Mytholumina
A Collection of Stories
Storm Constantine
Stafford England
Mytholumina: A Collection of Stories
© Storm Constantine 2009
Smashwords edition 2011
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, or events, is purely coincidental.
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Cover Artist: Peter Hollinghurst
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Contents
Immaculate
The Pleasure Giver Taken
As it Flows to the Sea
The College Spirit
Last Come Assimilation
Time Beginning at Break of Day
Did You Ever See Oysters Walking Down the Stairs...?
The Vitreous Suzerain
The Rust Islands
Built on Blood
God Be With You
So What’s Forever
The Germ of Life
Story History
Immaculate
Donna can feel computers dreaming; they reach out and touch her mind, or so she says. In the dark of her room, as the white noise tide of day goes out, and the sky rises dark and glowing, the machines begin to meditate, or so she says. It makes Reeb think of dogs twitching in their sleep, the tongues of slumbering cats licking at invisible bowls of milk; human signs.
‘You always have to look for human signs in everything,’ says Donna. She’s a star, she’s a nobody. She sells things.
Reeb is a director, a creative of sufficient reputation to currently work for Say! Play!, a company specialising in leisure software. This is the man who configured the footage that sold the product that juiced the data-suit that excited the customer who paid the cash that went into the accounts of Say! Play! He would not dare to call himself an artist, although his previous campaigns have done much to increase the sales of Say! Play!; his mind is the company’s, he can find no other.
Donna is their hot package of the moment. In studio, she is a child, innocent and trusting. As a warming light image on your retina, a sound effect between your ears, a grind and stroke of vibro-fabric, she can be your unforbidden lover. Is there such a thing as the girl next door nowadays? Who lives next door, or next floor, another tuned-up commodity? Marketing-wise, Donna is perfection. How young is she: thirteen? Sixteen? Twenty? She also hears voices; there’s a market for that, but is she the right product? She can hardly be termed normal. Once, she had a strange pain in her side and when the medics examined her, they found a tiny six-sided die in her liver. Donna was not surprised; she said the People had put it there. The People advise her often, although fortunately for everyone concerned they appear to have a fairly favourable view of her occupation. Neither does Donna punish herself. She has no conscience that Reeb can detect.
Today, she is pouting and blinking at the scanners, sighing softly in a provocative and exciting way. ‘Oh! Oh!’
Reeb supervises laconically. Later, he will tinker with the footage and, combined with a graphics package, will produce some hard-core delight for the consumer. Donna doesn’t have to be too explicit, not like it’s the real thing. Reeb can shoot a few limb movements tomorrow, some dildonics the next day; the software overdubs stock effects. Donna puts her tiny hands on either side of her face and grimaces. It is not part of the script.
‘What is it?’ Reeb asks from the other side of the observation panel.
‘Oh, they are speaking to me,’ Donna says, putting shaking fingers to her forehead, where the skin is almost translucent and has a damp sheen to it. Today, that suggestion of delicacy repulses Reeb; on other days, it has seemed attractive. She is a child, in mind if not in flesh. Reeb has a desire to tweak her smug piety with a burst of power; he can do that, but he doesn’t.
‘Who is speaking to you?’ He adjusts one of the scan controls, still shooting.
She shrugs, hand flopping into her lap. ‘My People. They’re gone now.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Something about an elevator.’
She’s making this up; she has to be. ‘What?’
‘I don’t remember.’
She can be convincing when she wants to be. That’s why she’s here in his studio. Dice and elevators, computers dreaming. Young lips wetted with the tip of a nervous tongue, wide eyes. Donna lives in another world.
If Donna has her aspects of freakishness, Reeb has his own too. Nearly two years ago, he lost half of his body. The accident itself was freakish, like getting hit by lightning. Relaxing in his data-suit at home, living out a hi-res dream, the suit had suddenly turned on him like a swarm of vicious insects, cooking his right side to a frazzle, eating away at his groin and gut. The prostheticians had been delighted by him. (We can redesign this man, they had announced proudly, and proceeded to do so. Reeb could see the humour in it now, but at the time, their eagerness had sickened him). Medics could not rebuild his apartment though or resurrect the other victim of the accident, his dog.
‘You called it to you, that power,’ Donna once said. He hated her the day she said that, the very first time he worked with her. For a while, after his therapy had proved so successful, he’d been a reluctant media star himself. Donna had recognised him instantly. ‘Electricity is alive too; it’s what makes the machines dream,’ she told him. His prosthetics are more sensitive than his meat ever was, but there is still a seam, a sense of unreality, a sense that outsiders have moved into his body and might, one day, take over.
‘The machines are alive,’ Donna says, casting a meaningful glance at Reeb’s right side. He puts his hand on his leg; squeezes. It feels like flesh, but slightly rubbery; perhaps like some kind of tough mollusc. This is his first commission since he came out of therapy.
Donna has been one of the company’s products for six months; her face is burned into a million consumers’ dreams. She might have been a little crazy for years and kept it quiet, only now she wants to tell people about her Voices and Visions, her People. She has mentioned them in interviews. People have conjectured whether her peculiarities are the result of how she was conceived. Donna was one of the first of the home-grown ‘virgin births’. This fact must be significant, surely? Some people are not only prepared to believe it, but desperate to do so. These people are a cult the media tagged The Immaculates. To Reeb, they are a sad group of crazies that grew up around the virgin birth kick, desperate under-achievers trying to populate the steamed- up, fucked-up world with little messiahs. At the end of the twentieth century the Goddess of Love had tended to stride around with a scythe in her hand, more often than not, and the fear of fatal disease had not only launched the suddenly-respectable software porn industry, but had also estranged many people from the desire for human contact. Thro
ugh artificial insemination, women gave birth who had never known a man’s touch, or indeed a woman’s. At first, it was just the single women, then the gay women; later, the cult of the Immaculates grew up. Men can be Immaculate too.
Reeb thinks the Immaculates should all be locked up, even though he knows the phenomenon is merely a reaction against the fear of death, the de-lustifying of sexuality. There’s no need for that anymore, but the vein runs deep in human consensus. Too many died back then. The Immaculates were a fringe group wanting to turn it all into a religion. Mercifully, they had never progressed beyond a minority, but they still gushed warmly about Donna in their cult magazines.
The company have kept an eye on the media and now wonder whether this is an angle of Donna worth exploiting. After all, if the rumours circulating on the networks are true, Donna is not unique. Many people, whatever their background, are stepping forward to talk about Voices and Visions. Donna, being public property, could very easily be turned into a spearhead for this movement. Her family is totally devoid of fevered religion-mongers looking for a place to hang their beliefs, but she does have two mothers; hers was a conception of convenience rather than conviction. Alexis, the woman who carried her, is now her agent and manager. Alexis is probably the opposite of anyone’s vision of a Madonna. It is doubtful whether her hands have ever met beneath her chin in prayer. She is an eternal teenager, lankily attractive with razor-cut hair and slept-in-look anti-fashion gear. That she could have spawned an angel like Donna is in itself, Reeb supposes, a kind of miracle. And, if your child really does look like an angel, and fulfils everybody’s dreams, then you exploit it; in the best possible sense. Especially when your girlfriend is obsessed by graffiti art and the photographic medium; nobody’s into anything less than 3D nowadays, so somebody has to see to the family income. Alexis brings Donna over to the studio four days a week, for Reeb to record her.
Reeb is also interviewing the girl about her Visions and Voices. Donna is pleased to comply, because she likes to talk. She is one of those pale, tiny people who sometimes become attractive under the right lighting, the right conditions of the mind. Sometimes Reeb likes her very much and is convinced she has a startling clear-sightedness. Sometimes, she irritates him and he thinks she’s stupid. He used to feel the same way about his dog, when he had one.
Reeb went back to live with his mother after the accident. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement - he’s still paying rent on his own apartment - but somehow he doesn’t have the will to move back home yet. He knows there couldn’t be a smell of burning flesh there anymore, and the block domestics would have cleaned everything up but... His mother’s apartment is spacious, she’s never there, she never bothers him. He likes the view, and it’s nearer to the studio than his old place. Occasionally, he thinks about ending his lease with the property agency, although it seems a little ungrateful, seeing as they compensated him so heavily for the accident.
Sometimes, he goes over to Alexis and Meriel’s for dinner; he has become friendly with them since working with Donna. ‘When are you going to let go of Mommy’s apron strings,’ Alexis says, smiling. They are worried about him.
Meriel points a camera at him. ‘And when are you going to strip for me,’ she says.
He’s not sure whether that’s an offer or a request.
He goes to the studio early. Alexis and Donna are late today. The trains were down again.
‘Someone died, I expect,’ Alexis says when she finally arrives, scraping back her artfully ragged black hair. ‘Jumpers! I hate ‘em. Why do I have to be inconvenienced by their inadequacy? It’s so selfish!’ Her eyes skitter nervously away from Reeb’s body as if she wonders whether she’s touched on taboo. ‘I can’t bear to be held up!’ she says.
In the office, after her mother has left, Donna leans against the desk-top demurely. Reeb cannot imagine her living with Alexis and Meriel; she is an anachronism, a time-child from years past. She wears a white dress, but that is part of her costume wardrobe. The primness exists in the fabric of the dress, but is it a part of Donna? Reeb doesn’t know yet. Is she an example of her mothers’ artistic experiments? He would not put it past them. They never talk about Donna to him, and neither is she ever present at the dim-lit, smoky evenings Reeb enjoys in their company. It is as if the women lock her away in a cupboard when she’s not working. Once, he tried to talk to Alexis about Donna’s problem.
‘She’s imaginative,’ Alexis said. ‘That’s all. She makes things up.’
‘She believes it,’ Reeb said.
Alexis rolled her eyes. ‘You think so?’
He hadn’t meant the voices and visions; the problem, in his opinion, was that Donna had a reality all to herself. Her home, the studio, A to B, and anything in between, like other people, her parents, street bums, commuters, interviewers, even himself, seemed only to touch her awareness on a superficial level. Her only contact with the world outside her own was through performance. And in her room, what did she do in her room? Reeb cannot ask Alexis questions like that; she is clearly not maternal material. The procedure was all the rage back then, of course. New legislation meant women could claim it as a right. Perhaps all Alexis’ friends were having children that way. A public statement about her chosen way of life, her chosen lover.
Over the past two weeks, Reeb has been studying the phenomenon that is Donna. There has to be a new angle on her as a product, something the company can use; that’s his brief. Has she always heard the voices, had these experiences, and not spoken about them, or are they a more recent phenomenon? Donna cannot remember. She wrinkles her nose, pulls a face. ‘One night Merry’s laptop dreamed to me,’ she says, ‘but I don’t remember when.’
And what does a computer’s dream look like?
She doesn’t have the words to describe it; she has grown up that much. ‘I could think it to you,’ she says, ‘but that’s all.’
He would dismiss it as fantasy, if it wasn’t for the die. The slap-marks which had appeared instantaneously on her arm one day could be explained away as being psychologically self- induced. At the time, when it happened, Donna had told him one of the People had got angry with her.
‘So, what are you going to do with this material?’ Alexis asks him, through the cloud of marihuana smoke she has just exhaled. He is over for dinner again, but has only Alexis’ company because Meriel’s been called out; a rare offer of work, she can’t refuse. Alexis never talks to Reeb about his work with Donna, so he is surprised she wants to discuss it now. Usually, she talks to him about himself.
‘Donna is not unique,’ he says, ‘there are others like her, increasing all the time. They make a market. Understand?’
‘A market for what?’ Alexis swings her booted feet up on the table, kicking a plate out of the way.
‘I’m supposed to be thinking that one up.’ He considers the next question before he speaks. ‘Aren’t you worried about her?’
‘She’s quite happy,’ Alexis says. ‘She’s always been happy. Completely alien to me, of course, but always happy. I think she gets on better with Merry.’ She pulls a face and hands him her joint.
‘I tried to be specific about what kind of donor I wanted when she was conceived. I think they lied to me, don’t you?’ She grins. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether anything of mine went into her at all.’ If she feels wistful about that, she hides it.
‘Where is Donna?’ Reeb asks. ‘She’s never around when I call.’
‘She’s in her playroom. All the things she likes are in there.’
Reeb thinks Donna is too old to have a playroom. She should be hanging out with kids her own age, learning to live. Is that discouraged? He can’t believe so. Alex and Merry wouldn’t be that into Donna fooling around with guys, he thinks, but they would never force their lifestyle on someone else, not even if that someone was their daughter.
‘What’s she get up to in there, anyway?’ Reeb asks, jerking his head in the direction of the closed door that is Donna’s.
/> Alexis shrugs. ‘Who knows? She doesn’t like us going in there, so we don’t. We all respect each other’s privacy.’
Reeb frowns at the door. Hasn’t Donna any friends at all?
‘Donna will be OK,’ Alexis says. ‘Don’t you worry about her; she’s a survivor. Now you -’ She stabs a finger in his direction. ‘- you, I worry about.’
She hardly knows him. He’s been working with Donna for maybe six weeks and hadn’t met Alexis before then. He ought to be annoyed at her interference, and would be, if he didn’t enjoy it so much. Is that what he wants, motherly concern? Becka, his own mother, doesn’t know how to deal with emotional crises; she organised his life and then butted out to leave him with the burned-out mess of his self-image and feelings. Perhaps that’s why he hardly ever sees her. She isn’t busy exactly; just busy avoiding him.
‘I ought to find myself a place,’ he says.
‘What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?’
‘It’s my mother’s. I cramp her style.’
‘I meant the one you pay for, stupid. Are you never going to go back there?’
He shrugs.
‘What reason is there not to?’ Alexis demands. ‘Your body probably performs now better than it ever did...’ She drops her eyes, actually blushes. ‘Oh, I’m sorry...’
More than an arm and leg had been burned away. But they can fix that. They can fix everything. He didn’t believe it.
‘It’s o.k.,’ he says. ‘You’re right. I just feel... I don’t know. It’s as if someone died in there.’
‘You had a dog, didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t mean him. Someone else.’
‘Oh.’ Alexis shrugs awkwardly. ‘I think I understand that. It’s terrible.’ She brightens and pours him another glass of wine. ‘Tell you what. We’ll look for a new apartment for you this week, shall we? Somewhere near here, so we can keep an eye on you.’
Reeb is glad he has met these women. He is happy to lean on them. ‘Yeah. Fine.’
‘I heard you talking to Alexis last night,’ Donna says, when she arrives at Reeb’s studio the following day.