Authors: Kim Newman
But the building was diamond hard in Susan’s mind. She couldn’t think her way around it. The drab walls superimposed over the plush wallpapering of the Mayor’s office. Her map-covered floor was still beneath her, but the office was now the shadow, the warehouse the substance. As it faded away, the portrait of Mayor Donlevy winked at her. She strained at the walls, but couldn’t project her consciousness beyond them. She tried to stand up, but she was tied to the chair at her wrists and ankles. Live snakes stood in for ropes, constricting viciously. The chair began to revolve, slowly at first. She took in all of the warehouse. The maps beneath the castors churned and tore. Paperweights rolled away. The chair spun faster. Susan was whipped by her own hair. The 360-degree panorama blurred, and Susan was trapped inside her own skull. The warehouse walls blended into each other like a painting drenched with turpentine. She shut her eyes but could still feel the spinning. The snakes multiplied, swarming over her, binding her more tightly to the chair. She heard funfair music in the distance. ‘Our Love Is Here to Stay’ played on a calliope organ.
Suddenly, the spinning stopped and the serpents were gone. Susan was thrown out of her chair and, although she put out an arm to break the fall, landed heavily on a floor. Underneath the maps she felt the bare concrete of the warehouse, not the thick carpet of the Mayor’s office. The heel of her right hand was damp and gritted, and her wrist might be sprained. She made the pain go away and thought the grit out of her hand, smoothing over the abrasions. It was like making a hole in the water. She glimpsed smooth skin, but the blood and dirt flooded back in. Concentrating, she tried again. It was no better. Indeed, when the bruises came back they were larger, more ragged. Now three of her fingers were broken and stuck out at strange angles. Painfully she straightened them out and healed the hand again. This time the hurt didn’t come back. But she was wearing a white glove with lines down the back. She had three thick fingers. It didn’t feel wrong.
She stood up and thought herself back into the Mayor’s office. The scene changed. She was on the foredeck of a sailing ship, rolling in a heavy wind. It was night, and raining. Sheets and sails flapped unmanned, and the wheel spun out of control. She was alone. Looking down, she saw an oilcloth suit and rough hands. She felt a wire wool of beard on her chin, and realised she was seeing the world two-dimensionally. There was a patch over one eye. One of her legs ended in a carved wooden peg. Something squawked and bit her ear, then flapped demonically off her shoulder.
As if by instinct, she took the wheel and wrestled the ship under control.
‘Avast, ye swabs,’ she shouted, astonished by the hoarseness of her voice, ‘belay yeselves an’ man the mizzen-mast. ’Tis a stormy course for Far Tortuga we’re sailin’ an’ the cap’n’ll not rest easy at the bottom of the sea ’til the treasure be ours!’
‘I beg your pardon.’
Suddenly she was swaying, and the ground was still. She was looking at a man in an evening clothe. It was Orin Tredway. She was in her own body again, but wearing a wet sou’wester with her best floorlength, belly-slit dress. They were backstage at the Rodney Award ceremony. That pompous skitch John Yeovil had just finished reading out the Best Dream nominations. Orin was looking at her as a Neanderthal might look at homo sapiens after a lecture on Darwinism. She was sure he was going to kill her.
‘And the winner is…’
Susan swept the sou’wester off her head and threw it away. Orin got wet but grinned.
‘Susan Bishopric, for
The Parking Lottery.’
The applause was thunderous. Orin looked sick and hugged and kissed her. She broke away before he could get a stranglehold and made her way to the podium, hitching up her dress and putting on her very best smile for the tridvid sages. She had forgotten her memorised thank-you speech, but knew she could improvise. People in the audience shook her hand, the applause swelled, the band played ‘If You Knew Susie’, her mother burst into tears, the other nominees popped drugs, and Susan had to fight to keep control of her bladder.
She climbed to the podium, picked up the surprisingly heavy statuette and leaned forwards to accept Yeovil’s peck on the cheek, hoping she wouldn’t flinch in three dimensions all over the world at his lizard’s touch. But she saw something unexpected in his usually frozen face, a trace of horror. There was someone standing behind him, glaring evilly at her. She hugged the Rodney to her breast, fearful lest they take it away from her.
‘Who… who are you?’ Yeovil gasped. The figure came forwards. It took Susan seconds to recognise the oval face, the pale eyes, the quiet smile.
‘Yes, who are you?’ said the real Susan Bishopric, taking the Rodney she deserved.
As she felt the statuette being pulled from her grip, Susan saw her naked, burly, hairy, scarred arm. The evening gown hung strangely on her one-legged pirate’s body. Everything went flat again.
The crowds were laughing now, and booing. Things were thrown. Susan’s wooden leg splintered through a hole in the stage and stuck fast. She bent to avoid a thrown object. A Rodney crashed into the Dreaming Face symbol behind the podium. Another smashed on the floor. All the other winners were throwing their Rodneys at her. One statuette hit the stage at a crouch and ran off, his hands modestly covering his genitals.
The real Susan Bishopric raised her deserved award and swung it at her head.
She ducked, and the decks were rolling again. A swarthy fellow with ringlets was taking a slash at her with a heavy cutlass. She parried with a weapon that turned out to be a medieval axe. Iron clanged against steel. The pirate was Orin Tredway, aged, bearded and with one ear raggedly sawn off. Despite her wooden leg, she was able to fend him off easily. He wasn’t up to the fancy footwork required for duelling on the high seas. Finally, with contemptuous ease, she lured him under the t’gallant and hacked at a shroud which parted, dumping a heavy chunk of rigging on the miscast Orin. An undisciplined cheer went up from the crew members who had been watching the fight.
‘Well, keel-haul me fer a Spanisher,’ Susan exclaimed, ‘ye’re as scurvy a shipment o’ cut-throats as any that e’er sailed the Main. Take this mutinous dog, hang him up from the yard arm, stripe him with the cat, douse him with salt, and when he comes to, flog him some more.’
The crew nodded at her and yelled in bloodthirsty assent. They wore animal heads. Not masks, but heads, still bloody and stretched out of proportion by the human heads beneath. Human eyes peered out through the empty sockets of beasts. Then there was a shift as the ship crested a wave and fell twenty feet or more. The crew fell, although Susan kept on her feet (foot, rather). When they stood up, they
were
animals, cramped by their human clothes. They ran about in a panic, those that could climb taking to the rigging, those that could swim going over the side. A hog in a headscarf squealed as she cleaved its skull with her axe.
Then they were gone. She was alone on the ship again, surrounded by wind-whipped ropes and treacherously swinging booms. She held up her axe to ward off a murderously diving spar, and split it in twain. Secured to the sail, the broken wood swung on, wrenching her weapon away with it. The greased and oiled ends of her hair and beard were alight, burning slowly.
She tried to think of her name, but it wouldn’t come to her. Suddenly, she had a new set of memories, crowding in on her own. Sea battles and voyages and plunder and buried treasure and king’s pardons and kidnapped wenches. She remembered the great white whale that had taken her leg, and the pistol ball that had claimed her eye, and a hundred other wounds and scars beside. The girl who could Dream was remote, a fantastical character.
He knew who he was. A pirate who might have been a Susan in his Dreams.
He looked down, and saw the planks beneath his shoe and stump turn transparent. He saw through the cabins, the holds and the ballast bilges. The keel stayed solid for a few moments, then clouded and became clear as glass. Beneath the phantom ship, dark waters churned, sharks and poison jellyfish boiling in the depths. Then he began to sink, passing slowly through the deck, feeling it slide up through his body. It caught on his chin as he tilted his head up and drew in a breath of salted air. He fell sharply through the space of the cabin, and was sinking again through its floor. He tried to hold a sea chest, but his hands passed through it as through something slightly thicker than water. It kept its shape, but offered no resistance. Then he was in the hold, chilly waters around his knees as he sank through the bottom of the boat itself. The cold crept up his body as he clutched fruitlessly at the insubstantial wood. He wriggled, trying to keep his head above the hull, but felt the currents tugging at him. His soaked clothes pulled him down. His head sank through the rough, barnacled wood. The boat was gone completely, and he was tossed this way and that in the water. He exploded through the surface, gasping for air, and saw his phantom ship drawing away, already beyond swimming distance, shivering like a reflection in rippled water. His head hissed as the burning ends of his rat-tails went out. Then he was underwater again, fighting for the surface.
The sharks came…
Soaking wet, and with a bloody stump where her right arm had been, Susan found herself in the cabin of an airship.
‘Don’t just stand there, you bove,’ snapped a slim woman in a black catsuit. ‘Give me a hand. The pygmies are hang-gliding at us in swarms.’
It was Vanessa Vail.
Darts shot through the steel-mesh and canvas wall of the cabin. Vanessa’s leg was porcupined.
Susan stepped forwards and fell over. Her wooden leg had come off. With only an arm and a leg, she crab-crawled across the deck. She felt her breasts scraping against the floor. She was in her own body again – although with the pirate’s disabilities – and in her ruined evening dress. Her stumps were leaking.
Vanessa was staggering, the poison going to her head.
‘Take the console, or we’ll go down. We’re over Maple White Land, the dinosaurs will rip us to bits.’
The heroine stretched her lovely, lithe body and fell. Even unconscious, she was gorgeous. She had passed out with no pain, and was dignified in disarray. Susan cursed her creation. Fighting the agony in her shoulder and the itch in the fingers she didn’t have any more, she pulled herself towards the console. The terminal coronet flapped loose. She got a hold of it and thrust her head up into it. Her nervous system melshed with the dirigible’s, which wasn’t such a good idea since two of the four motors suddenly cut out and the right-side viewcam blanked. Susan felt like a fat white whale surrounded by sharks. The pygmies turned and danced in the air, unloosing a cloud of stinging darts. The gasbag was multiply holed, and there was a jungle escarpment coming up. Susan had a choice: crash into the cliffs, or strain herself up over onto the plateau and wind up as tyrannosaur munchies.
Vanessa was no bloody help, as usual. Then the picture changed. The pygmies were gone, and below the airship was a soft desert of fine, white sand. Susan allowed the ship to drift down, and relaxed as the bulk settled into the receptive, motherly ground. She thought she’d pass out, but the pain kept her going. Concentrating on her shoulder, she pinched off the nerves and cut out the agony. Looking at it objectively, the shark had made a clean job of it. There was a knob of bone in the abused meat. Susan closed her eyes, and imagined her arm as it had once been. She started with the bones – good thing she had taken those anatomy courses – and laid on muscle, flesh and skin. She let blood in, and flexed the fingers. She opened her eyes, and surveyed her handiwork. It was a good arm. The only problem was that it wasn’t hers. It might have been the pirate’s – there was a three-breasted mermaid tattooed on it – and it only just fit her shoulder. She could fix that later. Like her leg.
She stood up, balancing on her foot. She slipped off the coronet, and let the airship go dead. The back-up cabin lights kicked in. Vanessa lay still. Susan turned her heroine over, and looked into the painted face of a dummy. Vanessa Vail was fully articulated and tremendously detailed, but in no sense alive.
‘Very clever, Daine,’ she said. ‘Good tricks.’
The background changed again. She was back in the abandoned warehouse.
‘Getting bored with the game?’
She was in her own shape.
‘Nice try, but I know unreality when I feel it.’
Her body changed. Her neck grew long and boneless, and was suddenly unable to hold up her heavy head. Her torso itched as it puffed up like a flightless bird’s, and her legs dwindled and divided into a clump of Cthulhoid tentacles. Inside, her organs twined about each other unnaturally, her bones softened and grew functionless knobs that breached her skin. She tried to move, but her brain hadn’t yet got used to its new home. Her head hit the concrete, and she couldn’t lift it. She was dragged down by her skull like an old-fashioned prisoner shackled to an iron ball. Something dangerous-sounding padded on soft feet into the warehouse and prowled around outside her field of vision, panting hungrily. She tried to move her newly issued body, but couldn’t get the hang of it.
She imagined a steel splint inside her giraffe neck, and felt the pain as it appeared inside her unfamiliar flesh. Around the split she created vertebrae and a simple ball-and-socket joint. Now she could raise her head like a crane. She constructed an elementary andrew skeleton inside the useless body Daine had given her, and pushed a set of wire and wheel-worked legs through her tentacles. Under her loose skin, she spread a network of interlocking durium plates. She stood up, and grew herself four waldoes, claw-and-grip-tipped mechanical arms that responded to the living nerves she wormed through the metal.
Looking down from a height of ten or twelve feet, she saw an old friend, the MGM lion.
‘Hello, Leo.’
It gave its familiar fanfare roar.
‘There, kitty-kitty-kitty.’
It pounced. She extruded a three-foot, honed-steel spike from the rubber palm of a suction waldo and held it out so the big cat would kebab itself.