Aeon Twelve Read online

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  Editors

  Marti McKenna

  Bridget McKenna

  Associate Editor

  L. Blunt Jackson

  Editorial Assistant

  Stacey Janssen

  Æon Twelve is copyright © 2007, Quintamid LLC, all rights reserved. Individual columns, articles, and stories are copyright © the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

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  Novelette

  The Butterfly Man . . . Sarah L. Edwards

  Short Stories

  Harry the Crow . . . John Kratman

  Fitzwell’s Oracle . . . Lawrence M. Schoen

  Toys . . . Dev Agarwal

  Her Box of Secrets . . . Lisa Mantchev

  Moonlight on the Carpet . . . David D. Levine

  Welcome to Oceanopia! . . . Katharine Sparrow

  Poetry

  Cat People . . . Bruce Boston

  Fox and Chicken People . . . Bruce Boston

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  Twelve

  In my not-so-humble opinion, the two worst movies to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture are:

  1. The English Patient

  2. The French Connection.

  The two movies share a coldness, a lack of human empathy, and a pointlessness so profound you wonder why you wasted those precious hours of your life. The reason you did-—besides the fact that the critics and pundits and the givers of awards loved the stupid movies—is simple:

  The movies are well made, beautifully filmed and, in the case of The French Connection, filled with ground-breaking cinematic moments, like the car-elevated train chase scene that I didn’t believe for a minute but which was the absolute highlight of the movie.

  I’ve been watching and reading thrillers lately, which is how I stumbled on The French Connection. I do try to see all the Oscar nominees and winners, but I’ve missed some—particularly older films—and somehow I’d missed that one. I approached it with trepidation—I’d heard it was graphic, and graphic films often disturb my sleep.

  I watched it the night after I watched Three Days of the Condor and during the same week that I read Day of the Jackal. I’m also rewatching all three Bourne movies, trying to figure out why they work.

  To that end, I listened to a Day By Day interview with Director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) about the reasons that The Bourne Ultimatum works. Friedkin said that it worked because the filmmakers, from the director to the writer to the actors and crew, shared the same vision. And his theory as to their vision? He believed they understood that a true thriller should have danger around every corner.

  He’s right as far as it goes. But even lesser thrillers have danger around every corner. What makes Bourne and Three Days of the Condor stand out are their characters. Jason Bourne is a man who has a hideous past that he cannot remember. It’s encroaching on his present. When he tells Julia Stiles in Ultimatum that she’ll get used to being on the run, we know that he’s lying to make her feel better. He has never gotten used to this life, and he probably never will.

  Three Days of the Condor has a similarly appealing hero. Robert Redford plays a CIA researcher who returns with the day’s lunch to find all his colleagues murdered because of a memo he has written. He uses his book-learning and his terror to keep himself alive against impossible odds, and (in the tradition of a 1970s paranoid thriller) he mostly succeeds.

  Without their strong characters, the three Bourne movies and Condor would have been little more than well plotted hour-long television episodes. That’s how The French Connection feels nearly forty years after it was made. It grew dated because the characters, while famous, were irredeemable caricatures.

  In the middle of all this thriller study, my husband asked me how come no one is writing science fiction thrillers. I bristled: I am. I’ve tried every possible mystery and suspense form in my Retrieval Artist series, and I think Extremes (the second book) is a better-than-passable thriller.

  But my defensiveness aside, he did get me wondering. Is anyone else writing science fiction thrillers? Has anyone written them in the past?

  While I can think of thrilling science fiction novels and great adventure stories (mostly in the past), I can’t come up with many modern ones. Part of that is due to the syndrome I talked about in Signals Six (Æon Six). Some of it, though, is caused by two science fictional problems.

  First, many science fiction novels—even now—eschew characterization for really cool whiz-bang science. It’s less important to like the person running through the scenario than it is to experience the scenario. I’m occasionally guilty of this one, especially in my short fiction. I like prickly characters because I like prickly people.

  But you know, I don’t often read novels about them.

  Second, it’s hard to write a “danger-around-the-corner” novel when the danger is dripping goop from outer space. This is the reason many SF mysteries don’t work. As Isaac Asimov once said, the science fiction mystery has to do double-duty: it has to explain the world, and then it has to explain (convincingly) what has gone wrong with that world.

  A thriller has to do that and more. To understand the danger around every corner, the reader has to anticipate that danger. And if the reader doesn’t really understand the world, then the reader can’t understand what faces the protagonist when he walks into a dark alley.

  Think of it this way: How many foreign tourists get mugged because they don’t understand the cultural differences enough to realize when they’ve walked into a bad neighborhood? Or how many adventure tourists get mauled by a wild animal because they don’t understand the warning signals every animal gives before it attacks?

  The job of thriller science fiction is three-fold. The writer has to explain the world, then has to show what has gone wrong with the world, and has to do so well enough that the reader can foresee what else might go wrong for the protagonist, who has grown up in that world.

  A very tall task that few writers are up for. To do it, you have to be an excellent science fiction writer, a stellar mystery writer, and the best-of-the-best thriller writer. To top it off, you need to be able to write great, memorable characters.

  And you must do it all with the short, spare prose of the thriller genre, not the often-dense jargon-filled language of most published science fiction.

  Not an impossible task, but not an easy one. And frankly, if the writer is good at all that thriller stuff, he’s better off writing a straight thriller that everyone’ll want to read than he is trying to write an SF/thriller which will only be marketed to the SF audience (see Signals Six).

  Still, I’d love to read a good SF/thriller, and I’d love to hear from readers who believe they’ve found a few (from any decade). It’ll save me from my next research project—making sure I’ve seen all of Oscar’s Best Picture winners.

  Because I have a hunch that within those seventy-something films, there are some more stinkers that make The English Patient and The French Connection look like the greatest movies ever made.

  Twelve

  Inside/Out

  Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to rea
d.

  —Groucho Marx

  Everything possessing three dimensions that we have personally investigated has an inside and an outside. For bodies of more dimensions you may feel free to invent the names of additional sides as you will; today our jurisdiction ends here, in a world limited to three observable dimensions and two ’sides: Out and In.

  Out is out. Right out. Out there. What’s not in us, within us, or of us is out—anything or anyone not included in in. Out is the outer darkness, outsiders, and outhouses. It’s outlandishness and outcasts, out in the cold, out to lunch, and out of luck. I’m out with the out-crowd, as the songwriter notably didn’t write.

  In, on the other hand, is inclusive and inviting. It’s where we get insight and inspiration. It’s in sync and in tune and in love. It’s in out of the rain—the basis of all architecture dating from the big-leaf-over-the-head school. In in we are included. Inside we are safe.

  Some of us are primarily motivated from the outside, and look mostly to others for our cues, but looking only to others could lead to crises of identity. Some look inside more often to decide their actions, but looking only inside might bring on self-absorption and severe social ineptitude. So mostly we’re a mixture of what’s inside and outside us, always aiming for some sort of balance.

  We can probably agree that there are both inner and outer realities. Some folks don’t have a lot of respect for the inner variety as opposed to hard, outside-confirmable “facts,” but each of us occupies an interior reality first and foremost anyway, or so it seems to us. We take in raw sensory data from outside, but what meaning we make of it is surely made by what’s inside. So why is what’s outside necessarily more real? Because it can be part of a wider consensus? How wide a consensus is required for real reality? Any wider than the idea that the Earth is flat, or that the universe is carried on the backs of turtles, or that Whitesnake was a really great band?

  We think that what we choose to call consensus or outside reality is made up of several billion individual inside ones, the owners of which (where they share a common language) may agree on words to describe it. But who owns the definitive definitions of those words? Who really understands the qualities they express? Other than “us,” of course—our version of reality is quite evidently superior to anyone else’s. When Count Alfred Korzybski said “The map is not the territory,” he quite evidently meant someone else’s map; ours is the real deal. Isn’t it?

  So on we go, creating our worlds by getting outside stuff in and inside stuff out. Artists of all kinds are particularly adept at the latter, and this issue’s batch of Æon authors are no exception. Frank Zappa said “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” We would respectfully disagree with his map of reality, and state for the record our opinion that art is making something out of ourselves and bringing it out from wherever it resides in there. Seven authors, two columnists, and one poet have made something out of themselves for your delight and delectation in Æon Twelve.

  John Kratman kicks off this issue with the story of an outsider who dreams of being part of the tribe in “Harry the Crow.”

  Next, Lawrence M. Schoen’s hero finds himself on the outside of academia looking in until he meets “Fitzwell’s Oracle.”

  Dev Agarwal transports us to a horrifying near-future where the human race have become the ultimate outsiders, or even merely “Toys.”

  Sarah L. Edwards tells the story of a young outcast hoping for a new life of belonging with “The Butterfly Man.”

  Look inside the hopes and disappointments of an ordinary woman as Lisa Mantchev opens “Her Box of Secrets.”

  Then explore inside the mind of a small boy of large talents in David D. Levine’s “Moonlight on the Carpet.”

  And rounding out this issue, take a holiday inside the ultimate “gated community” as Katharine Sparrow bids you “Welcome to Oceanopia!”

  Multiple award-winning author Bruce Boston contributes two poems that take the reader inside two fantastical possibilities, while our regular columnists provide their usual thought-provoking essays: Dr. Rob Furey fast-forwards to the reign of outsiders inside our insides in the minutes and hours and days after death in “Death Bugs You” (or is that “Death, Bugs, You….”?), and Kristine Kathryn Rusch searches for and finds the heart of the thriller inside modern film and literature.

  So come on in out of the cold and get cozy inside the pages of Æon Twelve.

  Harry the Crow

  John Kratman

  “Being a pessimist, I’ve always assumed that places like Yellowstone National Park will eventually be sacrificed to some political convenience or another. Consider the imminent exploitation of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge if you disagree. Being a writer, I wondered if there was a way to save Yellowstone, and given that, reconcile the modern world and the ancient one in a way that would not mean the destruction of the park or the human race.

  So I made Harry.

  Pretty dark opening for a comedic story, but there it is. Enjoy.”

  “A CONSTRUCT IS NO CROW!” Tommy shouted, the ridiculous war bonnet he’d worn to my father’s funeral slipping off his head. He pushed it back with an angry swipe of his hand, glaring at the gathered members of the tribe, daring them to laugh.

  “Harry can do everything a man can do,” I said. There were many people in the lodge that I recognized, but there were many more, ghosts of my past, who should have been there and were not. “He can hunt, write poetry, sing a song. He can think and he can feel. I taught him how to shoot and how to track, how to read and how to write. No matter that he sprang from my brain instead of my manhood. He is my son, the only one this old man will ever have. He is a Crow.”

  “What can a machine know of tradition and honor?” Tommy asked, his lined face veiled in the shadows cast by the fire. He drew a pipe from his pocket and packed it with angry jabs of his age-spotted hand.

  “He knows more of honor than you do, you stupid old fool—to hold a grudge over a woman for twenty years!” He had never forgiven me for that girl, so long ago. I don’t recall her name, but it had been a simple thing: a man, a woman, a bottle, and a cold night. Tommy’s jealousy still rode him like a demon. Stupid to throw away a lifelong friendship over something so small.

  Harry chuckled, tucking his six legs beneath him. “It’s not like I’m a Sioux,” His voice was deep and careful, somehow fitting, I thought, for a construct that resembled a clockwork spider. He was almost four feet high with a long neck and a saucer-shaped head dominated by a single eye. I made him from discarded components and the body of a General Mechanics cleandrone. I spent many long hours and plenty of medicine piecing him together on my nights off from the university, back when I dreamed the white man’s dream.

  “My father is dead.” I sat back in my chair, sighed, and rubbed my eyes. “The tribe needs a new shaman, and I am here. But my son must stay with me.”

  “No!” Tommy’s lips drew back. “I say no.” He looked around for support, and a few of his fellows nodded in agreement.

  “You do not speak for everyone here, Tommy,” I said. Long ago I had counted coups with my father and become a chief of the tribe. “If you would refuse Harry, do it for a reason, not over a love affair grown thirty years cold.”

  The eldest of the chiefs, my father’s friend Kicks-the-Coyote, spoke. A hundred winters had etched his face into a wrinkled ruin, but his tiny black eyes still shone with wisdom and cunning. “Chester Laughing Crow says the machine has the spirit of a Crow. Let him prove it by counting four coups before summer brings the buffalo back to the valley.”

  A murmur ran through the tribe.

  “And if Harry fails?” I asked. I wouldn’t stay without my son.

  It was Tommy that answered. “Then he leaves this place for good.”

  They wouldn’t let Harry stay at the lodge, so we camped on a hill about a mile north. It was cold—damned cold. I had lived in the city too long. But the stars! They shone above Yellowstone valley like nowhere els
e on the steel and cement-jacketed Earth.

  “Maybe we should go back to the University, Pop.” A mechanical hand tipped each of Harry’s six legs. He picked up a stick and poked at the fire. “No one wants me here.”

  I rummaged through my pack and took out the pipe my father had left for me. “Heck, no, boy. This is our home.”

  Harry nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t sure. “What is counting coup?”

  “It is a magical thing.” I watched the fire and felt the years slipping away, back to the time I had counted coup with my father, before my urge to see the modern world had driven a spike between us. “A coup is an act of bravery. By tradition, a brave must count four to be a chief of the tribe and sit in council.”

  “You did it?”

  “Yes. A long time ago.” A wolf howled in the distance, and one by one her packmates added their own voices until the hills echoed with their call. “My father helped me.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “First, you must steal a fine horse from an enemy.” I couldn’t help but smile, thinking of my own first coup—my heart hammering in my chest, the nervous stamp of the horse and the burning heat of its body under me as I rode away, shouting in triumph at the moon.

  “Steal a horse? How the heck am I gonna do that?”

  I looked down at the pipe and rubbed the scratches that my father and grandfather before me had made. Many generations. Many coups. “I heard Tommy say he was going to Norris tomorrow.”

  There’s a window in the back of the lodge that opens in on the tribe’s kitchen. It’s a huge place, the kind of place where they cook enough food to feed an army, every day, three times a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It got hot in there, and most of the time the cooks leave the window open.