Complete Stories (71 page)

The next morning, Giselle found four gold coins in the nest beneath the goose. She bit them and rang them, they seemed true as any coin. Karl, waking late, sat up blinking to stare at Giselle. “What’s happened?”

“The goose, Karl! She turned our two coins into four!”

“What!” The old peasant sprang out of bed to see. Four bright coins lay in Giselle’s dainty hand.

“Give me my two,” demanded Karl.

“You get
one
, Karl,” said Giselle and gave it to him. “I’ll keep one for the children, and I’ll feed these other two to Goosey to see if it works again! Then we’ll have
four
extra gold coins! Here, Goosey!”

Karl watched excitedly as the goose ate two gold coins from Giselle’s hand. He stayed in the hut at Giselle’s side all day, and finally, near dusk, the goose gave a warbling honk and rose to her feet. Gold glittered from the goose’s nest—and this time it was not just four coins, it was a heap that Karl feverishly counted as seventeen coins! Their fortune had more than doubled in one day!

Karl snatched up two gold coins for his own and hurried off to the inn, leaving Giselle to hide the new treasure. Once at the inn, Karl behaved very foolishly: he got drunk and began bragging about his white goose that laid golden coins. One of the emperor’s soldiers happened to hear him, and the next morning Karl awoke from his sodden slumber to hear Giselle arguing with someone while angry Goosey made her rusty hinge sound.

“It’s just an ordinary goose,” Giselle was saying. “We caught her on Summer Hill.”

“The goose may be Spore Magic,” came the stranger’s voice. “I’m here to claim her for the emperor.”

Any miracle that might be as valuable as the flying saucers was called Spore Magic. And, by ancient imperial decree, all Spore Magic was the property of the Klaatu dynasty.

Goosey came running to the corner of the hut where Karl lay.
If the goose is Spore Magic like the saucers
, thought Karl,
then the emperor will grant imperial favor to the one who brings her to him
. Karl grabbed Goosey in his arms and went out to face the stranger.

It was a young knight of the emperor’s guard, smartly dressed in flowing silks and furs. One of the emperor’s flying saucers rested in the dirt of the peasants’ yard; the saucer was a young twenty-footer, still but lightly filigreed. All the peasants from the neighborhood had gathered, or were still gathering, to watch. None of the emperor’s saucers had ever landed here before, and none of the peasants had ever been inside a saucer.

“I will come with you to bring the goose to the palace,” said Karl, his voice trembling at the enormity of the proposal.

“No, Karl,” cried Giselle. “The goose is mine. And I fed her two more coins this morning.”

“Silence,” said Karl. “We cannot argue with the emperor. I will bring the goose to him, and he will grant me imperial favor. He will give me a bag of gold and the rank of baronet. Have a care, woman!” Karl held the goose tight and stepped away from Giselle.

The young knight looked at Karl doubtfully, but then said, “Very well. Carry the goose into the ship, peasant. But don’t touch anything. You’re filthy and you stink.”

The inside of the saucer was of smooth silvery metal delicately veined with copper. There was a bulge in the wall that made a bench that ran all around the circular cabin. As well as the open arch of the cabin door, there were round, open portholes ranged along the walls. So as not to sully the fine fabric of the cushions on the seats, old Karl sat on the floor with Goosey cradled securely his arms.

The knight controlled the saucer’s flight simply by talking to it. “Fly back to the courtyard of Emperor Klaatu’s palace,” said the knight, and the saucer lifted into the air. Wind whistled through the open door and portholes. The view was dizzying. What with the uneasiness in his stomach from last night’s debauch, it was too much for Karl, and as the ship turned to angle down to the emperor’s palace, he vomited between his legs onto the floor. Goosey pecked at the vomit.

“You cursed old fool,” cried the young knight, and favored Karl with a sharp kick in the ribs. Karl endured the abuse with no complaint. At least he had now flown in one of the emperor’s airships.

The saucer landed in the palace’s walled courtyard. The knight called for a scullion to clean up Karl’s mess, then led Karl across the courtyard and into the palace. Still clutched in Karl’s arms, the goose turned her head this way and that, watching everything with her clear, blue-irised eyes.

The emperor Klaatu was a small bald man with a dark beard and a penetrating gaze. Sitting at the emperor’s side was his fool, or minister, a fat clean-shaven man with a loose smile.

“Is this is the goose that lays golden coins?” demanded the emperor.

“Yes, sire,” said Karl. “And I freely bring her to you. Will you grant me imperial favor?”

“Favor?” asked the emperor.

“A purse of gold,” said Karl. “And I should like to be made a baronet. I could rule my neighborhood in the name of the empire. Even my wife would have to obey me.” He bowed low and set the goose down on the floor at the emperor’s feet.

The goose gave a rusty honk, waggled her bottom, and squeezed out a foul-smelling puddle that resembled Karl’s vomit.

“I’m to grant a baronetage for goose-droppings?” roared the emperor. The fool, or minister, cuffed Karl on the head, and the knight screamed for a scullion to clean up the mess.

“I think you have to feed the goose gold coins first,” stammered Karl. “She needs gold to make gold. She shits out copies of whatever you feed her. Do you have a coin you can feed her, sire? Or a large gem?”

“Oh, so I’m to give you jewels as well as gold?” cried the emperor. “Knight, lock this charlatan and his goose in the dungeon. If the goose lays no gold by tomorrow, then put them both to death. I’ll have the goose roasted with turnips.”

“Oh, wait, please wait,” cried Karl, as all his courage fled from him. “If you want gold from the goose then you should cut her open right away. She still hasn’t shit out the two coins my wife fed her this morning.” The goose gave Karl a startled look as the peasant caught hold of her.

“Go on,” Karl begged the knight, stretching out the goose on the floor with her neck in his left hand and her feet in his right. “Cut the goose in half with your sword, sir knight. Cut right where she’s the fattest. I know there’s gold in her. Take the gold and flog me and set me free. Please spare me, my lords, as it is nearly Xday. I thought the goose was Spore Magic. I meant no harm.”

The emperor nodded to the knight, and the knight brought his razor sharp sword down on Goosey’s back, quite severing her breast and head from her feet and tail. What a shriek the poor goose gave!

Instead of gushing blood, the cut surfaces of the goose’s body were damp but firm, with the consistency and color of a ripe avocado. In the center of each surface was a hemispherical depression: Goosey was hollow at the center, hollow as an avocado without a pit. From the two halves of the cut-open cavity there oozed onto the stone floor a shiny fluid that quickly hardened into a puddle of gold.

Karl had let go of the goose as the sword struck. Now the goose’s rear section rocked back and began waddling around on its feet, while the front section settled its flat cut surface onto the floor and began honking and beating its wings. As the seconds passed, the rear section bulged up its top surface to grow a new breast, neck and head. At the same time, the front half of the goose rose slowly up onto a fresh-grown belly and legs. The flesh and feathers of the geese flowed and shifted as these transformations happened, so that the two new geese were each of half the weight of the original goose, with each new goose being about four-fifths the original size.

One of the geese hopped onto the emperor’s lap, and the other one waddled over to Karl.

“You…you see!” blustered the peasant. “The goose is Spore Magic. And look!” He leaned forward and pried the golden, somewhat vomit-reeking, puddle off the floor and presented it to the emperor. “Here is your gold, sire. Now please let me go home. My family needs me for Xday. Oh please, sire, let me go to them. I love them so.”

“Very well,” said the emperor. “But I will keep both of the magic geese. And you shall receive no gold, nor any baronetage. You have tried my patience too sorely.”

So Karl spent Xday with his family, laughing and feasting on a roast goose—which Giselle bought from a poultry dealer. So relieved was he to be alive, that old Karl opened up his heart to his loved ones as never before—and the good feelings lasted on through the rest of the year.

And the emperor? The emperor grew ever richer as he ran the contents of the royal treasury over and over through the bodies of his ever-growing flock of repeatedly subdivided magic geese, who stayed with him for a whole year. But on the eve of the next Xday, the geese herded the emperor, and all his family, and all his court, into the emperor’s flying saucers and flew them away forever—easy as pie. With no more emperors, Planet X became a more sacred place.

Hail Gaia, full of synchronicity, the universe is with thee. Blessed art though amongst dynamical systems, and blessed are thy strange attractors. Holy Gaia, mother of life, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

============

Written in 1993.

Christmas Forever
, Tor Books, 1993.

I’ve always loved the classic fairy tales, and this is a retake on one of them. I wrote this for a volume of Christmas stories.

Carlo the homeless artist was walking on the beach late one day in February with a tinfoil pipe and the last crumbs of a sinsemilla bud in the pouch of his sweatshirt when a family of tourists came strolling up the beach snapping electronic strobe pictures of the crashing majestic sea. Against the dazzling orange luster of the failing sunset and the crazy backwards arching gyrations of the foam flecks seemingly caught—imprisoned!—in the harsh thyristor beams, the Flintstones-like family seemed not only ludicrous but offensive, threatening all the peaceful possibilities of this beach, spoiling the end of Carlo’s hard-worked, wasted day. On impulse he seized a gnarled log of salt-sodden driftwood and waved it over his head like a caveman’s club (not that any caveman, probably, would have been so aware of the club’s contours as Carlo, who was wondering helplessly, as he approached the brightly clad middle Americans, if the club mightn’t be buffed to a fine sheen, blow-torched ever so slightly to enhance the natural weathering, coated with varnish, and sold at the weekly Surf City flea market), and bore down screaming on all the kith and kin and ilk and issue of Farmer Brownshirt, which redoubtable gentlemen gracefully sidestepped Carlo’s mad plunge, plucked the weapon from his impassioned grasp, and coolly laid a dam across Carlo’s raging, stoned, grandiose stream of consciousness.

As a Surf City taxpayer—he paid sales tax, didn’t he?—Carlo had every theoretical right to expect the police to take his side, but no, no, no, not with pot in his pocket. The voters of Surf City had recently approved an initiative to become a DFZ, or “Drug-Free Zone.”

Carlo’s fourteen-year-old pick-up truck was impounded and auctioned off; everything in the back (oxyacetylene torches, cans of resin, and miscellaneous clock parts and brass pencil-holder inserts) was stolen while the truck sat in the police parking lot. His driver’s license was suspended, and he was sentenced to either thirty days in jail or a “diversion program,” which meant thirty twelve-step meetings in thirty days, to be followed by six months of piss tests, with a missed meeting or a dirty test meaning you had to do the thirty days in jail after all. Not that Carlo was planning to do any of that. No fixed address—how would they find him? And who would really care? They’d already gotten the only thing of value Carlo had owned: his truck. Losing the truck rankled.

“It’s your fault!” Carlo screamed at his female partner Dina, as they sat eating someone’s abandoned wet nachos in the rain-splattered gale wailing up from the beach through the cement arches of the Taco Patio. He was acting out his anger over losing his truck. Carlo and Dina had been living together for several months in the cab of that pick-up, and now they had nowhere to go. “Schizos shouldn’t be allowed to vote! What’d you give for your address anyway? My truck’s license plate number?”

Dina had just confessed to Carlo that, standing dizzily in the voting booth, addled by the clouds of winged ants around the ceiling-mounted track lights—the winged ants that only Dina could see—well, she’d confused “DFZ” with “DMZ,” and then remembered “NFZ,” which meant Nuclear-Free Zone, like Oakland, or was that some kind of car? NFX? Anyway, she’d voted for it.

“Shut up, big deal, Carlo, it was just one vote. Don’t yell at me or I’ll kick you in the balls. Maybe the rehab meetings would be good for you. I mean if you get so torn up that you go try to club Barney and Wilma on the beach down there—it’s not realistic.”

“Don’t try to get out of it, Dina. You voted for the DFZ and got me into this mess.
You
should go to the twelve-step meetings, not me. You’d like it. You know there’s gonna be plenty of messed-up well-off guys in the program all hot to meet a down and outer like you. They’ll take you home like a lost kitten, baby. You and them can work the steps.”

“You’re in heavy denial, Carlo. You need rehab. Drugs and alcohol have ruined your life. The Great American Artist. Riiiight. I mean, look at you.”

The tip of Carlo’s tongue was bloody and swollen from where he’d bitten it while gobbling down the warm food they’d given him in jail, and now he’d opened the wound again on the pointy end of a nacho chip. He was wearing polyester slacks, four T-shirts and a sweatshirt with a pouch and a hood. His thinning blonde hair was in long knotted tangles, and his flushed broken-veined face was covered with greasy scraps of beard. He had a white bandage wrapped around his head from where the tourist had clubbed him.

“Look at me? Shit, Dina, look at
you
.”

Much of Dina’s face was hidden by her lank shoulder-length hair, but you could see that her sallow skin was drawn painfully tight over her sharp nose and high cheekbones. In the chill wind, her thin shoulders hunched forward over her flat chest. Like Carlo, she was dressed in a Goodwill outfit—three pairs of torn pantyhose and a beige sweater topped by a green polyester jumper. While talking to Carlo, Dina’s head kept scanning from left to right; she was always on the alert against the approach of winged ants.