What kind of writer am I, and what sort of stories do I write? Primarily speculative fiction, including fantasy, science fiction and occasionally horror, and once in a while a crime or mystery story. The thread that stitches them together is Character; the people in my stories are my main interest, as people are what most people are concerned with, most of the time.
My stories seldom follow “the Hero’s Journey” because I don’t view my characters as heroes and villains. As Otto Preminger said of his films, “They are all one’s children; none of them to be loved any less because they have a clubbed foot or a cleft palate.”
Anthologies
- Horseshoes, Hand Grenades and Magic (2016)
- After the Orange: Ruin and Recovery (2018)
- Socially Distant: The Quarantales (2020) with Frog Jones
- Last Cities of Earth (2021) -story editor, ed. by Jennifer Brozek and Jeff Sturgeon
Short Fiction
- Frank ‘n’ John (2011)
- Out of Time (2013)
- Under the Boardwalk (2013)
- Anne of a Thousand Years (2013)
- Sleight Changes (2015)
- The Certainty Principle (2015) with Edd Vick
- Ashfall (2015) with Edd Vick
- Uncommon Valor (2016)
- The Fisherman’s Wife (2016)
- Red Bait (2016) with Edd Vick
- One App to Rule Them All (2016) with Edd Vick
- So, This Alien Walks Into a Bar (2016)
- The Fisherman’s Wife (2016)
- Silver and Scythe (2017) with Edd Vick
- Childish Things (2017)
- Ténéré (2017) with Edd Vick
- Tweetstorm (2017) with Edd Vick
- Lost and Found (2017)
- Euterpe’s Song (2018)
- Ever After (2018)
- The Muse is a Harsh Mistress (2018)
- The Unicorn Wrangler in the Garden (2019)
- The Ghost of Torreón (2019) with Edd Vick
- A Weave of Europa (2019) with Edd Vick
- Expecting to Fly (2020) with Edd Vick
- Tin Man (2021) with Edd Vick
Poems
- What Fossils Don’t Tell Us (2016)
Essays
- Chattering Bones: A Brief History of Zombies (2010)
- Chattering Bones: Dr. Strangebite or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Suck (2011)
- Chattering Bones: Why the Dead Don’t Read (2011)
- Chattering Bones (2011)
- TV Review: Once Upon a Time (2012)
- Semi-Live in Seattle (2013)
- Vampires Come Around (2014)
- Introduction (After the Orange: Ruin and Recovery) (2018)
FREE Samples
Below are 3 samples of recent short stories by Manny Frishberg. Read and enjoy!
Frank and Jon
By Manny Frishberg
Jon didn’t like this a bit. It was just his luck to have been hanging around the squad room at the end of his shift when Frank Spildak, M.D. walked into the precinct house and announced that he was responsible for a pair of murders. He had no reason to hurry home since Helen left. He was stuck taking the doctor’s confession because it was his case and he had been too slow in filing the paperwork to mark it as closed.
The case haunted Morgenthau as few others had in several years. At 14, Willie Stargale had been too young to have working papers, but he ran errands for tips. Everybody in the neighborhood seemed to know him – by sight, if not by name. Neighbors talked about how he’s be whistling some nameless tune – but so quiet they never got annoyed. His teachers all remembered him as polite and respectful – a novelty at IS 137. When he spoke up he always had something worthwhile to contribute.
Maria Fuentes, the suspect he liked for the Stargale murder, had worked part time as Spildak’s housekeeper, coming in once a week to dust and polish, and to do the laundry. Willie had occasionally accompanied her to and from the laundromat, helping her carry her load and babysitting the machines to make sure nothing got stolen.
It bothered Jon that she had no clear motive for the killing, but the housekeeper looked good for it in so many other ways. She lived half a block from where his body had been found when the late winter snow piled high along the edge of the street melted. Some neighbors heard her calling the boy up to her apartment the last night anyone had seen him alive. But the clincher was the 14-carat gold Madonna medallion he had been given for First Communion, which his mother swore he would not even remove to shower. Morganthau found it in a pocket of the Fuertes woman’s coat. She’d insisted loudly and often that she had no idea how the kid’s medal had gotten there. But Jon had heard that before and, after all, what was she supposed to say? In his experience the only time someone broke down and confessed on the spot when confronted with the evidence was on “Perry Mason.”
True, there were other bits that didn’t add up. She had let the police in and not objected when asked if they could search her apartment. And there were some partial fingerprints they couldn’t ID. But that’s just how things worked in real life.
Morgenthau doodled aimlessly on his notepad, building bridges of stars between roughly sketched cubes, only half listening to the doctor’s ravings.
Jon was on intimate terms with the look on Spildak’s face. He had seen it on the faces of witnesses who had stumbled onto a corpse and on perps when they suddenly sensed the direction an interrogation was leading – weighing the odds before they broke down and confessed. And he’d seen it in his bedroom mirror after waking from a nightmare, groping blindly for Helen before the haze of sleep lifted and he remembered that she had gone to California to visit her sister. They both knew when she left that she would not be coming back.
Of course Morgenthau had interviewed Spildak before but that just made this all more bizarre. The doctor, a pathologist at New York-Presbyterian, had been cooperative but uninformative. Yes, he had known both the victim and the suspect. No, he did not know much about their relationship and no, he had no idea what would have possessed her to kill the boy. In fact, he’d said, they seemed to be genuinely fond of one another, in a little brother-big sister sort of way, from what he’d been able to observe.
The tired-looking man had not gotten around to saying what his role was in the Stargale killing, or even who his other victim was supposed to be. He went on about a mysterious stranger, a malevolent figure that was really the one in control. Standard paranoiac fantasy, as far as the detective was concerned, if he was concerned at all. Morgenthau didn’t suspect Spildak of anything worse than a chemical imbalance and an overactive imagination.
Jon wanted this to be over already but he had to hear the man through to the end. Some tidbit of information might leak out that would connect with other dots and form an image he hadn’t already seen. He glanced up occasionally at the tiny, barred window behind the doctor’s head, simulating attentiveness.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Frank Spildak said, leaning in across the table. “All doctors stop seeing patients at some point and just see bodies and their physical reactions. The good ones begin to see the people behind the list of symptoms again but I never did. That’s why I went into pathology, the dead don’t care. After a while I began to see death as more natural than disease.
The processes of life are not all that mysterious, just a self-sustaining chemical chain-reaction. But the why – how it starts and what happens when it stops, that’s one thing they can’t teach you in medical school. ‘Philosophy,’ they say, ‘alchemy’ … and you’re expected to leave it at that. Well, I couldn’t. I never stopped wondering” He slumped back in his chair and his eyes faded again into the remote, inner world they had been occupying, looking into some horror visible only to himself.
“The gap between alive and dead is so astounding that it obscures how little real difference there is at the molecular level. There’s a high energy barrier to initiating it, or re-initiating once it’s stopped. But given the right balance of precursor chemicals and a precisely calibrated jolt, it can be breached.” He shook his head morosely and let loose a burst of harsh laughter. To the detective it sounded like the poor guy had cracked a fiercely cruel joke at his own expense. But his eyes were wide open, white sclera showing all around his pupils in that unmistakable involuntary fear display.
He began talking again, in a bland, distracted tone. “You know,” he said, “when the dead come back to life they have the most extraordinary strength.” Morganthau’s pen stopped in mid-stroke. “Even the cats and dogs – you know, I had to work on them at first. I don’t know if it has something to do with the way the muscles are re-energized or if they’ve seen something that makes them more concentrated and focused on every movement. And when they speak it chills you to the bone. You know that you ignore it at your peril.
Morgenthau showed no outward change but a frisson raced up his spine and his scalp tightened. It was adding up in the detective’s mind as Schitzo-affective Disorder but Spildak now had his full attention. After all, even paranoids have real enemies. And being crazy certainly didn’t eliminate someone as a suspect. The detective waited in silence for the man across the table to carry on. His senses were hyper-keen and focused but mentally he was battling a nearly overwhelming urge to go running from the room.
“You might have thought solving the Mystery of Life would have been enough of an accomplishment. I would have been a shoe-in for the Nobel, not to mention a seven-figure book deal. Written my own contract, done whatever I pleased for the rest of my life. All I had to do was publish my work with the animal models in Cell or the Lancet.
“But I thought I needed something more dramatic, something incontrovertible. My ego couldn’t handle being called a fraud. Besides, I’m a doctor, not a molecular biologist and certainly not a vet.” He spit the last word out with a particular vehemence. The pitch of his voice rose as he talked. “I had bigger things in mind. I had something more to prove. You know what the difference is between a doctor and God?”
“I’ve heard it,” Jon responded without enthusiasm. “God doesn’t think He’s a doctor.”
“That’s right.” Spildak snorted a small, humorless laugh. “You have no idea how right you are.” He leaned back in his chair but this time he did not withdraw. He was on a roll now and his words were gathering speed. “I had to work late – take the night shift, hide equipment in my locker for when the chance would come to use it.
“Not just any corpse would do. It had to be whole, not too old, in good shape. But the biggest challenge was the brain. It doesn’t take long for cellular degeneration to set in and if the medulla or the hippocampus begins to deteriorate – well, I don’t mean to bore you with the medical details.
“In any case, it was a little more than a week after New Years that my luck turned. A fisherman came into the morgue. His boat had capsized and he’d died of hypothermia before he’d even had a chance to drown. His whole body was blue with cold. The only reason the EMTs took him to the hospital at all was to get the death certificate signed. They brought him straight downstairs to me. I don’t even remember what his name was. Is that really awful?”
Jon was sitting up in his chair, his head cocked slightly to the right; his hands were clasped in front of him on the table. His notebook balanced on his thighs, his eyes focused on the other man but he did not force eye-contact. He wanted the doc to get to the point, already. But at the same time he was fascinated by the sheer scale of the man’s delusions – But then, he thought, doctors start out with a God Complex.
“When you’re deeply engaged in doing something truly extraordinary, the doing is all that matters and you aren’t bothered by any thoughts of consequences At least, that’s always how it’s been for me,” said Spildak.
“Even after all that’s happened I like to imagine I’m not so different from the ordinary man. So it wasn’t until after I’d shocked the heart into beating again and I saw the poor bastard actually start moving, that the totality of what I’d accomplished really hit me.
“At first there was the exultation of having taken the ultimate step – not just saving a life but creating it. I had done what no one had ever done before – I might not be able to build a man from dust like the Almighty, but I breathed life into the clay, just as He did.
“And then, suddenly I truly saw what I had done.” The doctor’s words came in a halting whisper, his eyes focused on some sight that was unavailable to anyone else. “His skin stayed pale even after the blood flow had been restored, adding its own reddish tinge. And it sagged around his cheekbones and eye-sockets like something waxy had melted inside his face. The only sounds I heard were the hum of the refrigeration unit and the thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears. Now they were joined by his thick, raspy breath echoing in his nasal cavities. “My first thought was to kill him while he lay there, still in a stupor. But killing someone is not easy,”
Jon suppressed a laugh – in his experience killing someone is a lot easier than most murderers think before they’ve done the deed. “It is a lot harder than bringing it to life, once you know the trick.”
Jonathan Morganthau found himself only half listening to this part – Spildak was talking about himself, bragging even while he went on about his revulsion at what he claimed he’d created. The detective wondered what actually drove the poor bastard to make this wild, ludicrous confession. For a moment he lost touch with what Frank was saying.
“… to clear my head. I wandered outside into the snow. It’s funny, I have no recollection of even washing my hands, and that’s a ritual that never goes unobserved. Never. But I can still feel the night air on my skin. I see the night sky, clear, bright, bitter-cold, without a single cloud. With the streetlights you couldn’t see more than a handful of stars.
“I remember the sound of every step, every smell that hit me on that walk.” The sound that came from the man across the table from him grabbed Jon’s chest with a chill hand. It was the rueful laugh of a man who saw nothing funny anymore, anywhere in the world.
“Of course I had to head back eventually. I didn’t even have a coat on. I was glad to see he was still right where I’d left him. Only now he was sitting up on the examining table, his eyes wide open and they had the most malevolent look I’ve ever seen.
“His voice came out as this shrill whisper. Rigor had set in and worn off already. I suppose his mouth was still dry and his lungs were stiff. Still, the anger and hatred in his voice carried just the same.
‘What did you do to me?’ he said, those yellow-tinged eyes staring at me with the pall of death still in them.” Spildak gave an involuntary shudder, as though he could still see them. “Horrified as I had become by what I had accomplished, I think I was still expecting some gratitude from him. After all, I’d restored him to life.
“I assumed wrong. He said some more stuff but I can’t tell you what. I just kneeled there on the floor, retching, trying to keep my lab coat out of the bile. At some point he must’ve walked out of the morgue, ‘cause when I did finally look up again he was gone. Truth to tell, I was glad.
“I had a little sick-time coming so I took it and crawled into a bottle, you know?” The doc seemed like he wanted some assurance so Jon nodded and made an affirming noise. It made sense that the sick bastard had been on a bender.
The detective still didn’t see what all this was leading to, how in hell it tied in with the kid’s murder. But he thought if he started asking questions the guy would just shoot off on some tangent.
Against his own inclinations Jon had gotten interested in the fool story. In his experience most paranoiacs were bores – they strung together words and thoughts at random like bits of cloth and ribbons to make a kite-tail of fantasies that carried their thoughts off in whatever direction the wind blew them. This was different – the pieces all hung together in a coherent fabric of delusions. He’d even started making actual notes.
“I drank for days – passed out in my easy chair and only got up to get another bottle. I was afraid to go to bed; afraid I’d sober up and find out that it wasn’t all just a horrid dream. Not that I’m a drunk, you understand. The last time I had even had a drink was a champagne toast for New Years.
“Well, eventually my friend Bill showed up to see was I okay. I wasn’t much in the mood for small talk I mean, how could I ask Bill to believe what I had done? But when I opened the door he just pushed past me into the apartment. After a while Bill got me to agree to clean up and go get something to eat. We walked over to a Cuban restaurant on East 110th. The night air actually did me some good.
“Over a plate of bifstek and papas fritas he told me about a practical joke he pulled after learning about Galvani shocking the frog’s legs. You see, he used a programmable calculator and sent a series of charges through a frog’s body he wired up. Just as they were about to start dissecting it, the frog sat up and waved its arm, Bill said, and the kids nearly jumped out of their skins. He actually had me laughing – something I hadn’t thought possible.
“Somehow I let him talk me into going out on his skiff. So Bill hailed down a cab that took us to the boat basin. The river was grey-green and the wind was churning up frothy white-capped waves. I don’t know what either of us were thinking but I was still drunk enough to make the most awful ideas seem perfectly alright. Bill said the boat was big enough to handle the waves and we were just going up to the George Washington Bridge and coming back in. No need for life jackets, Bill said but I insisted.” He trailed off with another of those sorrowful shakes of his head. Jon jotted in his notebook while he made some mental calculations, trying to trigger something in his memory: a newspaper report on the discovery of a floater.
“Well, I’ve got to go to the bathroom before I burst. You’ll excuse me,” Morganthau said in what he meant to be a softly reassuring voice. That broke Spildak’s reverie and for just a moment and their eyes met, if not for the very first time, for the first time in a while. “I think I’ll grab a of coffee on my way back. Can I get you something?” Spildak shook his head and smiled wanly before the detective headed out the door.
Morgenthau logged on to his computer and navigated his way to the Times archives. He typed in the phrase “boating tragedy” and the date “Jan. 10th.” The brief report in the local news pages said William Newcastle had been fished out of the Harlem River, his life vest still strapped onto his body, an apparent victim of hypothermia. Mysteriously, his boat was located in its berth at the Westside boat basin. A cold finger traced Jonathan’s spine, squeezing his scalp before letting go.
“Crap,” Morgenthau muttered. If Spildak did have a part in this as he claimed, he would have to take a second look at the Stargale murder. The last thing he needed was a raving lunatic unraveling his neatly tied up conclusions, but he’d always sworn he’d quit the day he caught himself ignoring an inconvenient line of inquiry to keep his clearance rate up.
Just in time, he remembered to slosh some coffee into a Styrofoam cup on his way back to the interrogation room. He pretended to sip it on his way to his seat; the tepid liquid left a murky brown stain on the wall of the cup. Jon sat back down with the small pocket notebook on his lap again.
“You were telling me about the boat ride you and Bill Newcastle took,” he said matter-of-factly. “Did he fall into the water on his own or did you give him a hand?”
“Not me!” Spildak said, showing real agitation for the first time since they had come into the room together. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was that creature.”
“He was on the boat with you?” Morganthau said in his best bad-cop growl, leaning forward to challenge the doctor, holding eye contact and shading his tone with just a hint of sarcasm.
“He’s been stalking me the whole time.”
The detective leaned back in his chair and scribbled “total schitz!” in his notebook –”persecution complex.” Crazy 101, he thought. Projecting his guilt onto the outside world. The spark of interest was fast extinguishing; the weight of the whole miserable week was falling in on him.
“I don’t know how but he was there in the water next to us.” The doctor’s voice was pitched higher than it had been, words spilling out with a renewed intensity, his sad, tired eyes suddenly ablaze. “I could hear him splashing around. All of a sudden he was right there, clinging to the side of the boat and trying to climb aboard. Before I knew what was happening Bill was up and headed his way, swinging away with an oar. I yelled at him to get back and tried to grab him but I was too late. The creature was clinging to the side of the boat with one hand and had a hold of the oar with the other and he wasn’t about to let go.
“I screamed at the monster to just let go and leave us alone,” the doctor went on, spitting out the story in a steady assault of words, none of the hesitancy or distancing that had been in his voice. “Then I saw Bill disappear over the side and heard a splash as he hit the water. I ran over to where he had been struggling with he creature – the boat was heaving in the choppy water and I nearly lost my balance and went in after him.
“After I’d regained my balance I called to him but he didn’t answer – or if he did I never heard.” His tone was calm and flat again. “The monster let go of the side of the boat. He had what he was after. I could make out the churning in the water as Bill struggled to break it’s grip and get back to the boat, then all I could see against the waves was the creature’s wake as he cut across the waves toward the Jersey palisades, and Bill floating face down, not splashing at all anymore.” Frank Spildak stopped talking and held his head cradled in his hands – his palms covering his eyes. His shoulders bumped up and down in a quiet rhythm of despair.
Jon was grateful for the break. His mind was occupied with questions he didn’t want. Too many threads needed untangling but all he felt was a bone-deep tiredness. The doctor’d given him more than enough to ship him off as an EDP – because this person was surely emotionally disturbed, to say the least. He wasn’t going anywhere except Bellevue while the detective sorted it all out.
Jon wished heartily that Helen would be there when he got home to hold him but he knew all he’d have waiting for him was a sink full of dirty dishes, only a glass of bourbon to comfort him. Morgenthau left the doctor handcuffed to the table while he went out into the bubbling chaos of the station house to do the paperwork for a psych hold. Then he got his coat and left the rest in the hands of the desk sergeant.
Alone in the alley behind the precinct house a cold breeze washed over Det. Jonathan Morgenthau like a cleansing shower as he watched the clouds of breath against the pink glow of the street lights. A pale ring circled the moon. A contingent of tiny snowflakes drifted around in the air. He was relieved to see the pavement was black and only a little shiny.
As he started toward the subway, Jon heard a second set of footsteps on the freezing pavement. The unmistakable scent of decay assaulted his nostrils. He wrapped his fingers around the butt of the pistol under his coat, ready to spin on his heels and confront whoever was behind him. He froze in place when he felt a large hand grip his arm. Even through the overcoat and suit jacket, he could feel the pressure of each individual finger.
“I heard him tell you everything,” said a gravel-coated voice, calm yet menacing without need to be loud. “But he got everything wrong.” Jon wanted more than anything to not turn around but he had to in spite of himself. Even in the dim light the man holding his arm had a dreadful cast – the color of an almost-healed bruise, his lips tinged blue. “Everything is wrong,” he added, more to himself than to Jon.
Morgenthau had seen all manner of disgusting things on the job but he had to swallow hard to keep his nausea in check. The eyes, they were just as Spildak had described them, yet so much more grotesque than his imagination had allowed. Fear engulfed him, even though nothing the creature did was actually threatening. He sensed from its tone that he was not in any immediate danger. Despite all his training the detective let loose of his gun.
“It’s just a man. Just a man,” Jon repeated to himself silently, unconvinced. He clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, but not from the cold.
“It’s true that I killed that man on the boat – his friend. But I didn’t mean to,” the man, or whatever it was, went on. “I’d never killed a soul in all my life. I had never been that kind of man. I just needed to talk to talk to the doc,” it said “I had to talk to someone.
“I tracked him, waited for days for him to come out from his apartment. I needed a place where we wouldn’t be interrupted and where he couldn’t just run. So when they got on that boat it seemed ideal.
“That guy, he shouldn’t’ve attacked me – I wasn’t gonna hurt anyone. Then he fell overboard and I was just trying to get hold of him, to drag him onto dry ground. The water must’a been awful cold – I can’t really feel it anymore, y’know?” Jon made no response and the creature did not wait for one. “Anyway, it wasn’t any time at all before he stopped struggling – just shivered all over, then stopped moving altogether. I was scared. I just swam away.
“Now the kid, that was another story.” Morgethau’s detective mind kicked in at that, his interest overwhelming his fear. That had his attention“By then I was nothing but mad,” he said. Jon noticed that no cloud of breath formed when the creature spoke but he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d heard him out.
“All I could think was I wanted the doc to suffer – to make him feel as helpless, as bewildered and filled with fear as me. I spotted the kid – I’d seen him going in and out of the building, bringing in groceries. I had nothing against him personally, but he was close to the doc and easy to reach so I followed him to those projects by the river. I grabbed him and snapped his neck. It was like nothing at all – just a little pop.” Morgenthau had heard other people describe that sound. He felt the burn of bile in the back of his throat and swallowed hard. The other took no notice.
“Afterward I took the medal he’d been wearing and went back to the doc’s apartment. The door was unlocked and I could hear him banging around in the next room. Was having anything to say to him past, caring what he had to say. I dropped the kid’s medal into a coat pocket hanging next to the door and took off. I thought I was pretty damn smart.
“Then I saw a headline saying cleaning lady had done it. The newspaper said you had found the evidence the in her coat. That’s why I have to talk to you. You’ve got to make it come out the right way.” The thing let go of Jon’s arm. “You don’t need to worry, I won’t be bothering anyone anymore. And I’m already being punished.”
Det. Morganthau pulled his gun as the figure receded into the shadows but he wondered what possible good it would do if he did shoot.
“Sure, I’ve got to make it all come out right,” Jon heard himself saying out loud. “Just tell me how.” His quavering voice did not even sound like his own.
He could get the Fuertes woman sprung, alright. He knew where the holes were in the case he’d built against her. Spildak could take the fall and if his lawyer let him testify he would do his time in a psych ward. But that didn’t sit well with him either. The doctor hadn’t actually committed a crime – at least not one in the law books.
The ADA’d be pissed if he torpedoed the case against the Fuentes woman and then didn’t close it. But how was he supposed to explain a dead man’s fingerprints on the Confirmation medallion?
All the way home he listened to the monster’s words echo in the clatter of the subway tracks: “There’s a difference between being able to walk around and being alive. Pray to whatever God you believe in that you never find out what it is.”
The End
The Muse Is a Harsh Mistress
By Manny Frishberg
Alain stared into the star specked sky and wondered how it would feel to be truly alone. He trudged up the stony path, his feet feeling the way. Whatever possessed me? he thought and snorted a sardonic laugh. He knew precisely what – or who.
He looked forward to relinquishing this responsibility. He thought about sleeping in, being woken by the dawn and watching the sun rise with Fredeline, as they never had in all their years together. Yet, some part of him would be missing, too. Along with the tingle growing in his chest as he envisioned finally being quit of this task, he imagined it leaving, an empty space within him that had been filled since adolescence, losing something that had been an essential part of his being.
Every day since his 16th birthday he’d had to trek up that same mountain. But then, he thought, it had not been such a bad bargain, after all. He had not been sick even a single day since Fabian gave him the guitar. The music, Alain reminded himself, had brought him Fredeline, who lay sleeping peacefully in their bed in Cité Soleil. His guitar had even charmed the Tonton Macoutes into going away when they came for her. Sitting down on the familiar rock outcropping, he pulled the guitar around and strummed the chords he played every morning, his fingers finding their place effortlessly. He took no pleasure in the tune, the one he’d heard each morning for more than 60 years.
For the past few months he had been teaching Guillaume the song, rehearsing it, until the boy’s hands moved along the fretboard as reflexively as his own. Tomorrow he would accompany the boy to this spot, coming here one more time, watching to see the ceremony performed properly. Then he would leave the instrument to the boy for good.
Memories flooded in of that far distant moment when he’d accepted Fabian’s guitar and first recognized the spirit’s presence, overwhelmed by lightness and an electric thrill rushing in, beyond anything he had imagined in his young life. It engulfed him with a sense of belonging far stronger than his attachments to family or friends, or even the love he had found with Fredeline.
All the while, his hands moved, the refrain rang in his ears and the sky lightened from navy blue to indigo as the faintest stars were swallowed by the background. A rim of red-gold vapor collected over the edge of the horizon. Then Alain did something he had never dared imagine before and stopped playing in mid-phrase.
He sat, staring straight ahead, watching the horizon for a change that did not come. Colors froze in place. Frigid panic clutched his chest, spreading a chilled tightness through his lungs, desperately straining to fill them. His heart pounded against his ribs until it seemed ready to break through entirely. Gall burned his throat and nausea gripped him as blackness engulfed his sight. Without willing them to, his fingers began their dance across the strings again, vibrating in the too familiar pattern.
As air rushed back into his chest, the sky brightened again in shifting hues, like a dance of light and shadow performed for him alone. The old, familiar elation filled him, ecstatic laughter nearly throwing him off the rock. Alain admitted to himself that he would miss this, and the muse that brought him to it.
Fredeline will be happy, he thought. He always suspected she’d felt some jealousy, though she denied it. Maybe we could even travel now. This place, bordered by mountains and sea and the claptrap houses of scrap wood and corrugated steel, had been world enough for him. But he sensed that Fredeline had itched to tread on other pieces of earth; she had given up her dreams without even getting what he had in return.
For the first time since he began training the boy, he felt a twinge of guilt, acknowledged the burden he was passing along. And Guillame was so young, not even as old as he had been. Alain wondered what other life he might have had, where he could have gone had he not been chosen. But then, there might have been no Fredeline to share this life with. Instead of music, his days could have been filled with sweat and tedium, like so many of his neighbors’ lives.
After tomorrow, though, he would need the little money they’d put aside for another guitar, since this one would not be his own his anymore. During the hot days he earned a little money playing in front of the tourist hotels; in the evenings he played with friends in the kafe near their homes for beer and the occasional tip. Alain had lived all these decades knowing this day would come, that he would eventually pass on to another what had once become his.
Tears filled Alain’s eyes and smeared the sun cresting the hills as he reached the end of the ancient tune. The ground had already heated up when he trudged back toward town, descending into the odors of piss and sweat, dust and corrugated steel, baking in the morning sun. Fredeline had already started breakfast and, when he came close, he caught the rich aroma of her coffee.
After breakfast he spent G30 for a trip on a brightly painted tap-tap to the center of Port au Prince and played Kreol folk songs for tourists who dropped one-hundred goud notes into his hat. Later he walked to Guillaume’s to hear the boy play once more, listening for stray notes before finally announcing he was satisfied.
As he stepped out into the street for the walk home Alain felt a slight tug of something tearing loose. It surprised him not to feel the emptiness deep inside. Maybe the loss would hit him later. At the moment there was only an exultant thrill of no longer being possessed by the spirit. He was finally free.
The End
Uncommon Valor
Manny Frishberg
Master Sergeant Ernest Kravitz Stood at attention on the specially constructed platform, staring off at the cloudless, teal sky, a bead of sweat hanging on his eyebrow. Beside him, his crewmate Technical Sergeant Ranolph Urquell dug a finger under the starched collar of his dress uniform and tugged.
“I’ve never even seen an actual hero before now, and here we both are, heroes ourselves,” Urquell whispered. Ernie just stared at his crewmate, his lip curled in distain before his smile broke through.
“If they ever let us off this waterlogged hell.” Kravitz muttered before he noticed the Nimrazzian First Counselor loping sideways toward them. The FC turned to face them and bowed, bending from his lower knees, back curled and eyestalks stretching to look both of the emissaries in the face at once. His thorax flaps jiggled and emitted a long, modulated shriek that the exos described as a sign of respect and awe.
Personally, Ernie couldn’t see how they distinguished the Nimrazzian’s gender, if Nims even came in different genders. All he could say for sure was that they’d probably taste delicious poached in apricot ale. Or they smelled like they would.
Col. Hazelshen moved in Kravitz’s direction, stepping right through the Nim’s First Counselor in the process. Her holographic image shimmered like a mirage overlaying the FC’s iridescent shell until she realized the faux pas and quickly stepped back. A low, fluttering noise came out of the speaker, a sound of contrition the exos had recorded in their sessions with their Nimrazzian counterparts. All the Nimrazzians on the platform curled themselves in concave gestures of confusion—acknowledging such a social misstep would have obliged them to break off contact for at least a dark-light cycle, which lasted for 87 hours on Nimra.
<<>>
Twelve Earth-standard days out from Hyperion, just about the whole crew had gone down for the Big Sleep. Thanks to time-contraction, at .89c, the 24-year trip to HD 40307g would take just about thirty-seven days, as they counted them aboard ship. Even so, the sociopsychs had determined that more than 16 days of idleness led to a breakdown of morale and decreased fighting effectiveness.
Urquell’d had first anti-collision watch, two relative weeks on his own except for the ulitibots. Ernie had taught about half of the general utility robots to render a fair approximation of small talk to keep Randy from going insane on his own like that. The ‘bots’ basic SDK included a vocabulary of around 200 words, a dozen grammar elements, and a stochastic rule generator. But they also had a five-branch limiter to their logic tree to keep them from getting too independent or creative in their work, so they didn’t make what you’d call stimulating conversationalists.
Kravitz just wanted to finish giving his final instructions so he could crawl into his Sleep chamber and meditate his way into a few weeks’ oblivion. He had tired of listening to his friend go on about being alone and bored. Randy never seemed to run out of energy to bitch about things he couldn’t change and Ernie had never had the heart to just order him to shut up.
“Why don’t you make some of that rice ale of yours? That ought to keep you occupied between the proximity detector checks.” As a mess sergeant in the Terran Expeditionary Marines he specialized in making the crew delicious meals from whatever came to hand. It was a gift. One Urquell had never shown even a glimmer of talent for. Still, Randy had turned out to be a better sous chef than most technical sergeants he’d had under his command. And the man had a knack for making home brew out of just about anything. “You can set up the fermenter and train the ‘bots to monitor it until they rouse us.”
Famous last words. Utilibots were idiot savants by design. They learned routine tasks by example but they were less than worthless when it came to handling the unexpected. And, truth to tell, Randy wasn’t much better in an emergency.
Kravitz had known he was in trouble as soon as his eyes popped open. For one thing, he hadn’t been due to be roused from the Big Sleep for at least another week. For another, Randy was standing there, frozen at attention, a stricken expression on his face and Field Lt. Bengessert firmly clutching his arm. Ernie could read the animus in the lieutenant’s eyes. Son of a flag admiral, Bengessert was a stickler for regulations: first a courts martial, then throw them out the airlock.
Kravitz could almost feel Bengessert’s cold, hard hatred as the junior officer escorted them from the Sleep chamber. Led into the mess, he was nearly bowled over by an overpowering smell of yeast. Then he saw the gaping holes it had eaten in the walls and he understood his buddy’s panic stricken face. No one said a word. Bengessert pulled them roughly by the arms and marched the pair out of the galley, describing their fates in graphic detail as they went.
The brig occupied an all but unused section of the ship — a half dozen standard Sleep chambers and a single large caged space with three bunk beds. Built-in toilets and sinks grew out of the far wall and a noisy ten-gallon recycling plant in the corner supplied them with all their water needs.
Ernie could not recall even hearing of a Marine being confined in a ship’s brig. Major breaches of protocol or onboard rules were exceedingly rare. When transgressions did occur, they usually resulted in a double or triple shift on some scut detail, or maybe a day or two confined to quarters, isolated and awake. Then again, he’d never heard of anyone who had disabled a major component of an Expeditionary Battle Cruiser before.
“What do you think they’re going to do to us?” Randy whispered once the lieutenant had moved out of earshot.
“Maybe they’ll just send us back to Hyperion,” Kravitz told, hoping to wipe the fear off his friend’s face. He did not believe it himself. But dwelling on worst case scenarios did him no good—that was Urquell’s specialty and Ernie had no intention of being sucked into it.
Ernie could hear the lieutenant reading a set of instructions to one of the utilitbots — a basic program in the care and guarding of live, awake prisoners. Bengessert had evidently tired of tormenting them, though Ernie would have bet a reduction in rank that mercy had nothing to do with it. Once the utilibot had been trained, he figured they would probably not hear another human voice until their Article 32 hearing.
He turned out to be half right. Three days (by his best estimation, considering there were no light/dark cycles in the brig) the ‘bot rolled in a holoprojector and the top half of one Col. Verna Hazelshen, a no-nonsense desk officer from the look on her face, popped into the empty space.
“So,” Kravitz whispered to his cellmate, “at least they’ve got the Quantangle up and functioning.” Randy answered with a look of mild contempt and Ernie felt foolish for stating the obvious. Still, it had to be the most hopeful news either of them had gotten since being thrown into this hole.
“Just tell me your whole story,” Col. Hazelshen said in a caramel-smooth voice, her eyes shining with sincere concern. “Of course Lt. Bengessert has reminded you that all your utterances will become part of the official record.” She purred the admonition so reassuringly that Ernie felt like she was the last person in the inhabited worlds who would consider using something he said to his detriment.
“What are we charged with?” Sgt. Urquell broke in, unbidden. His question snapped Ernie out of his reverie, a slap across his cortex to remind him they faced serious charges this time.
“Theft of federal property. Unauthorized use of Marine facilities. Destruction of military property, sabotage, public intoxication.” The colonel read off something she was holding below the reach of the holocam.
“Public intoxication!” Randy struck a pose of genuine offense. “Sgt. Kravitz had to be dragged out of Deep Sleep just to be put in the brig. Even if there’d been anything to drink, when would we’ve had a chance to sample it, much less get schnockered?” Ernie tried to shush him three or four times but the junior spacer was on a tear. Col. Hazelshen smiled slyly, like a mongoose that realized she had the cobra tied in a knot.
“Then you admit the rest?” the colonel said in an uninterested monotone.
“We don’t admit anything,” Kravitz said quickly. “As senior mess officer it’s my duty to allocate edible resources.”
“And this was an authorized provisioning of how may kilos of water, Master Sergeant?”
“Was not authorized,” Kravitz mumbled.
“What was that, Sergeant?”
“It was not an authorized allocation, M’am,” he said, straightening his back as he did.
“And the grain?”
“No’m”
“The yeast.”
“Well…”
“That was mine,” Randy spoke up. “It’s what you might call a family heirloom.” The colonel did not look well-pleased by being contradicted. “M’am,” he added when Ernie reminded him with a kick in the shins. Ernie couldn’t see how whose yeast it had been made any material difference. Still, he was grateful to his friend for getting him out the firing line.
She nodded, consulted her invisible notes again. “Then what took place, Sgt. Urquell? In your own words. To the best of your understanding, of course.” The caramel tap was open again.
Ernie drew air deep into his lungs. The cold stung the back of his throat and the pressing on his ribs from the inside ached but he held back, letting it go out in a slow, silent leak through his nose. Mentally he tugged on Randy’s collar, shook him by the shoulders—say as little as you can. Tell just what you need to, no more. Don’t explain ANYTHING! But he stood ramrod straight, unmoving, knowing he had no good options.
“Well, first I had to malt the rice, and that was no easy think. You know, a lot of people think rice can’t be malted because that’s not how they make sake. They inject the grain with a special kind of mold instead. But you can malt rice, if you know what you’re doing.” Randy had clearly warmed to his subject. Col. Hazelshen just as clearly was not. The impatience blossomed on her face like a moon flower but she remained close-mouthed.
“Then, I decided on a single temperature infusion of the mash. It’s really the simplest way to do it, so I brought the water up to about 97 degrees and poured it all onto the malt, after I’d ground it up, of course. You need to keep the mash temperature down to about 92 or 93 degrees. You know, how you treat the mash and the temp you use is critical. It determines what kind of beer you’re going to end up with.”
When he began explaining the lautering process in detail the colonel had finally had enough.
“Just skip over to the accident itself, Sgt. Urquell,” she said, struggling to keep her irritation in check. Ernie recognized the effort—he’d felt the same way himself, listening to his friend carry on about the difference between brewing a good dark ale and a light pilsner. The Urquell family had been making beer since the 19th or 20th century. Randy said that stout ran through his veins instead of blood. Ernie had been tempted more than once to see if it were true for himself.
“Honestly, I don’t know what happened. After I’d gotten the wort into the fermenter I trained the utilibot to monitor it while I went to nap for a week or so. When the ‘bot got me up ahead of schedule I knew something was up. I came down to the mess, and you, know, what a mess I found.” He waited for someone to appreciate his pun, futilely. “There was beer everywhere. The fermenter was still intact but the plug that measures CO2 was clear on the other side of the room, and there was this white crust around the rim. Somehow the airlock must’ve got clogged up. I guess I hadn’t covered that eventuality when I was programming the ‘bot. I didn’t even think about something like that happening.
“Of course, there are lots of variables you have to take into account when you’re making beer and you know, you can’t always teach these utilibots what to do in all the eventualities. So I just told it to get me if anything out of the ordinary happened. Maybe I should have planned that better.” The colonel smiled sweetly and Ernie felt his stomach fall through the floor.
“Well, there was beer everywhere. All over the place, up the sides of the walls and even coating the ceiling. I didn’t know what to do about it. I got the ‘bot to start cleaning up the mess and I went and woke up Ern… Sgt. Kravitz. And by the time we got back there, the walls were getting kind of melty and there were holes up near the corner.”
“I could see right away what had happened,” Ernie picked up the story before Randy could get the colonel even hotter than she already was. “I sent the ‘bots down to Supply to get some wall sheeting from the Culturing Chamber, and we proceeded to patch things up as best we could.”
“And you never noticed any damage other than to the walls themselves?” Hazelshen asked, referring to her case file again.
“No, M’am,” both men said in unison.
“And when did you become aware of the damage you’d caused?”
Ernie did not like the sound of that at all. The colonel had evidently made her mind up that they were going to be held responsible for damaging the conduits shielding the wiring for all the ship’s weapons and navigation controls. He was just lucky the environmental controls had been routed elsewhere or they’d have been another Flying Dutchman cruising the outer edges of the spiral arm.
“We didn’t see any damage other than to wall, M’am. I didn’t realize that the nav system conduits were even made from soyaplastic too, let alone the yeast would’ve eaten through it and the fiber optics.” It sounded so stupid coming out of his mouth that Ernie blanched. Everything on an expeditionary ship had to be made of materials they could produce on board. “I suppose I really ought to have looked closer.”
“Do you think, Sergeant? That’s why your ship’s abeam, coasting in toward HD 40307g.”
Before he had time to answer, or even think things through enough to know not to, the room quaked violently. Col. Hazelshen blanked out and the two prisoners were left alone in their cell to wonder what had just happened.
No one bothered them for three or four sleep-wake cycles. The ‘bots delivered their meals on time but no humans appeared to tell them whether their fate had been decided, or even what had disrupted the interrogation. So, when the utilibot appeared without their breakfast, Ernie felt certain they were on their way to a summary court martial. But the ‘bot simply opened the cell and rolled out again.
“Are we free to go?” Randy asked.
“You can, if you want,” Kravitz said. “But this place was my last duty assignment and I’m not going anyplace until I get another order.” So the two of them settled back down on their cots and resumed the game of “I Spy” they’d been playing to pass the time until Lt. Bengessert arrived.
“I guess you boys are heroes, after all,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Come on. You’ve got places to go.” His smile made Ernie feel like a rabbit with a fox between him and his warren. They marched to their quarters in silence, and Bengessert ordered them to put on their dress uniforms and report to the shuttle pod.
On the way down to the planet’s surface one of the other junior officers filled them in.
“Puta que pariu! A wasrship, twice our size just popped into empty space a few hundred klics from our starboard side. The shockwave nearly spun us around.” While the Terran forces relied on quantum entanglement for instantaneous contact with their home base and other ships in the fleet, their aquatic hosts had leapfrogged that technology entirely and used a version of the Quantangle for instantaneous matter transfers. “If we hadn’t made that maneuver, a ‘respectful shift sideways,’ the exos called it, they might’ve just vaporized us on the spot.” How the exoethnologists had learned so much in the short time they’d been in orbit was beyond his pay grade, but Ernie’d been in trouble enough to know not to ask embarrassing questions.
<<>>
The colonel checked twice to make sure there were no other obstructions and took her place on the platform beside the two Expeditionary Marines as the First Counselor scuttled aside. She uncurled a scroll and began reading, stopping every five words or so to allow the translators to render the statement into a semblance of the Nimrazzian dialect.
“The Caudillo of Galactic Expeditionary Forces of the Terran People takes pleasure in presenting the Marine Commendation Medal to Master Sergeant Ernest Kravitz for valorous achievement as a combat mess sergeant in support of Operation Outward Bound on the Ninth Terran Standard Day of Tamuz, 2356 M.E. While in transit from their successful campaign on Gliese 581g, now known as the Hyperion Colony to Nimra, formerly designated as HD 40307g…”
Mention of the astronomical designation drew sustained belches of amusement from the Nimrazzian luminaries on the reviewing stand, interrupting the reading of the citation. Following their hosts’ example, Hazelshen pretended not to notice.
“MSgt. Kravitz performed tasks above and beyond the normal duties of his post that proved instrumental in the successful initiation of peaceful contact between the Terran and Nimrazzian…” Col. Hazelshen hesitated as half a head appeared, floating just behind her ear. The colonel cocked her head closer to the hovering face, forehead wrinkled and a pained expression on her face. Then a thin smile broke though. “… between the Terran people and the Nimrazzian solifugians.
“In the process of creating a special treat for the crew of the TPS Intrepid, Msgt. Kravitz, with the material assistance of Tsgt. Randolph Urquell, caused their vessel to approach the planet Nimra in a uniquely unthreatening manner, allowing the solifugians to recognize the peaceful intent and desire for mutually beneficial relations prior to actual First Contact. By doing so, Sgts. Kravitz and Urquell acted in keeping with the highest traditions of the Expeditionary Marine Forces and the United Terran Uniformed Service.” Ernie heard Randy swallow a laugh, making a noise in his throat that sounded distinctly like the Nimrazzians’ chortling. Ernie wanted to bust a gut, too but he did a better job of restraining himself.
The colonel then repeated essentially the same speech, substituting Randy’s name and rank where appropriate. Finally, the colonel draped phantom ribbons over their heads and saluted, before turning on her heels and marching into oblivion.
As soon as the Quantangle shut down the medals disappeared from their chests. As if on cue, the entire Nimrazzian delegation clacked, slid and dove for the water, their endurance on land stretched by the length of the ceremony. The officers making up the ship’s official delegation to the ceremony, broke ranks, mingling easily with one another. Now that no one was monitoring their behavior, they left a wide half-circle between themselves and the two noncom heroes.
Given the gap in fundamental science, the ship’s commander had made an executive decision and greeted them as if they were simply explorers on a peaceful mission of discovery. But that didn’t mean that he and his tech sergeant were off the hook as far as the crew was concerned.
Senior officers, from the captain on down, had found that the ship’s repairs could not proceed without their immediate attention. That left the junior officers to attend the humiliating ceremony, cozying up to a bunch of giant water scorpions. By rights they should be blasting the Nims to their liquid Hell, prepping the planet to be another outpost of the Terran Imperium.
Lt. Bengessert cast a look of cold disdain in Kravitz’s direction. No one had volunteered for this detail, even if it came with being the first to see the New Land—not that there was any land to speak of: a few rocky outcrops stuck their heads far enough out of the water to dry off in midday.
With the Nims gone, he abandoned any pretense of respect for the pair of fubars. From the expression he wore now, Ernie guessed Bengessert wanted nothing more than to frog march them back to the orbiting ship and shoot them out the nearest missile tube. Right now he was probably picturing himself pushing the fire button.
Standing apart from their escort detail, Randy Urquell paced the floating platform, waiting to load back onto the shuttle for the trip back into orbit. Ernie fingered the spot where the holographic medal reached on his chest, wondering where they would be sent next.
Having just been declared heroes, Ernie could be fairly certain they weren’t headed out an airlock as soon as they left for their next port of call but they’d probably be beached on the nearest colony world. He just hoped they’d have tasty local fauna for himself to work with. And some nice grains for Randy.
The End