CZM Book Club: The Flair by Nick Mamatas

heard of Nick Mammatas by any brandam chance? No, Nick Mammotas is awesome. Nick Mammotas is a very hard working fiction writer who writes just a honest stuff, especially short fiction, but not exclusively. I guess I could just read you their bio or his bio rather. Nick Mammatas is the author of several novels, including The Second Shooter and I Am Providence. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's Best American Mystery Stories, tour dot Com, Weird Tales, Asthma, Science Fiction,

and many other venues. Nick is also an anthologist. His most recent title is Wondering Glory Forever All Inspiring Lovecrafty and Fiction. Nick's fiction and editorial work have been variously nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. But the story is about clowns. It's not really about clowns, but there's a clown in it, and so that's why I'm reading it. That's not why

I'm reading the story. But I think it's clubby. This is a story about space lasers and clowns and clown down.

Just to hang on to the name International do not recommend. I traveled north in the early evening, when the temperature was bearable but not so cold i'd need to heat the car and waste precious juice. There were no charging stations once I passed Pyramid Lake, but the brigade promised that they already had power sufficient to reach our my model te They also promised that I would instantly know where to pull off the highway and pick up my liaison,

and they were right. Desert roads are always lonely, and when the sun finished its descent, the only light came from a failing Beaklin TM low orbit billboard and my ride's headlamps. They were not even any animals prowling the bush near the highway. No quick flashes of glowing eyes, no glintse of track or collars in the shadows. Nothing suddenly there and then gone in a blink. Both literal and figurative, just brush and a low sky like black slate.

There was, however, on the shoulder of the road, a circus clown, complete with red nose, great flipper shoes, and a comically oversized hitchhiker's thumb. She wore a pair of reflective yellow genie pants, a floofy sleeved crop top just as vibrant, and a single red rose upon her left breast. The clown's hair was pale blue and pink and pointed straight up, a bit like the flame from a gas burner.

Turned all the way up, going my way, I asked, She docked and entered the car headfirst, like an animal, or at least someone unused to being a passenger in anything smaller than a bus. I almost ate a mouthful of her cotton candy colored hair. It was stiff, coated and dried glue quick clowning around funny face, Hong Kong, she said, as she squeezed her funny nose. It was half broken and sounded like a wounded animal. But she did her best to compensate broken animals. But trying our best.

That's what life has been for the past fifteen years. The light Brigade had invited me out to their secret headquarters to witness and write about the launch of their home brew laser satellite. Just two years ago, the Brigade had created and uploaded open source plans for the improvement of your backyard photovoltaic receivers to convert solar powered laser

energy into good old DC electricity. It was a provocative move by this assemblage of hackers, engineers, and from the look of the looks of the clown under employed performance artists, especially provocative since there was and there is nothing for photovoltaic receivers to collect that isn't just coming from the Sun. Already, solar power satellites have been on the drawing boards and some of the most hopeful PowerPoint slide presentations ever created

for almost seventy years. Indeed, there are a handful of microwave transmitting satellites in low orbit right now, but they're not pointed toward the Earth. Instead, they are oriented towards the four long Wang weapons platforms located thirty five thousand kilometers overhead, to keep them powered up and ever ready for war. But that the Light Brigade wants you to

know is going to change. We didn't travel much more than a mile before the clown, whose name was Elektra, told me to pull over and get out of the car. She pointed her novelty thumb at me, then dug it into my ribs as if it were a pistol and she a mobster. It was fine, all part of our agreement. The night was frigid, but it's the kind of cold that's a relief, like walking by the open door of the store you could never afford to enter a freelance

journalist's salary. She kept me waiting outside, where I took nips now and again from my flask while she programmed a new route into the car's navigation system. Then stepped back out and said, want to sniff my flower? Before I could even say yes, it's squirted, and something sticky that smells of lavender hit me full in the face. I woke up blindfolded, still in the passenger seat of

my car, but definitely off road. A hard jostle sent my head up to the roof and nearly lost consciousness A second time, Easy said, Electra, we're close to the Shonzai. I was intrigued to hear that bit of Mandarin. It meant she trusted me. Shonzi distant strongholds beyond the reach of the emperor in ancient times, Shonzi bandit bands resisting

centralized power. In the merely pre modern era, Shonzi underground, non hierarchical factories for knockoff cell phones with extra features, and spider Man action figures in turquoise and purple instead of red and blue. In the recent past and today, Shonzai meant all those things and something more. I had a million questions, but I wasn't going to ask them well blindfolded. It was another thirty minutes perhaps before we pulled up to the Shanzai. Stay in the car for

one minute, please, the clown said. She stepped out and closed the door. I could hear other people milling around, and they made me wait for much longer than a minute. But finally the passenger door opened, and a man's hand pressed against my chest and told me one sec He took off my blindfold and then stepped back and said get out. There were six of them, including my chauffeur.

They introduced themselves. A couple shared their pronouns and won a brief list of headmtes only the clown and a woman with whom she was now holding hands, said welcome to the Light Brigade. We launched at dawn. They spoke in an eerie practiced harmony like creepy twins in a movie, then broke into laughter. And you know what else is like creepy twins in a movie?

and we're back. The brigade's rules were simple, no photos, no extensive physical descriptions. They let me know that none of the communicative tech I might have, including my watch, would work out wherever they were. I could only talk to the clown, her girlfriend, and one fellow who agreed to answer questions if I addressed them just to him, and if they were sensible. There had been a vote about my presence here, and it was a tie, so everybody one, according to half the Shanzai, I wasn't there,

so why a clown suit? I asked, over a meal of grilled grow meats and pine nut soup. We were sitting outside a top military surplus sleeping bags on the ice over floor of the desert. I wasn't allowed inside any of the structures, but I am allowed to say that they appeared to be hoop houses with opaque plastic canvases stretched over the frames. We needed helium, said Electra

the clown. She casually confessed to a series of crimes involving an illicit helium smuggling ring that caters to the more nostalgic members of the ultra rich for their children's birthday parties, her infiltration of the same, and a sudden and perhaps violent hijacking of a truck of canisters. Her girlfriend rubbed her back as she spoke of brandishing a firearm. How she convinced the truck driver that helium was as flammable as hydrogen through sheer force of will, And what

a challenge. It was unloading the truck in a safe house and then slowly transporting the canisters in ones and twos to this location. I kept the suit because I knew you'd stop for it, she finished. Who could resist? Nobody can resist, said the clown's girlfriend. Electra had told me much about the plans of the Light Brigade, just from sharing that one anecdote, the brigade would not be launching a microwave transmitting satellite. These six people were likely

the whole of the organization. There was no broad movement, no multinational organization stealing and smuggling, borrowing and building to create the means to provide free power to the masses. May I see your raccoon, I asked, Yeah, said the girlfriend. You can call me Robin, by the way, Tracy, said Electra, who finally took off her large wig and plucked off her nose and tossed it into the wigs cap. The other person, who agreed to speak to me only if

I asked sensible questions, identified himself as Lee. Though as Lee was the one with the headmates, I knew that agreement might be altered at any moment.

of reaching orbit from the ground. Raccoons were still technically useful, but the missile synic doocic of war. Even when there was no possible worry that an upper atmosphere mission would be targeted by an enemy, the very fact that raccoon seemed easy to shoot down was enough to mothball the inexpensive flexible technology. Tracy and Robin were happy to show off the disused minute Mann silo. The moon was new, and for obvious reasons, the Light Brigade kept its work

areas dark. We're not worried about the police, per se, Robin explained. As we picked our way through the bush, led by nothing but the lights of our wristwatches, my little ball of light found a scorpion on the desert floor. It didn't scuttle away or flex its tail, and I too found myself frozen, both terrified and feeling the cold of the night air for the first time. Tracy knocked the iraqnet away with her oversized shoe. Be careful, she said,

but she wasn't talking about the scorpion. Not a minute later, both women grabbed my forearms and kept me from taking a fatal step down the concrete tunnel they were leading me to. The silo wasn't capped, and the rocket sand's nose cone was much smaller than the Minuteman for which it was originally designed. There was a low concrete building on the far side of the lip of the silo, but it was dark enough, and I'd been focused enough on where I've been stepping, but I hadn't noticed it

at all. They wouldn't talk about the missile very much, except to saying that it was a solid propellant rocket and that its fuel was environmentally friendly Hexa nitro hexa's iso wurtzsustain, a word that danced on their tongues even through their giggles, but that utterly confused my transcription software. More importantly, and why this fuel was used during this straight conflict, is that Hexa nitro hexa's iso wurtz tain

burning rockets don't leave much of a visible trail. Thanks Nick for including that word twice in the story so that I had to read it. Thanks good looking out. I realized the ladies could toss me into the hole. They both had strong grips on my arms. This wouldn't be the first bunch of hackers or makers or burners or post rats or socialists or whatever the Light Brigade was hoping to be calm out here in the Great

Basin to simply devolve into madness. It's a good one, I said, idiotically, not that I've seen too many up close. The balloon the satellite. My clever idea was to give them a reason to lead me away from the silo rather than truck me down into it for whatever blood baptism they thought would help the mission. We'll show you everything except that which cannot be shown, Tracy said. Robin giggled at that none of this was helping. Except for

the small cement pillbox by the silo. There didn't seem to be any other buildings around their grips didn't lighten up as they led me off into the night, like two prison guards bringing a drunk to a holding cell. I was a little tipsy. Robin began making an unusual clicking noise with her tongue and cheeks. I opened my mouth to say something, but Tracy put a gloved finger to my lips. They stepped lightly, and I aped their tentative shuffling, thanks only partially to the hold they had

on my arms. The beam of watchlight passed over something and vanished into it. Then Robin disappeared for a moment, only to come back, holding the Knight in her hands and directing my attention to a flight of cement steps going underground hyperblack. I said, you were echo locating drones are everywhere, and satellite's too, the Tracy, as she nudged me onto the top step. Satellites are everywhere. There's one in the subterranean warehouse into which I was walked alone

at Tracy and Robin's urging. It was not quite as dark as the hyperblack tarp's top side, but it was pretty dim. Lee, the third member of the Shenzai who deigned to speak to me, sparked an old fashioned cigarette lighter, perhaps ten yards away. Everything from his eyeglasses to the size of the room was bigger than I imagined it

could possibly be, except for the satellite itself. He wouldn't show me the whole thing at once, but casually walked a tight circle around an object roughly the size and shape of a very nice propane gas grill, of the sort your parents might have once owned. It's the kind of thing you might look at and be compelled to say, what a butte, and then offer a pull from a flask. But I resisted, I should not have. This is just

the laser, Lee explained. His eyes were obscured by the triple refraction of the firelight and the lenses of his spectacles. A few more watts and he'd be the one shooting lasers. Diode pump alkali. We get potash from the desert. How do you know it works, I asked, How do you know any of it works? The laser, the satellite, the raccoon. Why are you asking me, Li said, because you think I'm a man. Examine your biases, madame. He extinguished the

lighter with the top of his thumb. Somewhere behind and above me, a clown nose honked for second after that, I didn't hear the echolocational clicking behind me. Journalists say, or they used to say, don't bury the lead, but I have done just that. I simply wasn't expecting the

story I ended up living through. Here's the lead. Fifteen years ago, third party transnational belligerents used laser satellites in low earth orbit to attack both Chinese and NATO positions along the Taiwan Strait during the Second Battle of the Davis Line and now the Nutcraft. The satellites existed in multiple sweet spots. Their orbits were too high for anti aircraft fire or drones to take out, but too low for the orbital platforms to target without possibly striking their

own forces on the ground. They were big enough to pump out lasers, capable of melting flight decks and combusting individual sailors unfortunate enough to be standing in the wrong place, too small to be spotted amidst all the other war drunk in the skies until they warmed up and started firing deadly enough that both said I had scored propaganda victories by blaming the other for violations of the laws of war insufficiently destructive to be anything more than a

political anomaly. After the fact, ten fatalities, dozens of casualties, mostly blindness and other vision impairments, some second and third degree burns. A single human pictogram in the infographic detailing the carnage of the battle, made special by the asterisk

explaining what had happened. The simple collapse of the world petroleum supply brought both sides to the negotiating table soon enough, and with the Treaty of Taipei, a significant population exchange, and the launch of Long Wang, the peace of pure exhaustion settled upon the world. But not here in the California Great Basin. I asked Lee one further question, could this be weaponized? And then I got a whiff of

Tracy's clown flower and fell down. Then woke up, this time just before dawn, in my car and not where I left it, parked on the grounds of the Light Brigade. The car's controls had been locked and my hands cuffed behind my back. I didn't think they'd knocked me out, stuffed me into my ride and programmed it to make a sharp right turn into a desert so that I could be cooked like a potato and die. I thought

I was going back to the airport. The cuffs, I guessed were the typical police issue that any security guard with the universal key could unlock for me after I rolled up to the parking lot attendants little box, probably, and as a bonus, I was going to need to pee before the car got me to my destination. Though JA school one oh one, start with softball questions, as the source might wig out or just end the interview

if you begin with provocations. But I was thinking of this article as a puff piece more than anything else. Check out the product and personalities, throw in a charming anecdote or two, and post. The fact is that there's never been a decent business case for peace full laser

transmitting solar powered satellites. Historically, they don't collect enough extra solar radiation to make it profitable to build, launch, and maintain them, no matter how dark the black one paints their solar panels, no matter how much helium one steals from the children of billionaires. In our post oil nineteen degree celsius era, when a cloudy day is practically an economical holiday and cheap and shiny photovol take collectors fill the parking lots of most defunct strip malls. There's just

no profit to be had. The only laser transmitting satellites that have ever been commercially deployed were used for space to space communication or wide scale high detail mapping. Those and the Davis line direct energy weapons fifteen years ago. You know what else promises to be commercially for one thing but feeds into a culture of war?

to bubble up on the horizon. In my rear view mirror, I see a black ball dragging a gray arrow up into the sky and tell the mirror to start recording. If I'm a war reporter, now I might as well get some good visuals from the model t's tiny hatch. I hear a voice say, oh good, you're awake. Tracy kicks out the armrest between the rear seats and unfolds herself, legs first out of the trunk, then slithers into the front passenger seat. Sorry, there was a coup. She glances

down at my wrists, ah, handcuffs. Also, they're after us by now? Probably you uh? I start? I am a legitimate master of the circus arts, Tracy says, who is after us? I say, there's a lot to know, now, who what when journalism is inscribed upon my nervous system? Robin, the investors, Tracy says, not all of them.

talk a lot when I'm with a new person. Sorry about that too, Where why?

as the desert twilight. We're going all the way to the airport unless you can pick the ignition or the door locks, I say, so, just start from the beginning. How do you prove to people that your laser transmitting solar powered satellite actually works if all it does is give randomly placed receptors a third more juice? Now and then it's proof of concept. We need dozens of them in sun synchronous orbits. So blow something up just once

for some venture capital funding layer for the dramatic. Well, ah, no, I realize the truth of the business model. Blow something up whenever one of the investors want something blown up. Pollution free, energy efficient ninety five percent of the time to pay fixed costs, and a profit center in privatized war, not dramatic, absurd? And why me? In the rearview mirror, the rocket ignited and took off a star and a quickly faded star filled sky. It's mostly the car, Tracy says,

because it's easy to track. But I know she waved a hand. Her fingers were very long and thin. People hate journalists, and the ending one would make worldwide news. He are, I am a Light Brigade's publicity person, but my idea was just to bring in a journalist, not to people hate mimes too. I found myself saying, I am a clown and we're not going to her. Gaze

flicks towards the rear view. It's rare to see a big, old gas or car on the highways anymore, since there were few operational gas stations but a fast four to three point fifty pickup is bearing down on us. Is that Nambud's person's car? It is, Tracy says. They probably figured out that I escaped with you. So how do we stop the car? Can you pick the ignition like the cuffs? Pick this, Tracy slowly the ignition? No, of course not. You have to hack these things and I can't.

I came here to get you out the second the car stops in the airport lot. She shrugs, exaggerated. A stage performer can't resist an audience. They want witnesses, maybe a terror angle to make sure you're on the news. It's up to me to stop the car. Least have my hands now. Of course, there's the issue of the pickup truck on her tail. Circus arts are powerless, and I'm no techi. What can journalists do except watch and write what they saw for pennies. Ah watch, ah, pennies.

We drove far enough that my watch is in contact with the rest of the world again. I take it off. Put on your seatbelt, I tell Tracy, as I put on mine. I hand Tracy my watch and tell her to log in under her own account and report the model t were in for drunk driving and drunk riding. Her fingers are nimble. She does it in a few seconds. It takes me to dig my flask out of my pocket. The interior turns red, and out of the steering wheel comes a breathalyzer tube, and a sickly sweet female voice

urges me to blow just a little a gulp. I swish and gargle and swallow, then blow. The car stops hard a clax and sounds inside, and the voice, now with a testy edge to it, warns me that this car is fully locked and will move no further. Into a retrieval truck arrives. Try to stay loose, I say more to myself than Tracy, who can certainly manage that trick better than I can. Booze aside. The ford slams into the rear. I see nothing but a white explosion

before me. I found out what happened immediately after the crash, only weeks later. I broke my nose in three ribs and really wrecked my back in those inexplicable ways that can never fully be healed. Stuff happened to my literal spinal fluid, one of the few substances we can't just laidle out of a vat pour into someone. Tracy was fine. She wriggled out over her airbag, kicked out the front windshield,

and then skidobtled around to see the ford. It had pushed us a good half mile up State Route thirty six, ate the back half of the Model Tea and nudged up between my shoulder blades. The ombuds folk were alive inside the wreck, unconscious and crushed between half a dozen air bags. We'd had a few seconds to prepare ourselves. They'd been completely surprised. Tracy pulled me from the wreck and dragged me past the side of the road onto

actual desert sands. A streak of blood and other liquids, like a great stroke from the paint brush, making a trail behind me. It was good she would be able to find me a few minutes later through all the smoke. Then she dashed down the road and found my watch. I came to fairly quickly. The thinnest sheet of ice

lay over the sand. In ancient Egypt, servants were sent out each morning before dawn to ever so gently scrape the millimeter of frost that would form upon the dunes overnight and collect it into a small cup so that the Pharaoh might have a small cup of Sherbert with his breakfast. I got two licks in before every molecule of H two O vaporized. With before my one good eye, I guessed that the satellite had just then passed overhead.

As both my rental and the Ford F three fifty burst into flames, I felt the soles of my feet blister, the sense of having toes vanish as flesh blue flew off bones. It was good. That meant my spinal cord was still functioning. When I woke up again, I was lying on the back of the cargo bed of their trievil truck. I screamed at the sky for an hour as Tracy negotiated with my watch in an attempt to re route the truck away from the airport vehicle's rental

office and to a hospital. In her other hand, Tracy gripped a mostly melted license plate. I remember that she kept having to take a new pictures of it and upload them to a satellite link in order to be believed. When she and Robin visited me in the hospital a week later, she showed me a scar on her palm that was shaped like much of the letter. W Lee sent my watch a JP three g depicting a big eyed owl holding flowers and wearing a sash reading get

well soon. That was somehow worth four and a half million dollars to a soft be auction bot on the Worldwide Hive. Like all freelancers, I am uninsured, but that gift paid for all my medical expenses save painkillers, so I've had to find another way to get addicted to them. I live in a tiny house on the roof of an apartment building, the first story storefront of which is the sort of very much not Irish pub that journalists enjoy drinking in. I get my pills from sympathetic colleagues

and well wishers. It took me a long time to file this story, but when it's posted, I'll have a few extra coins to buy some rounds for the gang. Other than the pub for pills, pints and peanuts, I stay in bed, very much not healing. I can pay my rent and buy my grow meats thanks only to a peculiar fact. Somehow, the photovoltaic collector on the roof of the shipping container I call home consistently collects a third again of my energy needs at a rate twenty

percent over its own listed capacity. I'm able to sell the extra electricity in my batteries back to the local utility. Every three months. The electric company sends me a check.

It's really it's a really interesting synthesis of a bunch of the worst ideas that any Wood had, Like the it's called the murder market, that there was this whole thing for a long time where there was supposed to be this scheme where that there was like an assassination market, oh effectively, uh huh, where yeah, you could like put The theory was that you could just keep putting money into it and eventually like the price would be high

enough that someone would do an assassination and kill the person. Yeah, and everyone I knew insisted it was run by the FEDS. I don't know if it was run by the FEDS.

don't have any sympathy for that. I totally don't know what that's like at all.

Alan Datlow. It's called Haunted Legends, finally available as an ebook at all Electrons stores, and that's the next phrasing of it. After thirteen years of being print only, is a good chance to bring back the spirits of ghost

stories for Christmas, so go check out Haunted Legends. Nick is very good taste in stories as well as writing good stories, and I will also hopefully have good taste in stories because I'm going to keep reading them to you every Sunday from now until I'm not doing it anymore.