The Monsters of Heaven

The Monsters of Heaven

By Nathan Ballingrud

This is how it happened:

They were taking Dodger for a walk. Toby liked to hold the leash – he was four years old, and gravely occupied with establishing his independence – and more often than not Brian would sort of half-trot behind them, one hand held indecisively aloft should Dodger suddenly decide to break into a run, dragging his boy behind him like a string of tin cans. He probably bit off more profanities during those walks then he ever did changing a tire. He carried, as was their custom on Mondays, a blanket and picnic lunch. He would lie back in the sun while Toby and the dog played, and enjoy not being hunched over an engine block. As some point they would have lunch. Brian believed these afternoons of easy camaraderie would be remembered by them both for years to come. They’d done it a hundred times.

A hundred times.

On that day a kindergarten class arrived shortly after they did. Toby ran up to his father and wrapped his arms around his neck, frightened by the sudden bright surge of humanity; the kids were a loud, brawling tumult, crashing over the swings and money bars in a gabblings surf. Brian pried Toby’s arms free and pointed at them.

“Look, screwball, they’re just kids. See? They’re just like you. Go on and play. Have some fun. »

Monsters of Heaven. Photo by Elena

Dodger galloped out to greet them and was received as a hero, with joyful cries and grasping fingers. Toby observed this gambit for his dog’s affections and at last decided to intervene. He ran toward them, shouting. “That’s my dog! That’s my dog! » Brian watched him go, made eye contact with the teacher and nodded hello. She smiled at him – he remembered thinking she was kind of cute, wondering how old she was – and she returned her attention to her kids, gambling like lunatics all over the park. Brian reclined on the blanket and watched the clouds skim the atmosphere, listened to the sound of children. It was a hot, windless day.

He didn’t realize he had dozed until the kindergarteners had been rounded up and were halfway down the block, taking their noise with them. The playground was empty. “Toby? Hey, Toby? »

Dodger stood out in the middle of the road, his leash spooled at his feet. He watched Brian eagerly, offered a tentative wag.

“Where’s Toby?” he asked the dog, and climbed to his feet. He felt a sudden sickening lurch in his gut. He turned in a quick circle, a half-smile on his face, utterly sure that this was an impossible situation, that children didn’t disappear in broad daylight while their parents were right there. So he was still here. Of course he was still here. Dodger trotted up to him and sat down at his feet, waiting for him to produce the boy, as though he were a hidden tennis ball.

“Toby?”

The park was empty. He jogged after the receding line of kids. “Hey! Is my son with you?” Where’s my son?

The Tenth Muse

The Tenth Muse

William Browning Spencer

I needed the money, but that wasn’t my sole motivation for flying the next morning from my home in Austin, via a disorienting stopover in Dallas, to Kansas City, renting a car, and aiming that car east on 152. I was curious about what Morton Sky had to say, and, in truth, I couldn’t resist this opportunity to contemplate my past through the patina of accrued wisdom and regret. I’d always intended to return to Empire to see if it made any more sense now then it had when I was ten. This was my chance. The aging, almost irrelevant Morton Sky and his overly venerated relic of a novel would serve as the catalyst for deeper philosophical concerns.

And I’d write about my father and mother, remarkable people, volatile people. My father was, for a while, famous himself, having written a collection of poetry, Imploding, that captured the spirit of the late sixties with such passion and anarchic wit that it sold several hundred thousand copies, an extraordinary feat for a book of poetry, an unheard of feat for a book of poetry that was rigorously metrical and assumed an educated, literary background on the part of its readers.

My father wrote Imploding when we were living in Durham, where he taught literature courses at Duke University.

The Tenth Muse. Photo by Elena

I remember the students, ragged and exotic to my child’s eyes, who sat at his feet while he declaimed, waving his arms, standing on a coffee table. My father knew everything and could grab, from the air, any secret a book had ever held, and dead author’s words, any thought the mind of man had formulated in the face of the terror and beauty of the world. My father was the spokesman for all that was important. I couldn’t have articulated that when I was a kid, but I knew it is what I thought, because I still think it, reflexively, and it requires an effort of willed objectively to think otherwise.

My mother is a more elusive shape in my mind, because she is still alive, and I am older.

When we moved to Empire and rented the house near to Morton Sky, Marshall Harrison was the celebrity author, and Morton Sky was an odd, morose man tending to his dying grandmother who had been ill for years and who expired a month after our arrival.

If I could portray my father in juxtaposition to Sky, I might have something quite powerful, something worthy of a book.

The Drowned Life

The Drowned Life

By Jeffrey Ford

Hatch floated down the long empty avenues of Drowned Town, a shabby, but quiet city in a lime green sea. Every so often, he’d pass one of the citizens, bloated and blue, in various stages of decomposition, and say, “Hi”. Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn’t return his greeting. A Drowned mother and child, bulging eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn’t acknowledge him. One old woman stopped, though, and said, “Hello”.

“I’m new here,” told her.

“The less you think about it the better,” she said and drifted on her way.

Hatch tried to remember where he was going. He was sure there was a reason that he was in town, but it eluded him. “He started looking up and down the streets for a pay phone. After three blocks without luck, he saw a man heading toward him. The fellow wore a business suit and an overcoat torn to shreds, a black hat with a bullet hole in it, a closed umbrella hooked on a skeletal wrist. Hatch waited for the man to draw near, but as the fellow stepped into the street to cross to the next block, a swift gleaming vision flew from behind a building and with a sudden clang of steel teeth meeting took him in its jaws. Financial Ruin was hungry and loose in Drowned Town. Hatch cowered backward, breast stroking to a nearby dumpster to hide, but the shark was already gone with its catch.

On the next block up, he found a bar that was open. He didn’t see a name on it, but there were people inside, the door was ajar, and there was the muffled sound of music. The place was cramped and narrowed the further back you went, ending in a corner. Wood paneling, mirror behind the bottles, spinning seats, low lighting and three deadbeats – two on one side of the bar and one on the other.

The drowned life. Photo by Elena

“Got a pay phone?” asked Hatch.

All three men looked at him. The two customers smiled at each other. The bartender with a red bow tie, wiped his rotted nose on a handkerchief, and then slowly lifted an arm to point. “Go down to the grocery store. They got a pay phone at the deli counter.”

Hatch had missed it when the old lady spoke to him, but he realized now that he heard the bartender’s voice in his head, now with his ears. The old man moved his mouth, but all that came out were vague farts of words flattened by water pressure. He sat down on one of the bar stools.

“Give me something dry,” he said to the bartender. He knew he had to compose himself, get his thoughts together.

The bartender shook his head, scratched a spot of coral growth on his scalp, and opened his mouth to let a minnow out. ”I could make you a Jenny Diver… pink or blue?”

“No, Sal, make him one of those things with the dirt bomb in it… they’re the driest,” said the closer customer. The short man turned his flat face and stretched a grin like a soggy old doll with swirling hair. Behind the clear lenses of his eyes, shadows moved, something swimming through his head.

“You mean a Dry Reach. That’s one dusty drink,” said the other customer, a very pale, skeletal old man in a brimmed hat and dark glasses.” Remember the day I got stupid on those? Your asshole’ll make hell seem like a backyard barbecue if you drink too many of them, my friend.”

“I’ll try one,” said Hatch.

Mr. Boy

Mr. Boy

James Patrick Kelly

I was not only one in my family with twanked genes. My mom was a three-quarters scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. Originally, she wanted to be full-sized. But then she would have been the tallest thing in New Canaan, Connecticut. The town turned her down when she applied for a zoning variance. Her lawyers and their lawyers sued and countersued for almost two years. Mom’s claim was that since she was born human, her Freedom of form was protected by the Thirtieth Amendment. However, the form she wanted was a curtain of reshaped cells which would hang on a forty-two meter high ferroplastic skeleton. Her structure, said the planning board, was clearly subject to building codes and zoning laws. Eventually they reached the out-of-court settlement, which was why Mom was only as tall as an eleven story building.

She complained with a town’s request for a setback of five hundred meters from route 123. As Stennie’s Alpha drove us down the long driveway, Comrade broadcast the recognition code which told the robot sentries that we were okay. One thing Mom and the town agreed from the start: no tourists. Sure she loved publicity but she was also very fragile. In some places her skin was only a centimeter thin. Chunks of ice falling from her crown could punch holes in her.

Mr. Boy. Photo by Elena

The end of our driveway cut straight across the lawn to Mom’s granite-paved foundation pad. To the west of the plaza, directly behind her was a utility building faced in ashlar that housed her support systems. Mom had been bioengineered to be pretty much self-sufficient. She was green not only to match the real Statue of Liberty, but also because she was photosynthetic. All she needed was a yearly truckload of fertilizer, water from the well and a hundred and fifty kilowatts of electricity a day. Except for emergency surgery, the only time she required maintenance was the fall, when her outer cells tended to flake off and had to be swept up and carted away.

Stennie’s Alpha dropped us off by the doorbone in the right heel and then drove off to do whatever cars do when nobody is using them. Mom’s greeter was waiting in the reception area inside the foot.

“Peter”, she tried to hug me, but I dodged out of her grasp. “How are you, Peter?”

“Tired”. Even though Mom knew I did not like be called that, I kissed the air near her cheek. Peter Cage was her name for me, I had given it up years ago.

“You, poor boy, here, let me see you”. She held me at arm’s length, and brushed her fingers against my cheek. “You don’t look a day over twelve. Oh, they do such good work – don’t you think?” She squeezed my shoulder. “Are you happy with it?”

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

The Caress

The Caress

Greg Egan

So I called an on-line Britannica, and said “Lindhquistism”.

Andreas Lindhquist, 1961-2030, was a Swiss performance artist, with the distinct financial advantage of being heir to a massive pharmaceutical empire. Up until 2011, he engaged in a wide variety of activities of a bioartistic nature, progressing from generation sounds and images by computer processing of physiological signals (ECG, EEG, skin conductivity, hormonal levels continuously monitored by immunoelectric probes), to subjecting himself to surgery in a sterile, transparent cocoon in the middle of a packed auditorium, once to have them swapped back (he publicized a more ambitious version, in which he claimed every organ in his torso would be removed and reinserted facing backwards, but was unable to find a team of surgeons who considered this anatomically plausible).

In 2011, he developed a new obsession. He projected slides of classical paintings in which the figures had been blacked out, and had models in appropriate costumes and make-up strike poses in front of the screen, filling in the gaps.

Why? In his own words (or perhaps a translation): The great artists are afforded glimpses into a separate, transcendental, timeless world. Does that world exist? Can we travel to it? No! We must force it into being around us! We must take these fragmentary glimpses and make them solid and tangible, make them live and breathe and walk amongst us, we must import art into reality, and by doing so transform our world into the world of the artists’ vision.

The Caress. Photo by Elena

I wondered what ARIA would have made of that.

Over the next ten years, he moved away from projected slides. He began hiring move set designers and landscape architects to recreate in three dimensions the backgrounds of the paintings he chose. He discarded the use of make-up to alter the appearance of the models, and, when he found it impossible to find perfect lookalikes, he employed only those who, for sufficient payment, were willing to undergo cosmetic surgery.

His interest in biology hadn’t entirely vanished; in 2021, on his sixtieth birthday, he had two tubes implanted in his skull, allowing him to constantly monitor, and alter, the precise neurochemical content of his brain ventricular fluid. After this, his requirements became even more stringent. The “cheating” techniques of movie sets were forbidden – a house, or a church, or a lake, or a mountain, glimpsed in the corner of the painting being “realized”. Had to be there, full scale and complete in every detail. Houses, churches and small lakes were created; mountains he had to seek out – though he did transplant or destroy thousands of hectares of vegetation to alter their color and texture. His models were required to spend months before and after the “realization”, scrupulously “living their roles”, following complex rules and scenarios that Lindhquist devised, based on his interpretation of the painting’s “characters”. This aspect grew increasingly important to him:

The precise realization of the appearance – the surface, I call it, however three-dimensional – is only the most rudimentary beginning. It is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that follows me.

At first, it struck me as astonishing that I’d never even heard of this maniac, his sheer extravagance must have earned him a certain notoriety. But there are millions of eccentrics in the world, and thousands of extremely wealthy ones – and I was only five when Lindhquist died of a heart attack in 2030, leaving his fortune to a nine-year-old son.

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