. Then he dribbled a generous dram of his life's blood into the glass.

  The mummy gulped his crimson aperitif. Dust puffed from his cracked flesh as his withered limbs plumped. His wily, flattened eyeballs rolled in their sockets. He was breathing.

  Occhietti pressed a snowy wad of kitchen towels against his tiny wound. It really hurt to open a vein. His head was spinning.

  With a grisly croak, Djoser found his voice. “Tonight you are going to Hell!"

  "So soon?” said Occhietti.

  Djoser licked the bloodstained dregs of his shot glass. “Yes!"

  Occhietti studied his spirit guide with sorrow. He regretted that their long relationship had finally come to this point.

  Once, the mummy Djoser had been lying entirely dead, as harmless and inert as dried papyrus, in the mortuary halls of Turin's Museo Egizio—the largest Egyptian museum in Europe. Then Occhietti, as a burningly ambitious young businessman, had occultly penetrated the Turinese museum. He had performed the rites of necromancy necessary to rouse the dead Egyptian. An exceedingly dark business, that; the blackest of black magic; a lesser wizard would have quailed at it, especially at all the fresh blood.

  Yet a shining lifetime of success had followed Occhietti's dark misdeed. The occult services of an undead adviser were a major advantage in Turinese business circles.

  The world's three great capitals of black magic (as every adept knew) were Lyon, the City of Heretics; Prague, the City of Alchemists; and Turin. The world also held three great centers of white magic: London, the City of the Golden Dawn; San Francisco, the City of Love;—and Turin.

  Turin, the Esoteric City, was saturated with magic both black and white. Every brick and baroque cornice in the city was shot through with the supernatural.

  He'd led a career most car executives would envy, but Achille Occhietti did not flatter himself that he ranked with the greatest wizards ever in Turin. Nobody would rank him with Leonardo da Vinci ... or even Prince Eugene of Savoy. No, Occhietti was merely the head of a multinational company's venture capital division, a top technocratic magus at a colossal corporation that had inundated Europe with a honking fleet of affordable compacts and roaring, sleekly gorgeous sports cars, a firm that commanded 16.5 percent of the entire industrial R&D budget of Italy. So, not much magic to marvel at there. Not compared to the concrete achievements of, say, Nostradamus.

  Having bound up his wounded wrist, Occhietti offered the mummy a Cuban cigar from his fridge's capacious freezer.

  Smoke percolated through cracks in the mummy's wrinkled neck. The treat visibly improved the mummy's mood. Tobacco was the only modern vice that Djoser took seriously.

  "Your Grand Master the Signore, he whom you so loyally served,” Djoser puffed bluely, “has been dead and in Hell for two thousand days."

  Occhietti wondered. “Where does the time go?"

  "You should have closely watched the calendar.” This was a very ancient-Egyptian thing to say. “Your Master calls you from his awful lair. I will guide you to Hell, for guidance of that kind has been my role with you."

  "Could I write a little note to my wife first?"

  Djoser scowled. A master of occult hieroglyphics, Djoser had never believed that women should read.

  With a sudden swift disjuncture straight from nightmare, Occhietti and Djoser were afloat in midair. Occhietti drifted through the trickling fountains of his wife's much-manicured garden, and past his favorite guard dog. The occult arrival of the undead Djoser had killed the dog in an agony of foaming canine terror.

  The two of them magically progressed downhill. The mummy scarcely moved his rigidly hieratic limbs. His sandal-shod feet left no prints, and his desiccated hands did not disturb the lightest dust. As they neared Hell, his speed increased relentlessly.

  They skidded, weightless as two dandelion puffs, down the silent, curving streets of Turin's residential hills. They crossed the cleansing waters of the sacred Po on the enchanted bridge built by Napoleon.

  Napoleon Bonaparte had drunk from the Holy Grail in Turin. This stark fact explained why an obscure Corsican artillery lieutenant had bid so fair to conquer the world.

  The Holy Grail, like the True Cross and the Shroud of Turin, was an occult relic of Jesus Christ Himself. Since the checkered Grail was both a white cup and a black cup, the Holy Grail belonged in esoteric Turin. The Holy Grail had been at the Last Supper: it was the cup that held the wine that Jesus Christ transformed into His blood. The Holy Grail had also been at Golgotha: where it ca
ught the gushing blood from Christ's pierced heart.

  The Shroud of Turin was a time-browned winding cloth soaked in the literal blood of God, but the blood that brewed within the Holy Grail rose ever-fresh. So that magical vessel was certainly the most powerful relic in Turin (if one discounted Turin's hidden piece of the True Cross, which never seemed to interest wizards half so much as the Shroud and the Grail).

  The Emperor Constantine had drunk blood from the Grail. Also Charlemagne ... Frederick the Second ... Cesare Borgia ... Christoforo Columbo ... Giuseppe Garibaldi ... Benito Mussolini, too, to his woe and the whole world's distress.

  In 1968, an obscure group of students in Turin had occupied the corporate headquarters of Occhietti's car company, demanding love, peace, and environmental responsibility. There the wretches had discovered the hidden Grail. The next decade was spent chasing down terrorists who kidnapped car executives.

  Occhietti and the mummy floated through the moony shadow of a star-tipped Kabbalist spire, which loomed over Turin's silent core. This occult structure was the tallest Jewish spire in Europe. Even with a Golem, Prague had nothing to compare to it.

  The mummy drew a wide berth around the Piazza Castello, in respect for the Pharaoh who reigned there. This stony monarch, wielding a flail and an ankh, guarded Turin's Fortress of Isis.

  At length the flying mummy alit, dry and light as an autumn leaf, in the black market of the Piazza Statuto: for this ill-omened square, the former site of city executions, held Turin's Gate to Hell.

  Hell's Gateway lurked under a ragged tower of blasted boulders, strewn with dramatic statues in sadistic Dantean anguish. This rocky tower was decorously topped by a winged bronze archetype, alternately known as the Spirit of Knowledge or the Rebel Angel Lucifer. He was a tender, limpid angel, very learned, delicate and epicene.

  As Djoser sniffed around the stony tower, seeking Turin's occult hole to Hell, Occhietti found the courage to speak. “Djoser, is Hell very different, these days?"

  Djoser looked up. “Is Hell different from what?"

  "I had to read Dante in school, of course...."

  "You are afraid, mortal,” Djoser realized. “There is nothing worse than Hell, for Hell is Hell! But I served the royal court of Egypt. I'm far older than your Hell, and Dante's Hell as well.” The mummy groped for Occhietti's pierced and aching wrist. “Lo, see here: below we must go!"

  Clearly, modern Italian engineers had been hard at work here in Hell. The casings of Hell's rugged tunnel, which closely resembled the Frejus tunnel drilled through the Alps to France, had been furnished with a tastefully minimal spiral staircase made of glass, blond hardwood, and aircraft aluminum.

  A delicate Italian techno-muzak was playing. It dimmed the rhythmic slaps of Occhietti's bedroom slippers on the stairway.

  Light and shadow chased each other on the tunnel's walls. The walls held a delirious surge of spray-bombed gang graffiti, diabolically exulting drugs, violence, and general strikes against the System—but much of that rubbish had been scrubbed away, and Turin's new, improved path to Hell was keenly tourist-friendly. Glossy signs urged the abandonment of all hope in fourteen official European Union languages.

  "Someone took a lot of trouble to upgrade this,” Occhietti realized.

  "The Olympics were in Turin,” Djoser grunted.

  "Oh yes, of course."

  Turin was an esoteric city of black and white, so its Hell was a strobing, flickering flux, under a chilly haze of Alpine fog. Being Hell, it was funereal; the afterlife was an all-consuming realm of grief, loss, penitence, and distorted, sentimentalized remembrance.

  The Hell of Turin was clearly divided—not in concentric layers of crime, as Dante had alleged—but into layers of time. The dead of the 1990s were still feigning everyday business ... they were shopping, suffering, cursing the traffic and the lying newspaper headlines ... but the dead of the 1980s were blurrier and less antic, while the dead of the 1970s were foggy and obscured. The Hell that represented the 1960s was a fading jangle of guitars and a smoky whiff of patchouli.... The 1950s were red-hot smokestacks as distant as the Apennines, while the 1940s, at the limit of Occhietti's ken, were an ominous wrangle of sirens and burning and bombs.

  Smog gushed over glum workers’ tenements, clanking factories, bloodily gleaming rivers and endless tides of jammed cars. The cars looked sharp and clear to Occhietti, for he knew their every make, year, and model; but their sinful inhabitants, the doomed and the damned, were hazy blurs behind the wheels.

  As an auto executive, Occhietti had always surmised that his company's employees would go to Hell. They were Communists from some of Europe's most radical and militant labor unions. Where else could they possibly go?

  And here, indeed, they were. Those zealots from the Workers’ Councils, self-righteous hell-raisers passionately devoted to Marxism, had all transmigrated down here. Their afterlife was one massive labor strike. The working dead were clad in greasy flannel, denim, and corduroy, cacophonous, boozing, shouting in immigrants’ dialects, a hydra-headed horde of grimy egalitarians ... packed like stinging hornets into their worker's-housing projects. They passed their eternal torment watching bad Italian TV variety shows.

  "Dante's Hell was so solemn, medieval, and majestic,” Occhietti lamented. “There's nothing down here but one huge Italian mess!"

  "This is your Hell,” his spirit guide pointed out. “Dante's Hell was all about Dante, while your Hell is all about you."

  "They claimed that the afterlife would be about justice for everybody,” said Occhietti.

  "This is an Italian Hell. Did you ever see Italian justice?” The mummy was being reasonable. “I can assure you that all the most famous and accomplished Turinese are here.” He pointed with a time-shrunken finger at a busy literary café, a local mise en scène that boiled with diabolical energies. “See those flying vulture-monsters there, shrieking and clawing both their victims, and one another?"

  "With all that noise, they're hard to miss."

  "Those are dead Italian journalists and literary critics."

  This certainly made sense. “Who's that they're eating?"

  "That's the local novelist who killed himself over that actress."

  "Fantastic! Yes, that's really him! The only writer who truly understood this town! Can I get his autograph?"

  The Egyptian raised his hierophantic hand in stern denial. “Humanity,” he pronounced, “is steeped in sin. Especially the human sins that are also human virtues. That manic-depressive novelist boozing over there, who understood too many such things, despaired of his own existence and ended it. But to kill oneself while lost in life's dark woods is the worst of human errors. So he stinks of his own decay; and that is why his vultures eagerly feast on him."

  They tramped Hell's stony flooring to a space that was garish and spangled. The smartly hellish boulevards were crowded with famous faces. All manner of local celebrities: film stars, countesses, financiers, art collectors, generals.

  These celebrities shared their Hell with the grimy underdogs of the Workers’ Turin. Yet, since this was Hell, the Great and the Good were no longer bothering to keep up their public pretenses. Human experience had ceased for the dead; their hazy flesh cast no shadows. Indifferent to futurity, with the post-existential freedom of nothing left to gain or lose, these ghosts were haplessly angry, gluttonous, slothful, and lustful. They were embezzlers, wife-beaters, brawling scoffers. Sullen depressives who'd gone to Hell for being insufficiently cheerful; moral fence sitters who'd gone to Hell for minding their own business.

  Gay and lesbian Sodomites whose awful lusts were presumably enough to have their whole city incinerated; cops in Hell for the inherent crime of being cops, lawyers for the utter vileness of being lawyers, firemen for having goofed off on some day when a child burned to death, doctors in Hell for malpractice and misdiagnosis....

  Italian women in Hell for flaunting busty decolletage that tempted men to lust, and women who had tragically failed to tempt men to
lust and had therefore ended up lonely and sad and crabby and cruel to small children.

  "Can you tell me who's missing from Hell?” said Occhietti at last. He was jostled by the crowds.

  The Egyptian shrugged irritably in the push and shove. “Do you see any Jews down here?"

  "The Jews went to Heaven?"

  "I never said that! I just said the Jews aren't in this Turinese Italian Catholic Hell!” The mummy fought the crowd for elbow room. “There were no Jews in my afterlife, either. And believe me, compared to this raucous mess, my afterlife was splendid. My nice quiet tomb had fine clothes, paintings, a sarcophagus, all kinds of wooden puppets to keep me company.... You'd think the Jews would have changed in three thousand years, but ... yes, fine, the Jews changed, but not so you'd notice."

  They clawed their way free from the pedestrian crowds of dead. The mummy was abstracted now, seeking some waymark through the dense and honking urban traffic. “I must usher you into the presence of your dead overlord. This ordeal is going to upset you."

  Occhietti was already upset. “I was always loyal to him! I even loved him."

  "That's why you will be upset."

  Occhietti knew better than to argue with Djoser. The mummy's stringent insights, drawn from his long historical perspective, had been proven again and again. For instance: when he'd first asked Djoser about marrying Ofelia, the mummy had soberly prophesied. “This rich girl from a fine family is a cold and narrow creature who feels no passion for you. She will never understand you. She will make your home respectable, conventional, and dignified, and cramped with a petty propriety.” Occhietti, considering that an overly harsh assessment, had married Ofelia anyway.

  Yet Djoser's prophecies about Ofelia had been entirely true. In fact, these qualities were the best things about Ofelia. She was the mother of his children and had been his anchor for thirty-eight years.

  Occhietti's Signore was one of a major trio of the damned, three bronze male giants, stationed in the center of a busy traffic ring. These mighty titans loomed over Hell like office buildings; the cars whizzing past their ankles were like rubber-tired rats.