WFR: What kinds of fiction or stories did you read and watch growing up?

Dempow Torishima: As a child, I liked stories with illustrations, like Doctor Doolittle, René Guillot’s Un petit chien va dans la lune, works by Edogawa Rampo, and so on (I was enthralled by the things that rose up between the words and the pictures), and I think that is also related to my present style of writing.

In my teenage years, I got really into strange, unique works of Japanese fiction, such as Kyusaku Yumeno’s Dogra Magra, Mushitaro Oguri’s Murder at Black Death Mansion, Shozo Numa’s Yapoo: the Human Cattle. In particular, I was strongly influenced by the word-plays, images of body modification, and so on in Yapoo: the Human Cattle.

After that, I started reading a variety of novels from a variety of countries (regardless of genre), and as you might expect, I really liked the ones with strong conceits and high levels of the absurd. These days, I like Can Xue, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Seth Fried. I’m also drawn to authors like Yoko Tawada and Yuko Yamao, who are very particular about the words they use. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Hisashi Kuroma’s translation style shocked me with its copious use of kanji neologisms and ruby text.

(In Japanese books, ruby text—tiny phonetic characters printed next to kanji characters—is sometimes used to indicate the pronunciations of difficult kanji. I use it to create wordplays, double-meanings, and so on. Still, from the time I was first published, I’ve been told those effects are impossible to replicate in English. )

As for movies, I like directors such as David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jan Švankmajer, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but even within that group Cronenberg looms large, and has influenced me strongly in terms of both visuals and speculation.

WFR: What writers or storytellers do you look up to the most, in regards to setting models for your own writing?

DT: So many names come to mind that it’s hard to narrow it down. For every work I write, I’m inspired by a different author. I’m drawn to authors who draw as well as write, like Edward Carey. As for contemporary Japanese authors, Toh EnJoe and Yusuke Miyauchi are always stimulating.

WFR: How would you describe your personal aesthetic in your own words?

DT: To the extent that it’s possible, I try to put myself in a state where my perceptions of beauty and ugliness, and right and wrong, are a blank slate, and write using only the subjective viewpoints and knowledge of the beings that live in the world I’m writing about. Just as novels with a contemporary setting don’t include explanations about refrigerators, as much as possible I try to use only descriptions to show the things that are self-evident about them. My ideal is to write something like a translation of a novel written in another world.

If I use pre-existing nouns to express various things in that world, somehow the impression just doesn’t gel, so I use the meanings and shapes and sounds of kanji characters (with ruby text) to coin terms appropriate to the appearance and content of those objects (and sometimes I’ll also cram a completely different meaning into a pre-existing noun). To me, neologisms are like sets, props, and special makeup effects in film art.

WFR: Is there such a thing as “too weird”? If someone tells you something you’ve written is “weird” is it usually a compliment?

DT: At the time Sisyphean was released in Japan, I was told it was untranslatable, and the fact that it can now be read in English is itself “too weird,” which makes me very happy. I’m truly grateful that thanks to the long, hard efforts of translator Daniel Huddleston, this has become a reality.

“Weird” is of course a compliment as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes I see comments like, “It’s too gross; I can’t read it,” or “I feel sick at my stomach,” but at times like that, I try to remember the words of John Waters, who said, “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”

WFR: Sisyphean is incredibly original and surreal. Can you tell us how it came together? When did you start working on it and where did you get the idea for it?

DT: I started writing “Sisyphean,” the title story, in 2010.

I think the misery of having to work for a long time at a company that had bad working conditions, coupled with all the turmoil I’d been bottling up because of my commercial illustration and design work, just broke out all at once, like the Great Dust Plague. The barrel burst. And when I looked around me, I saw lots of people suffering from outrageous demands of their jobs, and thought that by using the techniques of SF and fantasy novels, I might be able to make that present situation apparent. So I set out to create a work where the novel itself would function as a work of installation art on the extremities of labor.

Up until then, I had created stories and pictures as separate things, but it kept feeling like something was half-baked about both of them, as if something very important was missing. Before I started work on “Sisyphean,” I realized that by putting both of those things together, I might be able to achieve a synergistic effect. It was a vague idea, but at that point I intended to put greater weight on the illustrations, and produce a work that was like a visual story.

At first, I made a lot of sketches and expanded the image in my mind, and then after drawing a number of illustrations, I started writing. Prior to “Sisyphean,” I had experimented with writing a surreal dictionary-novel that was just a string of annotations upon annotations, sort of like a hybrid of Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, and that technique came in handy for describing the world of “Sisyphean.”  I was going back and forth between words and pictures, completing both with one another, and while I was writing, I started giving more and more weight to the sentences. (Rather than me writing it, it felt like I was excavating fossils buried in deep underground strata, or weaving it together from fragments of the excavated fossils as I turned them up, down, left, and right.) In the end, I went way over the page limit for the short story competition, and I believe my efforts to condense that text, paring multiple lines down to one, must also be connected to my present style of writing.

After that, using the overstuffed setting of “Sisyphean” as a base, I wrote the other stories going backward through the ages, changing things up with each one, until at last in 2013, I was able to bring it all together in one book.

As for ideas, the idea of the “Descent From Heaven” in “Cavumville,” for example, came to me while I was watching a scene of snow being removed from roofs on TV once, and imagined what it would be like if all of those snowflakes were bugs. Most ideas sneak up on me quietly, at unpredictable times and from unpredictable directions. I get a lot of ideas by attaching plausible explanations to wordplays. When I’m doing that while writing, I sometimes feel like I’m going on and on trying to keep some lies I’ve told consistent.

WFR: In terms of your artwork, what artists and artworks have influenced you? Have you been influenced by manga at all?

DT: Hieronymus Bosch, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon, Max Ernst, Max Klinger, Léon Spilliaert, and Zdzisław Beksiński…when I start listing fantastical painters I like, there’s no end to them. In terms of direct influence, though, I’ll say the paper architects, Brodsky ＆ Utkin and Albín Brunovský.

I’ve read a lot of manga, but that’s influenced me more in terms of content. As for patterns and designs, I’ve always been enchanted by those drawn by Daijiro Morohoshi.

WFR: What’s next? Is there anything you’re currently working on?

DT: After Sisyphean was published, my collection of materials on the setting was released as an e‑book. Aside from that, I’ve mainly been writing novellas and short stories.

There was a jailbreak story about a prisoner who’d been sentenced to have his body changed into an earthworm-like form, a story I contributed to an Ultraman anthology about a special cleaning company that disposes of all the monsters Ultraman defeats, one for Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! anthology about people who live in a building that keeps falling forever through a multilayered city, and one that describes daily life in a Japan where pseudoscience is a fact of life.

Presently, I’ve got an illustrated story called “One Hundred Views of a Hallucination” being serialized in Hayakawa Publishing’s SF Magazine. I’m also in the process of revising my first long-form novel, which I’m aiming to have published sometime this year. The story begins in the age that follows the human race’s extinction at the hands of murderous organisms, which are defensive weapons of formerly free-floating celestial bodies which the human race had colonized. Having lost their sense of purpose, these killer organisms have staked out turf like yakuza, and are living their daily lives when an inexplicable change begins to occur in their society, and they come to understand the human race’s scheme—it’s that kind of story. I hope everyone will be able to read it someday.

The post Sisyphean: An Interview with Weird Scifi Author Dempow Torishima appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Illustration by Dempow Torishima

Translation by Daniel Huddleston

1

When the on-site disassembler came to the synthorgan factory carrying his packing case, he stared for a moment at a worker who had assumed an awkward attitude toward him, apparently puzzled upon seeing another of his kind for the first time. He must have been born quite recently—his hair was jet-black and glossy, and his skin was fresh and young. The cycles sure run fast here, he thought with pity. He had just started to introduce himself as a worker from the fishery, when the young worker’s face twisted into a severe expression.

“That’s my name. I won’t have you referring to yourself as ‘I.’”

Just the same as before. The old memories didn’t come back right away, so there were many cases where self-identification didn’t go very well. They probably couldn’t help latching on to a word that would provide a definition of who they were.

“I’m the on-site disassembler,” he added simply, and then got down to work.

When the disassembler had finally finished disassembling the placoderms and was covered in oil, he requested the president’s signature on the paperwork. The body tissues of presidents and directors were injected into his skull as recording media. By way of his eye socket, that swollen finger came feeling around inside his head, and he wet himself.

He had a headache as he got into the lift, the corpse of that coffin eel still wrapped around all four walls as though trying to climb up on the nearly four-meter-tall cage. The cage shuddered and slowly descended. From between gaps in the elaborate ribs surrounding him on every side, the skeleton of a subordinape who appeared to have been swallowed whole was peeking out.

The lift stopped. He stepped off onto an island of rotting flesh and was loading his packing case on the flatboat when his eyes paused upon a small, steeply ascending island located directly beneath a vertical drainage pipe. It seethed with the gases of decomposition.

“What’s the matter?” asked the pilot.

The disassembler turned his short neck and indicated it with his jaw.

“You’ve tried how many times already? It’s hopeless. It’ll just be a parrot this time too.”

“I know. You’re probably right,” the disassembler said as he started walking out into the shallows of the putrefying muck.

“That gas is dense. You watch yourself.”

He waved a hand lightly behind him and pulled his scarf up over his nose. After crossing over to a tiny island covered in bas-reliefs of bones and organs, he sank to his knees in putrid filth that teemed with cockroaches and nematodes and headed toward a figure that was buried to its chest on the side of the highest hill.

It was looking up at the underside of the faraway deck. Its face was exactly the same as that of the worker he had met just moments ago. When, breathing heavily, he made his way to its side, its eyes moved. They turned toward the disassembler and stared.

The disassembler knew full well, though, that this was nothing more than a reactionary response. The magatama was always passed on to the newborn worker, so nothing of their former intellect could remain in those who had turned into parrots. The disassembler lifted up the parrot’s half-body, and they regarded one another, face-to-scab-covered-face.

“Hey there, you remember me?” Rows of sparse teeth began to quiver. “ ’Ey…member me?”

The disassembler’s eyes grew moist. He recognized his tears as a form of self-pity.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of someone whistling with his fingers. It was the pilot urging him to head back.

“All right,” he said. It was as he was setting the parrot back down, however, that the disassembler’s fingers detected a small, hard bulge in the body’s breast pocket. He undid its button and stuck his fingers inside. What came out was a magatama that gleamed with an emerald light.

2

At first, the worker thought himself—the pregnancy being little more than a biological and existential misunderstanding— submerged in water. This was because everything appeared distorted to him. He wondered if he had perhaps finally awakened from a nightmare in which he worked at a cruel synthorgan factory. After all, the room he was in looked a lot like the rooms in which the people of his hometown had lived. However, the familiar furniture and household appliances that were lined up against the wall were far too numerous, haphazardly pushed up against one another like animals snapping at each other’s throats. The dim light was coming from a torchburr. Had there been a room like this at the base of the synthorgan company building? The terror of when he had been thrown from that structure came back to him, and he tried to get up, only to discover that he couldn’t move in the slightest. It was as though he were buried to his neck on a sandy beach.

home><away> nothing>deep>depths>·<shell <seal <yoke<sin <

Suddenly, lonely thoughts that beggared his imagination came welling up, and his eyes filled with tears. Without spilling over, they remained quivering on the surfaces of his eyes, only to be swallowed up in waves of concentric circles emanating from the midst of his field of vision. From somewhere, he could hear a sound like a backed-up sewer pipe.

sign> flow> merge> destruction> · <desperation <void <execu- tion <world—his thoughts ached as though themselves possessed of a sense of pain.

Days spent in longing for a return from that place of exile beyond the bounds of society—days enough to turn boulders into sand. He could remember them as his own. Is this somebody else’s memory again? He was thinking that it was, and the chain of thoughts that nested around the axis of that single point grew outward in every direction, forming a shell all around him, until they began both to complement and overturn one another. Only in scattered fragments could he unlock their meaning, and when consciousness returned to him in that room, he could for some reason practically taste the presence of someone standing on the other side of the wall, and of corpses sealed within the disorderly layout of a multilayered, labyrinthine housing crystal lying farther in behind him.

Someone started walking toward him. It was not a worker from his own company; he looked a lot like the disassembler from the fishery. Though hadn’t he just been wondering where he worked himself? Coaguland…number four, it was the Fourth Coaguland Reaffirmation branch. He felt a pressure near his retinas, and the wall appeared again, and the disassembler appeared from a doorless entryway, confusing the worker. “You were pretty slow to wake up. I’d just about given up on you.” The voice that came to him sounded like it was passing through water. “We are presently located inside a vintage landfill stratum. The metabolism’s slow here, though, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

Fwaa ii zii—

What is this? was what the worker had intended to say.

“It must still be hard for you to speak. Can you tell, by the way, that you’re being preserved inside a director’s body?”

Images rose up in the back of the worker’s mind of a director caught in the grip of several canvassers…of organs and multiple yoked-in brains being smashed one after another. A shudder went through the corpuscyte that covered his entire field of vision, causing the disassembler’s face to waver about.

“This director took fatal injuries in a canvasser attack. They brought him in to the synthorgan factory right away, but there was no way to restore him, so they threw him out. Yeah…no hope of helping them once they’ve had their brains destroyed.” No, that isn’t right. Those yoked-in brains are internal prisons that greatly limit the functionality of cogitosome-bearing corpuscyte. “You’d turned into a parrot and were buried in an island of rot. For some reason, you were carrying a magatama. During pregnancy, the magatama moves to the embryo, so what you were carrying most likely belonged to someone who was swallowed by a coffin eel. Magatamas govern the intellect and memory of subordinapes like us.”

They were not merely memory organs for individuals. They reminded workers in great detail of all kinds of things they had no way of learning by themselves, and in much the same way that landfill strata created counterfeit copies of things using eide from the past, they had also succeeded in making those things real.

Now he stood unmoving in a dark alleyway, staring silently as many of his kind began to come and go along a street where time had frozen over. One of the parishes that had once flourished in the inner world of the canvassers—which had long afterward remained compressed and frozen inside the magatama—was unpacking into his neural network like a tightly folded paper being opened to reveal a completed diagram.

“Since you’re using some stranger’s magatama as a foothold, it isn’t clear whether you’re the same worker as before.”

The worker started walking. He was twice as tall as everyone else, but nobody seemed to notice. He tried touching a pedestrian on the back, but his fingers merely sank into him and got tangled up in the strings of letters there. It dawned on him that a subordinape was something chosen out of the collected data of the fifty thousand people that a canvasser’s magatama contained. That data was then modified and forcibly incarnated. He realized also that while here in this parish, he was himself in a comatose state.

“If you’re wondering who it was that merged you so splendidly with the director’s body, why that would be your own newborn self. Not that he understood what it was he’d accomplished, mind you. I had originally hoped to play the role you’re playing right now myself.”

As he advanced forward, spatial distortions began to appear here and there, and the worker noticed that the space around him was dotted with gaps.

“Should’ve known I wouldn’t be brave enough to be sealed alive in corpuscyte, though.”

The reason the warps and the gaps were appearing was that in regions where the medium differed from the rest— most likely near things like the cogitosomes that were scattered throughout the director’s body—only space constructed through classical physics was being displayed.

“At the fishery, I couldn’t even try to use a parrot unless I took it apart for disassembly practice.”

The worker was headed toward a place of extreme distortion. It was a park where sunlight dappled through the trees. There a man in a white lab coat was sitting on a bench, nodding at no one in particular as he stared intently at a cliff face towering above the treetops. There was no mistaking that the cliff was made of landfill strata. Was there something special about the cogitosome handling its construction? It appeared that it was showing him space from before the end of the world.

A man in a suit appeared to his right. He held a can of coffee out to the man in the white coat and spoke: “With things having come to this point, I find it odd that you aren’t getting registered to be Translated.”

“Double-translation is an imaginary cyclical transaction. You should know that. Here even the magatama itself is nothing more than a concretion that the <World> brought into existence. Most likely, the replacement by ultimaterial that was done in order to effectively use our limited computational resources has caused some kind of—”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“—harm from deprivation?” He stood up, gripping the can tightly. “All of this has already happened.”

“Probably so. Like they say, history repeats itself.”

“Not like this.”The man in the white coat tossed an object, which at some point had transformed into a light bulb, into an ultimaterial bin, and stared firmly into the face of the worker.

“Can’t you feel a presence there behind you?” “I’m not the type to believe in ghosts.”

“After you came out of your coma, you had your share of freakouts, though. ‘It’s the man I saw in my dreams,’ you said.”

“And that’s been taken care of through cerebro-physiological means. Now I just have dreams about everybody floating in the darkness.”

“Exactly. That’s because Hanishibe is still drifting through interstellar space alone in that spaceship even as we speak. By continuing to speak, he’s protecting us. The coordinates are—” “I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to go. Work is work, even in a world like this one. I’m off to the canvasser now, so I’ll see you later.”

The man in the suit crossed over the manifestation boundary as he departed, and disappeared. Dazedly, the worker moved away from that place. He knew that the scene he had just witnessed could not exist according to the law of causality. In other words, this was not the past.

“Hey, are you listening?”

Double-translation, interstellar spaceships—as he was strolling along unable to collect his thoughts, he bumped into an invisible wall. There were limits to the scale of the space that a magatama could contain. The other side of the wall was covered in fog through which another town could be dimly seen.

“Even you must’ve sought after answers any number of times. Why are we employed by directors? When did we sign such contracts? What are we getting in compensation? Oh, we remember these things dimly. That we signed a contract, that we received a baptism. But why aren’t these things consistent even in our own memories? What were these directors and humans originally?”

Those who are forever damned…those who long to return… those who trick us into servitude.

“Why are there magatama even inside the canvassers? Does it mean that those disgusting things—I don’t even know whether they’re alive or machines—are our original forms? Why? Why? Look—you must be able to see it!”

The worker looked across the parish town, and simultaneously he was looking down at it with a bird’s‑eye view. Dimly, he could make out the ghost of the <World> constructed by the web of interconnectivity created by the canvassers’—no, the cherubim’s—Whispering. But without whisper-leaves of his own, it was only possible to comprehend as a real image the parish with which he himself was affiliated.

“Whenever a fundamental question occurs to you, the lice appear and devour your thoughts.”

The worker strained his eyes at the rows of houses and streets on the other side of the fog. Transforming his arms into Code, he pried open the invisible wall and stretched out his hand toward the mist-enshrouded town.

“So we forget the inconsistencies right away. The same questions occur to us, and we forget them again. This cycle has been repeating for generations. When the nymphs hatch from the lice egg cases—”

Those weren’t louse nymphs. They were bits of Code as well, implanted by the directors in the roots of their hairs to prevent the lice egg cases from hatching—in other words, to prevent the activation of the snowpetal bugs, which were a self-defense mechanism of the magatama.

“—they cover your head like an umbrella and suck out every last bit of your soul. Even if you’re disassembled afterward, there won’t be a magatama inside.”

That was because the snowpetal bugs would form temporary whisper-leaves and bequeath all of the magatama’s data to the canvassers’ <World> network. In the present, however, where such dramatic reaffirmation was taking place at the livable boundaries beyond which a certain sort of life support became indispensable, the cherubim—and thus their <World>—was on the brink of destruction.

“If that happens, you’ll be left a CP-type, suffering from hyperfrequent hemo-φιλíα:.”

Regardless of business conditions, many things would be needed to preserve and reunify the inner world of the cherubim: magatama to serve as its seeds, its slate-blue development medium, cogitosomes to expand it, and corpuscyte to protect the cogitosomes. Even if this were to lead to a repeat of the world’s end…

“W‑what are you doin—?”

The worker was staring at the roads and the buildings of the two towns as they began to connect one to another, and at the same time, he was staring at the corners of the disassembler’s mouth as the director’s hands tore them apart; it opened wider and wider until the sides of the disassembler’s face had split in half.

The worker grabbed hold of the magatama stored inside the disassembler’s skull, then pulled his arm back out. The disassembler collapsed like a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped.

On the second floor of a certain hospital in the midst of the expanded city, however, the disassembler, who had been lying comatose, opened his eyes, turned toward the worker—who was watching over him through the window from above —and nodded.

As he hallucinated the ghost of a planet. Of a <World>. As he was laid bare to the directors’ hunger to return home.

Sisyphean copyright © 2013 by Dempow Torishima

The post The Disassembler Searched On appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The bicycle is an ancient model, deliberately picked for its thick, heavy frame and pedals, bare of rubber cover, whose serrated ridges as the hours go by cut first into callus, then the flesh of feet that press upon them.

The crankset, big as a gear from a belfry clock, is covered in the same tenacious rust that attacks brakes and handlebars. Each bicycle has its own particular skin disease: this one is flecked as if by a colony of metal-eating fleas that fatigue the steel itself, the wound from rust’s bite bigger with each passing day. That one seems overtaken by a paralysis of the joints; the handlebars never turn without a howl now, while the brake levers are pairs of jaws that won’t close.

The seat leather… but is it really leather? It seems cut from a triangle of emery cloth, of granite, so easily does its mere touch bruise muscle. Or is it leather chiseled off a mummy from a display case in some tumbledown museum of natural history? Whatever it is, in the hours to come, the seat leather will join the ranks of your enemies. For if you must confront the road, never forget that you will have to battle your own machine.

Sit as little as possible: the constant drizzle makes the leather’s friction on your skin even more painful. It’s like a stinging sensation growing between your legs. Don’t sit down.

Nothing to be done about the rain. The squall will scour your sides all day long, mixing with your sweat, clinging to your pubic hair in brilliant pearls. Nothing more annoying than the relentless drip-drip-dripping from the tip of a prick that’s become a drainpipe, the constant feeling like you’re urinating and can’t stop.

The cold, of course, is something to get used to. Especially on the downhills when, naked on your cast-iron grasshopper, you’ll scatter with your front wheel the iridescent mass of gas bubbles, some of which cling to the bike frame, to your skin. Try to pop them right away, before the metal tarnishes at their touch, or your skin starts breaking out in hard blisters.

The desquamation can last whole days, always working deep down, digging into dermis, fat, muscle. The bubbles stick especially to the hollow of the groin and the insides of the thighs. Nor do they scorn the armpits. Best thing, of course, is to avoid the bubble clusters stagnating on the road, across the yellow lines, but the compact mass of the peloton significantly reduces your maneuvering room. Moreover, condensation on the visor of your gas mask warps your sense of distance, and a collision is always to be feared.

One single commandment: NEVER STOP PEDALING. To which one might add: never lift your head too high, to avoid any pointless torque on the tubing between the gas mask and the crankset-powered air-production system. The rubber already has a hard time resisting the corrosive gas, and any sudden movements might result in a tear. It might seem obvious, but never forget: stop pedaling and you cut off your own air as surely as if you turned off a tap.

Never set foot on the ground. Urinate or defecate while you pedal standing up. Never stop.

As for flats—best not to mention them. As soon as your feet quit rhythmically pushing the pedals, the air pressure inside the mask will drop too low to push back the gas seeping in.

Then you’ll have three or four seconds before you feel a swarm of razor blades flay your larynx and explode in your lungs. The pain is tough to take, though it won’t kill you. Some cyclists start coughing so hard they burst a vessel and their chins get sticky with blood. Other let out long streams of scarlet urine, as if an invisible razor had just castrated them mid-race. Most of the time, you see them zigzagging before leaving the road and collapsing on the sidewalk’s sharp edge. And there they stay, paralyzed by pain, or twitching spasmodically like a worm severed with a pocketknife, until they can get back in the saddle and start pedaling again. No one helps them. Not pedestrians, whose bare feet squelch on the damp asphalt, or cyclists.

When the rain stops, artificial suns flood the road with harsh, unbearable light, and the bubbles play at being magnifying glasses, needling your skin with myriad luminous points each red-hot as the tip of a cigarette. Who hasn’t, as a child, toyed with making just such a weal rise from the back of a hand or a fatty thigh gushing from a pair of shorts, by focusing the sun through an old camera lens? Here, the pain is multiplied one hundred percent.

Constant contact with the rubber gas mask always ends up causing severe dermatoses, and you must fight the urge to slip your nails under the protective rim to itch yourself, since the gas will slither right in.

The signal to start is given in the morning, “morning” simply being an arbitrary and comforting way of locating yourself in time. There is no sky here, no real sun or moon.

Only an unbroken line of spotlights stippling the metallic vault over our heads, the gray ribbon of the road with its dotted yellow dividing line. To either side, sidewalks, then the dead-end red brick wall, devoid of door or window. No one looks at us, no one watches us. Why would they? Riveted to our machines as we are, we cannot stop pedaling for even so much as a moment.

The signal to start is given in the morning, surely too early, to go by the weight of exhaustion still stiffening muscles. Afterwards, there’s nothing but the constant squeal of tires on asphalt, the creak of the crankset or poorly greased gears. No way of talking, the masks smother voices, and the respirator tubing only carries a series of indecipherable gurglings. Besides, better focus on the road, keep an eye out for tacks that might’ve been scattered in the night. Victims of flats are often older, vision failing, ones who’ve lost or cracked their glasses. Besides, the mask is designed to make it hard to wear it over a pair of glasses, no matter how small.

The course is long. Very long. Straight at first, the road takes one turn, then another… the monotony of the wall and sidewalks cancels any sense of landmark, no way of knowing if the ribbon of asphalt makes a circle or just keeps going on and on, ever farther, to infinity. I think it’s a circle, but in that case, how to explain the endless changes to the asphalt’s morphology? Drawing a map amounts to a utopian notion; no cyclist ever encounters the same hill, the same curve, twice. No way of knowing what awaits you around the next bend. I keep thinking that the road is a closed circuit, but I must bring myself to face the fact that it warps during the night. Like an undulating snake, a gray snake, flat and striped with yellow.

On the sidewalks, the pedestrians push and shove one another. Their nudity makes them not know what to do with their arms. Some swing them rhythmically; others—women especially—cross them over their breasts; others still walk with their hands crossed behind them like schoolchildren of yore… or prisoners. (Don’t use that word.)

A long, high glass wall keeps the gas from them, and the greenish glints playing on the panes give their skin an odd aquatic tinge.

It’s said their toenails are polished with a magnetic varnish that carries a charge individual to each of them. In this way, optical scanners scattered throughout the asphalt identify the walkers, calculating the average time of each group. If the computer deems their pace too slow, the glass wall reveals its vents, letting in a quantity of gas proportional to the accumulated delay.

Then we hear them gasping, coughing, spitting. Invariably, they start running clumsily, and the women’s heavy breasts jolt and quiver like masses of gelatin on a lunatic platter.

Many envy the pedestrians; the physical effort imposed on them indeed seems less restrictive, but there may be other drawbacks…

The route is a tunnel marked off in hours, not miles; the route is a pipeline of pain we must ride on leaden machines in the ceaseless whine of pedals, the screech of ill-oiled chains, the stridency of brakes, or the tremendous din of a bike crumpling in two.

At night, a door opens in the brick wall. An entrance invisible in the daytime, which no one can ever find. One final push of the pedal, and then the bike is hung in the gloom of a chamber where oxygen lashes our legs, forcing back the clusters of bubbles that try to enter in the our wake. The wall closes again.

Take off the masks sticky with sweat; the skin where its straps dug in will remain raw all night. Some cyclists stay there, right by their machines, for fear someone will steal a part from them in the night. They’re probably right.

The room is empty, bare. At the far end, the doors to little booths gape open on the decomposer-reconstitutors: at least that’s what we call the white enameled devices in the middle of each 3 by 3 foot closet barely lit by a frosted bulb of measly wattage. Close up, they’d look just like toilets, if it weren’t for the network of ducts and the radiation lamps. All excremental matter is immediately broken down, each particle resuming its pre-intestinal aspect, and the regenerator lamps try and restore to it all an adequate nutrient content. The pasty material then removed from the tank has neither taste nor color. When the nutrient content drops to zero, when the regenerators can no longer extract anything from our excrement, we pop open some canned food, or chew a bar of alimentary concentrate. The regenerator allow us to live on these for at least three months, mining and making the most of the teensiest nutritive particles our digestive systems have discharged. At first, some cyclists vomited after every meal, while others obstinately refused to swallow the slightest mouthful. On the door of my booth someone’s scrawled four words in pencil: “Trash fed by trash…” I’ll have to erase that.

Those who arrive after the doors have closed must keep pedaling all night long, or get used to suffering. They probably try as much of both as they can stand…

The guards have donned fireproof gloves to put the cap back on the blackened jerry-can… but the cap won’t screw back on the spout deformed by the explosion. It’s some kind of acid meant to absorb the radiation, I think (so they say). The only drawback is it explodes on contact with liquid, which makes handling it rather tricky. Sometimes, a shadow slips away from the group, grabs one of the jerry-cans, and pisses into it. The results are instantaneous. Flames rocket out, white and blinding as lightning, blazing like a laser, right between the guy’s legs… For a few seconds, a magnesium glare lights up the room. I look around to try and spot the edges, but the flame never lasts long enough.

It can’t be said suicides have gone up… I mustn’t be disingenuous.

Recently, rocks have been ricocheting off the surface of the water without sinking in. The effects of solar lighting vary from place to place, greening your face in the valley, yellowing your shoulders on the flatlands, blurring your belly on the hilltops. Trees have been growing upside down, roots turned skywards, foliage buried under the grass. Chestnuts would explode the minute you made as if to touch them, sending burrs flying in all directions. Sometimes the wind would steal sounds and mix them up, a thunderclap would come out of your mouth, words you spoke would hang from a condor’s beating wings… the (don’t talk about how it was before). Besides, there’s no proof these images are real, doubtless my diseased memory has distorted much more rational facts. The bicycles clink and rattle in the shadows, lining the walls of the room. Only the tandem corner is empty. Nowadays all couples are separated. Little by little, as the hours go by, the crouching forms stretch out on the floor, the wreck of a conversation will dwindle to a monologue soon worn down by fatigue.

No rules oblige sleepers to remain in the lower chamber; we are all free to climb one of the stairwells with steps caparisoned in red wool that lead to the upper floor. However, few indeed undertake such a journey; no sooner are their bikes hung than exhaustion nails them to the floor. Up above, table with giant feet bear massive silverware whose mere weight could sink a ship.

A line of blue-green plates and dishes runs to the vanishing point of a hall hung with oppressive velours. A banquet for an army or a crowd, but the guests will be forever absent. The next few rooms, with their high beds, hordes of pillows in all sizes, flanked by candelabra rooted in floorboards that smell of beeswax… But it is raining on the empty soup tureens, and each drop is like the tapping of a woman’s long, pointed fingernail, a tinny music that fills the tarnished plates and mildews the tablecloth. The shower often pierces sheets and blankets, and an unhealthy moisture encourages mushrooms deep within the mattress. Dead birds overflow the credenza drawers; pages of books from the library are now forever faded, and only vast white pages remain, so beautiful they seem to be reserved for epitaphs, or deaths of historical importance…

Once, Maria cruelly bit my hand; I dropped a candle on the woolen rug. It was so damp that the flame went out at once.

You can sleep in these beds, you even sleep better there, a deeper sleep than the room downstairs. As the whiff of mold acted as a potent anesthetic, in its way. Upon waking, however, a slight worry assails sleepers regarding the uses made of them during their hours of unconsciousness, for rare is the occasion when sleepers do not wake with each orifice of their bodies feeling forced and painful.

And so Maria—

(Don’t—)

In the blemished mirrors on the upper floor, I can perfectly make out my face purpled by the swellings of asphyxia. And on the canopy bed’s still-white sheets, I can see perfectly well that my shadow is red.

HOWEVER, I will refrain from drawing any hasty conclusions, exhaustion and malnutrition maintaining me in a torpor from in which it is sometimes hard to tell dream from reality…

***

I can no longer remember just how I got here. Like most of us, I woke up in the room down below after the explosion, my head empty and yet heavy. Since that day, my sense of touch has diminished considerably, and I have the hardest time holding a pencil in my numb fingers. My memories have gradually faded away, surely from shock. Some whisper that we are dead, that we expiate our sins in the first circle of an absurd hell, but I find this theory far too romantic. No, for me, it’s more—

The fact is, each new arrival is brought in by a hearse, and unloaded on a stretcher amidst the others, who will teach him the rules… But I believe this is a vulgar practice meant to keep us in a certain state of unease.

I know the gas is corroding my brain cells—first my memory, then my perception of reality. The near impossibility drawing differentiations and making logical connections will not make me give up my desire to know, to… understand.

Are we prisoners in some forgotten jail, of some computer warden ignorant of changes in historical context?

Ignorant of the fact that the empty eye sockets of its programmers are now forever fixed on a white sun, so white their dark glasses have melted away?

And the machine continues to function, on insufficient data. Continues to drag, from their cells, convicts who have forgotten the very cause of their incarceration. Ensuring, through the intermediary of its android jailers, that sentences are handed out, never to be commuted, for lack of new data?

That’s just a theory, of course, and I lack the strength to carry out the verifications needed to refute it; besides I’m not at all sure my data is objective. The disaster and the gas have destroyed my mental workings… Unless… unless this is just the first phase of some kind of brainwashing, the prelude to an undertaking that escapes me.

At other times, I like to imagine that the blurriness of thoughts is an effect I strive for consciously. Then I convince myself that this entire monologue is recorded in a memory circuit… a magnetic tape speaks through my mouth, and I’m just an android with an official number, employed in the Funnyway Penitentiary, in charge of welcoming new prisoners when they come out of the usual post-conviction brainwashing.

My monologue is a speech type whose sole purpose is to increase their mental unease, to make them lose all bearings… to break them.

A fictional speech, but gangrenous.

My name is Alpha‑3, I belong to the section for the suppression of speed fetishists—I—

Who knows?

I will NEVER know if I am a prisoner or a jailer…

Besides, what would be the point?

What pleasure, what satisfaction would I derive from the certainty of being someone sentenced to life, instead of an android on the fritz, ready for the junkyard…

Or the opposite.

The bicycle is an ancient model, deliberately picked for its thick, heavy frame. We usually say that there are trap-cycles, one hidden in every dozen. Like a deadly bullet in a firing squad, eleven of whose twelve rifles are loaded with blanks. I don’t know how much credence to give these legends. Our machines are changed during the night according to a schedule difficult to determine for people like us, without watches or calendars. An entirely subjective estimate might be every six months. The machine from hell would have suddenly razorlike pedals, a seat that can burst into flames in a matter of minutes, lead wheels with sticky tires, and especially, the ability to triple its weight on uphills. We call it the black bicycle, or even the cycle of Asmodeus. They say its timbre is curiously crazed, never making the same sound twice.

But I’m not saying these things to frighten you; we too have our legends, our myths…

You’ll find your bicycle next to the others. If the handlebars are sticky, it’s due to sweat. If the pedals are hard, it’s because hundreds of feet have failed to get the better of the hatred stored in them.

You’ll learn to foil its treacheries, to beg for its favors… You…

Tomorrow, when it’s time to leave, my mask will keep me from muttering a word of encouragement, so I’m taking advantage of this moment to wish you “a good trip.”

Or as they say around these parts…

FUNNYWAY

The post Funnyway appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

It was like a gigantic pyre rising from the center of the gray, argil plain. A colossal intertwining of branches atop which the city seemed bizarrely unbalanced, with its towers broader at the base than the summit, its keeps oddly narrowed toward their crenellations, such that from a distance they might be taken for factory smokestacks that went on forever. The fortifications around the city had the same truncated-cone look; it was as if like the sentries pacing their wall-walks might at any moment topple into the void and go sliding down the steeply banked sides, helmets slashing showers of sparks from the black, gleaming slabs pierced here and there by spindly embrasures. Drawing closer, it became clear the mountainside where the city took root was entirely covered in countless logs, freshly pruned, sawn, scalped, reduced to the state of anonymous timber, forming an inextricable tangle that piled up against the outermost stones of the city’s surrounding wall. Whence the curious impression of a pyre thrown together pell-mell for some feverish sacrifice.

To gain entrance to the city took long days of navigating this labyrinth of wood, wood at first sticky with sap and then, nearer the summit, dry and studded with splinters. A path where every step might at any minute disturb and shatter the equilibrium of imbricate trunks, an instant death sentence beneath a hellish, thundering avalanche of logs, such that travelers feel like they’re picking their way through a giant game of pick-up sticks where the slightest misstep immediately leads to a crushing disqualification.

I, for one, quite clearly recall that no sooner had I stepped through the only gate than I sought the coolness of a church with blue slate walls, fleeing in the heart of its shadows the heat and unbearable smell of sawdust that had accompanied my entire climb. Instinctively, my fingers reached for the marble font normally beside the collection box on the first pillar. The merest touch of that icy liquid on my joints immediately dispelled my migraine, early warning signs for which had been buzzing at my temples. I rested my palm in the middle of the chipped Carrera conch, in the little iridescent puddle where a few rare glimmers danced, filtering through the stained glass windows. Pulling my hand back with a painful effort that betrayed all the exhaustion of my journey, I touched my thumb to my forehead, lips, and belly… The heady smell of fuel gave me a shiver.

I stayed there for a moment, leaning against the pillar, savoring the cold marble through my sweat-soaked shirt. From somewhere deep in the crypt rose a baby’s cry, frail, no doubt surprised to find itself naked and in unfamiliar hands above the baptismal basin while drops of kerosene pearled at the sacred cruet’s spout and splattered on its forehead, between its brows.

I left the church, eyes lowered, returning to the cobblestones of the sun-drenched street where in the burning dawn, the arabesques of one final farandole were dwindling away. Low to the ground, the wind blew a rolling wave of red confetti that stuck to my bare legs, gummy with sweat, like so many strange and fanciful pustules. Sick with the carnival measles, I made for the cracked fountain where a cluster of verdigrised bronze tritons spat ethyl alcohol by the mouthful, slick and almost viscous. Methanol, maybe. The harsh reek—nuanceless and even industrial—made me curse such a lack of taste and imagination in the choice of fluid. But the exhilarating fumes scrambled my thoughts, paralyzed my brain as if through prolonged exposure to ether, and images unrelated to my worries of the moment intervened between my eyes and reality.

As always, I had to make a violent effort not to let myself drown, knees suddenly weak, lifeless, and tear myself from the swell of ever more pervasive odors. I tore up the sloping street, twisting my ankles on uneven cobblestones rainbowed by steaks of alcohol with starbursts of gold and steel blue. The first pyres appeared right away, lining the sidewalks and thoroughfare. Meticulous stacks of dry, dusty firewood, jealously defended from humidity for years in waiting for this final day. Mountains of cunningly interlocked logs with access corridors and central combustion chambers designed for the entire family… I slowed my pace, offering up my irritated mucous membranes to the scent of knotty, splintering wood, those dark desiccated twigs, kindling, armfuls of rustling, skeletal branchings shattering underfoot in a concert of dry detonations. For a moment I watched the white, bluish hands striped with scratches hauling bunches of bines scrupulously selected long ago in anticipation of this ritual, and then I wandered among the piles of branches, amidst scents and sounds of an autumn forest. It was even hotter now, and my eyebrows could no longer stem the tide of perspiration flooding my brow. Suddenly I wished I could drown myself in the shade of the archways, and an unbearable thirst clogged my throat, swelling my tongue between my teeth.

A dark vault sucked me in… a dance hall with its floor a deep black reflective, its echoes at once near and far: a dome of night blue as the slumber of burrowed beasts. My toes left an incongruous halo of condensation on the marble, testifying to a fever that suddenly took on an obscene dampness in this place where mirrors and windows seemed conceived for something entirely apart from harvesting the dying breaths. At my feet, a handful of confetti had hastily sketched out a planisphere of unknown constellations. A silken shawl, stirred by a breeze, moved across the floor, strange fabric smoke fallen from a dancer’s shoulders to end up drifting the surface of this lake of frozen ink.

An intruder in this world of black snow, with my panting and sweat-stink, all of a sudden I wanted to see if my soles had melted the ice the floor seemed to be, and if my ankles were sinking into a pond of indelible waters, marking me for life in the most ridiculous way.

The woman was standing back, elbow on a caryatid, and her pale, bluish hand, nails cyanotic from an irrepressible internal cold, lay quite precisely between the breasts of the sculpted torso in an unintentionally provocative posture. A long scarf of gray silk wound round her neck, ends crossing behind her nape and falling again over her clavicles all the way to the floor, surrounding her frozen, naked body in a parenthesis of cloth. Her belly drooped and her breasts sagged. Networks of violet venules traced her flesh just under the skin, bringing to mind finely crazed porcelain. Fragile. Darkness drowned her features; all I caught was a glimpse of a thickened, graceless silhouette, pale and distressing; already her outstretched hand was offering me a cup of some liquid…

I drank. Without a word. Just before leaving, I seized her still outstretched fingers, bowed my head, and placed my mouth on the back of her hand just above the lumpen line of joints. She didn’t flinch, but the minute her wrist fell back, I saw quite clearly the horrible burn my lips had left on her smooth, cold skin, twin swollen lines of oozing blisters. Had I listened more closely, I might have caught, just as I was kissing her hand, a crackle and the unmistakable smell of burning flesh…

She smiled with an apologetic, weary, and worldly air, like a hostess who, upon noting an inadvertent lapse in etiquette during a lavish dinner, begs the complicit indulgence of her guests. I took my leave. Returned to the avenues, the heat, and the row of pyres punctuating the asphalt at regular intervals. Was I really feverish? Probably no more than usual.

I watched as some looked away from me, and others more shrewdly feigned to stare me down without seeing me, as if I’d been divested of all my opacity—made, in a word, transparent.

My detour into the dance hall had done nothing except make the furnace outdoors even more felt. Groups of silent, naked girls cluttered the balconies on either side of the street. Looking up, I could see on their hardened pubes shocks of hair, daubed in red phosphorus like their eyelashes, hair, and nipples. A few of them had shaved their heads and their bare skulls, which crusts of scarlet phosphorus fitted close as a helmet, helplessly teased my mind with the image of a giant match.

I think a few of them smiled my way, but I can’t be sure… I noticed their drawn features still bore traces of fatigue from the night before, from singing, dancing, maybe even fear. For I know bizarre festivities fill the alleys at night, horrible farandoles where boys and girls dance corseted in costumes coated with white phosphorus that spontaneously combusts when ambient heat reaches the fateful limit of 303°K, forcing them to vanish, to flee the streets and open squares as the first glimmer of dawn. From that moment on, woe betide he whom day catches drunkenly sprawled on a park lawn, lounging about in his deadly costume whose powdery white is not unlike the unsettling texture of butterfly wings.

Transformed into a living torch, the unlucky victim will be unable even to hurl himself into the first fountain he sees, for that will only fan the flames ravaging him. And yet they keep doing it. Every night, from one end of the city to the other, through puerile and outdated yet  laboriously reconstructed Italian carnival décor, they spread themselves out, dreadfully vulnerable, offered up, exposed to the slightest friction that might prove too brusque, to the tips of cigarettes some start smoking out of defiance, bravado, and dandyism. They dance without watches or reminders of any sort, since all the town’s clocks are now stopped. They dance on, knowing full well that in these latitudes, night gives way to day without transition of any sort, and that since they’ve lost all notion of time from drink, they will soon be unable to predict where and when dawn will surprise them.

And so the squares, gardens, grand esplanades that offer hardly any places to hide are particularly prized during these ironic and despairing sarabands. “The greater the risk, the better the party,” go the songs, and more than one farandole has suddenly gone up in flames like a living fuse, in a matter of seconds consuming everyone holding hands just a moment ago, leaving but a garland of charred corpses strewn across the flagstones, corpses oddly reduced and deformed by the fire’s devouring, tragically tarry statues that chance has shriveled up in postures straight from the rituals of ancient magic.

Thirst and fever made me stagger once more and seek refuge in the hollows of doorways. Atop a flight of steps, my damp and burning hands flattened against a chiseled marble plaque set above a great bronze knocker. Taking over from my eyes, briefly blinded in the gloom, my fingers deciphered the word MUSEUM graven in tall uprights and sharp serifs.  An ink-black carpet guided my steps between the hedges of gilded chain meant to protect the objects on display from the visitors’ tactile curiosity. The breeze from the still-open door made the festoons of metal links clank in lazy cadence. Right away the acid reek from the row of sculptures overwhelmed me, irritating my sinuses, a drilling prickle along my nostrils, and I grew lost in the contemplation of lemon yellow statues lining the hall. Slender maidens, tapering folds and veils atop which a countenance of absence of beatific nothingness discloses itself. Titans frozen in one final, prodigious spasm. Ephebes with curves soft and firm all at once, and so many more, all standing on their ebon pedestals, freed from sulfur by the chisel of a genius. Brittle masterpieces, of incredible fragility and suffocating smell, which a stray elbow might reduce to crumbs, to powder, which a spark might set ablaze in a torrent of choking smoke, leaving nothing of the work behind but a great flower of soot splattering the wall like the forgotten shadow of something that no longer exists. I have never been able to resist the fascination of these bodies, these actions, arrested by an artist in Sulfur, a medium so ill-suited to immortality; never been able to resist the cognitive heartbreak provoked by these friable and powdery wonders. We want them to be eternal, to be preserved forever from time the destroyer, and instead we find them poignant in their fragility, as if the creator, in picking an eminently perishable material for his art, had wished to highlight the irony of their vulnerability.

I crossed the hall slowly, leaving behind a double row of flammable creations, and entered the library. The smell of leather and paper, in heavy waves fringed with mold and dust, gradually supplanted the bitter whiffs of sulfur, and all I had to do now was let my fingers run over the shelves, counting out the gold-stamped spines like the letters of a prayer wheel… The curiosity of an entire people slumbered here, abandoned to all manner of fungus and rodents: phlogistical treatises establishing fire as the very essence of the body’s composition, abstruse studies on the putrefaction of fish and phosphine emanations as the source of will‑o’-the-wisps, parchment scrolls whose flow of exotic characters dissert on the secret of Greek fire, thirty-volume histories of Bengal lights and fireworks, with a main section of comprehensive reports on Roman candles, missiles, bottle rockets, snakes, and peonies… I continued on my way, pressing the palms of my hands cooled on leather bindings to my cheeks burning with infection. A corridor on high hurled me into the coppery world of pyrometers, a forest of feverish dials, each with a needle more sensitive than the last. As I did not know what units were used to calibrate them, the leaps and quiverings of red cursors as I passed gave me no clear idea of my condition. The corridor led to a vast chamber whose unaffected architecture, based wholly on the interlocking of enormous blocks, informed me that it was most likely located within the city’s walls. No system of lighting allowed me to banish the gloom maintained by two embrasures overgrown with vegetation. So I held my breath, knowing in advance what I would find. Quite soon and without surprise, my blind, outstretched fingers touched the smooth surface of a showcase, and I knew right away I’d made no mistake.

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the setting around me: rows of glass display cases like high upright aquariums holding within their walls the only canvases of ancient masters, invaluable tapestries, fabrics and silks painted long ago by virtuoso brushes. An entire world of irreplaceable portraits, frescoes, triptychs, painted or woven in their time with the help of materials derived from phosphorus pentoxide, and thus endowed with the disagreeable property of spontaneously combusting upon contact with air.

Whence the necessity of keeping them locked up in a vacuum forever within sealed and leaded glass walls that seem at first to insulate them once and for all from any danger. However, trusting in this apparent fact would be to misestimate gravely the great aesthetic perversity of artists on this planet, for not a single one of these protective panes is thick enough to stand up to a simple hurled stone. Some of them—usually those containing artistic treasures beyond compare—are made of the most fragile crystal, and the mere impact of a stray bird, come in through an embrasure and fluttering randomly about, would be enough to crack them from top to bottom, letting the surrounding air in immediately with a shrill whistling. Not a single one of the pyrophoric media on display would last more than a few seconds under such conditions, and the tapestries would consume themselves, victims of an internal combustion, a destruction written into their very pigments, their wool, their threads, from the first day of their existence, when they were created in an airtight tank by an artist in a diving suit in a total vacuum. What could be more riveting than to imagine this obscene and subtle game wherein an artist strives to destroy by creating—wherein, far from wanting to see his work cast in bronze, he toils to make something infinitely more delicate and fragile in which the seed of death might awaken at any moment. From then on, the constant danger can only keep the aesthete, the amateur in a state of rare and powerful exaltation, heightening his perception of things, a sensation not unlike that of trying, in the space of scant seconds, to commit faces from a railway platform to memory because already you know you will never see them again. I retraced my steps, in no hurry, borne by the fever’s torpor. Numb, and yet terrified at having to return to the heat outside.

It is true that here, on this planet, in these streets, beneath these archways, deep in these marble vaults, people die of strange frigid diseases that kill with neither fever nor sweats. “Adiabatism,” a girl once whispered in my ear long ago, in a single word summing up the problem of these bodies that neither receive nor emit heat in any quantity. Whence their fascination with flame, their entire aesthetic, and their morbid cult of incineration. But all this matters little, since after all, my task is not to ponder but to act. I know that they will feel nothing when they burn, that a child out strolling could have his hand on fire, watching his carbonized fingers shrivel, and not stop chewing on his mouthful of candy for a single second. What does it matter, then, if naked couples wallow on sheets damp with fuel and desperately rub their bodies up against each other, knowing all the while that in a few seconds the boy’s pubis, daubed in a crust of phosphorus and potassium chlorate, will strike his partner’s mons veneris, also abrasively lacquered, and this friction will give rise to the spark that will set them both ablaze in a final embrace. What does it matter?

My role will be over in a few hours, as soon as everyone has climbed to the top of the pyre like castaways clinging to the ridge of a tiny desert island and I myself, through streets now empty, have come to the great council chamber where, in the middle of an immense ceremonial table, lost in a vastness of dark varnish, the only match in all the city awaits me.

Perhaps, like some of their kind in other cities, they will have readied for me one of those shapeless white asbestos jumpsuits with a narrow slit of fire-resistant glass at eye level, but such considerations, though they attest to extreme sensitivity, are quite useless.

I will take the match, I will set it on my lips burning with fever, attentive to the quick crackle before ignition, and then with a sweep of my arm, all I’ll have to do is toss it out the window into the nearest fountain overflowing with alcohol. And then…

Then I’ll walk away amidst the first cracklings of the conflagration flowing from fountains in streams, streams to pyres, I will walk out of the city, through the whirlwind of sparks the wind blows into every opening. Perhaps, all the same, I shall wear the asbestos jumpsuit for the sole pleasure of seeing it darken in the whorls of soot…

I will leave through the city’s main gate, careful not to turn back until I’m about to enter the maze of trunks covering the hillside. Then I’ll see smoke, hard and thick in curls and scrolls surging upward like a living tumult atop the towers, making them at last like the factory smokestacks of my imagination, and the conflagration will growl and rumble behind the ramparts with a mighty, muffled roar. When I set foot on the plain, I will turn back once more, to sear deep into my mind the image of the hill become a gargantuan pyre, a mound of flames in the middle of the desert, and listen to the heavy shuddering of the inferno.

When the final flames die away, I will turn back, scaling the hillock once more in the sharp crackle of charred bark. I will climb toward the summit, toward the blackened ramparts, hugging close to my chest the little box of white wood, with its schoolboy-notebook label of two parallel dotted lines framed by the usual thick pink margin. Gently, from the hollow of my palm, I will pour between the four walls of this paltry and fragile receptacle the ashes of a people as vain as the hope of success. At night, my nails sullied with blue ink, fingers tight around the slender stem of my little penholder, I must inscribe, in laborious calligraphy, the name of the city, the planet, and its inhabitants in writing my fiery breath will dry that very instant…

© Éditions Denoël, 1980

The post Sun of Sulfur appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

After you read this story, check out our interview with translator Erik Simon for some background on it and Alfred Leman.

Translated by Erik Simon
From Der unsichtbare Dispatcher (Berlin, 1980).

Kioshi Tokito and Anatol Bykov are plodding over the black sintered tuff. They are silent. There are some things to be discussed, but right now they prefer just to think. Everywhere here is that black tuff, except for a few snowflakes of real water, mixed with a good deal of ammonia. The two men’s chrome-yellow parkas are glittering pink now. Also the little clouds along the steps behind the men look pink in the horizontal rays of the sun. Bykov carries an extraordinary thing on his shoulder, something like a dented metal sheet, shapeless, with large and small holes, covered with a black crust. He is reflecting on his find. Tokito, too, has a trophy. He walks, holding it in the palm of his clumsy glove in front of himself like a host, a little disc, brownish, smooth and covered with frozen metal pearls. And Tokito, too, is considering certain circumstances. “Stop!” says Bykov after several hundred steps. Tokito stops. Bykov walkes ten or twelve steps sideways, bends down, lifts something from the ground and then freezes in a position that seems strange to Tokito. Therefore he goes to Bykov who stares at another piece of metal sheet he has found. It is almost a big as his paw, the edges are corroded, it looks very old and, in that light, pink as well. “Aluminium”, says Bykov unwaveringly, turns the piece over and adds: “Gold. Vapor-deposited gold.” On this side, shining like new, a drawing can be seen. Lines, crossing each other starwise, and a few scrolls near the edge, remainders of some larger picture that has been beaten or melted off. “Those are pulsar frequencies”, says Bykov laconically, Tokito sees that the lines are cut into very precise patterns. After a while he nods agreement. Bykov’s black eyes are radiant like a child’s. “And this they say is a sterile lump?” he asks and stamps his boot mightily upon the tuff, and the other man understands he means the whole planet. “I don’t know,” answers Tokito the rhetoric question. “Has this developed all by itself?” Bykov waves the metal. “No. Surely not,” answers Tokito. Then they march on, Bykov carrying the piece in his hand like a monstrance. After two hundred paces in silence he stops and looks at Tokito in triumph. “But I know something. I know now what these scrolls mean. It’s three feet and a hand.” Both men bend over the piece of metal. “Well?” Bykov tries to hasten Tokito’s understanding. “It’s true,” confirms Tokito seriously, “three feet and a hand.” Bykov views the drawing mit delight, and his imagination completes the picture. “I’ve always hoped they would exist somewhere around here. Such as … well, such as us … Or similar.” Once again, head crooked, he eyes the image of the three feet, then he turns to move on. “I don’t know”, remarks Tokito after some time, and then he hears Bykov say: “We are experiencing something really great.” Bykov murmurs something, moved by the majesty of his insight. This time Tokito is silent. For the time of many steps his face has an absent-minded look. Now Bykov laughs like a boy and marches on so spaciously that Tokito must double the number of his steps. After a quarter of an hour Tokito starts takling. “I remember now,”, he says. “So? What, Kioshi?” Bykov asks lightheartedly, and Tokito answers a bit teachingly, trying to hide compassion: “In the nineteen-seventies a space probe of the Pioneer type launched from Earth was the first space missile to leave the Solar system. It carried with it a gilded aluminium plate with data of some pulsars known at that time and with a picture of a pair of humans. It was an attempt to give word of our existence to the universe.” Tokito falls silent, and now Bykov stands frozen. “This is true?”, he asks an eternity later, though he knows it is, for it was Tokito who said it. “Two hundred years ago,” he aches. “And there is nobody to find the thing. Nobody but us, us dudes.” Then he starts walking on. Tokito goes behind him. Now he can reduce the number of his steps to normal, and it seems to him that Bykov’s arms have become a bit longer.

***

Those thoughts. Now, right now in the last, irretrievable Moment. What silly ideas: People invent beings, raise them out of the inexhaustible dark of inexistence. Morgenstern’s nasobēms making music. Lem’s Tichy in Tentotam, beyond the Milky Way, hunting after the mysterious sepulkes and finding nothing but the bashful blush of the Ardrites. Vonnegut’s hand-eyed little green men who close their raised hands to fists when they don’t want to see what makes them uneasy. Are all those characters really nothing but invention? Last of the crew, Jiri swings into the airlock, and from now on it’s scarcely twenty minutes to takeoff. What brutal cut! Beyond, only bloodless conserves and memories are waiting, bound to fade away. But there is still an image coming through the hatch before it closes. Still it is possible to look outside into the fragrant, gentle air that can caress and sound like the echo of happy laughter. And down there they are standing! Hundreds. They are not green. They are not little. They are kind, and their palms are smooth and blind. But … We asked them about their songs, and they simply snapped themselves shut. All the time they were singing. Whatever they did lead into songs. For three entire years we have asked them about their songs. And for three years they have snapped themselves shut. As soon as the question was there, they hid it behind the shield of a strange smile, snapped shut, and through their nostrils we heard the song humming inside them. They did not stop singing, not even after a thousand questions. But they preserved their secret. They are singing even now. Suddenly I hear a single voice above the soft undulation of sounds, high-pitched as usual. Jiri stands by the translator, pressing the membranes to his ears. Slowly his mouth opens. “Record!”, he shouts, then, whispering with excitement: “He’s speaking about their songs.” The high-pitched voice is muted by the rumble of the lock hatch. The crack is closing. Jiri tears the amplifier from his ears, for there it is, the cut, the takeoff program has no receptor for revelations. Later we ask Gobar why they answered only when it was too late. Gobar used to understand them best. He laughs soundlessly, and we think it’s their way to smile that has wandered upon his face. “If you interrupt a good story you want your listeners to come back to hear the end”, he says. “For three years they have taken care to make their story good enough.” Gobar is looking straight through us in a strange way. What is on his mind now?

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Weird Fiction Review: What was Leman’s life like before he became a writer?

Erik Simon: Leman was born in 1925 in Nordhausen and spent his whole life in Thuringia, except a short time around the end of World War II when he was first as a soldier and then as a POW. After returning from an American/British prison camp, he became a teacher, later he studied biology and chemistry in Jena where he spent the whole rest of his life, and earned a diploma (then the German equivalent to a MSc) and a doctor’s degree in biology. He then worked in the Research Department of Carl Zeiss Jena, a rather important optics company, till 1985 when he was allowed to retire for reasons of fragile health. So he never was a full-time writer.

WFR: Can you give us an overview of Leman’s work as an author? What sort of works did Leman write?

ES: His first two books, co-written with two collegues, were scientific textbooks on botanics, still in use at the Universities today. All his fiction is strictly SF: two story collections (1973, 1980), two novels (1986, 1991), and a number of stories published in anthologies which would make up at least one more collection. The first story collection, The Gift from the Transsolarian Guestswritten together with Hans Taubert, one of Leman’s collaborators on the textbooks, was very important for the development of SF in the German Democratic Republic – it was, in fact, the first SF story collection of any quality, and it was international quality right from the start. All the following books and stories were written by Leman alone, without much change in themes, quality, or style. The second collection, The Invisible Dispatcher, contains what I consider Leman’s best story (rather a novellette), „The Revision“; SF criticism in the GDR generally shared this opinion.

Most of Leman’s SF (not all) is centered around two themes: encounters with alien life forms (not necessarily intelligent) or with their traces, and life in a highly computerized and automated near-future world that has become so complex that for the individual, it is almost stochastic and unpredictable except in tems of probability. (No cyberpunk, though.) There is a slight shift from the first theme that dominates in the story collections towards the second theme that becomes more prominent in the novels and the later stories. Biological complexity appears in several of the early stories, but with centering on social complexity rather, the novels themselves grew more complex. The first novel, Black Flowers on Barnard 3, combines not only both themes but also novel and short stories: An interstellar spaceship dumps a group of astronauts together with tons of equipment on the third planet of Barnard’s star simply too loose weight. The people must not explore the planet, their only task is to sit in their camp and wait till the ship will come along on its way back and take them aboard again. Against their will they get into trouble – namely, into contact with the planet’s intelligent aboriginals who are quite different from people not only biologically but even more so psychically. Inserted into this main novel plot are several episodes that might be stand-alone short stories as well, each telling a story from the former life of one of the astronauts, displaying rather different themes of their own but also adding to the protagonist’s character as it shows itself in the main plot.

WFR: How does “Two Episodes” fit in with his oeuvre both historically and thematically?

ES: It appeared in Leman’s second story collection, and it fits in well in both respects except for its form, a kind of stream of consciousness all in one paragraph. Especially the second episode is a kind of highly condensed Leman story. There is a third such miniature in the collection which, at least thematically, in fact can be considered a condensed version of the title story in The Gift from the Transsolarian Guests. All other Leman stories are written in a more traditional style, but in the same very quiet, unexcited tone, only hinting at certain facts and at the protagonists’ thoughts and reasons.

WFR: Have other works by Leman been translated into English or is “Two Episodes” a first?

ES: No translations into English, at least not to my knowledge. Quite a lot of his stories were reprinted in (West) German anthologies in the seventies and eighties (a few even appeared there for the first time), and translated in Eastern (including Eastern Central) Europe.

WFR: In “Two Episodes,” Leman mentions Stanisław Lem and Kurt Vonnegut. What authors influenced or may have influenced Leman’s work?

ES: From the second collection on (and possibly earlier) the influence of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky can be felt. The possible influence of Anglo-American SF on Leman must have been quite limited for the simple reason that very few of it appeared in the German Democratic Republic before the mid-seventies, original books from the West were not sold in the GDR, and for most of the time their import was simply prohibited. In their condensed form, the Two Episodes may be influenced by stories from Herbert W. Franke’s collection The Green Comet; a few of them appeared in the GDR in 1974, and 16 more in 1978. They cannot possibly have influenced the stories in the first collection, but in fact that collection by Leman & Taubert did for SF in the GDR what Franke’s stories had done about ten years ealier for the SF of (West) Germany and Austria: they established a paragon of stories full of the sense of wonder.

There are similarities between Leman’s SF and some stories by Bradbury (the kind we have in The Illustrated Man) or, say, by Le Guin (stories only, not her novels). In the case of Bradbury, there may have been some influence as well, while Le Guin was published too late in the GDR to influence Leman.

A clear but very limited influence can be traced in the title story of the second collection: „The Invisible Dispatcher“ is, as Leman himself stated in a postscript to the story, a SF version of „The Invisible Japanese“ by Graham Greene: the plot is quite exactly the same, with a rather strange alien life form appearing instead of the Japanese tourists, and going completely unnoticed by the protagonist who all the time boasts beeing such a great observer.

WFR: I’m interested to know more about German speculative fiction. Who were Leman’s contemporaries? How does German scifi/fantasy works differ from American/British ones (if at all)? 

ES: First of all I must say that I am more interested in short stories than in novels, so I tend to see things from that point of few. Second, SF in the German language consists of four parts: pre-war, SF in the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria till 1990 (the two forming a single marked) opposed to SF in the GDR, and SF in Germany and Austria since 1990. The four sections show different features, a common feature is that German SF (and later, fantasy) was and is much more oriented towards novels instead of short stories. There never was any fully professional SF magazine in the German language (except for several short-lived attempts).

Post-war German SF has been shaped more or less according to patterns of Anglo-American SF. This is, to some extend, true even for the SF in the GDR, where the influence was indirect and came later, namely, via Russian SF which, in turn, was influenced by a large number of American/British SF published in the Soviet Union in the sixties and early seventies. (Mainly the classical big names: Asimov Bradbury Clarke Simak Sheckley … Wells, of course, and a few less typical names like Vonnegut.) SF in the German language preserved, though, some more typical traits of European literature, including (sometimes) a less straight narrative, which in the best case results in more complexity, and in the worst, in a boring attitude of teaching morals. With a lot of “normal” stories in between, i.e. those in the tradition of Anglo-American magazine SF.

The most specific feature of GDR SF (in its best specimina only) was the existence of a specific type of reader: Life under censorship (sometimes rather liberal, sometimes rigid and entirely illogical) teaches the reader to read carefully, to look for hints, for meanings behind the surface of the narrative. It also increased interest in a kind of literature like SF which in fact very seldom criticised the official politics and ideology but quite often told of things far away from the official propaganda. SF in the GDR was a branch of literature not much respected, not much controlled by the state, not much important, and extremely popular with the readers.

German fantasy is quite different. Some of it simply apes the standards (Sword & Sorcery, etc.), and usually doesn’t do it well, but a few writers like Cornelia Funke have written some interesting things indeed. I am not qualified to discuss this in much detail, though.

WFR: Are there other notable German authors that may be of interest to speculative fiction fans?

ES: Sure, but this is a wide field, and a complex question. Have a look at the anthology The Black Mirror (ed. by Franz Rottensteiner, Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2008), this is the best overview to start with, but of course you cannot cover such a large field in one volume. For GDR SF the book’s main blind spot is Leman; other notable GDR writers not covered there are Gert Prokop and Bernd Ulbrich. For the period from 1990 on, important authors missing in that anthology include Karsten Kruschel and Heidrun Jänchen, both of the next generation after my own. Especially Heidrun was an incredibly good writer of SF short stories, but she seems to have fallen silent two years ago, probably disappointed by the fact that for about 15 years, no big publishing house has ever printed any new German SF short stories, so the entire field is limited now to semi-pro magazines and small press. Very small press, alas.

The post Erik Simon on Alfred Leman’s “Two Episodes” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The first impression was magnificent. That’s what he would remember later. A friendly voice kept repeating in his ear, “Please open your eyes, Sir!” And when he was finally able to comply, his first thoughts were a wordless hymn of delight.

The India of 2099! One hundred years had passed since the time he had stepped into a transit chamber that would keep him in suspended sleep. Now he saw a luxurious green plain spreading away towards a haze-free horizon. Mango trees in a nearby orchard filled his senses with their fragrance. White clouds were scudding against a blinding blue sky. Before him, in the distance, he saw India Gate, still standing proud and tall. Behind him, when his seat was swivelled, he saw the Qutub Minar. He remembered being surprised to see both monuments within the same radius of sight but told himself not to fuss with explanations just yet.

The friendly voice that had woken him from his transit-sleep belonged to a machine. It looked like a well-endowed human female wearing nothing at all. “Hello!” it said, when he was ready to tear his attention away from the splendid vista in front of him, “My name is Tina! I am your personal assistant!” He was still very stiff, however. “Please do not attempt to turn your head, Sir!” said Tina. “That function is not presently available to you.” There was a tiny click. “If you have understood this message please blink your eyelids once <click> If you have any questions, please blink your eyelids twice <click> Thank you, Sir! Please wait a moment <click> Your query will be attended to very shortly by a live attendant.”

As it sped away, the man wondered idly how such beings were referred to in this future era. Were they accorded the dignity of gender? Or were they treated like animatronic cell-phones? He felt no urgency to find out. For the time being he was content to remain as he was, floating in a transparent, lightweight capsule filled with an odorless, friction-free gel. It would be a while before his body would function normally, after a century of inactivity.

He had been the editor of a prestigious newsmagazine at the time of signing up for the perma-sleep program, known then as PSP. He burned with curiosity. How had the astounding turn-around in the country’s profile taken place? The citizens he could see from his vantage point looked physically Indian, but they seemed more relaxed and leisurely than the people he had left behind in his time. There was none of that frenzied jostling, that reckless energy born of desperation that had characterized the country he remembered.

It was strange, he realized, to see an India that looked neat and orderly. There were no crowds thronging the broad avenues. No snarling traffic jams. No gritty blanket of smog. It might almost be a different culture altogether. He paused that thought with a guilty shrug. It seemed disloyal to believe that the country of his birth would lose its character by cleaning up its act.

He was just learning to flex the corners of his mouth up in the beginnings of a smile, when he heard a warning tone of the sort that would, in his era, have been used to signal an airport departure. Sure enough, he found himself being whisked away from his viewing window by another robotic attendant just as unclothed and mechanical as Tina. It did not speak to him, however, so he had no option but to shut his eyes and wait as he was whisked away to a new location.

In this way he found himself being transported across the whole length and breadth of the country. In quick succession he saw Konarak, Kanyakumari, the Elephanta Caves, Mahabalipuram, the Dal Lake, Jaisalmer, Hampi and the Sunderbans. Each time he opened his eyes, he found that his body was a little more flexible. By the time he was looking out at the Udaipur Lake Palace, he was almost ready to take his first few steps. Better still, he was no longer alone. The long-promised “live attendants” had finally caught up with him.

They introduced themselves. “I’m Rosh, Sir,” said the young man bending deferentially towards him. “This is Vinny and that’s Hozanna. Your very own welcome-back team, Sir! We are delighted to make your acquaintance. The month is what was called December in your era and the time is approximately eight o’clock, fifty-two minutes and twelve seconds in sexagesimal units.” The young man stammered slightly over the unfamiliar words, adding, “We call this month Ten and the time, in today’s decimal units, is 8.87.”

All three were doctors who specialized in PSP revivals. “Please, Sir, it will be another few days before you can speak,” they said, when he struggled to move his vocal cords. But they allowed him to watch documentaries.

From these he learnt that the country was prosperous beyond the wildest dreams of the nationalists of his era. There seemed to be a slight shift in the name, however. He thought he heard newsreaders referring to the country as India, but in the subtitles the name was rendered as “I‑O-I”. He wondered what the letters stood for. He was not at liberty to choose what he saw, so he could not be sure to what extent he was being fed propaganda. But by whom and with what slant, he could not tell. The language he heard was neither English nor Hindi, yet he understood it easily. He guessed there was a sophisticated translation device implanted in his ears. Or, more likely, in his brain.

Food was plentiful. From the documentaries he learnt that it was mass-processed from natural materials, then reformed into shapes and flavors to suit the individual tastes of its consumers. Reverse-gravitation platforms made it possible to cause heavy objects to float so that, for instance, others could transport him from place to place without any effort on his or their part. Air, water, power and money –everything that in 1999 had been scarce was now available in such abundance it was obviously not considered newsworthy. Instead, the whole focus of broadcasters was on the fearsome calamities taking place among the teeming communities of Extra-Terrestrial Indians.

It was the existence of these colonies that explained the country’s prosperity, the editor gradually realized. India had apparently been at the forefront of a gigantic space-colonization campaign. Countless documentaries named the fearless explorers who had soared up into the starry wastes of space in the late 2030s. Millions had lost their lives in these migrations, but hundreds of millions had clearly survived too. The planet they had gone to was what the editor would have called Mars. It had been renamed several times depending on which ethnic community had the upper hand in the inter-planetary broadcasting service. Currently it went under the name of “Kalki”.

He learnt that the community known collectively as the Ordinaries occupied two-thirds of the planet. They were divided into Hindus, Muslims and OMs – Other Minorities. They fought vicious battles for space, food, water and political advantage. With limited resources for farming, socially accepted forms of cannibalism were practiced. It was referred to as “recycling” and every citizen was exhorted to make his or her meat available to the community by choosing early, voluntary death.

The remaining third of the planet had been taken over by a community referred to by broadcasters as “The Mutants”. They had no official broadcasting channels however, so the editor could gain no insights into their culture or origin. When he indicated to his welcome-back team that he would like more information about this mysterious group, he was informed that controversial subjects were to be avoided till he could talk.

On the morning of his speech-day, a special outing was planned to the Taj Mahal. When he was finally in front of it, tears flooded his eyes and his first words were thick with emotion as he said, “It’s … still … so … beautiful.” His team beamed with pleasure. That was what most Revivees said, they told him.

It took him a little longer to achieve the conversational skills that enabled him to ask more probing questions. It was only then that he learned about the bombs. Two blasts. They had occurred one after the other, they said, in the first quarter of the new century.

Vast tracts in the north of the country had been rendered uninhabitable on account of radiation. “Within 10 years, the Mutants began to appear,” said Rosh. They were the genetically deformed children spawned by the fallout of the bombs. Those who survived to the ages of nine or 10 years, possessed highly radioactive yet viable metabolisms. As a result, their very presence in the same room as an Ordinary constituted an assault with a deadly weapon. The so-called Great Migrations had begun right around the time that these diminutive warriors were becoming the dominant violent underclass. Having established their strongholds on the red planet, their numbers grew. Their stated aim was to annihilate the Ordinaries there, return to the Home Planet and annihilate all Ordinaries, everywhere.

“The international community on Earth considers the threat of Mutant invasions the most serious that our world has ever faced,” said Vinny. The editor expressed amazement that the Mutants had ever been given the opportunity to gain a foothold on Kalki. He looked from one to the other of the young team. He saw them exchange slight nods as a mood of quiet resignation bowed their shoulders.

“This is going to be hard for you to understand, Sir…” said Rosh. The expression in his eyes was sad. “The documentaries you have watched have not been entirely honest. You see, Kalki was set up to be a prison colony …”

At the time of the blasts, the international community had insisted that the sub-continent be made to pay dearly for the catastrophic damage caused to the planet. “So,” said Rosh, “the countries involved in the conflict were rendered to the charge of the international community.”

The editor gaped, unwilling to accept what this meant. Vinny nodded. “Yes, Sir,” he confirmed, “the country you knew as India is not today, in a continuous sense, a sovereign state any more.”

It had been split up into sectors, they told him. Radiation-free zones. Collectively, these zones were known by the acronym “I‑O-I”. It stood for the “Idea of India” and was based on the physical boundaries of British India during the Raj. The sectors were physically far apart, but modern transportation techniques made it possible to translocate across the different bits of the nation to create a “virtual continuity”. When shown a true-contour map, the editor saw unrecognizable strips representing the land of his birth. Some were broad, some thin, some sideways, some twisted. He had intentionally been shown only those landmarks that he associated with the nation he had known as India.

The welcome team went on to describe the many advantages of this system. The colonization of Kalki had made the region prosperous, for instance, which greatly softened the blow to national prestige. The international community had assisted very generously with the reconstruction and maintenance of the virtual continuity. National monuments had been meticulously restored.

The editor listened in silence. He recalled, now, the sense of foreboding with which he had entered the PSP transit chamber all those many years ago, in the final days of 1999. He’d signed up for the program because he’d wanted to put his hope in the future rather than succumb to the sense of doom that had gripped the nation at the close of the last century. But the future had turned to be even worse than what he and his colleagues had feared it might be, given the developments.

The Great Migrations had been a mandatory price imposed by the international community upon the nations of the subcontinent, not a choice. Sending millions of sub-continentals to Kalki had been one of the solutions to the problems caused by endemic over-population, disease and illiteracy. Ensuring that all Mutants were also transported out to Kalki was another of the solutions to the crisis created by their presence on Earth.

“Unfortunately it was not a very effective,” admitted Hozanna. “Even now some members of the Earth Council are demanding that unless the I‑O-I can guarantee the security of the planet before the end of this century, we may have to give up even the illusion of being a sovereign state. War will be declared on Kalki. All citizens of that planet will be considered enemies of Earth. The countries that once defined the region of the subcontinent will be struck from the record of reality. All our cultural artefacts will be reassigned to other nations.”

The old editor’s heart shrank to imagine this fate. For himself though, the choice was clear. “Onward,” he said, gruffly, pointing towards the PSP chamber he had emerged from. “Take me to the end of the next century!”

The post 2099 appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Sever Feliksovich Gansovsky (1918–1990) was a prominent Soviet writer of fiction, including science fiction. He wrote some of the best short stories of his generation, several of them collected in English in Macmillan’s Best of Soviet Science Fiction anthologies in the 1980s. He received the Russian Aelita Award in 1989. There is a fierce intelligence to all of Gansovsky’s fiction, wedded to a spare but effective characterization underpinned by a keen observation of the absurdities and ruthlessness of human nature.

In the classic Gansovsky story “Day of Wrath” (1964), a biological experiment creates human-like creatures with superior intellectual abilities that terrorize the Russian countryside. With echoes of H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau, Gansovsky’s story from Soviet Russia easily rivals that of any of his Western counterparts. This new translation by James Womack is part of our Strange Scifi Summer and appears in The Big Book of Science Fiction, out this summer from Vintage. Be sure to also check out our interview with the Womacks about translating science fiction.

***

Chairman: You read in several languages, you are familiar with higher mathematics
and can perform all manner of work. Do you think that this makes you human?
Otark: Yes, of course. Do humans know how to do anything else?
(From the cross-examination of an otark. State Commission Materials.)

Two riders came out of the thickly overgrown valley and started to climb the mountain. In front, on a roan with a twisted nose, rode the forester, and Donald Betly followed him on a chestnut mare. The mare slipped on the stony path and fell to her knees. Betly, who had been lost in thought, nearly fell off because the saddle—an English racing saddle with a single strap—slid forward down the horse’s neck.

The forester waited for him further up.

‘Don’t let her put her head down, she always slips.’

Betly, swallowing his anger, shot him a frustrated glance. Devil take it, he could have warned me about that earlier. He was cross with himself as well, because the horse had fooled him. When Betly had saddled her up, she had breathed in, so that the strap would be completely loose.

He pulled so hard on the reins that the horse danced about and moved backwards.

The path had levelled out again. They were riding across a mesa, and in front of them the hilltops were visible, covered in fir forests.

The horses took long strides, sometimes breaking into a trot and trying to overtake one another. Whenever the mare nudged ahead, Betly could see the sunburnt, cleanly shaven thin cheeks of the forester and his sullen eyes, fixed on the road ahead. It was as if he didn’t notice the presence of his companion.

‘I’m too direct,’ Betly thought. ‘And that doesn’t help me. I’ve tried to strike up conversation with him a handful of times, and he either answers me in monosyllables or else doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t think I’m worth anything. He thinks that if someone wants to talk, then he’s a chatterbox and doesn’t need any respect. Out here in the wilds they don’t know how to take the measure of things. They think that being a journalist doesn’t mean anything. Even a journalist like… Anyway, I won’t talk to him either. Damn it!’

But step by step his mood improved. Betly was a successful man and thought that everyone else should love life as much as he did. He was surprised at the forester’s aloofness, but didn’t feel any animosity towards him.

The weather, which had been bad in the morning, was starting to clear up. The fog melted away. The dull sheet over the sky had broken up into separate clouds. Huge shadows moved swiftly over the dark forests and valleys, and this emphasised the cruel, wild and somehow liberated character of the place.

Betly slapped the mare on her damp neck that smelt of sweat.

‘They must have hobbled your front legs when they let you out to graze, and that’s why you slip. But we’ll be alright together.’

He stopped pulling back on the reins and caught up with the forester.

‘Excuse me, Mister Meller, were you born around here?’

‘No,’ the forester replied, without turning round.

‘Where were you born then?’

‘A long way away.’

‘And have you been here for a long time?’

‘A while.’ Meller turned to the journalist. ‘You should talk a little more quietly. They might hear you.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The otarks, of course. They’ll hear you and tell the others. Or they could ambush us, jump out from behind and rip us to pieces… And it would be better if they didn’t know why we’re here.’

‘Do they attack people often? It says in the papers that such things almost never happen.’

The forester was silent.

‘And do they attack in person?’ Betly involuntarily looked over his shoulder. ‘Or do they shoot people as well? Do they have weapons? Rifles, machine guns?’

‘They only rarely shoot. Their hands aren’t made for it. Not hands, paws. They’re clumsy with weapons.’

‘Paws,’ Betly repeated. ‘So people here don’t think of them as human?’

‘Who, us?’

‘Yes, you. The people who live here.’

The forester spat.

‘Of course they’re not human. No one here thinks that they are.’

He spoke in bursts. Betly had already forgotten his vow of silence.

‘So, have you ever spoken to them? Is it true that they can speak quite well?’

‘The older ones can speak. The ones who were here when the laboratory was working… The younger ones speak worse. But they are much more dangerous. They are cleverer, their heads are twice the size.’ The forester suddenly reined in his horse. His voice was bitter. ‘Look, there’s no point discussing all this. It’s all useless. I’ve answered these questions a dozen times already.’

‘What’s all useless?’

‘All of it, this trip. You won’t get anything out of it. Everything will stay as it is.’

‘Why does it have to? I’m from an influential paper. We have a lot of influence. They’re gathering material for a Senate Commission. If it is shown that the otarks are really so dangerous, then steps will be taken. You must know that this time they are getting ready to send out the troops against them.’

‘Even so, nothing’s going to happen,’ the forester sighed. ‘You’re not the first person to come here. Every year someone comes, and they’re only interested in the otarks. But not in the people who have to live with them. Everyone asks: “Is it true that they can learn geometry? Are there really otarks who can understand the theory of relativity?” As if that meant anything at all! As if that were a reason not to destroy them!’

‘But that’s why I’m here,’ Betly began, ‘to gather material for the Commission. And then the whole country will know that…’

‘And you think that the others weren’t gathering material?’ Meller interrupted. ‘And… and how are you going to understand the situation here? You need to live here to understand it. It’s one thing to pass through, and another to be here the whole time. Oh, what’s the point of talking? Let’s go.’ He nudged his horse. ‘Here’s where their range begins, anyway. From this valley onwards.’

The journalist and the forester had reached the top of a hill. The path headed down in a zigzag from under the horse’s hooves.

A long way beneath them lay the brush-filled valley, cut in two lengthwise by a narrow stony river. The forest rose in a sheer wall straight from the stream, and beyond it in the immeasurable distance the snow-whitened slopes of the Chief mountain range.

You could see for tens of kilometres all around from here, but Betly saw no signs of life: no smoke from a chimney, not a single haystack. It was as if the place had died.

The sun hid behind some clouds, all at once it grew cold, and the journalist suddenly felt that he did not want to go down after the forester. He coldly shrugged his shoulders. He recalled the warm, heated air of his city apartment, the bright warm office at the newspaper. But then he pulled himself together. ‘Rubbish, I been in worse situations than this. What do I have to be afraid of? I’m an excellent shot, and I have very good reactions. Who else could they have sent instead of me?’ He saw Meller unshoulder his rifle, and did the same with his own weapon.

The mare carefully lifted its feet on the narrow path.

When they were at the bottom of the hill, Meller said:

‘We should try to ride abreast. Better not to talk. We need to get to Steglich’s farm by around eight. We’ll spend the night there.’

They spurred their horses on and rode for about two hours in silence. They headed up and rode round Mount Bear, keeping the forest wall to their right at all times, the drop off to their left, covered in bushes, but so small and sparse that no one could hide among them. They went down to the river and went along its rocky bottom until they reached an abandoned asphalted road, the surface cracked with grass growing through it.

As they rode along the asphalt, Meller suddenly stopped his horse and listened. Then he dismounted, got to his knees and put his ear to the ground.

‘Something’s not right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Someone’s galloping after us. Let’s get off the road.’

Betly also dismounted and they led the horses into a ditch in a clump of alders.

About two minutes later, the journalist heard the clattering of hooves. They came closer. You could feel that the rider was going flat out.

Then through the faded leaves they saw a grey horse galloping hard. On it, sitting awkwardly, was a man wearing yellow riding breeches and an anorak. He came so close that Betly got a good look at the man’s face and realised that he had seen him before. He even remembered where. Back in town there had been a group of people standing around outside the bar. Five or six men, dirty, badly dressed. They all had the same eyes. Lazy, half-closed, impertinent. The journalist knew those eyes—gangsters’ eyes.

As soon as the horseman had come past, Meller rushed out into the road.

‘Hey!’

The man pulled on his horse’s reins and stopped.

‘Hey, wait!’

The rider looked back, and obviously recognised the forester. For a few moments they looked at one another. Then the man waved, turned his horse round, and rode on.

The forester stared after him as the noise of the hooves dies away in the distance. Then he suddenly hit his head with his fist and groaned.

‘It’s not going to work now, that’s for certain.’

‘What is it?’ Betly asked. He had come out from among the bushes as well.

‘Nothing. It’s just put an end to our plan.’

‘But why?’ The journalist looked at the forester and was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

‘It’s all over now,’ Meller said, as he turned and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘The bastards! Bastards!’

‘Listen to me.’ Betly had started to lose his patience as well. If you’re going to get so worked up, then there’s really no point carrying on.’

‘Worked up?’ the forester exclaimed. ‘You think I’ve got worked up? Just look at this!’

He waved his hand at a branch of a pine tree with reddish cones on it, hanging over the road about thirty paces away from them.

Betly still had not realised why he was supposed to be looking at it, when a shot thundered out, he got a strong whiff of gunpowder, and the last pinecone, hanging by itself, dropped down onto the asphalt.

‘That’s how worked up I am,’ Meller said, and went into the clump of alders for his horse.

They reached the farm just as night was falling.

Out of the unfinished log house came a tall dark-bearded man with dishevelled hair who stood watching in silence how Betly and the forester unsaddled their horses. Then a woman came out onto the porch, red-haired and with a flat expressionless face, ungroomed as well. And three children came after her. Two boys of eight or nine years old and a girl aged about thirteen, skinny as if drawn with a single crooked line.

The five of them were not at all surprised at Meller and the journalist: they were not happy or sad. They just stood and stared in silence. Betly didn’t like the silence.

Over dinner he tried to start a conversation.

‘Tell me, how do you get on with the otarks? Are they really very troublesome?’

‘What? the dark-bearded farmer put his palm to his ear and bent over the table. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Speak up. I don’t hear so good.’

This was how things went on for a few minutes, and the farmer very clearly did not want to understand what was wanted of him. In the end he spread his hands. Yes, there are otarks here. Do they bother him? No, they don’t bother him personally. He doesn’t know about the others. He can’t say anything about them.

In the middle of this conversation the thin girl stood up, threw a shawl round her shoulders and left without saying a word to anyone.

As soon as all the plates were empty the farmer’s wife brought two mattresses out of another room and started to lay them out for the visitors.

But Meller stopped her.

‘I think it would be better if we slept in the barn.’

The woman stood up without saying a word. The farmer jumped up from the table.

‘Why? Sleep here.’

But the forester had already picked up the mattresses.

The farmer led them into the high barn with a lamp. He watched for a minute as they got themselves ready, and for a moment there was an expression on his face as though he wished to say something. But he only raised his hand and rubbed his head. Then he left.

‘What’s all this about?’ Betly asked. ‘The otarks won’t get into the house, surely?’

Meller picked up a thick plank from the floor and forced it up against the heavy solid door, checking that it didn’t slip away.

‘Go to bed,’ he said. ‘Anything can happen. They get into houses as well.’

The journalist sat on the mattress and started to unlace his boots.

‘Tell me, are there any real bears left here? Not otarks, but real wild bears. Didn’t there used to be a lot of bears wandering around here, in the forest?

‘There aren’t any more,’ Meller replied. ‘The first thing that the otarks did when they broke out of the laboratory and got off the island was to destroy all the real bears. And the wolves. And there used to be raccoons and foxes—all the normal animals. They took poison from the ruined laboratory and poisoned the smaller animals. There were dead wolves lying around all over the place—for some reason they didn’t eat the wolves. But they ate the bears. They sometimes even eat each other.’

‘They eat each other?’

‘Of course, they’re not people. You don’t know what to expect from them.’

‘Do you think they’re just animals?’

‘No.’ The forester shook his head. ‘We don’t think they’re wild animals. That’s the kind of thing they argue about in the cities, if they’re people or animals. Out here we know that they’re neither one thing nor the other. Don’t you see, it used to be like this: there were people and there were animals. And now there’s something else: the otarks. This is the first time such a thing has happened in the whole history of the world. Otarks aren’t animals—it would be great if they were just animals. But they’re not people either, of course.’

‘Tell me,’ Betly felt that he couldn’t stop himself asking the question, even though he knew it was banal, ‘is it true that they find it very easy to learn higher mathematics?’

The forester turned sharply towards him.

‘Listen, shut up about mathematics for once! Just shut up! I don’t give a toss if they know higher mathematics! Yeah, the otarks can do complicated maths standing on their heads! So what? You need to be a person, that’s what the question really is.’

He turned away and bit his lip.

‘He’s worked up,’ Betly thought. ‘He’s still really worked up. He’s not a healthy man.’

But the forester had already calmed down. He was uncomfortable to have flown off the handle. After a short silence, he asked:

‘Sorry, but have you seen him?’

‘Who?’

‘You know, the genius. Fidler.’

‘Fidler? Yes, I’ve seen him. I spoke to him just before I came out here. The newspaper sent me.’

‘I guess they keep him wrapped up in plastic over there? So he doesn’t get a single drop of rain on him.’

‘Yes, they look after him.’ Betly remembered how they had checked his pass and frisked him for the first time by the walls of the Science Centre. Then they had searched him again and checked his pass again at the entrance to the Institute. And the third search just before they let him into the garden where Fidler came out to meet him. ‘They look after him. But he is a truly gifted mathematician. He was only thirteen when he wrote his Corrections to the General Theory of Relativity. Of course, he’s an unusual man, you’d have to be.’

‘But what does he look like?’

‘What does he look like?’

The journalist hesitated. He remembered Fidler coming out into the garden in his baggy white suit. There was something odd about his figure. His hips were wide, his shoulders narrow. A short neck… It had been a strange interview, because Betly felt that it was rather he who was being interviewed. Fidler had answered his questions. But somehow frivolously. As if he were laughing at the journalist and at the whole world of normal people out there, behind the walls of the Science Centre. And he asked questions as well. Strange, almost foolish questions. Rubbish, like whether Betly liked carrot juice. As if the conversation were an experiment and he, Fidler, was carrying out research into a normal person.

‘Averagely tall,’ Betly said. ‘Small eyes… Have you really never seen him? He’s been here, out at the lake and in the laboratory.’

‘He came twice,’ Meller replied. ‘But he had so much security with him that they wouldn’t even let dead people get within a mile of him. That was back when they still kept the otarks behind fences, when Reichhardt and Klein were working with them. They ate Klein. And when the otarks escaped, Fidler never showed his face here again… What does he say about the otarks now?’

‘About the otarks? He said that they were a very interesting scientific experiment. Very challenging. But he’s not involved with them at the moment. He’s doing something to do with cosmic rays… He said that he was sorry for the victims.’

‘And why did they do all this? What for?’

‘How can I put it?’ Betly thought for a moment. ‘Something that happens a lot in science is what if. It’s led to a lot of discoveries.’

‘What do you mean, what if?’

‘Well, for example, What if we put an electrified wire into a magnetic field? And then you get the electric motor… I suppose what if just means experimentation.’

‘Experimentation.’ Meller ground his teeth. ‘They did an experiment: they let man-eaters out among people. And now no one thinks about us. You’ll get by as best you can. Fidler’s given up on the otarks and on us as well. And they’ve bred and there are hundreds of them now, and no one knows what they’re plotting against us people.’ He stopped talking and sighed. ‘The things these scientists think up! Making wild animals cleverer than people. They’ve gone crazy, the people who live in cities. Atom bombs and now this. They must really want to bring the human race to an end.’

He stood up, took his loaded rifle and laid it beside him on the floor.

‘Listen, Mister Betly. If there is an alarm, if someone starts knocking or trying to break the door down, you just lie there. Or else we’ll shoot each other in the dark. You lie there; I know what to do. I’m so well trained I’m like a dog, I’ll wake up just from instinct.’

In the morning, when Betly left the barn, the sun was shining so brightly and the rain-washed greenery was so fresh that the conversation they had last night seemed no more than a scary story.

The black-bearded farmer was already out in his field—the white patch of his shirt showed on the other side of the river. For a moment the journalist thought that this might be happiness—to get up at sunrise, not to know the worry and bustle of a difficult city life, to do business only with the handle of your spade, with the clods of dark brown earth.

But the forester quickly brought him back to reality. He appeared from behind the barn with his rifle in his hand.

‘Come on, I want to show you something.’

They walked round the barn and came out into the kitchen garden that backed up against the house. Here Meller behaved strangely. Bent double, he rushed past the bushes and stopped in a ditch next to the potato beds. Then he made a sign for the journalist to do the same.

They started to follow the ditch round the kitchen garden. At one point a woman’s voice could be heard in the house, but it was impossible to hear what she said.

Meller stopped.

‘Look here.’

‘What is it?’

‘You said you were a hunter. Look!’

On a patch of bare earth among the tangled grass was a clear five-toed footprint.

‘A bear?’ Betly said hopefully.

‘What bear? There haven’t been bears here for a long time.’

‘So is it an otark?’

The forester nodded.

‘It’s fresh,’ the journalist whispered.

‘From last night,’ Meller said. ‘You see it’s damp. They were in the house before it rained.’

‘In the house?’ Betly felt a cold shiver down his spine, as if something metal had pressed against it. ‘Right in the house?’

The forester did not answer, he jerked his head in the direction of the ditch, and both of them went back the way they had come.

When they got to the barn, Meller waited while Betly got his breath back.

‘I thought as much last night. When we got here last night and Steglich started to pretend that he couldn’t hear. He just wanted us to speak more loudly so that the otark could hear everything. The otark was in the other room.’

The journalist’s voice was hoarse.

‘What are you saying? People are taking sides with the otarks? Against real people?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ the forester said. ‘What do you mean, “taking sides”? Steglich couldn’t do anything else. The otark came and it stayed. That happens a lot. An otark comes and lies down, for example, in the bedroom. Or else they just throw people out of their houses and live there for a day or two.’

‘And what about the people? Do they just put up with it? Why don’t they shoot them?’

‘How are they going to shoot them, if the woods are filled with other otarks? The farmer has children, and cattle that he wants to pasture in the fields, and a house that could burn down… But the children are the most important. The otarks can take them. Can you really keep an eye on your children? And they’ve taken all the rifles anyway. That happened right at the start. In the first year.’

‘And people just gave them up?’

‘What could they do? The ones who didn’t surrender their weapons were sorry…’

He did not finish his sentence and suddenly stared at the willow coppice about fifteen paces away from them.

What happened next took only two or three seconds.

Meller lifted up his rifle and cocked it. At the same time a dark brown mass rose from the bushes, its large eyes sparkling, wicked and frightened, and said:

‘Hey, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’

Instinctively the journalist grabbed Meller’s shoulder. A shot rang out but the bullet just nicked a tree. The brown mass bent double and rolled like a ball into the forest and disappeared between the trees. For a few moments all that could be heard was the cracking of twigs, then everything fell silent.

‘What the hell!’ The forester turned round in a fury. ‘Why did you do that?’

The journalist, turning pale, whispered:

‘He spoke just like a human… He asked you not to shoot.’

For a second the forester looked at him, then his anger turned into a tired indifference. He lowered his rifle.

‘Alright… The first time it causes quite an impression.’

There was a rustle behind them. They both turned.

The farmer’s wife said:

‘Come and eat. I’ve already laid the table.’

While they ate they all pretended that nothing had happened.

After breakfast the farmer helped them saddle their horses. They left without saying anything.

When they had ridden off, Meller asked:

‘What’s your plan, then? I didn’t catch it. All they said was that I should ride you round the mountains, and that was it.’

‘What’s my plan? Well, I want to go around in the mountains, yes. To see people, the more the better. To get to know the otarks, if the opportunity presents itself. In a word, to get a sense of the atmosphere.’

‘Were you getting it back on the farm?’

Betly shrugged.

The forester suddenly reined in his horse.

‘Shush…’

He listened.

‘Someone’s running after us… Something’s happened on the farm.’

Betly had no time to wonder at the forester’s hearing, when a shout came from behind them:

‘Hey, Meller! Hey!’

They turned their horses and the farmer, panting, came up to them. He almost fell over, and grabbed the pommel of Meller’s saddle.

‘The otark took Tina. He’s dragged her off to Moose Canyon.’

He gulped at the air; drops of sweat fell from his forehead.

With a single movement, the forester pulled the farmer up onto his saddle. His stallion rushed forward, throwing up mud high from beneath his hooves.

Betly had never thought that he could travel so fast on a horse. Potholes, the trunks of fallen trees, bushes and ditches all slid by under him, forming some kind of patchy mosaic. At some point a branch whipped off his cap, and he didn’t even notice.

This speed largely did not depend on him. In the heat of the competition, his mare tried her hardest not to be left behind by the stallion. Betly grabbed onto her neck. Every second he thought that he would be killed.

They galloped through the forest, across a wide meadow, down a slope, passed the farmer’s wife and headed down into a big ravine.

The forester leapt down from his horse and, with the farmer following him, rushed down the narrow path into a grove of sparsely planted pine trees.

The journalist left his horse as well, throwing the rein over her neck, and rushed after Meller. He hurried after the forester and his mind automatically noted the surprising transformation that had taken place. There was nothing left of Meller’s former apathy and indecisiveness. He moved with light and collected gestures, never pausing to think, he jumped over pits, slid under low-hanging branches. He moved as if the trail of the otark was sketched out for him in a thick chalk line.

For a while Betly kept up with the pace, then he started to tire. His heart leapt in his chest, he felt tightness and burning in his throat. He slowed down to a walk, and for a few minutes walked alone among the bushes, then heard voices ahead of him.

The forester stood in the narrowest part of the ravine with his gun cocked and pointing at a thick grove of hazel trees. The girl’s father was there as well.

The forester spoke with emphasis:

‘Let her go. Or I will kill you.’

He was talking to what was in the grove.

He was answered by a growl, mingled with the sobs of a child.

The forester repeated what he had said:

‘Or I will kill you. I will give my life to track you and kill you. You know me.’

The growl came again, and then a voice, but not a human voice, somehow like a gramophone record, running all the words together, said:

‘And if I do this, then you won’t kill me?’

‘No,’ Meller said. ‘You will walk out of here alive.’

There was silence in the thicket. The only noise was the child’s crying.

Then there was a cracking noise of branches, and something white appeared among the trees. The thin girl came out into the long grass. One of her hands was covered in blood and she supported it with the other.

Still crying, she walked past the three men, not turning to look at them, and wandered staggering towards her house.

The three men looked as she walked away.

The black-bearded farmer looked at Meller and Betly. There was something so harsh in his wide-open eyes that the journalist could not bear it and bent his head.

‘That’s that,’ the farmer said.

***

They stopped to spend the night in a little empty watchman’s hut in the forest. They were only a few hours away from the lake with the island where the laboratory had once been, but Meller refused to travel in the dark.

This was the fourth day of their journey, and the journalist thought that his tried and tested optimism was starting to crack. Previously he had had a little saying prepared for every time he met with any unpleasantness: ‘But all the same, life itself is wonderful!’ But now he understood that this was a standby phrase, one that worked perfectly when you were travelling in a comfortable train from one city to the next or when you walk through the glass door that leads into a hotel reception, ready to meet with some famous person—this phrase was entirely inadequate to deal with what had happened to Steglich, for example.

The whole region seemed to be wracked with illness. The people were apathetic, unwilling to talk. Even the children didn’t laugh.

Once he asked Meller why the farmers didn’t leave the place. The forester explained that the only thing that the inhabitants owned was their land. But now there was no way to sell it. The land was worthless now because of the otarks.

Betly asked:

‘Why don’t you leave?’

The forester thought. He bit his lips in silence, then replied:

‘I can still be of some use. The otarks are afraid of me. I don’t have anything here. No family, no home. There’s no way they can put pressure on me. They can only fight me. But that is risky.’

‘Do you mean that the otarks respect you?

Meller lifted his head uncertainly.

‘The otarks? How could they? They don’t know respect either. They are not people. They are just afraid. And they’re right. I kill them.’

But the otarks still took a certain amount of risk. The forester and the journalist both recognised it. They had the impression that a ring was gradually tightening around them. They had been shot at three times. Once the shots had come from the windows of an abandoned house, and twice they had come straight out of the forest. After each of the three attacks they had found fresh tracks. And every day they found more and more marks made by the otarks…

In the watchman’s hut, in the little stone fireplace, they lit a fire and prepared their supper. The forester lit his pipe and looked sadly into space.

They had left their horses opposite the open door to the hut.

The journalist looked at the forester. All the time he had been with him, his respect for him had increased every day. Meller was uncultured, he had spent all his life in the forests, he had barely read anything, you couldn’t speak to him for two minutes about art. And even so the journalist felt that he couldn’t ask for a better friend. The forester’s opinions were always healthy and independent: if he didn’t have anything to say, then he didn’t say anything. To begin with the journalist had thought him somehow nervy and irritably weak, but now Betly understood that this was a long-standing bitterness that he felt on behalf of the inhabitants of this large abandoned region, which had been brought low by the mercy of the scientists.

For the last two days Meller had been feeling ill. He had swamp fever. It covered his face with red patches.

The fire was dying in the grate, and the forester unexpectedly said:

‘Tell me, is he young?’

‘Who?’

‘The scientist, Fidler.’

‘He is young,’ the journalist replied. ‘About thirty. No more. Why?’

‘It’s not good that he’s young,’ the forester said.

‘Why?’

Meller was silent for a while.

‘Well, they take them all, the talented people, and lock them away in a closed space. And they coddle them. And they don’t know anything about life. And that’s why they have no compassion for people.’ He sighed. ‘You need to be a person first of all. And only then a scientist.’

He stood up.

‘It’s time to go to sleep. We’ll take turns. Or else the otarks will kill our horses.’

The journalist ended up taking the first watch.

The horses were chewing hay from a small hayrick left over from the previous year.

He sat in the doorway of the hut, his rifle laid across his knees.

The darkness fell fast, like a cover. Then his eyes gradually became accustomed to the gloom. The moon came out. The night was clear and starry. Calling out to one another, a flock of little birds flew overhead. Unlike the larger birds, they were afraid of predators and so carried out their autumn journey by night.

Betly stood up and walked around the hut. The forest closely surrounded the clearing where the hut stood, and this was where the danger lay. The journalist checked his rifle to see if it was cocked.

He started to muse over the last few days, the conversations he had had, the faces he had seen, and he thought about how he would tell the story of the otarks when he got back to the newspaper. Then he thought that it was precisely the idea of his return that constantly appeared in his mind and gave a peculiar colouring to everything that he met with here. Even when they were tracking the otark after it had taken the child, he, Betly, had not forgotten that however bad things got here, he could always turn around and leave it all behind.

‘I’ll go back,’ he said to himself. ‘But Meller? And the others?’

But this was too harsh a thought for him to work out all its ramifications now.

He sat in the shade of the hut and started to think about the otarks. He remembered the headline from some newspaper: ‘Intelligence without compassion.’ It was like what the forester said. For him the otarks could not be human, because they had no ‘compassion’. Intelligence without compassion. Was that possible? Could intelligence even exist without compassion? What came first? Isn’t kindness a result of intelligence? Or is it the other way round? It had already been established that the otarks were more capable than humans of logical thought, that they understood abstractions better, had better memories. The rumours were already flowing that some of the first generation otarks were held in the Ministry of Defence and used to help decide certain particular problems. But electronic ‘reasoning machines’ were also used to solve certain particular problems. What was the difference?

He remembered that one of the farmers had told him and Meller that he had recently seen an almost completely naked otark, and the forester had replied that the otarks had recently started to become ever more like people. Would they conquer the world one day? Could intelligence without compassion be stronger than human intelligence?

‘But that won’t happen any time soon,’ he said to himself. ‘If it ever does happen. In any case, I’ll be long gone by then.’

But then he thought: what about the children? What sort of world would they live in—the world of the otarks or the world of cybernetic robots, also inhuman and also, according to some people, cleverer than humans?

His son appeared in his mind’s eye and said to him:

‘Listen to me, dad. We are who we are, right? And they are who they are. But don’t they think to themselves that they are a “we” too?’

‘You’re growing up too fast,’ Betly thought. ‘When I was seven I wouldn’t have asked such questions.’

Somewhere behind him a twig snapped. The boy disappeared.

The journalist carefully looked around and listened. No, everything was fine.

A bat crossed the clearing in its angular wavering flight.

Betly straightened up. The thought came to him that the forester was hiding something from him. He still hadn’t said who the horseman was who had overtaken them on the broken road that first day.

He leant his back against the wall of the house once more. His son appeared again, with more questions.

‘Dad, where does it all come from? The trees, the houses, the air, the people? Where does it come from?’

He started to tell the boy about the evolution of creation, then something seemed to jab him in the heart and Betly woke up.

The moon had gone. But the sky was still fairly light.

The horses were no longer in the clearing. Or rather, one was gone, and the other was lying on the grass, with three grey shadows crouching over it. One of them stretched up, and the journalist saw a huge otark with a large heavy head, grinning jaws and large eyes that glinted in the half darkness.

Then a whisper came from nearby.

‘He’s asleep.’

‘No, he’s woken up already.’

‘Go to him.’

‘He’ll shoot.’

‘He’d have shot earlier, if he could. He’s either asleep, or else he’s petrified with fear. Go to him.’

‘You go.’

The journalist was petrified. It was like a dream. He understood that there was no way out of this, that the catastrophe had arrived, but he could not move a muscle.

The whisper continued:

‘But what about the other one? He’ll shoot.’

‘He’s ill, he won’t wake up… go, I say!’

With a huge effort Betly managed to move his eyes. An otark appeared from round the corner of the hut. But this one was small, like a pig.

Overcoming his state of shock, the journalist pulled the trigger of his rifle. Two shots boomed out one after the other, two cartridge cases were expelled into the air.

Betly scrambled to his feet, the rifle fell from his hands. He rushed into the hut, shaking, slammed the door behind him and put the latch down.

The forester was waiting with his rifle cocked. His lips moved, and the journalist felt rather than heard the question:

‘The horses?’

He shook his head.

There was a scratching at the door. The otarks were propping something up against it.

A voice spoke:

‘Hey, Meller! Hey!’

The forester rushed to the window and would have stuck his rifle out. But at that moment a black paw flashed past against the starry background; he scarcely pulled his gun back in time.

There was satisfied laughter outside.

The gramophone voice, stretching out its words, said:

‘Your time is up, Meller.’

Other voices interrupted:

‘Meller, Meller, come and talk to us…’

‘Hey, forester, say something clever. You’re a man, you’re supposed to be clever…’

‘Meller, say something and I’ll tell you it’s wrong…’

‘Speak to me, Meller. Call me by my name. I’m Philip…’

The forester said nothing.

The journalist walked over to the window with uncertain steps. The voice was very close, just past the log wall. There was an animal stench—blood, dung, something else.

The otark who had said his name was Philip spoke right under the window.

‘You’re a journalist, right? You, by the window.’

The journalist cleared his throat. His throat was dry. The same voice continued:

‘Why did you come here?’

There was a silence.

‘Did you come here to destroy us?’

There was another pause, then other voices started to speak:

‘Of course, of course they want to wipe us out… First they made us, now they want to destroy us…’

There was a chorus of growls, then another noise. The journalist had the impression that the otarks were fighting.

Over the top of all this noise came the voice of the one who had said he was called Philip:

‘Hey, forester, why don’t you shoot? You always shoot. Come and speak to me now.’

Somewhere above them a shot suddenly rang out.

Betly turned round.

The forester had climbed on top of the fireplace, had moved aside the thin poles with straw on top that made up the roof, and had opened fire.

He fired twice, paused to reload, and fired again.

The otarks ran away.

Meller jumped down from the fireplace.

‘We need to get some horses. Or it’ll be tough for us.’

They looked at the three dead otarks.

One of them, a youngster, was practically naked, with hair only growing on the back of his neck.

Betly nearly vomited when Meller turned the creature over on the grass. He managed to contain himself, holding his mouth shut.

The forester said:

‘Remember, they are not people. Even though they can speak. They eat people. They eat each other.’

The journalist looked around. It was already dawn. The clearing, the field, the dead otarks—everything seemed at that moment to be unreal.

Could it really be so? Was he, Donald Betly, standing here?

***

‘This is where the otark ate Klein,’ Meller said. ‘One of the locals told us all about it, a man from round here. He worked as a cleaner, when the laboratory still existed. And that evening he just happened to be in the next room. He heard everything…’

The journalist and the forester were now on the island, in the main building of the Science Centre. That morning they had taken the saddles from the dead horses and had crossed to the island over the dam. They only had one rifle now, because Betly’s had been taken by the otarks as they ran away. Meller’s plan was to get to a nearby farm while it was still light and taking some horses there. But the journalist had talked him into allowing half an hour to look over the abandoned laboratory.

‘He heard everything,’ the forester continued. ‘It was in the evening, round about ten o’clock. Klein had some kind of contraption that he was taking apart, connecting to electric wires, and the otark was sitting on the floor, and they were chatting. They were talking about physics. This was one of the first otarks they had bred and he was considered the most intelligent. He could even speak foreign languages… This guy was cleaning the floor and could hear them chatting. Then there was a silence, then a thud. And suddenly the cleaner heard a voice saying ‘Oh God!’ It was Klein, and there was so much terror in his voice that his knees bent under him. Then there was a gut-wrenching scream of ‘Help me!’ The cleaner looked into the room and saw Klein lying on the floor and writhing, with the otark chewing at him. This guy was so frightened that he couldn’t do anything and just stood there. And it was only when the otark came for him that he shut the door.’

‘And then?’

‘Then they killed two other laboratory workers and ran away. And five or six stayed on as though nothing had happened. And when the commission from the city came, they talked to the otarks. Then they took them away. We found out later that they’d eaten another person on the train.’

Everything had been left untouched in the large laboratory. The flasks and dishes were on the long benches, covered with a layer of dust, and spiders had spun their webs through the cables of the X‑ray machine. The glass in the windows was broken, and the branches of wild, uncropped acacias came through the empty frames.

Meller and the journalist left the main building.

Betly wanted very much to look at the radiation apparatus, and he asked the forester for five more minutes.

The asphalt on the main road of the abandoned village had been broken through by grass and young strong shoots. It was autumnal and you could see a long way. It smelt of rotting leaves and damp trees.

On the village square Meller stopped unexpectedly.

‘Did you hear something?’

‘No,’ Betly replied.

‘I was thinking about how they came as a group to besiege us in the watchman’s hut,’ the forester said. ‘They never used to do anything like that. They always acted alone.’

He listened again.

‘It’s as if they were planning a surprise for us. Let’s get out of here as fast as we can.’

They went over to the low-slung round building with its narrow barred windows. The massive door was half open, the concrete floor by the doorway was covered with a thick layer of forest debris—reddish pine needles, dust, the wings of midges.

They went carefully into the first room with its hanging ceiling. Another massive door led into a low-roofed room.

They peered in. A squirrel with a fluffy tail like a flame rushed across the wooden table and leapt through the wooden slats covering the window.

The forester looked around quickly. He listened, holding his rifle tight, then said.

‘No, this is no good.’

And he hurried back the way they had come.

But it was too late.

There was a rustling noise and the outside door clanged shut. Then there was a noise as if something heavy were being placed against it.

For a second Meller and the journalist looked at one another, then they rushed to the window.

Betly took one glance then stepped back.

The square and the wide dry pool, which had been built there for no obvious reason, were filled with otarks. There were dozens and dozens of them, and new ones kept appearing as if they were coming out of the ground. A noise rose from this crowd of non-humans and non-beasts, a mixture of cries and growling.

In shock, the forester and Betly stood silently.

A young otark near to them stood up on its back paws. There was something round in its front paws.

‘A stone,’ the journalist said, still unable to believe what was happening. ‘He wants to throw a stone…’

But it was not a stone.

The round object flew through the air, by the window it burst with a blinding light, and a bitter smoke came into the room.

The forester stepped back from the window. He looked confused. His rifle fell from his hands and he grasped at his chest.

‘Damn it!’ he said and lifted up a hand, looking at his bloody fingers. ‘The bastards! They’ve got me.’

Turning pale, he took two uncertain steps then sank to his heels, then sat against the wall.

‘They got me.’

‘No!’ Betly cried. ‘No!’ He shook as though with fever.

Meller, biting his lips, turned his pale face to him.

‘The door!’

The journalist ran to the exit. There was already something heavy propped against it from the outside.

He went back to the forester.

Meller was lying down now against the wall, holding his hands to his chest. A damp patch spread over his shirt. He wouldn’t let the journalist bind the wound.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I can feel that this is the end. There’s no point causing any more pain. Don’t touch me.’

‘But I can get help!’ Betly cried.

‘Who from?’

The question was so bitter, so open and so hopeless, that the journalist grew cold.

They were quiet for a while, then the forester said:

‘Do you remember the rider we saw the first day?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was most likely running to tell the otarks that you were here. They work together, the city bandits and the otarks. That’s why the otarks were able to band together. You shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sure that if octopuses came here from Mars, they’d find people willing to side with them.’

‘Yes,’ whispered the journalist.

The time until evening passed without anything happening. Meller grew weaker quickly. He stopped bleeding. Even so he wouldn’t let anyone touch him. The journalist sat next to him on the stone floor.

The otarks left them alone. They made no attempt to break through the door, or to throw another grenade. The chattering outside the building grew faint, then rose again.

When the sun went down and it started to get colder, the forester asked for something to drink. The journalist gave him water from his flask and wiped his face as well.

The forester said:

‘Maybe it’s a good thing that the otarks have appeared. Now it will become clear what it means to be a man. Now we will all know that to be a man it is not enough to be able to count and to study geometry. There’s something else. And the scientists are proud of their work. But that’s not everything.’

Meller died that night, and the journalist lived another three days.

The first day he only thought about saving himself, moving from despair to hope, shooting a few times through the window with the idea that someone would hear the shots and come to help him.

Towards night-time he realised that all his hopes were illusory. His life seemed to be divided into two halves that were impossible to reconcile in any way. He was mostly agitated by the fact that there was no logical connection or continuity between them. One life was the happy intellectual life of a highly-successful journalist, and that life had finished when he and Meller had ridden down from the mountainside into the thick forests of the Main Range. This first life had given him no indication that he was destined to die here on this island, in an abandoned laboratory.

In the second life everything was possible and impossible. It was entirely made up of coincidence. And really, it could not be happening. He had been free not to come here, to have refused this call from his editor and take another job. Instead of studying the otarks, he could have flown to Nubia to write about the protection of the ancient monuments of Egyptian art.

An unlucky chance had brought him here. That was the cruellest blow. A couple of times he had almost stopped believing in what had happened to him, and had walked round the room touching the sunlit walls and the dusty tables.

For some reason or other the otarks had lost all interest in him. There were only a few of them left in the pool and on the square. Sometimes they would fight among themselves, and once Betly saw with heart-stopping horror how they threw themselves on one of their own, tore him to pieces, and settled down to eat.

At night he suddenly decided that Meller was guilty of his death. He felt disgusted by the dead forester and dragged his body into the next room and put it by the door.

For a couple of hours he sat on the floor, hopelessly repeating:

‘Lord, why me? Why me?’

On the second day his water ran out and he started to be tormented by thirst. But he had already understood that there was no way he would be saved, and he remained calm and started to think about his life again—it already seemed like someone else’s. He remembered how, right at the beginning of the journey, he had argued with the forester. Meller had told him that the farmers wouldn’t talk to him.

‘Why?’ Betly had asked.

‘Because you live in the warm, with all your comforts,’ Meller replied. ‘Because you are one of the people at the top. One of the ones who betrayed them.’

‘What do you mean, I’m at the top?’ Betly said, refusing to accept what he was told. ‘I only earn a little bit more than they do.’

‘So what?’ the forester said. ‘Your work is light, fun almost. They have been dying here for years, and you’ve written your little articles, you’ve gone to restaurants, you’ve had your intellectual conversations…’

He realised that all this was true. His optimism, which he had been so proud of, was in the final analysis the optimism of an ostrich. He had just buried his head when it came to the bad news. He read about executions in Paraguay in the newspapers, or about famine in India, but spent his time thinking about how to get money to buy new furniture for his large five-room apartment, or how he might be able to win the good opinion of some important person or other. The otarks—the otark-people—shot crowds of protestors, speculated on the price of bread, prepared wars in secret, and he turned away from it all, pretending that nothing of the kind ever happened.

From this point of view, all of his past life suddenly seemed strongly connected with what was now happening to him. He had never spoken out against evil, and now the time had come for pay-back.

On the second day the otarks came and spoke with him by the windows a couple of times. He didn’t reply.

One of the otarks said:

‘Hey, come on out, journalist! We won’t hurt you.’

And another one, standing next to him, laughed.

Betly thought about the forester once again. But his opinion had changed. He thought that the forester had been a hero. To tell the truth, the only real hero that Betly had ever encountered. Alone, without any kind of assistance, he had fought against the otarks, had struggled with them and died undefeated.

On the third day the journalist started to fall into delirium. He imagined that he had returned to his newspaper and was dictating an article to the stenographer.

The article was called ‘What is a Man?’

He dictated out loud.

‘On our century of astounding developments in science one might be forgiven for concluding that science is all-powerful. But let us imagine for a moment that an artificial brain has been created, twice as powerful as the human brain and possessing twice the capacity for work. Would a creature with a brain of this type really be allowed to call itself a man? What is it that makes us what we are? The capacity to perform sums, to analyse, to make logical deductions; or is it something else, which arises with the development of society, which is to do with on individual’s relation to others and with the relation of the individual to the collective? If we take the otarks as an example…’

And here his mind started to wander.

On the third day there was an explosion in the morning. Betly woke up. He thought that he had stood up and was holding his rifle at the ready. In fact he was lying helpless by the wall.

The muzzle of a wild animal appeared before his eyes. With an agonising effort of thought, he remembered what Fidler had looked like. Like an otark!

Then his thoughts lost their focus again. He could not feel how his flesh was being torn at, and for a tenth of a second Betly was able to think that the otarks were not really so terrible, that there were only a couple of hundred of them in this abandoned region. They could be dealt with. But the people… The people!

He did not know that the news of Meller’s disappearance had already spread across the whole area, and that the desperate farmers were digging up the rifles they had hidden.

The post Day of Wrath appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marian Womack

James Womack studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Chéjov, the Strugatski Brothers, Ivan Turgenev, and Sergio del Molino. His first collection of poems, MISPRINT, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He was recently selected for the prestigious PEN-Presents European Translation Project. His versions of Vladímir Mayakovsky, Vladímir Maiakovski and other poems, will be published by Carcanet in October.

Together, the Womacks run Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation.

***

The translation team of Marian Womack and James Womack recently embarked on several translations for The Big Book of Science Fiction, out from Vintage this summer. Continuing our exploration of “strange SF,” we’re happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Womacks—about translation and about science fiction. We’ll also be posting their translation of “The Ruins of Granada,” an early classic of weird SF, which could not be included in the Big Book of SF for space reasons as well as their new translation of Sever Gansovsky’s classic “The Day of Wrath,” which brilliantly updates Island of Dr. Moreau themes.

What has been the hardest translation job for either or both of you—into English?

Silvina Ocampo

James Womack: I find translating SF/F particularly difficult in general. At its best—and I would say that a lot of the stories we have translated for this book are among the best—it is a genre that is constantly wrong-footing the reader, and so your work as a translator is initially affected by your being wrong-footed as a reader. If you are translating stories set in worlds that are either fascinatingly different from or interestingly oblique to the ‘real’ world, then a lot of the handholds that you have with straight-down-the-line realist fiction just don’t exist. That said, within the stories we translated for the Big Book, I found Dmitri Bilenkin’s ‘Where Two Paths Cross’ tough because of the different perspectives within the story and the deliberately ‘alien’ vocabulary.

Marian Womack: TBBOSF has given me the chance to reencounter the Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo in a new way. She’s not only an author I am in awe of, but, together with Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter, she is a part of my personal corpus of imaginative and frighteningly clever writing. She excels at surrealism, which is such a difficult type of writing, so easy to do badly. Her language is endlessly inventive, her metaphors thought-provoking. She’s not the easiest of authors to translate, but the enjoyment inherent the challenge—the possibility of achieving results above the norm—makes the process that much more enjoyable.

Do you have a philosophy or central thought about what translation should be that guides you?

James: Nothing very interesting: pragmatic faithfulness, I suppose, in a very broad sense, and depending on what I consider ‘being faithful’ to mean in any particular context. Sometimes you need to reproduce certain formal aspects of a work; sometimes the literal meaning of a passage is absolutely paramount, no matter how clunky the translation sounds in English. And to try if possible not to be led too far by convention: sometimes things that are standard speech or standard literary locutions are just what you don’t want, and you have to fight against them.

Marian: I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but translation for me implies embodying an author’s voice, appropriating it for a short period of time, and so I can see an almost mediumistic quality to it. I certainly spend a great deal of time before starting a translation studying the author’s style and idiosyncrasies, her/his use of language, and rehearsing her/his voice. The transmutation process has to be faulty, that’s the nature of the act, but one can only hope to be as faithful as possible. And feeling that you are finally ‘embodying’ an author’s voice is rewarding.

At what times do you work together and when alone on translations? For example, do you, Marian, contribute to the Russian translations, too?

James: It’s a fairly collaborative process. We both read everything we translate, and edit together, no matter who does the first draft.

Marian: We are very old-fashioned in this. I like to think about us like a wife-and-husband team. When we started collaborating in these projects, around 2008, I had ‘some’ Russian, and James had ‘some’ Spanish. We have both grown on the way, as translators, both separately and as a team. But I find that the way our brains work mean that we can almost ‘side-read’ the other person. It’s like playing a duet; we inhabit the same space when we are working on these projects.

When you’re re-translating a famous work, like Casares’s “Squid in Its Own Ink”, is your process any different?

James: The advantage of there being a history of translations of a particular work is that you can do research before starting your own version: seeing how other people have dealt with problems is a good way of giving you ideas of how to deal with them yourself. Obviously, without plagiarizing or copying previous work, but there are times when previous translators have got something right in a way that seems to you both neat and unalterable, or at least gives you a roadmap to help you find something neat and unalterable of your own.

Marian: I’m the opposite; I prefer not to look at anything! It’s the same with writing: I have to read poetry if I’m working on a short story, non-fiction if I’m writing a novel. I am very easily contaminated. To me, approaching an author of that stature does not change my normal work process. But I’m very shy by nature, and have to try hard not be overwhelmed by an individual’s literary stature.

On the Russian side, what special barriers are there when translating Soviet-era work? I know you translated Bulgakov into Spanish, and some translators of Bulgakov into English have left out the Soviet-era referents.

James: I think I’ll answer this one. There is a strain in Soviet-era work which revels in localia, in specific particularly satirical details, but the best stuff overcomes this, and may even make a virtue of the obscurity and obfuscation out of which it was forced to grow. I’m thinking of scenes like for example the theatre show in The Master and Margarita, where the fairy gold conjured up by the devil transforms into illegal foreign currency. But Soviet debates about currency speculation are a background to this scene rather than its main point, and Bulgakov can be read with great pleasure even by people with no knowledge of the context. Or else, knowing just how virulent anti-religious propaganda was in the Soviet Union helps you see how transgressive as well as original Bulgakov was being in his retelling of the story of the Crucifixion, but it’s not something you absolutely need to know. There is a great deal of what the critic Lev Losev called ‘Aesopian language’ in Soviet literature, but it is a common element to Russian literature in general: writing which tries to speak between the lines, past the censor, to a public better-skilled at exegesis. Lots of this is, yes, untranslatable, but also a lot of it is of minor importance, reinforcing the already-visible main thrust of the work. One writer whom I would be scared to translate is Andrei Platonov, for whom absolute ambiguity is a fundamental creative principle, but luckily the translations into English, largely by Robert Chandler, are amazingly good.

When faced with a choice between fidelity and sense for a modern reader, which way do you go?

James: Sense. There is a lot to be said for interpretative translation. On a basic level, when a character says ‘On a clear day, you can see for twenty versts’, I find it generally makes more sense to me to have him say ‘On a clear day, you can see for a dozen miles [or even just ‘miles’]’ rather than give a footnote to explain what a verst is or else say ‘On a clear day, you can see for 13.2 miles’.

Marian: Sense, absolutely. Although verst is an interesting example to have chosen: Spaniards are used to the term, and it is even accepted by the Real Academia, the Spanish institution concerned with the ‘purity’ of the language, so for translations into Spanish we can actually leave it as it is.

Did you have a personal connection or commitment to any story or stories in particular that you translated for the Big Book of SF?

James: As publishers in Spain, we have brought out a book by the Strugatsky brothers, and are going to publish another hopefully next year, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do some of their work into English.

Marian: I am personally very fond of Silvina Ocampo’s work, and would love to see more of her stories translated.

Were there any surprises during the translation process for Big Book of SF?

James: I didn’t know anything about Sever Gansovsky before translating his story ‘Day of Wrath’, and he is a major discovery. The story itself is wonderful: astonishingly nihilistic for a Soviet-era writer, and very visual in its description of a Winter’s Bone-style backwoods Russian countryside that hasn’t had enough focus in Russian literature in general. And I’ve gone on to read a lot more by him, and he holds up very well. Worth translating more of; worth telling the world about.

Marian: I have to agree with James. And from the perspective of a small press publisher which started specializing in Russian, I have become aware of some amazing Russian SF authors I hadn’t previously read. Russian SF, and Russian literature in general, never ceases to amaze me; you are discovering new things every day.

Are there any personal favorites not yet translated into English that you would love to see in some future anthology?

James: On the Russian side of things, there are a number of contemporary writers whom I think are worth anthologizing. To name just one, Dmitri Kolodan is a fantastic young author: his novella Time of the Jabberwock is an inspired retelling of the tropes of Carroll’s Alice in a very different context.

Marian: I will give a Spanish example, if I may. Perhaps I’m being biased, because she’s one of our authors (and, full disclosure, a good friend), but I certainly think there is no one writing as well and with such variety nowadays as Sofía Rhei. Her output is breathtaking, from poetry to children’s writing, to speculative fiction and fantasy stories which explore her interests in linguistics and meta-literature, to adult fantasy novels, and the breath of her creativity is immense. I am quietly sitting in a corner waiting for the explosion to come, when everyone realizes that she is a genius.

In your role as publishers, writers, and translators, can you explore for me what you think the future of science fiction holds? How will SF be different in ten years?

James: Very briefly: publishers are getting more interested in writing from outside a straightforward Anglophone market; more books originally written in languages other than English are being noticed; translators are stepping up to the plate in what has been seen as their secondary job—but which might in the long run turn out to be the more vital side of their work—of suggesting to publishers authors who might be interesting. The difference will come from globalization, books that are reports from the frontline rather than armchair tourism.

Marian: From a Spanish perspective, the major change that we are seeing is that women are started to be more visible than before. It is still a struggle to get women in this cultural space—the recent nominations for the Ignotus Awards, a major Spanish SFF and horror prize, didn’t have a great number of women; but the general consensus was that there were ‘a few more’ than the previous year, so we are progressing, but it’s still a very steep mountain to climb. It is still difficult to convince a Spanish reader to pick a book by a woman, even if she’s had twenty five-star reviews. I can see that the tide is slowly turning, and I’m sure than in a decade female voices will be ‘mainstreamed’, but I’m not sure it’s happened yet. Not talking now in particular about female voices, but picking up on James’s answer, SF will change dramatically when new practitioners are exposed to diverse voices in general as a normal thing, and can count them as members of their own influential ‘canon’. It will be wonderful to see.

The post Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Henrique Alvim Corrêa illustration for War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been posting a series of strange scifi stories this summer at Weird Fiction Review. These are stories that were uncovered by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer as they edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, out this year from Vintage Books.

So far we’ve posted stories by two early-20th-century German fantasists Paul Scheerbart and Karl Hans Strobl. The first story, “The New Abyss” by Scheerbart, tells the story of a strange alien planet called Klips whose inhabitants watch as the planet becomes consumed by an abyss, while Strobl’s “The Triumph of Mechanics” recounts the tale of a town whose toy factory creates a small legion of toy rabbit replicas.

Next week, we’re featuring an interview with translators James and Marian Womack who translated a combined eight stories for The Big Book of Science Fiction. To accompany their interview, we’ll also be posting two stories: “The Ruins of Granada” by Ángel Ganivet, translated from Spanish by Marian Womack, and “The Day of Wrath” by Sever Ganovsky, translated from Russian by James Womack.

Lastly, we just wanted to mention a story we posted in 2015 called “Mutation Planet” by Barrington J. Bayley. It’s an excellent piece of weird science fiction by an author who has another story in The Big Book of Science Fiction called “Sporting with the Chid.”

We hope you’re enjoying our exploration of strange scifi and we should have a story or two more before summer is over so be sure to keep checking back.

The post Strange Scifi Summer appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.