Shepard, Lucius - SS - Radiant Green Star.pdf - Lucius Shepard - przemosta

RADIANT GREEN STAR

Lucius Shepard

Here's a powerful, darkly elegant and high-intensity novella that

takes us to the strange, haunted landscape of a high-tech future

Vietnam for a study of hatred, compassion, betrayal and

redemption—and of the many different kinds of ghosts.

Lucius Shepard was one of the most popular, influential and prolific of the new

writers of the eighties and that decade and the decade that followed would see a

steady stream of bizarre and powerfully compelling stories by Shepard, stories such

as the landmark novella "R&R", which won him a Nebula Award in 1987, "The

Jaguar Hunter", "Black Coral", "A Spanish Lesson", "The Man Who Painted the

Dragon Griaule", "Shades", "A Traveller's Tale",' "Human History", "How the Wind

Spoke at Madaket", "Beast of the Heartland", "The Scalehunter's Beautiful

Daughter", and "Barnacle Bill the Spacer", which won him a Hugo Award in 1993. In

1988, he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story

collection The Jaguar Hunter, following it in 1992 with a second World Fantasy

Award for his second collection, The Ends of the Earth. Shepard's other books

include the novels Green Eyes, Kalimantan and The Golden. His most recent book

is a new collection, Barnacle Bill the Spacer, and he's currently at work on a

mainstream novel, Family Values. Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, he now lives in

Vancouver, Washington.

* * * *

SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE MY thirteenth birthday, my mother visited me in a

dream and explained why she had sent me to live with the circus seven years before.

The dream was a Mitsubishi, I believe, its style that of the Moonflower series of

biochips, which set the standard for pornog-raphy in those days; it had been

programmed to activate once my testos-terone production reached a certain level,

and it featured a voluptuous Asian woman to whose body my mother had apparently

grafted the image of her own face. I imagined she must have been in a desperate

hurry and thus forced to use whatever materials fell to hand; yet, taking into account

the Machiavellian intricacies of the family history, I later came to think that her

decision to alter a pornographic chip might be intentional, designed to provoke

Oedipal conflicts that would imbue her message with a heightened urgency.

In the dream, my mother told me that when I was eighteen I would come into the

trust created by my maternal grandfather, a fortune that would make me the

wealthiest man in Viet Nam. Were I to remain in her care, she feared my father would

eventually coerce me into assigning control of the trust to him,whereupon he would

have me killed. Sending me to live with her old friend Vang Ky was the one means

she had of guaranteeing my safety. If all went as planned, I would have several years

to consider whether it was in my best interests to claim the trust or to forswear it and

continue my life in secure anonymity. She had faith that Vang would educate me in a

fashion that would prepare me to arrive at the proper decision.

Needless to say, I woke from the dream in tears. Vang had informed me not long

after my arrival at his door that my mother was dead, and that my father was likely

responsible for her death; but this fresh evidence of his perfidy, and of her courage

and sweetness, mingled though it was with the confusions of intense eroticism,

renewed my bitterness and sharpened my sense of loss. I sat the rest of the night

with only the eerie music of tree frogs to distract me from despair, which roiled

about in my brain as if it were a species of sluggish life both separate from and

inimical to my own.

The next morning, I sought out Vang and told him of the dream and asked what I

should do. He was sitting at the desk in the tiny cluttered trailer that served as his

home and office, going over the accounts: a frail man in his late sixties with

close-cropped grey hair, dressed in a white open-collared shirt and green cotton

trousers. He had a long face—especially long from cheekbones to jaw—and an

almost feminine delicacy of feature, a combination of characteristics that lent him a

sly, witchy look; but though he was capable of slyness, and though at times I

suspected him of possessing supernatural powers, at least as regards his ability to

ferret out my misdeeds, I perceived him at the time to be an inwardly directed soul

who felt misused by the world and whose only interests, apart from the circus, were

a love of books and calligraphy. He would occasionally take a pipe of opium, but

was otherwise devoid of vices, and it strikes me now that while he had told me of his

family and his career in government (he said he still maintained those connections),

of a life replete with joys and passionate errors, he was now in the process of putting

all that behind him and withdrawing from the world of the senses.

"You must study the situation," he said, shifting in his chair, a movement that shook

the wall behind him, disturbing the leaflets stacked in the cabinet above his head and

causing one to sail down towards the desk; he batted it away, and for an instant it

floated in the air before me, as if held by the hand of a spirit, a detailed pastel

rendering of a magnificent tent—a thousand times more magnificent than the one in

which we performed—and a hand-lettered legend proclaiming the imminent arrival of

the Radiant Green Star Circus.

"You must learn everything possible about your father and his associates," he went

on. "Thus you will uncover his weaknesses and define his strengths. But first and

foremost, you must continue to live. The man you become will determine how best

to use the knowledge you have gained, and you mustn't allow the pursuit of your

studies to rise to the level of obsession, or else his judgment will be clouded. Of

course, this is easier to do in theory than in practice. But if you set about it in a

measured way, you will succeed."

I asked how I should go about seeking the necessary information, and he gestured

with his pen at another cabinet, one with a glass front containing scrapbooks and

bundles of computer paper; beneath it, a marmalade cat was asleep atop a broken

radio, which—along with framed photographs of his wife, daughter and grandson,

all killed, he'd told me, in an airline accident years before—rested on a chest of

drawers.

"Start there," he said. "When you are done with those, my friends in the government

will provide us with your father's financial records and other materials."

I took a cautious step towards the cabinet—stacks of magazines and newspapers

and file boxes made the floor of the trailer difficult to negotiate—but Vang held up a

hand to restrain me. "First," he said, "you must live. We will put aside a few hours

each day for you to study, but before all else you are a member of my troupe. Do

your chores. Afterwards we will sit down together and make a schedule."

On the desk, in addition to his computer, were a cup of coffee topped with a mixture

of sugar and egg, and a plastic dish bearing several slices of melon. He offered me a

slice and sat with his hands steepled on his stomach, watching me eat. "Would you

like time alone to honour your mother?" he asked. "I suppose we can manage

without you for a morning."

"Not now," I told him. "Later, though . . ."

I finished the melon, laid the rind on his plate, and turned to the door, but he called

me back.

"Philip," he said, "I cannot remedy the past, but I can assure you to a degree as to

the future. I have made you my heir. One day the circus will be yours. Everything I

own will be yours."

I peered at him, not quite certain that he meant what he said, even though his words

had been plain.

"It may not seem a grand gift," he said. "But perhaps you will discover that it is

more than it appears."

I thanked him effusively, but he grimaced and waved me to silence—he was not

comfortable with displays of affection. Once again he told me to see to my chores.

"Attend to the major as soon as you're able," he said. "He had a difficult night. I

know he would be grateful for your company."

* * * *

Radiant Green Star was not a circus in the tradition of the spectacular travelling

shows of the previous century. During my tenure, we never had more than eight

performers and only a handful of exhibits, exotics that had been genetically altered in

some fashion: a pair of miniature tigers with hands instead of paws, a monkey with a

vocabulary of thirty-seven words, and the like. The entertainments we presented

were unsophisticated; we could not compete with those available in Hanoi or Hue or

Saigon, or, for that matter, those accessible in the villages. But the villagers

perceived us as a link to a past they revered, and found in the crude charm of our

performances a sop to their nostalgia—it was as if we carried the past with us, and

we played to that illusion, keeping mainly to rural places that appeared on the surface

to be part of another century. Even when the opportunity arose, Vang refused to

play anywhere near large population centres because—he said—of the exorbitant

bribes and licensing fees demanded by officials in such areas. Thus for the first

eighteen years of my life, I did not venture into a city, and I came to know my

country much as a tourist might, driving ceaselessly through it, isolated within the

troupe. We traversed the north and central portions of Viet Nam in three battered

methane-powered trucks, one of which towed Vang's trailer, and erected our tents in

pastures and school yards and soccer fields, rarely staying anywhere longer than a

few nights. On occasion, to accommodate a private celebration sponsored by a

wealthy family, we would join forces with another troupe; but Vang was reluc-tant to

participate in such events, because being surrounded by so many people caused our

featured attraction to become agitated, thus imper-illing his fragile health.

Even today the major remains a mystery to me. I have no idea if he was who he

claimed to be; nor, I think, did he know—his statements concerning identity were

usually vague and muddled, and the only point about which he was firm was that he

had been orphaned as a young boy, raised by an uncle and aunt, and, being

unmarried, was the last of his line. Further, it's unclear whether his claims were the

product of actual memory, delusion, or implantation. For the benefit of our

audiences, we let them stand as truth, and billed him as Major Martin Boyette, the

last surviving POW of the American War, now well over a hundred years old and

horribly disfigured, both conditions the result of experiments in genetic manipulation

by means of viruses—this the opinion of a Hanoi physician who treated the major

during a bout of illness. Since such unregulated experiments were performed with

immoderate frequency throughout Southeast Asia after the turn of the century, it was

not an unreasonable conclusion. Major Boyette himself had no recollection of the

process that had rendered him so monstrous and—if one were to believe him—so

long-lived.

We were camped that day near the village of Cam Lo, and the tent where the major

was quartered had been set up at the edge of the jungle. He liked the jungle, liked its

noise and shadow, the sense of enclosure it provided—he dreaded the prospect of

being out in the open, so much so that whenever we escorted him to the main tent,

we would walk with him, holding umbrellas to prevent him from seeing the sky and

to shield him from the sight of god and man. But once inside the main tent, as if the

formal structure of a performance neutralized his aversion to space and scrutiny, he

showed himself pridefully, walking close to the bleachers, causing children to shy

away and women to cover their eyes. His skin hung from his flesh in voluminous

black folds (he was African-American), and when he raised his arms, the folds

beneath them spread like the wings of a bat; his face, half-hidden by a layering of

what appeared to be leather shawls, was the sort of uncanny face one might see

emerging from a whorled pattern of bark, roughly human in form, yet animated by a

force that seems hotter than the human soul, less self-aware. Bits of

phosphorescence drifted in the darks of his eyes. His only clothing was a ragged

grey shift, and he hobbled along with the aid of a staff cut from a sapling

papaya—he might have been a prophet escaped after a term in hell, charred and

magical and full of doom. But when he began to speak, relating stories from the

American War, stories of ill-fated Viet Cong heroes and the supernatural forces

whose aid they enlisted, all told in a deep rasping voice, his air of suffering and

menace evaporated, and his ugliness became an intrinsic article of his power, as

though he were a poet who had sacrificed superficial glamour for the ability to

express more eloquently the beauty within. The audiences were won over, their alarm

transformed to delight, and they saluted him with enthusiastic applause but they

never saw him as I did that morning: a decrepit hulk given to senile maundering and

moments of bright terror when startled by a sound from outside the tent. Sitting in

his own filth, too weak or too uncaring to move.

When I entered the tent, screwing up my face against the stench, he tucked his head

into his shoulder and tried to shroud himself in the fetid folds of his skin. I talked

softly, gentling him as I might a frightened animal, in order to persuade him to stand.

Once he had heaved up to his feet, I bathed him, sloshing buckets of water over his

convulsed surfaces; when at length I was satisfied that I'd done my best, I hauled in

freshly cut boughs and made him a clean place to sit. Unsteadily, he lowered himself

onto the boughs and started to eat from the bowl of rice and vegetables I had

brought for his breakfast, using his fingers to mould bits of food into a ball and

inserting it deep into his mouth—he often had diffi-culty swallowing.

"Is it good?" I asked. He made a growly noise of affirmation. In the half-dark, I

could see the odd points of brilliance in his eyes.

I hated taking care of the major (this may have been the reason Vang put me in

charge of him). His physical state repelled me, and though the American War had

long since ceased to be a burning issue, I resented his purported historical

reality—being half American, half Vietnamese, I felt doubly afflicted by the era he

represented. But that morning, perhaps because my mother's message had

inoculated me against my usual prejudices, he fascinated me. It was like watching a

mythological creature feed, a chimera or a manticore, and I thought I perceived in

him the soul of the inspired storyteller, the luminous half-inch of being that still

burned behind the corroded ruin of his face.

"Do you know who I am?" I asked.

He swallowed and gazed at me with those haunted fox fire eyes. I repeated the

Shepard, Lucius - SS - Radiant Green Star.pdf

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