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- - - - [The following excerpt comes from Issue No. 10: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.] - - - -
A T T H E E N D O F He knew he was approaching the Core of Unquenchable Perfection, because the Baskin-Robbins "flavor of the month" was tunafish-chocolate. If memory served (served, indeed! if only! but, no, it did nothing of the sort… it just lay about, eating chocolate truffles, whimpering to be waited on, hand and foot) he was now in Nepal. Or Bhutan. Possibly Tanna Touva. He had spent the previous night at a less-than-opulent b&b in the tiny, forlorn village of Moth's Breath — which had turned out to be, in fact, not a hostelry, but the local abbatoir — and he was as yet, even this late in the next day, unable to rid his nostrils of the stultifying memory of formaldehyde. His yak had collapsed on the infinitely upwardly spiraling canyon path leading to the foothills that nuzzled themselves against the flanks of the lower mountains timorously raising their sophomore bulks toward the towering ancient massif of the thousand-peaked Mother of the Earth, Chomolungma, the pillar of the sky upon which rested the mantle of the frozen heavens. Snow lay treacherously thick and deep and placid on that celestial vastness; snow blew in ragged curtains as dense as swag draperies across the summits and chasms and falls and curved scimitar-blade sweeps of icefields; snow held imperial sway up here, high so high up here on this sacred monolith of the Himalayas that the natives called the Mother-Goddess of the Earth, Chomolungma. Colman suffered from poriomania. Dromomania was his curse. From agromania, from parateresiomania, from ecdemonomania, from each and all of these he suffered. But mostly dromomania. Compulsive traveling. Wanderlust. Fifty United States before the age of twenty-one. All of South America before twenty-seven. Europe and most of Africa by his thirtieth birthday. Australia, New Zealand, the Antarctic, much of the subcontinent by thirty-three. And all of Asia but this frozen nowhere as his thirty-ninth birthday loomed large but a week hence. Colman, helpless planomaniac, now climbed toward the Nidus of Ineluctable Reality (which he knew he was nearing, for his wafer-thin, solar-powered, internet-linked laptop advised him that Ben & Jerry had just introduced a new specialty flavor, Sea Monkey — which was actually only brine-shrimp-flavored sorbet) bearing with him the certain knowledge that if the arcane tomes he had perused were to be believed, then somewhere above him, somewhere above the frozen blood of the Himalayan ice-falls, he would reach The Corpus of Nocturnal Perception. Or The Abyss of Oracular Aurochs. Possibly The Core of Absolute Discretion. There had been a lot of books, just a lot of books. And no two agreed. Each had a different appellation for the Ultimate. One referred to it as the Core of Absolute Discretion, another the Intellectual Center of the Universe, yet a third fell to the impenetrable logodædelia of: The Foci of Conjunctive Simultaneity. Perhaps there had been too many books. But shining clearly through the thicket of rodomontade there was always the ineluctable, the inescapable truth: there was a place at the center of it all. Whether Shangri-la, or Utopia, Paradisaical Eden or the Elysian Fields, whether The Redpath of Nominative Hyperbole or The Last and Most Porous Membrane of Cathexian Belief, there was a valley, a greensward, a hill or summit, a body of water or a field of grain whence it all came. A place where Colman could travel to, a place that was the confluence of the winds of Earth, where the sound of the swaying universe in its cradle of antiquity melded with the promise of destiny. But where it might be, was the puzzle.
WHO CAN KNOW WHAT TWISTS AND TURNS WILL BE REVEALED, ONLY IN McSWEENEY'S MAMMOTH TREASURY OF THRILLING TALES. - - - - Harlan Ellison has written and edited more than seventy-five books and approximately 1,700 short stories, scripts, essays and reviews. He is the winner of eight World Science Fiction Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and five Bram Stoker Awards.
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