“Rolling Steel: A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story”
by Jay Lake and Shannon Page

Rough Beast slouched toward the Bethlehem steel mill. Tons of fresh hot metal in there, every cobber and new chum from the Allegheny to the Delaware knew that. Even Topper, the old cat-eyed bastard with steel cables for fingers and a brain stewed in barium-laced æther, knew which way the good stuff lay, for all that he couldn’t tell up from down on days ending with a /y/.

He’s a bad man, our Topper. Used to run child-soldiers over the St. Lawrence to the Froggies during the Quebec-and-Michigan War.   La troisième mutinerie, the Quebecoise called it in one of their endless prayers to St. Jude, for if ever a cause was lost surely it is theirs. Wolfe had put paid to their ambitions at the Plains of Abraham two centuries earlier, but no Frenchman ever born minded much dying for the romance of a shattered heart.

And there was no heart so shattered as that of a patriot whose country has been brought to ground.

And so we have Topper, driven bird-mad in the trenches of the Somme when it would have been kinder for him to have just died. Came home he did to the quack attentions of the New Friends of Sweet Reason, got caught up in the Technocracy movement as exhibit A, and finally fell apart as the country itself did in Roosevelt’s dying days.

Now there’s Wehrmacht units on the loose from Nova Scotia to New Jersey, the South has risen again (and again), the Federals are barely hanging on in the Mississippi basin, issuing wireless dispatches from Washington-on-the-Rails while the Great Madness takes anyone stupid enough to be caught outside at night anywhere between the Wabash and Pamlico Sound.

Only those who started mad can stand the stuff, and move faster by night than any prayerful man might by day. Especially Topper in his Rough Beast, which once upon a time was a machine meant to kill other machines before he made so much more of it, oh so much more.

“Metal, my pretty,” he whispered, patting with a clattering crackle of steel the crawler’s upholstered dashboard between the engraving of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the platinum-dipped weasel skull with the rhinestone eyes. Only one of those two had he killed, Topper, and some days he knew the difference. He squinted into the depths of night through the prism that made up Rough Beast’s forward vision block, watching for the mill which loomed close, its fires never banked.

Fate and fortune walked on the greased knuckles of Topper’s war machine, as never they had since Poland’s borders collapsed in the first of the lightning wars.

I patrolled the unquiet streets south of the steel mill, cussing as I walked back and forth in my own precious allotted square block of turf, practically wearing channels in the concrete with my steel-heeled stilettos. “Bastards,” I muttered, thinking of the Best Sister and her Little Chums. Well, ‘bitches,’ technically, but I didn’t fancy using such a term of endearment when referring to their ilk.

“Bastards,” I growled, as I turned the corner for the seventeen-thousand-and-thirty-second time, only this time I was thinking of my crib mates, the ones who had sniffed out some sort of rupture in my soul and handed me this godforsaken turf as my undue reward.

“Bastard!” I screamed, jamming to a halt as the ferocious machine loomed before me. Hadn’t heard the fucker coming at all. My NKVD surplus large-bore riot gun was already raised and trained on the madman coming up from a top hatch, red-lacquered nail rattling against the trigger as my finger trembled with desire. Then I saw it was Topper.

Which didn’t change my assessment of the situation, or my epithet. But I did lower the gun, and hike up my leather miniskirt an inch or two.

The gibbering fool grinned down at me, leaning over the console in a halo of actinic light to stare down the front of my corset. I set my shoulders back to improve his view and leered right back up at him.

“Going my way, big boy?” I called out.

“Bethlehem, Bethlehem, Bethlehem!” he chanted, his eyes rolling in his head. Oops, there went the tiny whisper of sanity I’d detected a moment ago. I danced back a step, just in case the worms in his brain told him to gas up that monstrous vehicle and put paid to the sexiest thing he was likely to see all day — any day.

My heels tapped on the sidewalk as I leaned against the wall of the foundry behind me. “And what are you going to do when you get there, mm?”

“Steal,” Topper said, letting the word do its double duty. “Stable.” Another word doing double duty. He stared down at the woman. Someone from another lifetime, Topper knows with animal cunning and vestiges of functional memory.

He has had many lifetimes, our Topper. Lived them all together inside one much-mended head, until his name has become legion because he is many. Swine out of Garaden could not be more multiplicitous than this man. But even through the palimpsest of his personality, this woman emerges like a slave ship out of an African fog bank.

“Coming with?” Topper asked. He gunned his twinned diesels for emphasis. Rough Beast shivered like a dog about to piss. The woman looked scared but determined, a combination which even Topper cannot ignore.

He locked down the upper hatch, set the brakes, pegged the clutches, disarmed the antipersonnel charges on the outer hull, and crawled back between the ammo cans and the fuel bags to undog the ventral hatch. As he twisted the clamps, Topper hoped the woman hadn’t run away or been jumped or something. He can’t protect her from up here. Rough Beast is made for salvage runs and fighting heavy metal, not personnel escort.

Topper is confused about a lot of things, but he’s not confused about what his crawler does.

The woman was still outside, armed and dangerous. And that was just her looks. Dark hair swept back from an aristocratic face. Pretty teeth, which Topper remembers from white rooms full of screams. She had a big gun, too, a riot weapon meant for stopping dogs or people caught in the Great Madness.

“You’re going to the plant,” she said.

It was not a question.

“In,” Topper ordered by way of a non-answer.

Indecision flicked across her face like a trout in a mountain stream, then she climbed the metal steps he’d dropped down for her. Rough Beast had ground clearance that would give an arborist’s ladder a bad case of envy.

Distant gunfire echoed as Topper dogged the hatch, but the incoming wasn’t to their address. He wormed back up to the driver’s station, leaving the woman to follow or not as she chose.

The crawler got moving with a shuddering lurch which foretold trouble for the portside throw bearings. He could rebuild. He just needed some high-grade ingots to trade out for the finished parts. That was how he took care of everything on this monster.

A single man wasn’t meant to maintain and operate something like Rough Beast. Not even a single man as profoundly unalone as Topper.

The woman squirmed into the radio operator’s seat behind him. That surprised Topper, he’d already forgotten about her. No radio, never had been one, but there was part of a sandwich rack out of an automat right in front of her face, as if she could plot their course in egg salad and bologna and trimmed crusts.

“So.” Her gun thumped briefly against the floor. He noted she was smart enough to clip it to the seat pedestal. “When did they let you out?”

Topper had to think that one over for a while. Finally he said, “Ain’t sure they have yet.”

Call it boredom if you like. I won’t dispute it if you do, not at all. Boredom, ennui, a sense of adventure left unaddressed for far too long — any of that could explain why I left my post and crawled up into that oil-dripping beastie with the lunatic pilot.

When I’m summoned before Best Friend and her bitches to explain myself, though — and you know I will be — we won’t be talking about any ennui bullshit. No, I’ll be spinning some tale about surveillance and undercover and getting on the inside of the enemy camp and all that sort of yak.

To support this notion, and also because I was damned curious, I slithered up the ladder at the behest of the grisly creature. (Hey, don’t let it be said I never plan ahead.) I’d known Topper before, of course; knew him before he was the raving lunatic we’d all come to know and love in the Madness. Not that he was ever entirely sane.

Who is, any more?

I knew him because I’d been part of the crew that had taken him down, during the last round of the world-shifting adventures. We’d taken him hard, real hard, even before handing him over to the New Friends for, shall we say, readjustment therapy. I’d never expected to see him again. Which was shame, in its way.

So here he was, grinding up my street on his way to god-knows-what kind of tomfoolery down at the plant. Didn’t even bother to deny it. Invited me aboard.

How could I resist?

I settled in behind him, looking around everywhere, trying to take it all in before he came to whatever shred of senses might have been left him by the New Friends and booted me out of there. Because, right, surveillance. Remember? I kept my right hand close to the NKVD riot gun in case Mr. Topper decided to get cute. But he had already started the monster rolling again, ignoring me completely.

He answered my question well enough, I suppose. All things being equal, you never really do get out, do you?

I fell silent after that, wishing the asylum refugee had thought to put windows back at my seat. What was I supposed to do with A-4 and D-0? I’d had a lovely lunch already, thank you very much. The rats are fat and sassy, this part of town.

Oh, Jesus, just kidding. What do I look like? I don’t eat rats. You think this figure comes from eating street sludge like rats?

Feral cats, now: that’s where it’s at. Yum yum, meow yum. Excellent diced and stir-fried, with tree ears and a sprinkling of hoisin sauce right at the end.

After a particularly difficult highway crossing, Topper’s mind wanders back to the woman. She was muttering under her breath now. Something about rats and cats and someone named Hawser Ann. He could smell her breath even in the diesel-and-metal reek of the crawler.

Cats was right in there. Topper cackled. He’d had a cat once, lived in the bed with him in the pale green room with the telephone that whispered secret vices in his ear-of-virtue, and blessings in his ear-of-vice. He knew what had happened to that cat too, every time he blinked his eye.

Our Topper spent some quality time under the close personal care of Doctor Sergei S. Bryukhonenko, after the good doctor B. had fled the collapse of the Eastern Front and wound up under a New Friends of Sweet Reason ban working out of a former mental hospital in the quiet fields near Yellow Springs, Ohio. The fields were quiet then because of the gas pooling in the low-lying watersheds which killed off everything with a central nervous system.

Dr. Bryukhonenko had been the beneficiary of good pressure seals and a number of human canaries chained to stakes in a three-mile radius around the hilltop facility. Our Topper had been the beneficiary of Dr. Bryukhonenko’s newfound health and safety.

Until the psychosurgeries began.

Now he saw in strange shades of gray, a world of movement and chiaroscuro, relying on childhood memories of paintboxes and flower gardens to fill in the colors. Topper still knows the curve of a woman’s breast from the rounded nose of a bullet — he’s not that far gone — but so much else slides past the greased corners of memory, electroshock therapy, and deep conditioning, as if he were a human carpet afflicted with flea’s eggs.

“Food?” he asked the woman. A gap yawned before the crawler, smoke crawling up out of some nether hole in the Pennsylvania soil. Mine fire? Enemy attack? Wrath of God? He navigated around it while one of his inner selves listened to her answer.

“Is that a request or an offer?” She began suggestively polishing the barrel of her riot gun.

“Dunno,” Topper said. “Thought you might have some catsmeat.” He felt vaguely like a cannibal for asking. Then his attention was distracted by the towering stacks of the mill, his destination. Someone flew a small aircraft close above them. He resisted the urge to jump up into the air and swat at it.

For all Topper knows, he might be able to do just that. Muscles he didn’t know he had creaked at the thought.

“Rowr,” the woman growled.

He wondered if she would purr, as well,

“You don’t remember me, do you?” I asked the lunatic, after he’d failed to respond to my clever sally about the cat. I’d even growled to remind him. Good times. But I’m not even going to tell you about the look on his face when I did that, now.

Suffice it to say, crazy or not, the man had a strange charisma. And not because I was hard up, either. Not that I was ready to hop into the sack with him. Not right then. Not even the floor of this machine, or up against the wall of the mill. Not me.

The mill! A squinting straining gaze through what I could see of the forward view told me we were almost there, though Topper hadn’t even been paying attention to the road. “Road” — such as it was, of course. The route, more like.

“Harridan Three, Harridan Three, do you copy?” a small voice crackled from my satchel. Damn, it must be one of the bitches in that plane buzzing overhead. Checking up on me. They don’t trust me to wipe my own ass, any more.

Of course I couldn’t respond, not overtly. But if I didn’t send her on her merry way, she’d land that overgrown horsefly right in our path, and… well, let’s just say I didn’t fancy being two feet behind Topper when he was suddenly beset by Sisters in a well-armed aircraft, attempting to halt his forward progress.

“Nice rig you got here, Topper,” I said instead. “I especially like the seats. Ooh, comfy.”

He tore his attention away from peering up at the sky and stared at me. A droplet of slobber formed in the V at the lowest point of his lip and hung there. “Seats?” he finally asked.

“Yep,” I said loudly, patting the foul cracked vinyl next to me. “These seats right here, in this-here vehicle you’re driving me around in. Yep. Love it.”

“Harridan Three, we copy,” came the voice in my bag. It was Lena: bad news. And she was clearly pissed.

But the drone of the plane engine faded, and then the mill loomed large.

Too large.

“Stop!” I screamed, just as this abortion of a tank crashed through the wall.

Topper came round to paying attention to what he should be doing just after a few dozen tons of masonry bounced off the roof. That plane had buzzed off, but it had dropped him a present on the way out.

He spun Rough Beast left, just to confuse anyone who might be sighting in on him. From the sound of things, the crawler was now taking out another portion of the mill’s outer wall.  The hull pounded and shuddered, a brick rain.

“Where’s the map?” he screamed over the deafening war.

She shook her head. Useless bitch, he thought. Bring a girl on a picnic, she doesn’t even remember napkins. Topper keyed off the antipersonnel charges ringing the upper hatch and jacked his chair for a look. He let his feet do the driving.

Thing about a cat’s eye is it sees in darkness. Not the pitch black of coal mines or a politician’s soul, but places where a human being would stand blinking and wondering which way to the egress. The very bad Dr. Bryukhonenko had built a neural jumper block so the input from the cat’s eyes jammed swollen and dry into Topper’s skull could be made sensible — sense-in-light for a man who lives in the endless nonsense of his own head.

All of which meant that with the Bethlehem mill running on blackout except for the glow from the Bessemers further down the compound, only Topper could see what was going on. The defenders had to rely on triangulation and their own knowledge of the terrain. Topper was ignoring the terrain in favor of the direct approach.

“Damned loading yard ought to be down here somewhere.”

Rails had been torn up a long time ago — their fixed routes were useless in this age of rolling borders and continuous sabotage — but the rail yard was still useful space.

Having gotten something resembling his bearings, Topper spun Rough Beast around. The wide open area had been behind him.

A woman was screaming from down near his waist. She sounded familiar. He jacked the chair low and looked around.

“Marie,” Topper said, pleased as hell to see her. “What are you doing here in San Diego?”

The look on Marie’s face was almost frightening. The gun in her hand worried him more, though. When had she learned to shoot?

Outside, the aircraft buzz had come back. Fucking spotters, he thought. “Whoops, got to go,” he said, “bad guys up above. Hold that fire til we need it, kiddo.”

By the time Topper was back out of the hatch and heating up the solenoids in the remotely-operated turrets, he’d forgotten what he’d gone down for. Until a gunshot echoed from inside the hull of his crawler.

Bastard flipped completely out on me after the impact. I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it wasn’t like I’d been having a peaceful day up till then, so I was a bit, well, off guard.

Hey. It happens.

Once the machine (not to mention Lena’s bomb) rendered the wall of the mill into so many smithereens, it lurched but didn’t stop, instead simply veering off to the left a bit. Or maybe that was Topper, yanking on the wheel. Anyway, that’s the part that rattled me more than anything else. I was airborne a good two seconds, then crashed to the slimy floor of the tank-thing at his feet.

At least I held onto my gun.

Which stood me in good stead once I’d recovered enough to think again. The freak was looming over me, again paying no attention to the road, or corridor, or whatever it was we were driving down at the moment… yeah, another wall, I think… interior wall. It was hard to tell, jammed underneath two hundred and fifty pounds of insane manflesh.

I waved the gun at him. “Back off, Topper, I mean it!”

He called me Marie.

Oh god.

Waving the gun again, I tried to look sufficiently menacing. This was no doubt undermined by his view down the front of the corset. He grinned, and mumbled something about San Diego. What the fuck?

Maybe I was still screaming or something, because just then Lena decided she’d had enough. “Harridan three, we’re coming in. You’re relieved from duty effective immediately. Surrender your weapon to the personnel who will be approaching the tank once we bring it to a halt.”

I almost laughed. How exactly were they expecting to do that?

A burst of machine gun fire came from above, mixed in with the aircraft engine. Oh, that’s how. At least it got Topper’s attention. He yanked his eyeballs away from my girls and scrabbled up top.

Unfortunately, I didn’t want Lena to take his attention. Nor did I want to “surrender” anything to any goddamned “personnel” inside Bethlehem. “Topper!” I yelled, but he was beyond hearing me.

I took a shot in his general direction, careful not to aim for anything vital. Like around the middle. Riot loads weren’t supposed to be fatal.

What? Just thinking ahead here. He’d cleaned up nicely once before. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? Girl can’t be too picky these days.

Good. That got his fleeting attention once more. He slithered back down below and stood before me. “Marie?”

“Not Marie,” I said. Then I reached down and toggled my radio to blessed silence so we could talk privately. “Grace, and don’t you forget it, you moron.”

“Grace….” The name slid off his pink tongue, making it sound dirty. “Graaace.”

Oh good lord. We were in for a long night.

Topper stuttered. That’s what the doctor had called it — not Bryukhonenko the surgeon, but that New Friends woman with three moles on her chin that always made him think of Jules Verne’s War of the Worlds for some reason.

Threes, all evil things came in threes. That’s why men and women stayed in pairs. That’s why a woman had two tits, a man had two nuts, everyone had two eyes, two ears, two hands, two legs, two nostrils, two lungs for the love of God.

Threes. And the stutters always came in threes. Dr. Roseglove, that was her name, like she had thorns turned inward to her hands, tiny red-brown spikes to pierce the skin, an Orchidglove would have been a very different doctor indeed, or a Lilly-of-the-Valleyglove and when he stuttered he lost time, he lost control, he lost his marker in the place of life.

Bad things. Threes. A woman named Marie, not Grace. But he’d known Marie? Had she been a twin? Or worse, a triplet? Was Grace her middle name, her secret name, her confirmation name, her gang name, her spymaster’s handle?

She was shouting. Outside something was bombing. His thigh hurt like fucking hell where something bad had happened.

Adrenaline, he thought, a moment of clarity amid the stutter. Adrenaline and a pressure bandage, before I die of assassination.

Why would anyone want to kill our Topper? Even he cannot answer that. Well, other than all the people he’s killed over the years, of course, but very few of them have anything to say about it now. Dead is dead, and no one’s got relatives no more, not in this fragged world.

She’s still yelling, this woman, but he’s ignoring her in single-minded pursuit of his wound. He doesn’t worry so much about the scattered pellets embedded in the flesh of his leg. They will either kill him or they won’t.

Topper jacked up into his open hatch. Rough Beast wasn’t equipped for anti-air operations. An angry woman loose with a riot gun down below was a problem. Amplified voices and high explosives outside were a bigger problem.

He left his stutter behind when he realized that his enemies had come to ground. Obliging of them. Rough Beast was very well equipped for anti-personnel operations.

A beefy woman stood in the red glare between shadows cast by his own arc lights, shouting for someone named Jason Adair to stand down. Topper didn’t know any Jason Adair, not since before the wars began when he might once have answered to that name, so he activated the electrically controlled chin turret that looked like a fuel junction and could surprise an unwary, beefy woman and turned this one into a spray of blood and cloth.

Then he ground the crawler straight toward the ducted fan aircraft grounded before him. Topper admired the engineering of the thing — innovative, frightening, probably stolen from the Germans — until Rough Beast crushed it to scrap.

He wasn’t sure which was more annoying: Marie screaming from below or some woman screaming from the crushed cockpit of the aircraft. In either case it didn’t matter. The metal yard was ahead, and that was his purpose here.

Okay.

Fuck.

Breathe. Just get hold of yourself: breathe, bitch.

‘Cause when Topper took out Lena and her bodyguard du jour, not to mention the whole fucking aircraft thank you very much, well, okay, it sent me into a bit of a spin.

So maybe I shot him again. Just a little bit. I’m really not sure, frankly. Everything got kind of crazy and blurry there for a few minutes. Like maybe there were psychotic drugs floating in the air around Topper.

No, I didn’t mean anti-psychotic drugs. That would have helped. I meant what I said. Pay attention, I’m not going to say it again.

It didn’t make a damn bit of difference to his apparent sanity, or lack thereof. I mean the shooting-him-again part, if it happened. The drugs, I have no idea. That was just a metaphor kind of thing. I was making a comparison, one thing to another.

Although who knows?

Anyway, my sanity, however. Well… like I said, I lost a few minutes there. Once everything was tracking again, I saw that the aircraft was a pile of oily rubble behind us, and Topper was rolling the tank forward, muttering about Germans.

He never stopped with the verbiage, that one. If only any of it made the smallest bit of sense. I’d love to see him across a poker table. Looked like every thought was immediately broadcast.

Not that I was likely to be playing poker again any time soon. Anyway, Lena had my deck of cards. Probably they were ground into the mud behind us, too.

Mud and oil and blood and…

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it!

I clipped my riot gun back into the rack beside the seat, just in case I was tempted to use it again. Because the part of my brain that had been functioning throughout the little misadventure of the past few minutes had just presented me with the irrefutable fact that my fate was now tied to that of this overgrown monkey, the one now drooling and gibbering and steering this massive bit of machinery towards what had to be the biggest metal yard I’d ever seen.

In other words: no more Sisters, not for me, not here, not now. By climbing aboard this contraption. I’d thrown my lot in with Topper.

God, I hoped he still cleaned up nicely.

I sidled forward in the cab, or at least something reasonably approximating sidling. Tough to do when the thing was rolling and grinding and rocking back and forth, throwing me from side to side like a hamster in a blender.

“Marie!” he said, catching sight of me. He gave me a delighted smile.

I fell into the copilot’s seat beside him, or whatever you’d call it. Jump seat. Small bit of cushioning in a vast expanse of well lubricated metal parts and pieces. “Grace,” I said, in a friendly and conversational tone.

“Marie-Grace?”

“Just Grace. Remember, sweetheart, how we went over this?” He kept staring at me. “Well — never mind that, anyway. Just watch where you’re driving, okay?”

“Driving, doing, zooming, duckling,” he said. But his head wafted back in the general direction of forward.

“Good boy,” I said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Sooner or later, some of this was going to make sense. For now, he just had to keep us alive.

“W-74,” Topper sang out. “Tungsten steel. Hard as a shield, cuts like a blade, keep it sharp, never be late… Burma Shave!”

Marie-Grace Just Grace snorted at him. He was pretty sure she’d shot him a bit earlier, but she had a nice smile. Maybe he’d been wounded one of the dizzy bitches from that airplane.

Bullets fell on Rough Beast’s hull like lead rain. The locals were getting to it. But now he was in the metal yard, the El Dorado of this Pennsylvania hellhole.

“Here, Missy Marie-Grace Just Grace,” Topper said, handing her down a gas mask. “Wear this a while and don’t get nothing on your skin.” He paused, solicitous as a fragment from some long-forgotten safety briefing (back when “safety” and “briefing” were applicable concepts) emerged into his forebrain like pack ice on a midnight river. “You weren’t planning to have no children, were you?”

“Not right now,” she squealed.

Topper wasn’t sure that Marie-Grace Just Grace had taken the real point of the question, but duty had been discharged. He pressed the big red button labeled “DO NOT PRESS.” It was wired just below a portrait of Bing Crosby with a Hitler moustache.

Several loud, ominous thumps echoed from the outside of the crawler’s hull. This was followed by a hissing noise. Topper belatedly remembered to pull on his own gas mask, then wondered what he’d done with the chemical suit.

The part of him that was sane enough to keep the rest of the traveling circus alive watched the sweep second hand on the dashboard clock — Swiss timing in a genuine hand carved Chinese ivory casing, and possibly the most valuable thing aboard Rough Beast. Topper liked his treasures portable. He was a man who’d left more towns under more clouds than Seattle saw in a year.

One hundred and eighty seconds later he bailed out into the dissipating yellow fog. Defending fire had stopped, except for the occasional stutter of a weapon discharged as a finger shriveled too tightly in death. That hardly counted, though Topper knew a bullet was a bullet no matter who had fired it.

He wasn’t moving right. The dizzy bitch really had shot him. Couldn’t have been something too fierce, or his leg would be shattered. Riot gun with rubber loads, maybe? Who the hell would hang around a Pennsylvania mill town at night armed with sublethal munitions? That was like bringing a housewife to a bullfight.

Ahead of Topper were thirty-six pallets of high grade tungsten steel. Finest kind, ready for shipment to the manufactories of Detroit and Fort Wayne. Or ripe for the jacking by an enterprising man with good intelligence and solid orders.

Or woman, he reminded himself. Topper turned to stare at Rough Beast, wondering what he’d been thinking and which part of him had been thinking it. Her head poked up now, insect-eyed and blank-faced in the gas mask.

An electric turret whined as she brought one of the Bofors to bear on him.

“Screw you,” Topper shouted, and began dragging the cargo chains out. It was hijacking time. He didn’t have what it took to die again right now.

After monkey-boy propositioned me a few times, I knew we were getting somewhere. Excellent. I could work with that.

The discussion of children, however, was a tad premature. I almost said something, but then he pressed some big goddamn red button and all manner of excitement began.

No, the other kind of excitement.

That all changed once he’d killed everyone within a ten-mile radius of the tank. Or so it seemed, anyway, given the swath of destruction all around us. After that, he turned back to me, with a terrible, deeply insane look about him.

I mean, he’d been insane all along. I knew that. You might have even said it was part of his charm. But I’d just watched him kill everyone I worked for, lived with, fucked and fought. Then I’d watched him kill everyone at the mill I was supposedly defending. Then he turned and looked at me.

“Now or never, baby,” I said to myself, cranking one of his cannon turrets to point at him. That ought to put the fear into him.

All he did was proposition me a third time, then turn away and start fooling with a tangle of chains.

I threw my riot gun at him. Insane I can handle. Inconsistency: that makes me crazy.

“Mary Grace Just Grace,” he babbled on, as he started spreading the chains out on the gravel in front of us. He ignored the riot gun completely, after glancing at it. I clambered down out of the tank and retrieved it, but it was too big to hold if I was going to help him get the pallets aboard.

Sure, I helped him. He could barely move the damn things. I was in far too deep to back out now. Might as well get our business done in here and get the hell out. Then we could talk about children, or whatever the fuck he wanted.

Men. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t stake ‘em out for the vultures. Though some of them might be improved. Including this crazy old bastard.

He was my last ticket.

Topper yanked the cold steel out of the charnel house of the mill one quarter-ton ingot at a time. The winches could handle the load, no problem — they were made for much heavier work than this, naval-grade hardware salvaged off a captured Kriegsmarine surface raider which had been broken in a gray-market yard hidden up the Rappahannock.

The girl helped. She was small, and weak, and not half-rebuilt out of spare parts and Soviet medicine, but she was tough and smart. Topper wondered how he knew her. Good-looking, too, and not just in an any-woman-in-a-war-zone way.

Somehow having his hands on all this hard-case metal was bring him back into himself. Memories spiraled in kaleidoscope paths to land in partially assembled chiaroscuros somewhere deep in our Topper’s head. Like how a real person might think, it occurred to him, coherent images and more than a little bit of focused recall stitching together into timelines.

He wanted to turn away from some of them — deeply unpleasant, unpleasantly deep, or just infused with a stunning sadness for the boy and man someone with his name and face might once of have been.

It was her, he realized. Not the metal. Not the dead. Not the distant thump of artillery and first drone of engines gone raiding in the cold, smoky sky. Not the screaming cats and bleeding eye sockets of memory. Not the white coats and wire-rimmed spectacles which had dominated so much of the intervening years.

Her.

Topper stepped closer, subtle as a pork roast in a synagogue, and sniffed.

“What the hell are you doing, you cre-” she shouted, then stopped when she got a good look at his face.

“M… Grace,” Topper said, and looked her full in the eyes. He could fall into that pooled, dark amber forever, he realized.

Something was waiting to be born here beneath the shadow of Rough Beast, behind the walls of Bethlehem.  He could feel it stirring inside him.

A soul. Hope. Affection.

Love?

He closed his eyes and breathed her in. She struck him all the way down into the lizard brain, scent and smell wired by million years of evolution and a hundred thousand generations of hairless apes dropping from the trees to say, this one. This is the one.

Before he could open his eyes again, she kissed him.

Somewhere inside the shattered Japanese puzzle box of his head, he was made whole.

“Let’s get the last of this stuff on board,” Topper said, rough but gentle as he drew her into his arms. “Then we’re gonna say screw it to the Sisterhood and the New Friends and the Federals and the Wehrmacht and go be alone together. There’s freemen in the Alleghenies would pay good money for our cargo, and hire us to raid for them.”

His mind was dancing with visions of a quiet cabin, an open sky, and skin exposed for no purpose more sinister than a long slow trail of the tongue.

God, it was like being a kid again.

For the first time in his life, Topper had woken up.

Yeah. So. Okay, I kissed him. Like I said, I’d kind of run out of options at that point.

But it was more than that. Much more.

When Topper turned and looked at me, really looked at me; when he got my name right; when the man that lived somewhere underneath all the layers of insanity our world had thrust at him suddenly bled through and took charge… I kissed him.

And when he pulled me into his arms and I caught the scent of him — the real, true scent, beyond the oil and blood and gasoline and the rank sweat of fear and battle — it hit me right below the belt.

Yeah, there. I meant what I said. How do you think things become clichés, anyway?

“Right,” I said. “Last load and we’re out of here.”

And we rumbled off into the sunset. Sunrise. Whatever: I’m telling the story here, okay? The light changed and took us with it into a different world.

About the Author

Jay Lake lives and works in Portland, Oregon, within sight of an 11,000 foot volcano. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with novels from Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Fairwood Press. Jay is also the co-editor with Deborah Layne of the critically-acclaimed Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. His 2009 novels are Green from Tor Books, Madness of Flowers from Night Shade Books, and Death of a Starship from MonkeyBrain Books. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short fiction and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing. {{{ Website: http://jaylake.com {{{ Shannon Page{{{Shannon Page was born on Halloween night and spent her formative years on a commune in northern California?s backwoods. A childhood without television gave her a great love of books and the worlds she found in them. She wrote her first book, an adventure story starring her cat, at the age of seven. Sadly, that work is currently out of print, but see the Fiction page of her website for current and upcoming publications. Shannon is a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, has no tattoos, and lives in San Francisco with nineteen orchids.

“The Dying World”
by Lavie Tidhar

1. Bonsai

It’s a beautiful world, easily worth killing for, but what would be the point? The world, encased in vacuum and glass, is blue-white, a miniature Earth, with a marble-sized sun rotating around it. It has a tiny atmosphere, tiny, lovingly-sculpted seas, three continents, numerous tiny islands, tectonic plate activity, miniature volcanoes, and some seriously large creatures for a world so small. It’s a hot, humid place, this world. The glass orb that contains it protects it perfectly. Touching the surface of the orb, the old man magnifies a part of the tiny planet, watching, completely engrossed, as a sea creature the shape of a disc wraps itself around a creature shaped like a ball with many circular mouths full of sharp teeth. The ensuing fight attracts other creatures, and for a moment this particular point under this particular sea is swarming with life.

The man is so engrossed in his creation that he fails to hear the doors of the old church opening behind him. Outside it is dusk, and an enormous red sun is visible on the horizon, setting slowly. The man had always loved this place, with its ancient mausoleum and church spires shaped like ice-cream cones and its wide open square. It has an aura of faded grandeur, of stories having been worn deep into the stones by the passing of countless humans.

When he does hear the light footsteps approach it is already too late. Something cold touches the back of his head; he has only enough time to think he would like to be reborn as a butterfly before the assassin squeezes the trigger and the old man’s head explodes all over the glass orb, covering an entire world in a violent red haze.

2. Black Rain

The assassin checks Mother Russia for the next forty-eight hours. Of the thirty of so humans living in the place one is still unaccounted for, which worries the assassin. He composes a message in Japanese, utilising haiku for its brevity and sincerity of form. It is a quantum haiku, with meanings ranging from Apologies For Disturbing One’s Shape to Notification Had Been Sent in Advance. He sends it to the church on Red Square in the biological form of a moth, the poem encoded into rapid wing movements. The moth fails to return. The assassin knows he can expect a counter-assassination at any moment, which he is quite looking forward to. He is using the ancient codes, Moscow Rules, to guide his behaviour. Meanwhile he waits. The Entity on Everest, having requested he carry out this assignment, has not sent further instructions. By protocol, the assassin would not deliver the world directly. There will be a portal — a drop point.

And so… he should wait but, being as he is, he does not like to. It is why he is Assassin, rather than Maker, say, which certainly requires a fastidious kind of patience, or Explorer, which basically means — to the assassin’s way of thinking — a way of further moving away from humanity, not to mention ice-sleeping in space for countless generations. The assassin is a humanist first and foremost, something he shared with his target, but he wonders now, a little uneasily, whether the target might be changing his mind about such things, which are a matter of philosophy, you could say, more than anything.

And so he decides, despite Moscow Rules, despite protocol, to act, to do — which is the human in him, still, the restless ape who doesn’t like to wait. He steps out of the giant black cube of a building that he had been inhabiting on Dzerzhinsky Square — which turns out to save his life. As he turns to look at the building he sees clouds gathering over the roof; they form in mid-air and concentrate into discs that hover lower and lower. Where they finally touch the surface the entire building slowly grows transparent, the black leached out of it into the clouds, then slowly the entire edifice crumbles gently to the ground, the dust swirling lazily in the air. The black clouds above slowly dissipate into water, or perhaps it is ink. Where their rain falls it stains the pavement. The assassin opens an umbrella and walks away, meanwhile lodging a complaint with the Greater Moscow Entity regarding the destruction of a Monument of Historical Significance, not to mention the forbidden use of clouds, banned under a treaty too long ago for anyone to remember it. Inside, though, the assassin is pleased. So the old man wants to play after all.

3. Butterfly

The man does not return as a butterfly, of course. He returns as a cloud of butterflies, which is quite liberating after wearing human form for so long. A part of him watches the assassin walking through the inky rain, his feet leaving soot-marks on the pavement. The assassin is following Moscow Rules, one of which is Always Blend In. He is shifting — becomes a part of old brickwork, becomes shadow in the awning of a store, becomes glass, becomes reflection — a tedious mode of travel, the old man feels, but it does make it harder to follow him. The old man is spread all over the city now, a cloud of bright butterflies that beat their wings lazily in the dying light of the red sun. A part of him acknowledges the Greater Moscow Entity’s complaint, sends back a Russian shrug, and watches as the old KGB building is reconstructed, the dust reassembling itself from the middle, up to the roof and down to the ancient foundations. He wants his world back, but it isn’t there, and he wonders with some irritation where the assassin had hidden it. For a moment he scribbles a message in the sky, rearranging molecules to reflect light in a certain way, so that anyone glancing up can see the words: Worlds Are To Be Given, Not Taken Away.

The man sighs, millions of butterflies beating their wings as one. No one cares much for his worlds. He feels he should be flattered, and wonders what collector had sent the assassin after him. He did in fact receive Notification of Intent but had forgotten to follow it up, being too absorbed in a new ring-world that seemed quite promising. He decides to wait. It is the assassin’s turn, after all, and he is curious to see what he would do.

4. Reflections

The assassin reconfigures himself into human form and for a moment watches his reflection in the air. His reflection stares back and nods in acknowledgement. It’s a good form, he thinks. He shapes a few more reflections out of air and dust and sends them across the city. He knows the man is watching him, but he doesn’t care. Where he is going the old man won’t be able to follow.

He rings the bell.

The building used to be a hotel, a long time before. Its current occupant has had it restored some time in the past before moving in. He is a collector, and each former room is now a museum of sorts. He is another collector — the world is full of collectors — but a useful one, which makes him almost unique.

“Come in.”

The door opens. He steps in and the door closes behind him, trapping a butterfly in the process. The butterfly emits a screech of what might be amusement before turning to dust.

“Second floor.”

He climbs the steps. At the top of the landing on the second floor is a small chamber. The unseen voice says, “Get inside.”

“Is this really necessary?” the assassin says.

“You know where the door is,” the voice says, unhelpfully, and the assassin shrugs and steps through.

The ancient meme-washer starts to life, flooding the chamber with steam. It is like a sauna filled with tiny crawlers, who comb through the assassin’s mind, searching for any meme he may have unwittingly picked up on his way and eradicating them. He feels a song go out of his head, a jingle for a soap that hasn’t been sold in millennia, a religion, perhaps two, a theory of everything, a new concept of beauty and a recurring image of possibly alien origin, he can no longer remember.

“You’re clean.”

The doors open, and he steps through into the corridor, where the collector waits.

5. The Collector

The collector is a fat man with a toupee and a pipe and three very blue eyes. He smokes high-density encoded tobacco, which gives him a glazed look as he assimilates the data with each puff on his pipe. “Life forms on Carthage III,” he says. “Fascinating.” Puff. “The poetry of sentient asteroids.” Puff. “Tasty. Ah, the Great Attractor, her life and cosmological significance for nearby galaxies. Did I ever tell you I met her once?”

The Great Attractor is two-hundred and fifty thousand light years away and the size of several galactic clusters. Apart from gravitationally affecting galaxies around her, she is also nosy, possibly senile, and generally believed to be, if not exactly God, then at least a high-level deity of some sort, in the same family as galactic centre black holes and trans-dimensional sentient manifolds. “You did,” the assassin says.

“Ah.”

“I need a weapon.”

“Indeed.”

“Or at least the idea of a weapon.”

The collector beams. “Then you’ve come to the right place!’ he says jovially, and puts one podgy hand on the assassin’s shoulder. “This place is full of good ideas.”

6. Ideas

For the next several hours, or possibly it is several days, the assassin rifles through the collector’s museum. There are memes preserved on anything from ink and paper to thought-globules, some in actual form, some in such exotic formats that he doubts even the collector can read them. He is looking for a weapons meme, which is the collector’s speciality.

“I heard you made the old man peeved,” the collector says some time into the guided tour. “Never understood it myself, that obsession with worlds. As if there aren’t enough out there already.”

“Contract,” the assassin says shortly.

“Hmm,” the collector says.

“Hmm?”

“If I were to venture a guess, I’d say one of the Entities put you up to it?”

“You know contracts are confidential.”

“Of course, of course. Nevertheless…”

The assassin ignores him as he goes through concepts, blue-prints, essays, pictures, alternate-universe snapshots, snatches of alien music and all the rest of it.

“Pesky things, Entities,” the collector says, undaunted. This time it’s the assassin’s turn to say, “Hmm.”

“Hmm?” the collector says. “Do you know, I often wondered if one could take out an Entity.”

“Don’t let them hear you say that,” the assassin says. The collector nods. “Grouchy, aren’t they.”

The assassin shrugs. He doesn’t care much either way. Entities are like black holes or the common cold — they’re just there. It is possible some were once human — or a conglomeration of millions of joined human lives — just as it is possible they are a machine amalgamation, or a hybrid of both, or some alien intelligence or even something out of a parallel universe that slipped in when no one was looking. At any given moment there are five or six of them on the planet, usually one or two on the moon, a few transient ones in the gas giants and several in the sun, either rebuilding it or hurrying its demise, no one is quite certain. The Everest Entity, his client, has been there forever, never comes down from a certain height, and has a fascination for human-made stuff like bonsai worlds or antique machine guns. Like this collector, the Entity is indiscriminate in its passions and, so the assassin thinks, has no taste besides.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the collector says, knocking the pipe against a wall. “Things to do, people to see.”

“Actually,” the assassin says, “I’m done.”

“Oh? What did you find?”

“An old idea.”

“Always the best ones,” the collector says, then he sighs. “Very well. And my fee?”

The assassin finds the sealed packed, opens it, communicates it across. “An ant culture Eliminator from the Sigma-IV Universe,” he says. “Black matter condenser, string-dimension automatic tuning, used between the hundred and fifth and the two thousand one hundred and second Grey Galaxy Wars.”

The collector claps his hands gleefully. “A genuine ant weapon?” he says. “Where did you get this?”

But the assassin is already gone.

7. Dead Letter Box

There is a post box on Red Square though there hasn’t been a postal service for millennia. It is kept for both historical and aesthetic reasons. It is also a portal, and the assassin’s destination. Half-way there the Everest Entity contacts the assassin. Do you have the item? it says.

“I do.”

You have shared the ant device? It has cost some effort to obtain.

“I’m sorry if you were inconvenienced.”

You are exhibiting sarcasm.

“You think?”

There is a roaring in his head, like a million black flies trapped in a tiny space, all trying to escape at once. Bring the world to the drop point.”

“I think the old man will be following,” the assassin says.

Then do your job. Again.

Then it is gone, and he is alone, flying across the red sky, his reflections joining him so that they appear to be an arrow of birds, flying in formation.

He lands at the square. He knows the old man will be waiting. By the rules of the game, the only way to resolve a contract is for the two sides to face each other in the end. He waits.

A giant, silvery moon rises slowly in the sky. It looks like an alien spaceship, so heavy it might drop down at any moment. The assassin scans the area but sees no opposition. He begins to walk towards the mail box, his reflections following.

A thousand black butterflies rise before him, blocking the way. He spreads his fingers in front of him like a magician and fire spits out. The butterflies melt. Where they fall they ooze, and a wall rises, green and yellow like pus.

The assassin forms his hands into fists and punches the wall, but where he does the wall bends back and becomes butterflies again, and they latch onto his hands and snare them. The assassin curses.

There is the sound of light footsteps behind him.

He tries to turn, and can’t.

“Give me back the world.”

The voice speaks old Russian. It is rusty, almost a whisper. “You didn’t,” the assassin says.

The dead voice laughs behind him. “It seemed appropriate,” it says. “After all, you cannot kill a dead man twice.”

“You’d be surprised,” the assassin says, and his hands become ice, a chill grows out of his body, and the butterflies holding him freeze and fall to the ground, breaking into thousands of tiny shards, the sound like a symphony. He turns.

“Give it back to me,” Lenin says.

8. Wings

The doors of Lenin’s mausoleum stand open. The mummy faces the assassin, a small smile playing at the corners of its lips. “The Greater Moscow Entity will complain,” the assassin says, though privately he appreciates the sentiment.

“It is a true Russian,” the old man says. “It always complains.”

“We seem to be at an impasse,” the assassin says.

“Not at all,” the old man says. “Since you will never reach the drop box. I have sent it back to your client with a little gift of my own devising, alas.”

“Oh?”

“From time to time I find the need for dead worlds,” the Lenin Mummy says. “I sent the Entity a private composition, an anti-matter world which, sadly, had a malfunctioning casing. I’m afraid by now the world — this world, I mean — is short a mountain.”

“I see,” the assassin says, impressed despite himself. “Did it work?”

They both turn momentarily to the Kremlin, converting its walls into a giant display.

“I… see,” the assassin says again.

“Unfortunate,” the old man says.

“It will come back,” the assassin says.

“No doubt. But that won’t help you.”

“Nevertheless,” the assassin says. “A contract is a contract.”

“Give me back the world.”

“What do you need with miniature worlds, anyway?” the assassin says.

“They make more sense then the other kind,” the old man says. The Lenin mummy takes a step closer, and another, its hands reaching out. The old man says, “Put it in the mummy’s hands.”

The assassin sighs. The orb materialises in his hands, the miniature world frozen inside it. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Oh? No harm done,” the old man says.

The assassin coughs. He puts the orb in the outreached hands but, as soon as it leaves his hands, the scene inside it changes. There is the sound of a thousand butterflies buzzing and the old man says, “What have you d — ”

“They did it to themselves,” the assassin says. “I admit I helped accelerate the process a little, but…”

Inside the orb, dots of light flash across the world. The lights grow in strength and intensity, consume first one continent, then another, spread out across the oceans, their brightness blinding, the flash of the explosions ebbing out of the orb like bleeding light. A moment later, the tiny red explodes.

“Thermonuclear devices,” the assassin says. “A shame — I became quite fond of them towards the end.”

There is a moment of absolute silence. The assassin tenses, waiting for the old man’s final strike.

It never comes.

The old Lenin body shakes, and it takes the assassin a moment to understand the mummy is crying. When it raises its head at last, its eyes are full of tears.

“It’s beautiful,” the old man says; and for a moment it seems to the assassin as if the voice is the sound of a thousand thousand butterflies, all fluttering their wings at once.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is the author of The Bookman and forthcoming sequel Camera Obscura. Other books include linked-story collection HebrewPunk, novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv), novella An Occupation of Angels and a host of to-be-released novels and novellas including Cloud Permutations, Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God and Martian Sands. He also edited The Apex Book of World SF and runs the World SF News Blog.

“From Dead Gods to Guys in Lizard Costumes: Six Questions for James Morrow”
by Jason S. Ridler

James Morrow is an accomplished novelist and short story writer, whose work combines a savage and sage wit with complex ideas and human concerns. From his highly regarded Godhead Trilogy to his recently acclaimed The Philosopher’s Apprentice, no subject matter is either too heady or humble for Morrow’s fecund imagination. His most recent outing is the novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima, and here Morrow explores the dark heart of the twentieth century with an alternate history of the coming of the atomic age. Instead of the Enola Gay dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Morrow presents a gonzo alternative weapons programme, the Knickerbocker Project, whereby the U.S. has created fire-breathing monsters to end the war in the East. However, faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to unleash the behemoths on civilian populations, the government hires horror movie B-actor Syms Thorley to don a monster suit and wage war on a miniature city, Shirazuka, in a vivid demonstration that they hope will force Japan to surrender. A clear, funny, and darkly satirical look at both the history of the atomic bomb and the Japanese monster movies that came in its wake, Morrow’s Shambling Towards Hiroshima provides cinematic satire that is funny, unnerving, and compelling.

What is the Origin Story for Shambling Towards Hiroshima? What inspired you to postulate this dual alternate history of both the Manhattan Project and the birth of monster movies at the dawn of the atomic age?

It all goes back to Roland Emmerich’s feeble and uninspired remake of the archetypal Japanese monster movie. I came out of the 1998 Godzilla saying to myself, “A crummy picture, to be sure — and yet the basic myth still resonates. One of these days, I’m going to do something with it.”

My initial outline for a Godzilla novel, which I wrote under the Yeats-inspired title What Rough Beast, had the monster traveling to Washington D.C. in 1995 to inspect the controversial Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute, his intention being to incinerate the city unless the curators prove willing to acknowledge certain uncomfortable political, military, and human truths about Hiroshima. I’d just finished reading Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell’s Hiroshima in America, an impassioned revisionist critique of Truman’s decision to wage nuclear war on Japan, and I was brimming with indignation over what might be called A-Bomb Denial Syndrome.

After noodling with What Rough Beast for several months, I decided that using the historical facts of the Smithsonian exhibition in such a bald and moralistic way would entail too few novelistic virtues and too many finger-wagging harangues. When Jacob Weisman invited me to contribute a short book to the Tachyon Publications list, I rethought the whole Godzilla thing from top to bottom, eventually hitting on the idea of a secret biological-weapons program overseen by the Navy in tandem with the Army’s Manhattan Project.

But the real breakthrough came when I recalled a passage from Hiroshima in America revealing that Truman’s Assistant Secretary of War, James McCloy, had argued for a quasi-public demonstration of the atomic bomb, whereby a Japanese delegation would get to see the new weapon’s awesome power and then presumably make the case to Emperor Hirohito that surrender was the best option. I decided that, once the Navy’s biological weapons program proved a success, bringing forth a generation of fearsome bipedal mutant iguanas, a renegade admiral and a top Knickerbocker Project scientist would start having qualms about the behemoths, subsequently convincing Harry Truman to reveal them to the enemy. Naturally this exhibition would take the form of a rubber-suited Hollywood actor stomping on a miniature Japanese city. And so Shambling Towards Hiroshima became the story of Syms Thorley, Monogram Studios horror legend, and how he conceivably might end the Pacific War by giving the performance of his life.

The novel maintains a theme or common subject matter visible in many short stories and some of your novels. In the play “Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus” and the short story “Apologue” you use the medium of all those creature feature presentations on broadcast television as both the backdrop and the thematic core for very human stories, in a similar fashion to the monster movies riffed on in Shambling Towards Hiroshima. What is it about these genre tropes/themes that you find engaging?

I suppose there’s nothing quite so boring as somebody else’s nostalgia. That said, I’ve been an incurable aficionado of vintage horror films ever since, at the age of eleven, I purchased the first issue of the late Forest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland way back in 1958. As Saint Thomas Aquinas remarked, speaking of religious belief, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessarily. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The same principle applies to classic monster movies starring Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr.

My one-act play “Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus,” recently collected in The Cat’s Pajamas, represented my first attempt to turn my undying affection for these films into an entertainment. It’s all about a TV horror host who, faced with the specter of cancellation, manages to convince his superiors that monster movies deal substantively and affirmingly with basic ethical issues — which, in their own loopy way, they do. Last year I saw a lovingly mounted production of “Dr. Sarcophagus” at the Confluence science fiction celebration. Those Pittsburgh fans were probably the ideal troupe for performing my play, being already sympathetic to my brief on behalf of the philosophical and moral import of the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Frankenstein monster.

My fondness for TV horror hosts is also on display in American Scary, a recent documentary about the phenomenon, from Vampira to Zacherley to Chilly Billy Cardille to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. In this astute little tribute, you’ll see me offering up sound bites alongside Forry Ackerman, Neil Gaiman, Leonard Maltin, Bob Burns, Donald Glut, and other horror geeks.

You did a lot of research to give the book’s roots in B-cinema and the Manhattan Project verity. How did your research inform your telling of the story? Did anything emerge from the research that changed the way you were going to write the novel?

Shambling Towards Hiroshima includes a framing story in which Syms Thorley, now approaching age seventy, attends a 1984 Baltimore monster-movie festival, right before the re-election of the quintessential Cold Warrior, Ronald Reagan. It turns out that Syms is a fixture on the horror-convention circuit, and he keeps trying to use this forum to get his fans thinking about Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. So I found myself doing a lot of research into this crucial moment in world history, so Syms’s rants would seem well informed. Of course, the convention attendees aren’t really interested. They only want to hear about Syms’s portrayals of Corpuscula the Alchemical Creature, Kha-Ton-Ra the Living Mummy, and, in the twilight of his career, the Japanese monster Gorgantis, King of the Lizards.

I ended up concluding that, when we argue about whether Truman should have ordered the Hiroshima raid, we are perhaps addressing the wrong issue. Rather, I think we should be asking three other questions.

First, given the fear and remorse that the obliteration of Hiroshima had almost certainly instilled in Emperor Hirohito, was it necessary to hit Nagasaki immediately afterwards? Some historians are troubled that General Leslie Groves systematically arranged for the second atomic attack to occur before Tokyo could formulate a coherent response to the first one.

Second, how essential was it to define the “unconditional surrender” of Japan in the most draconian terms imaginable? From the enemy perspective, the Potsdam Proclamation clearly allowed for Emperor Hirohito to be arrested, tried, and executed as a war criminal, an intolerable thought for the Japanese — and surely one reason for Tokyo’s maddeningly equivocal reaction to the ultimatum. And yet, ironically, after Hirohito finally demanded that his generals capitulate, there was evidently no sentiment among the Allies to apprehend him. Indeed, McArthur allowed the Emperor to remain the titular head of his nation, a gesture that proved essential for shutting down the tattered but fanatical remnants of Japan’s once mighty military machine.

Third, how necessary was it, both to immediate American interests and to the welfare of humankind in general, that the Pacific War end with minimal assistance from Joseph Stalin? Let’s not forget that, the day before the Nagasaki attack, the Soviet Government officially declared war on Japan. It seems reasonable to conclude that, even without the atomic-bomb factor, the Japanese would have ultimately surrendered in consequence of massive Soviet involvement — a situation that Truman could not countenance, given his understandable desire to curtail Stalin’s postwar influence in the Far East.

Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer for history of the atomic bomb project, once said he thought that the story of the atomic age was Dante’s Inferno for the modern era. The atomic age and nuclear affairs has certainly permeated much of your work (I especially love “Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole,” a story of nuclear fallout and John Wayne films), though it seems to have gone somewhat passé in the post Cold War era. While this may seem self-evident, why do you find these issues so compelling?

It’s true that the specter of nuclear Armageddon is no longer at the forefront of public consciousness — though it’s worth remembering that George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq adventure was sold to us as a stopgap measure against “weapons of mass destruction,” a rubric that presumably includes hydrogen bombs.

For better or worse, nuclear weapons raise bedrock moral and philosophical issues in a way that makes other technologies seem almost inconsequential by comparison. Consider the very term “weapons of mass destruction.” As I argued in my first piece of anti-nuclear fiction, This Is the Way the World Ends, these devices are not “weapons” as all, but Satanic instruments of indiscriminate murder. But George Bush couldn’t call them that, because to do so would be to question the legitimacy of our own obscenely proliferous arsenals.

At the moment, of course, everyone is concerned about the possibility of Iran and North Korea getting the bomb, along with concomitant delivery systems. There’s no easy solution to this threat, but I suspect the answer — if any — lies in tough-minded sanctions and negotiations. I would not put my money on Republican Party fantasies of zapping incoming missiles with Star Wars lasers: the famous Strategic Defense Initiative, so beloved by the cult of Ronald Reagan.

Shambling Towards Hiroshima seems the perfect length for its story, a short novel or long novella (and, by the by, I miss the era of the good, short novel). Why did you choose this length? What advantages does it provide you?

For many years my heart has been in the medium of the full-length novel, the more epic the better, hence the sweep of This Is the Way the World Ends, Only Begotten Daughter, Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, and The Last Witchfinder. And yet I’d have to say that, having completed Shambling Towards Hiroshima, I’m impressed with how much of my philosophical and political agenda I managed to cram into those 170 pages. Shambling contains many more ideas, characters, scenes, gags, and conceits than I would have thought possible on such a modest scale.

Although I always thought of Shambling Towards Hiroshima as a novella, I would have certainly added more scenes if the story seemed to demand them, and Jacob Weisman would have been happy to publish a longer book. But the thing happened to come in at about 39,000 words. Whoever thought up the 40,000 legal limit for a novella must have known what he or she was doing. I don’t think Shambling would be nearly so effective at novel length. Another three or four thousand words, and my outlandish premise would surely have overstayed its welcome.

At the moment I’m in the middle of composing a fat historical novel about the coming of the Darwinian worldview. Something tells me that this may be my last attempt to tell a story on so large a scale. In the future, you should look for a flurry of shorter works by James Morrow.

I keep reminding myself that my two favorite philosophical SF novels, The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are not novels at all, but novellas. If the form was good enough for H.G. Wells, it’s good enough for me.

If you had to put money down on a fight between Godzilla and your mutant iguanas, who would win and why?

Godzilla would win.  After all, the great Japanese lizard is real, whereas the Knickerbocker Project iguanas are mere products of my imagination.

About the Author

Jason S. Ridlers fiction has appeared in such magazines as Nossa Morte, Big Pulp, Crossed Genres, New Myths, Necrotic Tissue, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. “Billy and the Mountain” appeared in Tesseracts Thirteen, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell. His popular non-fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada.

“Where’s My Flying Car? The Future of Personal Aviation”
by Joyce Frohn

It’s 2009. Where’s my jet-pack, my car-plane hybrid? Where are all of those neat vehicles that science fiction promised? Actually they are already here, along with things that no science fiction writer forecast. Aviation pioneers around the world are working hard to bring us the vehicles of the future. Some of them you can even buy, though getting permission to fly them around may be harder. Here is a quick glimpse of what the future looks like today.

Jet-packs

Jet-packs are the best-loved and least practical of all science fiction gadgets. Usually they are more noise than propulsion, but the new Martin Jet Pack has finally broken through the technical ceiling. Their packs can last up to a half-hour of flight time, which is more than double the previous record. This allows them to reach a height of 500 feet or travel 31.5 miles (one or the other, not both). Early jet packs also ran on explosive rocket fuel, but the Martin uses ordinary gasoline.

If you order a Martin you can expect to wait at least a year for delivery, but there is no license required and training comes with purchase. You do have to be over 5′5” and under 250 pounds to use it. Alone the machine weights 250 pounds, without the recommended parachute. It costs as much as a luxury car, but it is fun, if you like loud and a little rough. I’ve been told the steering is tricky so practice someplace empty before trying a city.

Could you fly to work using it? That’s the biggest problem with things that take a long time to get to market: regulations can get there before you. You can’t use a jet pack in many cities without getting a lot of permits. You need to check on noise ordinances and specific rules for jet-packs. If those aren’t an issue, make sure you have a crew of at least three standing by to help you haul the jetpack someplace safe after landing. Hopefully they’ll be adding a trailer or hauling system soon. Don’t forget the earplugs; it’s still really loud, as the video makes clear. You’ll need concrete or tarmac to take off and land on.

Flying boats

There have been many plane/ boat crosses in the history of aviation, dating right back to the time of the Wright brothers. Most amphibious planes are hard to get into due to their seat height, and many can’t take off from solid ground. The ICON is making waves. It can take off from land or water and its wings fold so it can go into the optional trailer. It runs on regular gas and has an MP3 player dock and water-proof leather seats. It can pull a water-skier, although they haven’t found a volunteer yet.

This is the perfect vehicle for people who can’t afford both a new plane and a new boat, though it does require a pilot’s license. It costs $139,000, and if you order now you should get it by 2010. You can’t use it to get to work unless you work on the waterfront, but you can fish from the pivoting pilot’s seat. And you can take off from any river without filing a flight plan, as long as you’re not landing at an airport.

Flying cars

The Terrafugia Transition is the best-known of the new car-plane hybrids being developed. It is said to have begun life as a research paper at MIT. They solved the puzzle of crossing an airplane and a car by making a plane that can turn into a barely street legal ground vehicle. The wings fold alongside the cabin. It can reach 65 miles per hour, and gets 30 mpg, on the ground. It also runs on regular gas, which is a good thing as aviation fuel is running at $5.50 an Imperial Litre. As a plane it has a range of 460 miles. One of the avaible options is a built-in plane sized parachute, which is a common option in new planes.

If you order a Transition now, hopefully you will get it by 2010. There were a lot of advance orders. It requires a standard sport pilot’s license and a driver’s license. The latter is probably harder to get, although it takes twenty hours of training to get the pilot’s license and that can cost up to $3,000. A Transition costs $200,000 with the first $100,000 up front. You could drive it to work.

A little aside here about licenses: it is easier to fly a plane than drive a car. The US Government recognizes this. You must be sixteen to legally learn to drive a car; pilot’s licenses start (with restrictions) at 12, with a full license available at 17.

There is said to be another roadable airplane in development, the Cara Vellair Roadable Aircraft. They have booked a space at EAAirVenture for August of this year, but they are staying silent on the web. The Martin JetPack, Icon and many other innovative vehicles have debuted at that show in other years.

Helicycles

The Moller Skycar is another interesting vehicle in development. It is a motorcycle/ helicopter cross. Helicopters and motorcycles both require extra licensing and extra skill. Airplane pilots half joke that, “Helicopters are spare parts flying in formation.” Combining the two most hazardous methods of transportation into one seems like asking for trouble. Also they have been working on it since 2003 without going into production. Don’t hold your breath.

If this thing takes off, you could take it to work and take off from an empty parking lot. I wouldn’t try either of these things, but you could.

Somewhat less risky is the motorcycle/autogyro combo from Holland: the PAL-V. This has a range of 340 miles, runs on ordinary gas and has a top speed of 125 miles per hour on land or air.  It will be able to take off in a 30×100 meter space. The manufacturers are urging the Dutch government to scatter launch pads around various Dutch cities. It requires both licenses. Expect it in 2010, or maybe a year or two later. It looks very cool: exactly like you saw on the covers of the old pulps right down to the red and black paint job. If it ever goes into production you could drive it to work.

Gyrocopters

Gyrocopters are strange plane/ helicopter hybrids. There are several different companies that make them. You may remember seeing one in the Bond film, “You Only Live Twice”. They are mainly sold as kits that can take 200 hundred to 400 hours to assemble, depending on your skill level. Most types run on gas, though some need aviation fuel. They weigh about 250 pounds without the pilot and require 40-250 feet to take off, depending on model, weight and pilot skill level.

One of main advantages of gyrocopters is their safety. If the engine conks out, you ride down in a spiral with some glide, unlike a helicopter which always goes straight down with a resounding bump. However, they require special training beyond a regular pilot’s license. Again you’ll pay about as much as a luxury car. You couldn’t take one to work unless you live a rural area, and they can’t land at airports.

ParaPlanes

Another option is the ParaPlane. There are several different manufacturers, but only two basic kinds: backpack and go-cart. The wing is a parafoil parachute and the engine is a lawnmower or other small engine with a propeller. Steering is done with pull cords. Their takeoff speed is usually around 26 miles per hour. That is also their cruising speed. No license is required and they run on gas or a gas/oil blend. They can reach 10,000 feet, if the pilot is dressed warmly enough.

You can get a two-seater and buy training with a pilot or just buy one and learn as you go. The sane way to train for a parplane is to take parachuting lessons first, and then try flying but have a radio with an experienced paraplane operator on the line. The less sane but common method is to be launched and learn in midair. The ones with wheels are pulled by a car or truck to launch. Those without wheels are often launched by having the pilot strap the packed parachute and engine on and then get onto a chair on a trailer. The tow vehicle drives until it reaches 35 miles an hour and then stops. Hopefully the parachute will open and the pilot will start the engine before hitting anything. Some people are working on stationary launches, but the idea of being a human catapult can make folk nervous.

If any thing goes wrong with the engine, you are parachuting in a chair or a dune buggy. If your parachute fails, use the reserve. Some have crash cages and rollbars.

ParaPlanes usually require about fifty feet to take off and three feet to land. They can cruise at two feet off the ground if you want to. Look out for trees. If you live in rural area, they might not only be able take you to work; you could also use them at work. Ranchers have found that five to ten feet off the ground is ideal for rounding up animals. They are all banned from airports and populated areas.

There are some self-launching ParaPlanes - a good example would be the Parajet Skycar trying to fly/drive around Africa — and these should be considered a small plane, or dune buggy if they’re on the ground. Even the biggest are not street legal. They can be adapted to use pontoons or skis. The price for these is in the twenty thousand dollars range, or a less if you buy used or get a kit and assemble it yourself. They can be used by anyone tall enough to use a go-cart. With a few lessons on the ground, a ten-year could fly one legally.

The smaller ParaPlanes can fit in the trunk of a car. They are too small to show up on most radar and can go from trunk to sky in 10 minutes with a tow. The most solid things on the smaller ones are the engine and the pilot. Without a pilot they weigh about 45 pounds. These small ones can be bought used for as little as $1,000. You can also get plans to assemble one from parts and pay about a thousand dollars. Used ones have turned up for sale for as little as $300. 

The Future of Fuel

When it comes to alternative fuels, bio jet fuels are currently in the news. They are only the beginning. Smaller planes, gliders and paraplanes with solid frames can be converted to plug-ins. The Electra Flyer Company supplies the motors for $4,200. It takes about two hours to fully charge a plane’s batteries for a day. The same company sells a generator that fits in the plane so that if you land someplace without electricity you can use gasoline to charge up your electric plane.

I haven’t touched on planes that run on rocket fuel (the fabled NitrOx), or pure alcohol, which is favored by some acrobatic pilots. The main disadvantage of pure alcohol is the invisible flame, which is why many airports have banned it.

Curiouser and Curiouser

There are stranger things in the skies. Homebuilt personal dirigibles, personal hovercraft, wearable jets and hang gliders with motors are all out there. Any one of them might be the wave of the future, or be what science fiction writers will make fun of fifty years from now. No matter: the important thing is that the present is as strange and wonderful as any of us could wish.

About the Author

Joyce Frohn became a professional writer ten years ago with publication in a fan magazine for Ambrose Bierce. She is the mother of a five-year-old. Her husband, Tony, is waiting for the day when her writing gets him away from the daily grind of the sausage factory where he works.