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In such groundbreaking novels as Crache and Idolon, Mark Budz established his reputation as one of science fiction’s most exciting and innovative writers. Now he surprises us again with an ambitious new thriller set in three realities at once, where three different lives hang in the balance….
What if your world were rapidly running out of tomorrows? And what if the only way to save the future was to relive the past? But which past holds the key to survival? That’s the life-and-death question faced by three desperate people separated by the past, present, and future but who share a single terrifying reality. A tortured soul, brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident, issues a pirate broadcast out of a van in near-future California. In Depression-era San Francisco an architect with an inoperable brain tumor seeks a mystical cure. A post-human space traveler caught in a cosmic accident searches for a way to reconstruct himself and the future. In Mark Budz’s spellbinding narrative, their lives–and deaths–are drawn together by a force even more powerful than destiny.
- Sales Rank: #3993867 in Books
- Published on: 2007-07-31
- Released on: 2007-07-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.30" h x 1.10" w x 4.19" l, .43 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 400 pages
From Booklist
In three different eras, three protagonists struggle with the spectre of death and grasp for a means to survival. During the Depression, an architect communes with mystics for the key to healing. In the near future, a traveller who believes he has found the answer with Jesus broadcasts his story from a church van. Far in the future, a post-human space explorer who has lost vital parts of his programming because of an accident fights to maintain coherence. Each character struggles for truth and life, their fates becoming more closely linked with every passing moment. Discovering the truth behind their fates and choosing the right set of memories constitute the only path to survival for all three. Budz's fascinating thriller made up of three disparate stories crucially connected and eventually converging on a conclusion perhaps not entirely unexpected satisfies through the exploration of mind and choice that is its mainspring. Schroeder, Regina
About the Author
Mark Budz lives in northern California with his wife, fellow author Marina Fitch. His short stories have appeared in Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He is the author of four novels, Clade, Crache, Idolon, and, most recently, Till Human Voices Wake Us.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Santa Cruz, September 12
The singing was back.
Rudi Lauchman paused on the sidewalk, trying to isolate the precise source of the sound. The voice was soft, melodic. He couldn't make out any words. It was more like humming, vaguely choral. And not, he felt reasonably sure, coming from inside his head.
He had been hearing the voice around town, off and on, for a week. Close to the Cafe Pergolesi one day, the library the next. Elusive. More imagined than real.
This time it seemed to be coming from a recessed doorway partly concealed by a juniper bush dotted with small blue-purple berries. A FOR LEASE sign hung in one window of the small office building.
Rudi found himself standing next to it, his hands thrust into his pockets, unable to remember how he got there. He couldn't recall turning onto the walkway, or making his way up the path. Another lapse.
He shut his eyes. He'd heard the song before, he was sure of it. Church, possibly. But maybe not. He got confused. Sometimes, voices didn't match faces. He heard one person talking and saw another.
The music could be the accident talking . . . his old life--before the crash--bleeding into this one. But this song wasn't the one he was running from. This full-bodied contralto was different from the sinuous soprano that slithered into his head and spoke to him in a flicking, unintelligible whisper, raspy as scales against dry grass.
The singing stopped. Rudi opened his eyes.
"What are you doing here? Peeping on me?" A large woman with a metal cane and a blue knitted cap stood in the doorway. She glared at Rudi with bloodshot eyes before cutting a glance at his hands. Rudi jerked his hands from his pockets. "I wasn't--"
The woman sniffed. "Why don't you play with yourself someplace else? Before I call the cops." Rudi adjusted his baseball cap, careful not to disturb the lining. In the doorway behind her, he could make out a shopping cart, blanket, and scuffed black boom box. "I heard you singing. That's all." The woman leaned forward, her forehead creased by a frown. "What have you got under there? Reynolds Wrap?"
"You've been drinking," Rudi said. His scalp prickled.
The woman chuckled. Her shoulders rocked like two sofa cushions jiggling in an earthquake. "Not enough."
"I've been hearing you a lot. Do you always sing when you're drunk?"
"Singing's cheap. It don't cost nothin'. Which is exactly what I got right now. In case you were wondering."
"Except for a broken heart," he said. "Or an empty soul."
The crease in the woman's brow deepened briefly, then relaxed, as if overcome by sudden weariness. "You're crazy," she said.
"Rudi." He held out his hand, then snatched it back when it looked like she might whack it with the cane.
"Get a move on. Before you get any wrong ideas." She wavered, eerily insubstantial despite her size. "You hear?"
Rudi tilted his head. Barely audible music from the boom box scratched at the air. The woman followed his lopsided gaze. "Aretha," she said. " 'This Bitter Earth.' Now, leave me be." She shifted her weight. "My knees are givin' me hell."
"I have a radio show," Rudi said. "I play music sometimes and talk about stuff. I always do one Sunday mornings." He told her the A.M. frequency. "It's for people who can't make it to church."
"I'll be sure to listen. Now get outta here." She waved him on with the cane then hobbled into the shadows of her makeshift cave.
The next morning, at six-thirty, Rudi was transmitting from behind the Safeway on Mission Street.
Radio Baptiste. That was how he thought of himself: baptizing anyone who would listen with radio waves instead of water.
Sitting at the console in the back of the sound van, Rudi's skull felt like a pressure cooker ready to explode. He'd kicked off the hour-long program, The Rod of God, with a classic Greg Brown tune, "Lord, I Have Made You a Place in My Heart." It had been a favorite of his before the motorcycle accident, and like everything else associated with his old life he kept it around as a reminder of history not to repeat. From whiskey and bare-naked women, he launched into a rambling sermon that equated faith to the sound of one hand clapping.
"Belief can't be explained," Rudi said, winding down. "You don't have to see the tree to hear the sound it makes when it falls."
That was what he clung to since being released from the Lakeshore Foundation facility in Birmingham. Back in the apartment he'd been renting before the accident, he had found several joss sticks that had once belonged to his sister, a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a book called The Blue Cliff Record, with the Zen koans circled like points on a map he couldn't remember. Linnea. He hadn't thought about her for years. That part of his life was like an old well sitting in the back of his head. One misstep, and he'd fall in. Never see light again.
As usual, he wrapped up with a confessional, beamed out to the world via the dish atop the van.
"My mother knew I was a worthless sinner the day I was born." Rudi cleared his throat. "She said she could tell from the way I whined. I wasn't like my big sister. When I heard that, all I wanted to do was crawl back into the hole that spat me out. Not that she'd ever take me back. According to her, after all the problems I caused her those first nine months, she was glad to get rid of me. Her only regret was she didn't do it sooner."
The words, close to fifteen years old now, still hurt to repeat. But pain, as he'd reminded his listeners many times, could be a blessing. Lance a boil and it would heal. Exhausted, his face sweaty and his hands shaking, Rudi slumped into the wrinkled bosom of the sleeping bag in the back corner of the van.
He woke two hours later, roused by a heavy-fisted thrombosis of sound. Someone hammering on the back of the van. His brain felt pureed, Gerber baby food in a cracked jar. Drained, empty of the euphoria that gripped him during a broadcast, he sat up and pressed his fingers to his temples.
Food. That was what he needed.
He checked the time. Just after nine. Maybe the woman he'd met would be at the soup kitchen. Maybe she'd listened to his broadcast. Maybe the radio waves had washed over her like the waves of the River Jordan, leaching the hurt from her heart and the alcohol from her veins.
Rudi opened the back doors to the van and staggered out. The coastal fog was burning off, retreating under an unfocused sun. Mottled patches of melanoma blue shone through the haze. Rudi squinted at himself in the passenger's side mirror. He needed a shave and haircut. He ran his fingers through the lank strands plastered to his forehead, smoothing them into place. His eyes were red-rimmed around glossy black pupils. This morning they seemed to radiate as much light as they let in.
Turning from his reflection, his gaze skittered across the rust-scabbed side of the van. Despite several glossy applications of white enamel spray paint, a school of Jesus Saves fish with crosses for eyes, and a three-foot gash left by Hurricane Anika, the van's corporate logo was still barely visible:
RAD I/O.
The outline of the letters, tintype gray under the patchy paint, resurrected the dusty memory of a Greek bas-relief he'd seen during a fifth-grade field trip to a museum.
Rudi didn't think of the van as stolen. More like borrowed . . . or on temporary loan. He'd refused to hole up with his traveling companions when the hurricane hit and they'd opted to wait for the storm to abate before continuing on to Mobile. After they'd hunkered down in a cable-ready Pascagoula motel, playing it safe, he'd decided to go on without them.
"I'll be back in a day or two," he said before leaving.
"You're crazy." Bethel eyed the low-slung clouds and the apoplectic thrashing of sycamore trees. "You're gonna die."
"If that's God's will."
"Suicide is a sin," Travis had reminded him.
"Not if it's in the service of the Lord," Rudi quipped with blithe, practiced fatalism. Besides, he suspected they had an ulterior motive for wanting to spend the night in a motel. He didn't want any part of it.
In the days leading up to landfall, the Scion of Adam congregation had decided to dispatch the sound van from Prattville, Alabama, to Mobile and vicinity. The little strip mall church rented the van on weekends to spread the Gospel to people who couldn't make it into town for services. With the storm coming, they wanted to be there on the front lines when it hit.
"Eye of the devil," Bethel had said when the hurricane was still a couple of hundred miles offshore.
"That's right." Jim Odette's head bobbed as if attached to a spring. "People are gonna need hope. They're gonna need to hear the Lord is with them."
"Amen," Marilee Odette echoed. "If things get as bad as they say, we've got a duty to help lift them up."
On the drive down, along I-65, Rudi had been consumed with thoughts of Ezekiel; of dead bones rising up out of the earth, coming together, and putting on flesh. He kept his Bible on the seat next to him, within easy reach, and vowed to do whatever it took to make that happen. People would hear the Scripture, and if their spirit was broken it would be mended. If their bodies were injured, they would be healed. If their hope was spent, it would be replenished.
In retrospect, zeal had gotten the best of him. Proverbs warned that "pride goeth before destruction." There was too much fury, during the storm and after, to make it to ground zero. But at that point he was on a mission, stopped only whe...
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
At last - literary science fiction!
By Avid Reader
What I find tragic is that excellent novels like this receive little attention while utter trash revels in popularity. I'm talking about books with no editing, bad spelling, grammar and punctuation, cardboard characters, absurd plots, farcical science and dialogue straight from high school. Discovering a literary jewel in science fiction is indeed a prize. Let's face it - most scifi books are weak on character, dialogue, plot and anything relating to literary quality. But Mark Budz is different. This is a superior novel of great ideas, a flower that slowly opens until the ultimate beauty comes forth.
The idea of a technological life after death has been done before (nowhere better than the Inquisitor's Progress by Paul Hardy) but this take is very, very good. The slow synchronizing of the three stories is a beauty unto itself as the reader gradually becomes aware that something else is going on, something they can't put their finger on but yet feel its presence. The quality (perhaps I should say "interest factor") of the three separate stories within the story vary. Rudi was, of course, the best. And the noire machinations were a close second. The futuristic world lacked the depth of those in the past and this is understandable since the past is far easier to realize in all its intricate detail than a projected future.
My Grade - A-
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
One of the best books I've read this year.
By A. J. Luxton
I first saw this book in my local bookstore. As soon as I read the blurb, I picked it up. "T.S. Eliot, transhumanism and mystic neurology?" It was as if someone had written a novel just for me, and I hoped against hope that it would fulfill its promise.
In fact, it did.
Some of my favorite things in the world include the clinical tales of Oliver Sacks, and the interstitial territory where the experience of neurological events blends into the experience of self and mystical reality. Yeah, a mouthful, that. This may not be your sort of book if a few thousand-dollar words throw you off. But if this sort of thing fascinates you too, read ahead. This is the first piece of science fiction I've encountered which has a full handle on these boundaries and realities.
There is a point towards the middle of the book where a present-day character admits to experiencing a sense that his life is being recorded by cameras in his brain, and in the context of the three interlaced plotlines of the book, it is a moment of wonderful and startling ambiguity. Budz leads us to a place where the possibilities are balanced on a perfect edge: that this character is experiencing schizophrenic hallucinations and that his life *is*, in fact, being recorded by cameras in his brain.
It's a wonderful place to be, a place where it's possible for a thought to be insane and also true, where these qualities are not mutually exclusive. This is a theme throughout the narrative: another character experiences a brain tumor and a series of spiritual revelations, and the relationship between these things is not held to invalidate his experiences...
The situations of the characters in the book are often harsh and dark, but approached with empathy: a kind of open-eyed attitude toward all human experience that drew me deeply into the story. I found myself following every word with deep fascination.
The breadcrumb trail may be a little hard to follow at first, and the author assumes a background knowledge of "post-singularity" fiction conventions on the part of the reader, but it's well worth sticking with for the follow-through. "Human Voices" is a high-bandwidth book; as the pieces come together, it blows the mind, literally and figuratively. This one's a keeper.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Three strong stories that are stronger together
By Greg Wilson
The three threads are all strong enough to stand alone; they don't start to tie together 'til the middle of the book, but the end more than makes up for earlier confusion.
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