Mat Johnson - Pym

“Control your man,” Pym said to me, his spittle nearly covering every inch of the dozen feet between him and our door. I could see that no one wanted this conflict to end quicker than the man that stood before me, although for entirely different reasons than mine. Somewhere back in Tekeli-li there was a cool glass of fermented khrud waiting for him, its contents still and forlorn, and Pym missed it no less than any man had yearned for his true love. “We are here to discuss this civilly and calmly. Let us end the distractions and attend to the matter at hand.”

“Which is what, cracker?” Jeffree snapped back. It was easy to be brave on the other side of that door, particularly standing as he did behind me, his momentary human shield. Our attempts at seizing the argument were pointless, though, because I noticed for the first time that Pym was not even looking at me or Jeffree. Instead, he was addressing the lady of the house, whom Pym perceived had the most authority of those present. Mrs. Karvel for her part responded to the Nantucketer’s attention by moving farther away from the door, leaving me up front as her clear surrogate.

“I speak of the ceasing of your great fire, and the fans to blow their heat into the corridors of Heaven,” Pym hissed back at us. It was clear he assumed that we were well aware of his grievance. That this was not simply a part of our knowledge but the key part of our intent that he was exposing.

“The exhaust fan,” Nathaniel interjected. “You’ve got to turn off that exhaust fan; it’s blowing hot air right into the village. That’s what’s melting everything. Just take care of that and everybody will be fine. Nobody gets hurt. Everything can go back to normal.” His voice cracked, and the last word was perhaps an unconscious notification that there simply was no more normal to retreat to.

“The heat of your device is destroying the great city, vanishing paradise itself. We know not how you do it, nor do we care, but the assault must cease and for the solid foundation of our world to continue,” Pym explained.

“That’s all they want, Chris. Just go take care of this … whatever you have to shut off, and let’s end this thing.”

“And of course we will also need the return of the human chattel which owes its labor to the citizens of Tekeli-li, such as you yourself are surely aware. But nothing more, I assure you, honorable lady,” Pym said past me again to Mrs. Karvel. “This theft cannot be tolerated.” This last statement was directed at all of us, even Nathaniel standing beside him. When Mrs. Karvel, who I wasn’t sure even understood that she was being addressed directly, made no response to him, the aged Caucasoid followed up his statement. “The latter might be negotiated if the former is abided by.”

“Then you would be willing to talk this out, then?” Mrs. Karvel unexpectedly stepped forward, burning the side of my hand with her cigarette as she pushed past. “To handle this thing like decent, civil Americans?” Mrs. Karvel asked him. I don’t know what she made of the odd man in his cultlike white robes making demands of us, out here in the epicenter of nowhere, but Mrs. Karvel was clearly a smart woman, and a smart woman made the best of whatever situation she was presented with. “Y’all will be my guests then, mine and my husband’s. We’ll do this nice and friendly like. You tell your people, or whatever them things are out there, you tell them we’ll serve it up right here, bring tables right out onto the roof. Good home cooking and all that. Talk things out real civil. Invite as many as you want. How you like that?”

Pym looked over his shoulder, back behind him at the creatures he represented. How did he like that? There was a nervousness to Pym, a nervousness that he bore every moment I encountered him. His love of the Gods was based on his fear of them, and it was clear which of the two emotions was most overwhelming.

“What kind of food might you have?” Pym asked, preparing as he was to make the offer as attractive as possible to his masters.

“A feast?” I asked aloud as we closed the door behind us. It seemed a brilliant idea to me, truly inspired. The breaking of bread, the universal action of communal friendship. What more agreeable act could we offer? I was surprised at the rationalism displayed by Mrs. Karvel.

“A supper,” Mrs. Karvel said in response to me, lighting another cigarette and nodding. “We’ll give them a good, strong supper, and that will take care of all our troubles.” She went to the back of her little storage room and started unpacking the boxes, lifting them out of their furniture shapes and lining them up on the floor before us.

“Well, I don’t know if that’ll take care of all our troubles, but at least that’ll begin to—” I stopped when I realized what she was doing. Inside the boxes labeled with the images of rats were more little boxes with more little rats imprinted upon them. And as I watched Mrs. Karvel, I saw that inside those little boxes were little poisonous blue pellets, the kind you would feed to rats if you wanted them to cease being nuisances and start being dead.

“All our troubles. You said they have a village under the ice, right? A place big enough for a homestead, if we need to?” Mrs. Karvel asked, holding a box of poison and shaking it like a maraca before us. “Now help me look. I know there’s some packets of Kool-Aid back here.”

“You can’t just poison them, dog,” Garth kept complaining, simultaneously dipping his fingers into untainted cooking bowls to scoop up leftover food. Garth addressed me, but he was loud, offering criticism for the entire room. And, apart from my cousin, the room ignored him. Garth was different from us: we might have shared an ancient slave past, but we did not share our immediate one. Garth hadn’t been caught with us below. Garth hadn’t had his own brief taste of bondage to give him something invisible and bitter to suck on. No, Garth was an outsider in this regard, and we ignored him.

“I mean, what you guys are talking about is like some germ warfare shit, you know what I’m saying? It’s like some anti — Geneva conventions shit. It ain’t right.”

“Right. It ain’t tactical.” Captain Jaynes took over the discussion. “See, when you fight against your oppressors, it’s got to be tactical. There’s no point in poisoning them, there’s too many for that. And if you do that, you can’t never win the argument. You can’t never see that look on their faces when they know that you were right and they are so wrong.” We ignored Captain Jaynes for entirely different reasons. For one, he was clearly in shock, shivering there in his blanket despite the heat, and he was now so pale from his discomfort that he had gone from brown to gray. But really, the captain never sounded much more sane than this, so there was no confusing his current physical condition with his mental one. No, the real reason we didn’t listen to my cousin would’ve hurt the man if it’d been said aloud: even though I was the only one who had witnessed the actual intimacy between him and his personal captor, the truth was suspected by all. So we ignored him and kept quietly at our diabolic work. Garth filled the new silence.

“But dogs, you can’t just kill people. It’s not right, it’s not how you’re supposed to do things. I mean, these creatures freaked me out just as much as they freak you out, but there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong and poisoning a bunch of folks is just wrong. That’s like torturing them to death.”

“Young man,” Thomas Karvel began, and his voice alone was enough to quiet his biggest fan. The painter was still hoarse since rising back to consciousness, and he held the site of the painful blow on his head as if he was keeping his brain from falling out of a hole there. “Young man,” he repeated, emphasizing the words in such a way that through his southern accent “man” sounded belittling. “This isn’t some uniformed army, this is something totally different. There are no rules here.”