I Can Transform You Read online

  I CAN TRANSFORM YOU

  Maurice Broaddus

  Apex Publications

  Lexington, KY

  Apex Voices: Book 2

  This collection is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  I Can Transform You

  Copyright © 2013 Maurice Broaddus

  Cover art © 2013 David Pearce

  Cover design by Deanna Knippling

  Interior design by Jason Sizemore

  “I Can Transform You” © 2013 Maurice Broaddus

  “Pimp My Airship” © 2010, Maurice Broaddus (Apex Magazine, issue 2)

  “Introduction” © 2013, Matt Forbeck

  “Apex Voices: What Do You Hear” © 2013, Jason Sizemore

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Published by Apex Publications, LLC

  PO Box 24323

  Lexington, KY 40524

  www.apexbookcompany.com

  First Edition: May 2013

  For Rodney Carlstrom,

  The best intern a guy could ask for

  (accept this dedication in lieu of actual pay)

  — Contents —

  Apex Voices: What Do You Hear?

  Introduction

  I Can Transform You

  Pimp My Airship

  Acknowledgments

  Biographies

  Apex Voices: What Do You Hear?

  Welcome to the second book of our Apex Voices series! The first book, Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick, will be a tough act to follow, but as Maurice Broaddus has proven time and again during his career, he has the skills to accomplish about anything.

  Which leads me to Maurice’s accomplishments…there are a lot of them. The Apex Voices series has a goal of bringing relatively new talents to the eyes of readers, and Maurice has reached a point in his career that he might be considered…well-known. He’s had a mass market paperback trilogy (along with an accompanying compendium) published by Angry Robot Books. There have been two high-profile anthologies from Apex (the Stoker Award-nominated Dark Faith and Dark Faith: Invocations, both co-edited with Jerry Gordon) that picked up awards and numerous reprints in the annual Year’s Best collections. His short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine, Asimov’s, and a host of popular anthologies. In fact, by this point in his career, you could say he’s verging on prolific.

  So why include Maurice Broaddus in a series that is targeted to feature “new talents”?

  To lay the dirty truth bare…the Apex Voices series, prior to the release of book #01, has been percolating in my grand plans for several years. All along, I had considered Maurice to be one of my prime targets, and signed him several years ago to be a part of the Voices books. Then he went and made a name for himself before I could release this book. All the same, we’re pushing forward.

  Maurice Broaddus is one of the most unique individuals I’ve ever met. Every facet of his life appears to be at odds with another part of his life. He’s a devout Christian, yet he writes graphic horror that challenges the perceptions of Christianity (see Orgy of Souls, a novella from Apex that he co-wrote with Wrath James White). He takes joy in the frequent occurrence of being the only black man at a genre convention. He is not the type of person to expect anything from anyone (other than, perhaps, a bit of intellectual civility), but he works tirelessly to help those in need (his list of charity work is even more impressive than his bibliography). He’s British, Jamaican, and American, who lives in the heartland of the United States.

  Despite all this, Maurice is NEVER the fish out of water. He’s the one who immerses himself in whatever situation the world throws at him, and you’ll always, always find him at the top of the pile wherever he goes.

  This inexact amalgamation of intellect, social awareness, and social responsibility bleeds through his fiction (he’s also a prolific blogger and essayist, but let us focus on his fiction for the purpose of our introduction) that produces an important and vivid voice in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The shorter of the two works in this book, “Pimp My Airship,” is what I consider an important work of steampunk. The first time I read “Pimp My Airship” was the first time I had ever read a steampunk work that didn’t whitewash the world. His story contained…cultural significance…it didn’t avert its gaze from the hard realities of turn of the century race relations. And like all his work, it was serious AND funny.

  The heart of this book, “I Can Transform You,” is a novella that exemplifies why Maurice’s voice is so important in the SF genre. Here we have an extended study of society built on the framework of steampunk and noir conventions. He explores gentrification. Racism. Stereotypes. Corporate culture and greed. Read “I Can Transform You” more than once. There is a lot going on, more than I could ever hope to do justice to with this brief introduction.

  I hope you enjoy book #02 in our Apex Voices series.

  Jason Sizemore

  Publisher/Editor–in–Chief

  Introduction

  Matt Forbeck

  Maurice Broaddus is one hell of a gifted writer, and you, my friend, are in for a treat. Don’t let me spoil any of it for you. Go ahead and read the rest of this book and come back here when you’re done.

  Back already? Good. Go check out The Knights of Breton Court too. You can thank me later.

  Finished up with that? Start hunting down the rest of his work. Orgy of Souls, written with Wrath James White. (His is one of the all-time great names. Can you imagine growing up like that?) Bleed With Me. More short stories than I care to list.

  Keep looking around. Scour his website. Follow him on Twitter. Figure out where the good bits are hidden, and dig them up for yourself.

  Got it? That’s a lot of good reading, and it should keep you busy for a while.

  You’re welcome.

  I’ve known Maurice for many years, and I counted him as a friend long before I had the pleasure of reading his work. Our mutual pal Lucien Soulban introduced us at a lunch at Gen Con many years back — yes, we’re gamers and geeks too, and proud of it — and that’s a tradition we’ve managed to keep up just about every year since.

  He’s a black man of faith living in a white, secular nation. (Go read Dark Faith, an anthology he edited with Jerry Gordon, to watch him grapple with that.) He’s of Jamaican descent, yet he resides in Indianapolis. He can tell you stories about his father that will curl your hair, and at the same time you can see the love for his boys radiate from the smile that takes him when he speaks of them.

  He can be serious and hilarious by dizzying turns. He’s an explorer who (like all of us) still struggles to find his way. He wrestles with the big problems and eschews easy answers.

  He embraces every bit of who he is, and he pours that into his work. And we’re all the better for it.

  I’m not much for examining the author rather than the work, for stirring around in biographical analysis. All too often that can lead to readers making silly assumptions about the writer that only pan out in overactive imaginations and desperately reaching college essays.

  But in Maurice’s case, it’s important. It speaks to who he is and what he writes, so it’s worth keeping in mind.

  He writes stories most people couldn’t touch. Even if we could come up with the ideas on our own, we couldn’t pull them off.

  During one of those legendary Gen Con lunches, we — the whole table, really — got into a discussion about steampunk and the tendency it has to gloss right over the ugliest parts of history, especially when it comes to things like slavery or race. Many steampunk stories fog our view of history with a smear of nost
algic Vaseline on the lens. They make the time before electronic technology seem like a wonderful, atavistic adventure — which might have been true if you happened to be white, male, and wealthy.

  Maybe.

  Maurice came up with the title for one of the stories in this volume (the one in your hands) that day: “Pimp My Airship.” That alone was so damn funny we all insisted that he write it, knowing he’d do a better job than any of us.

  After that, I went and wrote a story myself called “In the Belly of the Behemoth” for an anthology edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg called Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance. The book collected steampunk romance stories, and I put a twist on mine by writing it from the point of view of a young woman living as a plantation slave in the Deep South during the Civil War. I had a lot of fun with it, using it to call some of steampunk’s more asinine assumptions into question.

  And then Maurice goes and writes “Pimp My Airship.”

  It doesn’t just examine those genre assumptions. It chops them up, grinds them into a fine powder, rolls them into some quality paper, and then smokes them for fun. It simultaneously dismantles the genre and slaps it back together into something newer, fresher, and — dammit — more interesting than the original.

  He does a lot of the same in “I Can Transform You,” but with a more subtle touch. He takes the buddy-cop drama, drops it into an alien-touched future, and slips it a Mickey full of distilled noir laced with racial reality. While you can see the echoes of all those influences, it’s something entirely different, new, and — well — Maurice.

  As you read the stories in this book, watch Maurice play with genre conventions. On the surface, he can seem like a kid being careless with a new set of toys, mashing them together for the sheer joy of it.

  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but scratch that skin and you’ll fine some serious muscles working beneath its pretty facade. Maurice knows the genres he’s toying with, and he’s playing not only with them but with his readers as well. Time and again he tiptoes straight up to the precipice of a cliché only to spin about with an artful pirouette and a Puck’s smile on his lips.

  He likes to sucker you in with dreamlike imagery that gives you an off-kilter sense of place. Then he stabs you with a sharp metaphor or observation that shows you the sharp point of taking such things for granted.

  Don’t be fooled.

  Read the stories. Then let them live in you a while before you come back and read them again. They’ll haunt your thoughts and maybe you’ll wake up one day to find your world tinted differently than before.

  That’s the power of taking the things you know and making something new with them. Or of reading a master of the form engage in such trickery. They can twist you around on the inside — transform you inside your own skin — and change you before you even know it.

  Give into that.

  Indulge.

  Enjoy.

  I Can Transform You

  Mac Peterson was hurled through a storefront window. As his world was reduced to a shower of glass, he counted himself lucky that the Chaise Lounge was an old-school establishment: most windows had synth fibers in them, smart glass that could turn any pane into a billboard. And despite what people viewed on their vids, industrial glass wasn’t designed to break away into a scree of shards upon impact. With the state of terraforming these days, it was designed to withstand minor earthquakes and eruptions. So a body would have to be sent through it with significant force in order for the glass to shatter. The kind of force Jesse “Duppy” Honeycutt was capable of generating when hopped up on Stim.

  This was supposed to have been a simple surveillance job. Some “creepy guy” at the Chaise Lounge was bothering a stripper—no, exotic dancer; no, anatomical sales model for display purposes only; shit, Mac didn’t know what to call them these days. He was to be paid to find the suspect and perhaps persuade him to move along. This conversation wasn’t going well.

  “You got a smart mouth, mon.” Duppy’s accent shifted between overly affected Jamaican and some version of Midwestern. He stepped through the jagged hole where glass used to be. A black tank top stretched over his huge frame, showing off the bulging muscles that came from a prison bid. A pattern of tattoos, like glow-in-the-dark runes, ran along his arms, which waved about in menace. Prior to crashing through the glass, Mac had studied the brute’s eyes and believed they told a counterintuitive story: that prison had broken him and drugs helped him forget the pain. Of course, that was before he found himself lying in a pool of glass shards. Hating to be wrong, he chalked Duppy’s violent outburst up to overcompensating. After all, everyone had an image to maintain.

  Case in point: born Jeremiah Dix of Bedford, Indiana, Duppy put on a faux Jamaican accent as a part of his story, just another small-time hood trying to make a rep for himself. Once he had landed in Waverton, he’d joined the Easton MS crew; the MS stood for Murder Squad because they were killing the streets. Clever disds. They had made a name for themselves as major Stim traffickers, and Duppy had hooked up with them. High on Stim, he proved less reasonable than usual.

  “Yeah, I get that a lot.” Premature gray at his temples, Mac had a good build on him, the last remnant of his former military training. A carefully cultivated week’s worth of facial hair covered his face. A low beard hid a lot of scars. Sunglasses covered his eyes. No designer glasses, no viz screen built in. Plain sunglasses were usually the first casualty in any conversation, so he saw no point in spending too many creds on them. For that matter, he’d hate to have to get a new coat. The dampener lining absorbed a lot and hid even more. This came in quite handy, as he was prone to take a lot of hits. He considered this a reasonable expense to compensate for his failed people skills.

  Sitting up, Mac shook his head to try to clear it while palming a fistful of glass. He staggered to his feet and wiped a trail of blood from his mouth.

  Duppy stepped through the open hole where the window used to be, oblivious to the jagged teeth of glass that bit into his hand as he searched for purchase. Stim was bad enough; if Duppy’s blast had been mixed with something else, things could get quite messy. Just like if Mac drew his Cougar PT-10, he’d have to use it and he wasn’t being paid enough to deal with the paperwork headache of a shooting. Neither of them had to end up dead over a simple dustup. Besides, he had Duppy right where he wanted him.

  “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot.” Mac neared him. “A fella as charming as yourself wouldn’t have any problem paying for tail somewhere else. The blind school’s only a few miles up the way…”

  Duppy charged him, wrapping Mac up in the beefy tubes he called arms. With his free hand, Mac ground the glass into the man’s eyes, and they tumbled to the ground. Duppy dropped to his knees, his screams cut short as Mac scrambled out of his grasp. A quick jab to his throat dropped the brute, but Mac proceeded to kick him in the head a few times. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done. Mac bent over and searched Duppy’s clothes for extra doses of Stim and slipped them into his pocket. The owner of the Chaise Lounge—a slovenly overweight bald man with a penchant for sweating through his wardrobe—approached him. “I think I’ve persuaded your stalker to peruse the merchandise at another establishment.”

  “You persuaded him through a new window.” The man daubed his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. “Who’s going to pay for that?”

  “For starters, he threw me. I had little say in the matter. Second, the terms of my rate were five hundred creds for the job plus expenses. Consider that an expense.”

  “Fuck you, Mac,” the man said, then held out a transaction scanner. Mac passed his hand under it, checked his balance on his own scanner, straightened his glasses, then turned his back on the scene.

  This job would barely cover his rent, and he wasn’t exactly staying at a high-rise over in Waverton. Mac hated being out on the streets here; they left him feeling too exposed. A hover drone whirred by. The administrators could just as easily use satellites fo
r the same purpose but they wanted the populace to be aware that they were being watched. The drones didn’t deter crime, nor did the death penalty, despite how swiftly it was carried out. People knew they would get caught if the LG Security Force cared enough to come after them. Many days that was a mighty big if. Those on the employment cycles traveled into Waverton on the artery of the trams like circulated blood once it had been deoxygenated, then passed back out into Old Town. Old Town felt like a prison for those whose only crime was to be born poor. There were no worries about the state of Mars colonization. There was no time for political discussion on trade among the corp-nations. No, the world he lived in was as lowest common denominator as it got. There was only room for day-to-day survival, with none of the luxury worries of middle class citizens. From Old Town, one could clearly see the towers of Waverton and the grand spires that formed the cityscape. Proud, tall, and distant, like an unobtainable dream. Sewer rats, strippers, junkies, and private investigators all lived in the shadow of the new architecture and stared up at the azure-streaked night skies, waiting for the world to end.

  The call tore Mac from the fitful thing he called sleep. At least he woke up in a bed, not a burned-out husk of a car or a stretch of sidewalk. Small comfort in the unfamiliar surroundings. He didn’t remember checking into a hotel. From the look of its decor—a full bed, a trash can, and a toilet and sink in the corner—it charged by the hour. The air was redolent with sex—unwashed, sweaty, desperate, and unremembered—and he stank of booze and stale Redi-Smokes. He hoped he hadn’t spent the entire job’s payday on his company. Had he found a companion dead next to him, it wouldn’t have surprised him.

  “Mac.” Deputy Chief Clovis Hollander’s voice sounded as hoarse as ever, as if he’d been screaming for the entire ten-hour shift.