The Anthology Anthology: The very modern horror of Ambrose Bierce

 

As I write this, I’m looking at another week of posts, and I’m far enough ahead that it is still technically the weekend. As it happens, I was already working on something that spun off into another post, the fiction of Ambrose Bierce, which was transformed into the “true” tale of Oliver Larch. Here, I’m giving a wider, still anecdotal survey of his work.

 

For introduction, I’m not going to try to cover the author’s life or his place in American literature. What I was interested enough to run down is the background of the two collections I consulted, The Ghost And Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, which I bought in ebook form, and the more luridly named Terror By Night. The former has an introduction by one Dan Hawks, the latter by David Stuart Davies. Both otherwise appear almost identical (I’ll get to that…) both to each other and to the 1964 publication The Ghost And Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, edited and introduced by E.F. Bleiler, a scholar of science fiction and fantasy. On working this out, I was immediately satisfied that the 1964 book was one which I had read during college. (I distinctly recall reading it the same night I saw the end of Eight Legged Freaks on TV, because my superpower is my torment.) So, here’s a rundown of the ones that have stayed with me all this time.

 

“Moxon’s Master”- This is the most historically significant story by Bierce, a proto-science fictional tale about a chess-playing automaton that takes losing badly. In an unfortunate common denominator, it’s not really his best work. A good chunk of it is a monologue that lays out a kind of pantheism as a rationale for machine intelligence. The actual bout between man and machine is well-paced and intriguing, but there just isn’t much here.

 

“A Vine On A House”- This is an example of the formulaic side of Bierce’s work, done better than usual. On stopping at a crumbling and ill-reputed house, two travelers notice a vine shaking without explanation. An investigation leads to a grisly discovery. Surely based on the actual case of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, it’s another story with overtones of animism, quite effective and still understated.

 

“Stanley Fleming’s Hallucination”- This is perhaps the most oddly prescient of Bierce’s stories, concerning a man who is threatened by nightly visions of a menacing hound in his bedroom. His roundabout confessions reveal a darker backstory that will end in supernatural revenge. One can find in it the conceptual bedrock of the Nightmare On Elm Street franchise (which I had previously traced through the work of Robert E. Howard). In a running theme, it feels underwhelming placed in context, which here more than usual is clearly our fault, not Bierce’s.

 

“A Fruitless Assignment”- Now we have Bierce’s true masterpiece, a brief misadventure of a journalist sent to investigate a supposed haunted house where mysterious yet decidedly unghostly figures come and go. It’s startling for how weak it should be on paper, less than 3 pages with a buildup that’s too long and never makes sense. But there is an incalculable impact in the utterly savage climax and the even more frustrating aftermath, with a deceptively well-realized and decidedly unsympathetic protagonist. On top of everything else, it’s a chillingly early treatment of PTSD. Here, the greatest horror is to live and learn nothing.

 

“The Spook House”- A longer piece by Bierce’s standards, another pair of travelers venture into a deserted house whose original owners disappeared. Only one will come out. It’s more of the economical savagery that the modern reader could easily overlook in familiarity, both atmospheric and gruesome. What impresses even now is the “ambiguous” ending, which Bierce truly excelled at.

 

“The Suitable Surroundings”- Here, we see Bierce in full-blown deconstructionism, tweaking the Gothic horror genre still in its prime. A writer challenges a reader to read his latest story under uniquely unsettling conditions, with deadly and comical results. I freely admit I didn’t try to re-read this one; what I remember is enough.

 

“The Difficulty of Crossing a Field”- A much better entry in Bierce’s cycle of eerie disappearance tales, a man disappears without a trace just outside his own front door. Again, the deeper horror is the exploration of the aftermath.

 

“A Jug of Sirup”- An entry in the “disappearing shop” niche genre as much as anything else, a storekeeper returns from the grave, so much himself that it takes a while for his old customers to notice. It’s another satire, not quite as subversive as “Suitable Surroundings” but correspondingly more unsettling. This is incidentally the epitome of Bierce’s view of the revenant dead, neither angelic nor vengeful, but merely acting the parts they did in life.

 

“Visions of the Night”- And this is the one that was only in the ebook, which I remembered from the 1964 edition. The author narrates a series of visions supposedly from his own dreams, the last being a seemingly whimsical encounter with a talking horse. One can take the authenticity with a heaping helping of salt, yet it is a convincing picture of the world of dreams that lays out a path for much to follow. (Fine, I’ll mention House…)

 

And that’s enough for me. Needless to say, there are many, many more that I am passing over, including supposed “classics”, but these are by all means representative of the stories that have impacted me. It should be obvious that I hold this author’s work in the highest regard, where it truly deserves it, and equally obvious that I am well aware of the flaws. In the proverbial light of day, Bierce stands out first and foremost as an author who didn’t and perhaps couldn’t pick a lane between satirizing what was wrong with a genre and actually doing it well. He also gives an early preview of the cycles of excess, self-parody, and revitalizing deconstruction that have afflicted horror fiction. But he also does offer some of the very best genre tales of his own or any other time, which are even now a breath of fresh air for anyone who has truly gone through the trash heap of history. Read him with my highest recommendation, perhaps ideally in small doses. The one thing you will not do is forget.

Image credit ISFDB.

Crypto Corner: The boy who really disappeared

 

As I write this, Halloween is approaching, and I’ve been getting enough Ideas that I might not even do that many movie reviews. Among other things, I had been planning an installment of my woefully intermittent features on short fiction, which in the process brought me to something on the Fortean vein. That provoked me enough to try filling out the lineup with another post in this feature. Last time, I covered the Mary Celeste, an actual unsolved historical mystery that just might come down to outright insurance fraud. This time, I’ll be talking about a case that was always fraud through and through. I speak of a horrifying tale that must have terrified countless impressionable kids, the disappearance of one Oliver Larch, whose real vanishing act was leaving no trace of his existence in the first place.

The tale, as I remember first reading it long, long ago, begins with a festive celebration by a family called the Larches at their farmhouse in South Bend, Indiana on Christmas Eve 1889. In the midst of the party, the young and instantly sympathetic Oliver, age 11, is sent out to fill a pail of water from their well, across a field covered in new-fallen snow. He leaves his popcorn behind (really, that’s repeatedly specified) to do his part for the family. Soon after, the family hears a commotion outside. They run out, to hear Oliver calling for help, and adding, “They’ve got me!” But his cries are fading, and they seem to come from overhead. Meanwhile, the family follows the trail of prints in the snow. At the end of it, perhaps halfway to the well, they find the bucket, but no trace of Oliver. And, invariably, it is affirmed that the police and other authorities investigated these facts and found them beyond dispute.

Except, of course, every remotely critical investigation found nothing of the kind. (See Kevin Randle's thorough, hilarious and pitiful rundown from 2008.) The South Bend police department stated only that they had not maintained or preserved records from the time of the incident. Newspapermen and other recordkeepers, evidently annoyed, reported no record of an individual named Oliver Larch or his family residing in the area at that or any other time, and openly opined that the tale of the disappearance was fantasy or fiction. On top of that, weather reports that were handed down recorded clear weather with little or no snow. But the smoking gun was that the tale was nearly identical to the plot of “Charles Ashmore’s Trail”, a work of fiction published by Ambrose Bierce in 1888. By the 1970s, after being repeated in such publications as Fate, the tale was repudiated in the Fortean community as either a legend or outright hoax. But was that the end of the story? I will be the first to say, yes, dammit, it was. Except, things still weren’t that simple.

And that’s where I come in, in the course of rereading Bierce’s work for what would have been another post altogether. In the midst of it, I remembered the strange saga of Oliver Larch and reread the tale that supposedly started all this. What struck me was that, for a story with such an enduring impact, it was conspicuously unimpressive. Bierce was a master of modern minimalist horror while Gothic purple prose was still riding high (I will name-drop “A Fruitless Assignment” as the peak of his form), yet one would not guess it from the yarn under consideration. Even allowing for its short length, it is awkward and oddly unengaging. What is all the more striking is that it lacks a number of dramatic details and sympathetic hooks of the received legend. Rather than a lovable lad, Charles Ashmore is just a guy of 16 who would have been considered virtually an adult in the Victorian era. Instead of Christmas eve, the night of his disappearance is simply an evening in November. In place of a dramatic disturbance, his family find his trail after merely noticing that he has not returned, and only later hear his voice in the course of their ordinary doings. Given these discrepancies, how certain can we be that this was the source of the tale of Oliver Larch?

In fact, we can guardedly give the lore a certain benefit of a doubt. It is already clear that the tale as received is more like a legend or “myth” than an outright hoax, though the more brazen “true” retellings certainly cross the line into the latter category. If it did originate from Bierce’s yarn at all, it certainly had to have evolved greatly before it reached the form known to us. It follows that Bierce himself might likewise have drawn from much older sources, and it is no stretch to allow that the underlying lore persisted independent of or at least in parallel with his influence. We may finally consider that the quite vivid tale of young Oliver is indeed the earlier and more authentic form of the tale.

It is at this point that we can consider certain oddly modern features of the story, which the folklorist will find more akin to “urban legends” than the folklore of the elder world. First, while a supernatural element is explicit, there is no endorsed or implied “explanation” that would root it in established religion or mythology. There is no invocation of devils, witches or fairies. For all intents and purposes, the abductors of Oliver Larch represent nothing more or less than the unseen and unknown. On a closely related note, there is no moralizing element. There is no suggestion of young Oliver being punished for any wrongdoing. Indeed, we might take his tale as a child’s jeering mockery of such adult-sanctioned lore, except that he is never set up as an obnoxious do-gooder either (compare/ contrast with Saki’s astonishing “The Story-Teller”). Finally, there are the effortlessly confident appeals to authority which leave no doubt of its truth, a distinctly recent preoccupation. On this vein, it is consistently recounted that no balloons were in the air, as if anticipating this as a viable explanation. To anyone actually knowledgeable about lighter-than-air aviation, of course, it would be obvious that a balloon used in the manner described (at night!) would simply crash in a trail of burning wreckage, as would any known aircraft prior to Sikorsky’s development of a practical (but still very, very loud…) helicopter in the aftermath of World War 2.

With this frame of reference, we can outline the most probable path of the tale’s development. It undoubtedly began somewhere in the morass of 19^th-century oral tradition, if it did not somewhat predate the 1800s. It was then retold especially among children and teenagers, perhaps at some point to a still young Bierce. With or without his influence, the tale persisted into the 1890s and early 1900s, when we know it first began to circulate in print. From there, it was a small if delayed jump into early Fortean literature, where it was repeated with painful earnestness long after multiple debunkings.

So that brings us to the end of the trail. And you know something? I still like the story. It’s the Platonic archetype of a campfire tale, and it perfectly expresses the anxieties of young and old alike. There will always be things we don’t understand. There will also always be bad things happening to good people, sometimes not even outside your front door. If it takes a tale like this to teach that lesson to the young, then it would be a more than fair price. The only people who made it a problem were grownups who only remembered contrived terror for its own sake. For the rest, knowing the truth is only part of the balance of growing up. With that, I bring this short chapter to an end.

 

Crypto Corner Returns?! The ship with nobody on it

 

It’s almost time for Halloween, and I have been thinking about the future of my blogging. That brought me back to one of the things that got me here in the first place, my interest in Forteana. That, in turn, got me thinking about something that I had never really thought about trying my own hand at either way. It’s the most famous and iconic of mysteries, the one that is still hailed as “unsolved”… and the one that has the highest volume of absolute nonsense. I speak of the Mary Celeste, the greatest of maritime mysteries… and I will be presenting the explicit hypothesis that it was a scam.

The facts of the case are already so frequently retold as to be moot in serious discussion. In 1872, a ship named Dei Gratia sighted another ship near the Strait of Gibraltar, moving erratically. The captain, David Morehouse, gave orders to approach what was presumed to be a vessel in distress, only to find that it in fact had no crew aboard at all. Its name was the Mary Celeste, an already disreputable vessel commanded by one Benjamin Briggs, a well-regarded if undistinguished seaman who had set off from New England with a cargo of alcohol, a handpicked crew and his wife Sarah and young daughter sophy on board. Though the lifeboat was gone, the ship was still largely seaworthy. But what made it remarkable was that a logbook found aboard recorded the ship’s last position as hundreds of miles further west. Further investigations would raise allegations of mutiny, murder, conspiracies and outright insurance fraud. Yet, in the end, multiple inquests could give no explanation, and neither the captain nor the crew nor his missing family members were ever found. So, of course, decades of literature suggested that it was the work of mutineers, or murderous ex-slaves, or pirates, or giant squid, or aliens, or… Yeah, we all know, this was bunk.

Now, to back this up, what’s really noteworthy are the two figures who gave the story its eventual form. One was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, who turned out an early yarn with a fictionalized retelling of the vessel, subtly renamed Marie Celeste. In his telling, the tale became a racially charged tale of vengeance. Though it specifically lacked a supernatural element, he made a number of additions and omissions to present a scenario that was far more mysterious than the mundane facts, notably portraying the vessel with its lifeboat still in place and with a “hot meal” on the table. (The latter detail seems to have come from a slightly earlier retelling in the Los Angeles Times.) The other is the infamous Frederick Solly Flood, an attorney general who investigated the case. He was quite justifiably incredulous at the truthfulness of the received account of events, but could not come up with a better alternative than increasingly contrived speculations that the captain and the crew had either murdered each other or been killed by the crew of the Dei Gratia. It is worth further note that, prior to the rise of the Fortean community, his was the dominant “narrative” of the event, as further reflected in the multiple lurid hoaxes that made the worst school library Forteana look like naïve exuberance.

Now is the point where we can double back to the “savvy” version of events, represented by Ian Wilson’s frequently cited Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries and Brian Hendricks’ fine scholarly rundown Ghost Ship. These accounts have at least set a bar of discussion higher than the self-mystification of the “true mysteries” books. We intelligent anomalists and historical investigators all know now that the lifeboat was gone from the ship. It has long since been agreed that, while the Mary Celeste was reasonably intact at the time of discovery, it had suffered significant damage that would probably have claimed it if not for its seemingly happenstance encounter with another ship. Finally, while items of significant value were left aboard ship, as well as the ship’s log book, the captain and crew did take the time to bring navigational instruments. The upshot has been at least to place the “mystery” in the realm of psychology rather than the paranormal. Obviously, the captain and crew decided to leave the ship, without believing the situation so dire that they deserted without preparation. It is sensibly postulated that they believed they could either reach land or simply return to the ship once some temporary problem resolved itself. At some point, they miscalculated or had a further mishap, leaving the captain, crew and a woman and child to a fate that was, in Wilson’s words, “tragically obvious”.

What is most noteworthy in all this is that these revisionist takes have done very little to put Flood in a better light. If anything, he has been the foil of the debunkers as he was to the credulous lay Forteans. In their accounts, he becomes a kind of misguided extremist, trying mightily to refute the posited facts of the case only to see them affirmed again and again. What is undoubtedly true is that there was precious little that was reasonable in his conjectures. The one thing that can still put him in a sympathetic light is the desperation that must have driven to it. He becomes the epitome of the specifically Victorian brand of rationalism, determined to find a “reasonable” explanation even for what was by all appearances a series of irrational acts. As the centerpiece of my own scenario, I posit what I find closest to the truth: He was the kind of prosecutor who, given the opportunity, would overstate and distort his case to the point of irreparable harm even if the facts and evidence were already in favor of the accused being guilty. We can thus frame the question as, just how much did Flood set rational inquiries back?

On this vein, we can see that Flood fundamentally botched his case as soon as he arbitrarily fixated on the notion that the crew had mutinied after getting drunk on alcohol from the ship’s hold. In fact, even if the alcohol was not strictly toxic as usually reported (only Hicks seems to admit any uncertainty on that point), it was certainly never intended for recreational consumption in any quantity. Beyond that, an uprising of intoxicated and enraged sailors changes the scenario from a crime of passion rather than cold-blooded fraud, without any advantage in accounting for the evidence. It was notably unlikely that such a ragtag band could act without resistance from loyalists in the crew and/ or infighting in their own ranks, either of which would almost certainly have left clear signs of struggle. What should have ended the discussion is and if such a group had given any thought at all to covering their tracks, they would simply set fire to the ship and its flammable cargo. Then the most consequential and malign error was that Flood all but rejected the simplest solution of all, that Briggs decided to abandon, burn or flat-out explode his own ship to collect the insurance. On this point, it must be considered that even if Flood was right, his unwillingness to accuse a captain of wrongdoing surely reveals a cultural blind spot that could easily have cost us key facts and context.

Now, we get to the infamous details, and I freely maintain that if my scenario does not explain everything, it leaves no more plot holes than any other. For example, we know that a certain amount of alcohol had leaked into the hold, and that at least one hatch was secured open. This was in fact a reasonably favorable circumstance for the kind of fuel-air explosion already prominently discussed by revisionists, as much as a man of the 1800s could have understood the phenomenon. It is especially noteworthy that this would allow for multiple contingencies. If whatever igniting mechanism was set up failed to produce an explosion, the resulting blaze could still destroy the ship. If it had not, then the flames could still burn up the cargo along with any evidence of intentional sabotage. The one thing would-be arsonists might well have been unprepared for was for a carefully planned detonation to fail entirely. That would have left the crew in the position we already know, either paddling away from the ship in the lifeboat or watching from a calculated safe distance. In the latter scenario, we can envision an argument whether to go back to the ship, just possibly long enough to delay a decision that would have changed their fate.

Another detail this can account for is the abandoned logbook, and the further fact that the last entry was 9 days prior to the ship’s discovery. From what we know now, this was probably at least a day or two before the abandonment of the ship, and of course, the apparent gap in the nominally daily log is all the more strange if anything untoward had happened in the meantime. It has also been freely noted that several calculations of the ship’s position may have been incorrect. This is precisely where outright fraud becomes, at a minimum, more economical than any other solution. Perhaps Briggs discontinued the log when his real plan started. If he had cared enough to make the effort, he might have kept two separate logs, a fraud known to Christopher Columbus. Or, for simplicity, the logbook may have been abandoned because the captain realized it contained information that would contradict whatever story he planned to tell.

At this point, the problem once again falls into the realm of psychology. Much has been said about Briggs’ piety and mild temperament, which is certainly a fair point against the broken-record guessing that he drove his crew to mutiny. But if the charge is premeditated fraud, the story of the scrupulous and reliable professional taking the money and run has long since become its own cliché. Of course, it can be further allowed that he objected to the plan only to be overruled by other conspirators, most obviously the ship’s frequently discussed owner, James Winchester. We might also reconsider a role for Morehouse, the one point where even Flood backed off. If Morehouse and any of his crew had been let in on a plot, they could have been induced by a chance to play hero by picking up the survivors as much as any share in an expected payout. If they were not, it could very well have been planned for the Mary Celeste to cross paths with his ship, notwithstanding the known discrepancies in their known and intended courses, and ideally give truthful witnesses to the destruction of the Mary Celeste in the process. Then we might wonder about a comment reported by his widow: “Poor Briggs! He and his wife and crew must have perished in that small, open yawl. There can be no other way out of it.” It is the same conclusion reached by others much further removed from the case, but wouldn’t the certainty and finality of his remark make all the more sense if that was what he expected to find on the fateful day?

The one obvious counterpoint is that Briggs would have to have embarked on the plot with not only his wife but the younger of their two children onboard. On consideration, this is no more or less than one more unknown, and another point where the lingering filters of Victorian morality have done us no favors. The later hoaxers were especially apt to push Sarah Briggs into the role of a passive damsel, which is in fact the one thing we can be sure she was not. In reality, she was  an intelligent and resourceful woman who had accompanied her husband often enough to be an seasoned mariner in her on right. From what can be known, Briggs in turn respected her as a partner in his ventures. If a plot to sink the Mary Celeste had been discussed between them, it is at least not preposterous that she might have approved. As usual, we can spin further motivations. She may have already wanted to return to a life on land and bring her wayfaring mate with her. Perhaps she would have seen a scheme as no more than a romantically piratical adventure. And of course, the only thing that needs to be added to this “what if” is, as usual, that something went very, very wrong.

And that brings us back around to the aftermath, as Dei Gratia’s crew surveyed the scene. We have already seen that it is not essential that they were party to a conspiracy, if one occurred, but it is all too easy to envision a spontaneous and organic “coverup”. If even the suspicious Flood was unwilling to sustain an accusation of wrongdoing against Briggs, his peers and friends would have been all the more reluctant to implicate him in a petty plot or for that matter a simple error that in all likelihood cost him, his crew and his wife and daughter their lives. Then, if the scenario laid out here is anywhere close to correct, there are plenty of things that would only have been “obvious” to experienced seaman, and many of those might only have been seen by a single person. It would have been easy to dispose of some crucial piece of evidence or remove it from context, easier still simply to omit it from the reports and subsequent testimony. The unavoidable irony is that if anyone had tried to come clean, it might only have further antagonized the likes of Flood.

Now as an epilogue, we might consider a deeper part of maritime lore, the supposedly “cursed” ship. As we all know, the Mary Celeste was the epitome of the legend even without the incident that made her infamous, from a maiden voyage with a captain who got sick and died to a wreck and costly rebuild that gave the ship its name to a final trip where she was in fact wrecked in what a court of law ruled to be deliberate insurance fraud. Through it all, we can see a bedrock of rational plausibility. The ship started as an undistinguished specimen of a type that would soon become both obsolete and unprofitable. In its rebuilt form, it became an awkward compromise, larger than it was meant to be yet only marginally improved, with a sunk cost that would weigh down its profitability. Along the way, it acquired a bad reputation that on objective scrutiny can be counted as nothing more or less than self-fulfilled prophecy. Captains and crew were increasingly unwilling to sail aboard the ship, especially after the disappearance of the Briggs and its crew. More tellingly, it passed through a series of increasingly indifferent or malicious owners, until it finally came to one who was willing to destroy it on purpose. The truth of the matter was that the ship was doomed not by any curse, but by economics that left it unprofitable yet too expensive to abandon until the very end.

And that ends this little rabbit trail. So, what do I think? I’m willing to say, I still don’t know. I have run with my scenario just to see how far it can go. Having come to the end, I will be the first to admit that it’s not a very likely solution. But I can also say, it certainly is not so unlikely that it can be dismissed out of hand. The real lesson of Mary Celeste research is that there will never be a perfect answer to every question. To believe otherwise is to enable the mystification that prevailed for so long, and also to overlook the true horror. If we cannot figure out why an experienced captain would take his wife and child as well as his crew onto the open ocean on a marginal lifeboat, does that not simply show us the limits of our reason? And who are we to say that any of us could not make an equally unfathomable decision, if we had to make it under the same limitations? That should terrify us more than any spooky yarn, and that is why the mystery will live on.

Fiction: Retro gaming parody novel publication announcement!

 

It's Labor Day, which means this is still technically the last weekend of a month when I've so far done only two posts and absolutely no movie reviews. I'm breaking the silence to announce that my Nintendo fan/ parody novel (see demos 1, 2,  and 3, the mythology appendix and extra) is up for sale, as linked to here.  In the meantime, I threw in some art on top of the cover I already spent too much on, resulting in the interior title page above from an artist named Carlos Miguel Garcia. My specific instructions were to make a "1980s futuristic" ship, and I will be the first to admit that really is what Eighties "kit-bashed" sci fi ships were like. Here's another piece of artwork I shelled out for. For context, the description in the book has the mother dragon monster using a chokehold. And they're both being held hostage by the empress of an evil magic-mirror dimension...

So that's what I have to show for 4 and a half months of work and definitely more money than I'm remotely likely to get back. So was it worth it? Well, it probably helped keep me sane, which is something. And while I'm at it, here's my final version of the ship design everybody kept telling me not to use.

That's all for now, more to come... I'm still not saying when.

The Horrible Horror Vault Revisited: The one with an evil boat

 

 

Title: Ghost Ship

What Year?: 2002

Classification: Mashup/ Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’m at the tail end of a phase of retiring some of my longest-running features, usually with some measure of relief. That has brought me back around to considering whether I should dust off any of them. It happened that the one that finally forced my decision was a horror movie from within the “modern” era, which I have usually specifically avoided outside of zombie films like Splinter.  I quickly realized that the one place it really fit was my one dedicated horror feature, the Horrible Horror Vault, and what made things interesting was that this one went in a quite different direction. I present Ghost Ship, a movie about a literal boat from Hell, and boy do I know there’s more than one.

Our story begins in the 1960s, with a captain and a little girl dancing on a cruise ship deck until a preposterously gruesome mass casualty event strikes. Skip forward, and we meet an evidently competent salvage crew with a butch lady boss who is technically second in command. A nondescript guy comes to them with a lead: After 40-some years, a missing cruise ship has been rediscovered, still drifting around what would in regular reality be the maritime border between two superpowers. This apparently seems neither improbable nor utterly terrifying to the crew, who sign on for a job. They discover a standard spooky ship where rats still scurry about and mysterious figures appear and disappear, particularly the captain and the girl. Just when the audience is thinking get the Hell off this thing, the crew discover a fortune in the hold, only to lose their own ship. The lady and her dwindling crew must survive the perils of the ship and the sea. But they are already part of a trap that claimed the lives of the original complement, and the stakes are their lives and their souls!

Ghost Ship was a 2002 supernatural horror film directed by Steve Beck and produced by Joel Silver (see Lethal Weapon, Predator 2) and Robert Zemeckis. The production was developed from a script that reportedly emphasized psychological horror over gore and supernatural elements. Similarities were noted to the 1980 film Death Ship (oh dear Logos, that should have been on my list of films too bad to review), ultimately including a very similar movie poster. The film starred Julianna Margulies as the lady boss Epps, with Gabriel Byrne as Captain Murphy and Emily Browning as the girl. Plans to film on an actual ship were rejected in favor of CGI effects and extensive miniatures, provided by the crew Photon VFX from Australia. The movie was released in October 2002 and on home video in March 2003. It received mixed to negative reviews but was a commercial success, earning $68 million against a $20M budget. It is currently available on digital platforms including HBO Max.

For my experiences, this is one I remember seeing around the time it came out without knowing it was “supposed” to have a bad reputation; I liked it, I hear nothing bad about it, and I distinctly remember at least one reasonably positive contemporary review. But what has really stood out is the whole “evil boat” concept. It’s a counterpart to the more niche “underwater sci fi” (see Leviathan, The Abyss) which I have covered with the likes of Deep Rising and The Ghost Galleon. (Wait, doesn’t Event Horizon kind of count???) In that context, what I have found most interesting is the degree to which it rides the line between horror and science fiction. The notes are Gothic, but the visual vocabulary is industrial, with shot after shot emphasizing the very solid if rusted and creaky walls, rooms and fittings of the ship. It’s a fascinating blend of genres, and that’s the other reason I remain very conflicted coming back to this film.

Moving forward, the word that applies here is indeed “solid”. Everything here is genre formula done quite well, with good acting and dialogue, excellent effects, and a story that at a minimum gets a real payoff out of a “twist” villain. It all serves to illustrate that cliches become cliches because they can and do in fact work. What is most impressive is that there is still complex conceptualization and  genuine ambiguity. Several incidents could be actual hallucinations. Others appear to be a combination of illusions by the spirits and hazards already present on the boat. Then there are certain points where the ship seems to show a malign will of its own, to a degree that I considered including this along with The Lift and Willy’s Wonderland under the “possessed machine” category of my robots feature. It all builds to an unexpected touch of beauty in the finale when (fine, spoiler) the sinking ship releases the souls of the dead. The only points where this becomes a problem are where the film goes with shocks over substance. It shows most around the middle act, which sees multiple redundant jump scares and one obvious gross-out. But we already see it in the ludicrous opening, which just feels like an unconvincing ripoff of the laser cheese grater in Resident Evil, even though a little chronological review would indicate that this was mostly in the can by the time that movie came out.

With these issues already on the table, where my nitpicking instincts kick in is the reveal of the original atrocity that killed everyone in the first place. This is the point where the story becomes a straight-up Medieval morality play, and for the most part, it’s another twist that really works, especially once the characters start to question each other’s identities and motivations. The problem is that the chain of events follows neither logic nor proportion. By my further penchant for rewriting, what would have worked is a potentially non-lethal scheme that actually went wrong, like a staged “accident” gone out of control (essentially the set-up of Deep Rising and for that matter an intelligible solution to the actual Mary Celeste). Instead, almost everyone jumps straight to mass murder on a literal war-crime scale, which goes as far beyond the standards of “rational evil” as killing a bank president, vice president and the entire board of directors to rob the bank. Even if this went according to plan, it’s obvious that it would almost certainly end badly. The real “problem” here is that the movie specifically fails to sell this as a slippery slope that might tempt the ordinary viewer, and that specific weakness is in contrast to the unsettlingly believable conflicts that arise among the present-day protagonists.

Now for the “one scene”, the one that really lingered in writing this review is a scene that makes absolutely no sense in cold blood. In the midst of the middle-act slow-down, Byrne/ Murphy has wandered into the captain’s cabin, where he discovers the ghost of the original liner’s captain. What is surreal off the bat is, first, that there is neither fear nor surprise, and second, that this non-reaction actually follows from previously established characterization. The captain simply accepts what he sees, and gives careful attention as the ghost presents a file on the discovery of another ill-fated and infamous ship. Murphy says simply, “I know the story,” without telling the yarn anyway. He adds, “There were no survivors,” at which point the ghost holds out a photo we don’t see. Of course, it’s always possible that this whole interaction is simply how a character we know to be imaginative visualizes a discovery he made rummaging through a desk. For the film’s purposes, it doesn’t really matter, and the story is already moving on accordingly.

In closing, I come to the rating, and this is a fairly rare case where I have been going back and forth the whole time. By my own admission, the main thing this film has had going for it is that I can remember a time when I viewed it quite favorably. Channeling early 2000’s me, I would probably have given it the same rating then that I do now. In other ways, however, time and more experience with the genre(s) have been unkind enough that I came close to knocking the rating down to 2 out of sheer disappointment. What settled things in my mind was simple perspective. This may never have been a great movie, but it still stands as one that did far better than might be expected and in some lights better than it really deserved to. (With Death Ship anywhere in the frame of reference, Sleepaway Camp would get the benefit of a doubt.) That’s enough to hold its own in my book, and that makes one more film I’ve made my peace with. Bon voyage!

Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 22!

 It's the middle of my attempt to do a full week of posts, so of course I'm taking a short cut with the Space Guys. This is really a new part of the adventure, but for now, I'm keeping the numbering and table of contents at the end. And hey, I worked in the Marz building!

 

The voyage of the Janus went on for months after passing Uranus, but the boredom and isolation that had fallen over the crew never returned. There was laughter, singing and a return to games, music and books that they had long declared themselves tired of. The morale was further improved by the appearance of one more orb in their path. “We didn’t announce it in the mission plan because we weren’t sure of the alignment,” the captain said. “You are seeing the paraplanet Pluto, within the orbit of Neptune.”

They did not pass as close as they had to other planets, so it did not appear on the porthole. Still, it was near enough to take turns looking at the orb from the communications tower during their closest approach. It was white beheld with the naked eye, mottled gray with hints of brown when viewed with magnification. Jason and Alek spent their turn talking with Old Yuri.

As Pluto receded, the captain made another announcement. When they gathered, he looked unusually solemn. Jason noted that he stood side by side with Professor Futura. “I have just received approval from Gaia to give a special briefing,” he said. “It should coincide with simultaneous broadcasts on the Homeworld and Mars. Moxon, load the disc.”

Moxon took out a disc with the markings of sensitive material. Jason realized that it was the same one that had been played for the mission briefing. The officer flipped the handling caddy before loading it in the video record player. The first image that came up showed the sigil of the Union of Nations and the stylized rocket of the space agency. Jason instinctively put an arm around Alek at the sight of what appeared next.

At a glance, it looked like a crystal, with four major sides subdivided by corrugations and protruding multitiered buttresses in place of its corners. Then the camera’s focus shifted to show its surroundings. It was the Southlands of Mars, not far from Hellas Basin. The object reared up from a level plain at the foot of the ice caps which dwarfed it. Even on that enormous scale, it was obvious that the object was immense, certainly as tall as the Janus was long, quite possibly even taller than the bygone Empire State tower it was compared to. It was evident that it tapered up to what looked like a cupola, topped by a dome and a tall, narrow spine that looked like an antenna. The focus shifted again, and Professor Futura came into view. He wore an archaic pressure suit with a dome supported by a square frame. He looked visibly younger, but only by five or ten years rather than more than Jason had been alive.

“I am at the foot of the Structure,” the Professor said. “All observations confirm that it is an artificial object intended for habitation. From corrosion and geological evidence, it is at least 1,000 and not more than 2 million years old. Preliminary findings further indicate that it was constructed by and for organisms comparable to humans in all major characteristics. We have entered and partially explored the lowest tiers of the structure through several compromised or unsecured entrances. Our efforts have been hampered by repeated equipment failures associated with electromagnetic anomalies from the structure. In particular, we have been unable to reach or enter an evident control center in the spire. I have determined that any conclusive investigation will require an exterior ascent and likely forced entry. I have prepared to affect such a breach. I will be accompanied by my wife, Irena Futura, who is recording this film. The rest of the party are under orders not to follow or allow others to enter.”

The film showed a small party climb up the exterior of the building with a series of rocket-assisted grapnels. The ascent culminated in the entry of the cupola through an already damaged window. There was an evident skip to an aerial shot of the cupola. There was a flash from the cupola, seemingly no more consequential than a glint of sunlight, until puffs of smoke erupted at the base of the spine. The spine listed and then toppled, momentarily filling half the frame before the camera and presumably the aircraft veered away. The camera zoomed in again, on a figure waving from the damaged window. There was another skip, showing the tower from a distance. It collapsed in smoke and flames, as ice and debris cascaded down to cover it.

Futura spoke up. “My wife and I spent 17 hours inside the spire of the Structure,” he said. “I brought no cameras or recording equipment, only limited writing materials. We spent the first 11 hours examining the lower superstructure, which I ventured to describe as the Globe. In the twelfth hour, I breached a possible control center at the meeting point of the dome and the spire. We found a series of computing stations, several of which were functioning and partially operable. These proved to be primarily for calculation, and thus a source of our most detailed information on the Builders’ numerical characters and mathematical system. After 4 hours of investigation, I attempted to use one of the higher-level stations. This activated a self-destruct mechanism which ultimately collapsed both the Structure and a large section of the polar cap. The device simultaneously sealed the entrances to the control center. Over the course of 47 minutes, we successfully escaped, and were rescued by our expedition’s hovercraft.”

The gathered crew gaped, except Donald, who scowled. “I spent the next 36 hours assisting my wife as she drew her observations of the structure from memory,” Futura concluded. “On my advice, the existence of the Structure was placed under highest classification, known to a few thousand individuals over time. A select few have been given access to our recordings and data, including a number of members of this expedition. A much smaller group have examined our drawings, which have remained in my possession. Three of them are here, Tanya Plotnikov, Mehmet Eskandari and Aleksandra Kapek Freeman.” Jason turned to Alek, who gave him a vaguely embarrassed smile.

“Hold on,” Donald said. “Here’s what I’m hearing. You found the first evidence of alien intelligence in the Solar System, from before regular people figured out gunpowder. So, you went in alone, didn’t take any pictures, and made the whole thing blow up. Then at the end of it, they took your advice and let you keep the only records that mattered.”

Tanya spoke up. “I reviewed the raw feed at the time, when I was consultant for Union intelligence,” she said. “Every decision Colonel Futura made was justified. There were extreme difficulties with equipment failure and unexplained lighting anomalies every time the expedition attempted to photograph the Structure interior. One of the technicians was almost killed trying to collect a sample of material. There was ample evidence that these difficulties were caused by active interference from the Structure itself. It had to be further assumed that a second expedition would be met with even stronger countermeasures, if the structure did not self-destruct. An individual or very small party without electronic instruments was the best chance we had.”

“Okay, so what do you have to show for it?” Donald said. “A few drawings of what you can remember?”

“The full report has over 500 drawings,” Alek said coolly. “Every one that could be checked against independent data was accurate within 0.5%.”

“Sure,” Jason said. “But why keep it secret until now? There’s more, isn’t there?”

“I had to consider several hypotheses,” Futura acknowledged. “All of them implied that the entities who built the Structure were very concerned that no other species or culture would be able to imitate their technology or identify its origin. Perhaps it was for their own protection. Perhaps it was for ours. Perhaps the two are one and the same. But Dr. Capek, excuse me, Dr. Freeman, and Dr. Plotnikov can explain that better.”

Alek stepped forward, smiling. “Thank you, I am proud to report my findings,” she said in her flat voice. “I prepared this report as an appendix to an earlier analysis by Mehmet and Tanya. Of course, their work is already quite comprehensive. I have only added what is useful to comment on.” Behind her, a canvas screen was set up with a microfilm projector. It showed the first in a long series of photographs and drawings, each of the latter as painstaking as a Greek statue or a Dutch still life. They showed almost gothic entryways, spacious corridors and atria, compact cells and storerooms, elegantly simple light fixtures, abstract patterns that seemed to be artwork, and here and there an interactive control surface, from doorknobs to instrument panels. Several drawings showed keyboards with as few as 8 and as many as 24 keys, most of them bearing sigils that looked like a wheel or a star, with varying numbers of arms and more arcane dots, circles and rings at the center. There was even a pair of lavatories, each comprised of a line of self-contained stalls that held a slot toilet in the floor and a showerhead above.

“Now, the central and repeated finding of both Futura’s report and the later analysis is that the Builders of the Structure were very similar to humans, biologically, mentally and even culturally,” she said. They came to a series of drawings of what could only be the dome of the Globe. This proved to be meeting place roughly the shape and nearly the size of Shakespeare’s amphitheater. There were regularly spaced signs with more of the sigils. “Their evident mode of locomotion is that of a bipedal vertebrate, their reproduction bisexual. Their height can be extrapolated as between 1.2 and 2.1 meters. Their geometry, numbering and architecture are based on multiples of 4 and 12, common to terrestrial cultures despite the biological fact that we have ten digits. The use of primary colors in their art further implies a similar visual range.”

She straightened. “In fact, this correspondence is altogether anomalous,” she said. “Consider all the ways an extraterrestrial species might differ from humans. They might be half our size, or half again. They might have six fingers on one hand and three on the other. They might have eight limbs instead of four. They might be color-blind, or able to see spectra beyond human vision, especially if their native star was of a different type than Sol. They might have entirely different senses, like the echolocation of a dolphin or the electromagnetism of a platypus. This requires a reconsideration of the Structure’s origin. That is borne out in one more anomaly… Almost every trace of writing was removed from the Structure.”

With that, Tanya stood up. “What Dr. Capek has mentioned is a central finding of our report, though we do not necessarily endorse all of her conclusions,” she said. An image appeared of what could only be shelves, completely empty. “To begin with, there was extensive evidence that printed records other media had once been present, only to be removed. This was unremarkable. We might do the same, if it held instructions for making gunpowder or the atomic bomb. Yet, there were many cases where completely innocuous inscriptions had been removed or defaced, including the lavatory. This was not explicable. There are dozens of languages and scripts of human origin that have never been translated beyond the most rudimentary level, if at all. The only reason they would have cause for fear is if mere comparison with other scripts would tell us something they did not wish to be known.”

She brought up a series of images of signs from the Globe. “It was only these characters that we were allowed to see, most likely because there were too many to remove, and perhaps because they were too intuitive for definite conclusions. Even so, there are certain similarities with known symbology. The swastika. The mandala. The Yin and Yang.”

“Yeah, and the Mercedes Benz logo,” Donald said, as one of several three-spoked sigils appeared. “So what? Are you saying these are aliens who talked to cavemen, like in the silly old magazines?”

“No,” Alek said with a smile. “I am saying they were humans. From Earth. And they knew we were coming.”

Table of contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!

Part 11: The Space Nazis!!!

Part 12: The inevitable geography lesson!

Part 13: The wedding!!!

Part 14:  The spicy chapter!

Part 15: The bad guy backstory!

Part 16: The Dinner!

Part 17: The alternate history!

Part 18: The weapons exposition!

Part 19: The alternate history Captain America!

Part 20: Zero G repairs!

Part 21: Bad Guy backstory, Part 2!

Featured Creature Special: The one where the werewolves have guns

 

 

Title: The Howling

What Year?: 1981

Classification: Runnerup/ Parody/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

As I write this, I have been taking longer than usual to decide on a film to review. What’s different is that I have actually gone a good stretch without watching a movie at all. That brought my decision down to whatever I finally watched, and as often happens, I already had a rental that I was not looking forward to. So with that glowing endorsement, I’m wading into a movie that I had watched exactly once and still remembered being disappointed by. I present The Howling, the movie that deconstructed the werewolf ahead of An American Werewolf In London, and boy, did they not do it better.

Our story begins with a reporter named Karen who goes out on an obviously hare-brained attempt to catch a serial killer that ends in a last-minute rescue that leaves the killer bullet-riddled in the morgue. After the traumatizing experience, a psychiatrist sends Karen and her husband out to the Colony, a counterculture settlement where people go to reconnect with nature. But all is not well, as the inhabitants mutter of dark secrets and a resident maneater. Meanwhile, the body of the killer has disappeared, leading the reporter’s colleagues to suspect that he might not be as dead as the authorities believe. In fact, the killer and the inhabitants of the Colony are all werewolves, living a conflicted existence under the doctor’s direction. It’s up to the reporter and her work friend to get out alive- but her husband is already one of the lycanthropes!

The Howling was a 1981 horror film directed by Joe Dante (see InnerSpace, Gremlins 2), based on the first of a series of novels by Gary Bradner. It was the first of three werewolf films released in 1981, preceding Wolfen and An American Werewolf In London. No serious allegation emerged that any of the films had copied each other. The film starred Dee Wallace as Karen and Patrick Macnee as the psychiatrist Dr. Waggner, with Robert Picardo (see Dead Heat) as the killer Eddie Quist. Other cast included John Carradine (Shock Waves), Dick Miller (Terminator, Night of the Creeps), and Elisabeth Brooks (Deep Space???) as Marsha. Creature effects were created by Rob Bottin, after Rick Baker (see King Kong 1976) left the project for American Werewolf. Additional stop-motion effects were created by David Allen (see Dungeonmaster, Robot Jox, etc, etc, etc), all of which were cut or replaced except for a shot of a group of werewolves at the end of the film. The film was a commercial success, earning $17.9 million against a $1.5M budget. It received 7 official sequels, none of which appear to have followed Bradner’s additional books. The movie is available for streaming on AMC Plus.

For my experiences, this is a film I watched on VHS in college, probably before American Werewolf. What has remained most interesting is that the two films represent an already undisputed case of what I call a “runnerup”, as well as a much rarer case where two such parallel productions were roughly equal in their impact and stature (compare to AntZ and A Bug’s Life). To me, what has been most intriguing in a sad way is that the two films are in every important respect opposites to each other. One was a highly polished medium-budget film from a “mainstream” director. The other was openly a low-budget genre film by a newcomer who never outgrew his roots. Unfortunately, this is an especially clear-cut case where the establishment unquestionably produced far better results.

Moving forward, the most significant and counterintuitive comparison to be made between this film and American Werewolf is that the latter was a “horror comedy” but not a horror parody. The present film is in itself proof of the difference. It aims to be knowing and subversive in its genre references and inside jokes, the best by far being a lead villain who hands a gun back to the nosy guy reporter. The “problem” is that there is not a lot here that is funny on its own terms. The most effective satirical elements come, tellingly, not from the gags but from the domestic dysfunctionality of the werewolves. They are set up as leftovers from another time (which could have worked far better if we knew something about their aging if any) trying to adapt to modernity. Left to their own devices, they present an unsettlingly mundane picture of a cult: Banal, petty, bickering and often simply bored. It’s an intriguing angle greatly improved by strong acting and dialogue, but on a certain level, it never goes anywhere. In the final confrontation, it’s quite clear all the arguments among the pack are merely a half-hearted delay before the inevitable. The real surprise is that the lone dissenter doesn’t get lunched by his own side.

Meanwhile, my personal beef has always been with the effects, and that only got worse when I looked into the history of the production. At best, the creatures are outdated off the drawing board, adding to an already strong vibe of a 1970s movie that happened to come out in the Eighties. At worst, they are inert and distractingly odd. (And dear Logos, what were they thinking with those ears???) Before the inevitable objections, this was only a year before the same guy made The Thing, and two years after Alien. They could definitely do better. What’s worse is that the more rudimentary makeup effects are far more menacing, especially as seen on Picardo (whom I did not recognize despite noting his presence on many other occasions). His full transformation is the biggest washout, to the point that his intended victim easily deals with him while he is still standing there. A further indictment comes from the tryst between Marsha and the newly turned husband, which for all its awkwardness manages to achieve the stylized surrealism the film clearly intended to give. My true rage moment came when I found unused stop-motion by Allen in a bonus feature. The final insult came as I discovered that what I remembered as the only shot where the wolves looked good was in fact the only remnant of his work on the film.

Now for the “one scene”, I decided it was long past time to feature the late Dick Miller, the greatest cameo artist in history. He appears around the mid-point as proprietor of an occult bookstore. The clip I found starts with him talking to the secondary reporters about the patrons of his store, allegedly including a certain real-life cultist. When the lady reporter asks about grave robbery, he matter-of-factly gives them a book. Of course, the conversation turns to werewolves, and a case of silver bullets whose origin should count as a plot hole yet actually works. In the process, he lays out the werewolves’ strengths and weaknesses. For me, what makes the scene is when the guy reporter comes out and asks if he actually believes anything he has been saying. His reply is better heard than described. Suffice to say, it’s as good a deconstruction of the genre and underlying mythology as anything in the film.

In closing, what I decided was worth coming back to is what makes a parody. Obviously, that has become far more pertinent in a landscape where revisionism, deconstruction and “meta” humor have become a genre in themselves. As I have shown regularly, we were already in the same cycle long, long ago. The one lesson worth learning is that a “good” genre satire has to be something more, and the best explanation of what works is to look at the examples that already succeed.  If you had never seen a Star Trek episode, Galaxy Quest would still be funny. If you cut all the jokes out of Shaun of the Dead, it would still be a good zombie movie. By comparison, The Howling is and always was going to be the “runnerup” to American Werewolf. I can get why people like this one and might even find it more entertaining than its competitor, or I would probably give it a lower rating than I have. It still remains a film that struggles to be decent, let alone “great”. And with that, I can finish for another day.

Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 11!

 It's my last day for a weekend post, and once again all I have is another Space Guys post, this time pretty much odds and ends. And yes, spoiler, I'm recycling the Space Nazis scenario from my Exotroopers (anti) series. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.

As the Janus left the asteroid belt behind, Jason finally proposed to Alek. The crew was gathered in the captain’s cabin in hopes of a glimpse of Jupiter. To that end, Donald set up a telescope in line with the porthole beyond the captain’s cabin. It was not a stable view, thanks to the rotation of the ring, but they could see the giant planet when the wing-like extensions of the Mission Fuselage were not in the way. The captain took the first look through the telescope, as the ring reached the bottom of its rotation, and gave his rumbling laugh of approval. As the others gathered to look through the telescope, Jason knelt and fumbled through his overprepared speech. Alek let him get halfway through before she cut in. “You want to marry me, no?” she said.

“Of course,” Jason answered.

“Why?” she said.

“Be… because I love you,” he said. “I… I want to make you happy.”

“Yes,” she said, shifting to her flat lecture voice. “But why do you want to marry me? What is in it for you?”

“Well, you… you make me happy.”

She made a point of pondering. “Good enough,” she said. “I accept.”

“Speaking of,” Donald chimed in. He abruptly kissed Anastasia. “The captain married us last night!” Alek looked incredulously at Anastasia. She blushed but held her head up, ignoring critical stares from Vasily and Jackie and a bemused gaze from Moxon.

 

In the company of their friends, Jason had learned that his best defense was to show that he was far from uneducated, joining in discussions of everything from astronomy to engineering to languages. Moxon in particular regularly quizzed him on geography, and rarely caught him in an error. Jason, for his part, was most interested in a subject called mathematical linguistics, apparently developed by Tanya and Mehmet, who could be found together often enough that there was speculation if they were involved. For their part, the odd pair listened respectfully when he told them one of the “story” problems from his education, this one set in the lands of Arabia, called the Scroll of Solomon.

“So, there was a Sultan called Saladin,” Jason said by way of introduction. “He was a powerful king and a great warrior, but what he valued most was wisdom. So he collected books from every land and in every language, and he paid hundreds of scribes to translate them in his own tongue. Then one day, someone brought him a scroll that wasn’t like any other. It was very, very old, with words written in gold and beautiful pictures. The scholar who brought it said that it had belonged to King Solomon, and he got it from a holy man who said that it was a gift from an angel. The problem was, nobody could read the letters, or find any script like them. So Saladin had his scribes give every letter a number, based on how often they found it in the scroll. Then they rewrote it as numbers, and what they found was one long, beautiful equation.”

Mehmet had considered for a few moments. “Interesting,” he said. “I’m sure it is based on a real text. A smuggler brought it out of Italy, as I recall, only about a hundred years ago. At any rate, the story was clearly created by someone who understood the basic principles of statistical linguistics. It would not work, of course, but for an illustration, it is sound.”

“So how does it work?” Jason asked. “Do you just treat languages like a code to crack?”

“No,” Mehmet continued smoothly. “Cryptography is about communication with a function that would be obvious if it were unencrypted. What we learn from it is that language and mathematics are not fundamentally different. All information has a mathematical component. By extension, no language can be so different from any other that certain things cannot be learned by statistical analyses. If an archeologist 6,000 years from now had no knowledge of English, they could still figure out that `e’ and `a’ were the most common letters and `an’ and `the’ were among the most common words.”

“What if someone tried to fool you?” Jason continued. “Suppose they just made up a bunch of symbols and chose which one to put together with a spinning wheel. From there, they could put together words and put them on the same wheel, only a few words could be repeated. How would you know there wasn’t something there?”

“It has been tried,” Mehmet said. “In the occult fields, it is fairly common. What we have learned is that the human mind is not equipped to understand randomness. We can look at momentary patterns of water vapor or the positions of stars thousands of kilometers away, and think we see shapes and order. But thousands of us could walk past a series of pits in the rock for decades before one figured out that they once held the support beams of a temple. In practice, we are even worse at producing the random than we are at recognizing it. Without a fully automated system, our conscious and unconscious minds will always contaminate the results?”

Jason glanced in Jax’s direction. “Suppose we found something out there?” he said. “Something that wasn’t built by any human?”

For just a moment, Mehmet and Tanya gave each other a glance that made him wonder if they knew something he didn’t. But the former merely shrugged. “We will only know if and when we see it,” he said. “Even so, I would wager that we could figure out their math.”

 

Jason also spent time learning about their destination. Almost all of it came from a single image, taken from a distance of over 4 billion kilometers. The established authority was Professor Futura. When he first presented the image, Jason immediately pointed to a bright white spot on the blue-gray orb. “What’s that?” he said.

Futura had smiled. “That is the main reason we are out here,” he said. “It has been called simply the Anomaly, which is really a routine practice. What we know is that it originated as a meteor impact crater. In those terms, it is large but not exceptional, perhaps half the size of Hellas Basin, though much larger in proportion to the planetary body. What is unusual is that the interior is a completely different climate system from the paramoon as a whole. It is much warmer, enough that the initial survey classified it as volcanic in origin. It also has a greatly different atmosphere. Spectroscopic data show gaseous nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, in quantities comparable to Gaian atmosphere. Most remarkably, there is a high volume of water, the source of the cloud layer. The data was inconclusive whether this is actual water vapor or suspended ice crystals, but either implies an Earth-like precipitation cycle. Unfortunately, the same cloud layer prevented direct observation of the crater interior. Our main objective is to survey the anomaly.”

“What about the paramoon?” Alek said. “The reports say it has nearly the same gravity as Gaia. How is that possible? How do you really know?”

Futura smiled again, more subtly. “We were able to infer certain things either from the paramoon or from its evident effects on the orbits of other moons,” he said. “Its gravity implies that it contains a core of very dense material. It is believed that it was captured by the gaseous planet in the relatively recent past. The real question has been how recent. Many moons and planetoids have been discovered within the Atomic Era, but every paramoon of comparable size was discovered before the Great Wars. Some have gone so far as to speculate that its capture only happened since space exploration began.”

“Then can it really be colonized?” Jason said.

“We don’t know,” Futura said. For a moment, Jason wondered if he knew something he would not tell. He did not notice that Alek had met the professor’s gaze and shaken her head.

 

Regular communications continued to and from Gaia and Mars. Every week, each crew member was allowed to record and receive at least one personal communication, and given the choice whether to listen in private. Jason and Alek were with Jax when he played a message from his wife. The morena kept a level tone and a calm expression as she explained that she was expecting their first child, and that it would be a son. Jason turned to his friend sternly as the message ended. “We knew,” Jax said. “It wouldn’t have mattered. You know how it is. Most of the time, that doesn’t work out anyway. This was once in a lifetime.”

Alek true closer, looking very sad. “I have seen figures,” she said. “The miscarriage rate is very high. Do you think… he will make it?”

Jason shrugged. “Usually, if something goes wrong, it would have by now,” he said. “It’s the same on the Motherworld, really.”

“What about Dr. Cahill?” Jason said with a scowl.

“She knows,” Jax said. “It’s not like that, anyway. We talk, we take care of each other. Jill knew it might happen. I told her she could do whatever she has to.”

“Then what does Dr. Cahill say?” Alek said.

“She says she’s glad I have someone back home,” Jax said. “She’s told me about her husband, and her son. I know all about that. They had problems before she came out here, not the way people think. It doesn’t matter.” The conversation trailed off then. But the next time Dr. Cahill came to the cabin, she left quickly, with tears in her eyes.

 

Then a time came when Jason lay with Alek, her face-down beneath him, half-listening to a documentary. “For seven years, the War had raged in the lands between the great oceans,” a narrator intoned. “But the final battle would come more than a year after its end, in the one place the War had never touched. It is the shores of Pantagonia, and young Professor Futura is leading the charge against the last stronghold of the leader of the Final Reich, Heinz Himmelman.”

Jason looked up in interest. Of course, he had seen the footage before: The desolate cliffs; the scrambling commandos; the lumbering Landkreuzer; the mass of rockets and fuel tanks it supported; and atop it all, a spade-shaped craft not unlike the Pegasus payloader. The narrator explained how Heinz Himmelmann had recruited or captured the greatest minds of the world for his special projects, starting with an electronic brain that proved that the Reich could not win the war. How he had diverted thousands of prisoners and laborers, billions of marks and countless tons of material for the greatest project of all. “His workers labored night and day, some in fear, some in devotion, some in the hope of some greater good,” the narrator continued. Jason felt Alek stir beneath him. “The sum of their efforts was the Tottenkarte, the first spacecraft capable of reaching into interplanetary space.”

The screen showed the craft rising into the sky. “It launched into the heavens, carrying Himmelmann and the greatest minds of the Reich. No other craft could pursue it, nor rise high enough to intercept it. The armies of the world could only watch as it rose to the edge of space… and vanished.”

“My grandfather worked on that ship,” Alek said. “Great grandfather, actually. We all just call him Grandfather. A lot of people think he was on it. But probably no. They only ever said that because nobody never found him. I spent a long time trying to find out what I could. I talked to people who would not have talked if they knew. They all said they did not know. I could tell it was true.”

“What do you think happened?” Jason asked.

Alek shook her head at that. “It is not like people think,” she said. “They never really had a chance. There was too much they did not know, too much they could not do. The only question should have been where they came down. But they never did. We should have seen it, we would have. People were watching, everywhere. Nobody saw nothing, never.”

She settled on her back, staring upward. “I feel like I know him, better than my own mother and father,” she said. “I understand him. I understand what it was like to be him. I am the only one left like him. You know, with the supergenius. There were a few others in our family who had it. But it skips around, like red hair. An uncle here, a cousin there, maybe one of my aunts. My mother and her father, not even a little. That is why I am here at all. The rest… all gone.”

She turned her head to meet Jason’s gaze. “I might be the last one, even if we have children,” she said. “I can’t, you know, until we get back. To come at all, I had to let a doctor do something, something only another doctor could undo. We all did. If we get back, you will still be a farmboy. I know, you are very smart; you will still never be like me. But it is okay. I like you the way you are. If it has to be a farmboy’s son with you or a girl like me with someone else, I would call it a fair trade.”

 

She put her arms around him. “There are things you do not know,” she said. “Do not worry, you will. Some, you may not like. I still like you.” She rolled down a partition. “Now show me again, what it is the farm girls do…”

Table of Contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!