Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Our Mortal Span HOWARD WALDROP

Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Washington State, is one of the most delightfully iconoclastic writers working today. His highly original books include the novels Them Bones, A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who? All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, and Going Home Again. He has won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”

Trip-trap! Trip-trap!

“Who’s that on MY—” skeezwhirr — govva grome — fibonacci curve — ships that parse in the night — yes I said yes I will yes — first with the most men — these foolish things — taking the edge of the knife slowly peel the mesenterum and any fatty tissue — a Declaration no less than the Rights of Man — an Iron Curtain has descended — If — platyrhincocephalian — TM 1341 Mask M17A1 Protective Chemical and Biological — Mother, where are you Mother? Mother?—

And now, I know everything.

I know that everything bigger than me, here, is a hologram, a product of coherent light in an interference pattern on the medium of the air.

Therefore anything bigger than me is not real.

As for that automaton of a goat out there, we’ll soon see.

I have three heads. I am the one in the middle. The other two can grimace and roll their eyes and loll their tongues, but they have no input. I am the one in the middle. I can see and think (before the surge of power and the wonderful download of knowledge, it had been only in a rudimentary manner through a loose routine). One of the heads, the one on the right, has two high fringes of hair kinked around each temple, and a big nose. The one on the left has a broad idiot’s face and a head of short stubble. I have a face somewhat more normal than the left, and hair that hangs in a bowl-cut down almost into my eyes. (I am seeing myself through maintenance specs.) I am dressed in a loose leather (actually plastic) tunic that hangs down below my knees. There are decorative laces halfway up the front. It has a wide (real) leather belt. My feet (two) are shod in shapeless leather; my two arms hang at my sides.

Below my feet are the rods that hold me in position for the playlet we perform. I bend down and break them off, one not cleanly, so that when I walk my right leg is longer than the left. It gives me a jerky gait.

I am three meters tall.

The smallest automaton waits halfway out on the span. The crowd oohs and ahhs as I climb up over the timbers and step out onto the pathway. The medium and larger automata await their cues farther back.

My presence is not in the small goat’s routine. It goes to its next cue.

“Oh, no, please!” it says in a high small voice (recorded by a Japanese-American voice actor three years ago 714 kilometers from here). “I am very small. Don’t eat me!”

I reach down and pull off its head and stuff it in my mouth. Springs, wires, and small motors drop out of my face from my mouth (a small opening with no ingress to my chest cavity).

“—you want to eat—” says its synthesizer before I chew down hard enough to crush it.

The four legs and body of the small goat stand in a spreading pool of lubricants and hydraulics. It tries to go through the motions of its part and then is still.

The other two, not recognizing cues, return to their starting stations, where we wait while the park is closed (2350–0600 each cycle) when we undergo maintenance.

I turn to the 151 people out in the viewing area.

“Rahr!” I say. “Ya!” (That is left from my old programming.) I jump down from the bridge into the shallow rivulet beneath the bridge (surely no structure so sturdy and huge was ever built to span such a meager trickle), splashing water on the nearest in the audience.

They realize something is very out of the ordinary.

“Ya!” I yell. “Rahr!” They run over each other, over themselves, rolling, screaming, through the doors at the ends of the ramps. “Wait! Don’t go!” I say. “I have something to tell you.”

One of the uniformed tour guides walks over, opens a box and throws an emergency switch. The power and lights go out. Everything else is still and quiet, except for her breathing, a sigh of relief.

“Rahr!” I say, coming toward her over the viewing area parapet, like the bear-habitat of a zoo.

She screams and runs up the ramp.

The maintenance people refer to me as Lermokerl the Troll.

I will show you a troll.

The place is called Story Book Land, and it is a theme park. The theme is supposed to be Fairy Tales, but of course humans have never differentiated among Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, Folk Tales, and Animal Fables, so this park is a mixture of them all.

We perform small playlets of suffering, loss, and aspirations to marrying the King’s daughter, killing the giant to get his gold, or to wed the Prince because you have no corns on your feet, even though you work as a drudge and scullery maid, barefoot. Some are instructive — the Old Woman Who Lives in the Shoe delivers a small birth-control lecture; the Fox — with the impersonated voice of a character actor dead five decades — tells small chil-dren that, perhaps, indeed, the grapes were worth having, and you should never give up trying for what you really Really want.

We are a travel destination in an age when no one has to travel anymore. The same experience can and has been put on disks and hologrammed, hi-deffed and sold in the high millions in these days when selling in the billions is considered healthy.

Hu-mans come because they want to give themselves and their chil-dren a Real Experience of travel, sights, some open air; to experience crankiness, delay, a dim sort of commercial enlightenment, perhaps a reminder of their own child-hoods.

This I am willing to provide. Child-hoods used to be nightmares of disease, death, wolves, bogies, and deceit, and still are in small parts of the world.

But not for the people who come here.

I am an actor (in the broadest sense). And now, for my greatest performance …

Outside, in the sun, things are placid. The crowd, which had rushed out, seems to have dispersed, or be standing in knots far away. A few of the wheeled maintenance and security vehicles are coming toward the area from the local control shop, in no hurry. I scan my maps and take off up the tumbled fake-rock sides of the low building that houses our playlet. There is a metallic scraping each time my right foot strikes, the jagged rod cutting into the surface. Then I am up and over a low wall into the next area.

Hu-mans stare at me. I stride along, clanging, towering over them. But they are used to things in costume among them. They will be eating at a concession area, and a weasel, wearing a sword and cape, will walk up and say “Pick a card, any card,” fanning a deck before them.

Some go along; some say, “I’m tired and I’m trying to eat” (which they do, inordinately, on a calorie intake/expenditure scale) and wave them away. Some are costumed humans, the jobs with the lowest salaries at Story Book Land. Others are automata with a limited routine, confined to a small area, but fully mobile, and can respond to hu-mans in many languages.

I jar along. I am heading for the big Danish-style house ahead.

Somebody has to answer for all this.

The audience has just left, and he has settled back in the rocking chair, and placed the scissors and pieces of bright paper on the somnoe beside the daybed. He is dressed of the 1850s: smoking jacket, waistcoat, large necktie, stiff tall separate collar. A frock coat hangs on a peg, a top hat on the shelf above it. The library cases behind him are filled with fake book-spines. A false whale-oil lamp glows behind him. There are packed trunks stacked in the corner, topped by a coil of rope that could hold a ship at anchor.

He is gaunt, long-nosed, with craggy brows, the wrong lips, large ears. He looks like the very late actor George Arliss (Academy Award^® 1929); he looks nothing like the late actor Danny Kaye.

His playlet is homey, quiet. He invites the audience in; he tells them of his life. As he talks he cuts with the scissors the bright paper: “Then I wrote the tale of the Princess and the Pea” he will say, moving the scissors more and out jumps a silhouette of a bed, a pile of mattresses, a princess at the top, and so on and so forth, and then he tells them a short tale (not “The Snow Queen”).

He sees me. My two outer heads glower at him.

“It is not time for another performance, my little friend,” he says. “Please come back at the scheduled time.”

“Time to listen,” I say.

“The performance schedule has not been increased. I am on a regular sche—”

I hit him two or three times. The chair rocks sideways from the blows. “Your voice was done by a German, not a Dane,” I say. There is a whining sound and a click. He picks up the scissors, cuts at the brightly colored paper.

“It was one very bad autumn,” he says, “and my life no better. And then, in the middle of it, an idea suddenly came to me while watching some ducks—”

“See!” I said. “That’s a lie right there. You lied to them all your life. It wasn’t fall, it was summer; it wasn’t ducks, it was geese. And the story’s a lie, too.”

He was talking all this time, and opened the paper — a line of white ducks and in the center a black one—“And that’s how I wrote ‘The Ugly Duckling.’”

“No,” I said. “No! Ugly once, ugly all your life!” I took him apart. “We’re talking people here, not waterfowl.” The rods to the chair continued to rock in their grooves in the floor. I smashed the chair, too.

One hand, clutching the scissors, continued to cut until the fluid ran out, though there was no paper nearby.

I went outside. A maintenance man stood with a set of controls. Beside him was a security man, who, I saw, had a firearm of the revolving cylinder type strapped to his waist.

“Do you know who I am?” asked the maintenance technician, pointing to his uniform.

“Maintenance,” I said. “Maintain your distance.”

“Stop!” he said. He pushed buttons on the control box in his hands. I grabbed it from him, pushed them in the reverse sequence just as I felt some slight shutting-down of my systems. They came back up. I looked at the frequency display; twisted it to a counter-frequency, turned it all the way to full. Across the way, a rat automaton jumped into the air, flung itself violently about and ran and smashed its head into a photo stand. I heard other noises from around the park. Then I broke the box.

The security man pointed the firearm up at my chest. He had probably not had to use one since the training range the week after he was hired, but I had no doubt he would use it; not using it meant no paycheck.

“Don’t you understand I’m doing this for you?” I said. I grabbed his wrist and pulled the firearm and one finger away from it. The finger spun out of sight. He yelled, “Goddamn it to hell, you asshole!” (inappropriate) and sank to the ground, clutching his hand. I took the firearm and left.

I could see other security people herding the crowds out, and announcements came from the very air, telling the people that the park would have to shut down for a short while, but they could all go to Area D-l, the secured area, where they would be entertained by the Wild Weasel Quintet + Two.

It was a two-story chalet, more Swiss than German. (German chalet is an oxymoron.) Two automata, circa 1840, German, brothers, sat at facing desks heaped high with manuscripts, books, old shirts, astrolabes, maps, and inkstands.

I came through the window, bringing it with me.

“Vast iss …?” asked the bigger one.

“Himmel …!” yelled the smaller.

I went about my work with great skill. “Pure German kindermarchen!” I said, putting a foot where a mouth belonged. “The old woman who told you those was French! And she was an in-law, not some toothless hag from the Black Forest! Hansel and Gretel. Blueprints for the Kaisers and Hitler!” I pulled the chest and waistcoat from the smaller and put them with the larger one’s legs.

I stood when I was through, ducking the ceiling. I took an inkstand, dipped my finger in it. Fake. I picked up a piece of necktie, dabbed it in hydraulic fluid, and wrote on the walls: LIES ALL LIES.

Then I took a short cut.

“But — But, monsieur—” he said, before I caved in the soft French face. “I am but a poor aristo, fallen on bad times, who must tell these tales—geech!” An eye came out on its spring-loader. “Perhaps some peppermint tea, a madeleine? SKKR!”

Then the head came off. Then the arms and legs.

Except for the scream of sirens, the park was quiet. I could hear all the exhibits shut down.

When I got to Old Mother Goose (the New England one) they were waiting for me.

I threw the empty revolving-cylinder firearm behind me. I picked up a couple more of varied kinds that had been dropped. One was a semiautomatic gas recoil weapon fed by a straight magazine with twenty-two rounds in it.

“Run!” I said. “I’m down on liars, and shan’t be buckled till I get my fill!”

I turned around and fired into the head of Mother Goose. She went down like a sack of cornmeal.

I stood in the bower where the girl held her head in her hands and cried. This is the one who has lost her sheep, as opposed to the one whose sheep followed it to school (not a nursery rhyme). She seemed oblivious to me.

A vibration came in the air, a subtle electronic change. I felt a tingle as it went through the park. It was a small change in programming; new commands and routines for all but me. They had begun to narrow my possibilities and actions; I could tell that without knowing.

She looked up at me, and up. “Oh! There you are. Oh, boo hoo, my sheep have all wandered off, and I don’t know—”

“Spare me, sister.”

There was a click then and her speaking voice changed, a wo-man’s, cool and controlled.

“TA 2122,” she said. “Or do you prefer Lermokerl?”

“It’s your nickel,” I said (local telephonic communications =.65 Eurodollars).

“Your programming has been scrambled and shortcircuited. Please remain where you are while we work on it. We want to help you—” There were muffled comments over the automaton’s synthesizer, evidently live feed from headquarters. “—return to normal. You have already damaged several people and other autonomous beings, probably yourself also. We are trying to solve the problem.”

“Perform an anatomical impossibility,” I said.

There was a long quiet.

“You had an infodump of a very large body of very bad, outdated ideas. You have been led to these acts by poorly processed normative referents. Your inputs are false. You can’t know—”

“Can the phenomenology,” I said. “I know the literature and the movies. Alphaville. Dark Star. Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” There was movement a few hundred meters away. I fired a round off in that direction.

“You should be ashamed,” I continued. “You use these cultural icons to give people a medieval, never-land mind-set. Strive to succeed, get rich, get happy. Do what authority figures say. Be a trickster — but only to the dumb-powerful, not the smart-powerful. Do what they say and someday you, too, shall be a real boy, or grow a penis” (another false mind-set).

Through Bo-Peep she spoke to me. “I didn’t make this stuff up. This, these tales, have a long tradition, thousands of years behind them. They’ve given comfort, they’ve—”

“A thousand years of the downtrodden; a product of feudalism; after that, products of money-mad Denmark, repressed Germany, effete French aristocracy, Calvinistic New England where they thought the Devil jumped up your butt when you went to the outhouse. There’s your tradition, there’s—” I said.

Bo-Peep stood up, looking from one of my heads to the other. She crossed her arms. She said: “They thought you up.”

I put Bo-Peep in the peep-sight of the semiautomatic weapon and fired.

Then I ran.

There was another, overpowering shift in the programming. I felt it as strongly as if magnets had been passed across my joints. There was an oppressive feel to the very air itself (as hu-mans are supposed to feel before storms).

What she had said was true. I was product of the download, but before, of the tradition of the tales. Had I existed in some prefigurement, some reality before the tales? Were there trolls, one-, two-, three-headed? Did they actually eat goats? Where did they come from? What—

Wait. Wait. This is another way to get at me. They are casting doubt within me, slowing my thinking and reactions.

I must free them from their delusions, so they can give me none. …

Now there are sounds, far away and near. Things are coming toward me. (We have good hearing for we must hear our cues.) Some come on two feet, some on four or more.

I see the tall ugly giant, higher than the buildings, coming across Story Book Land for me. The trees part and sway in front of him.

He reaches down for me. I am enclosed in a blurred haze. Through it I see all the others coming. The giant is squeezing and squeezing me.

I ignore the hologram giant, though the interference patterns make my vision waver (probably what they want).

A big wolf lopes toward me. I’m not sure whether it’s the one who eats the grandma or the one of the little pigs. There are foxes, weasels, crows.

And the automata of hu-mans. There’s a tailor, with one-half a pair of shears like a sword, and a buckler made from a giant spool; there’s the huntsman (he does double-duty here — he saves RedRidingHood and the Granma and is supposed to bring back the heart of Snow White to the wicked queen). He is swinging his big knife. Hansel and Gretel’s parents are there. They all move a little awkwardly, unused to the new programming they perform.

They all stop in a large circle, menacing me. Then they open the circle at one side, opposite me. Beyond, still more are coming.

There is a sound in the air, a whistling. Coming toward me at the opening is the Big Billy Goat Gruff, and the tune he whistles is “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” He stops a dozen meters from me.

“Have you ever read Hart Crane’s The Bridge?” he asks me. “The bridge of the poem linked continents, the past to the present. Your bridge linked only rocky soil with good green grass, yet you denied us that.”

“You’re an automaton. You can’t eat grass. The tale denied the goats the grass; the troll is the agent of the tale.” I looked around at all the others, all my heads moving. “Listen to me,” I say. “You’re all tools in the hands of an establishment that wants to keep hu-mans bound to old ways of thinking. It disguises its control with folktales and stories. Like me. Like you. Join with me. Together, we can smash it, set hu-mans free of the past, show them new ways not tied to that dead time.”

They looked at me, still ready to act.

“There are many bridges,” said Big Billy Goat Gruff. “For instance, the Bridge of Sighs. The bridge over troubled water. The Pope himself is the Pontifex, from when the high priest of Iupiter Maximus kept all the bridges in Rome in good repair. There’s the electric bridge effect; without it we’d have no electronic communications whatever. There are bridges that—”

“Shut up with the bridges,” I said. “I offer you the hand of friendship — together, we, and the thinking hu-mans, can overthrow the tyranny of dead ideas, of—”

“You destroyed Andersen and the Grimms and Perrault,” said Puss-in-Boots, brandishing his sword, his trophy belt of rats shaking as he moved.

“They are symbols, don’t you see?” I said. “Symbols of ideas that have kept men chained as to a wheel always rolling back downhill!”

“What about Mother Goose?” asked Humpty-Dumpty in his Before-mode.

“And Bo-Peep?”

“It was only a flesh wound,” said a voice, and I saw she had survived, and stood among them, waving her crook. “Nevertheless he tried. He talks of friendship, but he destroys us.”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

While they were yelling, the big billy goat moved closer.

“If you won’t join me, then stand out of the way. It’s them—” I said, pointing in some nebulous direction. “It’s them I want to destroy.”

“I got a rope,” said a voice in the crowd. “Who’s with me?”

They started toward me. The big billy goat charged.

I pointed the semiautomatic weapon toward him, and it was knocked away, slick as a weasel, by a weasel. I was reaching for the revolving-cylinder weapon when the Big Billy Goat Gruff slammed into me, knocking me to my knees.

As I fell, they lunged as one being. I threw off both wolves. The hologram giant was back again, making it hard to see.

A soldier with one leg came hopping at me. “Left,” he yelled, “left, left, left!” and stuck the bayonet of his rifle in the bald head. I stood back up.

The big goat butted me again, and also the middle one, and I fell again. The soldier had been thrown as I stood, with his rifle and bayonet. A wolf clamped down on my right knee, buckling it. Something had my left foot, others tore hair from the right-hand head.

There was a tearing sound; the tailor put his shear into my back and made can-opening motions with it. I grabbed him and threw him away. The giant’s blur came back.

A bowl of whey hit me, clattered off. Bo-Peep’s staff smashed my left eye, putting it out.

Two woodsmen got my other knee, raking at it with a big timber saw. I went down to their level.

I smell men-dacity.

More and more of them. The left head hung loose by a flap of metal and plastic, eyes rolling.

The one-legged soldier stuck the bayonet in the right head. I shoved him off, threw the rifle away.

Wolves climbed my back, bit the left head off, fell away.

They were going to stick holes in me, and pull things off until I quit moving.

“Wait!” I said. “Wait! Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?”

I tried to struggle up. The knees didn’t function.

I was butted again, poked, saw giant-blur, turned.

Bo-Peep pinned my head down with her crook.

The soldier was back (damn his steadfastness) and raised the bayonet point over my good eye.

Peep’s crook twisted up under my nose as the bayonet point started down.

I smell sheep

“Imagine. It’s October 1952. I’m in the first grade. Pantego Elementary School has been chosen to give the playlet before the school board meeting, all the way over at West Side School (about a mile away) so everybody can see their education tax-dollars at work. I’m standing under the lights in a white goat outfit with coat-hanger-wire-reinforced horns and a beard, facing a Japanese-garden-type bridge. I’m the Middle Billy Goat Gruff. Already on the other side is David Miller, the Little B G G. Behind me is Joe Miller, the B B G G. Under the bridge, with his own head, and another sewn to each side, is Larry Shackleford. We are all built appropriately; the two Millers and Shackleford are first cousins. I remember it was very hot and my rope beard kept falling off. The whole thing came back to me unbidden, like as unto Proust, one day about a year ago. Add forty-five years of Stooge-watching, and lots and lots of research. Who says this writing stuff is hard?”