The All-Consuming

The All-Consuming

By Lucius Shepard and Robert Frazier

Mr. Akashini stood blinking, as if absorbing this information, then threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Very good! A restaurant downstairs!” He wiped his eyes. “You have mistaken my meaning. I want you to bring me food from the jungle. Here. This will help you understand.”

He crossed to the cot, where a suitcase lay open, and removed from it a thick leather-bound album, which he handed to Arce. It contained photographs and newspaper clippings that featured shots of Mr. Akashini at dinner. The text of the majority of the clippings was in Japanese, but several were in Spanish, and it was apparent from these – which bestowed upon Mr. Akashini the title of The All-Consuming – and from the photographs that he was not eating ordinary food but objects of different sorts: automobiles, among the a Rolls-Royce Corniche; works of art, including several important expressionist canvases and a small bronze by Rodin; cultural artifacts of every variety, mostly American, ranging from items such as one of Elvis Presley’s leather-and-rhinestone jump suits, a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix and Lee Harvey Oswald’s Carcano rifle – obtained at “an absurd cost,” according to Mr. Akashini – to the structure of the first McDonald’s restaurant, a meal that, ground to a powder and mixed with gruel, had taken a year to complete. Arce did not understand what had completed Mr. Akashini to enter upon this strange gourmandizing, but one thing was plain: The man was wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, and although this did not overly excite Arce, for he had few wants, nevertheless, he was not one to let an opportunity for profit slip away.

All-consuming. Photo by Elena

“I am listed in the Guinness Book of World Records,” said Mr. Akashini proudly. “Three times.” He held up three fingers to firmly imprint this fact on Arce’s consciousness.

Arce tried to look impressed.

“I intend,” Mr. Akashini went on, “to eat the Malsueno. Not everything in it, of course.” He grinned and clapped Arce on the shoulder, as if to assure him of the limits of his appetite. “I wish to eat those things that will convey to me its essence. Things that embody the soul of the place.”

“I see,” said Arce, but failed to disguise the puzzlement in his voice.

“You are wondering, are you not,” said Mr. Akashini, tipping his head to the side, holding up a forefinger like an earnest lecturer, “why I do this?”.

“It’s not my business.”

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

Personal Silence

Personal Silence

Molly Gloss

He washed out the cut in a puddle of salt water. He didn’t have anything to wrap around it. He picked up the clam shovel in one hand and held onto her cut hand with the other. They started back along the beach. He could feel her pulse in the tips of her fingers. What did you dream, he wanted to say.

It had begun to be dark. There was no line dividing the sky from the sea, just a griseous smear and below in the cream-colored lines of surf. Ahead of them Jay watched something rolling in the shallow water. It came up on the beach and then rode out again. The tide was rising. Every little while the surf brought the thing in again. It was pale, a driftlog, it rolled heavily in the shallow combers. Then it wasn’t a log. Jay let down the shovel, and Mare’s hand and waded out to it. The water was cold, dark. He took the body by its wrist and dragged it up on the sand. It had been chewed on, or shattered. The legs were gone, and the eyes, the nose. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He dragged it way up on the beach, on the dry sand, above the high tide line. Mare stood were he was and watched him.

He got the clam shovel and went back to the body and began to dig a hole beside it. The sand was silky, some of it slipped down and tried to fill the grave as he dug. In the darkness, maybe he was shoveling the same hole over and over. The shovel handle was sticky, from Mare’s blood on his palm. When he looked behind him, he saw Mare sitting on the sand, huddled with her thin knees, pulled up, waiting. She held her hurt hand with the other one, cradled.

Personal Silence. Illustration by Elena

When he had buried the legless body, he walked back to her and she stood up and he took her hand again and they went on along the beach in the darkness. He was cold. His wet shoes and his jeans grated with sand. The cut on Mare’s hand felt sticky, hot, where he clasped his palm against it.

She said, in a whisper, “I dreamed this, once.” He couldn’t see her face. He looked out, but he couldn’t see the water, only hear it in the black air, a ceaseless, numbing murmur. He remembered the look that had come in her face when she had first seen his boat-building. There are mines in the strait. He wondered if that was when she had dreamed this moment, this white body rolling up on the sand.

He imagined Mare dead. It wasn’t hard. He didn’t know what kind of a death she could have that could end the war, but he didn’t have any trouble seeing her dead. He had seen a lot of dead or dying children, written about them. He didn’t know why imagining Mare’s thin body, legless, buried in sand, brought up in his mouth the remembered salt taste of tears, or blood, or the sea.

Invaders

Invaders

By John Kessel

It was Colonel Zipp’s third session interrogation the alien. So far the thing had kept a consistent story, but not a credible one. The only thing that kept Zipp from panic at the thought of how his career would suffer if this continues was the rumor that his fellow case officers weren’t doing any better with any of the others. That, and the fact the Krel possessed technology that would re-establish American superiority for another two hundred years. He took a drag on his cigarette, the first of his third pack on the day.

“Your name?” Zipp asked.

“You may call me Flash.”

Zipp studied the red union suit, the lightning bolt. With the flat chest, the rounded shoulders, pointed upper lip, and pronounced underbite, the alien looked like a cross between Wally Cleaver and the Mock Turtle. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What is a joke?”

“Never mind.” Zipp consulted his notes. “Where are you from?”

“God has ceded un an empire extending over sixteen solar systems in the Orion arm of the galaxy, including the systems around the stars you know as Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, Alpha Centauri, and the red dwarf Barnard’s Star.”

Invaders. Photo by Elena

“God gave you an empire?”

“Yes. We were hoping he’d give us your world, but all he kept talking about was your cocaine.”

The alien’s translating device had to be malfunctioning. “You’re telling me that God sent you for cocaine?”

“No, He just told us about it. We collect chemical compounds for their aesthetic interest. These alkaloids do not exist on our world. Like the music you humans value so highly, they combine familiar elements – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen – in pleasing new ways.”

The colonel leaned back, exhaled a cloud of smoke. “You consider cocaine like – like a symphony?”

“Yes. Understand, Colonel, no material commodity alone could justify the difficulties of interstellar travel. We come here for aesthetic reasons.”

“You seem to know what cocaine is already. Why don’t you just synthesize it yourself?”

“If you valued a unique work of aboriginal art, would you be satisfied with a mass-produced duplicate manufactured in your hometown? Of course not. And we are prepared to pay you well, in a coin you can use.”

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

The Cairen PurseCar

The Cairen Purse

By Michael Moorcock

I had last been in Egypt long before the great economic convulsion following the chain-reaction of destruction or near-exhaustion of so many resources. Then Aswan had been the final port of call for the millions of tourists who cruised the Nile from dawn to dusk, the sound of their dance music, the smell of their barbecues, drifting over fields and mud villages which had remained unchanged for five thousand years.

In the 80s and 90s of the last century Aswan had possessed, among others, a Hilton, a Sheraton, a Ritz-Carlton and a Holiday Inn, but now the luckiest local families have requisitioned the hotels and only the State-owned Cataract remained, a place of pilgrimage for every wealthy enthusiast of 1930s detective stories or autobiographies of the 20th century famous. Here, during wartimes, secret meeting were held and mysterious bargains struck between unlikely participants. Today on the water below the terrace some tourists still sailed, the Israelis and the Saudis on their own elegant schoomers, while other boats carried mixtures of Americans, Italians and German French, English, Swedes, Spaniards, Japanese and Hungarians, their women dressed and painted like pagan temptresses of the local soap-operas, displaying their bodies naked on the sundecks of vast slow-moving windliners the size of an earlier era’s ocean-going ships, serving to remind every decent Moslem exactly what the road to Hell looked like. No 18th Century English satirist could have provided a better image.

Cairen Purse. Photo by Elena

As an officer of the UN’s Conservation and Preservation Department I knew all too well how little of Egypt’s monuments were still visible, how few existed in any recognisable state. Human erosion, the dam raising the water-table, the volume of garbage casually dumped in the river, the activities of archaeologists and others, of tourists encouraged in their millions to visit the great sites and bring their hard currency, the two-year Arabian war, all had created a situation where those monuments still existing were banned to everyone but the desperate restorers. Meanwhile replicas had been made by the Disney Corporation and located in distant desert settlements surrounded by vacation towns, artificial trees and vast swimming pools, built by French and German experts and named “Rameses City”, “Land of the Gods” or “Tutankhamen World”. I was sure that this was why my sister had been secretive about her team’s discoveries, why it was important to try to avoid the circumstances which now made Abu Simbel little more than a memory of two great engineering miracles.

When I had washed and changed I left the Osiris and strolled through busy evening alleys in the direction of the corniche, the restored Victorian riverfront promenade which reminded me more than anywhere of the old ocean boulevard at Yalta. Without her earlier weight of tourists, Aswan had developed a lazy, decayed glamour. The foodstalls, the fake antiquities, the flimsy headdresses and gelabeas sold as traditional costume, the souvenir shops and postcard stands, the “cafeterias” offering “Crème Teas” and “Mix Grile”, were still patronised by a few plump Poles and tomato-coloured English who had been replaced in the main by smaller numbers of blond East Africans, Swedes and Nigerians affecting the styles and mannerisms of thirty or forty years earlier and drawn here, I had heard, by a Holy Man on the outskirts of Aswan who taught a peculiar mixture of orthodox Sunni Islam and his own brand of mysticism which accepted the creeds of Jews and Christians as well as the existence of other planetary populations, and spoke of a “pure” form of Islam practised in other parts of the galaxy.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skink

By DAFYDD aB Hugh

Chapter five we meet death and Democrazy

All at once as the sun rose in the sky like a big burn, Disha stopped and I almost ran into her.

She perked her ears up and snuffled her nose toward the sun but I could not smell anything yet and there was nothing to see but a hill of meat trash and rotwood. “Come on Nik Nok” she said and started to climb through a notch in the hill.

No one called to me, but I followed anyway for I was not about to get left alone in a strange place.

Then I smelled it too, it was a dead Dog in the bottom of the hill, named Duk Duk. I had played chase and bounce with her not long before.

He was dead and he smelled of junk to me.

Disha and Nik Nok stood together all the top of the hill and I could see the Boy did not really understand death yet, for he called out to Duk Duk. Then I smelled his fear as he began to understand.

Disha must have smelled it too for she moved over to put her head against his thigh.

“Do not be afraid Nik Nok” she said “for I will protect you.”

“It is not Junkyard Dogs and falling walls that scare me” he said “but I had a funny feeling in my stomach just now. Something bad is going to come of this extra diction. I have never been away from the bowl alley and venture path before.”

Disha nuzzled his ear softly and licked it.

The Coon. Illustration by Elena

“Nik Nok you are still too young to fight wars. You go home and I will be back to play with you very soon.”

He put his arms around her neck and “I cannot let you do it alone” he said. “And I am not too young for I became a man a season ago, at night in a dream.”

I shivered and looked back at Duk Duk. There were things on him. Every so often his fur would rup and flutter like he itched but it was only the bugs and burrowers who had gotten under his skin. His eyes watched me like they knew something and said “watch us well Skunk, you will come to this in no time yourself!”

Nik Nok and Disha held each other for a little bit, and they ignored me. But I watched them with bright Skunk eyes. I had began to know in words what was happening between them. It was not Democrazy, Democrazy was what lay in the ditch with Duk Duk.