Mat Johnson - Pym

“Dog, I ain’t doing the Karvels like that. Why don’t you just shut your pale ass up and keep an eye out for those snow monkeys? Okay?”

Garth aimed a look of annoyance over his shoulder at me while he pushed the bar on the exit door. For this reason, he didn’t see how prescient his advice had been. Looking beyond Garth out the door, I saw not the expanse of the tunnel but the expanse of a robe draped off of Tekelian shoulders. In that moment, my doom seemed immediate. In horror I looked, because what massive shoulders these were. Though it had been only a few loose weeks since my last close encounter with the breed, I’d already forgotten the improbable size of them. In my mind, I had pushed out their horror. This was the back of a creature that could kill us simply by falling. This was a monster capable of crushing our bones and the meat they held with such speed that we would feel it before we saw it coming. And one was guarding the exit door, ready to perform such an operation. It was only the roar of the engines that distracted the homunculus from immediately spinning around.

Close the door! I mouthed in the most deliberate and precise manner I could, staring straight into Garth’s brown eyes as he faced me, oblivious to our fate.

“Close the …? Man, when are you going to give up? There ain’t no Tsalal, get it? And if you don’t stop with that, I’m going to leave you and your bag of bones out on the—” was as far as he got before that wall of shroud that stood behind him started spinning around. This time it was my opportunity to save Garth from unseen danger, and I jumped to close the metal door. Unable to get past him in time, I was left with only the option of pushing back the big man himself, letting Garth’s startled girth fall into the door to close it. Even still, it wasn’t soon enough. The creature managed to fling his arm into the space between door and jamb, and the pale limb now kept the two from meeting. It wasn’t until Garth saw those gray fingers struggling to reach him that he stopped swinging on me and joined my efforts to reseal the entrance. The only things that kept the monster from knocking it open and flinging both of our bodies with it were a bit of leverage and surprise. For our part, we seemed to be trying the impossible, to slam the door shut and amputate the creature’s appendage at the elbow in doing so; neither one of us was trying to push the arm back out.

“Get the gun off me and shoot it!” Garth motioned with his eyes to his shoulder. There was no way Garth could lift his arms so the strap could be removed, so it was up to me to unhook the rifle with my shaking hands as it bounced around before me.

“Just break the damn strap. Yank it, dog!” was Garth’s advice, but this didn’t keep him from cursing at me when my first desperate tugs did little more than yank his neck. But the clip gave out before Garth’s strength did, and I was able to get his Winchester, cock the bullet into the chamber. The protruding, pale hand, almost as if it knew that it was to be my target, flailed wildly as the beast it was attached to howled in pain at another of Garth’s full-body thrusts. I couldn’t get a good shot with it moving like that, especially since I was too scared to step much closer.

“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Garth said. And I did. And missed. Only for Garth to yell, “Aim it this time,” as if that had not occurred to me. Garth leaned in with all his might and fat behind him, trapping the arm completely if only momentarily. Taking my time, breathing out and preparing to pull the trigger with my inhalation, I focused, staring over my scope at the thing. It was the perfect shot, the hand stretched out all of its fingers in a moment of pain, forming a clear target. So clear was my sight that, for the first time, I noticed those well-chewed nails on the ends of fingers that could only be considered pudgy in relation to the average of his race.

“Augustus!” I yelled, and after a confused look by Garth, I repeated my call, louder, loud enough to be heard over the twenty-foot-tall fan and all the machinery behind it.

“Chris!” came back to me. Not in the voice of my runt of a Tekelian. No, this voice was human. This voice was female. The woman I loved. And her voice brought a chorus of others behind it.

Hearing the responses, Garth eased up on the door, and the arm revealed itself to be that of my brief roommate and supposed captor. Augustus stood there, nursing his wrist, smiling at me.

“Friends,” he managed, and I thought he was talking about us till he stepped to the side and I saw Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter, Angela Latham and my cousin Captain Booker Jaynes standing behind him. Right on CP Time, they had joined me.

SPEAK no ill of the successful black male sellout, for he has achieved the goal of the community that has produced him: he has “made it,” used his skills to attain the status that would be denied him, earned entry at the door of the big house of prosperity. His only flaw is that he agreed to leave that community, its hopes, customs, aspirations, on the porch behind him. It is a matter of expedience as much as morality. I say this to forestall any judgment on Nathaniel Latham, who given the state of the world, just might have been the last sellout in history. And it was not completely fair to say that, in the end, Nathaniel Latham sold out his community for the Tekelians, for what he did, he did not only for himself but also for his wife. Unfortunately for Nathaniel, this was not how his wife viewed his hiring out of himself as an interpreter to the Tekelian army. Unfortunate for Nathaniel, but very good for me.

“You know, historically, many of our people have joined up in the armies of our oppressors as a means of solidifying our place in society,” I offered, refilling Angela’s tea as the group of us sat on the porch of our three-fifths of a home in Karvel’s paradise. I was comfort, solace, all things good and understanding. I could be. Nathaniel had proven unworthy and I the opposite. I could take my time now, and needed to. All of them, not just Angela, looked to be in mild shock in the plush, manicured surroundings after spending so long in the monotonous white hell that was Tekeli-li. Poor Augustus was nearly delirious now that he was removed from his natural habitat. And it was clearly not just a psychologically traumatic reaction the creature was experiencing. The heat of the room, while a perfect sventy-two degrees and unnoticeable to me, seemed to have the effect of wilting him. Before he could faint, we relocated him to the walk-in freezer, a place Augustus was happy to go when he saw the culinary treasures there. The only one who looked worse than the savage was my cousin Captain Booker Jaynes, who’d grown older in the last weeks at a rate accelerated beyond the limits of space and time. I couldn’t tell if this aging had occurred back at his frozen love nest in the weeks since my absence, or simply by walking in the imposing threshold of Thomas Karvel’s sanctuary. My grizzled cousin stared up at the colossal painted ceiling nearly the entire time, muttering what I assumed was the first prayer to make it past his full lips in years.

“No. No, my son-of-a-bitch husband has really gone and done it. He joined up. He’s trying to be one of them, trying to get in good. I know it. I’ve seen him act that way with potential corporate clients, that same groveling act. It’s disgusting. He’s limping around the tunnels wearing one of their robes now, tripping over the damn thing because it’s too long. He won’t even look at me. And if he was getting any extra food, I wasn’t seeing it.” Angela sighed, rubbed her skin, which must have itched after being numb with cold for so long. “I thought you were as good as dead, and then come to find out you guys have been living high on the hog this whole time? Unbelievable. I should have left with you when you asked me.”