Corrigan’s Homunculi E-Book

Larry Tritten

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 30

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Creating miniature soldiers for the military wasn't as simple as it sounded. But when you have unlimited funds, anything is possible—even if it doesn't come out quite the way you planned.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CORRIGAN’S HOMUNCULI

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1989 by Larry Tritten.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1989.

Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

CORRIGAN’S HOMUNCULI

by Larry Tritten

Setting it up had been a laborious task, but not a hard one. Money was the bottom line. It cost Corrigan a few million dollars, but analogically that was just a drop in the water of the vast ocean of his fortune, all inherited from his grandfather, who had made it selling weapons and military equipment to southern European and Central American despots. The grandfather had been fascinated by war ever since getting a set of military miniature Swiss pikemen for his sixth birthday, and it had become his passionate avocation, then his business. Corrigan inherited the avocation as well as the business. He would never forget the extraordinary impact of his first visit to his grandfather’s mansion in Nichols Canyon, the stunning first sight of the numerically complete diorama of Crécy: thirty-one thousand exquisitely rendered miniature knights, archers, and men-at-arms locked in gaudy combat. The greatest array of penny candy conceivable could not have been more enticing to him. And that night there had been a party, a costume ball at which his grandfather, as Il Duce, had presided over a room full of colorfully garbed celebrants—musketeers, lancers, hussars, Nazis, dragoons, Indians, paratroopers, et al. As a child, Corrigan remembered that day with the sort of vivid entrancement that other children remember a sensational Christmas.

After his grandfather died, Corrigan multiplied his inheritance. He had put more dioramas in the mansion—numerically accurate re-creations of Thermopylae, Austerlitz, Cowpens. But ultimately the static displays began to seem too concertedly novel and monotonous. He had heard about an underground geneticist who claimed to be able to do fabulous things, things that were criminal, and possibly unconscionable. Corrigan didn’t care about that, of course. He lived comfortably with the fact that blood was the source of his wealth.

He had gone to visit the geneticist in the motel-style apartment where he lived across the street from the old railbed just west of Century City. The meeting had been carefully arranged through their middleman. The geneticist, whose deep saltwater tan made a paradoxical contrast with his world-weary demeanor, was nonetheless lively and loud.

He put a cruse of mucosoquartz on a coffee table in the small living room and gave Corrigan a look of challenge.

Corrigan smiled and took an ampoule of devil’s jism out of his pocket and emptied it into the pink liquor. “Be my guest,” he said.

The geneticist laughed loudly and poured himself a drink. When he looked back at Corrigan, there was a glint in his eyes. “You’re a serious man, aren’t you?”

“Don’t fun me,” Corrigan said. He took a fist-size clump of currency out of his pocket and tossed it on the coffee table. “Anything you want,” he said. “What can you do?”

“It all.”

“Create life?”