Idiot's Mask

By Chester Burton Brown

Chester Burton Brown's famous dark wit and striking imagery come to the forefront again in this gripping tale of two young lovers who are neither of them what they seem. IDIOT'S MASK is a layered story in which the voice of the narrator itself is a clue to the final mystery penetrated by the book's charismatic and unique characters, who live caught between two clashing cultures in a far distant future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chester Burton Brown
• Release date: Feb 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465823731

Chester Burton Brown

CHESTER BURTON BROWN is a compulsive storyteller and pulp science-fiction wallah based near the North Pole. He is also known on the Internet as "Cheeseburger Brown." He is the author of dozens of novellas and short stories, as well as a regular correspondent for Wetmachine and Footprints magazine. Chester Burton Brown's first full-length novel was "Simon of Space" (Ephemera Bound, 2008). His stories have also appeared in Cosmos magazine, Stupefying Stories, and AE: The Canadian Science-Fiction Review. Mr. Brown likes a nice song, but dances poorly.

Book preview

IDIOT’S MASK

Chester Burton Brown

Smashwords Edition copyright 2012 Hemming Media, Publisher; all rights reserved.

Read more from this author at CheeseburgerBrown.com

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

1.

If anyone has the right to tell this story, it’s me. It concerns, after all, things that happened to me—or a thing very much like me—and so I argue that no one is in a better position to explain it all from my point of view. Or, at least, from a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Parts of the story I don’t know at all, but in this respect my diaries have been very helpful. Further gaps I’ve filled in with assistance from media reports and police files. And where such research has left me wanting, I’ve gone out on a limb and extrapolated actions and dialogues which I believe to be largely consistent with what I’ve come to understand about myself.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent. And to protect me, too. When all is said and done, you might agree that I deserve that much.

Or you might not.

If you’re Penardu, you’re already three quarters convinced that I’m reprehensible. And why shouldn’t you? You’ve grown up seeing our dirty mugs on the news, rotating sedately in the corner while images of our victims or their ruined possessions flash by: police are on the lookout for an Ilbisoon male, fair complexion, average height, scars and tattoos, gutter accent, the lack of hope poignant in his dull, vacant eyes...

That was me. I don’t deny it. I grew up on the low streets of Ilbis, spat into this world by a mother I never knew. I ran with a bunch of kids who’d been abandoned around the same time as I had—sleeping in pipes, picking pockets, begging for scraps. We each had a specialty. Mine was playing idiot for the tourists.

This boy can figure any sum in the blink of an eye! Even the thinnest slice of wage will buy you a personal show of his unique talent! Step right up, step right up!

I can almost smell Ilbis as I recollect it: the fume-orange sky, the stacked decks of sepia cloud, flies buzzing around livestock standing in the shade of an atmospheric processing tower looming over the low, ramshackle horizon of stove pipes and satellite dishes jutting up from a sea of makeshift roofs. Goats snuffed and bleated as rusted-out cars droned overhead.

Behold the hidden powers of this idiot’s rare brain!

Someone would spill coloured rice on a blanket. I’d roll my eyes and gibber and drool. Two thousand one hundred and nine blue, one thousand eight hundred twenty-seven red.

Folks would applaud and throw tips in the proffered hat. Few Penardu ever questioned my count, and none would deign ask a robot for verification. If someone seemed too suspicious, we’d just grab our blanket and our rice jar and run away. We laughed as we ran. Stupid marks.

They wore their masks, even on Ilbis. You could never see their faces, but what corners of their skin you might glimpse were untouched by the sun; there was no mistaking the signs of leisure, no confusing them for one of our own. No: the Penardu were as alien to us as giraffes. Another kingdom of creature. A thing very like a man but devoid of suffering. Or so it seemed.

We emptied their purses on the sly. And when there wasn’t enough sly to go around we emptied their purses while they bowed before our muzzles or blades or hard, horny fists. Sometimes they would fall completely apart at such treatment, the chins of adult men quivering while they retched and cried and begged for better. Why are you doing this to me?

What’s life without fear?

I’ll give you whatever you want!

There’s no use in offering what we take freely.

I’ll sabotage my feeds! I’ll report nothing! I swear!

Your feeds are already blocked. There’s nobody in this tiny world but you and us. Help will never come. This ends when we choose, if at all.

Sometimes we worked out some of our personal issues on people like that. Generally, talking to us only made things worse. There’s not a syllable a Penardu could utter that would soften the heart of an Ilbisoon—maybe a long time ago, but not now. It’s too late to be sorry. It’s been too late for ages.

We’d go home with bloody knuckles and a skip in our steps.

So why did they keep coming back? In a word: business. For a Penardu life is business—not the doing of actual things, no: for a Penardu business means the lazy and incessant jockeying of nonsensical affairs that results in the perpetual swelling of their lawless accounts and imaginary holdings. Ever since those faecal worms seized control of our Hojan moons and factories we had to split our pennies with them, and every year our slice got slimmer and slimmer. The whole star system had gone all rosy and crotch-itchy with money, but none of it ever seemed to drip down all the way back to Ilbis.

It was called an economic boom. And we were supposed to feel lucky. We were told we’d have a hope of understanding it all if we just had enough brains to stick it out through school.

But only charity schools would let me and my kind over the threshold, and charity schools serve only to prepare you for one of two fates: shipping off to Hoj for a life of labour, or running the low streets for grift and gain. So we did sign up for the charity schools—again and again—and then stole away in the night after we’d cleaned out the cupboards. Pretending to be turning over a new leaf was the only way to get close to the nuns’ stash, and we were experts at it. Every one of us.

When I was six years old, I could have any mark crying within five minutes. Any mark, no matter how he pegged his savvy. Just a third of the way through my story and I’d hear them sniff, or slip a finger up inside their mask to wipe at a running eye. And you’ve no parents at all?

No, esteemed.

What about school?

A man at the school put his thing in my bum, so I ran away.

I would end up sitting in their hotel suites, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and sipping lemonade. It tickled them pink if I dropped off for a spontaneous nap after that—they would tuck a blanket over me and sometimes capture my holograph. Look at me: I’m so peaceful!

All I needed were five seconds.

A briefly turned back, a bathroom break, a head bowed over a dataplate: their attention would snap back at the sound of the closing door, my little footfalls a light tattoo down the corridor and away, arms loaded with whatever I could grab.

Sometimes they would alert hotel security. Their descriptions of me would make the dour agents chortle. You want us to find a skinny pink boy in rags with matted hair? They would gesture out into the streets below the lobby’s panoramic windows, every corner and stoop jammed with unanchored Ilbisoon ragamuffins just like me. ...Which one?

When I was older and uglier this kind of trick lost its luck. That’s when I graduated to idiot. In time, I really grew into the role. I discovered the careless comfort people felt in the presence of a fool—the confessions they’d make, the idling ideas they’d let show. It wasn’t just marks this worked on, but anyone. To be affable and unthinking made me an easy companion for those who felt easily threatened; they’d work hard to defend their place in my daily idiot’s pantomime, to protect me from being stolen away. Their viciousness could always be turned outward, and I could crouch in its shadow.

For a long