Immortal Lycanthropes

VIII. On the C


When you say I am a thief, Pete, you lie. You can kill me, but still I will say you lie.

Jack London, The Cruise of the “Dazzler”


chapter 1.


There is a famous paradox, probably already familiar to you from the letters of Paul: Epimenides the Cretan has stated that all Cretans are liars. But if Cretans are liars, who trusts Epimenides the Cretan when he tells us all Cretans are liars? If you are a space robot, your circuits have already been fried by reading this.

Slightly less well-known is the fact that Plato, who proclaimed that all poets are liars, was himself a poet. “I wish I were the night, so I could watch you sleep with its thousand eyes,” he wrote. In Greek it’s a poem. Plato was therefore a liar.

Or was he? I mention Plato in the first place because he also proposed, through the mouth of Socrates, that so-called learning is merely recollecting what we, or our immortal souls, already knew. Usually this, like much Platonism, sounds spurious to me—Plato also said that humans were once four-armed hermaphrodites, and I think I would remember that if it were true—but Myron offers a curious case.

I have written a great many stories in my time, as I have mentioned, and certainly many of them involved a young man learning various things. Myron, at the very least, is or has been an amnesiac. For him, if anyone, learning can be recollection. What did he learn in the Fortress of the Id (as I call it)? Or what did he recall there? As he was leaving, dashing through the woods, did he think he was wiser than he had been two months before? Did he think he was as wise as he had been ten years before?

To be handed, after years or even a lifetime of powerlessness, a chance at power, this must be a heady feeling. But Myron had lost it, and whether he had thrown it away in the pursuit of absolute truth, or whether it had been wrenched from his grasp by a capricious fate—well, it was probably a little of both. The woods were cold and filled with burrs, and Myron was alone. For a good twenty feet the dim light from the blaze lit his way, and then abruptly it was dark. Whatever tears he shed in the blackness may have been for Spenser and may have been for himself.

When he finally stumbled onto a highway, his fancy suit was in rags and he was covered in mud. He kept his head down and stuck his thumb out. He asked the first trucker who picked him up if he was headed for the West Coast, but this was, of course, the wrong road for that. They were going to Chicago, which, Myron said, was good enough. Frankly, it was the only place he knew where someone he knew was.

Over the next two hundred and fifty miles, Myron passed the time inventing stories about how he had gotten separated from his Chicagoan family and cleaning himself with several-dozen premoistened towelettes. “I can give myself a complete bath with those things and still keep one hand on the wheel,” his driver said. “Wanna see?” But Myron faked asleep, and soon he really was.

Once within Chicago city limits, Myron hopped out at a stoplight and ran the wrong way up a one-way street, leaving behind only his hastily shouted thanks. Then he just looked up the Central Anarchist Council in a phone book. He went to the address and claimed he had burned his face off with acid protesting the existence of the bourgeoisie. The guy he was talking to didn’t know what the bourgeoisie was, but he thought burning your face off with acid was pretty hard-core, and he just went ahead and told Myron where to find Gloria. At a bowling alley, passed out in a booth near the back. She was wearing a powder blue tracksuit, with a unicorn on the top. Her shoes were not regulation. Half a cigarette had smoldered out in her hand. As Myron slid in across from her, Gloria’s head snapped up.

“Hello,” he said.

Gloria said nothing.

“I want to go to the West Coast to meet the Rosicrucians,” Myron said. “But I have no idea where they are, and I have no way of getting there. Can you help me?”

“Follow me,” said Gloria, lighting another cigarette.

They went out a back door into an alley. “Tie your shoe,” Gloria said. She held the doomsday device and the compound bow while Myron bent over. When he straightened up again, Gloria was atop a fire escape, her clothes a little disheveled. She was looking at the cardboard tube with doomsday inside it.

“Actually, I don’t want this,” she said, and dropped it down to Myron, who caught it after some bobbling.

“Hey, come back with my bow,” Myron then said.

“No one knows where the Rosicrucians are,” Gloria said. “You should probably just ask the Nine Unknown Men.”

“They want to kill me,” Myron said.

“They do, huh? You’re better at this than I thought.”

“Give me back my bow.”

“I’ faith, Myron, I’m doing this to teach you a valuable lesson about the world. No one else is going to take the time to teach you these things—”

Myron shouted up, interrupting, “Mignon Emanuel gave me lessons all the time.”

“She did? Like what?”

“Like about confirmation bias.”

“What the devil is that?”

“That’s when you notice things that agree with what you already believe more often than things that contradict your beliefs.”

“I’ve never noticed anything of the sort. Anyway, she was just using you, I heard all about the conference. No one else—”

“Spenser taught me all about woodcraft. He taught me how to make a fire with a soda can, and how to build a shelter.”

“The moose taught you how to build a fire?”

“And he taught me all about the lycanthropes, and how there’s one of each species and everything.”

“No, I taught you that. I taught you that in Shoreditch.”

“Well, he taught me more, about the Time of Troubles, and who killed who.”

“That was all implicit in what I told you,” Gloria shouted down. “You could have pieced it together yourself.”

“And he told me about meeting you in Scotland.”

“I had no way of knowing you’d even be interested in that.”

“And he taught me how things always get worse.”

“I could have told you that! Did you think I couldn’t have told you that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry! I’ll show you what I know.” Gloria turned, up on the fire escape, from an old woman into a gorilla. Her clothes stretched out but stayed on the gorilla; they just fit poorly. A cigarette still dangled from her lips. She jumped down to the alleyway and then became a woman again. The tracksuit was bunched up at the knee and off kilter around the shoulders. “No Unknown Men, then,” she said. “Some of us have met the Rosicrucians, although there are only three that I know of still alive. The lion’s one, but he’s right out. There’s the ring-tailed lemur.”

“I strangled her unconscious, and then her house blew up. Also, I don’t think she likes me.”

“Her house blew up? You are better at this than I’d thought. Well, that leaves the coyote.”

“And you’ll tell me where the coyote is?”

“Oh, Myron, that’s not what I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you so much more. You’re going to learn life on the C.”

On the sea was not something Myron had expected to hear in Chicago, and he had a bout of excitement mixed with a minor panic attack that his knowledge of geography was totally kinked. But the C was for con.

“I would really prefer not to steal from anyone,” Myron objected.

“What about when you liberated that suit of clothes in Shoreditch?”

“I was going to freeze to death! I needed that suit of clothes, and it was an emergency!” Looking back, Myron wasn’t sure this was true. He had been awfully cavalier about the theft.

“Well, we’re not even going to steal anything at all. We’re going to persuade people to give us stuff. It’s the only way we’ll be able to find the Rosicrucians. And anyway, we’ll be like Robin Hood, or some romantic jewel thief. We’ll only steal from the rich, and they can afford it.”

Myron was skeptical, but desperate. “Only from the rich?”

“The haute bourgeoisie only.”

But this, too, turned out to be a lie.