Paradox, #11, Autumn 2007

Issue #11 of Paradox ranges all over the historical map, not just geographically, but in time and in tone. This range makes for a more satisfying read.

The issue gets off to an excellent start with T.L. Morganfield’s “Love, Blood and Octli,” told in first person by Ayomichi, who gets her name from the feathered serpent Éhecatl on her seventh birthday. She’s pleased with her name until her brother makes fun of her, saying that she had to have been named for the turtle because she’s slow and stupid. Only the threat of violence from their mother causes them to mend their quarrel; when she begs Éhecatl for a name for her brother, he becomes Eehzio, “Very Bloody.” Ayomichi is upset that this might mean her brother would become like the other men roaming the forest, who were wild and violent, from whom her mother warned her and her sisters to steer clear.

The story goes on to develop the relationship (and conflict) between these three—Ayomichi, Éhecatl, and Eehzio—with Ayomichi the interface between the gods and her people. This is no easy task, despite the riches of tribute people bring her in gratitude for her, the gods, and the people grow closer together. As brother and sister grow, so do the conflicts, the threat of final sacrifice looming over them all. Morganfield does a beautiful job of weaving myth and verisimilitude, imbuing the characters with passion as well as personality. The magic is nicely done, with just the right details that evoke the symbols of Aztec artwork, adding a rich overlay.

Darrell Schweitzer’s “In a Byzantine Garden” also centers around male-female conflict. An ancient Empress sits in a garden, listening to her birds. She is suddenly joined by her lifelong enemy, the Grand Logothete, who gives her a ring, breathing words of peace at the end of their long, power-twisted lives. Can they trust one another at last? Schweitzer does a fine job with this tiny, lapidary story.

Michael Livingston’s “The Angel of Marye’s Heights” takes place, as the title hints, at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The story opens with a quote from Maimonides about angels being disembodied intellects, then shifts to that grim December day in 1862. One of the soldiers, a man named Gabriel Martin Greene, is nervously preparing to die again. Unlike all the men around him who fear the battle ahead, he knows about death and dreads the specifics. He is one of the Chosen. His soul is gone, and he has to live out this physical death repeatedly.

Livingston goes on to introduce us to the men around Gabriel before moving them toward, then into, the slaughter. With brutally vivid detail, the reader is made part of that terrible push up the half-mile hill into the Confederate artillery, and the aftermath, and unexpected grace. The story’s strength is in the rock-solid research made real, the surety with which Livingston creates distinctive characters before they are blown apart. If there’s a problem, it’s that—for this reader—the metaphysical conceit seems totally unnecessary to the story; if one skips the paragraphs about Gabriel’s familiarity with dying, which never add up to anything, the narrative is just as effective as a piece of straight historical fiction. Given the ending, maybe even more so.

“I Read the News Today, Oh Boy” by Richard Mueller gives us a first person narrator in David Lancaster, a sixty-year-old journalist who meets an interesting woman at Peet’s Coffee. Jeannie is 49, lively, smart, and interested in everything, though she hates the new billboards that flash “Threat Level Orange” at city traffic. But in the background, the news keeps reporting escalating terror attacks. I really liked the way Mueller establishes David and Jeannie’s relationship before working in their talk about history; they are established as a couple before the first reference to Historical Drift.

Mueller skillfully builds the mystery here; at first it seems to be only “low-rent historians” who are talking of this syndrome at conventions and symposia. By the time Jeannie hears about Historical Drift, there are theories—“space-time theories, mathematics, probability mechanics”—about why some people abruptly vanish not just from their homes and jobs and families, but their written work disappears from libraries and archives as if never written. David then hears about someone he knows, a man named Rohrmann, who thinks he’s living in England in the 1870s. His friends are trying to keep him from vanishing by dressing in period and acting as if he really is living in that time and space. Meanwhile, the terror attacks escalate.

This is a beautifully written story with the characterizations as strong as the ideas. I kept wishing it were a novel—fascinating ideas arcing out in every direction, which of course, a short story hasn’t the time to track. Mueller keeps tight control, bringing the story to a nifty close.

“Fort Bliss” by J. Kenneth Sargeant is a complete change of pace. Back in 1979, I had a Vietnam vet as a co-worker. He was at first glance a longhair hippie freak like most of us, mellow and laid-back, but every so often, something would trigger him into restless, tense memories. His demeanor utterly changed, which scared people; he didn’t usually bring up combat experience, but just once, he mentioned how some units had a rep for fragged lieutenants. We all asked what that meant and were told that problematical lieutenants, fresh from Stateside and sticklers for regs, occasionally got grenades accidentally tossed into their tents at night, and not by the Vietcong. None of us ever dared ask if this was hearsay or experience—and if the latter, how close he’d been to the truth.

“Fort Bliss” reminds me of that man, his stories, and most of all, the brief glimpses into the high-tension, anger-fueled, death-saturated madness of jungle warfare so far away, for so oblique a purpose. Sargeant brings to Fort Bliss Specialist Grace, who’s there to “assess the situation” at the base, and pass along recommendations. It seems that the jungles are not only full of Vietcong but mythological creatures whose styles of killing are even more imaginative. Should the government let the world know about them—or shouldn’t it? Grace’s first meeting is with a terrifying Sergeant who has three instructions, the last of which is, “Don’t talk to the harpy.” It seems they have one, kept prisoner, who informs on her own kind. Sargeant’s unflinching look at war, and the shocking mental landscape that survival mode imposes, uses the mythological figures to terrifyingly believable effect. (I also remember that our man had gone into the war an atheist and came out believing in ghosts. And not in a good way.)

“Letters on Natural Magic” by Matthew Kirby fictionalizes a fascinating hoax by the Austrian Baron von Kempelen who’d had a reputation as a scholar and inventor before the Empress Maria Theresia gave him six months to come up with an automaton that worked. This was during the Enlightenment, when the idea of a clockwork universe seemed the ultimate in rational logic. What he came up with was an elaborate hoax (I spent a little time delving my German sources, without success; my guess is an otherwise honest man was led astray by the conviction you do not say no to imperial whim) that is interesting now because of the many and varied famous names who made time in their world-shaking careers to play chess with the Turk—and lost. Napoleon Bonaparte being just one. Charles Babbage was another; there is no proof he believed that the Turk had volition, but there was no doubt that Babbage (and others) were struggling to find a way to use mathematics and the very sophisticated clockwork of the time to interact with human beings.

Anyway, in Kirby’s tale, the Turk is a real construct, one who hides sentience from the Austrian spy known simply as Kempelen. The Turk is supposed to repeat all overheard conversations, particularly those by famous men. But the Turk is beginning to discover abstracts such as friendship, particularly as expressed by one Benjamin Franklin, who is a friend to all scientists, even those under threat from various governments. It’s an absorbing tale, with a strong sense of Enlightenment scientific thinking. I did stumble over the misspelling of the word “lightning”—spelled here “lightening,” which is a verb for making something lighter. Because of the preposterous theories of science common at that time, I kept trying to read lightening as an action, not an object, until I finally twigged to the wrong spelling. Once I got past that, the story zipped along, with a particularly excellent portrait of Franklin as an added bonus.

During the last decade or so, it seems there’s been a fashion for deconstructing L. Frank Baum and Oz. First Gregory Maguire’s book and stage play, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, then a recent TV effort [Tin Man], and here we have Tom Doyle’s “The Wizard of Macatawa,” which I think is far better than both.

Macatawa was a resort town in Michigan, its fame being the beach and boardwalk. I’ve seen the private photos the Baum family inherited from their famous ancestor, who dearly loved Macatawa. According to the family, Macatawa’s children loved Mr. Baum the storyteller. They’d gather on the porch under the sign of the goose, and he’d spin out their favorite tales, mixing fantasy and science fiction in a way no one else did for many years. They flocked back in droves, joining his own children. Later, they’d romp in the clean sands and go out for boating fun or watch fireworks.

The story has all that, but more. What if L. Frank Baum got an Oculus from the Chicago Theosophical Society, a weird device that helped him see over the shifting sands into a story world? What if the people over the sands came here, only at different times?

This story focuses on a different Oz, a scary one with Wickeds who are at least as wicked as Ruggedo, but who can’t outsmart Dorothy Gale’s special ops. Up the timeline in 2000, a woman sits at a computer, which looks impossibly futuristic, to a sickly little boy named Jack in 1979, and a kid named Tip . . .

The reason I prefer this Oz to Maguire’s is that it is recognizable. There’s a line in “The Wizard of Macatawa” that snaps everything into place—including how I feel about the story. Naturally, it’s delivered by Dorothy:

Oz is America’s magical twin—and like America, it’s a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them.

A rousing good ending to an enjoyable issue.