The Book of Geezer
by John Teton
A brother and sister in Northern California get derailed from their ambitious career paths in art and science when their obsession with a mysterious elderly neighbor propels them to the inside of the sun and beyond. The Book of Geezer puts a literary spin on a rollicking tale of young professionals who get caught up in a mystery far more fantastic than they’d anticipated on the night they sneaked into an overgrown house on an island in the middle of a lake.
Excerpts from The Book of Geezer:
Marlie was annoyed at herself for feeling a glow of pride. Get a grip. You’re being whipped about by a reflex developed from years of craving and relishing praise from professors, mentors, and venture capitalists, but consider the source, for God’s sake: an aurorized ruffian inventor-kidnapper with sixteen-foot-long eyelashes.
Marlie grabbed her consciousness back to focus on Geezer. He was recounting how he had recognized Relura immediately, even though he’d only seen her once, on the iceberg, and that got him thinking about the twins. “Despite your egregious interference in my affairs four years ago, it was clear you weren’t dumb and you possessed healthy curiosity instincts.”
The twins sniffed Geezer’s effort to ingratiate himself, but it worked in spite of their suspicions. He lauded the progress they were making in their careers—a budding research scientist investigating plasma science (no big surprise there) and a skilled pilot and artist cashing in on images he’d confected courtesy of the auroracreatures they’d stumbled upon years before. For the human helpers he’d need to carry out his new mission, the best bets were the ones who had accompanied him on his earlier one.
* * *
Meanwhile his imagination’s night shift hummed along at its usual feverish pitch. Glancing at the frog out of the corner of his eye, he wondered what fantasies were jacking up the creature’s little brain. It was obvious he was het up about this expedition. Perhaps he imagined himself invited to join an elite brotherhood of superfrogs whom he could assist in an evolutionary leap over humans to surpass us in thought and planetary control, just as they already outmatched us in jumping ability. Such a delusion could only be expected among intelligent members of a species that had suffered so much decline in population and habitat due to the outrages perpetrated by humans upon their fragile environment. Maybe the frog was convinced that such an anointment was just what lay in store for him at Geezer’s, with all the certainty of a girl convinced that the fancy dinner her beau was taking her to would be the setting for his popping the question. Perhaps the Recipients—whoever they were—would whisk him away that very night in a protective bubble straight to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where he would be introduced to the true king of the world as the hot rookie prince they’d been scouting for years.
* * *
And it was not Earth alone featured in this show. Geezer’s frame revealed exotic animated tableaux of solar dancers, including a Busby Berkeleyesque, slowly spinning circle of interlocked aurorabirds in the sun’s photosphere arrayed like the spokes of a great wheel at a ship’s helm.
After letting his dumbstruck passengers marinate in wonder for a while, Geezer re-entered their consciousness with his gravelly basso profundo voiceover, schooling them in physics so far beyond “classical” as to make Marlie’s elite seminars at Stanford look like monastic alchemy apprenticeships in the Middle Ages. Having read into the history of science on her own (and incidentally having lived through a honking paradigm-busting adventure in her teens), Marlie was less smug than many in her discipline about the durability of presently treasured tenets of physics. She was a soft target for Geezer’s salvos aimed at the giants of the past, as well as the millions who’d been spoon-fed in school on their various dictates. “Don’t be too surprised by violations of the supposed laws of physics you’ve witnessed so far,” Geezer advised them. “There are more to come.”