Stories: All-New Tales

He will hand over his chronicle—all 2.4 million words he has written and, “far more interesting, I should think,” all 73,496 of hours of video that he shot on every continent but Antarctica in every year from the early fifth century to the late nineteenth century.

He will tell everything he knows about life in our part of the Milky Way, corroborated by the library of text and images stored at the station. “It’s all badly out of date, of course,” he says, “but it’s better than nothing.”

And he will give to the people of Earth his surviving pieces of technology—in particular the batteries that power the video player and portable beacon and Arctic station, all still operating 1,581 years after installation. “I should think,” he says, “that some bright scientists somewhere will be able to reverse-engineer them.”

As she wonders how many billions of dollars his Vrizhongilian batteries might be worth, she feels a jolt of self-loathing. “This is going to be unbelievable, Nicholas.”

He smiles. “Let’s hope not.”

“I mean, this will be the biggest thing…ever.”

“I suppose. I do hope that people, anyway most people, will be glad to learn, finally, definitively, that they’re not alone in the universe.” Because, he thinks to himself, I know I am inexpressibly happy that my loneliness is finally about to end.

“Nicholas?”

“Yes?”

“May I hug you?”

STORIES

Michael Moorcock

THIS IS THE STORY OF MY FRIEND Rex Fisch who blew out his complicated brains in his Lake District library all over his damned books one Sunday afternoon last September. Naturally the place was a horror to clean, but Rex never really cared much about the mess he left in his wake. What pissed me off was the waste: each blasted cell was a story he’d never tell; a story no one else would ever tell. Rex knew how to hurt himself and the old friends who loved him. Only a few of us are now left. Cancer took Hawthorn, Hayley, Slade and Allard that same year. The first three had shared digs with Rex when he first lived in London. It didn’t seem fair of the bastard to deliberately deplete what remained of our joint memory.

As I said at his funeral Rex had more fiction in him than could ever come out, no matter how long he’d lived. A superb raconteur, he produced stories in every form, from dry, funny narrative verse to self-dramatising social lies. Novels, plays, short stories, comic strips, operas, movies, RPGs: throughout his career he was never stuck for a narrative. In that respect we were pretty much alike and shared a kind of discomfort at our own facility. We both identified with Balzac, sharing a fascination for Jacques Collin, his sinister and ubiquitous many-named master villain who set out to ruin La Torpille in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Rex discovered that most people prefer a good story and a bit of conventional prejudice to honest ambiguity; they made their most profound life decisions based on tales they saw in the tabloids or on reality TV. That didn’t stop Rex telling the truth when it frequently occurred to him. Truth was always in there somewhere, even when he thought he was lying. For all his later right-wing posturing, he had, like Balzac, a way of tapping into poor peoples’ dreams and understanding what they wanted most in the world. I envied him his empathy, if not his ambition. There was one story he couldn’t write. I think it was what we were all waiting for and which might have brought him the literary recognition he longed for. But he believed Paris Review editors could “smell the pulp writer on you,” while as an editor I rejected stories because I could smell Paris Review on them. I believed we were too good for the reviews even when we appeared in them. The conventions of genre were staler in literary writing than Harlequin romances: exactly why Rex turned out to be the writer we most needed on Mysterious.