The Celt in the Machine

By Philip Emery

The Celt in the Machine - Philip Emery

 

A collection of story and verse, work ranging from the seventies to the present day – often challenging, sometimes too clever by at least three-quarters, sometimes fantasy, sometimes science-fiction, sometimes gothic, ranging from the traditional to the metafictional, sometimes strikingly/intriguingly/infuriatingly melding the two.

Sometimes throwing a spanner into the works of the expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Immanion Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798230097518

Philip Emery

Phil Emery teaches creative writing in Britain. His work has been published in the UK, USA, Europe and Canada since the seventies. Published works are, "Necromantra", 2005, a radio play, "Virtual Grafix", was produced by Minute Radio Drama and a short story, "ID" is regularly broadcast on BBC radio since 2007. Other short stories appear in a variety of locations, including several of the "Rogue Blades" anthologies. In 2003 he was jointly awarded a script development grant from the PAWS Drama Fund. The play "Sirens" was performed in 2006 at Leicester and Staffordshire universities and the monologue "Identity Crisis" can be found on thegoodearreview.com website. He was nominated for the Rhysling long poem award in 2000. The novelette, "Blasphemer" came out from Damnation Press at the end of 2010, and another novel, "The Shadow Cycles" was published in the UK by Immanion Press in 2011. He lives near Stoke on Trent.

Book preview

A COLLECTION TO SAVOUR

Introduction by Steve Sneyd

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In this age of non-stop influx overload, it takes something special in the way of writing to achieve genuine memorability. The good news is that the author of this book succeeds, again and again, in triumphantly overcoming that daunting challenge.

He does so in prose and poetry alike, and with a notable diversity of approach. Often he teases expectations of content and form, yet alongside post-modern playfulness go a variety of true strengths. Sometimes, it’s the driest of dark humour, on occasion notable expressions of the pleasures of sense of wonder, and over and again a genuinely gripping, and moving, emotional content.

To mention a handful of the stories here, first an instance sure to delight film buffs with its sideways look at an alternative movie history, Parallel-o-Gram, with elegant economy and wit reporting on Kafka’s career in Hollywood; Vampyre Noir, again making use of the ambiguous compulsion of the silver screen, indeed utilizing a film scriptish form, sets a Gatsby-esque G-man against the undead, with a wonderfully teasing payoff, cries out for filming.

Other stories that unforgettably arouse emotion, often keyed to emotional loss, and indeed ‘loss of loss’, the even more painful experience of losing a relationship that never really existed beyond wishes, include the mysterious Rhiannon-Lost, drawing on an ambiguous Mabinogion beauty to tell of a life hunting for her modern self through the slightest of traces; Nightdweller, Kurosawan in its blind swordsman protagonist, convincing in its evocation of Japan, and excitingly real in its swordfight, also centres on an obsessive longing for contact with a lost beauty of spirit. Even more spirited is the gene-manipulated heroine of Seraph, voicing as she awaits execution further perceived unnaturalness, in a mixture of first and third person text and authorial intervention which shouldn’t hold the reader’s suspension of disbelief yet utterly does. Finally, a particularly classic story, The Face of God, takes the reader to a space station observing a nebula which appears to show a holy image, and introduces a whole cast of seekers for some illumination from it, willing or unwilling to be convinced, figures vividly delineated as if a modern Hogarth had turned author.

The poems, too, reflect the range and flexibility of Philip Emery’s imaginative approach, across a spectrum from the traditionally Gothic strict form of Shadrezzar’s dark fantasy to the graphic novel frame verse treatment in Virtual Grafix’s portrait of a private eye shootouting round a post-nuclear wreckville’s deadly Downtown. Others particularly memorable include Jettison, a vivid evocation of a dying man’s longing interaction with a perfect perhaps-hallucination woman; Ekphrasis, a compelling miniature of alien interaction with a wrecked human dream of starflight; and the two Arthurian poems: Ludchurch, seeing through the lens of our ‘dispirited zeitgeist’ into Sir Gawain’s ‘beheading game’ final encounter, and equally compelling in its use of brevity, Merlyn, grimly real in its visceral account of the wizard’s rebirth from subterranean captivity.

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Steve Sneyd is a poet, critic, bibliographer, publisher and editor. His many collections include several volumes of SF poetry. His handwritten newszine Data Dump covers all aspects of SF and fantasy. The SFE Encyclopedia of Science Fiction acknowledges him as a significant figure in SF poetry.

NIGHTDWELLER

I stand in the darkness and await Ezlo’s tracing finger on my upturned palm. My other palm waits also. It rests on the rayskin and cord of my sword handle.

There are seven... no, eight warriors standing before us. Ezlo’s finger is hesitant, imprecise. He is probably letting his eyes glance over to them. And sometimes when he is anxious or scared, as now, he presses too hard or traces the words too quickly. Sometimes the meanings are lost then. Pressure is inflection and speed nuance in this silent language of ours.

Eight warriors, then.

Across my face I can feel the waft of the heat from their lanterns. These will light their night, but not mine. I dwell with the night. Its forms upon my skin are legion, some sweet, some not.

My tongue tastes my words as it shapes them and passes them to the air leaving my throat. I ask the warriors what it is they want of me.

A moment. Then Ezlo’s finger again on my palm.

They want nothing of me. They have other business.

I speak again.

What is their purpose then, at night, on a remote road about to lead into a lonely forest of sugi trees?

Ezlo’s fingertip.

Honoured Nightdweller, we are master-torturers from the town of...

Ezlo’s finger pauses. Gleamings of chill pass through me as he traces the word slowly, reluctantly, on my palm.

...Ral-Geth.

The town is known to me. To many. For generations the inhabitants prospered in luxury. But over time a dark ennui seeped into them and they began to look for newer pleasures. They looked to mysticism and metaphysical horrors to amuse themselves. They studied and experimented with pain - physical, mental, and even supernatural. They crafted occult means to capture and torment spirits.

And that is their business tonight. One of the spirits they have lured to Ral-Geth, and tortured, has broken free and fled. They’re hunting her.

Ezlo etches her name.

It is known to me. A memory. A memory shaped upon my palm. And I know I must find her first.

If it was winter Ezlo would have to tell me that the eight torturers have gone. In the coldest days of the coldest season I go about in my thicker kimono - a second blindness - a second deafness. But now spring is drifting through the country and I wear my sheer robe. Thus I can feel the air slide and break in meaningful tides against my skin, and know that the heat of the torturers’ lanterns has gone.

I thrust my palm out. Have they gone into the forest?

Yes.

Can you still see them?

No.

Take us into the forest on the same path, Ezlo. Soon you will come to a sugi with a broken bole. Twelve of my paces further we will go left off the path.

My memory of this place is a memory of taste and smell and touch. This is how I find my way about the world now - by knowing the taste of the evening air from the morning, the perfumes of a palace from the aromas of a market, the green muzzings of summer from the bitter shadow of winter, knowing the sun has risen by the fleshless warmth sliding between the blankets...

Ah. Ezlo halts me. I reach out and my fingers encounter the soft damp rubbly jut, my nose breathes the rich dull sweetness of decaying wood. The broken sugi. We take the twelve paces. Ezlo takes my hand and leads me left onto the hidden path.

I was alone, and no less deaf and blind, when I came this way before. It was a different season and a different wind murmured on my face and neck from a different direction. The forest too, like all living things, has changed and so now even the same wind would travel differently, having to weave a slightly altered path through the sugi. Alone I could again eventually find my stumbling way to the shrine deep in the forest. But it is to the shrine that I believe the hunted spirit will go, so this time I must find it quickly, and so I must trust Ezlo.

Sometimes this is not easy.

The thief malady struck me three years ago, as I quelled unrest with my kin-warriors in the provincial town of Jun-Rei. On my sick-mattress, I closed my eyes while gazing at a moth quivering against a crack on a wall and fell asleep to the distant sounds of rioting. Poor last things to see and hear.

Soon after that the fever departed, my strength returned, and I began a pilgrimage in search of healing. I travelled the prescribed way, through town and country, visiting shrines said to possess mystical properties. I made faltering progress from temple to statue to relic to waterfall to tree. I prayed to the spirit of each. I shambled away from each still blind, still deaf. It was while visiting the last such place, the sacred spas at Shan-gar-i while leprous with despair, that I met Ezlo. He a young beggar, myself little more, we began to fashion our language.

But sometimes I suspect that, either from stupidity or cunning or even malice, he changes the language we agreed, perhaps gives a sign a different meaning. Did those torturers really call me ‘Nightdweller’, the address of respect for a blind man? Or has Ezlo translated cripple or some other insult into respectful form to avoid anger from me? I thrust the pointless suspicion away from me as always. As I am now a lesser man than I once was, I must be frugal and must myself recast old words into new meanings. Only through him can words ever reach me, so what the boy draws on my palm I must address as truth.

Eventually the path narrows with thicket - as it did the last time I came this way.

Now the slight dipping of the ground - as before.

Now the change from soil and mud to rock underfoot, and - yes, here - as before - is the treacherous tilt to the path.

Sure enough, suddenly Ezlo’s hand jerks out of mine. I halt, waiting, my hand waiting. In a moment his hand returns, his grip angry. Stop, I say, before he can pull. Wipe your hands of the mud. I manage not to smile. Now wipe mine.

He takes my arm differently when we come to flatter, steadier ground. Moisture speckles my face and I know that we walk through mist - and so the river is near. And beyond, I recall, is the shrine I visited two years ago on my pilgrimage. It is to there the spirit hunted by the eight torturers from Ral-Geth will go. She must go.

Something stirs. An emotion. It has long been frozen in me, but I still have a word for it. When Ezlo and I sat in the streets of Shan-gar-i, I would speak a word I could no longer hear and he would trace a pattern on my palm to replace it. Repeating. Memorizing. Even then the emotion I speak of was frozen in me - breathing had become an act of will rather than desire - yet it was one of the first words we fashioned. Hope.

Then Ezlo’s hand - both his hands - clasp my arms fiercely. There is the bite of panic in the suddenness. He tries to maul me around, to face something behind me. If not for the mist I would have known already.

I catch Ezlo’s arm and twist it, more than is required, because I am angry at the mist, at its reminder of my inadequacies. The twist sends Ezlo stumbling back a step. I turn with slow dignity and in the same manner I extend my arm and upturn my palm.

One of Ezlo’s hands cups under mine. A fingertip from the other writes.

It is the torturers from Ral-Geth - no - one of the eight.

I suspected. When I could see and fought in daylight I would try and keep the sun at my back. Now I try to face the wind. It carries the torturer to me. The lilt of the smell... the blend of unguent and youth... is arrogant.

Ezlo relates his speech.

The torturer introduces himself as is the custom, addresses me respectfully as honoured Nightdweller.

I acknowledge, throwing word pebbles into a silent lake.

The torturer speaks again.

He slipped away from his fellows, traced our path. He wishes battle. The kudos of slaying a famous warrior.

A cripple, I say.

An honoured swordsman of renown, he replies, one who still fights with skill. He repeats his challenge.

I accept.

I slide my sword from my sash and my other hand joins the first on the rayskin and cord of the handle. I wait.

The torturer is moving forward.

Seven strides away, six, five, four, three...

The angle of the torturer’s swordcut.

I turn my blade to deflect it.

The harshboned impact of metal on metal.

I shift my weight and twist my wrists, but his blade slides away from mine back into the dark. My pulse beats faster. My sword probes that dark. I probe that dark. We are the same. One. Even more now than before, when I could see it in my hand and hear it cleave the air. Ezlo has helped me practice...

Another cut -

Parry -

...Ezlo, whose sweat I can feel souring with anxiety.

A slash -

Parry -

Still his sword slips away from mine...

A thrust to my midriff -

Parry -

A vertical cut to my - no! a cut to my shoulder! I throw my balance to the side.

Adrift in confusion, a windchime of sensation more instinct than sense, and I roll.

The snicker of the torturer’s blade cutting my arm. My night turning chiaroscuro with pain. Flecks of soil rolling from shoulder to spine, then my feet on the ground again. My hand is empty.

I fight back the coruscations of sting that run along my wounded arm and lift my open hand. A cripple again. Rayskin and cord presses into it.

No warrior allows anyone else to touch his sword. I allow Ezlo to tend mine, not because I cannot, but because in battle we are one, a complete warrior - alone something he could never be and I could never be again. I think this is why he stays with me - and why I allow him to. A cripple and a beggar shackled together by need, a strange, pathetic humpback. Ezlo closes my fingers on the handle in an act that may be solicitude or mockery, and again we are the four-legged humpback with a warrior’s clean, sharp sword.

One of my feet is not touching earth, but sugi timber. I remember the bridge, which bows over the river, to the shrine. I remember her name, etched by Ezlo on my palm. It must be me that crosses.

I step back.

A swordcut to my shoulder -

I step back again and because the bridge is bowed I am now higher than the torturer.

For me my opponent’s eyes are lost.

For me my opponent’s feet are lost.

For me my opponent’s shouts are lost.

There is only the sword... the breath...

And this time the torturer’s sword does not slide away! My wrists turn and roll, and this time I catch his blade, hold it against mine.

Like my words, my swordstrokes are also pebbles tossed into a black pool - but unlike my words the ripples from these pebbles return to the pebble and then to the thrower. ‘Touching-swords-technique.’ I sense my opponent’s mind through his arm through his sword and into mine. Intention becomes no-intention, and I feel his movements before he makes them and move to thwart them. He makes to pull his sword away, makes to force it through mine and into my body, makes to slide his blade past mine and circle it back to cut at my legs. My legs and wrists flow to dam every attempt before it can begin.

His sword transmits his confusion now, his frustration, and now it transmits his panic which I turn and thread with my sword and feel the steel cut into him like a cruelly pitched whistle.

I turn and hold out the sword by hilt and blade flat, and in a moment the rayskin and steel are lifted off my fingers. The battle over, we are two again. A cripple and a beggar.

Clean it while I go to the shrine, I tell Ezlo.

He takes my palm.

No, I tell him. This I must do alone.

As I cross the bridge I can feel the cold slipping into the warm print left by Ezlo’s hand on mine.

Beyond the bridge I no longer have the railing to guide my steps, but I remember the shrine well, remember that in fifteen strides I will stand beside the menhir.

Centuries ago a hermit-priest carved the likenesses of twenty-two spirits into the ancient standing stone. One is the likeness of the spirit the other master-torturers are still searching the forest for.

Fifteen steps and I put out my hand to nothing. I take another half-step and the stone is there. I have never forgotten the sight of her, but memories grow misted with time. Now - as I caress the stone - the face and the form in my memory grows sharper, as it did when I touched this selfsame menhir two years ago. I find the image as if it were yesterday. As my hands trace tresses, cheeks, lips, forehead, eyelashes, the memory of that memory sharpens also. Like echoes focusing.

Somehow I can feel in the stone that she has not yet been here tonight - but she will come. Such shrines are gateways to and from this world.

She will come. The torturers from Ral-Geth know their trade. This is her only way of escape from them. The torturers will know the shrine exists somewhere in the forest, but probably not its location - the people of Ral-Geth do not pilgrimage - they have no interest in healing. They will find this place, but not before she. She will come first.

She has.

Flames jabber through my body and temples. My heart wrenches. This is not fear. My palm knows fear, has a sign for it. I turn from the stone and reach out. I touch a whimper of poignant lampyrines...

There was once, as the young torturer said, a swordsman of renown. He held high position in the court of the warlord of his native province. This warlord, as is the fashion, kept a beautiful spirit-geisha, screened, an ornament for his eyes alone. Yet once, as this warlord slid back the screen to gaze, the swordsman also saw. He never spoke of it. To do so would mean death. Even if he had the words to do so. Yet he never forgot the face or the form.

Although this is not fear, my hands shake as I hold them out. Again they caress cheeks, lips, a forehead, brush eyelashes - the same but not the same. Not stone. Moonlight breathing on a lotus pool... Even now, after so long, words recast themselves in vain.

I stand between her and her escape and so risk her anger. I prepare myself for the scent of acrimony. The dazzle of raking talons.

This is not fear. It is akin to it, but lacks the sick heaviness. It is something which trembles, etherial but deeper. I felt it when I saw her, long ago, but such things cannot be remembered, only felt. I feel it passing through me - her passing through me - into the menhir.

A whisper of poignant lampyrines...

Moonlight breathing on a lotus pool...

Petals freckled with the aftermath of lullabies...

A flourish of azure larksong...

Sad silken moans of jade, mayfly delicate...

I stagger.

A kiss of...

And she is gone. But the feeling remains, and this time I know it will never fade.

Over the river I can smell Ezlo’s sweat. The night outside my night flexes and murmurs on my robe, on my skin.

I have a sign for hope but little use for it. What has just passed through me I have no sign for, but it has shaped itself upon me far more deeply than on my palm. It is a feeling that will walk with me until I no longer walk.

A kiss.

A kiss of blood and dream.

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Nightdweller first appeared in Abyss and Apex online magazine number three, May-June 2003.

WEDNESDAY’S CHILD

She opens the door to the swell of the waves. She’s often wondered how she’d feel at this moment, and she’s still unsure. Afraid? Perhaps not. But not unafraid. Most definitely not unafraid.

She avoids the eyes of her visitors, looking beyond, searching for calm in the ocean. It looks quite lovely in the morning. On such a remote part of the coast pollution dabs it with prismatic slicks. She must look a moment too long, because as she forces her attention to the two men they’re exchanging perplexed expressions.

Both wear suits. Both have close-cropped hair. Pendent around his muscular neck each wears a hologram cross against a deep chest. The taller one, about thirty-five and perhaps ten years the elder, holds out a white card encased in a plastic wallet. It catches the early sun but it doesn’t matter. She knows more or less what it will say.

‘Spiritual Government of our Lord on Earth. Dept. fourteen: Enforcement of Precognitive Legislation.’

And it will have a little unrecognizable photograph of its owner beneath the printing.

May we come in, Mrs. Balfer?

The tone is polite, but it’s not a request. She does nothing for a moment, then stands away from the door and indicates the lounge.

Please sit down.

They take similarly uncomfortable positions on the edges of chairs, leaning forward and looking at her with similarly grave eyes. Their crosses bob slightly off their chests, the dimensions blurring. They haven’t even told her their names - Tweedledum (the older) and Tweedledee? It’s the older one who speaks again.

You know why we’re here.

She stares through the patio windows at the ocean. A hovercraft belonging to her visitors lies on the ebbtide beach. People like these are one reason she resigned her position as a computech and moved to this godforsaken hideaway.

Mrs. Balfer?

Tweedledum’s voice is still level, but it’s sharper than before. It isn’t really threatening, but it’s more grave, more official, less patient. And she’s afraid.

Last week a Mobile Automed Unit was summoned to your home and delivered your baby.

At the last word something within her leaps and dies.

I’m sorry?

There’s really no point in denying it. Copies of all birth-related data are routinely forwarded to our department.

Another reason for her self-imposed seclusion: data-data-data! About everything, everybody. Utilized by a bureaucracy so infernally monumentally

efficient.

Anger. That’s dangerous. She must watch that.

Where is the baby? This is the first time the younger man speaks. She turns to him.

We have the authority to know, as you’re aware.

Yes, she’s aware. All government departments are sanctified by the state, but fourteen (there is no thirteen, of course) comes under the Augustinian Charter. It’s licensed to disregard or reinterpret any law, secular or scriptural, to enforce Precognitive Legislation.

Mrs? Tweedledum.

The Nostradamus Bureau. The anger again.

What was that, Mrs. Balfer? Tweedledee.

Oh what the hell. You’re the bloody Nostradamus Bureau.

Tweedledee coughs. There’s a speckling of anger there too - underneath the embarrassment. Like catarrh. As an epithet we find that somewhat –

- uncomplimentary, finishes Tweedledum.

But appropriate. Michel de Nostradame, a sixteenth century astrologer whose predictions came, or at least seemed, to come true. Didn’t he predict the rise of Hitler? Nostradamus?

Actually he called him ‘Hister’, snipes Tweedledee.

But what about the new prophecies? she counters, knowing she shouldn’t. The ones unearthed twenty years ago? The ones written in plain French, going way beyond the present? Totally explicit about times, places, names...

An urban myth, Tweedledum interrupts, a vocal hand waving the subject away. Now, as to your baby?

Upstairs. She would have had to say it sooner or later. The necessary word. But even so...

Tweedledee stands and turns to the staircase.

In a way I can understand! She blurts it out after two steps. He stops.

Why the government would take an interest in precognition. Almost a kind of un-holy grail. The possibility of knowing, controlling the future.

Mrs. Balfer... Tweedledum.

Tweedledee takes another step.

And in a way I don’t blame them! He stops again. She’s gabbling now, but every second’s delay is a breath of life.

I don’t blame the poor devils, the suspected ‘precogs’ you arrest under the Nostradamus Amendment to the New Witchcraft Act.

There is no Nostradamus Amendment, Mrs. Balfer. Tweedledum. The vocal hand slaps this time.

Nevertheless. I’d probably do the same as them. Tortured, drugged to force predictions out of them - I’d say anything.

That doesn’t happen, Mrs. Balfer. Another slap. Harder. Colder. The baby?

Upstairs. In the nursery. Asleep.

Tweedledee moves again.

Of course that doesn’t happen, she goes on. And there was no such thing as the Nostradamus Project."

But he doesn’t stop this time.

The government never tested millions, she goes on, students especially weren’t tempted to supplement their education loans with the payment made to volunteers. And because of that payment they didn’t come in floods from the Poverty Camps either. Subjects scoring high rates of success in their predictions never became government employees. I wouldn’t’ve blamed any of them if they had – it’s not like they would’ve had any choice. She keeps talking, but Tweedledee isn’t stopping. But as for those paranoid hypocrites in the government actually creating new laws on the strength of those predictions, no matter how bizarre...

Mrs. Balfer.

Laws like the Antichrist Statute.

And it’s now that Tweedledee stops. Turns around. Comes back to stand in front of her. It isn’t the words. Or the cracking in them of her necessary insouciance. It’s the fear, finally surfacing in her voice.

Tweedledum goes on. You realize that your failure to register your pregnancy is a criminal act.

Tweedledee breaks in before she can answer. No doubt they’ve done this before. Where’s the father Mrs. Balfer?

God knows.

Blasphemy is an arrestable offence, but they don’t even caution her. They’re on more serious business.

There’s no record in your files of the required Christian marriage -

We performed our own ceremony.

That was a strange interruption. It throws confusion into the face of Tweedledee. Tweedledum isn’t confused. He emphasizes the precision in his voice to show her that.

When was the last time you saw the father? Days?

Weeks? jabs Tweedledee.

Months? Here Tweedledum gives her time to answer. She doesn’t use it and he goes on. You say you’re familiar with the Antichrist statute, Mrs. Balfer?

Mrs. Balfer? Tweedledum again. She doesn’t say anything. She doubts she’s expected to. Oh, yes, they’ve done this before.

Tweedledee recites: "Since it has been predicted that the Antichrist is to be born on a Wednesday, it is henceforth illegal for any child to be born on the above day.

Clause three - it is mandatory that state mediservices be informed of all pregnancies so that prenatal techniques may be utilized to prevent such births.

He pauses, and then: Clause eight - Any attempt to pervert mediservices to actually induce birth on a Wednesday carries the maximum penalty.

In comparison Tweedledum sounds almost sympathetic.

Your wipe of the Automed’s memory was very nearly total. Only one data fragment, at the deepest security level, survived.

The date of birth?

Her question, like so many of theirs, isn’t really a question.

We’re authorized to drop all charges, providing you now co-operate with us in what the law requires be done.

The room is still while several waves wash ashore. Finally she nods, stands, and walks toward the door.

They get up and follow, a little puzzled perhaps at the lack of trouble - no hysteria, no pleading. Perhaps they assume that her fear has collapsed into hopelessness. They’re wrong. The fear is still there, and the anger.She moves through the room to the stairs, somehow finding the strength to do what has to be done. She forces herself up step after step. This is necessary, she tells herself, as she’s always told herself, knowing this moment must come. But now it has, and now she

CAN’T!

She screams it, hears herself scream it, shocked at the ferocity that