Poison from a Dead Sun. Michael Hemmingson

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      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2001, 2013 by Michael Hemmingson

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For Rominna Michelle Hemmingson

      —cross the wounded galaxies we intersect, poison of a dead sun in your brain slowly fading—

      —William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine

      PROLOGUE

      I woke up.

      Everything was quiet. Kelly was beside me, deeply asleep, and she was pregnant. She told me she was pregnant.

      Outside in the world, in the city I lived in, the explosions started. The invasion had begun. I knew I would call on Goldgotha.…

      I just didn’t know what timeline I was in.

      * * * *

      I was in a large gray metallic room. I was not alone. A man I knew, but could not place his name, sat holding his head in his hands. He was bald and had dark Haitian skin.…

      He looked up. “They fooled us all, Nolan,” he said.

      CHAPTER ONE

      GOLDGOTHA V. ARMADILGEDDON; OR, THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF MONSTERS

      I left my homeland in Okinawa and went to college in California. I’d received enough negative response from my family (both my American father and my Japanese mother, divorced) and friends when I expressed a desire to do graduate work under the tutelage of Dr. Ethan Lory. I started to have doubts: was I really doing the right thing? Was this my true path? Should I stay in Japan and become a scientist like my father?

      When I arrived at the University of California, San Diego, and went straight to Dr. Lory’s office, I knew this was the correct path for me.

      There could be no other.

      UCSD was a beautiful facility composed of five colleges on a cliff in La Jolla, overlooking the ocean, in the heart of San Diego’s wealth and prosperity; many movie stars who lived in Malibu and Beverly Hills had second homes in La Jolla—Dr. Seuss and Raymond Chandler had once called the place home.

      Ethan Lory was speaking to a very tall blonde female graduate student about her M.A. thesis on H. G. Wells. She wore a very small and short skirt and revealed a lot of tanned, long leg, and I thought she should be posing for Playboy and not writing about the works of a dead author. She looked at me and got up, flustered, told Lory she would see him later, and departed quickly.

      “Nolan Bender,” I said.

      “Ah, you’re here, finally,” Lory said. He motioned for me to sit down. He was in his mid-fifties, wore a Hawaiian shirt (which he did every day) and khaki slacks and tennis shoes.

      “Yes, sir, I am.”

      “Sir.” He laughed. “Say, let’s go get a drink.”

      * * * *

      “Why monsters?” he said and sighed. We were sharing a pitcher of beer and tequila shots at Porter’s Pub on the UCSD campus. “I tell you,” he said, “I come from a more innocent time. A time when things were black and white, when you knew what and who was evil and who and what was good. There were the bad monsters that wanted to do nothing but wreck cities and cause general havoc and mayhem; and there were the good monsters who helped mankind fight off all kinds of nasties, like the bad monsters and invaders from other dimensions and time travelers with ill intentions. Now, you don’t know who is who and what is what. A monster can be both good and bad; it will save your life and then turn around and stomp on you. You just can’t tell anymore.”

      “For me, it all has to do with Goldgotha,” I said, trying to hide how buzzed I was getting. I wasn’t much of a drinker, not like Lory, who could put them away and still maintain his composure.

      I hiccupped.

      He smiled. “Ah, yes, your claim to fame.”

      Goldgotha was attached to me—like a cancer, is the way I felt at the time; the famous monster had been with me ever since I was a child.

      History—my father was a nuclear physicist, working on Okinawa. He accidentally left some radioactive samples in test tubes at home where I could see them one nosy night when I was seven years old. I intentionally poured the liquid nuclear matter in my goldfish’s bowl, to see what kind of effect it would have on my poor, unsuspecting goldfish. One could academically argue, in the Lacanian or Freudian mode, that deep down in my child psyche, I wanted (desired) to create a monster…and created one I did.

      My goldfish grew slowly overnight, after I had gone to sleep, and by morning it had escaped its water bowl. It was the size of a cat. It smashed a window and went out into the world. Within a week, it was the size of a Goodyear Blimp, and growing bigger by the hour. It could move on land and swim in water and fly whenever it needed to; it also could emit a laser beam from its fishy eyes, for protection and destruction. At first it was considered a bad monster, until, one curious day, three mutated spiders merged into gigantic twenty-four-legged beast and attacked Seattle. Goldgotha (that was the name the media had given my fish) fought this big arachnid and won. Now Goldgotha was considered a good monster. It (he) retreated back to the sea, waiting for another day of kaiju glory.

      My father wasn’t very happy about what I’d done. “There are enough damn monsters in the world, real and imagined,” he said, “and what do you do? You bring another one in it.”

      Lory burped. “So,” he said, “there hasn’t been much activity from Goldgotha lately. Certainly not for the last seven years. Is it true you can just call upon him and he’ll show up?”

      “I only did that once,” I said; “I was ten.”

      “Hmm. What is it with kids and monsters?”

      “This was when that mad scientist’s diseased lung detached itself from his body and wanted to wipe out all of mankind.”

      “Ah, yes, Lungilla! I remember that beast well. Breathed out carcinogens onto people, killing them instantly. Indeed, the disease inside the lung was from a parallel universe. Then Goldgotha, the giant laser-breathing goldfish, emerged from the sea and did battle with Lungilla.”

      I said, with pride, “Goldgotha squished Lungilla flat.”

      “That’s what I have been talking about when I talk about monsters,” said Lory. “In those days, good always triumphed over evil! Nowadays, you see the bad monsters winning and going off to stomp Tokyo.”

      “Why is it always Tokyo?” I asked. “Doesn’t Tokyo get tired of rebuilding only to have everything smashed down again months later?”

      “Economics, kid. The developers and construction companies love it. A steady stream of labor. Frankly, I always had a theory that the yakuza was controlling those monsters—what a great way to wipe out your enemies, blame it on the kaiju, get rebuilding contracts funded by sympathetic world governments. It’s all a political game, always was. And,” he said, “I think Tokyo takes some kind of sick pride in always being wounded. Look at the worldwide attention it gets. But the monsters—well, the monsters have always been merely an extension of our avantpop, post-postmodern, post-kaiju selves. They are connected to the oldest fears and desires of humankind. That’s the meat of our academic field.”

      * * * *

      I, too, was quite fascinated with the cross-disciplinary, interpersonal, and post-ethical historical and contemporary interactions between humans and monsters. After all, my take was beyond academic—I had an interpersonal, historical, and empirical connection with Goldgotha. I think the other graduate students in the Monsters Studies Department resented me for this; none of them had ever had a close encounter with the object of their theories; everything about this field, for them, was distant and suppositional—their information came from books, the TV, and interviews with those who had had contact. While their research