She called him a monstrosity. Other words, some of which I had never heard before: abnormity, perversion of nature, a vile derision of what God had created first, a hideous crime of unnatural science. She said, I was told, “This thing would make Jesus himself vomit!”
Then there were commentators. And news anchors. And hand-held cameras and tripods and long-distance lenses. There were men with uncombed hair and stubble on their faces who found ways to confront us that were heroic. There were awful newspapers one can apparently buy alongside decks of playing cards and various kinds of chewing gum at the check-out in the Rite Aid where I bought him his eyewash.
There was much talk of God and “natural this” and “unnatural that,” most of which seemed very silly to me. But this Franco woman would not stop. She appeared everywhere and said it was clearly an attempt by Godless atheists and some people she called the cultural elite and “limousine liberals” to pervert God’s Will and God’s Way. I was deemed “Dr. Frankenstein” and men with unruly hair and shadowy cheeks found their way into the lab at Eleanor Roosevelt Tech, seeking busbars and galvanic coils and Van de Graaff generators. But, of course, there were no such things in the lab. Not even the crèche in which I’d created the tiny man.
It grew worse and worse.
In the halls, no one would speak to me. I had to carry him in my inside pocket, out of fear. Even Jennifer Cuffee was frightened and became opposed to me and to him. She demanded I return his clothing. I did so, of a certainty, but I thought it was, as the tiny man put it, “Rather craven for someone who used to be so nice.”
There were threats. A great many threats. Some of them curiously misspelled—its, rather than it’s—and suchlike. Once, someone threw a cracked glass door off an old phone booth through my window. The tiny man hid, but didn’t seem too frightened by this sudden upheaval of a once-kindly world. People who had nothing to do with me or my work or the tiny man, people who were not hurt or affected in any way, became vocal and menacing and so fervid one could see the steam rising off them. If there had been a resemblance between my tiny man and the race of men, all such similarity was gone. He seemed virtually, well, godlike in comparison.
And then I was told we had to go.
“Where?” I said to them.
“We don’t care,” they answered, and they had narrow mouths.
I resisted. I had created this tiny man, and I was there to protect him. There is such a thing as individual responsibility. It is the nature of grandeur in us. To deny it is to become a beast of the fields. No way. Not I.
And so, with my tiny man—who now mostly wore Kleenex—but who was making excellent progress with Urdu and Quechua, and needlework— we took to the hills.
As students at Eleanor Roosevelt put it, we “got in the wind.”
I know how to drive, and I have a car. Though there are those who call me geezer and ask if I use two Dixie Cups and a waxed string to call my friends, if my affection for Ginastera and Stravinsky gets in the way of my appreciation of Black Sabbath and Kanye West, I am a man of today. And as with individual responsibility for myself, and my deeds, I take the world on sum identically. I choose and reject. That, I really and truly believe, is the way a responsible individual acts.
And so, I have a car, I use raw sugar instead of aspartame, my pants do not sag around my shoetops, and I drive a perfectly utilitarian car. The make and year do not matter for this disquisition. The fate of the tiny man does.
We fled, “got in the wind.”
But, as Isabella has said, “Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved,” and everywhere we went, at some small moment, my face would be recognized by a bagger in a WalMart, or a counter-serf in a Taco Bell, and the next thing I would know, there would be (at minimum) a jackal-faced blonde girl with a hand-microphone, or some young man with unruly shark hair and the look of someone who didn’t stand close enough to his razor that morning, or even a police officer. I had done nothing, my good friend the tiny man had done nothing, but what they all said to us, in one way or another, was something I think Alan Ladd said to Lee Van Cleef: “Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town, boy.”
We tried West Virginia. It was an unpleasant place.
Oklahoma. The world there was dry, but the people were wet with sweat at our presence.
Even towns that were dying, Detroit, Cleveland, Las Vegas, none of them would have us, not even for a moment.
And then, all because of this terrible blonde woman Franco, who had nothing better to do with her time or her anger, a warrant was sworn out for us. A Federal warrant. We tried to hide, but both of us had to eat. And neither of us, as clever as he had become, as agile as I had become, were adepts at “being on the dodge.” And in a Super 8 motel in Aberdeen, South Dakota, the Feds cornered us.
The tiny man stood complacently on the desk blotter, and we looked honestly at each other. He knew, as I knew. I felt a little like God himself. I had created this tiny man, who had harmed no one, who at prime point should have elicited no more serious a view than, “How interesting: a tiny man.”
But I had been ignorant of the laws of human nature, and we both knew it was all my responsibility. The beginning, the term of the adventure, and now, the ending.
I held the Aberdeen, South Dakota telephone book in my hands, raised it above my head and, in the moment before I brought it smashing down as ferociously as I could, the tiny man looked up at me, wistful, resolved, and said, “Mother.”
I stood staring down at him, and could barely see through my tears. He looked up at me with compassion and understanding and said, “Yes, it would always have had to come to this,” and then, being god, he destroyed the world, leaving only the two of us, and now, because he is a compassionate deity, he will destroy me, an even tinier man.
Apart from his 2006 SFWA Grand Master Award, this is Harlan Ellison’s fourth Nebula, His “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Tick-tockman” won the very first short story Nebula in 1965, and with this year’s award in that category for “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” it makes Mr. Ellison the only person ever to win in that category three times.
THE JAGUAR HOUSE, IN SHADOW
Aliette de Bodard
“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” is my second attempt to take the Aztec culture into the twentieth century: my earlier attempt had left me dissatisfied, so I started over with this story. Part of the challenge (and of what had frustrated me with the earlier attempt) is making sure that “modern” doesn’t end up equating “twentieth-century Western culture”; and equally making sure that the Aztec culture doesn’t turn out to be an ossified version of what the conquistadores saw (which would be as realistic as, say, modern-day England still following the mores and social customs of Shakespeare’s time).
One fast way to do this—and the point to address first and foremost—was to deal with Aztec religion, which had been bound up with war and the waging of battles. As I took the society forward in time, I imagined war would have given way to espionage (the same way it did in our twentieth century); and more particularly to industrial espionage. The Jaguar Knights therefore shifted from the elite troops of the fifteenth century to the spies and agents provocateurs of the twentieth century: the eponymous Jaguar House is a mixture between a monastery, a military bootcamp, and the MI6, and I had a lot of fun making up its customs.