INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (8 page)

Felix went through the flat with a refuse sack, shoving the flowers and air fresheners and bloody scented candles into bags, closing and locking the windows, drawing the curtains. Then, when he was ready to find out her reasons, he returned to his office and switched on his laptop:
hot metal, burning plastic, wisps of toxic smoke.

With a bellow of rage he reopened the window and tossed the computer after the dog.

•••

It took three days before he gave in. On the first day he went to the kitchen and made a wonderful-smelling meal out of all the things that Joanna didn’t like. Not so much out of defiance, or even because he was hungry, but because on that side of the apartment he could barely hear Bijoux’s howls. The dog was unharmed, just pissed off. The laptop had not fared so well. On the second day, both dog and wrecked device were gone. Felix threw himself into work, or at least tried to. Every phone call was met with excuses. They even seemed to object to talking to him, as if merely the sound of his voice conjured the imaginary smell.
All of this could easily have been discussed by email
, one customer said.
It’d have been so much more convenient if only you would use Teleroma
.

That night he went to Joanna’s bedroom and donned the Nose to see what lingered:
sickly perfume, unlaundered sheets, the musk of sex that hadn’t involved Felix
. Then he looked at himself in her mirror.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re a master of your profession, and yet no one will have anything to do with you. You could still get by if you weren’t so afraid of the future.”

“You’re right,” he replied to himself. “If the old world doesn’t want me, perhaps after all I can make a place for myself in the new one. How bad can it be, really?”

He really had no option.

On the third day Felix went to an electronics store and asked for their top-of-the-range computer. Pretending not to notice the fleeing customers, he cornered the clerk who had been slowest to escape. The girl rattled through the features in a blur of words. Felix cut her off: “Teleroma.”

She nodded, swallowed. “Comes as standard on all new models, sir.”

“I’ll take it.”

Pink relief coloured her pallid cheeks. She told him how much it cost.

Just because he was feeling spiteful at the world, he said: “I want a discount. Otherwise I’ll have to have a good look around.”

•••

Felix wrote that afternoon to those clients with whom he still had some tenuous relationship and informed them that he might after all in some circumstances be willing to work remotely using the Teleroma service. He intended to spend the subsequent hour learning how Teleroma worked but the help document bewildered him and the number of results to his Google search for something simpler was so bewildering that he only got as far as understanding two things. Firstly, that Teleroma was a mechanism for transmitting scent over the internet, which he’d already surmised. And secondly that it was hugely popular. People used it for everything: cookery videos, perfume advertisements, porn. He scowled at the little grill in the laptop casing, his finger poised to click play on a coffee ad, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Outside, the sound of people laughing passed and faded. The bark of a distant dog made him wonder where Bijoux was. His apartment was still and silent.

Occasionally the phone rang, but after the third call from a newspaper wanting to talk to the
incredible stinking man
, he switched it off.

Going through his emails, Felix discovered an invitation to join a dating site. He stared at it. Even he knew better than to click on unsolicited links. But this one was personally addressed, and very welcoming. He stared some more, and then he clicked on it. What was the worst that could happen? The site offered him a bunch of forms. It took some time to list all of his achievements before his application was ready to send off.

He had a reply within the hour. Her name was Ania, and she was Polish. In the subsequent exchange of emails, she came across as cultured, understanding and not lacking in humour. When she asked if he would like to Skype, he cringed but in for a penny… Besides, he was still handsome, and he had no intention whatsoever of switching on the Teleroma, even if he was able to work out how.

Ania had a strong face, a broad mouth with nice teeth when she smiled, which was often, and a sexy nose. Could a nose be sexy? Hers was. It had very wide nostrils. She was a partner in an accountancy firm. She worked late and was divorced. In what little free time she had she drank vodka and torrented HBO shows and chatted to men from dating sites. She winked when she said that.

Felix didn’t know what torrenting was. He didn’t understand the wink either. But Ania proved a good person to chat to and he told her about his work (she was impressed) and his recent singledom (she was sympathetic). While they chatted his eye was drawn repeatedly to her nose. The gorgeous nostrils flared, as if inhaling deeply, and when she breathed out it was through her mouth. Heavily, a little shaky. There was a flush in her cheeks. He’d not seen her hands for some time.

“Are you –
touching
, I mean are you—?” he blurted.

Ania grinned sheepishly. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help myself.” Her hand came up into view. She licked her fingers. “You smell unbelievably good. I’ve never—” She suppressed a shudder. “Oh, God,
never
.”

Felix’s heart tripped over itself in panic. “You can
smell
me? That thing is on?” He clicked wildly at icons on the chat window. Ania disappeared but he could still hear her.

“Of course. Teleroma is on as standard, you have to opt out. But please.
Please
, don’t.”

Don’t
? She could smell him, and she wasn’t repulsed? He relaxed a fraction. “Well, why can’t I smell you?”

“I’m sorry, I’m being selfish. I didn’t want my feedback to contaminate you. It took so long to track you down.” When she reached forward to click something on the computer balanced on her lap he noticed that her blouse wasn’t tucked into anything. The taint of soap mixed with the faint but unmistakable odour of female arousal leaked from his computer. “Felix, I’ve got to see you tonight.”

“But aren’t you in Poland?”

With a smile, she shook her head. “Please.”

He told her his address. She closed the connection.

While Felix waited, he went over what she had said. She genuinely found his odour attractive? What was she, some sort of freak?

Ania almost knocked him over when he opened the door. Then she was kissing him, licking his face, yanking off his robe, popping buttons from his pyjamas. He smelled the rain on her hair, the sweat from her run up the stairs, the edge of something else –
alcohol
?

“The Nose,” she breathed. “Put on the Nose.”

She followed him through to the office. “I smelled you in the drop off zone of Frederic Chopin Airport. I
had
to have you,” she told him as he unlocked the desk drawer and retrieved the box. “I’ve bribed people. Coerced them even. Eventually I got your email address. Thank you for replying.” She nodded at the golden gleam in his hand. “Put it on.” Felix did as he was told, and immediately his visitor shuddered.

“I smell worse when I’m wearing it?”

Ania licked her lips several times before finding the breath to reply. “Oh, God, a million times better.” With the Nose on, her arousal was overpowering, her sweat almost as erotic, and that other smell was stronger too. Not alcohol, but familiar. Something medicinal…

She pushed him back against the desk, tore off what remained of his nightwear, and it was only when the damp cloth was clamped over his face that he finally recognised the smell.

Of course,
chloroform
.

•••

The house was very nice. It was spacious and sparsely but tastefully decorated. Clean walls, stone floors, functional furniture, plain accessories. Sterile. It was not in Vienna. There were no mountains high enough for the air to be this pure in Vienna. Felix didn’t even think it was in Austria. The German the housekeeper spoke was different. He suspected Bavaria perhaps.

He thought of himself as a prisoner. But he found he didn’t mind so much. He watched HBO and played Warcraft (his goblin avatar was called Stinky Bill) and read from a well selected library of books.

And three times a day he got naked, put on the Nose and broadcast himself in Teleroma for an hour.

Occasionally, Ania visited. They had exhausting sex and then lay in bed and talked. She told him, to his surprise, that he was not in fact a prisoner in the house. Rather, he owned the place, having paid for it outright in the first two weeks when they’d broadcast him sedated as “proof of concept” to their backers. It would be unfortunate if he was to leave, but he could do so if he wanted. He thought the distinction was a technicality, but stopped worrying about it when she showed him his bank balance.

And so it went. To keep things interesting for the punters, they varied his diet: Spice Time!, Umami Hour! Apparently that made a difference to his odour. Sometimes, they gave him things to smell with the Nose – orchid blossoms, durian fruit, cow shit – because that made a difference too. Felix did as he was told. He chose early on not to watch them watching him – the myriad white faces in dark rooms, many with Teleroma masks squashed against them as they struggled to breath in everything he had to offer, the orgiastic groaning; it was all too much. Much better to content himself with the ever fluctuating, but overall steadily rising, visitor stats. To think of the money.

One time he asked Ania: “Am I famous?”

Her smile was broad. “In the greater world, no one has a clue who you are,” she said. “But to the people who matter, you are a god.”

They fed him exquisitely but he knew he was losing weight. “Am I going to die?”

Ania kissed his brow. “We all die,” she whispered. “Surely all that matters is that, by the time we do, we achieve the things are hearts wish for.”

Felix stroked the Nose, heavy and solid and cold. He breathed in and smelled, faintly, an entirely new smell. It was warm and cool, and bright and mellow. It was rich, and it was oh so very sweet.

•••••

Neil Williamson’s last
Interzone
appearance was ‘The Posset Pot’ in issue 252. You can read more of his stories in his collection,
The Ephemera
. His debut novel,
The Moon King
, has been called “literary fantasy at its best” by T
he Guardian
and “a sparkling debut novel” by none other than
Interzone
.

The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and is decided by an international panel of judges made up of professional authors and editors. Previous winners have gone on to either win other awards or get published regularly, which is exactly why the award was set up. The winning story receives a cash prize, a handsome trophy and publication in
Interzone
. Entries are received from all over the world, and a shortlist is drawn up for the judges. To learn more about the Award itself visit
jameswhiteaward.com
.

This year’s judges were Sophia McDougall, Emma Newman and Adam Roberts. The winner of the £200 first prize was ‘Beside the Dammed River’ by D.J. Cockburn. The judges also awarded a special recommendation to Vina Jin-Mae Prasad for her story ‘Flesh and Bone’.

The 2015 James White Award is now open. Entry is free.

The James White Award was instituted to honour the memory of one of Ireland’s most successful science fiction authors, James White. To learn more about James White and his writing, visit
www.sectorgeneral.com
.

BESIDE THE DAMMED RIVER

D.J. COCKBURN

Narong heard children running to the road before he heard the pickup truck. He sighed. When he’d been a child, there had been nothing unusual about cars in Ubon Ratchathani province. All the same, he was happy enough to set down the empty water barrow and stretch his back as the plume of dust approached.

As the truck and its trailer got closer, he savoured the healthy roar from the engine. As rare as the unscraped white paint under the film of dust. He couldn’t remember when he last saw a truck that didn’t carry its age as he did, in wrinkled bodywork and incessant wheezing before starting up. He winced as a pothole thumped the tyres and rattled the suspension. The healthy sound wouldn’t last long if the driver kept hitting them like that.

Perhaps Narong was still a child at heart because he squinted, trying to make out the manufacturer’s badge. The truck thumped another pothole. The engine screamed in mechanical agony, faded to a whine and fell silent. The truck coasted past him and stopped fifty metres away. He wondered what was under the tarpaulins covering the truck’s bed and its trailer.

A
farang
woman got out on the passenger side. Her ginger hair was just long enough to shimmer as she moved. She wore a sleeveless shirt and knee-length shorts, revealing skin so white it defied the sun pounding this water-forsaken corner of Thailand.

Narong’s interest stirred. Today would have more to mark it than dust and water barrows.

The line of children by the roadside collapsed into a gaggle as they ran toward her, like a shoal of catfish outside a river temple when someone threw food into the water. Narong decided he was definitely still a child when he found himself following them as fast as his arthritic knees would carry him.

The woman backed toward the truck, looking as though she expected the children to steal the clothes she stood in. Her bare shoulder touched the hot metal of the cab. She jerked forward with a yelp.

“Stand back, younger brothers and sisters.” Narong caught his breath. He may have been a child at heart, but the pounding in his ears reminded him he didn’t have the heart of a child. “It is not good to get so close to our visitors that they cannot move without treading on you.”

The children backed away without taking their eyes off the woman. One of them fell into the dry ditch beside the road but there was no laughter as he scrambled out. Even the funniest mishap was less interesting than an exotic stranger.
Farang
were such a rare sight that today’s children didn’t even know the jokes that kept Narong and his childhood friends entertained for hours.

The woman looked at her driver, a young man with his hair cut short at the back with a longer fringe. He’d probably never driven more than a hundred kilometres from Bangkok. The driver spread his hands, looking helpless. He reminded Narong of the junior official the government sent a couple of years ago, who gave a speech about how the government hadn’t forgotten the north east of its country and went back to Bangkok before it got dark. Even the government had shown more sense than to let such a boy drive himself.

The driver stepped out of the cab and looked at Narong. His stare carried all the respect Narong expected a man wearing foreign-made shoes to show an old man wearing sandals made from an old tyre.

Narong had met too many well-dressed boys from Bangkok to expect him to say anything worth listening to. He walked toward the
farang
woman. He wanted to hear her voice.

She watched him coming without looking at him directly, showing her wariness.

Narong pressed his hands together and bowed. “
Sawadee kob
.”

She shuffled her feet and returned his
wai
with the clumsiness of someone unused to the action.

“
Sawadee kob
,” she mumbled. No one had told her women said
kha
instead of
kob
.

“My name is Narong,” he said. “Guess your gearbox dropped.”

Relief washed over her face at being addressed in English.

“Angela Ri—” She bit off what Narong assumed was her surname. “Angela.”

She held out her hand, then remembered she had already done the local equivalent and withdrew it. “How do you know it’s the gearbox?”

Narong felt a moment of disappointment. Her voice sounded as if she never used it to laugh.

“Sure sounded like it,” he said.

“The gearbox. That’s bad?”

The question was addressed to the driver, who looked as though she had set him a problem in differential calculus.

“Got a toolbox?” asked Narong.

Angela looked at the driver.

“Must be jack and wrench somewhere,” he said.

“He said a
toolbox
, Gehng. It’s a bust gearbox, not a flat tyre.”

As she rounded on Gehng, Narong saw pearls of sweat gathered across her shoulders. How much water must she drink in this climate? He winced at the volume he estimated.

“In this make, it’s usually under a panel behind the cab,” said Narong.

Angela looked at Gehng, who showed no sign of knowing if there was a panel, let alone a toolbox. Narong reached for the knot tying the tarpaulin to the cleats along the side of the truck. Gehng seized his wrist.

“It is not good to look underneath.” The hard edge in Gehng’s Thai contrasted with his deferential English.

“Oh for God’s sake, Gehng, let him look.” Angela may not have understood Thai, but Gehng’s body language was unambiguous. “
He
seems to have some idea of what he’s doing.”

“I call headquarters in Bangkok.” Gehng pulled a phone from the pouch on his belt. “They send…”

His voice faded.

“Where there’s no water, nobody repairs the roads.” Narong returned to the knot. “Where the roads are bad, there are no maintenance trucks. Where there are no maintenance trucks, there is no signal.”

The rope was so new it was slippery. Whoever tied it knew nothing about knots and had tried to compensate by tying several of them. Narong’s fingers weren’t as nimble as they once were.

“Narong. I know your name.” Gehng returned to Thai. “So if you ever speak of what is in the truck, it will not be good for you and your village.”

Narong tugged the last knot apart. He stepped back and looked at Gehng. He was more irked by Gehng’s omission of the respectful
pee
, the right of an older man, than by his empty threats. If whatever was under the tarpaulin was that important, Gehng wouldn’t admit he’d allowed Narong to see it. If Gehng reported to anyone who cared who said what in Ubon Ratchathani, he’d leave Narong out of the report.

He looked at Angela with the secret surname, letting Gehng know it was obvious who was in charge here.

“Go ahead,” she said.

Narong allowed himself a trace of a smirk when he looked back at Gehng. A look that said if he was trying to impress Angela into giving him a bonus, he wasn’t doing very well so he could stop acting the
phoo yai
big man. Gehng’s eyes replied that he read the message and hated Narong for it, but realised his mouth would serve him best by staying shut.

Narong glanced at Angela, whose expression hadn’t changed. She had seen nothing that passed between him and Gehng.

Narong couldn’t resist a flourish when he threw back the tarpaulin, revealing the load to the children. The rock on the truck’s bed was matt grey. Its surface was bubbled as though it had been almost melted and then solidified. He touched one of the bubbles. It was as hard as stone. Some sort of polymer, he guessed. He looked up to the holes bored into the top of the rock and understood Gehng’s unease.

Angela gave him a smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. She obviously hoped an old man pushing a water barrow wouldn’t know what he was looking at.

“Pity we can’t see it without the heat shield,” he said. “The children would appreciate the sparkle of enriched platinum ore. From an M-type asteroid.”

Angela said nothing. Even though asteroid mining had produced enough metal to drop prices, he was looking at no less than five million dollars.

“So that’s a crane in the trailer, and the parachute that was bolted to it?” he asked.

Angela’s nod was minute. If she was trying to hide her thoughts, she wasn’t very good at it. She was wondering how an old peasant understood so much and wished he didn’t. She wouldn’t know Ubon Ratchathani had been a wealthy province twenty years ago. If the world had retreated from Ubon Ratchathani with the water, Ubon Ratchathani had not forgotten the world.

The curved edge of the asteroid didn’t cover the toolbox panel, so they wouldn’t need to unload it. Still, some temptations couldn’t be resisted.

“I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said to Angela. “Perhaps you could have your driver get the toolbox out?”

Angela nodded. “Gehng.”

The look on Gehng’s face gave Narong a memory to treasure.

He turned back to Angela. “Your company sent you to recover it?”

For a moment, her face showed the need to avoid the question battling the need to ingratiate herself with a possible rescuer. He waited until she nodded uneasily. “It was supposed to go into the Gobi Desert. That’s…”

She waved a hand, wondering how to explain the geography.

“In Mongolia,” he said.

“Yes. Um. Well, something went wrong and it ended up in Thailand, so they sent us to get it.”

“And take it to Cambodia,” said Narong.

“Uh, no, I mean…”

“You’re going the wrong way for Bangkok.” Narong was enjoying himself a little too much. “No airport ahead of you till you get to Phnomh Penh.”

The sound of a tearing shirt and a very Anglophone expletive drew Narong’s attention to Gehng falling out of the truck with the toolbox.

“Thank you,
Neung
Gehng.” Narong deliberately addressed him as a younger man.

He opened the toolbox. The shine of stainless steel assailed him. For the first time since he’d seen the truck, he wanted something. Rows of screwdrivers and spanners cried out to him, pleading their supremacy over his own rusty toolkit that he kept wrapped in an old shirt.

He called himself a foolish old man. Tools like these belonged to his past. Narong’s knees cracked as he eased himself on his back. He pulled himself under the truck. There wasn’t a speck of rust on the chassis or the suspension, which was reinforced to take the load. It was a youthful vehicle compared to the doddering old wrecks he was so often called to resurrect, but he doubted it was treated with a fraction of the care people lavished on their vehicles in Ubon Ratchathani. This truck was owned by people who could afford to hand it off to a driver who didn’t realise he was invested in it until it broke down. It was painful to look at.

“You should be careful on these roads,” said Narong. “The dirt tracks aren’t too bad, but a lot of the roads round here are just tarmac that broke up for want of maintenance. They’ll rip your truck to pieces with this load.”

The answering silence told him Angela was glaring at Gehng and Gehng was looking anywhere but at Angela. Gehng must have bored her because her feet moved behind the front wheel until they were level with Narong’s head. Her face appeared as she squatted down to watch him.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

She wanted him to say he’d have it fixed in five minutes, no problem.

“I’ll know in a minute.”

She was leaning forward to see under the truck, giving him an interesting view down the front of her top. He hauled his eyes back to the gearbox. He was too old for such things, he told himself sternly. But he couldn’t resist snatching another look.

“What company do you work for?” he asked.

“One of the small ones.” Her eyes shifted away. “You probably haven’t heard of it.”

He’d heard enough to know there were no small companies able to afford the investment needed to mine asteroids. He also knew that while the UN Outer Space Treaty said nothing about exploitation, it didn’t allow for staking ownership of asteroids. If a chunk of asteroid happened to fall on Thailand, it became the property of the Thai government. Angela and Gehng couldn’t have made it more obvious that removing the asteroid was illegal if they had shouted it at him. No wonder Gehng was nervous.

It occurred to Narong that he was helping Angela steal from his country. Still, if the government cared whether people in Ubon Ratchathani followed its rules, it wouldn’t have left them to desiccate.

“You seem to know a lot about mechanics,” said Angela. “And you speak very good English.”

Narong managed to restrict himself to studying her face. She didn’t see what she was doing as stealing. She was going where her company had sent her, doing an unpleasant job that involved heat, dust and keeping the company’s business a little more confidential than usual. Gehng looked like a junior employee of a local subcontractor, who would be in Thailand long after Angela had left for good. No wonder he didn’t want anyone seeing the asteroid.