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==========================================
InterText Vol. 5, No. 4 / July-August 1995
==========================================

  Contents

    FirstText: Stage Four: Internet Backlash..........Jason Snell

    Need to Know: Books are Alive and Online!........Geoff Duncan

  Short Fiction

    Horse Latitudes................................Richard Kadrey

    Chronicler.....................................Pat Johanneson

    Bludemagick..................................Jacqueline Carey

    The Farm Story...................................Steven Thorn

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@intertext.com                   gaduncan@halcyon.com
....................................................................
    Assistant Editor                     Send correspondence to 
    Susan Grossman                        editors@intertext.com
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 5, No. 4. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this 
  magazine is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold 
  (either by itself or as part of a collection) and the entire 
  text of the issue remains intact. Copyright 1995, Jason Snell. 
  Individual stories Copyright 1995 their original authors. 
  InterText is created using Apple Macintosh computers and then 
  published in ASCII/Setext, Adobe PostScript, Adobe Acrobat PDF 
  and HTML (World-Wide Web) formats. For more information about 
  InterText, send a message to intertext@intertext.com with the 
  word "info" in the subject line. For writers' guidelines, place 
  the word "guidelines" in the subject line.  
....................................................................


  FirstText: Stage Four: Internet Backlash   by Jason Snell
===========================================================

  I grew up in a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada 
  in Northern California. By "small" I mean that within the Sonora 
  city limits there are about 3,000 people, and there are probably 
  about 40,000 in all of Tuolumne County. Sonora is the county 
  seat and the county's only incorporated city. During my last 
  visit to Sonora, upon entering the town and stopping at what was 
  once the only stoplight in the entire county (there are now at 
  least a half-dozen -- the '90s haven't _quite_ brought urban 
  blight to Sonora, but they have introduced the dilemma of 
  whether to speed up or slow down at a yellow light), I spotted a 
  large sign in a storefront window: INTERNET ACCESS!

  It turns out that there are not one, but _two_ Internet service 
  providers in Tuolumne County, both offering e-mail and SLIP/PPP 
  access to their customers at reasonable rates, even when 
  compared to big-city providers. This, in the place where, in 
  1984, my best friend and I started the first BBS using a 300 
  baud modem, an Apple II+ and BBS software written in a few 
  hundred lines of BASIC.

  It was at this point that I really realized just how big the 
  Internet has become. Yes, the flood of people who can now see 
  the Web via America Online's web browser have shown that the Net 
  (and especially the Web) is getting bigger, but the fact that 
  two companies are competing in the tiny town of Sonora to 
  provide the best direct Internet connectivity made more of an 
  impression.

  A long time ago, the Internet made the transformation from 
  something nobody knew about to something everyone talked about, 
  even if they didn't really understand what it meant. Now we're 
  in the middle of phase three: just about everyone wants to get 
  on the Net. Not on CompuServe, not on AOL -- though those are 
  certainly still good, inexpensive, easy options for online 
  newcomers -- but on the Internet itself. And by the end of the 
  year, all the major online services will essentially be 
  added-value service providers, offering standard Internet 
  connectivity in addition to local forums and pay-as-you-go 
  services like encyclopedias and news wires.

  Get ready for phase four: Internet backlash. Porn aside, the 
  Net's not all it's cracked up to be. Right now, the people back 
  in Sonora are experiencing the heady feeling that comes with 
  connecting to people all over the world. It's the same feeling I 
  had when I took my first real plunge into the world of the 
  Internet and of Usenet newsgroups.

  But eventually, your view of the Net begins to mature, and 
  things that once were exciting just because you were able to 
  hold conversations with people you could never have talked to 
  before end up becoming stale. You unsubscribe from newsgroups 
  you once frequented because if you see one more flame war over 
  the moral consequences of homosexuality or whether the
  _USS Enterprise_ could beat up _Battlestar Galactica_, you'll be 
  sick. You stop participating in the mailing list devoted to your 
  favorite band because while everyone else is dissecting the same 
  song lyrics for the third time, you've already said your piece. 
  You realize that while the Net is a great place to find out 
  useless information about your favorite TV shows and sports 
  teams, it's not so hot when it comes to useful information like 
  breaking news or full-text searches of magazine, newspaper, 
  legal and business databases.

  Of course, by the time the folks in Sonora and everywhere else 
  have come to this point, those services will be available on the 
  Net... for a price. But then they'll just feel angry, because 
  they're already paying almost as much (if not more) as they do 
  for cable TV just for their Internet dial tone. "Now you're 
  asking me to pay more?" they'll ask.

  We're now seeing stories of sex and degeneracy on the net, soon 
  we'll probably see a slew of news articles and TV programs 
  asking if the Net is really good for anything, I think at that 
  point the Net will so big that no amount of backlash will be 
  able to stop it. In the '60s, Newton Minow, then chairman of the 
  Federal Communications Comission, said that television was "a 
  vast wasteland," and it was. It still is. But it's still a 
  controlling force in the lives of billions of people. And that's 
  where the Net is headed. Right now, it's growing on the strength 
  of discussions about _Star Trek_, but by the time we're sick of 
  all that, it'll be indespensible. We'll be using it to make bank 
  transactions, to shop at home, to keep in touch with countless 
  friends and relatives, to stay on top of the latest news, to 
  stay in contact with our colleagues.

  So when _Newsweek_ and _Time_ say that the Net is the Next Big 
  Thing, they're probably right, even though in the next two 
  years, I'd lay money that both magazines will publish stories 
  lamenting "the failure of the Internet." But by the time the 
  Internet "fails," it'll be too late. It will have become part of 
  our lives, and there will be no escape. We'll be trapped in a 
  new vast wasteland. Like television, the Net will continue to be 
  filled with wastes of time and incorrect information, as well as 
  a lot that's useful. And like it or not, that sliver of 
  usefulness that makes it indispensible will ensure its survival 
  on into the 21st century.


  Horse Latitudes   by Richard Kadrey
=====================================
...................................................................
  Amid the monkey shrieks and walking wounded of a San Francisco 
  surrounded by rainforest, a dead man begins to explore the music 
  of the Earth.
...................................................................
  Excerpted from the novel _Kamikaze L'amour_ (St. Martin's Press, 
  1995); published in _Omni Best Science Fiction One_ (Omni 
  Books).
...................................................................

  One.
------

  Fame is just schizphrenia with money.

  I died on a Sunday, when the new century was no more than four 
  or five hours old. Midnight would have been a more elegant 
  moment (and a genuine headline grabber), but we were still on 
  stage, and I thought that suicide, like masturbation, might lose 
  something when experienced with more than 100,000 close, 
  personal friends.

  I don't recall exactly when I accepted the New Year's Eve gig at 
  Madison Square Garden; the band had never played one before, but 
  it became inextricably tied in with my decision to kill myself. 
  Somehow I couldn't bear the idea of a 21st century. Whenever I 
  thought of it, I was overwhelmed by a memory: flying in a 
  chartered plane over the Antarctic ice fields on my thirtieth 
  birthday. A brilliant whiteness tinged with freezing blue swept 
  away in all directions. It was an unfillable emptiness. It was 
  death. It could never be fed or satisfied -- neither the ice 
  sheet nor the new century. At least, not by me.

  No one suspected, of course. Throughout this crisis of faith, I 
  always remained true to fame. I acted out the excesses that were 
  expected of me. I denied rumors that I had invented. I spat at 
  photographers, and managed to double my press coverage.

  The suicide itself was a simple, dull, anticlimactic affair. The 
  police had closed the show quickly when the audience piled up 
  their seats and started a bonfire during our extended "Auld Lang 
  Syne." Back in my room at the Pierre I swallowed a bottle of 
  pills and vodka. I felt stupid and disembodied, like some 
  character who had been written out of a Tennessee Williams play 
  -- Blanche Dubois' spoiled little brother. I found out later 
  that it was Kumiko, my manager, who found me swimming in my own 
  vomit, and got me to the hospital. When I awoke, I was in 
  Oregon, tucked away in the Point Mariposa Recovery Center, where 
  the movie stars come to dry out. There wasn't even a fence, just 
  an endless expanse of lizard green lawn. Picture a cemetery. Or 
  a country club with thorazine.

  I left the sanitarium three weeks later, without telling anyone.

  I went out for my evening walk and just kept on walking. The 
  Center was housed in a converted mansion built on a bluff over a 
  contaminated beach near Oceanside. I had, until recently, been 
  an avid rock climber. Inching your way across a sheer rock face 
  suspended by nothing but your own chalky fingers is the only 
  high comparable to being on stage (death, spiritual or physical, 
  being the only possible outcome of a wrong or false move in 
  either place). It took me nearly an hour to work my way down the 
  granite wall to a dead beach dotted with Health Department 
  warning signs and washed-up medical waste. I checked to see that 
  my lithium hadn't fallen out on the climb down. Then, squatting 
  among plastic bags emblazoned with biohazard stickers, and 
  scrawny gulls holding empty syringes in their beaks, I picked up 
  a rusty scalpel and slit the cuffs of my robe. Two thousand 
  dollars in twenties and fifties spilled out onto the gray sand.

  I left my robe on the sand, following the freeway shoulder in 
  sweat pants and a t-shirt. In Cannon Beach I bought a coat and a 
  ticket on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. My ticket 
  only took me as far as San Francisco. We reached the city two 
  days later, in the dark hours of the early morning. As we sailed 
  in under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco was aglow like 
  some art nouveau foundry, anesthetized beneath dense layers of 
  sea fog. Far across the bay, on the Oakland side, I could just 
  make out the tangle of mangrove swamp fronting the wall of 
  impenetrable green that was the northernmost tip of the 
  rainforest.

  Six weeks later, I left my apartment in the Sunset District and 
  headed for a south of Market Street bar called Cafe Juju. A 
  jumble of mossy surface roots, like cords from God's own 
  patchbay, had tangled themselves in the undercarriages of 
  abandoned cars on the broad avenue that ran along Golden Gate 
  Park. Here and there hundred-foot palms and kapoks jutted up 
  from the main body of the parkland, spreading their branches, 
  stealing light and moisture from the smaller native trees. The 
  Parks Department had given up trying to weed out the invading 
  plant species, and concentrated instead on keeping the museums 
  open and the playgrounds clear for the tourists who never came 
  any more.

  Downtown, the corners buzzed with street musicians beating out 
  jittery sambas on stolen guitars, and improvised sidewalk 
  markets catering to the diverse tastes of refugees from Rio, 
  Mexico City, and Los Angeles. Trappers from Oakland hawked 
  marmosets and brightly plumed jungle birds that screamed like 
  scalded children. In the side streets, where the lights were 
  mostly dead, golden-eyed jaguars hunted stray dogs.

  Overhead, you could look up and watch the new constellation: 
  Fer-De-Lance, made up of a cluster of geosynchronous satellites. 
  Most belonged to NASA and the UN, but the Army and the DEA were 
  up there too, watching the progress of the jungle and refugees 
  northward.

  Inside Cafe Juju, a few heads turned in my direction. There was 
  some tentative whispering around the bar, but not enough to be 
  alarming. I was thinner than when I'd left the band. I'd let my 
  beard grow, and since I had stopped bleaching my hair, it had 
  darkened to its natural and unremarkable brown. As I threaded my 
  way through the crowd, a crew-cut blonde pretended to bump into 
  me. I ignored her when she said my name, and settled at a table 
  in the back, far away from the band. "Mister Ryder," said the 
  man sitting across from me. "Glad you could make it."

  I shook the gloved hand he offered. "Since you called me that 
  name so gleefully, I assume you got it?" I said.

  He smiled. "How about a drink?"

  "I like to drink at home. Preferably alone."

  "Got to have a drink," he said. "It's a bar. You don't drink, 
  you attract attention."

  "All right, I'll have a Screwdriver."

  "A health nut, right? Getting into that California lifestyle? 
  Got to have your Vitamin C." He hailed a waitress and ordered us 
  drinks. The waitress was thin, with close-cropped black hair and 
  an elegantly hooked nose sporting a single gold ring. She barely 
  noticed me.

  "So, did you get it?" I asked.

  Virilio rummaged through the inner recesses of his battered Army 
  trenchcoat. He wore it with the sleeves rolled up; his forearms, 
  where I could see them, were a solid mass of snakeskin tattoos. 
  I couldn't be sure where the tattoos ended because his hands 
  were covered in skin-tight black kid gloves. He looked younger 
  than he probably was, had the eager and restless countenance of 
  a bird of prey. He pulled a creased white envelope from an 
  inside pocket and handed it to me. Inside was a birth 
  certificate and a passport.

  "They look real," I said.

  "They are real," Virilio said. "If you don't believe me, take 
  those down to any DMV and apply for a driver's license. I 
  guarantee they'll check out as legit."

  "It makes me nervous. It seems too easy."

  "Don't be a schmuck. The moment you told me your bank accounts 
  were set up with names from the _Times_ obituaries, I knew we 
  were in business. I checked out all the names you gave me. In 
  terms of age and looks, this guy is the closest match to you."

  "And you just sent to New York for this?"

  "Yeah," Virilio said, delighted by his own cleverness. "There's 
  no agency that checks birth certificates against death records. 
  Then, I took your photo and this perfectly legal birth 
  certificate to the passport office, pulled a few strings, and 
  got it pushed through fast." From the stage, the Stratocaster 
  cut loose with a wailing solo, like alley cats and razor blades 
  at a million decibels over a dense batucada backbeat. I closed 
  my eyes as turquoise fireballs went off in my head. "You never 
  told me why you needed this," said Virilio.

  "I had a scrape with the law a few years ago," I told him. 
  "Bringing in rare birds and snakes from south of the border. 
  Department of Fish and Game seized my passport."

  Virilio's smile split the lower part of his face into a big 
  toothy crescent moon. "That's funny. That's fucking hysterical. 
  I guess these weird walking forests put your ass out of 
  business."

  "Guess so," I said.

  The waitress with the nose brought our drinks and Virilio said, 
  "Can you catch this round?" As I counted out the bills, Virilio 
  slid his arm around the waitress's hips. Either she knew him or 
  took him for just another wasted homeboy because she did not 
  react at all. "Frida here plays music," said Virilio. "You ought 
  to hear her tapes, she's real good. You ever play in a band, 
  Ryder?"

  "No," I said. "Always wanted to, but never found the time to 
  learn an instrument." I looked at Frida the waitress and handed 
  her the money. From this new angle I saw that along with her 
  nose ring, Frida's left earlobe was studded with a half-dozen or 
  so tiny jewelled studs. There were more gold rings just above 
  her left eyebrow, which was in the process of arching. Her not 
  unattractive lips held a suppressed smirk that could only mean 
  that she had noticed me noticing her.

  "That's interesting," Virilio said. "I thought everybody your 
  age had a little high school dance band or something."

  "Sorry."

  Frida folded the bills and dropped them into a pocket of her 
  apron. "They're playing some of my stuff before the Yanomamo 
  Boys set on Wednesday. Come by, if you're downtown," she said. I 
  nodded and said "Thanks." As she moved back to the bar, I saw 
  Virilio shaking his head. "Freaking Frida," he said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Frida was okay. Used to sing in some bands; picked up session 
  work. Now she's into this new shit." Virilio rolled his eyes. 
  "She sort of wigged out a few months ago. Started hauling her 
  tape recorder over to Marin and down south into the jungle. 
  Wants to digitize it or something. Says she looking for the 
  Music of Jungles. Says it just like that, with capital letters." 
  He shrugged and sipped his drink. "I've heard some of this 
  stuff. Sounds like a movie soundtrack, 'Attack From the Planet 
  Whacko,' if you know what I mean."

  "You ever been into the rainforest?" I asked.

  "Sure. I've been all up and down the coast. They keep 101 
  between here and L.A. pretty clear."

  "L.A.'s as far south as you can get?"

  "No, but after that, you start running into government defoliant 
  stations, rubber tappers, and these monster dope farms cut right 
  into the jungle. Those farms are scary. Mostly white guys 
  running them, with Mexicans and Indians pulling the labor. And 
  they are hardcore. Bloody you up and throw your ass to the 
  crocodiles just for laughs."

  "I may need you to do your name trick again. I have some money 
  in Chicago--"

  "Not anymore you don't. Not for two or three months. Nothing but 
  monkeys, snakes and malaria out that way, from Galveston to 
  Detroit. If you have any swamp land in Florida, congratulations. 
  It's really a swamp." The kid took a sip of his beer. "Of 
  course, I could do a data search, see where the Feds reassigned 
  the assets of your bank."

  "No never mind," I said, deciding I didn't particularly want 
  this kid bird-dogging me through every database he could get to. 
  "It's not that important."

  Virilio shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, and shook his head 
  wearily at the bare-breasted young woman who bumped drunkenly 
  into our table. "Run, honey," he told her. "The fashion police 
  are hot on your trail," as she staggered over to her friends at 
  the bar. The local scene-makers had taken the heat as their cue 
  to go frantically native; the majority of them were dressed in 
  Japanese-imported imitations of Brazilian Indian gear. It was 
  like some grotesque acid trip combining the worst of Dante with 
  a Club Med brochure for Rio: young white kids, the girls wearing 
  nothing but body paints or simple Lacandon hipils they had seen 
  in some high school slide show; the boys in loin cloths, showing 
  off their bowl-style haircuts, mimicking those worn by Amazonian 
  tribesmen.

  "The Santeros say that this shit, the jungle, the animals, all 
  the craziness, it's all revenge. Amazonia getting back at all 
  the stupid, greedy bastards who've been raping it for all these 
  years."

  "That's a pretty harsh judgement," I said. "Are you always so 
  Old Testament?"

  "You've got me all wrong. I'm thrilled. L.A.'s gone. They 
  finally got something besides TV executives and mass murderers 
  to grow in that goddamed desert." Virilio smiled. "Of course, I 
  don't really buy all that mystical shit. The FBI are covering up 
  for the people who are really responsible."

  "The FBI?" I asked.

  "It's true," Virilio said. "They hushed it up -- same branch 
  that iced Kennedy and ran the Warren Commission.

  "A couple of geneticists who'd been cut loose from Stanford were 
  working for the Brazilian government, cooking up a kind of extra 
  fast-grow plants to re-seed all the burned-up land in the 
  Amazon. Supposedly, these plants were locked on fast forward -- 
  they'd grow quick and die quick, stabilizing the soil so natural 
  plants could come in. Only the bastards wouldn't die. They kept 
  on multiplying, and choked out everything else. Six weeks after 
  they planted the first batch, Rio was gone. It's all true. I 
  know somebody that has copies of the FBI reports."

  The band finished their set and left the stage to distracted 
  applause. I stood and dropped a jiffy bag on Virilio's side of 
  the table. "I've got go now. Thanks for the I.D.," I said. 
  Virilio slipped some of the bills from the end of the bag and 
  riffled through them. "Non-sequential twenties," I said, "just 
  like you wanted."

  He smiled and put the bag in his pocket. "Just to prevent any 
  problems, just to short-circuit any second thoughts you might be 
  having about why you should give a person like me all this money 
  for some paper you could have gotten yourself, I want to make 
  sure you understand that the nature of my work is facilitation. 
  I'm a facilitator. I'm not a dealer, or muscle, or a thief, but 
  I can do all those things, if required. What I got you wasn't a 
  birth certificate; any asshole could have gotten you a birth 
  certificate. What I got you was _the_ birth certificate. One 
  that matches you, close enough so that getting you a passport, 
  letting you move around, will be no problem. I had to check over 
  two years of obituaries, contact the right agencies, grease the 
  right palms. It's knowing which palms to grease and when that 
  you're paying me for. Not that piece of paper."

  I slid my new identity into my jacket. "Thanks," I said.



  Two.
------

  Outside Cafe Juju, the warm, immobile air had taken on the 
  quality of some immense thing at rest -- a mountain or phantom 
  whale, pressing down on the city, squeezing its Sargasso dreams 
  from the cracks in the walls out onto the streets. I pulled out 
  my emergency hip flask and took a drink. I was reminded of the 
  region of windless ocean known as the Horse Latitudes, called 
  that in remembrance of the Spanish galleons that would sometimes 
  find themselves adrift in those dead waters. The crews would 
  strip the ship down to the bare wood in hopes of lightening 
  themselves enough to move in the feeble breeze. When everything 
  else of value had been thrown overboard, the last thing to go 
  were the horses. Sometimes the Horse Latitudes were carpeted for 
  miles with a floating rictus of palominos and Arab stallions, 
  buoyed up by the immense floating kelp beds and their own 
  churning internal gases. The Horse Latitudes were not a place 
  you visited, but where you found yourself if you allowed your 
  gaze to be swallowed up by the horizon, or to wander on the map 
  to places you might go, rather than where you were.

  I'd walked a couple of blocks up Ninth Street when I realized I 
  was being followed. It was my habit to stop often in front of 
  stores, apparently to window shop or admire the beauty of my own 
  face. In fact, I was checking the reflections caught in the 
  plate glass, scanning the street for faces that had been there 
  too long. This time I couldn't find a face, but just beyond a 
  wire pen where a group of red-faced _campasenos _were betting on 
  cock fights, I did see a jacket. It was bulky and black, of some 
  military cut, and one side was decked with the outline of a bird 
  skull done in clusters of purple and white rhinestones. The 
  jacket's owner hung back where vehicles and pedestrians blocked 
  most of the streetlight. It was only the fireworks in the 
  rhinestones that had caught my eye.

  Just to make sure it wasn't simple paranoia, I went another 
  block up Ninth and stopped by the back window of a VW van full 
  of caged snakes. When I checked again, the jacket had moved 
  closer. I cut to my right, down a side street, then left, back 
  toward the market. The jacket hung behind me, the skull a patch 
  of hard light against the dark buildings.

  I ran down an alley between a couple of closed shops and kept 
  going, taking corners at random. The crumbling masonry of the 
  ancient industrial buildings was damp where humidity had 
  condensed on the walls. I found myself on a dark street where 
  the warehouses were lost behind the blooms of pink and purple 
  orchids. The petals looked like frozen fire along the walls. 
  Behind me, someone kicked a bottle, and I sprinted around 
  another corner. I was lost in the maze of alleys and 
  drive-thru's that surrounded the rotting machine shops and 
  abandoned wrecking yards. Sweating and out of breath, I ran 
  toward a light. When I found it, I stopped.

  It was a courtyard or a paved patch of ground where a building 
  had once stood. Fires were going in a few battered oil drums, 
  fed by children with slabs of dismantled billboards, packing 
  crates, and broken furniture. Toward the back of the courtyard, 
  men had something cooking on a spit rigged over one of the 
  drums. Their city-issued mobile shelters, something like 
  hospital gurneys with heavy-gauge wire coffins mounted on top, 
  were lined in neat rows against one wall. I had heard about the 
  tribal homeless encampments, but had never seen one before. Many 
  of the homeless were the same junkies and losers that belonged 
  to every big city, but most of the tribal people, I'd heard, 
  were spillover from the refugee centers and church basements. 
  Whole villages would sometimes find themselves abandoned in a 
  strange city, after being forcibly evacuated from their farms in 
  Venezuela and Honduras. They roamed the streets with their 
  belongings crammed into government-issue snail shells, fading 
  into a dull wandering death.

  But it wasn't always that way. Some of the tribes were evolving 
  quickly in their new environment, embracing the icons of the new 
  world that had been forced on them. Many of the men still wore 
  lip plugs, but their traditional skin stains had been replaced 
  with metal-flake auto body paint and dime store makeup. The 
  women and children wore necklaces of auto glass, strips of 
  mylar, and iridescent watch faces. Japanese silks and burned-out 
  fuses were twined in their hair.

  Whatever mutual curiosity held us for the few seconds that I 
  stood there passed when some of the men stepped forward, 
  gesturing and speaking to me in a language I didn't understand. 
  I started moving down the alley. Their voices crowded around me; 
  their hands touched my back and tugged at my arms. They weren't 
  threatening, but I still had to suppress an urge to run. I 
  looked back for the jacket that had followed me from Cafe Juju, 
  but it wasn't back there.

  I kept walking, trying to stay calm. I ran through some 
  breathing exercises a yoga guru I'd knew for a week in Munich 
  had taught me. After a few minutes, though, some of the 
  tribesmen fell away. And when I turned a corner, unexpectedly 
  finding myself back on Ninth, I discovered I was alone.

  On Market, I was too shaky to bargain well and ended up paying a 
  gypsy cab almost double the usual rate for a ride to the Sunset. 
  At home, I took a couple of Percodans and washed them down with 
  vodka from the flask. Then I lay down with all my clothes on, 
  reaching into my pocket to hold the new identity Virilio had 
  provided me. Around dawn, when the howler monkeys started up in 
  Golden Gate Park, I fell asleep.

  I tried to write some new songs, but I had become overcome with 
  inertia, and little by little lost track of myself. Sometimes, 
  on the nights when the music was especially bad or I couldn't 
  stand the random animal racket from the park anymore, I'd have a 
  drink, and then walk. The squadrons of refugees and the damp 
  heat of the rainforest that surrounded the city made the streets 
  miserable much of the time, but I decided it was better to be 
  out in the misery of the streets than to hide with the rotten 
  music in my room.

  I was near Chinatown, looking for the building where I'd shared 
  a squat years before, when I ran into a crowd of sleepwalkers. 
  At first, I didn't recognize them, so complete was their 
  impression of wakefulness. Groups of men and women in business 
  clothes waited silently for buses they had taken the previous 
  morning, while merchants sold phantom goods to customers who 
  were home in bed. Smiling children played in the streets, 
  dodging ghost cars. Occasionally a housewife from the same 
  neighborhood as a sleepwalking grocer (because these night 
  strolls seemed to be a localized phenomenon, affecting one 
  neighborhood at a time) would reenact a purchase she had made 
  earlier that day, entering into a kind of slow motion waltz with 
  the merchant, examining vegetables that weren't there or 
  weighing invisible oranges in her hand. No one had an 
  explanation for the sleepwalking phenomenon. Or rather, there 
  were so many explanations that they tended to cancel each other 
  out. The one fact that seemed to be generally accepted was that 
  the night strolls had become more common as the rainforest crept 
  northward toward San Francisco, as if the boundary of Amazonia 
  was surrounded by a region compounded of the collective dreams 
  of all the cities it had swallowed.

  I followed the sleepwalkers, entering Chinatown through the big 
  ornamental gate on Grant Street, weaving in, out, and through 
  the oddly beautiful group pantomime. The streets were almost 
  silent there, except for the muted colors of unhurried feet and 
  rustling clothes. None of the sleepwalkers ever spoke, although 
  they mouthed things to each other. They frowned, laughed, got 
  angry, reacting to something they had heard or said when they 
  had first lived that particular moment.

  It was near Stockton Street that I heard the looters. Then I saw 
  them, moving quickly and surely through the narrow alleys, 
  loaded down with merchandise from the sleepwalkers' open stores. 
  The looters took great pains not to touch any of the sleepers. 
  Perhaps they were afraid of being infected with the sleepwalking 
  sickness.

  Watching them, cop paranoia got a hold of me, and I started back 
  out of Chinatown. I was almost to the gate, dodging blank-eyed 
  Asian children and ragged teenagers with armloads of bok choy 
  and video tapes when I saw something else: Coming out of a 
  darkened dim sum place -- a jewelled bird skull on a black 
  jacket. The jacket must have spotted me too, because it darted 
  back inside. I followed it in.

  A dozen or so people, mostly elderly Chinese couples, sat miming 
  silent meals inside the unlit restaurant. Cats, like the 
  homeless, had apparently figured out the pattern the 
  sleepwalking sickness took through the city. Dozens of the 
  mewing animals moved around the tables, rubbing against 
  sleepers' legs, and licking grease off the stacked dim sum 
  trays. I went back to the kitchen, moving through the middle of 
  the restaurant, trying to keep the sleepers around me as a 
  demilitarized zone between me and the jacket. I wasn't as 
  certain of myself inside the restaurant as I had been on the 
  street. Too many sudden shadows. Too many edges hiding between 
  the bodies of the dreaming patrons.

  There were a couple of aproned men in the kitchen, kneading the 
  air into dim sum. Cats perched on the cutting tables and freezer 
  like they owned the place. Whenever one of the sleepwalking 
  cooks opened the refrigerator doors, the cats went berserk, 
  crowding around his legs, clawing at leftover dumplings and 
  chunks of raw chicken. There was, however, no jacket back there. 
  Or in the restroom. The rear exit was locked. I went back out 
  through the restaurant, figuring I'd blown it. I hadn't had any 
  medication in a couple of weeks, and decided I'd either been 
  hallucinating again, or had somehow missed the jacket while 
  checking out the back. Then from the dark she said my name, the 
  name she knew me by. I turned in the direction of the voice, and 
  the jewelled skull winked at me from the corner.

  I had walked within three feet of her. She was slumped at a 
  table with an old woman, only revealing herself when she shifted 
  her gaze from the tablecloth to me, doing a good imitation of 
  the narcotised pose of a sleeper. She motioned for me to come 
  over and I sat down. Then she pushed a greasy bag of cold dim 
  sum at me. "Have one," she said, like we were old friends.

  "Frida?" I said.

  She smiled. "Welcome to the land of the dead."

  "Why were you following me?"

  "I was raiding the fridge." She reached into the bag and pulled 
  out a spring roll, which she wrapped in a paper napkin and 
  handed to me. As she moved, I caught a faint glimmer off the 
  gold rings above her eyebrow. "You, I believe, were the one who 
  only seconds ago was pinballing through here like Blind Pew."

  "I'll have my radar checked. Do you always steal your dinner?"

  "Whenever I can. I'm only at the cafe a couple of nights a week. 
  And tips aren't what they used to be. Even the dead are peckish 
  around here."

  The old woman with whom we shared the table leaned from side to 
  side in her chair, laughing the fake, wheezing laugh of 
  sleepers, her hands describing arcs in the air. "So maybe you 
  weren't following me tonight," I said. "Why did you follow me 
  the other night from Cafe Juju?"

  "You remind me of somebody."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. Your face doesn't belong here. But I don't know 
  where it should be, either. I know I've seen you before. Maybe 
  you're a cop and you busted me. Maybe that's why you look 
  familiar. Maybe you're a bad guy I saw getting booked. Maybe we 
  went steady in the third grade. Maybe we had the same piano 
  teacher. Ever since I saw you at the cafe, I've got all these 
  maybes running through my head."

  "Maybe you've got me mixed up with someone."

  "Not a chance," said Frida. She smiled and in the half-light of 
  the restaurant I couldn't tell if she knew who I was or not. She 
  didn't look crazy, but she still scared me. I'd gone to the 
  funeral of more than one friend who, walking home, had turned a 
  corner and walked into his or her own Mark David Chapman. 
  Frida's smile made her look strangely vapid, which surprised me 
  because her eyes were anything but that. Her face had too many 
  lines for someone her age, but there was a kind of grace in the 
  high bones of her cheeks and forehead.

  "You're not a cop or a reporter, are you?" I asked.

  Her eyes widened in an expression that was somewhere between 
  shock and amusement. "No. Unlike you, I'm pretty much what I 
  appear to be."

  "You're a waitress who tails people on her breaks."

  She shrugged and bit into her spring roll, singing, "Get your 
  kicks on Route 66."

  "Now you're just being stupid, " I said. "Virilio didn't tell me 
  that part. He just said you were crazy."

  "Did he say that?" She looked away and her face fell into 
  shadow. I leaned back, thinking that if she was crazy, I might 
  have just said the thing that would set her off. But a moment 
  later she turned back, wearing the silly smile. "Virilio's one 
  to talk, playing Little Caesar in a malaria colony." She picked 
  up a paper napkin from the table and, with great concentration, 
  began wiping her hands, a finger at a time. Then she said: "I'm 
  looking for something."

  "The Music of Jungles?"

  "Jesus, did he tell you my favorite color, too?"

  "He just told me it was something you'd told him."

  "Red," she said and shrugged. "I _am_ looking for something. But 
  it's kind of difficult to describe."

  "California is on its last legs. If you want to play music, why 
  don't you go to New York?"

  She reached down and picked up a wandering cat. It was a young 
  Abyssinian, and it immediately curled up in her lap, purring. 
  "What I'm looking for isn't in New York," she said. "I thought 
  from your face you might be looking for something, too. That's 
  why I followed you."

  "What is the Music of Jungles?" I asked.

  She shook her head. "No, I'm sorry. I think I made a mistake."

  I slid the hip flask from my pocket and took a drink. "Tell you 
  the truth, I am looking for something, too."

  "I knew it," she said. "What?

  "Something new. Something I've only seen in flashes. A color and 
  quality of sound that I've never been able to get out of my 
  head. I started out looking for it, but got distracted along the 
  way. I figure this is my last chance to see if it's really 
  there, or just another delusion."

  "You're a musician?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  She picked up the flask, sniffed, and took a drink, smiling and 
  coughing a little as the vodka went down. "What's your name?" 
  she asked.

  "You already know my name."

  "I know a name," she said, setting down the flask. "Probably 
  something store bought. Maybe from Virilio?"

  I shrugged and took the flask from her. "Your turn. What's the 
  Music of Jungles?"

  She looked down and leaned back in her chair, stroking the cat.

  "First off, " she said, "it's not the Music of Jungles. Jungles 
  are in Tarzan movies. What you're trying to describe is a 
  tropical forest or a rainforest. I don't use rainforest sounds 
  in my music because I think they're beautiful, although I do 
  think they're beautiful," she said. "I use them because they're 
  the keys to finding the Songtracks of a place."

  Frida set the cat on the floor and leaned forward, elbows 
  resting on the table. "Here's what it is," she said, "Some of 
  the tribal people in Amazonia believe that the way the world 
  came into existence was through different songs sung by 
  different gods, a different song for each place. The land, they 
  believe, is a map of a particular melody. The contours of the 
  hills, the vegetation, the animals -- they're notes, rests and 
  rhythms in the song that calls a place into being, and also 
  describes it. Over thousands of years the Indians have mapped 
  all the songs of Amazonia, walked everywhere and taught the 
  songs to their children.

  "Where we are now, though, is special," Frida said, and she drew 
  her hands up in a gesture that took in all of our surroundings. 
  "The forest that surrounds San Francisco, it's Amazonia, but 
  it's new. And it has its own unique Songtrack. That's what all 
  my music is about. That's what I'm all about. No one has found 
  the song of this part of Amazonia yet, so I'm going to find it," 
  she said.

  "When you find it, what will the song tell you?" I asked.

  She shrugged, pressing her hands deep into the pockets of her 
  jacket. "I don't exactly know. Maybe the story of the place. 
  What went on here in the past; what'll happen in the future. I 
  don't know exactly. It's enough for me just to do it."

  I put the flask in my pocket. "Listen, Frida," I said. "The 
  atmosphere in here is definitely not growing on me. Would you 
  like to go someplace?"

  "I don't live too far away." She paused and said, "Maybe I could 
  play you some of my music."

  "I'd like that," I said. As she stood she said, "You know, you 
  managed to still not tell me your name."

  I looked at her for a moment. An old man shuffled between us, 
  nodding and waving to sleeping friends. I thought about the 
  Music of Jungles. Was this woman insane, I wondered. I'd been 
  dreaming so long myself, it hardly seemed to matter. I told her 
  my real name. She hardly reacted at all, which, to tell you the 
  truth, bothered me more than it should have. She picked up a 
  bulky purse-sized object from the floor and slung it over her 
  shoulder, looped her arm in mine, and led me into the street.

  "This is a digital recorder," she said, indicating the 
  purse-thing.

  "I go to Marin and Oakland whenever I can; fewer people means I 
  get cleaner recordings. I prefer binaural to stereo for the kind 
  of work I do. It has a more natural feel."

  "Teach me to use it?" I asked.

  "Sure. I think you can handle it."

  "Why do I feel like I just passed an audition?"

  "Maybe because you just did."

  In the quivering light of the mercury vapor lamps, the activity 
  of the Chinatown looters was almost indistinguishable from the 
  sleeping ballet of children and merchants.



  Richard Kadrey (kadrey@well.com)
----------------------------------

  Richard Kadrey was the Senior Editor at _Future Sex_ from 1993 
  through 1994. He is the author of two novels, _Metrophage_ (Ace, 
  1988) and _Kamikaze L'Amour_ (St. Martin's Press, 1995), as well 
  as the non-fiction _Covert Culture Sourcebook_ (St. Martin's 
  Press, 1993; version 2.0, 1994). His work has appeared in 
  _Omni_, _Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_, _Wired_, 
  _Mondo 2000_, _Interzone_, and many other publications.



  Chronicler   by Pat Johanneson
================================
...................................................................
  "He gets involved in his stories" is usually a high compliment 
  to a journalist. But "He becomes part of the story" is an 
  insult. The line between the two can be as sharp as a razor.
...................................................................

  I shifted a little bit, enough to get some fresh blood down to 
  my feet. They'd gone numb, so numb I'd forgotten about them, 
  down there in my ancient high-top Reeboks. Now they came back, 
  first with that weird fizzy feeling like when you put your hand 
  over a freshly-poured glass of 7-Up, and then a sparkling pain, 
  pins and needles, the pain of fresh blood washing out the 
  fatigue poisons or whatever it is. The science editor explained 
  it to me once, but I wasn't really paying attention.

  I hate this city. It disgusts me, that something like the Zone 
  can exist in a theoretically civilized world.

  I suppose that, hating the city, hating the Zone, I should by 
  extension loathe myself, but I don't. The way I see it, hating 
  myself for what the world has made me is a cheap excuse to climb 
  onto the accelerating downward spiral of drinking.

  No, I don't hate myself. Even if I am a vulture.



  Sometimes I wonder what the kid's real name is, the one who 
  keeps calling me. He tells me his name is Lupus Yonderboy, but I 
  know that's not it because that's the name of a minor character 
  in a book I read a few years ago. I wonder if Lupus read that 
  book. There was one time there when he didn't call me for about 
  four months, and I started wondering if maybe he'd been one of 
  the dead- and-dying left there bleeding. Then he called again, 
  and when I picked up the phone his voice was a little bit 
  deeper. "Jack?"

  I recognized the voice and automatically slipped into our 
  pattern, created on our first conversation and never strayed 
  from since. I said, "Yo?"

  "Lupus."

  "Yeah."

  "Fourth and Mason."

  "Yeah."

  "2 a.m. Hasta la vista, baybee."

  I wanted, that time, to ask him where he'd been, but there was a 
  dry click and dial tone.



  Tonight was Ninth and Kruguer, 3 a.m. I shifted again, 7-Up on 
  my calves now, and touched the pad on my watch.

> 02:42

  I always come two hours early, always on foot. If they ever see 
  me, they never let me know. Maybe the camera bag is my white 
  flag of truce, my ticket of safe passage.

  Maybe they don't know about me, but I think they do. My neck 
  hairs can feel their eyes on me, just out of my range of vision, 
  in the dark under a dark sky.

  02:49 in dark seven-segment numerals against the pale blue glow. 
  I always do this, in the last twenty minutes or so. Check my 
  watch every couple minutes, wondering where the hell they are. 
  It's a twisted kind of anxiety, kind of like a vulture waiting 
  for an animal to die, and I really prefer not to think about it. 
  This way lies madness. Or at least booze, and I'm not about to 
  get back into drinking.

  Downward spiral, get thee back.

> 02:51



  I ground my cigarette out on the wall beside me, then looked out 
  the window. Nothing but dark street, the glitter of a full moon 
  glinting off smashed windows in dead buildings. Where the hell 
  _were_ they? Maybe they were out there and I just couldn't see 
  them. I'd trashed my night vision smoking that cigarette, and it 
  was still rebuilding. Should've closed one eye.

  I shifted again -- feet -- and pulled open the "soundless" 
  Velcro closure of the camera case. It made a sound, but in the 
  tomb-quiet of the abandoned tenement, my _breathing_ was loud.

  I grabbed the camera and hoisted it out, brought it up to my 
  face. My thumb found the power stud on the light-amp hood by 
  memory, and I was looking at the crossroads of Ninth Street and 
  Kruguer Way by green daylight.

  Nothing. No one. A framework of rust that had probably been a 
  Camaro, up on blocks. One of the cinderblocks had collapsed and 
  the ex-Camaro was now tilted, the right front wheelwell on the 
  sidewalk. Ruined buildings, some blackened by fire. Cracked and 
  busted asphalt.

  I thumbed the switch again and it was all gone.

> 02:55



  Rachel called me a vulture when I told her about Lupus, which 
  was after the third call. That was when she was my wife instead 
  of some woman who happens to have the same last name as me. I 
  never figured that one out, why she kept my name.

  "Where were you last night?" she asked, that morning three years 
  ago.

  "Out. Lupus called."

  "Lupus?"

  I didn't want to tell her, but I also didn't want to lie to her. 
  She wasn't happy when I told her how Lupus had been calling me 
  when there was a battle coming, and she _really _didn't like it 
  when she wormed it out of me that I'd been in the Zone.

  "You could have been killed," she'd said, and I didn't have any 
  kind of reply to that. But then she asked me how old I figured 
  Lupus was, and when I said fifteen maybe, her eyes went all hard 
  and she said, "Jack, you're a vulture." Then she got up and 
  started to get dressed.

  When I touched her shoulder at breakfast, standing behind her 
  chair, she shrugged my hand off and my stomach just fell.

  It's a weird irony that she got the divorce when she did. All 
  those years while I was busy killing myself, she stuck with me, 
  but then when I got off the booze she walked out because I took 
  pictures of people getting killed. Maybe she liked cleaning me 
  up when I shit myself, but I don't think so.

  I think she blamed me for the Zone, the war going on there. The 
  children dying every few days in skirmishes and battles at the 
  core of the city. The war's been there for fifteen years but 
  it's my fault. My fault, even though I'm not a general, not a 
  combatant, but only the war's chronicler.



  02:59 and I heard a sound, a click, bootheel on pavement.

  Brought the camera up and thumbed the switch. Green daylight.

  Forty of them, give or take. About half in longcoats with no 
  sleeves, no shirts on underneath, muscles rippling. The rest 
  were in no particular uniforms but they all wore white cloth 
  strips around their right wrists. I'd seen these two gangs go at 
  it before, a couple months ago. All of them were packing: Uzis, 
  pistols, a couple sawed-off shotguns, you name it. One guy with 
  a cloth bracelet had a machete strapped to his back and a .30-06 
  in his hands. The strap for the machete doubled as an ammunition 
  bandolier.

  They sometimes have a weird version of the Geneva Convention in 
  the Zone, and occasionally some rules of engagement. The two 
  groups just glared at each other for a few seconds, and then -- 
  at 02:59:30 by my watch -- they scattered.

  03:00:00 brought gunfire and screams.



  It's kind of like being a war correspondent, really, only less 
  and more frightening at the same time.

  Less frightening because, at least instead of being alone in 
  some foreign land, I'm in my own city.

  More frightening because _I'm in my own city._

  You never get cops down here. People living near the Zone have 
  gotten hardened to the sounds of war. Of kids, screaming and 
  killing and dying. Gunshots. I wonder sometimes why I bother to 
  take the pictures anymore.

  While I wonder, my index finger does the work for me.

  clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik 
  clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik clik

  Instants frozen in time:

  ...A Longcoat firing a .357 Magnum, the flash from the pistol 
  overwhelmingly bright in the light-amplified photo, a round ball 
  of glare blotting out most of the gun.

  ...A long-haired White Bracelet sliding down a wall, mouth 
  slack, leaving a trail of shiny darkness.

  ...The guy with the machete, grinning insanely as his blade 
  cleaves a Longcoat's forearm, the fingers still clutching an Uzi 
  as the meat falls to the ground.

  ...A White Bracelet lying in the street with no face.

  ...The guy with the machete standing with a great dark cloud 
  coming out of his back, the flash still fading from the pistol 
  held by the Longcoat who has just shot him at near point-blank 
  range. The guy with the machete is still grinning like a 
  berserker. I watched him as his knees buckled and he collapsed 
  to the blood-wet pavement.

  ...A Longcoat crouched behind the tilted hulk of the Camaro, 
  reloading his pistolized eight-gauge pump.

  ...and so many more, black-and-white photos, grainy with light 
  amplification, taken from a third-story window in a condemned 
  tenement in the heart of the Zone.

  A vulture and his camera.



  And in the middle of it all I saw Lupus.

  It had to be him. The way I'd imagined him, talking to his voice 
  on the phone. _There_ -- blond hair to his shoulders, cloth 
  bracelet white against the skin of his wrist, everything tinged 
  green by the light-amp hood. He shot three while I watched, 
  forgetting to take pictures, one in the throat -- dead -- one in 
  the chest -- dead -- the third taking the bullet high and a gout 
  of blood from his shoulder -- running. Lupus. Yes, it had to be 
  him. I knew that, just this weird intuitive certainty.

  And I knew I had to meet him.



  03:34 and it was all over. usually what I'd do was wait at least 
  an hour before leaving, just in case, but this time--

  Well, I _had_ to meet him. Had no idea _how_, but I decided I'd 
  think of something.

  I popped the image chip out of the camera and hid it in the 
  little pouch in my jeans, in the back of the knee, sealed the 
  soundless Velcro. Packed the camera and hoisted the case, stood 
  up and let the new blood do its work, pins and needles all down 
  my legs. 03:40 and I was out the broken doorway, down the 
  stairs, and out onto the street, where the dead and dying lay 
  silent or moaning. Soon other, more dangerous vultures would be 
  out: the ghouls, pallbearers of war night in the Zone. I didn't 
  want to be anywhere near Ninth and Kruguer when _they_ showed 
  up.

  I got about a block and a half down Ninth, headed west, the way 
  the White Bracelets had gone, when something heavy and hard hit 
  the back of my head.

  There was a brief, intense light show...



  ...and I was gagging, sputtering, cold stale water in my 
  sinuses, my face.

  "Wake _up_, wake _up_, we want you a-wake fer this--"

  "W..." I said, then gagged again. Whoever it was quit pouring 
  water in my face.

  "Hey, muthafuck-a," said a voice, "where you get a toy like 
  this?" I looked towards the voice and it was Lupus, dangling my 
  camera. They doubled back, I thought, like that was going to 
  help me. "Nice fuckin' toy," said Lupus, in a voice that wasn't 
  his, and I realized then the terrible mistake I'd made. He 
  grabbed the camera by its case, both hands, and hurled it into 
  the paved ground. I heard glass shatter, the multitude of lenses 
  trashed, and a piece bounced up again, high as not-Lupus's 
  waist. The light-amp hood. "Now it's shit."

  "Hey," I said, starting to roll, to get up, and faster than that 
  the other guy was on me, knee on my chest, something sharp at my 
  throat.

  "Tell'm what we gonna do, Skull," said not-Lupus.

  "What we gonna _do_," said Skull, "yeah, is we gonna take you 
  _apart_, my man. You come in here, man, comin' deeper into our 
  Zone, you ain't fuckin' _welcome_ here, so we gonna take you the 
  fuck _apart_. Slow." He grinned. "An' you stay alive, man, for 
  hours and fuckin' _hours_. 'Cuz we start with your feet."

  Not-Lupus laughed and stooped down and showed me something made 
  of shiny steel. A scalpel. It glinted in the moonlight. "Gonna 
  _start_," said not-Lupus, "with your _fuckin'_," and right then 
  there was a spray of something warm on my face and the knee was 
  gone from my chest, the knife from my artery, and two gunshots 
  and not-Lupus was on his back screaming, I was standing, Skull 
  was dead with a huge hole punched in the middle of his forehead, 
  not-Lupus was screaming screaming screaming a raw thick high 
  girl-wail that went on and on and on and on there was something 
  gray and shredded hanging out of his flayed belly in a long 
  obscene loop I turned and a huge dark fist hit me in the face 
  drove me to my knees my nose was bleeding and through a haze of 
  pain I watched the black guy in the sleeveless longcoat stride 
  (click of bootheels angry on pavement) to not-Lupus and point a 
  pistol, shoot him one more time in the face and not-Lupus 
  finally quit screaming.

  Then the black guy came over and grabbed me by the back of my 
  jacket, hauled me to my feet. I saw not-Lupus with a hole right 
  between the eyes and a dark puddle around his head starting to 
  stain his blond hair to red.

  "Are you Jack?" the black guy said, conversationally. I knew 
  that voice.

  "Why'd you--" I couldn't say it, couldn't say _kill_. I have no 
  idea why.

  "Gutshot. Can't leave a man to die like that. You Jack?"

  I nodded. The guy was maybe eighteen. Maybe.

  "Lupus. How'd you get so fuckin' stupid, Jack?"

  "I thought--"

  "Why the fuck didn't you stay put? You always did before."

  "I--"

  "No," he said. "Don't bother. Just get out."

  "What?"

  "Get the _fuck_ out of the _Zone_. Go."

  "Lupus," I said, "thanks."

  "You're welcome. Run."

  I ran.



  I haven't gotten a call from lupus in eight months now. I don't 
  expect to anymore.

  I've been moved to the science section -- I have an undergrad 
  degree in physics, after all -- and I'm doing fine there. No 
  more nightmares. Well, not so many anymore, anyways.

  And on the nights when the faint sound of gunfire comes to me 
  over the four miles separating my place from the Zone, I call 
  the cops.

  One of these days they'll go in there. Maybe then we can start 
  reclaiming the Zone.


  Pat Johanneson (johannes@austin.brandonu.ca)
----------------------------------------------

  Pat Johanneson lives in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, where he 
  works as a computer operator at Brandon University.



  Bludemagick   by Jacqueline Carey
===================================
...................................................................
  Faith and belief are things we learn -- no matter how tightly we 
  shut our eyes, reality always shimmers at the edge of our 
  vision.
...................................................................

  The major had killed her rooster. That was what, after she had 
  scrubbed away his seed all sticky with dirt and someone's blood 
  mixed in it, hardened her heart. Brave rooster. He'd come at the 
  major rattling his feathers like spears, red eyes glaring, spurs 
  cocked like Le Diable's horns. But the major had two quick 
  hands, to grab and give a scrawny, feathered neck one sharp 
  twist and hurl the limp bundle away. That was the star by which 
  she would set her course; poor Tio Noche, a ragged bundle of 
  black feathers held together by bone and scrawn.

  Clever major, but there was such a thing as being too clever. 
  All roosters were sacred to Oudun Redeye, and Tio Noche 
  especially. He'd been dedicated. Sabada was no fool. She'd saved 
  the scrap of cloth she'd used to wipe off the major's seed, and 
  now she tied it around one of Tio Noche's stiff, skinny legs to 
  make him remember. She drew a circle of flour around the 
  rooster, then sprinkled its body with Spirit-Stay-Put powder.

  She would need a drummer, that was one thing, and it had best be 
  done tonight. Otherwise Tio Noche would start to forget and not 
  be angry any more. Sabada tied a bright scarf about her head and 
  sallied forth.

  Christophe was sitting in the morning sun, carving on a 
  half-finished totopo with its butt end anchored between his 
  feet. He gave her a sidelong look.

  "Heard you yellin' last night, girl. Saw a man leave." 
  Christophe was no vodu-guru, but he knew things on account of 
  what the wood told his hands while he carved. "My Gina tell me 
  she hear that major-fella trade for three bottles of rum 
  yesterday."

  Three bottles, and he'd only brought one. Sabada spat in the 
  dust like a viper. "He come by 'bout moonrise. Ask me to read 
  the cartas for him, look in the candle flame."

  "I said it before, your mama should've seen you handfast afore 
  she died." He spoke mildly, but the astropo he wielded by its 
  double handles flashed in the sun, broad, thin wood-shavings 
  curling in its wake. "You ought to know better than to believe 
  them that come asking after vodu readings and isn't born 
  Izladoran."

  "He said," Sabada said fiercely. "The candle and the cartas."

  "Never trust no man bringin' rum." Christophe's face was 
  stubborn. Ripe, rounded, double curves took shape beneath the 
  blade of the astropo; La Dama, who the women called 
  Lady-have-pity and the men called Swaying Hips.

  "He killed Tio Noche. I'll fix him for that."

  "Well." Even Christophe knew the major had no call to be doing 
  that. "You be careful, girl. You think about usin' the 
  bludemagick, you be careful."

  Sabada looked at the hard, red rage in her heart and avoided 
  responding. She drew a line in the dirt with the hard heel of 
  one foot.

  "Well," said Christophe finally. "He shouldn't have killed the 
  rooster." The girl had set her course and he held no sway to 
  turn her. He watched her walk away, then spit in his hands and 
  offered a quick prayer to Bon Dieu Bon to keep her safe; not 
  that he carried much sway with Bon Dieu Bon either. His Gina'd 
  come out to hang the wash and she caught his eye, shook her 
  head.



  She was a headstrong one, Sabada was, and proud enough of it. 
  Not long a woman, but she had a mean temper when crossed. 
  Christophe's Gina said once that La Fria must've spit in her eye 
  the day she was born and today Sabada thought with satisfaction 
  that it might be so. She stood with her fists on her hips and 
  stared up Mont Peligra at the village Millie Tarries nestled in 
  a gorge. The major lived there, him and other mericanos, 
  soldiers and sailors and who knew what. They felt safe there -- 
  safe, Bon Dieu Bon, in the shadow of Tarry-no-more! Many an' 
  many of them that wasn't born Izladoran had made that leap, from 
  the peak of Tarry-no-more straight into the arms of old Papa 
  Bones.

  "He Mister Highstepper," Sabada murmured. "Ain't no wall tall 
  enough to keep him out. You watch out, major. You wake up and 
  find Mister Highstepper a-knockin' on your door."

  She made her way down to the sea and sought out King Jambo, 
  finding him mending his net on the shore. He looked up when her 
  shadow fell over him, flashing a white, white smile.

  "Miz Sabada, you lookin' as bright and pretty as bouganvillea. 
  What bring you down 'mong all these smelly fishnets?"

  "Looking for a drummer, King."

  "Holdin' a fete galante, Miz Sabada?"

  "Bludemagick."

  King's sunny face darkened. "Who done what, girl?"

  "The major, he force me. He trick me. And he kill my Tio Noche."

  "Oo-wee, Miz Sabada! You don' say. I be there 'bout sundown. Do 
  you some righteous drummin', catch old Brother Blood's ear."

  "We do that, King."



  Willie Handelman was sitting under the eaves on the Club's 
  porch, playing cards with Private Macauley, and he let out a 
  long whistle when the major walked up. "Looks like she hoodooed 
  you but good, major!"

  "Shut your mouth, Willie," the major said. He was the only major 
  on the base, on the whole of the island, and proud of it. There 
  had been a naval lieutenant, but he was gone now. It was what 
  you'd expect. The officers never lasted long. "Who's manning the 
  radio?"

  Willie looked at Private Macauley, who shrugged and shifted his 
  cud of coca leaves to the other cheek.

  "Neevil, or Harris, I reckon," the private said. He squinted at 
  the sun. "T'ain't my shift. You oughta put you some asafoetida 
  on them scratches, major."

  "I've washed them already, private."

  "Them's nail tracks, they fester real easy. You'll be wantin' a 
  good root and leaf man for that," Willie said helpfully. "My gal 
  Jessamine, her brother's fixin' to be a feuille docteur."

  "I'll let you know if I need the services of an herbalist," the 
  major said sourly, and pushed his way through the saloon doors 
  into the dark of the Club.

  "Hair of the dog, major! Best thing for it," Willie called after 
  him.

  "Likes of him won't listen," said Macauley, and shifted his cud 
  again.

  "Nope."

  "Workin' at that radio seven year now. Ain't nobody ever gonna 
  answer."

  "I reckon not. You ever hear anything on it?"

  "Heard, sure. One time I even heard 'em comin' outta Cape 
  Cannibal; in Florida, you know? Thumbed that mike till I 
  blistered raw. You?"

  "Reckon I have. Merican Airliner. Cuba, even; it ain't so far. 
  Same thing's you. Blistered my thumb, hollered myself hoarse."

  Macauley snorted with laughter. "Transmitter's probably been 
  broke since before we went down."

  "Before we set out," Willie agreed.

  "Before we was born, maybe."

  "Yep."

  They'd said it all before. There were always new catchphrases, a 
  few months after a new group was marooned. When they started to 
  wonder if they'd ever get off the island, but still thought in 
  their hearts that some day they would. Time took care of that, 
  ground down the sharp edges of their black humor until nothing 
  was left of it but a few well-worn, familiar words.

  The first death or two always took off the edges too. Leapers, 
  island sickness, vodu; hard to tell the difference sometimes. 
  And there were the ones who tried to leave, the ones who washed 
  back ashore a week later. It wasn't always bodies. Engine parts, 
  boards, lifeboats, part of a nameplate sometimes.

  None came back alive, and there was never any rescue.

  "Major fixin' for trouble, you reckon?" Macauley asked after a 
  time.

  "Yep," said Willie.



  He knew, the major. He knew. Unlike the others, who either died 
  fast or evolved gradually into the slow, strange rhythms of 
  Izladora, the major maintained a survivor's passions toward the 
  island that had saved and claimed his life.

  The rage was unintended. It was a horse he couldn't curb, a 
  demon on his back. She had a temper and a tongue on her, Sabada 
  did, but that was no excuse; he had known, when the red fog 
  cleared, that he had crossed a bad line. Cold and rational, a 
  weapon that thought, his mind denied the whisper of vodu 
  revenge, but his blood knew better. The pumping of his heart 
  anticipated the beating of drums and each surge of blood was 
  impregnated with fresh fear. The major was sweating.

  "Abuelito, give me a rum and lime," he said brusquely, pulling 
  up a stool. "With a splash of soda."

  The old man behind the bar blinked once, slowly, and shuffled to 
  the rack. He peered at the scratches that furrowed the major's 
  neck and disappeared into his collar, shook his head once, 
  slowly, and mixed the drink.

  "Not a word, Abuelito." The major picked up his glass and downed 
  half the contents at a gulp, grimaced and set the glass back on 
  the bar. The tropic sweetness of the rum coated the inside of 
  his mouth with a syrupy taste that neither the tartness of lime 
  nor the fizz of soda could allay. "Goddammit."

  Abuelito did not speak, but his thick, heavy eyelids creased 
  briefly. His skin was the color of well-oiled teak and he had 
  tended the Club at Millie Tarries since long before the major 
  had arrived.

  "What?" the major asked irritably, but with a pulse of fear 
  beneath the irritation. "What?" The old man's eyes gleamed under 
  his heavy lids. "Tell me, dammit."

  "Eh." Abuelito shook a hand-rolled cigarette from a faded 
  cigarette pack given him by a long-ago serviceman, then lit it 
  with a crudely made Izladoran match, cupping the match between 
  his hands. "Seen many an' many men with the mark on them."

  "What mark?" A drop of sweat crawled from the major's right 
  temple to his jaw. The Club's fan, propelled by a windmill atop 
  the roof, rotated slowly. "Goddammit! What mark?"

  "Fear." The old man's eyes gleamed again.

  "I don't believe in vodu," the major said stiffly. Abuelito 
  shrugged.

  "Not vodu," he said. "Bludemagick. There's them that are born 
  with the drawing power in they blood. Your Miss Sabada, she's a 
  one."

  A shudder that began deep in his bowels racked the major. His 
  sweat turned cold and his heart rate increased.

  If you give in, his mind whispered, the island will have won. It 
  will have broken you. Izladora will laugh while the last sane 
  man on the island bids his marbles farewell.

  And if you don't, his blood whispered, you'll die. You'll stand 
  on the edge of Tarry-no-more with Oudun Redeye's hot breath on 
  the back of your neck and Oudun Redeye's sharp spear in the base 
  of your spine and you'll jump and you'll scream all the way 
  down, and when your mind snaps and your bones snap and stab 
  their way out of your flesh you'll still be screaming.

  And if Redeye doesn't get you tonight, his sister will, La Fria 
  will come, Knife-in-the-dark, and she'll creep into your head 
  and you won't ever know until you wake up screaming, your knife 
  in one hand and your private parts in the other and after the 
  knife flashes and La Fria's black smile shines in the dark 
  you'll still be screaming.

  The major shuddered again and lifted his fear-sick gaze to meet 
  the old man's eyes. "Help me," he said.



  Darkness was falling on the island. Sabada's hut was lit with 
  many candles. She hummed through her grinning teeth as she drew 
  in white flour on the dirt floor the veve-sign of Oudun, which 
  would enclose both her and the rooster.

  In the corner, King Jambo had begun drumming; softly yet, the 
  drumming only a rasping, thrumming pulse. He hummed too, and 
  swayed as he drummed. He was the best drummer on Izladora, King 
  was, and he loved drumming for drumming's sake, so much that the 
  Espiritus would come sometimes just to listen.

  Tio Noche lay in the center of the veve-sign, his stiff claws 
  pointing toward the roof of the hut, a black candle at his head 
  and a red candle on either side; before him sat the empty bronze 
  bowl and the flint knife.

  When the veve-sign was finished and nightfall lay like on the 
  island like a black cloak, Sabada set aside the flour and smiled 
  fiercely to herself. She pulled the bright scarf from her head 
  and tugged out the pins that held her braids in place. The 
  braids fell free, writhing and tangling like black mambas, all 
  the way to her waist. "Time now, King," she said, smiling still, 
  and the whites of her eyes had gone all scarlet with blood.

  King Jambo swayed, and the drumbeat deepened.



  "That's all." The major was trembling with the force of his 
  confession. "By all that's holy, I swear it."

  He knelt at the feet of Mere d'Mere, Mother of the Espiritus, 
  Mother of All. The major was far from Millie Tarries.

  Abuelito scratched his ribs through his sleeveless undershirt 
  and nodded at the major. "Buen. You give her the offering now, 
  major."

  The ribbons that marked his rank and history and achievements 
  were clenched in his fist. The major opened his hand with an 
  effort. Mere d'Mere's face was neither welcoming nor 
  compassionate; it was smooth and impassive, heavy-lidded and 
  broad-lipped. The major averted his eyes as he fastened the 
  ribbons on the effigy's rich robe, which was already crowded 
  with offering tokens. His hands shook.

  Then it was done, and something in his mind gave way, taking 
  with it an enormous weight and leaving him weak with the 
  delerium of relief and surrender. He could almost laugh, and he 
  could have curled at the feet of Mere d'Mere and gratefully 
  slept.

  "Eh, buen." Abuelito ground out the cigarette he was smoking and 
  tucked thebutt carefully in a pocket of his baggy, wrinkled 
  trousers, then shuffled over to one of the lamp-lit shelves that 
  lined the grotto of Mere d'Mere, chiseled from the rocky walls. 
  From a wooden bowl he took a handful of salt, and then shuffled 
  to the pool in the center of the grotto and cast the salt on the 
  water. "Salt be blessed, purify this water." He nodded at the 
  major and gestured at the pool with his chin.

  The major stripped down and climbed into the pool; the water was 
  cold and looked black and oily in the wavering light of the 
  lamps. Chest-deep, the major shivered. Abuelito squatted on his 
  haunches at the edge of the pool and placed a hand on the 
  major's head. Once, twice, three times the old man submerged the 
  major.

  "You get out now," he said.

  The major climbed out shivering. Abuelito dug in his pockets and 
  found a small, stoppered bottle of blue glass. "Holy Oil of 
  Repentance and Sorrow," he said, and drew an oil-smeared cross 
  on the major's brow. "Mere d'Mere, this man has crossed you and 
  he is sorry. He place himself under your protection and ask 
  forgiveness. He has crossed your son Oudun Redeye and he is 
  sorry. He makes repentance to you in the name of all the 
  Espiritus and the Bon Dieu Bon. This man makes an offering and 
  asks for your protection. He asks you intercede on his behalf 
  with your son Oudun Redeye. This he so beseeches. Mere d'Mere, 
  hear his prayer." Abuelito removed his hand from the major's 
  brow. "Grace misery cord. Amen."

  "What happens now?" The major was still shivering. The old man 
  shrugged and sat on a boulder, rolling another cigarette.

  "Wait and see."



  The drumming was grown wild and frenzied. King Jambo was far 
  gone into the rhythms, his eyes closed, his hands a blur, his 
  skin glistening with sweat.

  Sabada swayed, and the stone knife danced in her hands. It wove 
  patterns in the candlelight, it leapt from hand to hand and 
  pricked her skin with sharp kisses that drew tiny beads of 
  blood.

  Oh, they had caught old Brother Blood's ear for sure this night. 
  Sabada felt his presence crowding her hut, felt his dark and 
  thunderous interest pressing against her skin, his smell like 
  ozone and heated bronze.

  "Oye!" she cried, "Oye, Oudun Redeye, Spear-shaker, Brother 
  Blood! Come, Redeye, come, I have for you to drink. Oye, come, 
  Oudun Redeye!"

  The stone knife flashed dully across her left forearm, opening a 
  new seam in skin which already bore several straight scars. 
  Rich, red blood spilled into the bowl.

  "You see, Redeye, you see Tio Noche, your servant. We asking 
  justice for his death. You see he be marked with the seed of the 
  man who done it; we asking justice."

  Clever major, foolish man. She'd have shared with him what he 
  wanted, maybe, if he'd have come courtin' rather than lyin'. 
  Even then, with the rum... but there was no giving to them that 
  wanted to take. He'd crossed her, and he'd killed her Tio Noche.

  The knife cut again. Sabada held both arms over the bowl, 
  letting them drain and chanting, "Oudun, Oudun, Oudun." The drum 
  drove her heart-pulse, her heart drove her blood, the blood drew 
  the Espiritu. The bronze bowl grew full.

  Outside her hut stormclouds gathered and spears of lightning 
  jabbed the night. Thunder rolled through the drumbeat and Sabada 
  laughed aloud.

  "Oudun!"

  The Espiritu answered. Sabada screamed once and went stiff, her 
  eyes rolling up to show the blood-red whites.

  He came, he answered. Tio Noche's dead feathers rattled. The 
  candle flames fluttered wildly. King Jambo's hands fell silent 
  on the drums. The bronze bowl spun and spun and emptied, spun 
  and wobbled and settled into stillness. Oudun Redeye's war cry 
  thundered; he came, Oudun Redeye, came and went.



  "Eh." The old man cracked open one eye and peered at the 
  gathering storm. "Oye, Spear-shaker."

  An angry rumble of thunder replied. Abuelito glanced at the 
  sleeping form of the major, who slept with his knees drawn up, 
  his hands tucked between his thighs. The thunder rumbled again, 
  an impatient spark of red winking in the roiling clouds. 
  Abuelito grumbled and found his feet, taking a seat on a boulder 
  and addressing the storm while he searched his pockets for a 
  cigarette.

  "Oye, patience, Spear-shaker. I am an old man." He cupped a 
  match between his creased, leathery palms and lit a cigarette. 
  "Eh, buen," he sighed, exhaling smoke. "Well, I have given your 
  rightful prey into the protection of Tu Maman Grande's arms. So. 
  The girl is young, and headstrong. She uses you for what is 
  rightfully between her and the man. That leaves only the 
  rooster. So?"

  Lightning flashed violently.

  "Aiee, well... He has repented, and been shriven." Abuelito drew 
  thoughtfully on his cigarette. "Let us say... Suppose I take on 
  the blood debt for the rooster. Would that be acceptable, eh?"

  There was a long peal of thunder. The old man shrugged.

  "It is a matter between your mother and myself, let us say. So. 
  Do we have a bargain?"

  The stormclouds roiled furiously, the red eye in their midst 
  flashing. Crescendos of thunder boomed and shook the island. In 
  his sleep, the major whimpered. Abuelito coughed and spat 
  alongside the boulder. Lightning flickered; once, twice, three 
  times, and the storm clouds drew in upon themselves and 
  disappeared with a final, fading burst of thunder.

  Stillness returned to the island.

  "Oye, Mamacita," the old man said to the effigy of Mere d'Mere, 
  "A Millie Tarries man for the blood-price of one rooster. Pretty 
  good, eh? Your son is not happy, but I am thinking I made you a 
  good bargain." A deep silence answered, and the old man nodded 
  to himself, then glanced at the major. "Eh, major. You a part of 
  Izladora now, and the island, she is part of you. Fight her no 
  more."

  In his sleep, the major sighed deeply and relaxed.



  Sabada was awakened by King Jambo's hand shaking her shoulder.

  "Gotta be goin', Miz Sabada. Fish don't wait for no 
  bludemagick."

  "Mercy, King. Be seein' you." She watched him leave with his 
  drums tucked under his arm, and full waking greeted her riding 
  on a wave of disgust. The aftermath of bludemagick, sure enough; 
  and worse. Something had gone wrong. If it went right, the power 
  returned threefold, but Sabada was as weak as a day-old kitten.

  No tellin' where the blame was to be laid just yet. Sabada 
  wrapped a sarong around her waist and walked to the river to 
  wash the dirt and black blood and flour from her skin. Her nanny 
  goat Cleo bleated at her, pleading sore to be milked, and the 
  taro patch sore needed water.

  "Heard old Spear-shaker rattlin' the roofbeams last night," 
  Christophe called as she walked back from the river. Sabada 
  didn't answer. "You think maybe he could 'splain 'bout that 
  fella comin' down the path there, girl?"

  It was the major. Sabada would have spat when she saw him, but 
  there was no spit left in her this morning. The major didn't 
  look like himself. She'd never seen him without Millie Tarries 
  clothes on, but he didn't have nothing on but a pair of short 
  pants tied up with sisal rope, and a big old cowry shell 'round 
  his neck, and a scrawny little black rooster under one arm and a 
  bottle of rum under the other.

  "What you want?" Sabada asked, making her voice mean. The major 
  set the bottle down and held the rooster out to her.

  "To make amends," he said. "He's for you. Abuelito said to tell 
  you his name is Paga a Pecado."

  "I don't need no damn rooster from no vieux mexicali guru-man. 
  Rooster don't pay for sin. Rum don't pay for no sin. Blood pay 
  for sin."

  "No." The major went down on one knee and released Paga a 
  Pecado, who began scratching in the dust around Sabada's feet. 
  "Life pays for sin." He picked up the bottle of rum and stood, 
  holding it out toward her. "Here. I'm sorry."

  Sabada gave him the evil eye sidelong, but her power was weak 
  and the eye had no sting. She pointed at his cowry shell with 
  her chin. "Token of Mere d'Mere, eh? He's smart man, that vieux 
  mexicali. Come to bludemagick, she 'bout the only thing holds 
  sway to turn the Espiritus. They listen to they Maman. Always a 
  price, though, 'specially if you in the wrong."

  "Yes," he said. "My military rank."

  "So, no more Millie Tarries guru-man, eh? Poor major," she 
  scoffed. He shrugged.

  "I wasn't a very good guru-man. I used to be, before. Not here, 
  not on Izladora. Everything's different. You were born here, you 
  don't know."

  "Many an' many of them that wasn't born Izladoran make the 
  leap," Sabada said in dire agreement. "So you believe now, eh 
  major? No more mockin' the candle and the cartas, vodu and 
  bludemagick and the Espiritus. No more, eh? You believe."

  "I do," he said, and he expected a shudder of terror and loss, 
  but there was none; only the hot morning sun, the scratching 
  rooster and the woman.

  "Good." Sabada stooped and picked up Paga a Pecado. "Pay for 
  sin, eh major? You start by waterin' my taro patch." She turned 
  on her heel and made for her hut. The major scratched his head, 
  smiled wryly at his cowry shell token, and followed her.

  Behind the bar at the Millie Tarries Club, the old man chuckled 
  to himself and rolled another cigarette.



  Jacqueline Carey (carey@hope.edu)
-----------------------------------

  Jacqueline Carey studies anything from Goedel's theorem to 
  Egyptian astrology, all or none of which may inform her writing. 
  Her work has appeared in a handful of small press publications, 
  and she supports her writing habit by working as the coordinator 
  of the DePree Art Center & Gallery in Michigan.



  The Farm Story   by Steven Thorn
==================================
...................................................................
  In the movies, a hard-working farmer and his family endure 
  hardship but always come up all right in the end. What do they 
  do if they're not in a movie?
...................................................................

  The gunshots cracked all day, from when the sun blazed into the 
  blue above the eastern pasture, beyond the rusting frame of the 
  old windmill that had been the fortress of so many childhood 
  imaginings, to when it fell, casting a thickening bloody light 
  over the wheat field, whose upward grade made it seem a vast 
  expanse extending to the horizon.

  The ripeness of that ugly stunted rust-ridden wheat and its 
  seeming immensity under that sun, were lies. Hollow betrayals of 
  light and land.



  The gunshots woke me. a distant, dry cracking. As dry as the hot 
  wind rushing over the fields of dead wheat.

  I pulled on my jeans and boots and ran through the kitchen, 
  grabbing a piece of toast from Margaret's hand as I passed, 
  before she had time to slather on any butter. She gave me a 
  stern motherly look, her eyebrows rising.

  "Grandad said not to. He'll be livid!"

  But I had kicked open the screen door and was running, for what 
  I thought would be the last time, to my tower.

  I clambered up the iron frame and sat on the wooden platform 
  below the rust-eaten triangles of the blades. I could see 
  Grandad, a small figure in white beside the tractor. The 
  dust-red Hereford herd, their white faces like skulls, milled 
  around before him. Grandad pushed up his hat and dabbed at his 
  brow with a bandanna. Then he tied it around the barrel of the 
  .33 Winchester slung over his shoulder, took bullets from a box 
  on the nose of the tractor, began thumbing them into the breech.

  I stared, stunned, as he lifted the butt to his shoulder, took 
  careful aim, and pumped bullets into the heads of the calm and 
  lowing cattle.

  A red star exploded on the white skulls. The cows lost their 
  dung and dropped. I could imagine their eyes rolling with 
  surprise and momentary pain as they staggered and fell heavily 
  on their sides, raising a burst of dust. Some would kick their 
  legs a little, searching for the hard earth, before they were 
  finally still.

  Occasionally a beast would meander away from the herd. Then 
  Grandad would whistle a particular way and Petersen, our 
  black-and-white Collie, would leap around and bark and nip at 
  its ankles until it returned.

  When a dozen or so were dead, Grandad would climb into the 
  tractor, kick over the engine with a spurt of diesel exhaust, 
  and then reversed, using the grader on the back to push the 
  carcasses into a ditch.

  From my tower I watched Grandad's methodical labor. When half 
  the herd lay dusty in the ditch and the sun was a rage of gold 
  high in the sky, I returned to the house.

  Grandad came in with the dusk. From the front room, among the 
  suitcases and packed cardboard cartons, Margaret and I heard his 
  boots clump heavily up the steps. We turned from the television 
  to watch him through the screen door.

  Sweat ran down his arm, trickled over his fingers and steamed 
  off the barrel of the Winchester. He made a circling motion with 
  the rifle, so that the bow of the kerchief tied around the end 
  of the barrel licked the dust off the floorboards. Then he 
  dropped it. A shot rang out the evening, with a certain 
  finality, and Margaret clutched Zebediah, her toy horse, tighter 
  in her hands.

  Grandad's eyes were rolling, then staring, bloodshot and mad. 
  Had he not been such a hard man, they probably would've been 
  filled with tears. He seemed not to have heard or noticed the 
  shot at all. Eyes rolling and staring into the blackening night, 
  as mad as Margaret's pony Old Bent Back's were the day he'd 
  eaten jimson weed and gone wild.

  We'd had to shoot Old Bent Back. It looked like we'd have to 
  shoot Grandad too. Margaret cried for a week when we shot Old 
  Bent Back, until Grandad had made a small bedraggled unicorn out 
  of wire, straw, glue and some of Old Bent Back's mane. Grandad 
  had carved its horn from a steer's cropped horn. Old Bent Back's 
  soul was in that unicorn, Margaret said. She named it Zebediah 
  and that had quieted her.

  There were speckles of blood dried to black on Grandad's shirt 
  and on his moleskins. Moths and gnats and mosquitos and 
  iridescent beetles flickered around his head. He chucked off his 
  hat, brushing at the insects which swarmed around his hair. He 
  stomped through the front room without barely a nod at Margaret 
  and me, and went down the hall to shower.

  He was mad yesterday. Today he was crazy.



  It wasn't the drought that had ruined our earth, like it had so 
  many others. Grandad was canny. He'd used the last overdaft to 
  stock up on cattle feed. Said he could smell a dry season coming 
  on the breeze from the west. The government had deregulated the 
  market, though. Imported beef from Asia was cheaper than our 
  dust. It cost more to truck the herd to auction than what we'd 
  get for it. South West Queensland Beef and Dairy owned the 
  trucking. They owned the auction yards. They owned the abattoir, 
  the estate agent and the bank. We were shafted.

  The bank delivered the foreclosure notice and posted the auction 
  signs. A South West Queensland Beef and Dairy subsidiary would 
  buy our farm, our cattle, like they had so many others, and 
  razor a profit while we yet owed them our labor and our blood.

  Grandad wouldn't even let the suit from the real estate borrow a 
  shovel to dig the post holes. Perfectly within his rights, 
  Sheriff T. Jackson-Flynn said. The bastard had to drive the 127 
  kilometers back to Windorah to get a shovel.

  As soon as the sheriff and the bankers and the estate agents had 
  gone, Grandad took a can of gas, doused the "Auction: 
  Foreclosure" signs and set them blazing.

  "Bastards. Sweating, collared men," he spoke with derision, 
  "with narrow eyes and small minds. The suits hang on their 
  crooked shoulders like the hunched wings of carrion birds. 
  Vultures, let them profit and feast on carcasses." He didn't 
  curse much, especially in front of Margaret, so when he did you 
  knew he meant it.

  Margaret just said how pretty the flames looked, all halloween 
  orange, burning triangles within squares "livid against the 
  dusk."

  Me, I said nothing. I knew it was futile. I just could smell the 
  burning in the air. It seemed to herald... something special, 
  like Christmas Eve and the last day of school and the day after 
  the finish of harvest put together. An expectancy of something 
  new -- change and freedom -- yet also an ending. Everything 
  complete, but not quite, and everything about to start again, 
  but not quite yet.

  After dinner of greens and carrots and lamb roast that Margaret 
  had put on in the afternoon, a dinner at which no said as much 
  as "Pass the salt please," Grandad sat on his wicker chair on 
  the porch drinking straight from a bottle of Johnny Walker he'd 
  been keeping for a celebration. He'd given that bottle to Dad 
  ten years ago when Margie was born. Mum and Dad died a month 
  later in a car smash.

  I was four then, so although I remembered a lot about them, the 
  smell of Mum's perfume and Dad's rough chin, and the sound of 
  both their voices, Grandad had always been there too. That 
  bottle had sat on the shelf ever since. Yeah, tonight Grandad 
  was celebrating.

  We did the washing up and Margaret helped me with my algebra 
  homework; she was good at that sort of thing, but I never had 
  the patience. Then we watched TV for a while, a program set in 
  the lush English countryside. I couldn't bear it, the taste of 
  dust still dry on my tongue, so I went to bed.



  The moon lifted huge and yellow over the fields out my window, 
  and I was too restless to sleep. There was a smell, heady on the 
  warm breeze, like when we'd drive into Windorah along the 
  highway, past the abattoir.

  As I turned my mind to what the city'd be like (we'd be going in 
  just under a month, after the auction, to stay with Aunt May in 
  Brisbane) and began finally drifting into dreams, I heard 
  Grandad go out into the night, the creak of the barn door, and 
  then, like the breaking of clock whose mechanism yet refused to 
  fail completely, the rustle and twang of bailing wire, extolling 
  some purely imaginary hour.

  Margaret woke me earlier than the sun and said she couldn't find 
  Grandad. She'd cooked a big breakfast of sausage and egg and 
  fried tomato, and had made both tea and coffee. But when she 
  went to wake him, he wasn't there.

  "And I'm absolutely livid!" she added, (she'd heard the word 
  _livid_ on TV and had been applying it liberally ever since) 
  pointing at the breakfast, now cooling, laid on the best Gingham 
  cloth, with Zebediah clutched in her hand. Her cheeks were 
  flushed as she held her face tight against the welling tears.

  I went outside and looked for him. Grandad had let the chickens 
  out, and Petersen had killed a whole mess of them and was 
  chasing the rest around.There were feathers and bloody chicken 
  carcasses scattered around the yard. The rooster, escaped into 
  the lower branches of a scraggly gum by the coop, crowed 
  mournfully.

  Petersen was barking and chasing a chicken that he'd half-mauled 
  so it was running with its torn off head, held by one or two 
  gory tendons, dragging a trail in the dust. The dog was well on 
  its way to becoming wild. There was blood on his white bib, and 
  he gave me barely a glance as I shouted his name.

  Then under the crystalline blue of the shadowless pre-dawn, we 
  saw something glinting, moving in the wheat field. Margaret, 
  standing by me on the porch, pointed with Zebediah clutched in 
  her hand, its horn piercing.

  The glinting, shimmering as the sun licked it, made a twangy 
  chimey music as it dashed through the wheat. It raised a dust 
  haze as it ran, kicking the earth and crushing the heads to 
  powder. It swung something into the air, a crooked stick, a 
  scythe that caught the sun and arc on its blade.

  It was Grandad. I could see tufts of his ashen hair through the 
  wire cap on his head. He'd wrapped himself in baling wire and 
  was hacking at the wheat with the scythe like some madly animate 
  scarecrow. He'd leap and twang and chime and slash a mighty 
  slash out of the dead dry wheat. In the gusts of powder, he 
  looked like some emaciated Michelin Man, like the one on the 
  paint peeling sign at Murray's Tire and Gas in Windorah.

  He seemed to tire. I wasn't sure if he'd noticed us. He stuck 
  the handle of the scythe into the earth and let go of it as he 
  dropped to his knees, vanishing but for a gleam amongst the 
  chest-high stalks. The scythe bent over him like some curious 
  long-necked, silver-beaked bird, and as Grandad sobbed the wire 
  jangled and twinged like tinny bells.

  He grabbed handfuls of the cut wheat, its heads turned to dust 
  under the pressure of his hands. He just sat there, suddenly 
  still, the dust running through his clenched fingers and the sun 
  gleaming on his armor of wire.

  Margaret, tears wet on her face, suddenly ran forward. 
  Blubbering, she prised open his hands, taking the bundles of 
  straw from his fist and pressing Zebediah into them.

  "Don't be sad because you had to shoot all the animals, 
  Grandad," she said. And with her little hands she bent the thin 
  sheafs of stalk around each other, so they looked a rough straw 
  doll of a beast. "We can make more, like you made Zebediah, and 
  they'll be even more pretty and their spirits will wander the 
  fields of heaven with Zebediah."

  Grandad's head sprang up all of a sudden, like he'd heard a 
  shot. He stood, all ajangle and glowing silver in the risen sun, 
  and said, "These fields forgotten. This earth has forsaken us, 
  but that is the way of earthen things. I love you kids. Let's 
  forget this earth and have a celebration." He put his silver 
  twined arm around Margie, smiling as they emerged from the 
  wheat, and we walked back to the house.

  "Steven," said Grandad as we finished wolfing down the now-cold 
  breakfast, "your father's black suit, the one he wore to 
  Grandmother's -- bless her soul -- funeral, in the brown trunk, 
  I think. Margaret, wear your mother's satin party dress. We'll 
  rustle the best damn herd anyone's ever seen, and watch those 
  duffers from the bank's faces when they come to auction off the 
  beasts."

  So I dressed in my father's black suit, which smelled of 
  camphor, and Grandad found, rummaging in a box, Great Grandad's 
  harness-racing silks, so over the top I wore a harlequin vest. 
  Then Grandad tied a green-and-blue polka dot tie around the neck 
  of my red shirt, and pinned his father's war medals on my chest.

  Margie strolled out, beaming, in Mum's emerald satin party 
  dress, too loose around her thin shoulders. So she tightened it 
  up with sashes of silk around the waist, and a gold clasp that 
  bunched up the baggy bosom, and draped herself in Mum's and her 
  own jewelry so she glittered with chains of gold and brooches 
  and pearls and rings, loose on her fingers.

  Grandad strung his wires with the pull-tops of beer cans, brass 
  washers, Christmas tree ornaments, bells, fridge magnets the 
  shape of fruits and Disney characters and smiley faces, ribbons 
  of aluminum foil, my old toy matchbox cars, keys, and other 
  bright metallic and jangling odds and ends, and finally stuck 
  our Christmas star in his cap.

  Margaret put on her straw hat, and I donned my wide brimmed 
  Akubra. Grandad pulled the brim so the hat sat at a jaunty angle 
  and said, "Now we're ready." He took his camera and set the 
  timer, so it trapped a photo of us together on the end of the 
  porch, with the scattered bodies of chickens and Petersen 
  leaping about behind us.

  We pulled on our gumboots, and Margaret said, "We look 
  positively livid!" I had to agree. We were dressed for the 
  maddest Halloween costume party ever.

  Then Grandad, with a jangle and a magician's flourish, held up 
  the tractor keys.

  "Mow the wheat field, Steven, my boy. Mow it all." He had never 
  let me drive the tractor by myself alone before, though I'd 
  driven it a few times when he'd been out in Windorah. I grabbed 
  the keys and ran for the barn, waving my hat in the air and 
  hollering.

  "I want a good-sized stack, ya hear?" he shouted, then laughed.

  I climbed into the cabin, adjusted the seat downward and 
  forward, put in the key and pressed the starter. The engine 
  kicked and I revved the engine so it spouted exhaust. I snapped 
  on the stereo to a rock station, raised the harvester blades and 
  roared out to the field.

  I raised a hell of dust, both ocher red chaff and the brown of 
  cracked earth, as I carelessly churned the wheat. The dust rose 
  and drifted for kilometers, turning the sky to red. The tractor 
  roared, I bellowed and the music blared. I was inscribing my 
  bitterness, my anger, into the earth that I had loved and that 
  was no longer mine.

  When the field was reduced to stubble, carpeted in straw, I 
  lowered the hay grader and reversed, inscribing a star from 
  points to center, pushing the wheat into one enormous stack. The 
  scythe, I realized, had been forgotten in my storm. Like the 
  proverbial needle, it was lost in the depths.

  Then I mowed the wild straggle that edged the field, the 
  Paterson's curse. Mum had planted it when she'd kept an apiary, 
  and I remembered the distinctive taste of the honey from those 
  purple flowers. Mum had caught me, my fingers sticky, sucking 
  the sweetness from them. But all she said was how the scrubby, 
  purple flowered weed was also called Salvation Jane. Then she 
  dipped her fingers in the jar too.

  When the sun was middling in the sky and the dust clouds had 
  mostly settled, Grandad and Margaret drove out in the Ford 
  pick-up, a tangled jigsaw of wire jangling, teetering and 
  towering in its bed.

  Grandad waved a gleaming arm and I cut the tractor engine.

  "Come on, Steven!"

  "What do you think, Grandad?" I said with a nod toward the 
  mountain of hay, edged with Paterson's purple tangles, that rose 
  like some monstrous dusty bloom, as high as the house over the 
  stubbled field.

  "A veritable Himalaya, Steven my boy. An Ulluru of straw! The 
  biggest mountain of hay in the world."

  "It's absolutely _livid_!" said Margaret.

  Grandad was excited. He was crazy excited. "We'll unload the 
  pick-up and then have our picnic lunch."

  He let down the tailgate and rolled a tar drum off the back of 
  the Ford. Then we lashed some rope among the tangle of wire. We 
  pulled at it, straining, and it rolled off with a flutter of 
  petals like some enormous tumbleweed. It came to rest by the hay 
  mountain.

  The bottom of the pick-up's bed was deep in flowers -- irises, 
  violets, chrysanthemums, marigolds, angel's trumpets, and 
  posies. It was every last flower from Margaret's carefully 
  tended garden. We shoveled them off and the perfume crashed out 
  of them. They sat, a small brightly-colored hillock by the hay.

  Margaret had spread a sumptuous picnic lunch out across a lurid 
  quilt of patchwork paisley. While we feasted, Grandad spoke of 
  the city, of dynamic ribbons and globe symbols. Of white noise 
  and chaos. Of bleakness dressed in rainbows. Of how the city was 
  a palace of mirrors, how the reversals of mirrors are lies. Of 
  glass houses full of stone-throwers.

  And we knew he was mad, but both Margie and I listened in 
  rapture to this man of wire and leather whose raucous laughter 
  shook his body and rang the midday with jangling and tinkling 
  and twangs and chimes.

  "And now to work!" And we stood, brushing the crumbs from our 
  finery.

  Grandad and I started untangling shapes from the tumble of wire, 
  while Margie packed away the luncheon. We stood wire skeletons 
  of cattle all around. With a long-handled brush, Grandad began 
  ladling tar over the frames, and when he'd finish one, Margie 
  and I would stick sheafs of the hay, tangled with Paterson's 
  curse, to the beasts. Then Margaret stuck a red chrysanthemum to 
  the end of each muzzle as a mouth, and violets as eyes, and tied 
  stiff straw tails to their rears.

  By three in the afternoon, a magnificent herd of fat straw 
  beasts stood quiet on the sun-blasted pasture. Tufted with straw 
  and spattered with tar, we looked like a trio of scarecrows.

  That night, I dreamed I was soaring away from an unremitting 
  turbulence.



  At dawn I ran out to my tower for the last time. Below me, 
  Grandad had taken his silver wire wrappings, my father's black 
  suit, and mother's emerald dress, our fine costumes of yesterday 
  with regalia, and made three scarecrows. They were curious 
  shepherds overseeing the herd from the height of wooden crosses.

     Fleshed in straw and thistle and Paterson's curse
     Crimson-mouthed and violet-eyed
     When the farm died
     After the scorching months
     We shot the herd
     Took a thousand miles of baling wire
     A thousand miles of rust-flaked baling wire
     and tied a hundred head of cattle
     and three fine horse
     and three fancy farmers
     They stood proud, our golden calves
     Then the rains blew in
     And scattered them
     And they rotted in the sun



  Shake a nativity under glass and snow falls. A wind blew, 
  smelling fat with rain, and the beasts bristled against it. The 
  dust raised and swirled. The shadows of our quivering beasts 
  grew, and they seemed to move in fear, golden calves before some 
  coming wrath.

  A storm as black and immense as the onslaught of a winter's 
  night swept over the horizon. I clambered down and ran back to 
  the house. The rain came, slow at first, the heavy drops kicking 
  up spurts of dust. Then a sudden hammering, scattering our 
  beasts, tumbling them, stampeding them. The storm knocked them 
  down, ate away their flesh of straw, plucked out their eyes and 
  mouths. They floated away.

  It thundered and flashed for only half an hour, We watched from 
  the porch, distraught, this hell lit in lightening flashes. Then 
  the sun came out, smeared over the slick earth. Quickly drying, 
  glinting on the bent and tangled skeletons. Muddy clumps of 
  straw began to ripen and rot.



  Grandad seemed transformed to his usual taciturn self, but we 
  knew he wasn't. He was hurting, as if cursed.

  We took our cases and odds and ends and put them in the pick-up. 
  Margie clutched Zebediah in her hands. Grandad had an old and 
  browning family photo in his lap.

  The last I saw of the farm as we drove for Windorah was a few 
  lonely, bedraggled beasts of tattered straw and Paterson's 
  curse, the scythe, glinting, somehow still planted in the earth, 
  and we three fanciful scarecrows beside it.

  Our flowered eyes were weeping; our flowered mouths were 
  laughing.



  A year or so later, in a southern suburb of Brisbane, in an 
  ordinary life in which we walked to school rather than studying 
  by relay satellite, Margaret wrote a poem that won a school 
  competition, and was published in a local paper.

  People asked me about the poem. Teachers, a journalist, Aunt 
  May. What did Margaret mean by it?

  So I wrote this story.



  Steven Thorn (thorn@macconn.mpx.com.au)
-----------------------------------------

  Steven Thorn was born in Sydney, Australia in the mid-'60s, and 
  grew up on the outskirts of New South Wales country towns, in 
  industrial cities between sea and desert, on the streets of 
  Sydney, and on many roads in between. In addition to his 
  university studies, he is currently writing a film script based 
  on "The Farm Story."



  Need to Know: Books are Alive and Online!   by Geoff Duncan
=============================================================

  For several years now -- especially since the explosion of the 
  Web -- pundits have been predicting the death of the book. Why 
  would anyone want to buy a book, when soon _any_ text will be 
  available on demand via the Net? Well, don't look now: some 
  clever booksellers are beginning to turn these "seeds of 
  destruction" into the fruits of success. WordsWorth Books in 
  Cambridge, Massachusetts, has set up Virtual WordsWorth," 
  (http://www.wordsworth.com/) to serve not just information about 
  the store itself (including directions and a map of the Boston 
  subway!), but also its database of 100,000+ titles in a wide 
  variety of subject areas. The store is as courteous on the Web 
  as you would expect in real life -- users aren't forced to 
  "authenticate themselves" the instant they walk in the door 
  (unlike many commercial sites), and they consistently give you 
  the option send a query to a real human. As a general bookstore, 
  WordsWorth's selection tends to have more breadth than depth, 
  although I was startled at the number of obscure, niche 
  publications in stock. And if you can't find it, they'll find it 
  for you: with an e-mail message and three dollars, WordsWorth 
  will conduct a search for an out-of-print book.

  Looking for a speciality shop? The Future Fantasy Bookstore in 
  Palo Alto, California (http://futfan.com/) has been maintaining 
  a Web site for some time with the assistance of Digital 
  Equipment Corporation. As the name implies, Future Fantasy 
  specializes in science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries, although 
  a quick search of its online database reveals a good selection 
  of horror and other hard-to-categorize fiction. Future Fantasy 
  makes its newsletters and store events available, and the 
  operation has a nice homespun feel. As is appropriate for a 
  specialized shop, the searchable database allows more selective 
  queries, so you can get a list of the vampire books published in 
  paperback in the last two months (ten, if you're curious). If 
  this doesn't satisfy, check out Yahoo's Books listing 
  (http://www.yahoo.com/Business/Corporations/Books/) for a 
  rapidly-growing list.

  Is there a downside to all this? If you're at all like me, you 
  _enjoy_ patrolling a good bookstore, being startled at the
  _Star Trek_ and celebrity-tell-all franchises, and maybe finding 
  a great book you hadn't expected. It's impossible to do this 
  online: though most online bookstores have features on selected 
  titles, they're mostly new, marketable releases you may not much 
  care about. The only way to browse the shelves is to scan the 
  databases, and while that's useful, it's certainly not the same 
  experience.

  Also, the technology of financial transactions on the Web is 
  young, and these sites (perhaps wisely) have chosen not to 
  immediately jump aboard. So, when you order online you face a 
  choice: send billing information over the Net, or over the 
  telephone. I've ordered from both the stores above, and I have 
  wound up playing phone-tag to confirm an order.

  So, is the book dead? Not yet! Thanks to these folks, I'm buying 
  more books now than I was before the "information highway" 
  became a buzzword. If I'm any example, the future of the book is 
  quite secure.

                                                  --Geoff Duncan
 
 

  FYI
=====

...................................................................
    InterText's next issue will be released September 17, 1995.
...................................................................


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  The days when it took two chords to make a rock and roll tune 
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