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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: Tuo Yaw is a collection of possibilities played out in alternative landscapes. Time shifts, paranormal happenings, bio-mechs, mind control, battles with state and authority. This collection encompasses the range of writing for which Douglas R. Mason has become renowned. "In these future worlds, there has to be room for the hope of love and for the human spirit to stick its head over the parapet. There are Rubicons to cross. Each one prepares his little boat to make the journey. Love is the great gesture to make against the insolence of oblivion--a clenched fist to raise at the receding shoreline."--DRM. Above everything, there is always a Way Out.

eBook Publisher: Golden Apple, Wallasey, Published: UK, 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: November 2004

2 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [245 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [232 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [233 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.3 MB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [264 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [258 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [277 KB] , hiebook (KML) [556 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [315 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [216 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [268 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [294 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [352 KB]
Words: 78282
Reading time: 223-313 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

After his "trouble" Alf tried other places. Eighteen months later, he was back at "The One-handed Clap".

Pressure stronger than reason worked as a hidden persuader and delivered him to Goldring's office, all set to put his thumbprint on a new contract. Experience, in spite of the dictum, needs to work its tiny fingers to the bone to teach anybody anything.

He had wound his tether round its pin and brought himself to dead centre. Goldring, that inscrutable pivot, lost no time in putting his fat finger on the nub.

"Look, Alf, son, you know me, Mr. Accommodation. Always ready to do for a friend. You're a good piano player. That I'll not deny. We miss you. Do you know that? Nobody else with your touch. But business is business. After that nasty turn you had, it was months before I got a steady boy. That I don't want again. You see my problem?"

Percussive clatter from a road drill in the narrow cul-de-sac made a period. Work was well under way on a foundation shaft for multi-storey redevelopment and an optimistic civil-defence network for underground storage and shelter. Alf Pearson waited patiently for a lull, and timed it well to come in with, "That's all right, Mr. Goldring. I understand. But that's all finished. Not a dizzy spell in twelve months. Look at that."

Two long, angular hands stretched across the table and waggled their near-skeletal fingers at the impassive Hebrew. Bony, spatulate, immense span; so that a big keyboard shrank to toy size when they began their crablike sidlings. But rock steady, as of now.

"That's good, Alf. Good. I'm happy for you. But what will you do down there, eh? You know what it did to you before."

Alf could remember that bit without a prompt. He could still smell the foetid damp of the cellars. Piano sited against a piece of ribbed brick wall at a Y-junction, with tunnel arms stretching away to smoky distance left and right. Curious that, the way he got stereo vision down the two shafts, as though he might one day get them merged for a brand new 3-D effect, if only he hit the focus right.

Overwork. But that was a norm on this job. Night after night, long hours, until the time he had felt himself dragging his anchor and shifting out of reality altogether. During a solo spot, hands moving as though with independent life, hitting a strict beat, lost in a house of his own building, with chain-link fences of sound cutting him off from the here and now, he had found himself isolated indeed.

Not a superfluous note, concealment of art so that anyone felt he could sit there and do it, he was giving form to sounds they all had in their heads. Clients had stopped talking and looked his way. Long oblong face with a falling lock of straw hair, heavy eyelids, half-closed. Fresh cigarette in the corner of a large loose-lipped mouth. Craggy nose.

They saw him crumple forward, doing a classic grab at his chest; but only Alf had been in on the transformation scene.

For him, there had been a brand-new log fire burning at his back. Dogs, bones, stench, clatter and a two hundred pound bearded type in a belted nightie shooting casually at the minstrel with a strange, bulbous hand gun.

At the hospital, where he opened his eyes, they would not believe that he had not been hit. No penetration of skin; but extensive bruising consistent with a heavy jab with a blunt stick. Complicated tissue damage as though by spontaneous breakdown.

"Stigmata," the headshrinker said. "Due to an intense mental image of being the victim of a gun wound. You are a very suggestible type, Mr. Pearson. God's gift to a gold brick salesman."

Goldring was still waiting for a reply, thoughtfully picking his front teeth with a sharpened matchstick.