THE COURTLY CHRONICLE

  “Peace Breaks Out!”

  After unfortunate family disputes which, incidentally, cost thousands of lives and brought whole sections of the country to a standstill, the Royal family has resolved its differences.

  The palace announced yesterday that the Queen has gone into seclusion to rest after the harrowing events of the past year.

  THE ANGLO-SAXON STAR

  “King Throws Queen In Jail!”

  Though the rebellion was a family affair, the King has responded harshly. Yesterday he locked up the Queen and threw away the key.

  Posing as a chamber maid, a Star reporter managed to sneak into the Queen’s quarters for an exclusive interview. Please turn to Page 3.

  THE EVENING JESTER

  “Queen Claims: I Was Only Trying To Help!”

  According to an exclusive interview printed in this morning’s Star, Queen Eleanor claims that King Henry completely misunderstood her intentions when she and her three eldest sons raised an army and launched an attack against him.

  Richard “Dickie” the Lion Heart was not available for comment, having gone off to some other country to slaughter people who never did him any harm. However, Prince Harry had this to say: “Well, um, my mom told me to do it.”

  Geoff was also not available for comment, as he was babysitting brother John at the time of this reporter’s interviews at the palace. Too young to have participated in the war, Johnny stayed at home and pulled the wings off flies.

  THE MEDIEVAL TIMES, ca. 1189

  “King Dies: Long Live the King?”

  King Henry II died yesterday afternoon, and the succession remains uncertain.

  Might as well turn to the financial section.

  THE COURTLY CHRONICLE

  “Henry Heads Heavenward!”

  His Grace King Henry II is survived by: his wife Queen Eleanor, eleven years his senior; his son Geoffrey, who is quoted as saying, “Finally! I thought the old bugger would never die!”; his mistress, the young Princess Alais who has been affianced to nearly all the king’s sons at one point or another; and his sons Richard and John who could not be reached for comment at the time of the King’s death, as they were busy rebelling against him again.

  My Husband Became a Zombie

  and it Saved Our Marriage

  by Karen Haber

  Karen Haber sent me her biographical information with an Elvis stamp on the envelope. Apart from being a woman of taste and discernment, she has had her short fiction appear in such publications as Asimov’s, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Full Spectrum, After the King, The Further Adventures of Batman, among others. Her novels include The Mutant Season (co-authored with Robert Silverberg), The Mutant Prime, Mutant Star, and Mutant Legacy. With husband Robert Silverberg she edits the original SF hardcover anthology Universe, and is currently working on the first of an SF trilogy, The Woman Without a Shadow, for DAW Books.

  She assures me that this story is not autobiographical.

  The sun broke through the morning fog and spilled down the pine-scented hills, through the spotted plate-glass window of the weekly Hillsidean’s offices, across the cigarette-burned city desk, and right into the pale blue eyes of Theola Simmons, Managing Editor.

  She blinked grumpily at the searing light and looked back down at the blue editing marks she had just made on the day’s galleys. Theola preferred cloudy weather: she got more work done.

  The swivel chair creaked beneath her as she turned away from the creeping sunlight. She had one more column to correct: Scotty Wilkins’ weekly neighborhood news roundup. Theola didn’t care for Wilkins’ cheery airhead style but knew that if she fired him she would have to find another willing victim to do the job for less than minimum-wage or do it herself. And Wilkins was certainly at the top—or bottom—of his form today:

  —Somebody’s been feeding miniature poodles to our Nessy again. While that’s okay, remember that Nessy’s a big fish and needs a lot of protein or else she complains. Don’t bother with the small stuff. She prefers large dogs, deer, or teenage boys between fifteen and eighteen years of age.

  —Speaking of Nessy, Ron and Glinda Chambers are the winners of the town lottery this quarter. They get the cheery job of cleaning Nessy’s pond. Congratulations, folks, and watch out for those front teeth.

  —Hitler has been arrested—again—for shoplifting at McLendow’s Hosiery: she’s been a sucker for Hanes sales ever since her South American sex-change operation. A hundred dollar fine for Hillside’s very own fuehrerette. McLendow’s is threatening to prosecute next time. Hey, Adolfa, a word of advice: try support hose. They last longer.

  —More on that UFO that crash-landed in Brawley’s market parking lot yesterday: as we feared, the craft is a total wreck. But the passengers escaped with minor injuries and Charley Brawley hired them to collect tickets at the parking lot. So smile when you see them, folks, and remember, they’re new in town.

  —Calling all our maniac gardeners: Pastor Grigsby still has that pile of monster earthworms. They’re big and juicy and nasty and they’re free. Just bring several large pails with good lids, an electric cattle prod, and heavy gloves.

  —The Neason Siamese Twins were the hit of the flaming volleyball tournament in Hillside Park: one spikes, the other doesn’t, and both carry fire extinguishers. Nice going, kids. Keep that spirit smokin’ in the semifinals.

  —The Widow Karsh saw John Lennon’s ghost again: this time he was standing in her sink lecturing her about her garbage disposal. Widow Karsh has called several repairmen and an exterminator. She would ask all you Lennon fans out there to stop putting old record albums and candles on her lawn: it scares her dog.

  —Selma Roundtree reports that her husband, David, escaped from the house last night and was last seen lumbering down Main Street toward the freeway. David, as you may remember, is a zombie, and his day vision isn’t too good. Selma is beside herself with worry. Anybody who happens to see David should call Selma or Dr. Nkebolo, ASAP.

  Standard stuff, Theola thought as she put down the galleys. Another Lennon sighting! And the damned zombie loose for the hundredth time: Selma should buy a leash for him. Hillside was a nice town but it was so-o-o predictable sometimes.

  With the relief and gratitude that only comes from finishing an odious task, she signed off on the galleys and left the pile by Senior Editor Ed Deerfield’s computer terminal.

  Dan Hockstader, typesetter and photo stripper, came in, swinging his take-out bag of tripe.

  “Seen the aliens?” he asked.

  “Not yet. They weren’t on duty when I got in at six.”

  He blinked at her from behind faceted, triple-thickness eye glasses. “If you do, ask them what they think of the way the market’s been acting. They’re pretty good about that stuff.”

  “Thanks, but I usually get my stock tips from Pops Shorter’s Siamese, Bathsheba. She hasn’t led me wrong yet.” Theola waved farewell but Dan was oblivious, already chowing down on his pig intestines and snorting with laughter over the sports galleys.

  She tossed her thick black hair behind her neck and sashayed out the door, taking small, careful steps in her high-heeled Japanese wooden sandals.

  The blast of sunshine nearly blinded her.

  “Damn!” Groping for her sunglasses, she felt like a bat caught outside of its cave. It was an unseasonably bright, warm June day in the San Francisco Bay area—at least seventy-five degrees—with nary a hint of lovely, cool gray fog to make things comfortable. Theola reminded herself to reapply her sunscreen and look for her sunhat. Her glasses were at the bottom of her black velvet bag. One of the lenses came loose and she ducked, squinting, in a doorway, trying to fit it back into the frame.

  No matter what Theola did, she couldn’t get the lens to fit. Finally, in disgust, she flung the lens back into her purse, shoved the glasses onto her nose, and closed her exposed eye.

  “Hey, Theola,” called a familiar voice on her blind side. “Nice glasses. Where can I get a pair?”

  She turned and saw Jamie the six-foot spider sitting at one of the picnic tables outside of Cooney’s Ice House. He had a mug of root beer clutched in one feeler and waved two of his hairy multijointed legs at her. She peered at Jamie’s faceted optic receptors and wondered why she had never noticed before how much he resembled Dan Hockstader. “Root beer again, Jamie?”

  “I’m an arachnoid of habit. Join me?”

  “Only for a minute.” Theola took a seat in the shade and helped herself to one of the fried ants on the spider’s plate. “Not bad,” she said. “Pretty crunchy. I like that touch of hot pepper.”

  “I asked them to use chili oil.”

  Boom!

  At the sound of the nearby explosion, Theola jumped in her seat.

  “Must have been Fred Matthias,” Jamie said. “Poor guy. Sound like he finally ran out of antacids.”

  “It was bound to happen, sooner or later.” said Theola. A whisper of wind raised goosebumps along her arms. The murmur grew to a shriek and an icy gust buffeted Hillside’s Main Street, nearly upending the table and throwing Theola into Jamie’s lap.

  The light around them flickered, turned red, then green, and finally back to regular yellow. The wind died down and the summer heat returned. Two figures stood in the middle of the street. They wore medieval-style clothing and carried huge bundles wrapped in animal hide.

  “Ginny, Roger, welcome back!” Jamie called.

  “Hey, you guys,” Theola said. “How was the thirteenth century?”

  “The food was better in the 1660s, Roger said, doffing his crumpled hat. “But the bugs were worse.”

  Ginny shed her heavy coat. “It’s great to be back. The more I travel, the more I enjoy coming home. See you all after we’ve bathed—it’ll be the first time in weeks.”

  Theola waved as they receded down the street, glanced at her watch, took one more bite of fried ant, and stood up. “Jamie, let’s get together for coffee sometime.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay. Watch out for that root beer, now.” Theola hurried across the street and into the Brawley Market parking lot. A yellow poster on a telephone pole caught her attention.

  “Wanted: single white male or female subjects for controlled experimentation ..

  Something sharp was poking her, hard, in the back. “Stick ’em up,” said a high, piping voice.

  Theola spun around and stared through her one-lens sunglasses in amazement. A group of Girl Scouts stared back at her. They were all blond, all freckled, two wore pigtails, and one of them had lost her two front teeth. The shortest Girl Scout held a huge yellow and chartreuse water cannon with its sights trained on Theola.

  “Pardon me?” she said.

  “Just act normal and no one will get wet.”

  Theola looked with horror at the cruel orange muzzle of the water cannon. “What do you want?”

  “A ride to Franklin Park.”

  “But that’s on the other side of the tunnel!”

  The girls nodded. Their smiles were ugly, especially the one with missing teeth.

  “I haven’t eaten lunch yet,” Theola said, hoping to enlist their sympathy and thereby gain time to think.

  “We’ll give you a hot dog once we get there,” said the tallest one, who also had the most freckles.

  Theola shuddered. “No, thanks.” She stared in revulsion at the water cannon. These kids would soak her to the skin, ruin her dress. The only thing she disliked more than glaring sunlight was water. Everybody in her family was phobic about getting wet. “What the hell,” she said. “Come on.” They marched right past the green naked alien parking lot attendant.

  “Good morning,” it wheezed through its membrane. “Buy low, sell high.”

  Help, Theola thought loudly. I’m being kidnapped by a bunch of Girl Scouts.

  The alien fixed its huge moist purple eye upon Theola in what might have been a look of comprehension and encouragement, punched a ticket in the time clock, and handed it to her.

  Hey, she thought, aren’t you guys all telepathic? You should be reading my thoughts and calling the police.

  The alien nodded. “Dow closed up 40 yesterday. Have a nice day.”

  “You’re a big help,” Theola muttered. She unlocked the door of her blue Edsel. Her stomach rumbled. “Hop in, girls.”

  The ride through the tunnel was dark and peaceful. But all too soon Theola had once again emerged into the merciless sunshine.

  “Turn right here,” the littlest Girl Scout snarled.

  Obediently, Theola pulled into a driveway next to a sawtoothed wooden sign which read: “Franklin Park. Open 6 to 6. No dogs.”

  “We’re looking for the William Howard Taft campsite.”

  “Can’t you girls just walk from here?”

  The water cannon jabbed Theola in the ribs. She winced.

  “No, I suppose not.” She drove perhaps a half mile farther and stopped the car. There was no need to go on. The park was awash with girl scouts: a veritable sea of green uniforms, sashes, and berets. It was a frightful sight. Theola clamped her jaw and vowed to stay calm.

  With nary a murmur of thanks nor even a curtsey, her captors sprang out of the car to join their friends. In a moment they were lost in the crowd, indistinguishable from the other milling girls pulling each other’s hair, complaining, and eating.

  Didn’t your mothers teach any of you manners? Theola thought. No, of course not. Besides, there’s probably a Girl Scout badge for kidnapping newspaper editors. But at least she was free again. If only she could find her way out of here and back to the familiar sights of Hillside.

  The air was filled with the scent of grilling meat and the sound of prepubescent shrieks. Theola began to feel dizzy and mildly nauseated. The car was surrounded, swamped by tall, short, fat, and thin scouts. She couldn’t move forward or back.

  Panic clouded her thinking and she leaped from her car, gasping, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the lunging crowd. But she was hampered by her purple sheared-velvet hobble skirt and wooden sandals, forced to take quick, mincing tiny steps. She stumbled over sticks, tripped over tree roots. An ominous crack gave her a two-second warning before the heel of her left sandal came away from the sole in two pieces. Disgusted, Theola kicked off her shoes. The carpet of pine needles and twigs pricked and bruised her feet but she had no choice. She was in the midst of a ghastly nightmare: trapped in a girl scout jamboree.

  There were hot dogs, potato salad, great brimming tubs of cole slaw: it was horrible, just horrible. Plates of pink and glistening cold cuts lay, edges curling in the sun as yellow jackets nuzzled them lovingly. The rustic setting, coyly folksy, all rough-hewn picnic tables and tree stumps, nearly turned Theola’s stomach. It was all so weird and repellent.

  Bravely, she forged on, past the scenes of raucous merriment, the smells of a hundred outdoor grills, and into a towering grove of Monterey pines. The maddening sounds of the jamboree receded. For a moment she was blessedly alone in the park with only the whine of the mosquitoes and whisper of the tree limbs in the wind for company.

  Suddenly a new and even more dreadful sound assailed her ears. Voices, male and mellifluous, rose up in lush and lifting four-part harmony.

  “Sweet A—del-ine. My A—del-ine.”

  Theola peered out fearfully from between two pines.

  Before her, the grove was filled with portly middle-aged men in red and white striped blazers and white straw boaters.

  All around the grove, barbershop quartets were tuning up. Men in red and white striped jackets and straw boaters leaned, shoulder to shoulder, humming. Theola wheeled in her tracks, whimpering like a cornered animal. Girl Scouts to the left of her, singing barbers on her right. Wherever she turned, alien weirdness pressed in on her. What was next, a pancake lunch with the PTA?

  She hurried past the raffish singing men and found a path which seemed to lead toward the park entrance. Hurry, Theola thought. Get away before you’re ill in public.

  She turned left down the path, followed it for perhaps half a mile, emerged from a thicket of rhododendrons and stood, wondering which way to turn.

  Behind her, something enormous roared.

  Theola looked over her shoulder.

  A huge black-and-yellow bus was bearing down, horns blaring. She jumped out of the way just in time but was nearly hit by a lime green Volkswagen beetle which beeped menacingly as it sped past. Theola staggered, disoriented and frightened in the hot sunlight. She blinked in disbelief.

  It couldn’t be true. This absolutely couldn’t be happening to her.

  She was standing in the middle of a busy street in a thriving suburban town. Everywhere she looked she saw car washes and supermarkets. Clean-cut cheerful young people. Dogs and cats. Little children in aerodynamically-sound, state-of-the-art strollers padded in drool-proof nonsexist colors and natural fabrics. Coffee shops where young mothers congregated over steaming cups of capuccino, oblivious to their preschool troops in rubber-bottomed toilet-training regalia gumming discarded biscotti, falling off the slatted green French bistro chairs, or chasing one another in complicated slaloms between and around the marble-topped tables.

  Boys and girls in long T-shirts were wound round one another, walking down the street or sitting on benches kissing—mwah—loudly, wetly, and long.

  Planters dotted the sidewalk, filled with colorful mixtures of pansies and impatiens: pink and white and orange and yellow. The sun shone brightly. Neighbors called out greetings to one another. A white truck selling ice cream drove slowly down the street ringing its bell. The scent of fresh-mown grass filled the air. It was all so horribly cheerful. Theola grew dizzy under the ruthless onslaught of unremitting cheerfulness.