Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Human they seem, though endless of life, and many a man’s tried to make one his wife
But human they’re not, appearances decieve, and every one in time’s come to grieve
A hearth and a home, they don’t understand, preferring instead the wild untamed land
No children will they bring into the world, the lineage ends, its banners all furled
Spirits are they, the body’s all fake, no hungers they sate, no thirsts do they slake
A long lonely wait ’til death do they part, the man who has bound them by sorceror’s art
Heed a warning from one who knows well, leave beauty alone lest ye wind up in hell

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The company had offered much more luxurious lodgings, but Maria didn’t have much in the way of worldly possessions. A week’s worth of clothes, a week’s worth of uniforms, and a keepsake or two. Everything else she needed was on the network or carved onto her living skin.

So the company had agreed to set her up in a smaller place in the Al-Baghdadi Towers. A bed, a desk, a closet, a bathroom, and a window. They wouldn’t let Maria keep the rest of the housing allotment, so she’d donated it to a colleague she barely knew that had five kids.

When she wasn’t aboard a ship, Maria spent her time in her apartment, on her terminal. It filled a whole wall, and she carefully subdivided it with news feeds, entertainment, and a little pornography just for kicks. Whatever she focused her eyes on broke in across the audio feed, and with a single programmed gesture she could expand anything of interested to fill the space.

Needless to say, it had all been programmed before Jessie had died. The upper corner had always been the Jessie feed, and half of the things buzzing in from the network were originally selected to be Jessie-pleasers, Jessie-conversation-starters, Jessie-impressers.

Now, on her first day home from a long voyage, Maria sat in her chair, glassy-eyed and unfocused before the terminal, legs propped up on the desk before her. She wore only her favorite pair of jeans, her Jessie-jeans, and the sloppy polish drying on her toes was quite forgotten.

Lit from behind by the setting sun of Mesopotamia Prime, it struck Maria as just the sort of thing that Jessie would have enjoyed. That naive sense of wonder, that excitability…they had been the perfect counterpoint to Maria’s instinctive cynicism and misanthropy.

A message from corporate jumped across Maria’s feed. Limply, she brought it to the fore. “What is it?”

“I see that I’m interrupting you again.” It was Lassiter, unfazed by the relaxed posture and dress code showed by his contactee. “Shall I call back after you have finished wallowing in self-pity?”

“You’ll never call back in that case,” sniffed Maria. “I’m having my mail delivered to self-pity these days. I’m on the verge of renting out my place over in self-loathing and making it official.”

“The rents there are outrageous, and corporate won’t issue a housing scrip. Try self-doubt, I hear all the executives have summer homes there.”

Maria liked Lassiter. He was no Jessie, but he understood where she was coming from and was always happy to roll with the punches and do a little light verbal fencing. He also did not condescend, and if he worried about the accounts he managed, he at least respected requests not to hangwring over it. “I’ll take a tour, see how I like it.”

“While you’re planning that, corporate has a contract offer open for you that you may be interested in,” said Lassiter. “Details are inbound, but you know I like to talk everything through to give it that personal touch.”

“Hit me with the deets, giant talking head,” Maria said.

“There’s a high-risk courier job open, leaving day after tomorrow. Details are classified conditional on acceptance, naturally, but suffice it to say that the legitimate government of Celebes II has great need of something we have the ability to sneak through a blockade.”

“Hmph,” said Maria. “Hazard pay?”

“Hazard pay, hush money, playing ball bonus, and full survivor benefits,” Lassiter said. “The works.”

“I’ve heard all that before.”

“What you may not have heard,” Lassiter said, “is that the promised flexibility includes the ability to transfer these benefits to any corporate account on completion or expiry.”

Maria sat up, suddenly at intense attention, leaving a smear of half-dried polish where she scraped the edge of the desk. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that this includes your…other…account,” Lassiter said. “I’ve seen your balance sheet.”

Silent for a moment, Maria nodded. “Get it in writing for me and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

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Thomas should have known that there’d be more to the tale than he’d read. The great and mysterious Armadillo of Chachatusco wasn’t going to give up its secrets that easily. Greater men than he had wondered what the Incas had meant in its giant bulk, its nine tons of solid and worked stone in the form of a coiled armadillo. In finding the Quipu of Manyana Capac, the great lost chain of talking-knots held fast by a long-obscure relict population of Incas, Thomas had been sure he had the key to the mystery. Go up to the stony thing, say the proper words in Quechua, and voila.

When the big damn thing thundered down off its plinth and began rolling at him, Thomas came to see his error. Rolling through the built-up streets of Chachatusco, with Thomas only steps ahead of it wailing and flailing, the armadillo threatened to claim its first victim since the Viceroy of New Spain had tried to destroy the thing with a cannonate in 1697. It was some small comfort to be merely crushed instead of decapitated by a cannonball ricochet, though.

Chachatusco was at the edge of a great plateau that sloped down gently into the Atacama Desert; there was nothing to stop the thing once it was on a roll. Thomas was just a few steps ahead of the rolling armadillo of doom and beginning to run out of steam when a laughing Chachatuscano cried out to him.

“¡Debe ejecutar de lado, idiota!” he cried. “Run sideways, stupid!”

Thomas felt very dumb as he took a rolling tumble into a side street. The armadillo felt very large as it took a tolling rumble down the street regardless.

Thomas followed it at a safe distance, commandeering a scooter after throwing a wad of bills at its former owner. In about half an hour, the giant stone armadillo was rolling across the sands of the Atacama Desert toward the sea. Thomas quietly worried that it would reach the brackish waters, submerge, and its secrets would be forever lost to anyone without dive equipment and the winch to rule all winches.

Luckily for him and his lack of dive gear and winchery, the rolling stone armadillo came to rest in a great mass of sand near some mostly buried Inca ruins. Wherever it had come to lie, it was home.

Thomas, approaching it gingerly for fear of a renewed squishing, jumped back as the armadillo shell began to crack open and unfurl with a series of gunshot-like noises. Approaching it, the intrepid explorer was shocked to see that it did not, in fact, contain stony ‘dillo bits on its inside.

Instead, there was a massive pearl, big as a tin of jam, with a cloudy yellow liquid sweating from it in vast quantities. Thomas, who had been without a drink for some time and was further dehydrated from the extreme sport of ‘dillo-fleeing, knelt down and lapped up the liquid.

It was chicha de jora, the famous alcoholic corn beer that the Incas and their descendents had guzzled for centuries. “The legends are true!” Thomas crowed. “The Incan Pearl of Eternal Beer!”

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The Exalt has seen it again and again. A flowering species, a burst of static across every band of visible and invisible radiation, and then…nothing. Some of them burn out, truly, floundering on the cinders to which their planets were reduced. But many more survive, only to withdraw themselves from the world and ensconce themselves in virtual coccoons of their own creation.

When their cooling remains are found, when every drop of energy has been wrung from their suns and worlds, their evitable awakening is as shocking as it is short. In the Exalt’s travels and observations, it has often seen and remarked upon the fact that these virtual realms are often simulations of the wider galaxies, sidestepping the real problems of interstellar travel in favor of a pale shadow thereof.

For what real universe can compare with the universe within?

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“Earth has changed so much.” The spacesuit made One’s voice crackle with static. “Hard to believe we evolved here.”

“Well, what do you expect?” said Two. “Our ancestors left long ago, and they exerted a powerful hold on this planet. We took ourselves out of the equation in order to stop that and let evolution take its natural course.”

“Still…look at those trees. Look at all the snow on that mountaintop! It’s not the pictures we’re used to seeing.”

“Well, the atmosphere verges on being poisonously unbreathable too,” said Two drily. “The gas mix is all wrong. We’d have a few minutes of gasping at best before we passed out.”

“I wonder,” One said. “Do you think that, maybe, someone or something evolved in a similar way that we did? I mean we left plenty of relatives behind.”

Two glared at One through is suit visor, his feathers ruffled. “Highly unlikely,” he said, clipping his beak shut on the last syllable for emphasis.

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“Where did it come from?” Sammy asked.

“Nobody knows,” said Tilly. “Dad says some people say it was aliens. Some people say it was the government. He thinks it just evolved that way, maybe as a totally new way of things evolving, too.”

Bethany raised her hand. “Does it hurt?”

Tilly shook her head. “Nope. Maybe it you press me real hard there, but that hurts no matter what.”

Ms. Culligan nodded. “Does anyone else have a question for Tilly?” Her tone made it clear to kids used to playing “guess what teacher’s thinking” that they hadn’t yet asked the right one.

After a moment of unusual quiet in the classroom, Mikey raised his hand. “Can we catch it?” he said.

“Only if you touch it,” said Tilly, “and then put your fingers in your mouth.”

Ms. Culligan quickly got up and strode to the front of the class. “That’s only true if you’re not on the proper medication,” she said hastily. “Since Tilly is joining out classroom we will all be on the proper medicine which is 99% effective. There’s no danger of anyone else catching it whether they touch Tilly or not.”

The teacher put a hand on Tilly’s shoulder and began guideing her back to her desk. The kids, mollified but still interested, stared at their new classmate. More specifically, they stared at the azure crystalline deposits protruding like diamond freckes from about her eyes and on her upper arms. Most of them had heard of the crystophage from the news or conversation around the dinner table, but it was an affluent school and few had ever seen it.

“What happens…you know…later?” one of the kids whispered. “They get bigger, don’t they?”

“I’ll be shiny and strong,” said Tilly. “Like Dad said, a totally new way of evolving.”

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What most readers fail to realize is that the Walrus was a metaphor for a corrupt and jowly king, the Carpenter was a metaphor for the urban bourgeoisie hostile to the monarchy, and the oysters were a metaphor for the oppressed masses who feel the depradations of both.

Eventually, once the oyster-proleteriat had been exploited to its fullest extent, the Carpenter attacked King Walrus. The latter defended himself with terror and oppression but could not stave off his final fate at the hands of an assassin’s blade. Far from being a more benevolent ruler, though, the Carpenter only redoubled the exploitation of the oysters. Sessile and complacent, easily led about by jaunty songs and slogans, the oysters’ class consciousness lay dormant.

Did the author hold out hope for a revolution that would put the means of production in the hands of the hardworking oysters? Or did he merely resign himself to a grinding cycle of oppression so complete that any relief would have to be generations, eons in the future? Either way, it is clear that his is the most scathing critique of late capitalism of its time, and that we living in the time of later capitalism would do well to heed his warnings.

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“T-that’s not hair!” cried James, recoiling in horror. “Those are tentacles!”

“Yes,” said Cephy sadly, her unusual yellow-blue eyes glowing all the more fiercely. “I am actually an octopus driving a sophisticated animatronic puppet.”

“H-how has n-no one noticed that before?”

“Hats, and living in New York City. I don’t even have the weirdest hair secret in my building.”

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Their brutal emotions sated, the assassins buried Lily in the ducal gardens and took her head to the Marquess for their promised reward. The Marquess reveled in the destruction of whom she had been so intently jealous, and had the head cast into a sphere of pure crystal to set amongst her most cherished trophies in the crypt beneath her manor. It would serve, she thought, as both a reminder of her triumph and an immortalization of the beauty that she had pruned from the world.

The assassins, as it happened, buried the body beneath a weak and woody rosebush. The Duchess, distraught at the seeming disappearance of her only child, withdrew into herself and left the once-rich gardens to rot. There was therefore no gardener to arrest the sudden and intense rosebush growth that followed. It was visible to passersby through the locked and barred gate, and every day a few more stopped by to gawk.

In a way that few rosebushes do, the plant in the Duchess’s garden had a large and woody stem made from the seeming fusion of many smaller growths. In time, it was over five feet tall, with roses only at the end of two long branches; people began to notice shortly thereafter that the woody stem had developed on such a way, with twin knots above and below, that it resembled mothing so much as a female form.

Around the time the Duchess began to sicken, her mental collapse becoming a physical one as well, a bud appeared at the top of the “form” right around the place a head might have been. Wasting away took nearly six months for the poor Duchess, and during that time–in defiance of botanical logic–the bud grew larger and larger but never opened.

It was only with the peal of the bell announcing the Duchess’s death that an immense and blood-red rose opened atop the woody form. And it was only with her burial three days later that the humanlike form began to move.

Its ultimate destination? The Marquess’s crypts.

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“You are apprehensive, I can see that,” said the Archon. “Please, before we continue, let me know how I may put you at ease.”

“It’s just…I’ve looked up at this place all my life, but I’ve never been allowed inside,” said Avelline. “The Founder Crags are museum and church, government and god, made all the more mysterious by the prohibition on entry.”

The Archon leaned over a railiing, which gave an excellent view of the great metropolis below. It had been installed by the Forebears in the Founder Crags between two sides of a great chasm, leaving raw and living rock as the walls on either side. “Some of the Archons, I think, take themselves a little too seriously,” she said. “When the Forebears settled here, they came to the Founder Crags for protection. The entire population lived here, within these walls, until we were secure enough to spill over them.”

“Then why allow no one but the Archons and Subarchons inside?” Avelline asked.

“Mostly for our own safety,” the Archon said. “Assassination and physical violence are, after all, the oldest tools of politics. I think that some of the others, and myself if I’m being honest, enjoy the exclusiveness of it all.”

“I see,” said Avelline. “So why hold the interviews here? I am neither Archon nor Subarchon.”

“Convinience, and to gauge your reaction,” said the Archon. “We cannot expect one such as you to sacrifice her life and her soul for the wellbeing of our way of life without seeing every facet of what you are being asked to preserve.”

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