infinities (21 page)

I hoped my anger was not showing, but Jeesus, I yearned to pound him into fishpaste.

'Angela,' he sighed, in a maddening display of put-upon tolerance. 'Your undertext
reeked
of the appeal for me to save you.'

The books piled all over the floor did not help me one bit. I glanced at the top one on the nearest pile:
The Bestseller
. It leered at me.

'And when I arrived this morning, what did you do?' he needled, in a maddening tone of reason.

I thought back. Sunday morning. The day of the interviews for the new housemate. There had been a number of calls already, and we knew that the kitchen would be full. So tedious, but if I didn't attend, I wouldn't have a vote, and then I could get a housemate-from-hell on the other side of the wall. So I had groaned and crawled out of bed. I had then thought of the other duty of my day: to produce something. Anything. And that made me look forward to the house meeting, in preference.

I remembered what I did next. Check my email, in which there was a letter from Julie telling me about how she has this new idea for a screen play and how she is going to begin writing it. And then I remembered my reply to Julie. And then I remembered smelling a smell that made me check the extension cord, and then I remembered finding it just fine, but still there was that smell, and then I saw this person in the corner.

'I remember,' I said to him.

I remembered more.

'What the fuck are you doing in my room!' I hissed at the person, not wanting to yell in case he was a sleep-deprived spunky-looking-overnighter of Simone's who had just strayed to the wrong room from the loo downstairs. Simone always liked exhibitionists, and this one looked just her type. Very sexy, but in a narcissistic way. A great head of hair, but I do remember thinking that if he really wanted the horns to show, he should shave himself bald, though maybe he thought that was common. I was just thinking of telling him to get out and back to Simone's bed, when he spoke.

'Are you interested in developing your true potential?' I remember him—the Devil—asking, and then I remember to my shame, that I answered 'yes', though upon reflection, this is the worst come-on line I have ever heard.

~

I was mind meandering when the Devil dragged me back to the here-and-now. 'When I explained to you who I was, you didn't fidget or scream, or run out of the room, or jump out of the window, did you?'

I thought back. 'I guess not.'

'Have you thought about why?'

I was thinking, when he interrupted. 'I'll tell you why,' he said, cracking his knuckles one by one. 'You—and I mean all of you—never truly think of the future. Only of what you want now ... and you think the future can, I think your phrase is, "go to the Devil", but again, you don't mean it.'

'Don't mean it?'

'You don't think it will come. Not when it is what you don't want. At least when it relates to yourself.'

I thought about my credit card.

'Then you've answered your own query,' I observed, as he hadn't repeated his question about my motivation for wanting him, or not being frightened about doing a deal with him when it came right down to the deal itself.

He bent and eased the laces on his thick black boots. 'You were very creative,' he said 'about getting me into the house.'

'What? The Australian War Memorial communications officer  who is on stress leave, with your lifestyle-discrimination case pending in the Federal Court?'

'Yes, that. I could never have thought of that.'

Perhaps he was flattering me. Perhaps not. 'You need to know cultural stuff, to be able to have the right cover.'

'So true,' he crooned, and I wasn't sure why. 'And the name.'

'Your name?'

'Yes.'

I was unaccountably pleased. 'You like it?'

'Quite.'

'Brett Hartshorn does kind of roll off the tongue,' I admit that I bragged. 'And with respect, your ideas...' and then I ran out of words—'sucked' seemed suddenly, ineloquent.

But there was one question that had to be answered before we could really establish a working relationship. 'Why are you here for the week?'

He opened his bootlaces even more, and sighed. 'Quite frankly,' he said, 'a holiday.'

This was something I had never read about. 'The Devil ... you ... take holidays?'

'I need to keep in touch.'

'Don't you know what's going on all the time?'

'Do you?'

'Of course not.'

'The deuce you say!' he grinned, and his chin bristled with five-o'clock shadow. 'Well, I don't either. You must stop thinking of me as omniscient.' A thought seemed to strike him. 'Think of me as a construct. Does that help?'

He even pronounced it as CON-struct. For one wonderful and awful moment, I thought: are all the philosophy professors dead? But anyway, this was getting too deep for me. He was incontrovertibly the Devil, and he was sitting on my bed, the only soft sitting place in my room, and I was cross-legged on the floor a metre away. I had more questions.  But first: 'Uh, I don't know how to put this, but what do I call you?'

Now he was confused. 'Can't you guess?'

I hadn't a clue. So many names came to mind. Mister Devil (sounding like a drink), Beelzebub, the Evil One, the Tempter, the Prince of Darkness, His Satanic Majesty, plain old Satan.

But none of them seemed right. Besides, they were all hard on my tongue. For comfort, I would have preferred what he would have been called where I grew up, if he'd rolled into town: Beez, Evo, Maj, or even Horny. And then there were the other names that were just part of Bunwup's Saturday night crowd: Ugly (handsomest bloke in town), Boozer (the parson who came to the pub and drank orange squash), and of course, the ever common Blue, for redheads.

The Devil interrupted this train of going-nowhere thought. 'I was always partial to "The Angel of the Bottomless Pit", he said. 'Until you called me Brett.'

He smiled that wide smile of his.

'So, Brett,' I continued, rather inordinately pleased. 'Why do you come up here—or is it down?'

'It's more like over, he said, stretching himself full length on the bed. 'I like to get a feel for things during Pledge Week, and then we always have our pledgers chaperoned by someone, as it were, throughout the week.'

'Why?'

He plumped my pillow and shoved it under his head. 'Trust. And getting the job done.'

This was confusing all over again. I remembered all the instances I'd read about the time being up and the person being dragged off to hell, or shoved in the Devil's collecting box and stuffed in his pocket. 'I thought a deal is a deal with you.'

'It is,' he said, 'but we've got competition. You must know of our competition? And besides, you...' And here he bowed and waved his hand in a gallant swashbuckle of a flourish. 'I don't mean to impute—but you in a more generic sense—don't always play straight. We prefer not to let you go once you've signed.'

That made sense. Once, in response to a radio station's pledge drive that had some story that made me cry, I rang the station and pledged. This reminded me.

'And besides,' he said. 'About that award-winning best-seller that you're going to write, that's going to win you fame...'

'Yes?' Suddenly I felt all over again that thrill of signing the contract, only hours ago.

'Who's going to write it?'

I panicked as the whole vision fractured. 'Me?'

His raised his eyebrows so high, his horns moved. 'Not a word, my silly worrier,' he said, and I know I should never use the word
soothingly
, but he did say it that way.

I was trying to figure out how he was going to coerce anyone really good to write it when he pointed to his chest. And then he smiled not only soothingly, but rather egotistically. I didn't care. After five years of everyone asking
When is it coming out?
I was off the hook. I could just go to work and come home, and in a short time, only a hell's week, the book would be done and I would be ...

The room swam with the smell of success, mixed with Celestial Sky.

I felt alive of an aliveness that I had never felt. In one week (I hadn't asked about the details of what this meant exactly, or read the contract that closely, as it had seemed rude at the time), anyway, it was hard to put all these thoughts in coherent order (which had always been one of my problems)—there would be me, the finally-famous writer of some book (unnamed as of yet). My whole body thrilled (I could
feel
somewhere—probably my intestines—effervesce with joy). The book—my book that had eluded me for bloody
years
—this book that I'd talked about writing for
years
but never specified, would finally be written, holdable, read by others, translated, quoted, and plagiarized—and would be ghost-written by the Devil himself, 'Brett Hartshorn', the best words of fiction I ever thought up.

...continues

Copyright information
© Anna Tambour, 2005, 2011
Spotted Lily
was first published in 2005, and is reprinted as an infinity plus ebook:

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Spotted Lily by Anna Tambour
$2.99 / £2.18.

 

 

A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives:

Jubilee is a bold young woman of seventeen, on the cusp of leaving the security of her family home to seek out her own future. But her life is thrown into tumult by a visit from a forbidding stranger who has come looking for Jubilee's beloved brother, Jolly—who is seven years dead.

Jolly died as a child, consumed in an unprecedented flood of "silver"—a mysterious substance resembling a thick, glowing fog. Silver is a force of both destruction and creation. Sometimes it dissolves what it touches, at other times it randomly rebuilds structures from the lost past, but no person caught within its reach has ever survived it.

And yet...

If Jolly is truly dead, how could this stranger know him? And if Jolly is alive, how did he survive the silver? And where has he gone? Jubilee soon discovers that the stranger is not the only person interested in her brother's fate.

Looming over all is the question of the silver's nature and purpose. Silver is rising in the world, flooding ever more often and more deeply so that someday soon the world must drown in it.

Determined to find answers, Jubilee leaves home one step ahead of a ruthless pursuit. The quest she undertakes will unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther than she ever imagined.

"The feel of visionary fantasy mixes with hard SF in this powerful novel of a young woman's quest for a missing brother in a far future world beset by out-of-control technology."
—
Locus

"...Nagata's book conjures up a richly realized world in which a truly eerie landscape serves as the vibrant background of a tale of self-discovery and courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds."
—
Booklist

Buy now:
Memory by Linda Nagata

For Junzo—
A Quest, a Puzzle
And Multiple Lives

When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on my blanket—and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.

This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, "We have been so very fortunate to have such a wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wisdom." My father would laugh, but I would pout, knowing I had lost another round, and that I must try harder next time.

I seldom suffered a guilty conscience. I knew it was my role to be wild—even my mother agreed to that—but on the night my story begins I was troubled by the thought that perhaps this time I had gone too far.

I lived then in the temple founded by my mother, Temple Huacho, a remote outpost in the Kavasphir Hills, a wild land of open woods and rolling heights, infamous for the frequency of its silver floods.

As often as three nights in ten the silver would come, rising from the ground, looking like a luminous fog as it filled all the vales, to make an island of our hilltop home. I would watch its deadly advance from my bedroom window, and many times I saw it lap at the top of the perimeter wall that enclosed the temple grounds.