Right

(Doyce's Story)

It wasn't meant to be bad. The kind of people who come up with these kinds of ideas aren't the kind of people who can mean for them to be used the way they inevitably will be used. Perhaps it's a kind of protection for the human race: the creators can only be duped for so long before they cut off the source of their creativity. Ideas and ideals go together like...well, if I think of something, I'll let you know.

But then someone comes along after them and says, "You know, that shiny thing over there? Now, that would make a great weapon." Or, "a lot of money."

My brother? He's the first type.

I'm not.

Greg's a neuroscientist. A genius. He made this headband that can somehow tell what it is that you most need to do--and then it compels you to do it. Hey, useful stuff, right? Imagine the kind of good you could do if you just put this in the hands of a psychologist. Or a priest. Or a doctor. Anybody, really. Because it doesn't make you do what I (for instance) think you need to do. Just what you need to do. Greg has the prototype. He wears it all the time. Keeps him focused. He doesn't have to worry about stopping to eat, because when it's time, he'll eat. Simple as that. There's no pain or anything. It just makes you.

There are a couple of safeguards built in. It cuts out if you try to something majorly illegal (although not necessarily immoral), like killing someone or yourself, and it can't be preprogrammed or overridden. Failsafe. Foolproof.

Right?

I may or may not go on with this...we'll see.

Filing System of the Gods, Part IV

Back on Odin's shoulders, Munin doesn't so much as stick his beak in Odin's ear before Odin starts ruminating about Baldur's last day. The great, one-eyed face droops lower and lower, until tears roll down his cheeks and disappear into his beard, and he snuffles like a great, big beagle.

Normally, this is where Hugin takes over--Thought, you know. But not today. He has something else on his mind: The Filing System of the Gods.

Being Thought, Thought with a Capital T, Hugin likes to read books. Philosophy, physics, calculus...well, sometimes an Enquirer, too. Just for fun. He'd rather peck out eyeballs. But a tabloid is a good, close-second option. Sometimes he musses a page or two, but that's because he's using his beak, and, like all truly thoughtful people, he doesn't really pay attention to what he's doing.

Anyway, one of the books he's read is about memories (lower case) and how to organize them: using a house or some other familiar structure, the memories are associated with mental images--mistletoe with Baldur, maybe--and gathered in rooms.

While the book was speaking (figuratively speaking) figuratively, there shouldn't be any reason it couldn't work literally, too.

The only problem is where...where...

Then a bright idea hits Hugin, and it's such a bright idea that he completely loses his balance and topples off Odin's shoulder with a squawk!

Mugin looks back at him, dangling precariously (and upside-down) from a tangle of Odin's gray hair and dark cloak.

"What--" Caw! "--are you doing?" Caw! Caw! Caw! Munin's laughing so hard he almost drops a fat one on Odin's shoulder.

But then Hugin wraps his wings around himself and starts to cawkle, trying to keep the idea in and shaking so hard he finally does lose his grip and crash to the floor, and Munin begins to almost get frightened...

Sleepless in Sideways

(fragment)

I have this talent for sideways time, so when I graduated from high school, I got recruited by TimeLines Unlimited, Inc. Which is just a glorified bus company, for shuttling people around. Since most people can't do sideways time, we just load 'em up on the bus and let them "sleep" the whole time I'm driving. Poof! Instantaneously in New York City. Poof! Instantaneously in Dallas! While yours truly spends twenty-seven hours driving their corpselike bodies from here to there.

I'm based out of Omaha. Great place. Better than Sioux City, anyway. I don't complain--much--I mean, I could be driving cows. Live cows. Dead cows. Pigs are scary. Some of them don't sleep.

Anyway, I was on the route from New-New Orleans to Minneapolis and all stops between, just minding my own business, when I noticed one of the passengers was awake. Bugger, thinks I. I won't be able to stop in Memphis and boost a few ribs this trip. But I keep driving, because I don't want to let him know that I know, you know?

Bibliophage, Part IV

At first, it was shocking to see Martin--but she called him the Bibliophage--eat her books.

First, he would inhale, savoring each part of the book, sometimes individual pages. Then he would remove the pages--either with a scalpel or by hand, keeping the edges as neat as possible--a sensual purr of torn fiber. And then, while he soaked the binding in a mixture of warm water and salt, he ate the pages, tearing them into bite-sized pieces, almost absent-mindedly, while chatting with Marina about books he had eaten, books only he remembered now.

There didn't seem to be any magic involved.

The first book he had eaten was, naturally enough, a children's primer, back in 1943, its pages already warped from the drool of his two older brothers (whom he had not seen in years). The best book he'd eaten was a copy of the Bible, too common to itself disappear, but populated with the family tree of one of the women killed in Salem, Massechusetts, as a witch; it had also contained pressed wildflowers and a few lines of erotic poetry addressed to another girl's boy-friend, rhyming skin with sin and again and again.

The Chandler?

Marina felt the book--that is, the book's name, which was all she knew of it--lift out of her, like a bird in flight, somewhere between the mastication of pages 107 and 108. But the memory of her husband, handing her the book, smiling, kissing her forehead, etc., etc.--all of that remained, as liminal and pervasive as ever.

Marina knew then that Martin must be killed.

Bibliophage, Part III.

"A burglar? Of a sort," the man whispered. His voice was as worn as Marinas, but rougher. "My name is Martin. I'm here to kill you and eat your books."

"My books?" she asked. "You're going to eat my books?" At that, she stepped forward, flicked on the lights, and took a good look at the man, in case she should need to describe him to the police.

He was tall and spare; both his cheeks were scarred and hollow, as if his babyfat had been cut away with a dull knife and patched back together with a soldering iron directly onto live flesh. His fingers were like divining rods, long, wide-spread, and jerking toward the floor at odd moments, making the light flash (laboriously) from the rusty chef's knife as he talked.

"I am a book-eater," he said. "I steal into houses and kill the owners; then I take the books I want and steal them away to eat them. Of note: they must be rare books. Forgotten books. Because when I eat a book, it stays eaten, unless it is a common book. I have been passionately fascinated with Pride and Prejudice, but its taste is hollow, overstretched.

"A certain book dealer tells me which houses I want...he often has the pick of everything I'm forced to leave behind."

"Samson," Marina lisped under her breath.

The man nodded.

But a plan had already formed in her mind. "Follow me," she said, and led him toward the guest room, and the Chandler.

Bibiophage, Part II

Marina's voice had faded years ago; for days at a time she was completely silent. She coughed, and the stranger, a dark man half-buried in shadows, glanced at her: the whites of his eyes flicked at her, flicked away.

"The drawers are all full of books," he said. "Where are the knives?"

Marina lowered herself down the stairs as if into a slippery bath. "To the left. Bottom drawer. Under By the Light of the Fairy Moon, by Arthur Miller. Poetry."

The man opened the drawer, pulled out the book, ruffled its pages. His nostrils may have widened to take in the scent of its slowly decaying pages. "First edition?"

Marine nodded, and the intruder set the book aside slowly, brushing its cover with his fingers, as if promising it to himself for later.

The knife was old and, shamefully, spotted with rust.

"Don't you have--?"

Marina shrugged. "I'm old. Two orderlies bring my meals to the door, already hot. And I never liked to cook. I keep it around in case I need to cut the tape on a package."

"He said you'd have a lot of books, but--" He gestured with the knife.

"This is--yes, it's 1984. The year I finally admitted I was old and no longer needed to go through the motions of fussing around in here."

"1984?"

Marina explained about the years. "Not many books in this lot I would mind losing, to tell you the truth," she said. "Sometimes--but what are you doing here? Are you a burglar?"

Bibliophage, Part I

Marina's library was organized by date. The date she had acquired the book, the date she had first read it, the date of the last time she read it, the date she had last lovingly run her fingers down its spine, wondering whether she'd have time to read it again before she died. As you might imagine, the books' positions changed over the years, with some books completely forgotten, stacked helter-skelter in the cellar's former wine racks.

Or almost completely forgotten.

It was a dark and rainy night, and Marina was lingering in the guest room, next to the shelf of 1957s, wondering whether she would be able to work up the courage to finally read the last book her husband, Rinaldo, had given her before his death (an obscure black comedy by Raymond Chandler, called The Wax Museum, published in 1956 by Auden Press), when she heard the glass shatter in the kitchen downstairs.

Glad of the interruption, she discovered an unusual figure (but what burgalur is usual?) rummaging through the drawers--in search of a knife, as it turned out.

"Excuse me?" she whispered.

Filing System of the Gods, Part III

With the echo of that statement still ringing back from old shields for miles around, Munin grandly picks up his left claw and half-lurches, half-flaps from the smeared old helm he's been hogging toward a white spear (Hugin thinks) thrusting out of a pile of armor.

"The bright helm to the...thigh bone!" Munin chants. The he lurches right, towards and insect mound covered with dark shapes that normally swarm through dead flesh like it was mulch. "The thigh bone to the...beetle mound!"

Hugin follows Munin around the field of the dead, staying one hop behind.

"The pearly ring to the...scarred sword!"

"The red scarf to the...letter home!"

"It's piiiink," Hugin cawed. But softly. Because, deep inside, he knows, knows beyond all shadow of a doubt (and Hugin, there's a raven who can doubt), that if he interrupts Munin, they're going to have to start all over again.

"The icy horns to the...golden shield! And here's the memory of Baldur!"

Munin is standing o'er a shield bearing the sign of the golden disk of the sun. He lifts his beak up high in the air and strikes it down on the shield, which lets out a bell-like peal, a terrible, iron sound, and the memory of Baldur falling to the ground, pierced by Loki's mistletoe spear (but thrown by an innocent hand) gasps over his soul like the wind that howls over the body of a coward.

Hugin can see Munin opening and closing his beak, but he (thankfully) can't hear a single noise out of that overblown peacock.

The Love Tree.

(Dale's idea.)

After Dr. Methuselah's wife, Candy, died, he went a little crazy. A little mean, a little maudlin. He mixed the genes of a weeping willow with a few DNA strands harvested from the hair of his late wife, weaving in a passel o' nanotech...

The first love tree seeded itself on top of Candy's grave. Satisfied, Dr. Methuselah killed himself.

The tree grew tall and lovely, with long limbs and leaves of peaceful sussuruss. And, after the course of a few seasons, it came to bear the most unusual nuts, the exterior of which resembled hazelnuts, spiny and vicious. The nut, however, was the color of brass, and hinged. Upon opening the nut, one would find a membrane, delicately balanced, that would always point true -- toward the holder's true love.

Some called the tree a blessing; others, a menace. But always the membrane would point toward the true love. Marriage, death, gender -- these things meant nothing. There was only the direction, and the courage to follow it.

Mad Science Mother Love

My mother deserved better, but then I always had been an inferior child. I'd left her ashes in their dark urn--in a garage, extruding only the smallest amounts at Christmas, her birthday (ironically, on Valentine's Day), and Mother's Day, wearing the sigil of her love of my forehead like the mark of a curse, or the mark of contrition.

But then, what other son could create the Remembrance 2000, into which one fed the ashes of one's ancestors, animating them for a few moments at a holographic shrine?

She begged for more moments, and I, cruelly, let her have them. She vituperated me without let, but within the year, she had consumed herself, and I was free--of curse, contrition, and love.

Filing System of the Gods, Part II

But Hugin, being the raven he is, just can't leave it alone. Eventually, Munin gives in and brings him to the fields of the fallen.

Out back behind Yggdrasil* is this place you'll never find unless you're looking for it, because it's hidden. It's a battlefield. And it looks just like any other abandoned battlefield you'll find in Asgard. Or Midgard** for that matter, except that Hugin and Munin are the only two ravens there. Dead warriors, disintegrating horses pooling in their plate-mail armor, bright blades snapped at the hilt and poxed with rust, mounds of dirt churned with maggots and pale roots, fingers reaching to the sky with bony wrists, skulls filled with shining, irregular jewels of pus-- rot as far as the eye can see--as far as a raven can see--as far as a hawk can see. Farther than that. Past the horizon. It's vast. It's...

"Corpses?" Hugin asks.

"Memories." Munin struts and preens his feathers.

Hugin looks around at the vastness of it, and says, "Then the question isn't why does it take you so long to find Odin's memories...but HOW YOU FIND IT AT ALL!" --He screeches this last bit so loud Munin scares up into the air for a second.

Munin lands in exactly the same place and clacks his beak at Hugin. "What, you don't know where the memory of Baldur is the day before he died? Or the other names of the Norns? There are quite a few, you know! You want to know how I find it all? Caw! Like...this!"


*The "World Tree." The Interstate Highway and Internet of the Gods--loosely translated.
**A word which here means the mortal realms.

Beevolution.

The leaders of the drones rose up and called for a change in the social order: no more queens! The queen, Hymenoptera, took this in stride. First, it was only the drones, which might live or die for all that anybody cared, if only they mated when they ought. Second, She was just as glad to lay down the burdon of producing 2,000 eggs per day as the drones were to lay down the burden of...of...

Well, whatever. If they didn't know a good thing when they saw it, so bee it.

What Hymenoptera did not understand was that the drones had a secret dance of their own. Using copper wire and stolen refrigerator magnets, the drones had passed down, through the generations, a new bee technology, powered by the waves from nearby cell phones...

Within a few years, it was beevolution from Brazil to the Kenai Fjords. The population dipped for a time, but rose steadily as the techno-drones researched increasing pollen production in flowers, more efficient dance languages, and...shh...Royal King Jelly.

Filing System of the Gods, Part I

(A Fable of Project Management)

So one day Hugin & Munin* are sitting on Odin's shoulders, digesting corpses and crapping down Odin's back, when Hugin turns to Munin and says, "Why does it take you so Garmr-awful long to remember the most trivial of things?"

Munin snaps his beak at this. "So long? So long? Caw! Odin the All-Father has lived long and his memories, both glorious and shameful, are as numerous as the stars! Do you think I can find the specific memory among the fields of the fallen the way a maiden picks daisies? Caw!"

This peaks Hugin's interest. "The fields of the fallen--?"

But Munin is too angry for human speech and ends up cursing in Raventongue. "Caw! A-caw! Caw!"

At first, Hugin tries to explain. But this always happens whenever Hugin has an idea. Hugin patiently explains what Munin could be doing better, and Munin devolves into caw-cussing and doesn't even listen. So Hugin loses patience, too. "Caw! Caw! Caw!"

And then Odin loses patience and shoos them both away, calling for Peace and Quiet,** who are too timid to appear when Hugin and Munin are around.


*Which, if you don't know, are Odin's ravens. "Hugin" means "thought," and "Munin" means "Memory." I always get them mixed up.

**Adumbian and Astillian, Odin's goldfish.

Sewer Goddess

After Venus (who started out as Goddess of the Sewers, a vital function in a town where cholera should be taken as a matter of course) got promoted, her intern, Caelia, got the job. Jove signed the contract himself (in blood), and suddenly, she was part of The Family.

Things went smoothly for a long time. The whole Christian thing came and went pretty quickly, with a hostile takeover by the cosmic lawyers, SaulCo, who turned a nice little indy religion into a vanilla franchise. Some of the other gods and goddesses got pushed around. Some survived by remarketing themselves; others just faded away into their own "Greatest Hits" bins at the discount record stores in the sky.

Caelia (who had changed her name to Sally) and Psyche used to hang out and have drinks together until that whole Freud thing blew Psyche's ego out of proportion. It had been fun, coming up with joint horrors to come crawling out of the pipes, but without Psyche, it felt like Sally wasn't coming up with anything better than mutated pets and lab rats, although that was fun in its own kind of way...