Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 27-28. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!
Summary
“I’m happy to smoke my tautological weed in private.”
Sarah said things would be bad in the Green Glass City. Aloud Zelda agreed, but she silently hoped that things had worked out.
Sarah was right. The city they left on the mend, mutants exiled, Brigit and her people safe, is empty; its bottle-green skyscrapers have tarnished, and birds and overgrown vegetation are the only living things. Their robot-horses drag the Challenger through deathly silence.
The alt-riders reach the labyrinthine palace at the city’s heart. Wealth and power built it, and generations of graft reaped obscene profit for its officials, until the last mayor fell and mutants replaced its statue heads with busts of their tentacled leader. The humanoid drones that Ish revived to serve Brigit remain, motionless except for their pulsing polymer hearts. There are no bomb-craters, no bloodstains or bones. No signs of rot, either.
Unchallenged, the alt-riders find the palace’s underground garage. To their amazement, it remains perfectly stocked and maintained, no dust or cobwebs anywhere. Ramon expected the job to take two days; uneasy, he decides to do it overnight. Together the alt-riders repair the Challenger – once again solving the “five-body problem” that is their fellowship.
While the others sleep, Ramon tries to persuade Sarah to accept help warding off the cowboy. Sarah concludes she was wrong to try to exclude June from the fight they’re all in – she chose to be here, and chose again knowing what she was getting into. Back at their sleeping bags, June lies still enough that Sarah suspects she’s only pretending to sleep. Sarah whispers an apology, but a touch reveals that June’s “shoulder” is actually her knapsack, a trick. June is gone.
Determined not to let Sarah face the cowboy alone again, June’s left the garage to search the palace. Her shadows go with her, murmuring. She loses her flashlight in a vast marble hall, but discovers she can see in the dark. The cowboy’s booted footsteps sound on the floor above, but retreat when she challenges him. June pursues, her shadows like sense-extending “whiskers.” He enters a room with no other exit, and she follows. Intense lights blind her. Something covers her face, steals her breath. She falls. And is lifted.
* * *
Sarah’s cry wakes the others. Ish’s knack tells him June’s alive, nearby. He runs into the palace, leading the chase.
June wakes to a room whose walls, ceiling and floor shine with “pitiless artificial sun.” She sits in a metal “chair” made of drones who bind her with their hands. June’s right hand is bleeding, the work of a gaunt, ragged woman who circles into view, swaying as if drunk, holding a glass knife. June looks like Sal, the woman says. Never mind her friends: the would-be rescuers are lost in “the maze.”
June realizes her captor is Brigit, though it’s hard to see the heroic leader in this skeleton. Brigit admits the alt-riders helped defeat the mutants. Then they left, and the shadows grew. They infected her people, urged them to abandon their hard-won safety. There are no shadows in the light-bathed room, June sees. When she tries to call some, Brigit stabs her thigh – she can see the rot in June, having traded her eyes for the metal threads stitched into her empty sockets.
Meanwhile, Zelda and Ish figure out that the rooms they pass and repass are moving. Ramon slashes carpet to reveal a trapdoor. Underneath is a ladder. The alt-riders climb down into what Ish recognizes as the drone control center, brighter-lit than before, with more surveillance cameras. All this “scrutiny” is what’s quelling their knacks.
They find the server room. Someone’s been living there, amid scalpels and pill bottles. On surveillance screens Ish accesses Brigit’s “interrogation room.” Zelda and Sarah go to find it, leaving Ish to turn off the drones immobilizing June.
Brigit rants about her people’s desertion. Finally she found the rot’s source in this room, in that crack in the wall. June sees black appendages struggling out, only to be withered by the caustic light. Brigit wants June to bring her people back; she has become the knife that will cut June until she obeys.
June pretends to try, while silently calling for the shadows, for Sal, to help her. Zelda’s arrival distracts Brigit. Brigit, too, is rot-infected, Zelda says. She has to let go and heal the crack, with Zelda’s help. Instead Brigit says she sees the rot in Zelda and must cut it out. As she attacks, Ish fails to shut down the drones choking June. Ramon cuts the cables that supply coolant and power to the palace-wide systems.
In the interrogation room, the lights go out. Freed from their imprisonment, the shadows kill Brigit. The drones go inert, releasing June. Sarah and a wounded Zelda carry June through smoke-filled darkness as the disabled palace catches fire. The cowboy reappears, but Sarah banishes him again, and the restored Challenger and robot-horses speed the alt-riders from the conflagration.
This Week’s Metrics
What’s Cyclopean: The Green Glass City probably is cyclopean, but the descriptions invoke Oz as much as R’lyeh: bottle-green buildings, moss-colored windshields, emerald mirrors.
The Degenerate Dutch: At Yale Ramon lived in Calhoun College, named after John C. Calhoun (“‘Slavery is a positive good’? That motherfucker?”) It’s since been renamed after Grace Hopper.
Libronomicon: Sarah lists her kids’ favorite books: The Westing Game and the Dog Man series.
Weirdbuilding: You know the mutants were bad, because their leader had tentacles.
Anne’s Commentary
Who could want to see Oz’s Emerald City descend into ruin, while flying monkeys desecrate its once-glittering halls, especially after saving the damn place once already? It’s a shock for the alt-riders to discover their Oz in worse shape than they found it the first time. In apocalyptic times, adventurers expect to encounter lawless gangs, and/or zombies, and/or mutants with or without tentacles. That’s fine, you can fight all of these with sentient muscle cars and might-as-well-be magical knacks. It’s what comes after the ultimate global (or here, civic) smackdown that must devastate: The emptiness and silence that follows the extinction of your species.
In the Green Glass City, colonizing trees and weeds have crowded into the plazas, so they’re not actually empty. Birds still sing and chatter, so silent the city is not. But the people are missing, utterly, having left not even bones behind; for Zelda, that’s what renders the GGC dead. She tells herself she didn’t expect parades. She tells herself she’s always known that bad outcomes were the alt-road default. The crazy thing is that a decade of alt-hopping hasn’t killed her capacity for hope. She acknowledges that they hadn’t left Brigit’s people safe, because there was no “safe.” Mental-seconds later, she’s thinking that “there was still a chance this would all turn out okay.” It’s only momentarily that she can’t “deny the grinding force of history at work,” instead of insisting she’s “a clearly outlined person with wants and goals and needs,” the possession of which implies agency. Or not. There’s also the false agency of the music box monkey, convinced it’s banging those cymbals of its own accord.
Next paragraph, Zelda obliquely compares herself to the cowboy. Would wearing his hat – say, wielding power for power’s sake – feel the way she felt when they reactivated the GGC drones? Do the White Hats have a truer agency, and could theirs last?
Zelda’s a complicated character, all right. Not that any alt-rider’s a simple soul, or else the gravitational force of Zelda’s charisma couldn’t have pulled them in a five-body problem of ridiculous interpersonal complexity. Ramon, however, doesn’t despair of finding a solution to their “astronomical” conundrum. Anecdotal evidence: When the alt-riders have to, they “sort their shit out, cowboys or monsters or rot.” They are all fixers, Ramon of machines, Sarah of bodies, Ish of numbers, Zelda of rot. And June, ally of shadows, fixes things via the rot.
A fix for one player in the cosmic game could break another player, perhaps a requirement for maintaining essential balance. For me, one puzzler Last Exit poses is: Are there absolute good guys and absolute bad guys? Put simply, or perhaps simplistically, are the alt-riders and their allies always Right, while the cowboy and the rot/Beyond-Sal are always Wrong? Initially it looked this way. Granted, Zelda’s always beating herself up for having failed Sal, the alt-riders, the whole of unrotted existence, but that might just be Zelda’s self-doubting way and worthy of sympathy rather than censure.
On the other hand, what about Zelda’s bursts of “clarity” in Chapter 28? What if by groveling in self-condemnation, Zelda had not sought forgiveness but the denial of forgiveness, shifting the spotlight from her victims to herself. As she puts her insight: “Really it was about me the whole time. Like always.” Even during the desperate search for June, she catches herself making “the moment” about Zelda.
Zelda, Zelda, Zelda! If “life was always going to skew in the worst possible way because she was ruined inside and spoiled what she touched,” that meant some inscrutable Power mocked Zelda’s monkey-doll pretenses to autonomy, and “failure was not her fault.” But! If Zelda did have the agency to fail, she might also succeed: “Then there was still a way. A chance.”
“They have all gone into the world of light!” is the first line of a poem by 17th-century poet Henry Vaughan. Of those she’s lost, Brigit must cry out: “They have all gone into the world of darkness!” The rot has tricked them away, every citizen, every officer and confidant. All her people, the ones she saved with the alt-riders, the ones she tried to save again, alone. All the alt-riders have savior-complexes to one degree or another. Brigit has a savior complex too, but it’s grown pathological, shorn of the heroic and sunk into the egomaniacal. All her people, but culpable for their fate through their ingratitude. Seducible, they were seduced.
Or – they went into the dark because it was beautiful, and they embraced it, as Sal did, as Zelda and June have been tempted to do.
Is it rot that’s driven Brigit mad, as Zelda believes? Will June’s knack for the rot, however useful at the moment, finally corrupt her? All bad, the rot? All good? Like humanity, a mixed bag?
I’ll have the mixed bag of rot for now. You can always pick out the really icky bits and give them to the squirrels. Or maybe not to the squirrels, that could get scary….
Ruthanna’s Commentary
There’s a lot going on in this week’s chapters. Outside the chapters, however, I am dealing with eye trouble: did you know that “stye” is not just a crossword puzzle entry? It’s an annoying-yet-minor condition that requires poking ointment into my eye four times a day. Unfortunately, I have read way too much horror, and scenes with bad things happening to eyes stick with me. Thus, all-too-vivid images rear themselves in my memory every time I go through my care routine. Brigit appears at an inopportune time, and I’m not primed to like her even if she weren’t torturing June with a glass knife. The self-inflicted “fixed” eye sockets, staring hollowly into the void to pin it in place, are more than sufficient. Ow. June, please, please, don’t think about how she did it, and definitely don’t think about whether she used an ice cream scoop.
I’m gonna take a break now and lie down with a warm compress over my eyes. Possibly an armored one.
Brigit started as a hero: a scrappy fighter with bow and arrow, a perfect ally for the college-aged gang who needed a garage to fix their car, and who needed a fixable apocalypse. They helped her fight off tentacled mutants, gave her control over powerful humanoid drones… and left her and her people in a “good place”. Happy endings depend on when you leave the story behind and ride off into the sunset. Brigit’s people didn’t appreciate the good place left for them – maybe because, given any sort of power, she was determined to keep them safe, like it or not. She would exert as much force, as much control, as much close surveillance, as was required to stop them from choosing anything other than safety. And so she’s left with the trinity of pills, knives, and surgical equipment.
Brigit reminds me unfortunately of Ish. Use the all-seeing, certainty-creating machine to hold back the rot, and you end up serving something else. On Earth it’s the cowboy. Brigit may not wear a white hat, though it shows up briefly in her computer system, but she’s sure got something on her head.
“A monster at least had rules,” says June. “A hero didn’t have any.” I’m not sure this is true, but it is often what makes for a facile story of beatable monsters. If you know the lore about vampires you can stake Carmilla sleeping, find the passage in the Necronomicon that lets you stop the ritual, walk the line that keeps you safe in the woods. A good hero has a code, has things she won’t do, principles that see her through the less-than-simple problems. But if you’re a hero just because you’re fighting mutants and have “Disney Princess eyes” (oh god the eyes), you’ve got no brakes. And maybe no tolerance for people who don’t appreciate your obvious heroism.
What kinds of heroes are our alt-riders? Sal certainly didn’t have brakes, nor does Zelda. Ish is all too much like Brigit. Ramon and Sarah, impure and tied to lovers and family, might at least stop and think. But they all want to save the world, and have little patience for the slow mundane work of, say, getting a university to take down celebrations of slavery. And they all love to play the solo martyr; on this count at least June fits right in. Someday these people are going to figure out how to ask for backup before riding out alone – if they all manage it at the same time, they might even find that grail.
Assuming that heroes exist at all: Zelda considers the great man theory versus the cogs of historical force, herself as clockwork monkey atop a music box. If she hadn’t discovered alt-jumping, would someone else have figured it out? The gang and the princess working through the multiverse from opposite sides, just because it was steam engine apocalypse time?
And now they’re riding out again, away from the palace as it finally collapses Usher-style. It’s not quite riding into the sunset, but riding out with your back to the fire is an equally tried-and-true album-cover image: sky the color of new possibilities dawning, or old ones collapsing, or the first night at the college where you’re going to invent interdimensional travel.
Leave a new mess behind you or a tidily-wrapped happy ending: maybe there’s not so much difference after all.
Next week, you’ve just bought a new house, but you used the wrong kind of inspector: buyer beware in Kiera Lesley’s “Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom.”
