Cinnabar Read online

  CINNABAR

  by

  EDWARD BRYANT

  Published by ReAnimus Press

  Other books by Edward Bryant:

  Phoenix Without Ashes

  Coming Soon from ReAnimus Press:

  Among the Dead and Other Events Leading to the Apocalypse

  Wyoming Sun

  Particle Theory

  Neon Twilight

  Darker Passions

  Flirting With Death

  The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age

  © 2013, 1976 by Edward Bryant. All rights reserved.

  http://ReAnimus.com/authors/edwardbryant

  Licence Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The lyrics at the beginning of “Brain Terminal” are copyrighted © 1939 by Leo Feist, Inc., New York, N.Y.; copyright renewed in 1967; international copyright secured. The accompanying musical notation is not that of the copyrighted song.

  ~~~

  This one is for the members of the Denver and Colorado Springs SF Writers’ Workshops; but is especially for Doris Beetem the Elder, first honorary citizen of Cinnabar.

  ~~~

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Everyday Life in the City at the Center of Time

  1. The Road to Cinnabar

  2. Jade Blue

  3. Gray Matters

  4. The Legend of Cougar Lou Landis

  5. Hayes and the Heterogyne

  6. Years Later

  7. Sharking Down

  8. Brain Terminal

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Perhaps the most powerfully symbolic natural substance of all, which has a profound meaning, is cinnabar. This is a rosy-purple crystalline stone, sulphide of mercury. Ground up, it is the red pigment used in painting. But in Taoist symbolism and magic it represents the nuclear energy of joined yang and yin, which is to be fired in the internal crucible by alchemical yoga, to generate the yogi’s immortality—just as mercury is produced from the rock by calcining it, when the sulphur releases a shining metallic fluid.”

  —PHILIP RAWSON and LASZLO LEGEZA

  from Tao

  Acknowledgments

  The Road to Cinnabar, Copyright © 1971 by Lancer Books, Inc. Originally appeared in Infinity.

  Jade Blue, Copyright © 1971 by Terry Carr. Originally appeared in Universe.

  Gray Matters (as Their Thousandth Season), Copyright © 1972 by Edward Bryant. Originally appeared in Clarion. Also appeared in Among the Dead, Macmillan, 1973.

  The Legend of Cougar Lou Landis, Copyright © 1973 by Terry Carr. Originally appeared in Universe.

  Hayes and the Heterogyne, Copyright © 1974 by Mankind Publishing Company. Originally appeared in Vertex.

  Sharking Down, Brain Terminal, Copyright © 1974,1975 by Mankind Publishing Company. Originally appeared in somewhat different form in Vertex.

  Years Later, © 1976 by Edward Bryant.

  In addition the author should like to thank Thames and Hudson, Ltd., for permission to quote from Tao by Philip Rawson and Laszlo Legeza, Copyright © 1973 by Thames and Hudson, Ltd., London.

  Finally, grateful thanks are offered to the editors who nurtured this first volume of Cinnabar stories through birth: Gary Meadows, Ellen Couch, H. W. Griffin. Other profuse thanks go to the editors who liked these tales sufficiently to publish them individually in magazines and anthologies: Robert Hoskins, Robin Scott Wilson, Terry Carr, Don Pfeil. Thanks as well to Christine Cosgriffe Meyers who is responsible for the arrangement at the beginning of Brain Terminal. And acknowledgment also to Joan Bernott, who pioneered in the writing of Cinnabar stories.

  Introduction: Everyday Life in the City at the Center of Time

  The title above seems infinitely more interesting than “Where Do You Get Your Ideas,” which really is what this introduction is all about. Yet both titles, in the finest tradition of Cinnabar, reflect into each other like parallel mirrors lining a hallway. Well, almost. It may take a while to notice that the images in that procession marching to infinity do not duplicate themselves with complete fidelity.

  However subtly, entropy does sneak in; and into the writer as well as the work. But that’s another story....

  What I’m trying to work toward is the observation that Cinnabar is a city of infinite diversity, an opportunity for the exercise of endless alternatives. However superficially idealistic, that facet of the city demonstrates its Damoclean nature.

  “May you live in interesting times.” Remember, that’s a Chinese curse.

  That’s essentially what I wish to tell you about Cinnabar itself. Need I indicate that City Center marks the focal point of all time? That the time stream cascades into Cinnabar in a multidimensional vortex? That the city lies only as distant from us as several freeway exits and uncountable parsecs and millennia? The particulars will unfold themselves.

  Now the inhabitants of Cinnabar—them I want to mention: Tourmaline Hayes, the Network sex star; Jade Blue, hybrid catmother; the Carcharodon megalodon Sidhe; Harry Vincent Blake, the twentieth-century college boy who fell down the rabbit hole; Cougar Lou, the last hero; Leah Sand, melancholy media artist; Obregon, the never-quite-completely-mad scientist; and all the others. I hope you like meeting them.

  Back up the line, where the key word was diversity, I meant to write something about story ideas. Let me hasten to say that Cinnabar is no mere fictional construct; it exists on one level or another. Which levels? Ambiguity is just another urban renewal project in Cinnabar.

  These stories are visions of the city filtered through my mind and assembled into a partial mosaic. Any good mental puzzle should have its clues. Here are some of the subjective pieces:

  (a) Back in the late nineteen-thirties and early forties, when my mother was a young woman living in Brooklyn, she spent her summers on a dude ranch in Peekskill, New York. The dude ranch was called the Cinnabar.

  (b) Meanwhile, my father, having been reared in Colorado, had run away to sea and joined the Merchant Marine in 1932. From there he joined the United States Navy.

  All of which leads to (c): the summer of 1940. My father was sitting around the Brooklyn Navy Yard with a buddy, both of them wondering how to spend a leave. My father closed his eyes and stabbed a pencil into a map of New York State. Right. Peekskill. The Cinnabar.

  Five years passed. I was born precisely three weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima. Can anyone wonder that romance plays such an integral role in the everyday life of Cinnabar?

  (d) I grew up in southern Wyoming, spending years both on ranches and in a small town. Like many readers-turned-writers of speculative fiction, I started reading SF for escape value. Seeking escape velocity, I looked for trajectories terminating somewhere outside a small, rural community.

  (e) Cats. I can appreciate their proclivity for staring into apparently empty corners. Cats know and understand what lies beyond the mirror (which is where, of course, you’ll find signposts to Cinnabar).

  (f) In July 1969, at the Clarion Workshop in Science Fiction and Fantasy, visiting author Harlan Ellison gave us would-be writers an overnight assignment. As an exercise, we all were to create an entire page of narrative hooks, those catchy first lines of stories designed to snag the attention and interest of the average reader.

  I thought my cleverest invention was: “One day the Pope forgot to take her Pill.” That’s a story I’ve never written and probably never will. On the other hand, one of my opening lines down near the bottom of the page was: “The road to Cinnabar was lined exclusively with the burned-out shells of school buses.” That was the first time the city had cropped up in my prose.

  (g) For many years I’ve read and admired the work of English writer J. G. Ballard, especially his stories of the perennially decadent community of Vermilion Sands.

  (h) It’s because of (g), I suspect, that I’ve been seduced into a peculiar affair with Venice, California—Vermilion Sands West.

  (i) The epigraph came after the book. All but one of the stories in this collection were finished before someone pointed out to me the Taoist significance of cinnabar. Naturally I was fascinated and excited.

  ~~~

  Cinnabar, doomed city of hope, haven for paradoxes. I think the above are all the historical notes I want to include now. I’d like to finish up this introduction with just two wishes: first, that the reader find in this story collection a sum greater than the simple addition of the individual pieces; and second, that at one point or another, the reader will wish that he or she were in the city where these tales are set.

  To paraphrase W. C. Fields very loosely, all things considered, I know I would rather be in Cinnabar.

  EDWARD BRYANT

  Denver August 1974

  CINNABAR

  1. The Road to Cinnabar

  It wove through the warp of the desert; a dusty trail looping around wind-eroded buttes, over dry stream beds, among clumps of gray scrub brush. Straighter, but always within sight of the roadway, was the elevated train track. No trains had run in centuries and the track was streaked with verdigris. Though there were seldom travelers to hear it, the wind in the trestles shrilled atonal scherzos.

  Closer to the city, the road was lined with
the burned-out shells of what had once been buses.

  Then came the greenbelt, a mile-wide sward of grass and trees continually tended by small silent machines. Here walked occasional lovers, and others.

  At last, the city. Cinnabar was a flux of glass towers and metal walls perched atop red cliffs crumbling down to a narrow band of beach and then to ocean.

  The desert. The greenbelt. The city. The sea. There seemed very little more to the world. The elevated railroad was rumored to run to a place called Els. But no one was quite sure; no one remembered ever having traveled so far.

  One day a man came into sight on the road to Cinnabar. He marched in from the desert toward the city, whistling martial tunes as he walked. He was a tall man, and thin. His sweat-stained white burnoose flapped back in the wind like bat wings. His hood was pulled far forward for shade but could not hide the long hooknose. Upon reaching the greenbelt he stopped to rest. Strolling lovers eyed him incuriously.

  “I’m looking for an inn or hotel of some sort,” he called to one pair. The couple stopped and exchanged glances. The girl, who was pale and beautiful except for a jagged scar down her left cheek, laughed silently at some private amusement. Her companion looked thoughtful.

  “Try the Coronet,” said the young man.

  The traveler gestured impatiently. “I’m new to the city. Direct me.”

  “Just follow the road.”

  “The sign of the crown,” said the girl in a voice so low it barely rose above the fountain’s ripple.

  “Grateful,” said the traveler. He walked away toward the road.

  “Stranger?”

  He turned and the young man called, “How long did it take you to cross the desert?”

  The traveler opened his mouth to answer, then closed it in confusion as he realized he had no answer. Both laughing now, the couple walked away. The stranger shook his head and drank at one of the fountains before continuing into Cinnabar.

  The bubbles tickled her throat. Leah Sand put down her glass of iced ginger ale and relaxed. She sat in her customary chair in the front room of the Coronet. Across the planed-oak tabletop the afternoon sun warmed carefully defined squares of hardwood.

  “Care for an ice to go with the drink, Miss Leah?” The voice cut through the dobro song on the jukebox and the rhythmic, incoherent patterns of tourist-talk. She looked up.

  “What flavors?”

  The innkeeper Matthias Kaufmann counted laboriously on his fingers: “Um, pineapple, chocolate, watercress, just three.”

  “No lime?”

  “No lime. Stock hasn’t come in this week.”

  Leah flashed him a smile. “Thanks. I’ll wait on it.”

  Enchanted as always by Leah’s dark beauty, Kaufmann returned the smile over his shoulder as he walked ponderously away. Into the path of a serving girl. The collision didn’t jar the innkeeper. But the girl was deflected toward a table of tourists who watched the approaching debacle with bovine expressions. Tourists, table and serving girl collapsed in a welter of cola drinks and watercress ices.

  The serving girl began to wail, the downed tourists mumbled and moved spastically like gaffed flounders, and Kaufmann was enraged. “Clumsy scullion! Retard!” The girl cried louder.

  “Enrique!” said the innkeeper. “Gonzago!” Identically short and swarthy, the two men appeared from a back room. They were the bouncers, generally used only at night when a rougher trade frequented the Coronet.

  “Discipline her!” Kaufmann pointed to the serving girl who was now choking on her sobs. “Perhaps she can learn some coordination.”

  Gonzago took the girl’s wrists and dragged her to the center of the front room. Enrique produced a coil of rope and bound her hands together. Then he tossed the coil up and over one of the ceiling timbers. The two men hauled on the rope and soon the girl dangled, her toes centimeters above the floor.

  Enrique grasped the back of the girl’s high collar and pulled hard. The blouse ripped; the girl’s back was golden in the light of imminent dusk. Gonzago handed Kaufmann a long black whip.

  “This is for your stupid clumsiness,” said the innkeeper, drawing back his arm.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Kaufmann stopped in mid-motion, lowered his hand. In concert, everyone looked toward the door.

  “Who the hell are you?” asked the innkeeper.

  The gaunt man in the burnoose stepped into the Coronet. “Cafter. Wylie Cafter.”

  “Oh.” Kaufmann turned back to his victim and again raised the whip.

  “Don’t do that.” In three steps he was beside Kaufmann. Cafter’s hand dipped and took the whip away from the innkeeper. Gonzago and Enrique moved in, menacingly, one on either side. For a dilated moment Kaufmann and the stranger stared at each other.

  The innkeeper backed down. He murmured an obscenity and turned to Gonzago. “Okay, cut her down.” Kaufmann walked back to his usual position behind the bar as the suspended serving girl swooned to the floor. She was immediately carried into the kitchen by two buxom cooks.

  Gonzago and Enrique retreated to their back room. Outside the inn, the sun had touched the ocean.

  “Tondelaya Beach is even more beautiful at dawn,” said Leah. Cafter, standing close by her table, stared out the window.

  “The length of the afternoon hardly justifies such a brief sunset,” he said.

  “It was a long afternoon for you?”

  “Very. And dry.”

  “Then sit,” said Leah. She motioned to a serving girl.

  Cafter pulled a chair away from the table and sat. Leah was very beautiful, and he had nowhere else to go. “Dark beer,” he ordered.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a labor organizer.”

  “Indeed? I’m fascinated.” And Cafter knew that she was.

  There was a pop of displaced air as an object the size and hue of a robin’s egg appeared on the table. Leah picked it up, rapped it smartly on the oak and extracted a folded paper from among the pieces.

  “It’s probably from the Network.” She unfolded the message, her lips moving silently as she read. “Yes.” The note and the broken shell of the carrier evaporated into the air.

  Leah pushed her chair back. “I’m sorry, Wylie. I’ve got to go. But I’ll see you again.”

  Cafter hesitated. “Soon?”

  “Soon for you. I have to go in toward the city’s center.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “Will you really?” Leah smiled, but her eyes were puzzled. “You’re not supposed to.”

  Cafter sipped his beer and looked down at the table. “Agreed. Let’s just say I wish you wouldn’t go so that I could have time to know you better.”

  “Wylie, that’s not what I—” Distracted, she set her glass down and rose from the table. Then, impulsively, she bent and kissed Cafter’s forehead. “I’ll see you.” A flash of crinoline skirts and an on-the-way smile to Kaufmann, and she was gone.

  “Hey, Lash,” yelled Cafter to the innkeeper. “Give me another beer.”

  In this outskirt of Cinnabar, the night was presaged by an all-too-brief dusk. Measured out in empty bottles, the dark pressed against Cafter’s window before he had finished the third beer. He took a final swallow and left the emptying Coronet. The street was deserted; Cafter walked a cracked and buckled sidewalk past a line of storefronts whose shades were drawn and doors locked. Around the first corner he found a small park with a raised, grassy center, a few benches, a stone obelisk of man-height, and a blank plaque. Cafter touched the metal. His fingers told him there once had been an inscription, now worn smooth. He tried to trace out the message, but it was too weathered. Only four numerals, more deeply carved, remained. 2... 3... They almost followed the whorls of his fingertips. 96...

  Cafter sat on a bench until the darkness was complete. He faced south, the direction of the desert road and the elevated tracks to Els. Near the horizon, the stars were like the eyes of desert animals fractionally trapped by firelight, cold and unblinking. Cafter tracked familiar patterns up the night sky to the zenith, where the stars twinkled in many colors. Standing, he turned toward the north, toward the distant center of Cinnabar. He saw the stars flash faster until the constellations merged in a white glow above the city’s center.