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?

The post Two Episodes appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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.

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