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  THE MAGAZINE OF

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION

  December * 58th Year of Publication

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  NOVELETS

  BYE THE RULES by Matthew Hughes

  THE CHRISTMAS WITCH by M. Rickert

  DAMASCUS by Daryl Gregory

  SHORT STORIES

  DAZZLE THE PUNDIT by Scott Bradfield

  PILLS FOREVER by Robert Reed

  JOHN USKGLASS AND THE CUMBRIAN CHARCOAL BURNER by Susanna Clarke

  DEPARTMENTS

  BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint

  BOOKS by James Sallis

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  FILMS: BEAUTIFUL SLACKER, WAKE UNTO ME by Kathi Maio

  CURIOSITIES by David Langford

  COVER BY LAURIE HARDEN FOR “THE CHRISTMAS WITCH”

  GORDON VAN GELDER, Publisher/Editor

  BARBARA J. NORTON, Assistant Publisher

  ROBIN O'CONNOR, Assistant Editor

  KEITH KAHLA, Assistant Publisher

  HARLAN ELLISON, Film Editor

  JOHN J. ADAMS, Assistant Editor

  CAROL PINCHEFSKY, Contests Editor

  JOHN M. CAPPELLO, Newsstand Circulation

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 111, No. 6, Whole No. 656, December 2006. Published monthly except for a combined October/November issue by Spilogale, Inc. at $3.99 per copy. Annual subscription $44.89; $54.89 outside of the U.S. Postmaster: send form 3579 to Fantasy & Science Fiction, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Publication office, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Periodical postage paid at Hoboken, NJ 07030, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 2006 by Spilogale, Inc. All rights reserved.

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  * * * *

  CONTENTS

  Bye the Rules by Matthew Hughes

  Books To Look For by Charles de Lint

  Books by James Sallis

  The Christmas Witch by M. Rickert

  Dazzle the Pundit by Scott Bradfield

  Coming Attractions

  Damascus by Daryl Gregory

  FILMS: BEAUTIFUL SLACKER, WAKE UNTO ME by Kathi Maio

  Pills Forever by Robert Reed

  John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner by Susanna Clarke

  FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION MARKET PLACE

  Curiosities: The Cruise of the Talking Fish, by W. E. Bowman (1957)

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  Bye the Rules by Matthew Hughes

  Matthew Hughes first introduced us to the noonaut Guth Bandar in “A Little Learning” in our June 2004 issue. (You can find the story online at www.archonate.com.) Since then we've followed Guth's adventures as they have taken him through some strange sections of the collective unconscious and gotten him kicked out of the Institute. Now we find him working in his uncle's housewares emporium when trouble comes seeking him again....

  Mr. Hughes was born in Liverpool just a few years after those lads McCartney and Lennon, but unlike them, he emigrated to Canada at the age of five. His novels are all set in the Penultimate Age of Old Earth, one eon before the age of Jack Vance's Dying Earth. The growing legions of fans of Mr. Hughes's work will be pleased to know that a new novel featuring Henghis Hapthorn, Majestrum, is due out by the time this issue hits the newsstands.

  Guth Bandar spent the morning attending to occasional customers in his Uncle Fley's housewares vendory and, between those encounters, constructing a decorative display of insipitators. The devices had lately become hugely popular among the inhabitants of Boderel, a self-contained district of the ancient city of Olkney on whose main thoroughfare stood Bandar's Mercantile Emporium and to which Guth Bandar had returned after being dismissed from his post as an adjunct scholar at the Institute for Historical Inquiry.

  At first, he had stacked the insipitators in a pyramid, but soon realized that the arrangement was a deterrent to their purchase. Shoppers must take only the topmost item, or risk an avalanche of the squat, rotund appliances. And since Bandar had needed to mount a folding step to position the pyramid's upper strata, the customer who could reach for the apex insipitator would have to be freakishly tall. After two purchasers had required him to fetch and unfold the step so he could hand them down the highest item, he realized his error and tore down the stack. He rearranged the devices on a series of terraced shelves, allowing persons of varying heights to reach the insipitator that was closest to hand.

  Bandar sighed heavily as he labored. He found the work tedious and dull, far less interesting than had been his explorations of the nosphere, the grand collective unconscious of humanity, whose study was the purpose of the venerable Institute. But that phase of his life now lay behind a door that had slammed shut, to remain forever sealed against him.

  His longstanding academic rival, the detestable Didrick Gabbris, had roused the Institute's Grand Colloquium. Faculty, students, and alumni had unanimously rejected Bandar's heretical contention that the Commons, as the collective unconscious was known to scholars, had paradoxically achieved consciousness of itself—and not only self-awareness, but a will to act.

  Worse than heretical, the scholars found the idea to be novel. And being offered to a conclave of academics on the ancient planet Old Earth, where no new idea had emerged in scores of millennia, it was received with shock, outrage, and derision. Gabbris had skillfully orchestrated the different streams of opprobrium, playing the Grand Colloquium as a conductor leads an orchestra, achieving at the end a crescendo of repudiation that sped a thoroughly disgraced Guth Bandar back to Boderel.

  A plurality of the Boderel district's inhabitants were adherents of the Concord of Astringency, a philosophical system that prized rigorous sobriety and self-denial. For the past several years there had been a gradual loosening of the Concord's strictures, accompanied even by the use of sweeteners in the weekly ceremonial of the gruel, but now a new First Locutor had wrested the leadership from the backsliders and launched a wave of reform. Astringents were once again wearing uncomfortable fabrics and eating only foods whose flavor had been removed by insipitators. As he stacked and sold the devices, Bandar thought to see a convergence between his situation and that of his customers: he found his new life both tasteless and a source of chafing.

  He was mulling this thought when the who's-there at the emporium's front door chirped the first words of its customary greeting to an incoming customer, then abruptly changed its tone and choice of words; its percepts had recognized that the tall, thin man coming through the portal was Fley Bandar, the proprietor.

  Guth Bandar left the insipitator display and went to greet his relative, putting on as cheerful a face as he could manage. After all, his troubles were no fault of his uncle's and the man had been generous to take him in and give him a livelihood. “Ho, uncle,” he said, “the insipitators are moving well. You may need to order fresh stock."

  Ordinarily, such news should have gladdened Fley Bandar's being, since he was a commerciant to his core and lived to sell useful products at a decent mark-up
. But now Bandar saw that the older man's face remained long, his brows pulled into a troubled vee and his lips downdrawn at the corners.

  "What is the matter?” Bandar said.

  He received only a sigh for an answer. Fley took his customary seat on a stool behind the device that recorded transactions, bowed his grayed head and clasped his hands across his midriff. After a moment, he looked up at his nephew and said, “There is a problem."

  Bandar instantly felt an urge to assist his uncle in meeting the challenge. He had noticed that whenever the older man faced a challenge, be it so minor as a need to rearrange the merchandise in the front display area, Bandar experienced a surge of motivation and felt good about himself when he was able to make a contribution.

  "What is the problem?” he said. “How may I assist you?"

  Fley spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “There has been a change,” he said.

  "A change?” Bandar's face arranged itself into an icon of bepuzzlement. “What change? There is never a change."

  He spoke from the authority of universal knowledge. In Olkney, nothing ever changed. Eons before, history had come to a complete and final end. Everything that could be tried had been tried, all possible forms had been established, filled with content, then emptied and refilled countless times. There was not, could not be, anything new under the fading orange light of the senescent sun. “What can have changed?"

  "Tshimshim Barr-Chevry has sold up and moved offworld. A new man has taken over his enterprise. He has announced a program of direct competition with us. It was the talk of the guild meeting this morning."

  Bandar blinked. “What does it mean, direct competition? Are we to run races, do puzzles in our heads?"

  His uncle sighed. “I asked similar questions and was told this: the new incumbent will sell the same goods as we, but at lower prices. Also, he will offer inducements. For example, persons who purchase the new man's insipitators will receive a corrugated pillow, free of charge."

  "Madness,” Bandar said. “Barr-Chevry's does not sell insipitators. They sell immovables and interactive decor. Thus has it always been, through all the generations of Barr-Chevrys."

  "Not anymore,” said Fley. “Apparently, the latest iteration of the Barr-Chevry line had long harbored a secret desire to roam the open savannahs of distant worlds, places where moons pass through the skies and strange scents waft on the breezes."

  Bandar made a fricative noise of dismissal. “We all have our fantasies. I dreamed of being a nonaut; much good it did me."

  "Tshimshim Barr-Chevry has converted his fantasy into a ticket on a spaceliner that lifted off before dawn. By now he has passed through the first whimsy and will shortly be halfway down The Spray."

  Fley let out a deep breath, rose and walked a few paces, then turned and retraced his steps, his thin legs bending at the knee and his elongated feet slapping the well-worn floor. His head was bowed and his brows knit.

  "Who is this new man?” Bandar said. “Perhaps he is unaware of how things are done. We can arrange for his erroneous views to be corrected."

  "That is the strangest part,” said Fley, pausing in his perambulations and turning to his nephew. “He is only a placeholder, employed by the true purchaser of the enterprise, who sits behind a shield of anonymity."

  "You're saying the owner does not operate the business? I've never heard the like."

  Fley sighed again and resumed his pacing. “It is decidedly peculiar,” he said. “Yet, there it is. The issue before us is: how to respond?"

  Bandar felt another flash of incentive. “You must fight,” he said. “And I must stand with you."

  Fley rang a finger down his lengthy nose while his eyebrows performed a shrug. “I suppose we must,” he said. “It's good of you to take my side, Guth."

  "It's what I'm here for,” said Guth Bandar and was surprised to find how deeply rang those simple words in his being. “Now, what we need is a plan."

  * * * *

  "I wish to inquire as to the proprietorship of a business,” Bandar told the integrator at the Archonate Bureau of Cognizance.

  "Why do you want to know?"

  "How is my motive relevant?"

  "Are you saying it is not?” said the bland voice. Bandar was alone in the small booth yet the words seemed to be spoken in the air just behind his left ear. “You seek information in which you have no interest? This seems a feckless pursuit. Are you normally governed by your every passing whim?"

  Bandar had heard about the Archonate's integrators. Some had been in continuous service for durations more closely measured by geological periods than by human lifetimes, even the lengthy spans of Old Earth's inhabitants in this, the planet's penultimate age. The devices developed quirks and odd enthusiasms, and some of them appeared to take a perverse delight in putting difficulties in the way of the citizens they purported to serve.

  "My motive is concern for the wellbeing of a close relative,” Bandar said.

  "How so?"

  Reluctantly, Bandar explained the circumstances, knowing that each detail might send the integrator off on a wild tangent, requiring perhaps an entire afternoon to work it back to the point of his inquiry. Fortunately, however, the device was as nonplused by the news of the new policy at Barr-Chevry's as he had been.

  "What is the alleged purpose of this competition?” the integrator asked.

  "That has not been made known to us, only the fact of its existence."

  "But this smacks of disruptive behavior. Commerciant affairs in Olkney achieved optimum stability during the Archonate of Terfel III. Why disturb perfection?"

  "Exactly,” said Bandar.

  "Hmmm,” said the integrator.

  "Might this transaction be illegal?"

  There was a pause while the device consulted eons of codified law. “It appears not."

  "But it is not a trend the Archonate would wish to encourage."

  The integrator's tone grew distant. “It is not a trend at all, merely an instance. Perhaps someone has gone mad."

  "So an appeal to the Archon is not indicated?"

  "It rarely is,” said the integrator.

  Bandar knew that the Archon was empowered to do anything at all to anyone at all, although ordinarily he was disinclined to interfere in the balance of affairs. “Yet this situation might constitute an imbalance, or at least the beginning of one,” he said.

  "Indeed.” The integrator was silent for a moment, then said, “Do you wish to hear my optimum counsel?"

  "That is why I came."

  "Very well. Keep in mind that the Archon sits at the very pinnacle of the social order. His view of what is best and proper originates from a unique perspective. Those who invite his intervention can sometimes receive much more help than they anticipated. Indeed, occasionally it is more help than they can bear."

  "What do you mean?"

  "For example,” said the integrator, “there was the dispute between two aristocratic families that occupied the large island in Mornedy Sound. They disagreed bitterly as to which should have precedence over the other. After an escalating series of violent incidents, culminating in arson and mayhem, they appealed to the Archon Barthelmeon VIII for a judgment."

  "Wait a moment,” said Bandar, “there is no large island in Mornedy Sound."

  "Exactly,” said the integrator. “Now, do you wish to involve the Archon in your uncle's dispute?"

  "Perhaps not."

  "Then, good day."

  "At least give me the information I first asked for: the name of the new owner of Barr-Chevry's Immovables."

  "Very well.” The integrator then made a sound that indicated mild interest. “There has been some attempt to disguise the ownership through a chain of reciprocal hand-offs and cut-outs—not an entirely clumsy attempt, at that, but the trail leads back to one person."

  "And that person is?"

  "His name is Didrick Gabbris."

  * * * *

  "Why do you torment my uncle?” Ba
ndar said. Didrick Gabbris voiced no reply, merely placed his nose in an elevated position and made to step away. But Bandar seized the man's elbow through the sleeve of his academic robe, spun him around and repeated the question.

  He had intercepted Gabbris beneath the stand of tittering hissol trees in the smaller quadrangle of the Institute of Historical Inquiry. It was late afternoon. Gabbris had just finished hearing a pack of undergraduates deliver the results of their conjectural flights—or “hunchmanship” as the exercise was colloquially known—and was now on his way to the masters’ lesser conclave that would occupy the hour before the bell called all to dinner. Bandar had come directly from Olkney by hired aircar to find his old enemy fast-stepping through dappled orange sunlight, doubtless with thoughts of spiced cordial and seeded buns foremost in his mind.

  "I am not answerable to you,” Gabbris said. He sought to pull his arm from Bandar's grip but could not. He looked around for help but saw only a gaggle of students from his hunchmanship session, all of whom seemed interested in seeing their tutor accosted, none of whom showed an inclination to intervene.

  Bandar increased the pressure of his grip. “Expect no aid,” he said. “You have never inspired sympathy."

  "Let go of me or it will go ill with you,” Gabbris said.

  Bandar made a noise that mingled derision with hate. “What will you do?” he said. “Have me expelled? You forget, you have already taken from me all that I ever desired. That now leaves you face to face with an angry man who has nothing to lose. I also point out that, though you are taller, I am wiry and well coordinated. Finally, I am mightily motivated to cause you pain and humiliation."

  "I would see you clapped into a cell in the Archon's contemplarium,” Gabbris said, but the squeak in his voice leached any power from his threat.

  "Indeed?” said Bandar, letting his expression assume a thoughtful aspect. “And what I'd be contemplating would be the memory of your tear-stained face, blood and mucous streaming from its disarranged nose, as I stood over you and applied the toe of my boot to the softest parts of your person."