BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY DAMIEN BRODERICK
Chained to the Alien: The Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]
Climbing Mount Implausible: The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer
Embarrass My Dog: The Way We Were, the Things We Thought
Ferocious Minds: Polymathy and the New Enlightenment
Human’s Burden: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)
I’m Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners (with Rory Barnes)
Post Mortal Syndrome: A Science Fiction Novel (with Barbara Lamar)
Skiffy and Mimesis: More Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]
Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature
Warriors of the Tao: The Best of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature [Editor with Van Ikin]
x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction
Zones: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY RORY BARNES
The Dragon Raft: A Young Adult Novel
Human’s Burden: A Science Fiction Novel (with Damien Broderick)
I’m Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners (with Damien Broderick)
Space Junk: A Science Fiction Novel
Zones: A Science Fiction Novel (with Damien Broderick)
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2009 by Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To Pam Sargent and George Zebrowski—D.B.
And to Wainwright’s ghost—R.B.
PART 1
I was running a nice little earner called Feng Shui Solutions when my past caught up with me. I’d hung my shingle on an ornate free-standing Victorian mortgage, not mine, in Parkville—close enough to the university for academic respectability and not so close to the zoo that the lion stink annoyed the clients. The cast iron door knocker knocked. I wasn’t expecting a client so I’d left off my Knights of Bushido kimono, but I was fucked if I was going to climb out of my jeans just to open the door.
“Mr. Purdue?”
My caller had seen better days, but she’d kept herself trim. I suspected twice weekly workouts at the gym, which is as much as I can be bothered with myself these days, and twice-yearly dry-outs at the fat farm.
“At your service.”
“Sharon Lesser. I have an appointment for eight-thirty?”
I blinked. Something troubled me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then again I’ve had a few blows to the head in my time. “I believe that’s for tomorrow.” One of the drawbacks of doing your own secretarial. “But come in, Mrs. Lesser.”
“Call me Share. No, definitely this evening, yesterday was my bridge night and that’s been Thursday for two years.”
I helped her off with her fur. It was real, minimal entry wound, no exit. I hung the coat myself. The upside of doing such menial tasks is no nosy secretary, no secretarial wages either. We went into the Seminar Room, and I was pleased to see that Sharon Lesser was not intimidated by my bulk. Some women are. I don’t know, some of them say they like a bit of brawn to go with the deeply sensitive gaze and readiness to listen but plenty shy away.
A decade and a half earlier I’d have been dismissed with a curt glance: the angular Vegan-diet poet type that only rangy Vegan diet women and cooing butterballs favor. Eighteen months in a boutique prison outside Seattle had made a man of me: ten hours daily of weights work and my heaped handful of vitamins. Anyone can get heroin and blow in jail, it’s the common currency, but steroids and HGH are at a premium. It made me shudder, sometimes, recalling what I’d had to pay for my supply. But beefy crims are less choosy than good looking women. Supply never outstripped demand. After a year I was able to set my own terms, and when they offered me parole for the final six months I carefully beat the shit out of my original supplier and remained where I wanted to be, full gym facilities and three good fattening meals a day, without the fat.
Share avoided the jumbo House of Orient beanbags, settled herself into the big Franco Cozzo faux leather armchair and regarded me with satisfaction, I was what she wanted. My clients are gullible fuckwits, obviously, but Vinnie would have looked this one over and muttered from the corner of his toothless mouth, “Well stocked hope chest her Mum left her.” But then Vinnie’s a seventy-five-year-old alky, and I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time.
“I’ve been reading in New Idea about this feng shui,” she said. I raised one hand, smiled with capped teeth. “That’s fong shway, Share.”
She wasn’t flustered. “Oh, is that how you say it?”
She crossed her legs. Share was on the wrong side of forty and the gym was battling the crème caramels, but I appreciated the result. Something noisy happened in the street, like a pallet of bricks being dropped from the second floor. Share leaned forward and started to say something else when the front door, visible through the arch of the Seminar Room, slowly opened. The blood drained from my face, seeking refuge from terrible things. The door was triply-dead bolted with a fail-safed electronic controller, fitted into a sturdy frame. Nobody else had the key code.
The door bent open in the middle, like a soufflé folding down with a sigh when you open the oven too soon. I grabbed Sharon Lesser and shoved her under the big desk at the far end of the Seminar Room. She squealed and then I jumped across the room looking this way and that. I knew there wasn’t a gun conveniently in the sideboard, I’m not totally stupid, it was the phone I was after. Once upon a time phones stayed where they were, anchored to the wall. The door stopped buckling, caught on the bolts at top and bottom. I could see one corner of the shiny steel bulbar of a Mack truck peeking around the edge. I found my cellphone, stabbed three letters. It started ringing. I slammed the phone against my ear.
“Jesus, what? I’m busy.”
“It’s Purdue, you fuckwit,” I yelled. “What bullshit is this?” “For Christ’s sake, are you still in there? Get the fuck out right now, Purdue.”
“Bugger off, Mauricio, it’s only Thursday you cretin, I’ve got a customer with me. Client.”
“Friday, Purdue. I got carefully laid plans, mate. Ready or not.” Mauricio gunned the Mack’s motor, the door screeched and buckled some more. The door would hold, I was sure of that. The steel frame would hold too. But the frame was set into bricks and mortar—bricks and mortar from the century before last.
“You’ll wake the neighbors,” I yelled into the phone.
“Do something!” Share screamed from under the desk.
A section of plaster above the door broke away from the wall and crashed into the room. The dust billowed up like farm soil in the Big El Nino Drought. Bricks cascaded down on either side of the frame. The ceiling was starting to go.
Thank Christ for the inner-city outhouse!
§
In the century before last, when the bricks and mortar now rapidly disintegrating around us were troweled expertly into place by skilled artisans, even the elegant homes of the colony’s robber barons were a bit light on for amenities. You could have all the cut-glass chandeliers you wanted hanging from the ceilings, the crystals bending the candlelight to softly illuminate the starched collars and deep cleavages arranged around the mahogany dining table, but the privy was still out the back. And it wasn’t connected to anything as sophisticated as a sewer. When the bucket was full, the night soil carter trundled his horse and dray down the purpose built