B0t#1 Read online

  ****

  The Art House Project

  Matthew Sanborn Smith

  My story that you're about to read in this premiere issue of b0t, A Body is for Driving, is the guinea pig for a distribution model I'm calling the Art House Project. I listened to an old interview from The Agony Column a couple of weeks back in which Rick Kleffel asked David Lynch about how he approaches distribution since getting Eraserhead, an oddball independent film by an unknown director, into theaters. Lynch answered that there are a lot of good theaters out there owned by people who love cinema and he just goes out and meets them. He went on to talk about the film, Coal Miner's Daughter, in which Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones (Playing Loretta and Mooney Lynn) took their first record to country radio stations all over the southern U.S. and asked the DJs to play it. Well, you know how it worked out for Lynch and the Lynns.

  It sounded exciting to me. Grassroots, bootstraps, ground up, all those things we like to talk about in the States, whether we do them or not. I wondered what the equivalent might be in the short story field. A novelist might self-publish and knock on bookstore doors or the insides of computer screens, but I thought a short story writer might take a story to little zines, sites and blogs all over the web and ask their owners to run it. Being published in Analog is a good way to reach a lot of science fiction readers, but could you reach the same amount by being published in a great deal of much smaller venues?

  I hadn't heard of anyone trying it. That in itself made me far more interested in giving it a go. I don't stand to make a cent off of it. I just want to see it happen. Mind you, if I fail miserably then b0t is the one and only place you'll ever read this story, but as failures go, that's a pretty damned good one to have under your belt. I'm thrilled to be here at the beginning of what promises to be a great zine (I know the guy who runs it. He's got talent squirting out of all of his pores). Even if my idea succeeds fantastically, this may be the only piece of the fully realized result that you see. Don't worry. All the other pieces will be pretty much identical.

  So, Gentle Readers, I present to you with a dollop of whipped cream, your very own slice of The Art House Project, A Body is for Driving. Clean your plates.

  ****

  A Body is for Driving

  Matthew Sanborn Smith

  His bare feet slap slap slap on the city street, capillaries bursting them purple, as his reproductive organs beat themselves into blinding pain on his hairy thighs. Through huffs and puffs he chants, "A googolplex times a googolplex times a googolplex times a googolplex times a . . ." and so on. This will keep his pursuers occupied.

  He runs through clouds of twilight gnats. Dozens of them are plastered to his skin with the coolant which seeps out. Some get into his air intake while the valve is open. His body spasms with hard percussive breaths, trying to blow them back out. The system is automatic. So clever those ancient designers. Driving this body is like examining the quaintly complex mechanics of an old chronometer.

  One of his maker's makers found this human body on the bottom continent, so well preserved it looked cherry, like she could fuel it up and run it then and there. She couldn't, but over the years she'd painstakingly rebuilt the thing, searching the system for original parts, lymph nodes from a forgotten Martian colony, an unblackened nose from High Europa on Upper Earth and so on. And what did she do once she'd gotten it running again? She showed it off to her pals at the classic body shows. And not a damned thing else. What an unbelievable waste. He, at least, knew how to live. Or was learning.

  One exquisite smell, besides the shorn lawns lining the park, besides the ozone crackling from the tourists who try to parse him, one exquisite smell catches him dead in the limbic system and his mouth drips without his knowing why. There! An Irish Setter just electrocuted itself on the Dog-B-Q on the corner. How many times has he smelled that in his natural form and ignored it as nothing more than an indication of another pest being eliminated by a trap? That same scent now though, the cooking meat . . . he bares his teeth without meaning to. He wants so badly to take one ripping bite out of the dog's smoking corpse. Some internal process in his midsection vibrates and gurgles.

  No! He has to keep going. They could stop him at any time. He has enough fuel to do what he wants to do. He runs into the forever tall building. They had hundreds like this in the old days, back when humans walked the earth. They built cities thousands of times the size of this memorial park back then. Even so, few of those people knew how to have a good time.

  He's up the stairs, never even glances at the elevator. He's going to run this body into the ground. He won't ever get a second chance. His maker's maker kept it in good shape, but never dreamed of running it flat out. The thing backfires a couple of times, blowing exhaust out the back end instead of the top. Little red hairs all over his body catch the tickling breeze as he thumps up and around and up the zig-zagging stairwell. The body gasps big sucking chests-full of air. Two steps at a time now. Coolant splatters everywhere with each leap.

  So much wonderful information assails him with every pounding step. The grainy dirt sticking to his soles, the warp of a mislaid tile and how incredibly this body compensates for the tiny loss of balance. His thighs and rear end are itching, his chest is burning. He gets so much more in his normal body but none of that has ever felt this good.

  "Please cease and desist!" comes a voice from just below him. He tries to chant his googolplex ward, but it's all he can do just to breathe. The Park Ranger will overtake him within a minute. Now or never. He dives for the next door, pulls it open and throws himself through, pulling it closed behind him to slow the cop. Ten floors up, not nearly what he wanted but it will have to do.

  "Please stop before you further damage that stolen vehicle!"

  In the tenth floor lobby, a great window reflects polished brown chairs and the rainbow of hardcopies fanned across the table, at the same time giving a deep indigo preview of the coming night beyond its surface. The human body is on its last, but even at that, it picks up the slightest bit of speed as his goal is in sight. The tight weave carpet catches a torn toenail and rips it off completely a second before he leaps.

  "Stop!"

  He slams into the cold glass. He passes through and feels the sky.

  YES!

  Busted nose, ribboned skin, fluids rushing out into the cool evening air and he screams screams of 1)joy, 2)fear, 3)excitement, quickly quickly because things move so fast in this slow, slow body.

  How is it going to feel when he smacks into that gray speckled ground below? It can't come fast enough for him. The air forces itself into his face but he can't take it in. His eyes water, waste water dribbles from his reproductive organs, the little engine in his chest feels like it's about to explode.

  This is what exhilaration means! This is what it means to be ali--

  ****

  Matthew Sanborn Smith's work has appeared at Chizine, GUD magazine and Albedo One. He sometimes can be heard swabbing the decks of the StarShipSofa podcast, and airs his least rational thoughts on his own podcast at Beware the Hairy Mango.

  ****

  Science, Faith and Fire Lizards

  Jeremiah Tolbert

  I am in the McCarter Elementary School library in Topeka, Kansas. It is 1987 and I am ten years old. I don’t know it, but I’m about to discover a book that will change my life entirely.

  The book is one of those mildly embarrassing titles, by an author whose prestige seems to have faded in the past decade—Dragonsong by Anne McCaffery. Its cover depicts a tall, willowy girl standing on a rock, waves crashing around feet while miniature dragons in a variety of hues swoop around her head. It is, of course, the cover that captures my interest.

  I am not, at this time, a fan of science fiction books, although I am primed for them by circumstance. My father is an avid science fiction fan and has a few homemade bookshelves of coverless paperbacks, remaindered books rescued from a dumpster outside a small used bookstore downtown. It isn’t until I
am much older that I realize there is anything even slightly illicit about the lack of covers. Instead I have concocted a personal myth that my father loves to read so much he doesn’t want the art on the cover distracting him from the words inside.

  You could chart his relative finances through the years by going through his collection and measuring the percentage of books with covers versus those without. Mostly, he read library books with glossy cellophane jackets over hard cover. I have been promised a library card of my own at the City Library next year.

  I don’t read science fiction like my father, but I like movies with science fiction things in them. I love ET and He-Man and a movie called Star Man. I play Dungeons and Dragons with older kids down the street and eventually, my father buys an old Atari 2600 from the neighbor for $25. Later, my father will buy a brand new Nintendo Entertainment System with the proceeds of his tax refund, and we’ll stay up until two in the morning on weekends playing head-to-head Tetris. But video games are still far into the future. Right now there are only books.

  Mostly mystery books for children: The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew (my favorite—she was the smartest of the kid detectives and her father was rich). I launched my own kid detective agency the year before by pinning up hand-written fliers around my neighborhood. An annoyed neighbor called my parents to complain about the “vandalism” and I was sent to take them down. This was to be the first of my many entrepreneurial failures.

  There are also Choose Your Own Adventure books of which some could be argued to be science fiction, but they are more of a kind of game, and they never take more than half an hour to play through anyway. I am aware of the tropes of science fiction, but the genre is not a brand that I seek out. I read whatever books are in the large lots of books my mother buys at auctions and garage sales for a quarter.

  I am browsing the shelves of the school library, looking for more books about clever children solving mysteries. I’m fascinated by mysteries, even if the only one I’ve known personally is why my parents suddenly divorced the year before. I see a golden spine, and pull the book from the shelf.

  Dragons? I like dragons! I check it out along with a stack of Encyclopedia Browns.

  ****

  I can mostly do what I want because my parents are rarely home. My dad spends ten hours a day walking the beat as a meter “maid” for the city. My mother lives with Bruce, my new stepfather, a man who later attempts to kill her by strangling her in a parking lot outside of a bar.

  Bruce is a Holy Roller and spends a lot of time talking to me about God and Jesus. I’m fascinated by the Turin Shroud as a kind of unlikely physical evidence, but most of it strikes me as a little unbelievable. It’s one thing, I think, to read about such things, but to actually believe the dead can live again strains my young credulity.

  The only thing that makes visiting Bruce and my mother bearable is a stack of books just thick enough to get me through the weekend. Bruce lectures about God, or yells at my mother about failing to do some trivial household chore, and I read.

  ****

  I discover Dragonsong in the middle of the week. That night, while my father snores downstairs, knocked out by his seventh cheap beer in three hours, I devour the book in my top bunk while my little brother snores softly below in his Smurf bedsheets. I use the light from the street lamp outside to read by. Dad hates it when I use his flashlight to read in bed and run down the batteries, and we don’t have reading lamps.

  The fire lizards—the miniature dragons on the cover—capture my imagination. They’re empathic, which means they can read your emotions, but not really your thoughts. They fly and they even teleport, and they can breathe little gouts of fire if you feed them a special rock. But they’re not just pets—they imprint on you, and then they’re companions, smarter than any dog or cat.

  I want one more badly than I have ever wanted anything. No, not just one—I want a dozen of them like the heroine of McCaffery’s novel. I begin to spend all my spare time in class drawing my own pod of fire lizards. I have a bronze, two greens, a gold (of course), and one blue.

  I read the sequels soon after—luckily, the library has them. I next turn to some of the books on my father’s shelves. When he’s not too tired or too drunk, he gives me recommendations.

  “Ah… I don’t think Gor is something you would like. Try this book by Heinlein. The aliens are really cool.”

  It happens gradually, and I don’t realize the change that has come over me until I pick up a newer Nancy Drew from the school book sale in the spring. She seems different, and she is; this book having been written for a “modern” audience, toning down the character and making her less headstrong. But where are the space ships, the aliens, or the dragons? Is there any magic? That would be neat—how would Nancy deal with an evil wizard?

  I begin to define myself by my love for it. I’m a science fiction fan. I give up on the mysteries.

  ****

  I have never had a science lesson at school, even though I love science and have as long as anyone can remember. If you ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I will tell you without any hesitation, “a scientist.”

  My family, and especially my father, are pleased with my interests and encourage them when they can. There’s only one person perturbed by this change in my reading interests. My teacher, a Cuban refugee with the unfortunate name of Mrs. Dyche, seems to struggle with this idea of me loving science and science fiction.

  Some standardized test scores come in from the previous year and worry the adults that my assignments aren’t challenging me enough. Mrs. Dyche generously makes special extra lessons for me to work through when I am bored in class, which is often. But the extra lessons are light, if not entirely lacking, in science, just as the regular curriculum is. To fulfill my curiosity, I read the entire science book section in the school library in a few months. It’s not hard. There are only a dozen or so.

  I especially love a book about the solar system that included a section hypothesizing about the kind of life that might live on other planets, and the librarian finally bans me from checking it out, saying that it is time for someone else to have a turn with it.

  At the end of the school year, Mrs. Dyche gives me a book and inscribes an encouraging note in the front. I try to read the book, but it’s far too dense for an 11 year old kid with no science education. There’s an awful lot of equations, and the book brings up someone it calls the “Creator” a lot too. I don’t make the connection between “Creator” and “God” until years later.

  ****

  I am in my teens and my friend Jason is in my room browsing through my small collection looking for something to borrow. He loves comic books and Star Trek: Next Generation novelizations. I borrow them from him and he borrows from the Forgotten Realms books that I’ve accumulated on birthdays and Christmases.

  Jason laughs and pulls the book from Mrs. Dyche from the shelf.

  “Why do you have this? I didn’t think you were religious.”

  “I’m not. A teacher gave it to me. I could never get into it. Why?”

  “This is about creationism. You know, that God stuff where He made the world in 7 days and there’s no such thing as evolution?”

  By now, I have had an earth sciences class and I am firmly in the “Earth is billions of years old” camp.

  “Really? I didn’t know that.” I’m ashamed of the book for a moment, ashamed that I didn’t see it for what it was before, but I was only a kid, and I hadn’t ever finished it. “That’s lame.”

  Jason puts the book back and moves on to the D&D novels.

  ****

  Mrs. Dyche meant well. She did her best to impart in me her core values, but I find it hard to forgive this improper use of her status. If she had given me the book a year earlier, before Dragonsong, she might have succeeded in steering me down that path. I can hardly imagine how differently my life would be if she had.

  ****

  I go on to earn a
Bachelors degree in Biology with a focus in evolutionary ecology. I am the first person in my family to ever attend college. I send a few graduation invitations, and on a whim, I have a family member look up Mrs. Dyche in the Topeka phone book and I invite her to attend. She had been so helpful to me in those tough early years, despite the Creationist propaganda.

  A few weeks later, I receive a card in the mail. It has a picture of a smiling Jesus on the front, and inside, there’s a handwritten note thanking me for the invitation, and declining. She has signed it, “God Bless, Mrs. Dyche.”

  I use the card as a bookmark in a library copy of Dune for two weeks until it falls out while I cross campus. I spend a little time looking for it, but give up quickly enough. I only feel a little guilty about not trying harder.

  ****

  Jeremiah Tolbert lives high in the foothills of Northern Colorado. The majority of his time is spent building websites for authors and publishers as Clockpunk Studios. When he can spare the time, he can be found still at his desk writing short fiction, or some place outdoors, cold and uncomfortable, camera in hand. His fiction has previously appeared in Interzone, Polyphony, and a number of other anthologies, including most recently, Way of the Wizard edited by John Joseph Adams.

  ****

  "I think everything counts a little more than we think": Reflections on The National's Boxer

  Mark S. Deniz

  There are just too many directions you can go in when talking about The National: their strength of lyrics, the dulcet tones of lead singer and songwriter Matt Berninger, the power and integrity of their music, the melancholy spiced with optimism… However, it all becomes clear what to write about, when you consider Boxer, their fourth album, released in May 2007.