The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (10 page)

The corn had apparently retained its distant genetic memory of Earth, because it ignored the seasons of the new planet and grew at its own slow speed. Sikes lavished attention on the stalks as if they were his children, and eventually silky-topped ears began to sprout. He looked forward to a meal of orange-eyed pink bird stuffed with corn. Every morning he checked the progress of the precious fruit, and then one day he discovered that some of the ears were missing. He knew immediately, from the footprints in the soil, that the Geets had come at night and stolen from him.

That night he did not go to sleep but kept himself awake by designing in his mind a new Maize board he would carve out with his knife on a section of blue bark. This kept him well awake and so entranced he did not hear the first stirrings in the corn stalks outside his shelter. When the noise finally became clear to him, he grabbed the rifle and crept outside. Up in the sky, the ringed planet lightened the night with its reflected glow. He moved cautiously around the corner of the rows and saw before him a good-sized Geet reaching for a second ear of corn. He brought the rifle up to aim and pressed the wave generator button at the side. The creature heard the subtle click and, startled, turned to look. By then, Sikes had his finger on the trigger, but he did not fire. The Geet clumsily plucked the second ear of corn and lumbered away into the night with it.

Back in the shelter, Sikes lay on the floor, the same scene repeatedly playing in his mind's eye. He saw the Geet turn to look at him, and when it did, its long blonde hair whipped in a wave over its left shoulder just as Methina's had back on Aldebaran a lifetime before. Since he had begun his struggle to survive, he had not allowed himself to think of her once, but now the memory of their night together came flooding back to him. In his mind he again touched the soft skin of her legs and stomach, and his loneliness became a momentary pain in his chest that nearly killed him. It was also in that moment that his most incredible and diabolical strategy of all was born. He would later come to call it the Lover's Conceit.

In the next ten days, Sikes mercilessly murdered all of the Geets he could find whose hair was not the same color as the beams of the growth lights positioned in the fields of Aldebaran. The extent of the killing sickened him, but he would not stop. By the time his rampage was over, there were very few of the Geets left living in the caves at the north of the oasis. To these chosen blonde creatures, he brought all but an armful of the corn he had grown. Although they fled when he arrived with it, he watched from a blind as they later snuck out of the forest and feasted on his offering. When the silver leaves fell from the trees, there were now many more young with hair the color of Methina's. Even the babies with lighter hair, but not the exact shade, he murdered.

The microwave rifle was rarely given a chance to cool down in the seasons that followed. Sikes no longer thought of it as an instrument of death but now as a tool of creation. After the blonde color was achieved, he began to select for a lack of body hair. This process took the equivalent of two full Earth years and many Geet generations, but Sikes was patient and focused. The days passed more quickly now and he was never bored. He had a purpose that, for him, bordered on the religious.

In the years that followed, he selected for nakedness, skin tone, the shape of the eye, weight and height. The Geet populations dwindled as they grew more and more to resemble Methina. He knew he could never hope, in the span of his life, to achieve her intelligence and personality in them, but something had changed in their ability to think for they had become increasingly difficult to hunt. They seemed to know when he was coming, and they abandoned the caves altogether a year or two after he had created a brood whose soft flesh was the color of weak tea. Although he had nearly forgotten Aldebaran, the image of Methina remained crystal clear in his mind, and like a depraved sculptor whose medium was an innocent species, he carefully carved his way toward his concept of perfection.

The silver leaves fell, turned to ghosts and were resurrected so many times that the new blue-barked Maize board, chipped and cracked in half, had twice been replaced. I need not describe at length the horrors Sikes's experiment had visited upon those poor creatures throughout this long age of slaughter, but one day when he was out in the woods searching for their new hiding place, he saw, at a distance, one of the adults of the species. She must have heard him approaching and froze in a crouch. He looked through the telescopic sight of the rifle and nearly lost his breath. There, two hundred yards away stood, for all intents and purposes, Methina. Sikes was an old man now, wrinkled, stoop-shouldered, bald, and bad in the knees, but the sight of her made his passion stir. The only work left to be done was to produce eyes the color green of the fabled wandering star, Karjeet.

He continued to grow corn, and had increased his yearly output by ten times what the first crop had yielded. Besides having been a main staple of his diet, the Geets loved the taste of it more fervently with each altered generation, and he would use it as a lure to draw them into the open. This is what he was doing one day, hiding in a blind behind a fallen tree fifty yards from a pile of corn, when he heard something behind him. He turned quickly only to catch the sight of Methina charging at him. She opened her mouth to display a row of sharp teeth, an item of anatomy he had not before seen in the Geets. Lunging for his rifle, he inadvertently knocked it out of his reach. She lunged for him, pinned him to the ground and sunk her fangs into his shoulder. Even with the pain, having her lying on top of him confused his thinking, mixing desire in equal parts with fear. At the last moment, before she could disengage and go for his neck, he reached for his knife and cut her throat.

As he knelt over the beautiful body he had created, he shook his head, wondering how he had managed to overlook the Geets' increasing aggression. He remembered how, not but a few days earlier, he had witnessed a pack of his special Methinas attack and eat an imperfect one with throwback hair on its face that he had wounded in the arm with a bad shot. So immured had he become to the death of the lesser Geets that at the time it had not struck him as anything worth noting. But now he saw that as they approached perfection, they were becoming more dangerous. He then heard others in the woods around him and fled back to his camp by the southern lake.

The color of Karjeet eluded him, but he continued to try to render it. More incidents of the Methinas' aggression had taken place, but now he kept the rifle perpetually with him and powered on. He hated to have to shoot some perfectly good specimens, whose eye color was now tending toward that of a ripe lime, not perfect but moving in the right direction. As he went about his gruesome work, he began to have more and more memories from his days on Aldebaran.

One night, after playing what he considered to be perhaps the most perfect game of Maize against himself, he fell asleep in the structure and dreamed of flying above the spires of the bottled city with Methina. They stood atop Shiva Tower, and when it was his turn to leap up to touch the inner dome, he did not ascend but halfway. With each subsequent jump he made, he flapped his arms harder and felt within as though he were approaching some kind of total climax. She stood on the observation deck beneath him and yelled louder and louder with each successive thrust that took him closer to his goal. Just as the tip of his finger was about to touch the center of the inner dome, he awoke.

The glow of the ringed planet shone in the one small window above where he slept on the floor. He became immediately aware that he was not alone in the structure. He cleared his eyes and saw the gleam of their hair and the shadowed curves and soft contours of their naked bodies.

“Methina,” he said and held out his arms.

As she came toward him, the final move of the Lover's Conceit, she smiled sharply in her myriad forms.

There you have it, one kernel of human history to serve as an example of the whole twisted game. The planet that Sikes had been stranded on is now called Fereshin, and the oasis that held him captive still exists. The Geets are still there and yet more changes have been wrought in them, leading on from the work he had accomplished. There are those who still bare a strong resemblance to Methina, and irony of ironies, their eyes are now the exact green of Karjeet. This development came not directly from Sikes but from their acquired cannibalism of those born differently without their selected beauty. Some chemical in the heart, I believe.

Sikes's unnatural stress on the species moved them to a sharper level of cognizance. The Methinas who became violently ill from the consumption of his flesh now had the wherewithal to remember never to devour another like Sikes again. His looks had become imprinted upon their newly vibrant minds and, in their eating of the ugly others of their species, they avoided those Geets who carried any of his physical traits. Follow the progression of this practice over generations. Now, if you were to travel to Fereshin and the far oasis in the red desert, you would find it predominantly populated with a multitude of Sikeses and Methinas, like a single couple trapped in a labyrinth of mirrors.

The old saw in writing fiction is show it, don't tell it, but there are those writers who tell it and do so to wonderful effect—Borges, Chekhov, Steven Millhauser, sometimes Kipling. This is a story in the “tell it” vein. I was influenced in writing this piece by the book
, Ka,
a reconfiguration of the stories of the Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso. These amazing myths take all kinds of wild and wacky plot twists without warning. They waste little time on devices that contemporary fiction insists upon to suspend disbelief. The concept at the end of “The Far Oasis” that deals with the radical altering of a species through unnatural selection came to me through an essay in Carl Sagan's collection
Cosmos.
In this essay, he tells about a place in the Sea of Japan, where a princess and her Samurai retinue drowned themselves instead of being captured by the enemy. Local crab harvesters, in the ages that followed, sometimes found crabs with a mottling on their shells that somewhat depicted the face of a Samurai and would throw them back in honor of that ancient sacrifice. Now, there exists in those waters a species of crab whose shells carry precise portraits of those noble warriors.

The Woman Who Counts Her Breath

Dorothy Himmelreich, as I know her, has a stocky build, generous of bosom and gut, a rear end in the Rubens-meets-gravity line, and rather thin limbs. She wears her hair cut short, a bleached-blonde skullcap that is never quite perfectly combed. All of this is of little consequence, existing merely to frame her face. It is a meaty face, jowly, and thick in the lips. Her nose is short and pushed in a bit. The eyes are deep-set and always on the move, scanning the room to see that everything fits into her expectation of how it all must be. Should she come across, say, a child acting out or a person expressing a complex thought, her top lip curls ever so slightly and her nostrils flare. A slight grin that has nothing to do with merriment is the sure sign that she is about to set things straight. Her overall air is one of constant suspicion, an ever readiness to take offense.

It is well known that Dorothy Himmelreich counts everything. The telephone poles she passes while walking, the steps from the house to the mailbox at the end of the driveway, the spots on a lady-bug's back, the number of rings before someone picks up the telephone, the stars in the night sky, her husband's sneezes. When the day is done and she is lying in bed, her eyes closed but not yet asleep, my mother-in-law, Dorothy Himmelreich, counts her breaths. The very experience of life for her is a running tally. Perhaps when it comes time for figuring the total, she wants to make sure she is not being overcharged. She is pathologically cheap, even to the point where I once heard her express joy at the purchase of a garden hose because it was probably the last one she would ever have to buy before she died. Her favorite story to tell is one in which a salesgirl had mistakenly undercharged her for an item.

For one so concerned about money, it would seem logical that she would not be very interested in spending it on unnecessary items, but this is not the case. She will buy anything if it is cheap enough, and she will buy a lot of it, whether it is something she needs or not. Every weekend during spring and summer, she leaves her house early and travels to the local garage sales and flea markets. “I only spent ten dollars for all of this,” she will say to her husband while pointing to a box jammed full of rusting gadgets, single dinner plates from discontinued sets, old tools, ash trays (she doesn't smoke), party decorations, shirts from the seventies with gravy stains. In response her husband simply stares in disbelief, his mouth open, thinking of the third stall of the garage, so heaped with possessions that it resembles the proverbial “Dark Side of the Moon.” Give the woman some credit, though; at the end of each summer, she has her own garage sale and tries to unload it all for more than she paid for it. Parting with these things causes her little anguish because she knows that the following spring other detritus will be hers again.

Her belief system is a gumbo of stoicism and superstition. If you try to rest while the sun is up, she bangs the pots and pans in the kitchen, slams the door, calls out in a loud voice. Naps are tantamount to public masturbation. If you try to tell her about a supernova recently discovered at the edge of the universe, she will shake her head, squint her eyes, and ask you to show her in writing where you saw such a story. Since you don't have the magazine with you, she simply smiles, self-satisfied. She has told me that she would never want to win the lottery, because that would make her famous and great catastrophes only happen to famous people. Her children have, to a degree, accepted her superstitious system. They recount a story about a young boy in the neighborhood whom she didn't like because he was impolite. When he reached the age of twelve, he climbed a water tower in town and leaped to his death. She told her family back then that she had put a hex on the boy. Now when the story is told in her presence she does not admit to the hex, but in her eyes there are small fires burning and she can't help but laugh.