Winter 2007 Read Free Page A

Turkish Seige; as the 20th century
Viennese use their historical knowledge to help the 16th Century Viennese,
time-traveling pro-Viennese forces appear and fight a pitched battle with
time-traveling pro-Ottoman forces, pushing everyone back to 955 and the Battle
of Lechfeld; when the time-traveling pro-Magyar forces show up, they are
slaughtered by everyone else which is tired of all this time-traveling crap,
thereby ending the causality loop. Vienna becomes world power; Henry
Jasomirgott first man on the moon, 1155
    Scenario #7
    Event: ADOLF HITLER is
KILLED by MARATHON FORNICATION BY SIX VIENNESE PROSTITUTES
    As a result: Prostitutes
arrested and revealed as libidinous time-travelers from a very sexy future who
teach the Viennese their futuristic ways of astro-pleasure; Janine Lindemulder
first woman on the moon, 1996
    Scenario #8
    Event: ADOLF HITLER is
KILLED by VAPORIZATION WHEN METEOR HITS HIM SQUARE ON THE HEAD
    As a result: No noticeable
historical changes arise from event at all. However, as the meteor is a
precursor to a massive asteroid cruising toward Earth, human history had only
22 hours, 16 minutes to develop from that point before being obliterated.
Humanity wiped out along with Hitler and 93% of all species; society of rats
rises and falls; society of frogs rises and falls; society of pillbugs rises
and falls; society of squid rises and sticks; Gluugsnertgluug first squid on
the moon, 2,973,004,412
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Fiction: The Surgeon’s Tale by Jeff
VanderMeer & Cat Rambo
    Part I
    Down by the docks, you can
smell the tide going out—surging from rotted fish, filth, and the briny
sargassum that turns the pilings a mixture of purple and green. I don’t mind the
smell; it reminds me of my youth. From the bungalow on the bay’s edge, I emerge
most days to go beach-combing in the sands beneath the rotted piers. Soft crab
skeletons and ghostly sausage wrappers mostly, but a coin or two as well.
    Sometimes I see an old man
when I’m hunting, a gangly fellow whose clothes hang loose. As though his limbs
were sticks of chalk, wired together with ulnar ligaments of seaweed, pillowing
bursae formed from the sacs of decaying anemones that clutter on the underside
of the pier’s planking.
    I worry that the sticks
will snap if he steps too far too fast, and he will become past repair, past
preservation, right in front of me. I draw diagrams in the sand flats to show
him how he can safeguard himself with casings over his fragile limbs, the
glyphs he should draw on his cuffs to strengthen his wrists. A thousand things
I’ve learned here and at sea. But I don’t talk to him—he will have to
figure it out from my scrawls when he comes upon them. If the sea doesn’t touch
them first.
    He seems haunted, like a
mirror or a window that shows some landscape it’s never known. I’m as old as he
is. I wonder if I look like him. If he too has trouble sleeping at night. And
why he chose this patch of sand to pace and wander.
    I will not talk to him.
That would be like talking to myself: the surest path to madness.
    ***
    I grew up right here, in my
parents’ cottage near the sea. Back then, only a few big ships docked at the
piers and everything was quieter, less intense. My parents were
Preservationists, and salt brine the key to their art. It was even how they
met, they liked to tell people. They had entered the same competition—to
keep a pig preserved for as long as possible using only essences from the sea
and a single spice.
    “It was in the
combinations,” my dad would say. “It was in knowing that the sea is not the
same place here, here, or here.”
    My mother and father
preserved their pigs the longest, and after a tie was declared, they began to
see and learn from each other. They married and had me, and we lived together
in the cottage by the sea, preserving things for people.
    I remember that when I went
away to medical school, the only thing I missed was the smell of home. In the
student