“What the hell! Take what? If you want my wallet—"
“He's a Yank, Liam,” another man said. “Leave him be."
“Yes! I'm an American, I'm wearing—” Wilbur screamed. His keen nose told him that the gun had been made in Sweden and shipped by way of Libya before it shredded his insides.
“Sure and he sounded like a Yank, Liam."
“Bloody black Protestant Belfast murtherer,” Liam said. “Been watching fooking Simpsons on telly, that's all, to copy the accent. I can smell his lot a mile away."
* * *
Self-Restraint
Timothy Stilson's parents discovered 614 new varieties of insect before being laid low by one too common for their notice. Timothy buried them near the shack where he was born and mourned them on his hike downriver to the mission, where the mailboat came once a month.
“You will find many things to dislike about civilization,” Father Texeira said, “and they will do you no harm. It is the things you will like that you must beware of."
Timothy knew all about civilization. When they had not been instructing him in entomology and the lesser sciences, its horrors had been his parents’ constant theme.
“Has the world come under the iron fist of one monolithic tyranny yet, Father?” That had been his mother's fondest nightmare.
“No, unhappily. Each man attends the voice of his own heart, Satan's favorite impersonation."
Timothy's mother had written a book contrasting the world of insects with the skewed hills heaped by humans. Eager to hear the worst, people bought it in such numbers that the Stilsons quit their academic posts and made their lives one long field-trip on a tentative trickle of the Amazon.
They had always meant to return, for Timothy would need playmates—but he played without them; classmates—but he learned without them; a mate—and here the Stilsons conceded that the field-trip was over. Even so, his mother had almost convinced herself that some of the young ladies at the mission were really quite nice, and that a young man could have worse in-laws than headhunters and cannibals. She had dreaded going home to find that her prophecies had come true; or that they had not. Timothy had to see for himself.
The mailboat whistle howled at the end of the dock. Parrots and Indians clamored in response. Father Texeira smiled when Timothy winced.
“One of Hell's minor airs,” the priest explained. “You have yet to savor its masterpiece, scored for siren, radio, jackhammer and auto-horn."
Timothy surveyed gridlocked toys. “It's not at all noisy up here."
“The improvement it gains with distance,” the lawyer said, “is our chief stimulus for advancement in the firm. Have you yourself considered a choice of career?"
“I brought my parents’ work with me. Putting it in order for publication will take years."
“There's no money in that sort of thing. Unless your mother's papers include a sequel to her book, one comparing civilized hypocrisy with the healthy, sexual abandon of naked savages...?"
Though naked, Timothy explained, all the savages he knew were malnourished dwarfs who passed their short lives in a stupor of terror that they might overlook one of their innumerable taboos.
“Fortunately, you don't need money. If you would direct your attention...."
Timothy settled in a chair and listened to the reasons why he would remain wealthy unless he meddled with his capital or questioned his advisors. The lecture was interrupted by a man who burst into the office and strode to the desk. Surprised and angry, the lawyer opened his mouth to protest.
“Simon sent me,” the intruder said.
Instantly mollified, the lawyer said, “I am at your service."
“In the matter of United States v. Amalgamated Invultuations, you will arrange to lose."
Timothy had heard about bad manners, but he had never seen them displayed. As if to make sure that his arrogance was appreciated, the stranger turned to stare at him. Timothy resolutely studied the bottoms of clouds and the tops of skyscrapers beyond the window.
“As you wish,” the lawyer said. When the other had left, he resumed his inventory of Timothy's assets.
“What a rude man!"
“Excuse me?"
“I assume he's your superior, but even so—"
“Who is?'
“Mr. Simon, or the man he sent to interrupt you."
“No person of that name is associated with the firm of Rackwright, Spanielson & Cutpurcell, and only you, Mr. Stilson, have interrupted me."
Since the lawyer's perplexity seemed genuine, Timothy supposed that such intrusions were so common as to be immediately forgotten. He had observed a similar phenomenon last night, when the relatives with whom he was staying professed amnesia upon being asked to explain a television commercial they had all just watched.
The lawyer asked, “Are you unwell?"
“I'm all right. Do you represent something called Amalgamated Invultuations?'
“The firm does. I'm surprised you should have heard of that case, it involves an obscure point of anti-trust law—a nuisance, really. The action was brought under a previous administration, and the present one would rather forget about it. But—"
“Then you hope to win?"
“It will never come to court."
Timothy had shipped his parents’ research materials to the great university near Boston where they had taught. When he followed the shipment, he found confusion. The university could give him no space to sort out the work, much less pay him for doing it, because he didn't even have a degree, for heaven's sake.
He was undeterred. After demonstrating general knowledge consistent with a bachelor's degree and a grasp of entomology as firm as that of a distinguished professor, he was given a job assisting that professor in organizing his parents’ slides, notebooks and specimens.
Timothy worked alone in a dusty carrel where the professor would dodder every so often, trailing ashes and disruption. He had earned a doctorate by the time his mentor died, and it occurred to no one else to disturb him.
Some months after his meeting with the lawyer, he read that Amalgamated Invultuations, Inc., had been fined a stupendous amount of money and ordered to divest itself of itself.
The daughters of Boston were in some ways more desirable than those of Amazonia, but Timothy doubted they could be won by gifts of pigs or gin, and he spent a long time pondering alternative approaches. He at last visited a bar where he had been told he might encounter unescorted young ladies. He struck up a conversation with a beautiful undergraduate who dazzled him with the assertion that she was into bugs.
While they swapped pleasantries about the life-cycle of Culex melanura that soon grew giddily ambiguous, Timothy was distracted by a man across the room who stared at his new friend with the total but dispassionate interest that he brought to his own skewered specimens. Even in a place where one came to be noticed, his stare was overbold. Timothy interposed his back.
He forgot the incident, but then the man shouldered his way between them. He spoke to the beautiful student, and they left the bar together. She gave Timothy not so much as a parting glance.
He was too shaken to be angry or hurt. He ordered a shot of rye, as cowboys did in the westerns he had come to love, and swallowed it whole. The bartender was flustered, for Timothy, taking his cue from the student, had been drinking banana daiquiris.
“You know, you look like Robert Redford,” said a young woman at his side.
“I'm sorry, you're mistaken. I am not he."
Although his conviction dwindled in the cold silence of Charles Street, he believed the interloper had said, “Simon sent me,” and the student had replied, “I am at your service.” But the bar had been noisy; he was unused to alcohol; the man, speaking quietly, had faced away from him; and the woman had swallowed her vowels, as she had been trained to do at Wellesley, to the point of incoherence.
He neglected his work to spend days in disquieting thought. While growing up, he had been denied certain things tha
t had deluged the civilized world: aerosol sprays, the Beatles, Coca Cola, plastic, strobe lights, toilet paper, X-rays, yogurt, zipcodes. The list was endless, but as he added to it, he subtracted items from his apartment, his carrel and his life. Any one of them might contain a drug or a suggestion that had turned most people into zombies, activated to blind obedience by the words, “Simon sent me."
After he had painted the windowpanes of his apartment black, his landlady volunteered the suggestion that he might be losing his mind, so he consulted a psychiatrist.
“Subliminal persuasion is, of course, possible,” the psychiatrist said. “Experiments were once conducted with messages flashed on movie screens—"
“We had no movies. That's the point."
“—but even assuming methods I've not heard of, even assuming that drugs were used to enhance receptivity and that the suggestions were relentlessly reinforced, only a small, a minuscule percentage of the population would succumb."
Gratified by the tentative relief on Timothy's face, the psychiatrist leaned back in his chair and asked, “What was the phrase you heard, the one that triggered this submissive state?"
"Simon sent me."
The doctor's face abruptly lost all expression. Timothy shivered at the fancy that he was alone with a mere thing. It said, “I am at your service."
“Don't send me a bill."
He could expose the invasion, the coup, the conspiracy, whatever it was, but to whom: to Father Texeira and his flock, or to some equally forlorn pockets neglected by the conquerors? He could use his knowledge selfishly, but he might get caught, and the arrogance shown by the world's secret rulers suggested ruthlessness. Besides, if he plunged into the press of humankind to command power, fame and love with the sovereign phrase, he would expose himself to the influence that had enslaved everyone else. If he used his freedom, lonely horror though it was, he might lose it.
Shunning human contact, renouncing an encyclopedic list of civilization's suspect fruits, he blended into the tweed-eroded woodwork of the university. Only the computer that sent him a check every two weeks knew his name. Hoarding his power against the day he might need it, he collated, checked, annotated, catalogued, cross-indexed and revised until the pages of his parents’ notebooks turned yellow, the ink faded to gray and the wings that had once scribbled silver subtitles on the green pageant of the Amazon crumbled to his no longer steady touch.
“
Sit down, please, Dr. Stilson,” the head of the department said, “and tell me what you've been doing with yourself all these years."
“Eh?"
She repeated her request more loudly. Timothy complied, his voice creaking from disuse.
“And you have never published any of this material?"
“Why, no ... years ... it will take years before it reaches that ... ah ... stage.” He wagged his head gravely. “Years."
Her tone was not unkind, but her words cut: “I'm going to ask Dr. Wittol to evaluate your work and bring it to some sort of conclusion."
Not having troubled to speculate on the reason for this interview, he had seen it as a petty nuisance. It was as if one of the foot-tangling holes in his living room carpet had revealed itself as the mouth of hell.
“You can't do that!” He knew she could. “That was my parents’ work, their life—my life."
“In the agreement—” she produced a document from his dossier, handling it with the care and with even some of the wonder she might have brought to the original Magna Carta—"you donated your materials to the university. You were supposed to have produced a book, a monograph, a letter to a scientific journal, a simple list—anything. It was a unique arrangement, and I cannot imagine how it has escaped review, but you have taken more time to publish than Darwin did. May I have your keys?"
“Wait a moment.” The dreaded time had come. He tried to speak but could not. He swallowed and managed to whisper: “Simon sent me."
She stared. He found that he could stop his hands from shaking by clenching them, but then the rest of him shook.
He chuckled bitterly, or meant to: the odd noise that he produced startled them both. The one time he needed the power, it had failed him. She was immune, the code had been changed, he had outlived the conspiracy, or—but this was intolerable—he had thrown his life away on a misapprehension.
She said, “What did you say?"
Another explanation struck him: she was of the elite. If so, he was damned already. Clearly and firmly, he enunciated: "Simon sent me."
“I am at your service."
“The arrangement will continue."
“As you wish.” She closed his folder and put it aside. In the next instant she stared at it as if it had dropped onto her desk from the moon, but she recovered quickly. “What—forgive me—was I saying?"
Timothy shrugged and smiled.
“I'm sorry I interrupted your work.” Obviously, her lapse of memory embarrassed her. “But it was so pleasant to talk with you at last, doctor, to speak with a—I hope you don't mind—a legend. You know, you remind me of a popular actor when I was a girl. You're much older than he was then, of course...."
Caught dozing, Timothy feigned alertness by producing a childhood memory of his own: “I knew a cannibal's daughter once who had eyes like black cherries.” He nodded vigorously as he struggled, with much less vigor, to rise. “Black cherries. They're safe enough, if you know where to buy them."
“I'm sure.” Now she looked as if he, too, had dropped from the moon.
He jammed his cap down on his bald head, carelessly crumpling the aluminum-foil that was his main line of defense against lasers and microwaves. She was too polite to comment when he removed it and nudged the foil back into shape.
* * *
The Return of the Colossus
The situation was looked upon by the more superstitious as a veritable omening of the world's end.
—Clark Ashton Smith: “The Colossus of Ylourgne."
In the spring of 1916, to his intense chagrin, Lt. Cyril Fairchild of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was seconded to an experimental warfare unit and despatched on what seemed a fool's errand to the untroubled province of Averoigne.
Cyril was a very young man who looked younger, with the azure eyes and flaxen locks of a Botticelli angel. His men, who had attained their stunted trollhood in the shadows of lowering coal-tips, at first sniggered over the unspeakable uses to which such a lovely lad might be put in the pits. The blood that pinkened Cyril's downy cheeks and rose-petal lips, however, flowed undiluted from the veins of Hengest and Horsa; and in his first action, a trench-raid of medieval intimacy, he proved himself a very devil.
Whatever credit his daring earned him with his men was immediately squandered when he drew his Webley to keep them from bayoneting prisoners. His chivalry was rewarded with the nickname “Little Hansel,” combining the slanders that he was a fairy-tale youth, too good to be true, and possibly an agent of the Kaiser. Cyril could sense the indictment in the whispered asides or sober expressions of the other ranks. “They are basically decent chaps, and the gamest lot you would ever want beside you in a scrap,” he noted in one of his frequent letters to his fiancee, Penelope Delapoer, “but lack a proper appreciation of their place in the natural order."
He had been looking forward to a big show brewing near the Somme for a chance to redeem himself when orders whisked him to a chateau in the rear, where a don-in-uniform confused him with hints, questions, tags from Horace and readings in decayed Latin from a mouldy book. A steel engraving in this book, of a piece with its depictions of gryphons and mermaids, showed a giant that was fabled to have ravaged Averoigne in bygone times. As one convinced that all legends conceal more than a grain of truth (the war may have distracted him from a quest for relics of the historical Cinderella), the unlikely officer actually believed this bollocks.
Cyril wondered if his detested nickname had not recommended him for this mission. “As we have no Jack-the-Giant-Killers among our less in
dispensable subs, this is clearly a task for Little Hansel,” he could almost hear Major Brashley telling the brigadier.
“Your men dig, don't they?” the don-in-uniform asked. Cyril was accompanied by a vexing trio, Privates Powell and Thomas and Corporal Jenkins, who insisted on viewing their respite from punishing the Hun as a lark. He answered, thinking of trenches and latrines, “Assiduously, Sir."
“Good, good. It's underground, or so this Father Nathaire tells us.” He studied a letter but did not share its specifics. “Miners, they may be the thing, so send for as many more as you need. But first go to St. Azédarac, talk to this padre, and see what you can dig up.” He gave a series of asthmatic whinnies, as if that were a rich joke.
St. Azédarac was a toybox whose cone-topped towers and crenelated walls had yet to suffer from the tantrums of the adolescent century. The girls in starched linen and wooden clogs, the mustached widows in perpetual mourning, even the dray-horses that steamed in a prickling mist seemed to be waiting patiently for Albrecht Dürer to come and sketch them. Plucked from a world of mud and noise, Cyril found the green radiance of the surrounding hills, the bleating of lambs and the restive clanking of cowbells almost balefully alien to a modern sensibility. Jenkins and Thomas and Powell sensed this, too, for the archaic swagger they adopted in the cobbled streets suggested harquebusiers on leave from the Religious Wars, who would not be trifled with by civilian ghosts.
Father Nathaire suited his parish. His bulging eyes and translucent skin were those of an Inquisitor who had denied himself all in the dogged extraction of Truth. Expecting a steep descent into the dark hall of his rectory, Cyril nearly sprawled flat, for the priest's large and waxy face gleamed below the twisted shoulders of a child-sized body that a black cassock rendered nearly invisible.
The four young men were nevertheless forced to stretch their legs to keep up with his remorseless scuttle up the steep hill overlooking the town. When they paused gratefully for red wine, crusty bread and a local cheese that Cyril found sublime—but, “This cheese smells like my feet,” Thomas muttered—the priest said, “The Colossus was the work of Satan. To use it against his more evil creations is no more than just."
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