Infinite Fantastika Read online

  Book Description

  This eclectic, wide-ranging collection of some of Di Filippo’s newest stories—plus one newly excavated gem from nearly thirty years past—illustrates the enormous territory encompassed by modern fantastical fiction in general, and this writer’s realm in particular. From the sheer Lovecraftian weirdness found in “The Horror at Gancio Rosso” to the biopunk future of “The Herple is a Happy Beast”; from the old-school pulp of “Airboy and Vooda Visit the Jungles of the Moon” to the hardcore cyberpunk of “A Faster, Deeper Now,” these tales chart the unexpected, the comical, the tragic and the likely-to-happen. Whether our heroes are trying to kill God (“The Trail of the Creator, the Trial of Creation”) or time-travel to a happier era (“I’ll Follow the Sun”), they exhibit all the intelligence, derring-do, resilience and manic assaults on the multiverse found in the best classic imaginative literature.

  Praise for Paul di Filippo

  “Di Filippo is like gourmet potato chips to me. I can never eat just one of his stories.”—Harlan Ellison

  “Out of a rich impasto of language, a story that is sensual, sexual, and hot takes shape around one of the most engaging heroines since Southern and Hoffenberg’s Candy.”—Samuel Delany on A Mouthful of Tongues

  “A ruthless fantasy of aggressive sexuality and archaic intentions.”—A. A. Attanasio on A Mouthful of Tongues

  “Fluid, fantastic, rich with menace and heat, A Mouthful of Tongues is a run amok past the limits of the human, Eros the Jaguar with claws intact.”—Kathe Koja on A Mouthful of Tongues

  “This collection, Ribofunk, stands as the field’s madcap Dubliners of the biogenetic revolution.”

  —Michael Bishop on Ribofunk

  “Ribofunk is great science fiction: wildly inventive, warmly human, culturally relevant, and deeply funny. Paul Di Filippo does dazzling new tricks with English. And then he puts the wonderful language and the wild science together … and the whole fractal exfoliation leads to the utterly wonderful Ribofunk. The book of the year.”

  —Rudy Rucker on Ribofunk

  “Fractal Paisleys channel surfs postmodern apocalypse brilliantly.”—Jonathan Lethem

  “An often genuinely funny mixture of Raymond Carver, Harry Harrison, and Douglas Adams.”—Booklist on Fractal Paisleys

  “Di Filippo is the spin doctor of SF—and it is a powerful medicine he brews.”—Brian Aldiss

  “Paul Di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy is the literary equivalent of Max Ernst’s collages of 19th-century steel-engravings, spooky, haunting, hilarious.”—William Gibson

  “Strange Trades is a splendid collection … witty, thoughtful, accessible … the book’s finest story … has a humanity worthy of Dickens or Hardy.”—Publisher’s Weekly

  “Vibrant, nervy, and full of gloriously wiggy language, Ribofunk is anything but the same old stuff.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

  “It’s like Tom Robbins’ classic Even Cowgirls Get the Blues recast in the hands of gonzo mathematician Rudy Rucker as a kind of ontological daytrip.”—Locus on Fuzzy Dice

  “An author who genuinely comes close to defying all attempts at description. A true original.”—Infinity Plus

  “In terms of composition, narrative description and voice, Di Filippo is well nigh masterful.”—SF Site on A Year in the Linear City

  “One absolute knock-out story … that is among the most exciting pieces of fiction I’ve read in years.”—Cory Doctorow on Wikiworld

  “Even when Di Filippo does make use of more common images or tropes, it’s with a disturbingly original spin.”—Gary Wolfe on Little Doors

  Infinite Fantastika

  Paul di Filippo

  Contents

  Introduction

  Before and After Science

  The Trail of the Creator, the Trial of Creation

  Domotica Berserker!

  I’ll Follow the Sun

  A Faster, Deeper Now

  Thirteen Ways of Being Looked at By a Blackbird SR-71

  The Herple is a Happy Beast

  The Horror at Gancio Rosso

  Airboy and Vooda Visit the Jungles of the Moon

  Antikhthon

  The Bartered Planet

  Devils at Play

  Previous Publication Information

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Infinite Fantastika

  by Paul Di Filippo

  Copyright © 2018 Paul Di Filippo

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-679-8

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  WordFire Press ebook edition 2018

  Printed in the USA

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  Created with Vellum

  For Deborah, infinitely fascinating.

  And for my mother, Claire Louise, a beloved source of infinite stories.

  Introduction

  Start Here, End Everywhere:

  A Multiverse of Adventure and Possibilities

  I love realistic fiction, whether contemporary or history-based. I am a maven of mimesis, a voyeur of verisimilitude. To borrow and warp the title of one of Robert Crumb’s famous characters, you could call me “Mr. Naturalism.” Give me Thomas Wolfe the Elder, William Faulkner or Charles Dickens, and I will become happily lost in their deft and vivid representations of consensus reality.

  But this affection for the quasi-journalistic-moderated-by-authorial-sensibilities depiction of the world around us did not always reside in my heart. It was only when I got to college and my reading habits broadened that I learned to love realism.

  Before then, from the time I began to read, I loved only science fiction, fantasy, horror, the weird, the surreal, the absurd—in short, all those genres and many others which are subsumed in the word “fantastika,” imported into our conversation by famed critic John Clute in order to serve as an umbrella for all that is not realism. In my callow youth, I denigrated realism, and thought that only “imaginative literature,” “speculative literature,” fantastika was worth my time.

  The famous editor John W. Campbell was fond of categorizing literature into two camps along these same lines. He said that realism’s remit was only what was known to exist, the ding-an-sich if you will, and only those bits which came directly under our limited human attention. Our civilization, our various societies and customs and historical eras. Meanwhile, science fiction and its sister genres encompassed everything else: all the counterfactual, impossible, heretofore-unknown, magical, as-yet-unrealized scenarios stretching from before the Big Bang to beyond the Heat Death of the Universe. One was bounded, one infinite. If you accepted his division of topics, then how could any rational, open-minded person limit themselves to realism alone, as so many inexplicably do?

  In many ways, I still believe in the accuracy and validity of this division promulgated by Campbell, which is why my deepest fondness re
mains for fantastika, and why I practice mainly in that realm. There’s just so much territory to explore, beyond the fields we know. But at the same time, I don’t bother to put realism and fantastika into a scale anymore and try to weigh their contrasting virtues so that I can proclaim one is lesser and one is greater. I take each on its own terms. To use Stephen J. Gould’s label for the remits of religion vs. science, I regard them as “non-overlapping magisteria,” each with their own appeal.

  So in this volume you will find naturalistic passages aplenty—but all in service to wild-eyed, non-realistic conceptions: a Venn diagram of all my loves.

  For many years I thought this story was lost to me forever. It first appeared almost three decades ago in a fanzine, and my only copy had vanished. Neither was there a manuscript left. And then, a miracle. An idle, half-hopeless Google search revealed that someone had scanned the fanzine and put it online! And so I was able to reclaim my long-lost tale.

  My inspiration at the time of composition was the supremely weird music of Brian Eno, and the visions it conjured. I never generally write plotless stories, and it felt fun to work in that mode. I seem to recall that Italo Calvino was also riding my shoulder.

  Before and After Science

  1. BEFORE (Backwater)

  Before science we spoke the strong names into ragged deep holes in the ground which no man had ever dug, and our ancestors answered us in the language of the dead. Their voices lived in our heads for weeks after each distant conversation, and we tasted mold in our fresh bread and felt as if roots had knotted our eyeballs and threaded their fibers through our nostrils. But it was important to speak to those who had left us, and the ones among the living who could unriddle the harsh and cryptic syllables of the dead became respected shamans. We listened with silent attentiveness to these interpreters and followed their sage advice until we saw that night sky look in their eyes, heard the sepulchral undertone in their voices, all of which betokened their desire to join their interlocutors. Whereupon, with delight, we killed them.

  Before science our houses were made of thick air and frozen moonlight. Our world’s constant wind, impacting the walls which were fashioned from a different phase of itself, adhered. Thus our houses steadily accreted new material to themselves, growing and thickening like pearls. (Every morning we had to break a thin seal over our doors and windows.) Each year a woman’s house was visibly larger. The oldest among us lived behind walls so massive that they had to walk for half a day down a long tunnel to reach their front door, whereupon they would break the seal, poke out their heads for a breath of the air that was immuring them, catch a glimpse of sunlight, snatch up the food their neighbors had left for them, and begin the trek back into their homes so as to arrive once more at their living moss beds in time for sleep.

  Congealed moonlight formed the roofs of our homes, casting a pleasant glow inside all day and all night. (These lenses condensed in certain nearby hollows on a single night each month.) Depending on what kind of rain fell, the compacted moonlight shone a roseate pink, a glaucous green, or the yellow of old bone. We had different ceremonies for each shade of light. Some were sad, others were not.

  Once an oldster, despairing of the daily shuffle to front entrance and back, resolved to exit through the roof. None of us had ever thought to try this before. It was just as well. The old one thrust head and shoulders through the roof of moonstuff and promptly went mad. Moonlight leaked continually from his eyes and ears. He tried to kill himself by swallowing needlefish, but this we could not permit, as once deceased his mad voice would have disrupted all our conversations with the dead. We were forced to remove his soul and lock it into a stone. The stone we tossed into the sea. His body was used to flavor a batch of beer, so that we might remember his folly and not duplicate it.

  Before science we mated with anything that pleased us. Our tastes were catholic, our energies fervid. Spiders, mud, books, sea-apes, flames, the lemon wind, ghost-trees, all these and many other objects knew our passionate embraces. These matings occupied many hours of our days and nights. Some were communal, some private. Occasionally one among us became obsessed, fixated on some singular individual or species. It was thus with He Who Loved Rukhs.

  The Rukhs were avians as big as ourselves. They lived high in the mountains surrounding our village, in nests of spun glass. Often one would see them gliding soundlessly on thermals far above our homes. Their plumage was of various colors, thick and bright, save over their mammalian breasts which stood out bare.

  He Who Loved Rukhs would climb laboriously to their perches, clasp a bird and lock organs with it. The Rukh, startled, would launch itself into the air. The matings were consummated in the depths of the sky, where blue gave way to indigo. If all went well, the Rukh would alight and He Who Loved Rukhs would dismount and walk away. Sometimes, though, for no apparent reason, the Rukh would stiffen all its muscles at the climax and plummet towards the ground. The first time this happened, the Rukh-lover saved himself only by catching onto some thick air during his fall, and sinking slowly to the earth, where the Rukh lay broken and dying. He laid his head on the breasts of his avian lover and wept. The Rukh made grievous reply. We who had witnessed this counselled him against further such intercourse. He ignored us, as was his right and, perhaps, his geas.

  The second time this happened, He Who Loved Rukhs broke both legs and several ribs. We healed him with salves made from river-coral and cave-fungi. He returned to the Rukhs shortly thereafter. The last time a Rukh behaved in this manner, we found He Who Loved Rukhs in a crumpled heap, broken beyond repair, and we could do naught but ease him on his journey. For many years thereafter, Rukhs at sunset circled the spot where he died, uttering mournful cries.

  Naturally there were many others whose loves had also left them scarred in one way or another. Missing limbs, claw-etched faces, lacerated organs, muscles spasming from exotic poisonous secretions ingested unthinkingly in the heat of lust—all these evidences of savage and unlikely couplings could be seen among our people.

  The offspring of such matings were everywhere. The more tractable we adopted as our own, rearing them to civilized behavior. Others, less human, wandered the fields and forests, the air and sea, sometimes further interbreeding and creating offspring even more bizarre than their parents. Eventually the world became more interestingly populated than it had been when the first of us walked forth from the Omphalos, and we congratulated ourselves on our fecundity.

  Before science we ate mostly whatever came to hand. Only bread and beer did we bother to prepare, and this only because the dead had revealed the secret of their manufacture to us. Otherwise we foraged for edibles in the woods and along the riverbank, in tidal pools or under rocks. Occasionally we ate the rocks themselves, if the fancy took us, and they had been sufficiently softened by the hot rains that made our moonlight roofs glow the color of slate.

  Once, a glutton among us ate another member of the village before we could stop him. Thereafter he could not control his left side, and fought a constant war against his possessor. At night we would gather in a circle, seated, with the unfortunate one at the center and watch his struggles, which we found instructive. He died attempting to swim the river during floodtime, when his uncooperative half failed to paddle. His voice and that of his unwilling companion were linked in death as one forever after.

  Whenever any of us found something particularly good to eat, such as an enormous sponge tree, she would summon everyone within hearing, and we would devour it down to the ground.

  Sometimes the food fought back, and then we were eaten ourselves.

  Before science there was nothing in the sky that we did not understand. Everything was comprehended instinctively, and spoke volumes to us.

  Before science war was a game. We met with those from other villages and exchanged poems. Those poets who were accorded the cicatrice of victory went to live in the rival village as honored guests, relieved from all necessities, even that of walking. (They were carried abo
ut on the backs of volunteers.) Those contestants who lost were buried headfirst in the earth until they sprouted leaves from the soles of their feet, whereupon they were pruned and mulched and watered. They served better in this capacity than in their former unsuitable role.

  Before science the elimination of bodily wastes took place only while we squatted together in the ocean, during a full moon. This latter condition obtained more frequently then.

  Before science our dreams sometimes manifested themselves tangibly, without our intervention. We tried always to think harmoniously prior to falling asleep, just in case such a thing should occur. We were not always successful. Once we awoke and there were footprints a mile long and half as wide outside our doors. Twelve houses had been crushed with their occupants. We determined who the dreamer was and excised his organ of dreaming with flint knives. Afterwards he dug a trench for himself, lay in it, heaped the earth back over himself, and changed into a worm.