Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (19 page)

“The authorities appreciate your cooperation,” Howlaa said. The Regent sniffed and walked away.

“Come, Wisp. Back to our eternal vigilance.”

“Back to the bar, you mean.”

“Just so.” Howlaa grimaced, touching zir stomach. “Shit. I’ve got a pain in my gut.”

“Are you all right?”

“Probably something I ate in another form that doesn’t agree with this one. I’ll be all right.” Howlaa shivered, stretched, and became the questing beast. We traveled.

I tried
to get some sense out of Howlaa at the bar, before zie drank too many red bulldozers, primal screams, and gravity wells to maintain a coherent conversation. I slipped a tendril into zir mind and said, “What is your plan?”

“Assume what I told the Regent is true,” Howlaa said, smiling at the human bartender, who looked appreciatively at Howlaa’s human breasts as she mixed drinks. “If things work out, it won’t matter, but if things go badly, you’ll need all the plausible deniability you can get. No reason for you to go down with me if I fail. This way you can honestly claim ignorance of my plans.”

“You want to protect me from getting in trouble with the Regent?” I said, almost touched.

Zie laughed aloud and gulped a fizzing reddish concoction. “No, Wisp. But on the off chance that they imprison me instead of putting me to death, I don’t want to be stuck in a cell with you forever.”

After that, zie wouldn’t talk to me at all, but had fun as only Howlaa on the eve of potential death can.

Zie vomited more often than usual, though.

A day
passed, and Howlaa was sober and bored at home, playing five-deck solitaire while I made desultory suggestions, before the fat man reappeared. The singing gem keened at midday. Howlaa cocked zir head, taking information from the gem.

Zie became the questing beast, and we were away.

This time we landed in the city center. The fat man sat on the obsidian steps of the Courthouse of Lesser Infractions, face turned up to the sun, smiling up at the light. He held a golden scythe across his knees, and blood and bodies lay strewn all over the steps around him, many wearing the star-patterned robes of magisters.

Howlaa did not hesitate, but traveled again, this time appearing directly in front of the fat man and lashing out with barely visible hooked appendages to grasp the killer. Then Howlaa traveled again. We reappeared in the racing precinct, startling the spectators and scattering the thoroughbred chimeras. The fat man struggled in the hoof-churned mud, his weapon gone.

I had barely overcome my disorientation before Howlaa traveled again. I knew it was Howlaa controlling the movement, for the sensation was quite different from the swirling transcendence that came when the fat man dragged us to that other world. This time we appeared in another populated area, the vaulted gray halls of the Chapel of Blessed Increase in the monastic quarter. We flickered again, Howlaa and the fat man still locked in struggle, and flashed briefly through another dozen places around the city, all filled with startled citizens—in the adder’s pit, the ladder to the stars, the moss forest, the monster farm, the glass park, the burning island. We even passed through the Regent’s inner chamber, briefly, though he was not there, and through other rooms in the palace, courtrooms, dungeons, and chambers of government. There was a fair amount of incidental damage in many of these instances, as the fat man rolled around, kicked, and thrashed.

Then we appeared in the dream engine’s chamber, and everything in my full-circle visual field wobbled and ran, either as an aftereffect of all that spatial violation, or because bringing a dream into such proximity with the dream engine set up unstable resonances.

Howlaa and the fat man thrashed right into the pulsing royal orphan in its tangle of wires. The orphan’s wings fluttered as it broke free from the mountings, and the ovoid body fell to the floor with a sick, liquid sound, like a piece of rotten fruit dropping onto pavement. The fat man broke free of Howlaa—though that wasn’t possible, so Howlaa must have let him go. He attacked Howlaa, who flickered and reappeared on the far side of the weakly pulsing royal orphan. The fat man roared and strode forward, a new weapon suddenly in his hand, a six-foot polearm covered in barbs and hooks. He tread on the royal orphan, which popped and deflated, a wet, ripe odor filling the room. The fat man swung at the unmoving Howlaa, but the weapon disappeared in mid-arc. The fat man stumbled, falling to one knee, then moaned and came apart. It was like seeing a shadow-sculpture dissolve at the wave of an artist’s hand, his substance darkening, becoming transparent, and finally melting away.

Howlaa became human, fell to zir knees, and shivered. “Feel sick,” zie said, grimacing.

I was terrified. The Regent might kill us for this. We’d stopped the fat man, yes, but at the cost of a royal orphan’s life. “We have to go, Howlaa,” I said. “Become the questing beast. I won’t try to stop you—let’s flee across the worlds. We have to get away.”

But Howlaa did not hear, for zie was vomiting now, violently, zir whole body heaving, red and milky white and translucent syrupy stuff coming from zir mouth, mingling with the ichor from the dead orphan on the floor.

The door opened. The Regent and two Nagalinda guards entered. “No!” the Regent cried. “No, no, no!” The guards seized Howlaa, who was still vomiting, and dragged zim away. I floated along inexorably behind. The Regent stayed, kneeling by the dead orphan, gently touching its unmoving rainbow wings.

“Feeling better,
traitor?” the Regent said. Howlaa sat, pale and still unwell, on a hard wooden bench before the Regent’s desk.

“A bit,” Howlaa said.

The Regent smiled. “You didn’t think I’d let you be the questing beast forever, did you? I couldn’t risk your escape. Wisp is one line of defense against that, but I felt another was needed, so I laced the blood with poison and bound their substances together. When the poison activated, your body expelled it, along with all the questing beast’s genetic material. You’ve lost the power to take that form.”

“I’ve never vomited up an entire shape before,” Howlaa said. “It was an unpleasant experience.”

“The first of many, for a traitor like you.”

“Regent,” I said, “as Howlaa’s witness, I must inform you that you are incorrect. Howlaa did not mean to harm the orphan. The fat man appeared and disappeared, and Howlaa and I were simply carried along with him. Surely there are others who can attest to that, testify that we appeared all over the city, fighting? Howlaa held on, hoping the fat man would fade and we would be taken to the world of the dreamer, but before that could happen…well. The dream engine was damaged.”

“The orphan was killed,” the Regent said. “You expect me to believe that, by coincidence, the last place Howlaa and the killer appeared was in that room?”

“We could hardly appear anywhere after that, Regent, since the dream engine was destroyed, dissolving the fat man in the process.” I spoke respectfully. “Had that not happened, I cannot tell you where the fat man might have traveled next.”

“He was a lucid dreamer,” Howlaa said. “He’d learned to move around at will. He was trying to shake me off, bouncing all over the city.”

The Regent stared at Howlaa. “That orphan was the result of decades of research, cloning, cross-breeding—the pinnacle of the bloodline. With a bit of practice, it would have been the most powerful of the orphans, and this city would have flourished as never before. We would have entered an age of dreams.”

“It is a great loss, Regent,” Howlaa said. “And we certainly deserve no honor or glory for our work—I failed to kill the dreamer. He killed himself. But I did not kill the orphan, either. The fat man trod upon it.”

“Wisp,” the Regent said. “You affirm, on your honor as a witness, that this is true?”

My honor as a witness. My honor demanded that I respect Howlaa’s elegant solution, which had saved the city further murder and also destroyed the Regent’s wicked dream engine. I think the Regent misunderstood the oath he requested. “Yes,” I said.

“Get out of here, both of you,” he said. “There will be no bonus pay for this farce. No pay at all, in fact, until I decide to reinstate you to active duty.”

“As you say, Regent,” Howlaa and I said together, and took our leave.

“You lied
for me, Wisp,” Howlaa said that night, reclining on a heap of soft furs and coarse fabrics.

“I provided an interpretation that fit the objectively available facts,” I said.

“You knew I was the one dragging the killer around the city, not vice versa.”

“So it seemed to me subjectively,” I said. “But if the Regent chose to access my memory and see things as I had seen them, there would be no such subjectivity, so it hardly seemed relevant to the discussion.”

“I owe you one, Wisp,” Howlaa said.

“I did what I thought best. We are partners.”

“No, you misunderstand. I owe you one, and I want you to take it, right now.” Howlaa held out zir hand.

After a moment, I understood. I drifted down to Howlaa’s body, and into it, taking over zir body. Howlaa did not resist, and the sensation was utterly different from the other times I had taken possession, when most of my attention went to fighting for control. I sank back in the furs and fabrics, shivering in ecstasy at the sensations on zir—on my—skin.

“The body is yours for the night,” Howlaa said in my—our—mind. “Do with it what you will.”

“Thank you.”

“You had the right of it,” Howlaa said. “We are partners. Finally, and for the first time, partners.”

I buried myself in furs, and reveled in the tactile experience until the exquisite, never-before-experienced sensation of drowsiness overtook me. I fell asleep in that body, and in sleep I dreamed my own dreams, the first dreams of my life. They were beautiful, and lush, and could not be stolen.

Afterword by Tim Pratt

“Dream Engine” is a hodgepodge story, combining various free-floating ideas I’ve had for years.

I’ve always liked weird cities—from Edward Bryant’s Cinnabar to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium to China Miéville’s New Crobuzon, and I’ve long wanted to create my own bizarre urban setting. I came up with the idea of a city at the center of a multiverse, a big messy organic sprawl built on the spinning axis of the great wheel of the multiverse, with whole discrete universes whirling around it on all sides. Conceiving of such a place raised obvious questions. How would this linchpin city be populated? How would the citizens feed and shelter themselves, how would they trade, etc.? At some point, reading about the collapse of the former Soviet Union, I came across the word “kleptocracy,” to describe a state ruled by thieves. That seemed perfect. The denizens of my city, Nexington-on-Axis, are magpies of the multiverse, snatching buildings, people, animals, and even hunks of land from passing planets, planes, and dimensions. I knew I’d hit upon a great setting, one where I could do almost anything. I wanted the city to have weirdly alien rulers and a Regent with a hidden agenda, and so I created them.

But a setting isn’t a story.

The notion of a man who kills people in his dreams—and the question of whether he would bear a moral responsibility for those murders—has fascinated me since high school, and I made a few failed attempts at writing that story over the years. I realized how I could apply that idea to my new setting, so I decided to give it a try. At that point, I had a setting, and something that could become a plot. All I needed was a protagonist.

I like detectives, from literary ones like C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Sam Spade to newer media detectives like Veronica Mars. (I’m also fond of bounty hunters, assassins, and secret agents.) A weird city like Nexington-on-Axis would need some kind of detective/enforcer, and who better than Howlaa Moor, a shapeshifting rogue of no fixed gender, who serves the state because the only alternative is death or imprisonment? (The no-fixed-gender thing did provide a challenge when it came to pronouns, so I chose to use one of the several invented gender-neutral sets of terms: “zim” instead of “him” or “her” “zir” instead of “his” or “hers,” etc.)

I’m a big fan of sidekicks, so it seemed natural to give Howlaa zir own Dr. Watson, in this case, the bodiless tattletale know-it-all Wisp. They seemed like perfect foils—Howlaa can transform into virtually any living shape, while Wisp has no physical body at all, just a charged field of floating motes.

Once I had setting, plot, and characters in mind, the story was remarkably easy to write, and it’s a world I expect to explore further. Howlaa and Wisp have a lot more adventures in them, I think.

Freddy and
I were busting our butts cleaning out his parents’ toolshed. Freddy’s father had offered us each a couple of bucks to do the work, which was fine with me. Of course, it turned out to be a lot more work than either of us counted on.

“Man, it’s amazing how much junk you can put in one of these sheds,” I said as I collapsed on the ground next to a huge stack of tools and boxes.

“Tell me about it,” Freddy said. He opened a small box. I remembered it since it had weighed about eight million pounds and I’d nearly busted my gut carrying it out of the shed.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“Fishing magazines,” Freddy said. “Dad hasn’t fished in years. Guess it goes in the recycling pile.”

I helped him drag it over. We’d decided to sort everything into three piles: recycle, keep, and throw out. Toward the end of the cleanup, I opened a box that was filled with hats.

“Hey, Dad!”
Freddy yelled toward the house. “You want any hats?”

“No,” his father called back through the open window. “Toss ’em.”

“We should keep these,” I said, lifting one of the hats from the box. It looked like a baseball cap, but it didn’t have a team name. All it said over the brim was
ENERGY.
I put it on.

And I felt great.

“Hey, let’s load those recyclables into your dad’s van,” I said.

“Hold on,” Freddy said. “I’m beat.”

“Not me,” I said, lifting the box of magazines. “I’ve got tons of—”

“Tons of what?” Freddy asked.

“Weird,” I muttered. I’d been about to say “energy.”

“What?” Freddy asked again.

I reached into the hat box and grabbed another hat. This one promised
HAPPINESS.
Before Freddy could say anything, I plunked the hat on his head.

“All right!” Freddy shouted, grinning at me. “Come on. Let’s get moving. Man, I’m glad we’re doing this.” He laughed and grabbed a box.

That was fine with me. We loaded the van. I’d just put in the last box when I heard Freddy say, “Hey, what a great surprise. There’s Millard Thwaxton. Hey, Millard, how ya doing?”

“Hold it,” I said, grabbing Freddy by the arm. But it was too late. Millard was the meanest kid in town—and Freddy just got his attention.

I snatched at Freddy’s hat, figuring he was too happy for our own good. It was stuck. I reached up and tried to get mine off. It was stuck, too, like a jar lid that’s threaded on the wrong way. I thought it might come off if I worked on it, but I didn’t have the time right now. Millard was rumbling our way.

“Keep talking,” I said, running toward the backyard. I tore through the box of hats and searched for one that might save us. I passed on
ANGER
and
CURIOSITY.
The first would get us killed and the second didn’t seem too promising, especially if it made Millard curious about the best way to cause us pain. I grabbed
KINDNESS.
That would do the trick, and make the world a better place.

I got to the front yard just in time. Millard had reached Freddy and was playing that bully game where the other player always loses.

“What did you say to me?” he asked.

“I said hi,” Freddy told him. “And I meant it. I’m awful happy to see you.”

“That some kind of a joke?” Millard asked.

“Hey, have a hat,” I said, tossing the cap to Millard.

He grabbed it and stared at me. I was afraid he’d just throw the hat away. Or throw me away. But he put it on.

He shoved it on his head. Backwards. With the brim facing away. I wondered what that would do to the kindness.

I found out right away.

“I’m gonna smash both of you,” Millard said.

Freddy and I took off. At least I had lots of energy for running. And Freddy seemed pretty happy. For the moment. But when meanness caught up with him, it wouldn’t be pretty.

Afterword by David Lubar

My first writing task each morning is to add something to my “what if” file. (OK—that’s a lie. My first writing task is to make coffee.) I have about fifty-five pages’ worth of ideas there. When I need inspiration, I’ll scroll through the entries and look for something that grabs me. “Hats Off” sprang from this entry: “What if kids get some hats that give them magical powers, but they wear the hats backwards and get the opposite effect?”

The next step of the process reminds me of playing chess. (One of the many things I do just well enough to know how bad I really am at it.) A beginner has to think through each possible move. An experienced player processes a lot of factors automatically. When I’m thinking about a story idea, the same thing happens. My mind shuffles through settings, plots, and characters, discarding weak moves and dead-end paths. I liked the idea of the kids finding the hats while cleaning a shed, but I wasn’t thrilled with the simple twist of having one of them put the hat on backwards.

I realized it would be fun for them to try to use the hat against an enemy and have the plan backfire. On a different day, with stronger coffee, the enemy could have been an ax murderer or a vampire. That day, it was a bully. You might have noticed I made another slight change to the idea. While the hats are magical, the powers they grant are mundane. I felt there was no need to double up on the magic.

So I had everything I needed. I could have built a bigger world around the idea. The characters are admittedly slight. The reader has no reason to care what happens to them. But I strongly believe two things about stories. First, they should have plots. This isn’t a problem in the genre world, but it infects the literary world to such a degree that much of what gets printed isn’t worth reading. (See
davidlubar.com/litfic.html
for a parody of this.) Second, any story that relies entirely on a simple twist should be extremely short. O. Henry knew this. So did Saki. It’s fine to encounter a twist after several pages. It’s annoying to meet one after reading for an hour. Or a week.

There you have it—an explanation nearly as long as the story itself. And no twist at all. As for the original venue of this piece, I’m thrilled that He Who Is Often Mentioned invited me to contribute two stories to each issue of his
InterGalactic Medicine Show.
What a joy. I’ve tried hard to give the readers a variety of stories, from light and goofy to truly twisted. For a much darker sample of my work, try “Running Out of Air” in the October 2006 issue of
IGMS.
I really hope it will take your breath away.