A New Man for the Princess

Well, you made my life difficult. For our magazine launch, we asked you to send us sentences from books you had on hand, and you sent in some marvelous, if complicated ones. Our low-budget AI language model, ChatCheapyT, had a difficult time pasting them together into a cohesive text, but the computer did manage to spit out—something. Today's short story, which incorporates all those sentences, came out a bit long, but that's your fault, not mine. It's an odd story, not what I would have picked to launch a major magazine, but, again—your fault, for being weirdos.

You can read the submitted sentences as a list, if that floats your boat. (I think I got them all. If I missed yours, a thousand pardons.)

And here begins the story...

Once upon a time there was a Princess who was always wanting something new and strange. She had many things to her name, but, sadly, all of them were old and usual. Take, for example, Aunt Gwen, who had arrived the previous night. Thanks to her, the Princess had endured a full morning of tedious needlepoint in her mother’s salon, where the hours passed, like a kidney stone.

“I never go to Scotland,” her mother was telling Aunt Gwen. “Such a dreadful place. Haven’t I told you what happened the last time we were there?”

“Do tell,” said Aunt Gwen.

“Well, In St. Giles Cathedral, John Hanna, dean of Edinburgh, was reading from the new Book of Common Worship, which people had taken to calling ‘Laud’s Liturgy’, when he was struck by a stool flung by a woman in the congregation.”

“Truly?” said Aunt Gwen, duly scandalized. “Who was the woman?”

“No one saw,” said the Princess’s mother, upon which assertion a knowing look passed between the Princess and her cousin Amy, who was there too, if I hadn't mentioned that, engaged in her own tedious needlework.

“Then how did they know it was a woman?” asked Aunt Gwen, astutely.

“Had to have been,” said the Queen. “A man would have thrown a chair.”

“Auntie Gwen,” said the Princess, opening her gambit, “have you seen the roses in the glade? If you haven’t, you should. They’re splendid.”

“Not today, child,” said Aunt Gwen. “My hay fever, you know.”

“Well,” the Princess maneuvered, “maybe Cousin Amy might like to see them?”

“If she wants to, I suppose,” said Aunt Gwen. “Keep her out of the sun, though, and away from any bees.”

‘’I will,” promised the Princess.

“We’re not really going to see the roses,” asked Cousin Amy, as they arrived not at the glade, but the bell tower.

“Of course not,” said the Princess. “We’re reanimating a corpse.”

“Are we?” said Cousin Amy. “How daring!”

“My car’s over here,” said the Princess. “Help me wire the battery pack to that downspout.”

"This is your Model S?" said Cousin Amy, skeptically.

"Why should anyone steal a watch when they could steal a bicycle?” said the Princess, with a cryptic shrug.

While the Princess made the final preparations, connecting a nest of cables from her laboratory table to the man lying stiffly on it, Cousin Amy read passages from the Princess’s notebook.

“This sounds exciting,” said Cousin Amy. "A violent electrical storm raged overhead as Tesla came into the world, an appropriate portent for a child who would become the 'Master of Lightning.' Is that true, though? Will we need a lightning storm?”

“No,” said the Princess, rolling her eyes. “I was being poetic.”

“I wouldn’t have known you were the type,” said Cousin Amy.

“You wouldn’t think so, would you,” admitted the Princess. “I just write poetry to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief."

“You're going to call him Tesla, after your car?”

“I don't care what we call him,” said the Princess, "as long as he does our bidding."

“What if we called him Arthur, for my dear, old father,” suggested Cousin Amy.

“Suits me,” said the Princess.

She went to the kitchenette and pulled a shot of espresso, drinking it hot, in one gulp. Then she pulled another, and put that in a mug with steamed milk and foam. She brought the mug to the table, and set it beside the pale body. Lastly, she took a bottle of absinthe from the wet bar, opened it, and gave a sniff.

“Care for a drink?” she said to Cousin Amy.

“Wouldn't you rather be sober when Zombie Man wakes up?”

“It’s not for me,” said the Princess, filling a cup to the brim.

“That’s a lot of absinthe.” said Cousin Amy. “Tell me you're not planning to—have your way with him?”

“Uck,” the Princess recoiled. “Of course not, probably.”

“Why the booze, then?”

“This isn’t just a cup of absinthe,” the Princess told her fervently, “it’s a cup of life. See, one of the theories for how the tequila kind of spirits came to be called that, is, the vapor given off and collected during the distillation process was thought to be the spirit, or essence, of the original material. And they were right! The spirit of the bottle is exactly that: a ghost. That's why people do strange things when they're drunk. They're literally possessed! So the spirits will call the man back to his body. That, plus about eight thousand watts.”

“Are there spirits in coffee, too?” asked Cousin Amy.

“No, that's just to wake him up. Can you help me with this electrode?”

Cousin Amy took the wire, and helped the Princess thread it into the dead man’s ear.

“Isn't this—risky?” she asked.

“Sure," said the Princess. "Flooding puts you at risk of drowning. News at eleven. Are you ready?”

Cousin Amy nodded. The Princess opened the dead man’s mouth, and poured the absinthe in. On a count of three, she flipped the antique-looking handle of the main power switch.

Suddenly…

The corpse on the table made a gurgling sound. Its arms twitched. Its lips started moving. It drew a breath—

“Well, actually,” it mumbled, “Cole had started films in 1932 and had actually tallied more screen credits than Trumbo at the time of the hearings, though most were done for the B units at various studios. But that's beside the point.”

“Undead Soul,” commanded the Princess, meaning to stop his driftless monologue, “hear me and waken!”

“Anyhoo,” the dead man went on rambling, “I replied that I would be dashed if I took my wooly muffler.”

“What?” said the Princess.

“What?” said the corpse. He opened his eyes and registered the Princess looming over him. “You aren’t Winston Churchill,” he accused her. “Who are you, a demon?”

“Close enough,” said the Princess.

“You’re no demon.” He wagged a wrinkly finger. “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

“What were you saying about a wooly mammoth?” asked the Princess.

“Muffler,” said the dead man, rubbing his forehead and sitting up. “Where am I? How did I get here?”

“Let’s see,” said the Princess, “you’re in the bell tower, and you’re here because you claimed a model train set as a business expense, so my father had you executed. Just now, I’ve reanimated you, and you’re my undead slave.”

“Our undead slave,” Cousin Amy chimed in. “We’re calling you Arthur.”

“Arthur,” said the erstwhile corpse, “I'm pleased with that, but I don’t like the sound of ‘undead slave.’”

“You were a tax cheat and a dork,” said the Princess. “You’re only getting what you deserve.”

Arthur held up a hand—hold that thought—and swallowed half his cappuccino. “I was in paradise, you know,” he said. “On the celestial plane. I was One with the hypergunk.”

“The hypergunk?” asked Cousin Amy.

“Don’t encourage him,” the Princess warned her.

"There are distinctions," Arthur explained, "between countable gunk (a gunky object that has not more than countably many non-overlapping parts), gunk of higher cardinalities, and hypergunk."

“Never mind,” said Cousin Amy. “Sorry I asked.”

But Arthur went on, undeterred. “Some physicists have in recent years encouraged an unfortunate aspiration towards grand unified pictures, but I fear we must accept that the world that we encounter, the world of real stuff that we see and touch, is far too messy for that."

“Told you,” said the Princess.

“Is my universal wisdom bothering you?” scoffed Arthur. “You're the one who snatched me from the realm of pure understanding. How impertinent.”

“If I wanted a nerd, I'd have made one,” said the Princess. “See that big jar? That's Einstein's brain. Doesn't look so fancy now, does it?”

Arthur shook his putrifying head. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. You disappoint me, Princess."

Cousin Amy hefted a large, brass bell-clapper, and swung it into Arthur’s temple, which effectively stopped his droning.

"Well handled," said the Princess.

“You are demons!” growled the undead man. Then his eyes, which had been a mundane blue, came aglow, and burned orange-red. He bared his teeth. He flexed his decaying muscles, wrenching off the leather straps that held his legs. In a single bound, he grabbed Cousin Amy, threw her over his shoulder, and leapt up the stairs to the belfry.

“Oh, Cousin,” sighed the Princess, “now you’ve done it.”

In life, if you were careful, there were simply not that many times when you absolutely, positively, had to turn into a bear. But exceptions arose. The Princess went to her bureau, where she had a row of beakers lined up on a stand. She took the third one from the end, removed its cork, and swallowed the oily, green syrup therein.

Three floors above, Arthur was up on the high balcony, holding Cousin Amy by the ankle, dangling her over the edge.

“My father will kill you!” shouted Cousin Amy, flailing ineffectually.

“What good would that do?” bellowed Arthur.

Behind him, the belfry door exploded in a million splinters and one aggressive grizzly. Amy screamed. Arthur cursed. The bear seized them both, in one fluid motion. Tucking them under her meaty paws, she trundled them down the stairs again.

Back in the lab, the bear let go of Cousin Amy, gesturing toward a length of thick rope. Cousin Amy understood the suggestion, and went about binding Arthur's limbs, while the bear held him to the table. Then the bear surveyed each knot, rumbled her assent, and left Cousin Amy to guard Arthur while she went to the bureau and ate the fourth beaker, glass and all. Moments later, the Princess had returned to her delicate, princessy figure. She laced her dress, and came back to the table, smoothing Arthur’s hair, looking almost kind.

“How are we feeling now?” she asked him. “More compliant?”

Arthur nodded, wide-eyed.

“Good,” said the Princess, with a beatific smile. “And how should a faithful servant behave, when he gets his feelings hurt?”

“Whether you are waiting for your food," said the animated corpse, "or lining up to be counted, you can always practice breathing mindfully or practice smiling.”

“That’s right,” said the Princess, with a wink at Cousin Amy. “Simple, isn't it?"

—Twenty Year Later—

“So Simple and the Princess were married, and the crew of the flying ship were at the wedding, and all of the captains and the colonels and all the generals of his army, and never had there been such a wedding in the kingdom. And by and by the King died, and Simple became the King, and the Princess became the Queen, and they lived happily ever after.”

The new Queen closed the book, caressing the Young Princess’s cheek.

“Is that how you met Father?” asked the Young Princess. “Did he come to the castle on his flying ship?”

“Better than that,” said the Queen. “Your father came straight from heaven. Isn't that right, dear.”

“Indeed,” said Arthur, dejectedly.