Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury Read Online Free PDF Page A

you humiliate me in front of my peers and then fire me. I’ve played that several times. That werewolf episode is in heavy demand as well, and we can up the price now you’re awake. The fans love it when the, ah, when the former—when the headslave has to watch too.”
    “Sid Bryant likes the one where he’s a driveling senile old guy in a retirement home and you visit him and then abuse him,” says Suzie. “He laughs a lot when you call him a carbuncle. He’s ordered a clip of that so he can have it on the video-art screen in his office.”
    The two of them smile at him happily. Then they kiss, a lingering, smouldering, hormone-sodden kiss, nothing faked about it. Suzie presses herself against Derwent’s lab-coated, discreetly logo’d torso. She utters a soft moan. Quentin feels himself writhing in pain, even though he has nothing left to writhe with.
    “Want a demonstration?” says Dr. Derwent. “Of the system. It’s really remarkable, very hi-def images. You can watch the screen right along with the viewers. But you don’t have to, because the exact same thing is playing in your head.”
    “Even if you close your eyes,” says Suzie. “Maybe Quent would like to see the one where he beats up his first wife. The umbrella whippy accessory is so totally weird! It’s kind of a rape thing too, though that part doesn’t go too well. But there’s some good lines, aren’t there, darling?” She nibbles Derwent’s ear. “You couldn’t make it up!”
    “That one’s been a general favourite,” says Dr. Derwent. “Or the one where he’s whimpering, and his mother pulls down his little jeans and hits him with a—”
    “Get me out of this bottle!” Quentin howls.
    “Oh no, Quentie,” says Suzie. “That would kill you. And none of us would want that, would we?”
     
    With thanks to Graeme Gibson for the core idea
     
    About “Headlife”
    I read Ray Bradbury as a teenager, and those stories really sank in, especially “The Martian” and the other Chronicles , and Fahrenheit 451 . Some writers jump straight to what we might call “deep metaphor,” writing at a mythic level, and that is what these stories do. To quote Elias Canetti in The Agony of Flies: “To withhold meaning: nothing is quite so unnatural as the constant uncovering of meanings. The merit and the true power of myth: its meaning remains concealed.”
    My own story is just a pale little riff. Cut-off heads were one of the tropes of ’50s science fiction, both written and filmed; perhaps “Headlife” is another, more sinister version of The Illustrated Man .
     
    —Margaret Atwood

HEAVY
    Jay Bonansinga
    A t one of the tallest buildings in Los Angeles the contractor arrives after dark. Riding the crystalline glass elevator up to the lavish, gleaming spires of the upper floors—where the law offices and consultants burn the midnight oil to finance their BMWs and alimony payments—the contractor finds Room 1201 and pauses.
    He unsheathes his Browning nine-millimeter semiautomatic from its holster inside his sport coat. He calmly screws the silencer into the muzzle, checks the magazine, then moves his six-foot-six, 260-pound frame through the doorway and into the richly appointed outer office of Zuckerman Gold and Fishel Artist Management.
    Over the bubbling fish tanks and frothing infinity fountain, the contractor hears the shrill voice of Marvin Zuckerman drifting out of his opulent inner office: “Morris, she happens to be a very talented young lady . . . and this offer is unacceptable, a disgrace, a dishonor to her fine . . .”
    The contractor steps into Zuckerman’s inner sanctum, holding the Browning at his side like a parcel.
    The agent raises one hand, as if to say give me a second , while continuing to chatter on his wireless headset: “Okay, so she’s had a few problems with Oxycontin . . . Morris, she has lower-back pain—”
    “Excuse me,” the contractor interjects, squeezing the gun.
    “Hold on a second,