Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

(America’s oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, was the first to fully join the Hearst movement. The Fabians, Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Wells, Stapledon, Haldane, the many brilliant Huxleys, publisher Alfred Harmsworth, Edward Linley Sambourne and his fellow cartoonists at Punch — They soon had complete control of the reins of governmental power.)

Reprint books of newspaper strips began to appear in America. And then the original pictonovel was born. That’s when the tipping point was reached—

And my trolley had reached its destination as well, as the conductor announced over clanging bell.

I left my GH magazine behind on the seat and climbed down the stairs to join the costumed crowds surging into the Frank Reade Playing Fields.

Past fragrant food carts and knickknack booths and bookstalls, costume-repair tents and armouries, taverns and daycare corrals, I strolled, heading toward the fields assigned to the Children of Cimmeria. (My Mom’s business had a hand in running all this, of course.)

I decided to take a shortcut down a dusty path that angled across the vast acreage, and there I encountered a startling sight.

In a tiny lot mostly concealed by a tall untrimmed privet hedge, a few people were playing what I think was a game once called “football.” They wore shabby looking leather helmets and padding, obviously homemade. The object of their contention was a lopsided, ill-stuffed pigskin.

I chanced upon the game when it was temporarily suspended, and I spoke to one of the players.

“Are you guys seriously into this antique ‘sports’ stuff?”

The player made a typically Geekish noise indicative of derisive exasperation. “Of course not! This is a simulation of sports, not real sports! Frank Merriwell stuff. We’re just trying to recreate a vanished era like everyone else. But it gets harder and harder to find re-enactors. This sports stuff never really made much sense to begin with, even when it wasn’t dead media.”

I left the football players behind and soon arrived at the dusty turf allotted to the Conan recreators. I registered with the gamemasters and quickly inserted myself into the action.

For the next several hours I ministered in my priestly role to the dead and dying on the mock battlefield, liberally bestowing prayers and invocations I had learned off the a-net on their hauberked torsos and helmeted heads. For a big he-man guy, Conan’s creator Thomas Wolfe sure had a way with the frilly, jaw-wrenching poetry.

It was hot and sweaty work, and I was grateful at last to hit the nearby grog tent for some shade and mead. While listening to a gal in a chainmail bikini sing some geeksongs about the joint adventures of Birdalone and the Grey Mouser, I spotted the Pigeons from Hell crowd, recognizable from their a-net profiles. One of them was Ted Harmon, an anesthesiologist compatriot of Hornbine. As he wasn’t engaged in conversation, I went up to him.

“Hey, Ted—I mean, Volacante. Neat ruckus. I saw you get in some wicked sword thrusts.”

Ted looked at me for a moment as if to say, Do I know you? But his weariness and the mead and my compliments and the congenial setting disarmed any suspicions.

“Thanks. Been practicing a lot.”

“I just wish old Balkpraetore could’ve been here to see your display of talent. Shame about his death.”

We clinked flagons in honour of Dr. Hornbine. Then Ted said, “Yeah, a damn shame. You know, when I first heard about him kicking it, I thought—”

“Thought what?”

“Oh, nothing…”

“C’mon, now you got me curious.”

Ted leaned in closer. “Well, he was just so nervous the last time I saw him. Something was obviously bothering him. It was almost as if he expected something bad to happen to him.”

“Oh, he was always like that.”

“Are you serious? You never saw Balkpraetore without a grin and a joke. It was only after he had that visit at the hospital—”

“Visit?”

“Yeah, from a drug rep. Guy named, uh, Greenstock. From MetamorPharma. I remember the rep’s name because it reminded me of the Green Man. The Green Man’s always been a minor passion of mine. You see, it all started with a Henry Treece novel when I was twelve—”

I cut Ted off in a practiced Geek manner. I couldn’t indulge him in a passion-rant now. “Queue it up. Back to Greenstock. What do you think he proposed? Something shady?”

“I don’t know, but it freaked Hornbine out.”

“Some kind of bribery scheme maybe, to get a certain line of drugs into the hospital?”

“Maybe. But it seemed more threatening than that, almost like Greenstock could compel the Doc to do something bad against his will.”

I wanted to press for more information, but Ted began to turn a bit suspicious.

“Why’re we chewing up this old gossip? Tell me more about the slick way I took down that bastard Numendonia….”

I always tried to honour an individual’s passions as much as the next geek, but sometimes it’s hard work pretending to be interested. Especially when I was suddenly aching to tell PJ what I had learned.

Our waitress wore a transparent plastic carapace moulded to her naked breasts and torso, black lurex panties, tights and musketeer boots. Her hair was pouffed up and her makeup could’ve sustained a platoon of Calder gynoids. She carried an outrageously baroque toy blaster holstered at her hip. I didn’t know where to put my eyes.

I had decided to take Polly Jean Hornbine out for supper, rather than relay my news in my office. I chose the nearest franchise of La Semaine de Suzette , because it was a fairly classy low-budget place, and I was in the mood for French food.

The restaurant chain was named after one of the French zines that had gotten behind Hearst and his program shortly after the Brits came onboard. The French bande dessinée artists (and their Belgian stripverhalen peers) had joined the ranks of the utopian Funnypaper Boys with awesome enthusiasm and international solidarity. And in Germany, artists like Rodolphe Töpffer and Lyonel Feininger, and zines like Simplicissimus, Humoristische Blätter and Ulk weren’t far behind. And when the Japanese invented manga—

But like all geeks, I digress.

I knew that the waitresses at La Semaine de Suzette dressed like characters from their namesake zine. But during all my previous visits, their outfits had mimicked those of Bécassine and Bleuette, modest schoolgirls.

What I didn’t realize was that La Semaine de Suzette had also published Barbarella , starting in 1962, and that the waitress uniforms went in and out of rotation.

No matter how much you knew, it was never everything.

So now Polly Jean and I had to place our orders with a half-naked interstellar libertine.

It was enough to make Emma Frost blush.

Somehow we stammered out our choices. After Barbarella had sashayed away, I attempted to recover my aplomb and relate the revelations I had picked up from Ted Harmon.

PJ absorbed the information with dispassionate intensity, and once again I was taken with her quick intelligence. Not to mention her adorable face. When I finished, she said, “So a visit to this fellow Greenstock is next, I take it?”

I began sawing into my Chicken Kiev, which was a little tough. The chain keeps prices down by using vat-grown chicken, which is generally tender and tasty, but this meat must’ve been made on a Monday.

“That’s right. If we’re lucky, the trail will end there.”

She shook her head. “I can’t see it. If this were just a simple case of Dad refusing a bribe, there’d be no call for murder.”

“If it was murder—”

PJ’s temper flared again. “It was! And that could only mean a big deal, bigger than Greenstock and his company. You’ve got to find out who’s behind them!”