THE CONTINENT OF LIES

James Morrow

www.sfgateway.com

Enter the SF Gateway …

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

Sleep, baby, sleep

Thy father guards the sheep;

Thy mother shakes the dreamland tree

And from it fall sweet dreams for thee,

Sleep, baby, sleep

—MOTHER GOOSE

We are not so evil as the interpretation

of our dreams would lead us to suppose.

—SIGMUND FREUD

PART ONE

1

A Dreambean Deciphered

When I was ten years old, my father called me into his private study and said, with a solemnity not typical of him, “Son, don’t ever let anybody tell you there’s no such thing as reality.” He rapped on his desk, as if to show me what he meant by reality. “Reality is all we have, Quinjin, and believe me, it’s more than enough.”

“All right,” I replied.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

In time, however, I came to appreciate my father’s advice. It served me particularly well in my chosen career as a critic of dreams.

The noostrees have been extinct for more than two decades now, and I suspect that most of you are too young to have eaten their fruits and experienced the programmed hallucinations, the preplotted mirages, stored inside. So let me now assure you that everything you have heard about cephalic apples is true. Compared with a good cephapple dream, gourmet food was about as satisfying as a sore throat, sex about as involving as a blink. For the dreamweavers, you see—those gifted, solitary souls who made the seeds from which the noostrees sprouted—were not mere technicians. The dreamweavers were not mere conduits of the story line. The dreamweavers were artists. Great artists, failed artists, pure artists, corrupt artists. But artists.

Now, I won’t pretend that all the cephapples I reviewed could be properly termed works of art. Most of them, in fact, could be properly termed garbage. Other critics got to analyze realistic psychological dreams about love, hate, marriage, divorce, friendship, parenthood, death, and angst. I got to review dreams in which homicidal maniacs stalked through back alleys, sucking out streetwalkers’ brains with weaselpumps; in which martial-arts experts felled entire police forces with their feet; in which Antaresian plasmidleopards escaped from circuses and set about terrorizing the nearest elementary schools; in which starship captains brought law and order to hinterland planets, using nothing but their nitrogen-cooled laser rifles and chiseled chins.

I’ll tell you something, though. I did not hate the lurid dreams. The best of them had an emotional reality, a core of honest sensation, that brought me nearer to aesthetic truth than did the stuff that the literati were always fussing over. Art, I believe, is where you find it.

The story of why and how I helped destroy the art I loved is really a kind of fairy tale, and it happens to begin with a fairy tale. The fairy tale was called The Toad of Night. I had this dream on the twelfth of Inanna, Anno Galactica 791. That atypical day began typically, the horalbell summoning me from sleep, my consciousness thawing in usual sequence: damn noise … have to finish that piece on Altars of the Heart … I hope there’s an egg on hand … are there any really good reasons not to stay in bed all day? I reached out and managed to silence the screaming clock after some graceless slapstick comedy involving not only the device itself but also my overweight cat and a tumbler of water, yet my apartment did not grow quiet. The second layer of noise, as it turned out, came from the vidiphone, which I answered, “Hello,” without switching on the camera. Whoever it was, I did not wish to confront him or her in the transmitted flesh.

“Hello, Quinjin.” It was Francie, glorious Francie Lem, guiding light behind Dreambeans Deciphered and one of the few electrozine editors in Terransector with backbone enough to print my stuff. Dreambeans was what people who took their cephapples seriously called cephapples; people who didn’t take their cephapples seriously called them brainballs. “Turn on your camera,” Francie continued, smirking down from the vidiphone screen. “I dislike talking to my mental image of you.”

Francie’s mental image of me was probably fairly positive that particular morning—in those days, before my adventures with the Tree of Death, I was not unpretty—and I wanted nothing to tarnish it. By keeping my camera off, I prevented her from seeing my rumpled pajamas and whisker-infested chin—not to mention the uncovered floors, the bare-ass light bulbs, the fractured plaster, the furniture intended for beaches, and other signs of poverty overtaking my apartment. As a point of pride, I preferred for Francie to believe that my Dreambeans Deciphered income was subsidiary to my lecturing fees and book royalties, when in fact it paid the rent and put food on the card table.

I told Francie my camera was broken.

“My left ovary,” she replied smoothly, leaning toward her own camera, giving herself a closeup. “You don’t want me to see the ash heap you call home.”

I think I loved Francie Lem, loved her with the sort of oblique, semiconscious love you enjoy experiencing because it entails no obligations. Two decades my senior, she made being fifty-six seem like a good idea. Our face-to-face communication was confined entirely to the vidiphone, so that I had no notion of what the nape of her neck looked like, though I assumed it was as stately and handsome as the rest of her.

“Tomorrow I’m sending you an unsolicited piece on that love dream I was telling you about,” I said. “Altars of the Heart. A minor effort, sure, and I could do without the title, but it made me fight tears, and we should all rally behind it.” This last sentence probably trailed off as I lurched away from the screen in a successful effort to keep Basil the Cat from singeing his whiskers on yesterday’s coffee, which my computer had just now decided to reheat.

“Never mind that,” said Francie. “Your task for the moment is to get your mouth over to the Cathexis and swallow the first available fruit. The box office knows you’re coming.”

“What’s the show?”

“The Toad of Night.”

“Let me guess—a horror bean.”

“Not exactly. You haven’t heard the news? Doesn’t anything interest you scribblers besides coffee and words?”

My screen showed that, behind Francie, the Dreambeans Deciphered offices bustled with staff members plugging in their thoughtwriters and groping for their coffee mugs.

“What’s the matter with The Toad of Night?”

“The press release calls it a modern fairy tale—an allegory on that old Brothers Grimm thing about the Frog Prince.”

“Allegories give me hives.”

“Anyway, near the end there’s evidently a scene where you bury somebody alive.”

“Hell, Francie, can’t I cover some subtle stuff for once? I wish—”

“So yesterday this poor crazy ten-year-old, Suzie Freed, drops by the parlor, eats the apple, goes home, tosses Baby Brother Phillip into a shipping crate, and sinks the crate in quicksand. Death by asphyxiation.”

I was sorry but hardly shocked. Art, I knew—real art—is no prissy pastime, and the dreambean medium, with its unprecedented credibility, had a particularly notorious record of inspiring lunatic acts. Indeed, this Suzie Freed Tragedy was following hard on the heels of the previous month’s Wendy Cromboc Tragedy, in which a young woman of psychotic persuasion had thrown herself in front of a maglev train after eating Reinwort’s adaptation of Anna Karenina. And before that, the Paxton Wolfe Tragedy. And before that, the Martin Mergeron Tragedy.

“Why do you always give me such weird dreams, Francie? Don’t tell me the offbeat is my beat—I’ve heard it. What about Altars of the Heart? What about—?”

“Quinjin, I need help.”

“Let me guess. SUPEREGO wants to shut down the show.”

“SUPEREGO wants to shut down the whole goddamned dream industry. The situation demands more than a simple review, of course. It demands a counterblast, and you’re the man to write it.”

SUPEREGO. Bad news. Very bad news. To wit: the Society for Unconditionally Purging Entertainment by Restoring Ethics and Godly Order. The SUPEREGOists’ numbers were growing every day, and my boss was not being paranoid when she suggested they had the power to make cephapple-eating illegal. The SUPEREGOists talked a great deal about God. They knew where God stood on every issue.

Furtively I kissed Francie on her glass lips. “You don’t suppose this incident heralds another Vorka Massacre, do you?”

Her habitual breeziness died. “Vorka is an ancient crime,” she snapped. “It did not, does not, and never will have anything to do with cases like this. It was completely … other. Put Vorka in your article, and you’ll see what editorial tampering looks like.”

Perfect word: other. The next five years would gradually disclose just how other events at the Vorka Psychoparlor had been. But that morning all I knew of Vorka were the grim statistics. I knew that four hundred and six people had bought tickets to a matinee … that four hundred and six people had eaten cephapples … that four hundred and six people had assumed they were ingesting an innocuous romantic comedy … that four hundred and six people had apparently been slipped something else … that four hundred and six people had gone insane. “Massacre,” of course, was an exaggeration. None of the Vorka victims died. But they had all needed shutting up in the bughouse, double locks and steel strictusuits, and not one had ever come within hailing distance of reason. The perpetrator remained unidentified, the motive unfathomed, the crime unsolved. And ever since Vorka, the world lived in fear that the plague would visit again.

The chatter of thoughtwriters began pouring from my vidiphone speaker, but Francie’s agitated tones easily beat it down. “I’m expecting a masterpiece, Quinjin. An epic. We’ll spread it over the next three issues. Get the Suzie Freed business out of the way, then give us a whole smelly story of Dream Censorship—start with the book burners and work forward. I’ll pay on manuscript receipt.”

“You pay on manuscript receipt and you’ll receive no manuscripts.”

Francie showed me a brittle smile and shut off her camera. “Your check is in the mail.”

The basement floor of my apartment building was conveniently contiguous with a troglobus station, so that every parlor in Shadu City stood less than five minutes from my thought-writer. Of course, many cephapples of note never played Shadu City. Some never even played my home planet, Zahrim, sole captive of my home star, Alpheratz; I was a seasoned faster-than-light traveler.

As I milled around the subterranean platform, shin-deep in gum and eager for the bus to come whooshing down the tunnel, I realized just how annoyed I was at my editor. She hadn’t come out and said so, but she clearly had no intention of purchasing my Altars of the Heart insights. True, it was a conventional dream, it did nothing new with the medium, but it still deserved space in Dreambeans Deciphered beyond the usual capsule review.

My annoyance had evaporated by the time the bus arrived. Staying mad at Francie Lem was no easy undertaking, for, among bean critics, to know her was not only to love her but also to have been helped out of at least one hopeless jam by her. In my case, the hopeless jam was the notoriety I had achieved upon publishing—in an electrozine called Family Hour—a review of that grindingly inspirational bean, By the Wind Grieved.

By the Wind Grieved (A.G. 788). 84 minutes. Weaver: Emory Crostik. A biographical dream that turns you into the self-made bastard Edgar Whittlecrop, who started out with seven veneers in his pocket and, upon discovering the jungjelly used in FTL transportation systems, wound up a billionaire. The viciousness, greed, and spiritual squalor that most historians agree were the hallmarks of Whittlecrop’s character are underplayed to the point of whitewash, and the focus becomes how you assembled the first jungjelly derricks and enlisted God in selecting their locations and exploiting the unimaginable wealth they generated. This is the sort of apple we’re all expected to adore because it embodies something called “decency in dreaming,” but the decency of By the Wind Grieved is a selfish, irresponsible decency, a decency predicated on the belief that the ruthless should inherit the earth, a decency I trust about as far as I can pee mercury. …

From there I went on to attack SUPEREGO, creeping theocracy, the profit motive, and the ethics of the pangalactic bourgeoisie.

After reading the first wave of hate mail, my editor at Family Hour took about five nanoseconds to decide I needed firing, a sentiment destined to sweep through nearly every electrozine office in Terransector. Get labeled “controversial” in this life, and you wind up either fabulously rich or permanently unemployable—more likely the latter, unless, of course, it is your felicitous fortune to run into Francie Lem. Fast as the heroic dogthing in Crostik’s Woggle Comes Through, Francie galloped to my rescue, giving me moral support, a cover story in Dreambeans Deciphered, and regular work thereafter.

Troglobus rides are meant to be uneventful, that’s their point, so after the expected nonexperience of traveling uptown I left my seat, crossed the platform, climbed to street level, and walked one block to the Cathexis Psychoparlor. It was a warm morning in Shadu City, blessed occupant of a latitude where just about every day managed to be spring. As Alpheratz crept toward noon, giant shadows flowed down the marble façades of the banks and offices hemming Nindukagga Square. Shadu has always been a regal city in my book: clean, rational, a true urban Arcadia, suffused with a smell like noostree syrup.

Above my head a looming, sunstruck billboard exhorted the people of Shadu to go see The Toad of Night. The billboard showed a fairy-tale castle, all buttresses and spires, superimposed over a young girl whose face consisted primarily of teeth. The name of the dreamweaver was also provided: Roger Conchfiller, who, my cephapple-addict’s memory informed me, had been responsible for Gratuitous Violence, an underrated comedy of two years ago.

The Cathexis would be open till midnight, but already the line coiled twice around it, with a new clump of customers arriving every few seconds. Yesterday’s holovision coverage of Phillip Freed’s murder was clearly turning to gold at the box office. Even if SUPEREGO managed to yank it out of the parlor by sundown, the bean would probably turn a profit.

Marching up to the ticket window, I gave my name to a middle-aged woman whose life was clearly not going as she would wish, whereupon a liveried usher, female and pretty, appeared and led me past the front of the line and into the place where dreams came true.

Typical of parlors built in the first half of the century, the Cathexis was high-domed and mosquelike, its rubber chairs filled with amniotic fluid, its voluptuous walls padded for the protection of those occasional customers who wriggled out of their seatbelts and ran amok. Parlors of more recent vintage were nothing but rectilinear warehouses strewn with aquacots, an arrangement more suited to fornicating than to hallucinating. I always suspected that couples who mixed the two media experienced neither to its fullest. (The exception, of course, was the kind of dream explicitly intended to be consumed under the influence of lust. If you played your cards right, you could be party to a kind of quadruple orgasm: yours, your character’s, your partner’s, your partner’s character’s. I had known such synchronicity only once, but the memory will always linger.)

The usher pointed to the one vacant seat, and I saw that it held a scrap of paper containing my name, misspelled. Before slumping down, I took the opportunity to observe the other customers, for often such mental notes worked their way into my reviews. (“The audience seemed composed mainly of pimps and kidnip addicts, as would befit this latest assault on civilization from the weaver of Hydraulic Nights.”) They were a diverse bunch, all ages and shades, but unified by the zombie impassivity that haunts the face of the bean-eater. Over here bloomed a momentary smile, there a fleeting chuckle, behind me a truncated gasp; no one’s dream was completely in step with anyone else’s.

By buckling myself into my seat, I caused a mechanical arm to emerge from the floor like a mesmerized cobra. The arm culminated in a gloved hand. The Toad of Night lay in the palm. Like all dreambeans, it was a simple object: no core, no pit, no seeds, nothing but bland meat enveloped in glittery red skin. Reaching forward, plucking my cephapple, I experienced a twinge of nostalgia. In the good old days, the usher brought you your dream on a platter.

Three bites, and The Toad of Night was in my stomach. My senses began shutting down, my incredulity trickling away.

I am not a scientist. Don’t ask me to explain what a cephapple actually did after its enterprising little molecules had started soaking into your cerebrum. A microbiologist once told me that, when you examined a cephapple sliver under a photonscope, you did not see orthodox vegetable tissue but a honeycomb of throbbing hexagons, each preset to activate a particular population of brain cells at a particular nanosecond, like a blasting cap in a carefully orchestrated explosion. Naturally this technology and its innumerable antecedents, both dubious (LSD-49, for example) and legitimate (Rossiter magic mushrooms, for example), could have evolved only in the last century, when neurocartography crystallized into a science of impeccable empiricism, and the inducing of narrative hallucinations became a mere matter of blazing the right enzymatic trails. But I’ll tell you something. This same microbiologist confessed to me that one facet of the cephapple phenomenon was always a total mystery. No one really knew how, during his creative trance, the dreamweaver could author a drama so biochemically cohesive that, precipitated as a plasmid, planted as a seed, nourished as a tree, and consumed as a fruit, it transformed its eventual audience into one of its characters. So you see, apples were an art.

My blindness was soon supplanted by a vision that was all form and no content. I did not see objects; I saw seeing. Nor in my deafness did I feel deprived. Those appendages called ears had simply never existed.

You can understand why it was both unlawful and unwise to dream outside the parlors.

Heat now, wave after wave. I had officially left the air-conditioned Cathexis, had irrevocably entered the story. The heat rolled across my skin like a scalding dew. My eyes unclogged, and the cause of the heat became clear: The Toad of Night began in a sweltering jungle.

I stood beside the hull of a spaceship, a golden sphere glinting amid creepers and ferns. “The Toad of Night,” intruded a resonant voice upon my earless hearing. “Written by Fauver Yost. Weaved by Roger Conchfiller. Planted by Pamela Bosque.”

The cephapple gave me knowledge. I was a willowy girl, about to explode into adolescence. I was a princess, and beautiful, and smart to boot. Exploring the Regulus system, I had run afoul of a meteor shower, landed my shattered ship on the first available planet. It was now incumbent upon me to master this unknown world, living by my wits until I had collected the raw materials needed to repair the damage.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, my Quinjin self began moaning, it’s a goddamned space opera.

I trekked through the jungle, performing the usual heroics: slaying serpents, smashing scorpions, outwitting cannibals, ho-hum. All these clichés were partially redeemed by the conviction with which dreamweaver Conchfiller had transformed me into a twelve-year-old. I felt twelve, I experienced adolescent stirrings—extraordinary illusions that were certain to earn excited adjectives in Quinjin’s review.

But Conchfiller’s greatest gimmick came when the swamp appeared. He gave it an amazing smell. Decayed but not disgusting, alluring but not perfumed. Moss and vines bobbed on the blind, dark waters. Before long I noticed a string of air bubbles rise to the surface, as if the swamp were aboil. The bubbles foretold life. Amphibious life—what else?—a repellent humanoid toad that suddenly hopped out of the water and landed at my feet.

The toad’s popping eyes were the first two things I noticed about it. The third was its skin: brown, crinkled, a terrain of silt-creeks and warty hills. Sealed by slime, its mouth ran ear to ear.

The mouth opened. The creature talked.

He said that he was king of this planet. He had power, treasure, slaves. For him, restoring my ship was a favor he could grant with a mere snap of his webbed fingers.

But I had to promise him something. On an unnamed future date, I would have to let him come live with me as my husband. Assuming that this was the toad’s idea of a joke, I consented.

Quinjin gasped at my naïveté.

Back home, I grew to womanhood. My sixteenth birthday occasioned a lavish feast at my father’s palace. In the middle of dessert, the banquet hall trembled with the thunks of the door knocker. The court jester froze in the middle of a punchline. When a servant opened the door, the light of three moons gushed into the palace.

One hop, and the Toad of Night was over the threshold. A second hop, and he was inside the banquet hall. A third, and he was on the table, smoothly relating to my father the details of our agreement.

The toad said that he had come to foreclose.

A bargain is a bargain, was my father’s reaction. Characterization has never been the strong suit of the fairy tale.

And so I began living with a monster. With each passing day, and especially with each passing night, my revulsion doubled. Eventually I could stand it no longer.

Dawnlight probed the palace. The toad slept beside me. I gathered up the sheets, secured the bundle with rope, deposited the beshrouded creature in an airtight coffin, and hurled the whole arrangement into a bog not unlike the toad’s natural habitat.

Within hours, however, I began experiencing severe pangs, as if I were in labor—absolutely the best simulation of pain my Quinjin self had ever experienced during a cephapple dream. It was the princess’s conscience, struggling to be born. Shaking with remorse, I ran back to the bog, dived in, retrieved the coffin, lifted the lid.

As soon as the Toad of Night opened his gooey eyes, joy overcame me. I began kissing his bumps, every one of them—whereupon, of course, he turned into a handsome prince.

The wedding cost my father several small fortunes.

A voice said, “The End.”

And I was Quinjin again.

Back on the troglobus, I tried composing a grabby line or two for my series on Suzie Freed and Dream Censorship. “Our culture is crumbling for sure when we decide to regard cephapples as the captains of our fates and the masters of our souls.” That sounds pretty good, I thought. “If The Toad of Night ‘caused’ Suzie Freed to kill her brother, then why didn’t it ‘cause’ the same behavior in the child sitting next to her? Why has there been no epidemic of fratricides?” Not bad.

The bus moaned to a halt, and I shuffled onto the platform. Flanked by an animadvertisement for deodorant pills and by a poster for Altars of the Heart, a newsscreen showed me its dormant glassy face. With no conscious intent I lobbed in a few coins and called up last week’s issue of Dreambeans Deciphered. Allowing the device a few seconds in the rapid-scan mode, I instructed it to loiter near my review of a recent Wexel McPoon retrospective. Wexel McPoon was a perpetrator of my least favorite genre of dreambean, the avant-garde. “There’s a quip circulating among beanbuffs this month,” I said aloud, reading my words with growing unease. “‘How do you bore a hole in a diamond?’ And the answer is, ‘Take the hole to a Wexel McPoon retrospective.’”

Now you probably think that a dream reviewer’s job was a real plum, but as far as I’m concerned it was a no-win situation. If you didn’t give a weaver like McPoon a hard time, you risked cultivating in your readers wishy-washy standards and general narcosis. But if you went too far, you could plummet a promising talent into an unproductive despair. When I initially wrote my Wexel McPoon piece, I thought it instructive and clever, but now it just seemed cruel.

Starting down the hall toward my apartment, I realized that it simply wouldn’t do to assail SUPEREGO with sarcasm and flip dismissals. No, I would have to concentrate on the meaning of The Toad of Night—the deftly dramatized transition from sex perceived as mysterious and repulsive to sex perceived as natural and miraculous. Thus I would demonstrate how, in attacking the dream’s violence and its supposed effect on Suzie Freed, SUPEREGO was completely missing the point. By the time I reached my apartment door, I was prepared to rush whole paragraphs of polemic into my thoughtwriter.

At which point the universe went awry.

This same door, emphatically locked when I had left for the Cathexis, was now angling into my dark, windowless living room. Thieves!

Thieves? Then why were the lights off?

“Hello?” The voice had nothing of the organic about it.

“Good afternoon.” Two cautious words, followed by two cautious steps forward.

A light came on, and there in my favorite beach chair sat an object that I immediately recognized as a robot of the genus Pseudocortex, just about the wisest breed of machine ever bolted together by man or woman. Basil the Cat, atop the bookcase, was spitting on it.

When I say “robot,” you probably picture the sort we have today, athletic-looking manikins stuffed with circuits. But in the year A.G. 791, people did not want their servomechanisms to look like themselves. Doppelgängers gave them the willies. The problem was solved by retaining the highly efficient humanoid design and then plastering the flesh with pointless capacitors, meaningless resistors, absurd diodes, and existential wires.

“My common name is Iggi,” the machine said, “though I prefer the unabridged version, Intelligence Gathering and Grouping Interface. In other words, I’m a spy”—the vanity in his voice was both irritating and poignant—“at least, that’s how my program goes, which is why I had no trouble picking your lock.” By “spy” I assumed Iggi meant an industrial spy. His pride in this heritage was understandable, for robots who did such work led glamorous and risky lives—stealing secret formulas, smuggling prototypes out of factories, trading unorthodox sexual favors for blueprints. I once gave a rave review to an industrial-espionage bean called The Meaning of Fear. “Unfortunately,” Iggi continued morosely, “Clee Selig prefers to use me as a slave and messenger boy—you can’t imagine how humiliating that is. Do you recognize my master’s name?”

In those days, not recognizing Clee Selig’s name was like not recognizing yourself in a mirror. Iggi was apparently retained by the cephalic apple’s renowned inventor. What protocol was proper to such a rare visit? Should I offer to play the robot a quick game of chess?

“He has something to tell me?”

“The message is this.” There followed an android equivalent of throat-clearing, after which Iggi launched into what I took to be a flawless impersonation of Selig.

MR. QUINJIN: YOU ARE A TALENTED CRITIC. I SHALL PAY YOU THE SUM OF TEN THOUSAND VENEERS, CASH, FOR A REVIEW OF AN UNTITLED CEPHAPPLE PRESENTLY IN MY PRIVATE COLLECTION. IF YOUR ANSWER IS YES, PLEASE BE IN MY LIBRARY BEFORE HOUR 18 TOMORROW NIGHT, SOUTHERN QUADRISPHERIC TIME. IGGI HAS YOUR DECONSTRUCTION TICKET. SINCERELY, CLEE SELIG, PH.D.

At this point, the robot was again assaulted by feline saliva.

Ten thousand veneers! In A.G. 791, ten thousand veneers was not a sum to draw sneezes. With ten thousand veneers I could appease the landlord for a year, place my rump on something softer than beach furniture, treat Basil to an occasional can of tuna, and in general haul myself out of shabby poverty and into genteel poverty.

Iggi looked ready to spit acid on my cat. “I shall deliver your reply as soon as I receive it.”

“Ten thousand veneers?”

“Cash.”

“For one crummy review?”

“Correct.”

“Where do I sign?”