Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #226 Page 13

  My stomach knots up and bile stings the back of my throat.

  I lean over the edge and vomit into the foamy waters.

  * * * *

  Days pass. The man is feverish. His sickness helps me forget where I am. My task is to heal him. I try to put everything else from my mind. I become familiar with our home, with the landscape around. Tenacious brackens which bear sweet, edible berries are the only vegetation in a terrain of coarse grasses. On the horizon I see the edge of a blackened forest.

  While the man sleeps, which is most the time, I study the Tamaraic language, anticipating the day he is able to write again. I have to admit there is an elegance to the language that is missing from our own tongue.

  Sometimes I go out in the banshee.

  One morning, not twenty klicks from the cave, I spy a cluster of buildings on an escarpment that marks the beginning of rolling hills. There is no sign of life, but I land the banshee well away and hike closer just in case. From a hundred paces I see that it's a Loyalist place, and I feel a little easier about any thefts I might make. As I raid the seed casks under the eaves I realize the place isn't deserted. A woman is singing a lullaby, her proud voice spilling out from a high window further down the building.

  I have to look. I have to see who I am stealing from.

  Keeping it upright, I spin the cask until it is under the window. Delicately, I climb onto the top and then wait, crouching. The woman is still singing. It is the same song, the same verse, over and over again. For a moment I wonder if I'm listening to a broken record rather than a living human, but if I listen carefully I can hear occasional cracked notes and sighs and I know the voice comes from flesh and blood. I place my palms on the wall and slide myself upwards. The bricks feel damp, and I can smell mould. My body warmth flows away and I shiver.

  My fingers reach the sill. I take a breath and lift up my head.

  The room is gloomy like the hills. It looks bare save for the silhouette of the woman and a small bed in the corner. As my eyes adjust I see that there is a child standing next to the woman, a thin arm wrapped around the woman's legs. The small bed in the corner is not a bed, but a cot, wooden rails like emaciated cell bars.

  There is something in the cot.

  The woman is dressed in traditional Loyalist clothing—an all-in-one piece of flowing black. She faces the cot. There is a baby inside. I can see the shape of its chubby limbs and the curve of its round, doughy head. It isn't moving. Its cheeks are ebony white.

  It's dead.

  Instinctively, my hand darts to cover my mouth, and in doing so I knock some loose debris off the sill. It falls inside the room, smashing into pieces on the stone floor.

  The child twists around. It's a girl, pretty eyes puffed and watery. She has a look nobody of that age should be familiar with. A look of utter loss, utter incomprehension—like the look I saw in the mirror the day Yemeni died. She sees me but does nothing and eventually turns back. Her disregard chills me. As if she can see my plight. See that I am of no consequence whether friend or enemy.

  Am I a wraith now, dead like the land?

  The woman doesn't break from the song.

  I wheel the cask back, empty the bag of seed, and leave.

  * * * *

  We get by.

  The decline of the land seems to have been arrested. The bare patches of earth that pepper the brushland are no longer multiplying. The numbers of the crustaceans that riddle the rock pools at low tide have stabilised.

  One morning, after catching an unusually hearty fish—it must be as long as my hand—I climb the rock face and return to the cave.

  "How's your appetite, today,” I ask, unable to keep the pride from my voice. I unwrap the fish from the seaweed that swaddles it, and show the man. Who knew scales and black eyes and that piscine stench could be so mouth watering?

  His eyes reveal gratitude, but not hunger. He will eat it, but not in the greedy way you might imagine. He has bundled a small animal hide under his head, and he sits slightly up in the bed. He motions for the paper and stylus.

  I pass him the objects, admiring his inner stamina. He's still frail, but the fever has broken, and the cuts and bruises have faded. He writes with bold strokes because fine calligraphy is beyond his trembling hand. A few words cover a single sheet. Until now he has only written about immediate needs—a request for more blankets or the attention of a wound. This time the message is different.

  I must go back.

  I scan the words again in case I've misread something. There's no mistake. “Go back where?” I ask, trying not to understand.

  Another sheet. Two words.

  The town.

  "What are you talking about? Go back to the town? To the starship? To the cell?"

  Wherever. The town.

  "They'll kill you. They'll kill me."

  He shrugs.

  This is too much for me. I fling the fish package at the wall. It hits with a slap and leaves a damp mark. “Why?” I thrust the stylus back into his hand. “Tell me why."

  He shakes his head and brushes the paper onto the floor.

  "I won't take you back."

  He turns his back to me. Thin white scar lines crisscross his spine. Stalemate.

  * * * *

  "Who are you?” A few days have passed since our disagreement. I sit on the edge of his bed, and let him sip water from a canteen. The fear he might slip out when I'm asleep terrifies me. I've hidden the banshee in an alcove in the next bay. I sleep in the cave's entrance. His identity has begun to consume me the way it consumed Kelif.

  He makes no effort to respond. No expression. No gesture.

  "Are you Loyalist or Senastrian?” I've never spoken to him like this before. Who he was didn't matter before. Now it does.

  He doesn't move.

  "Maybe you're neither. Maybe you came down from the ships alone. Which ship were you on?"

  Nothing.

  "You came down from the ship alone and you came here. You came here and set up a home so you could live apart from us. All of us."

  He snorts.

  "Right, that doesn't make sense. Why would you want to go back to the town?” I hate airing my ill-thought conjectures like this. I hate being an interrogator. “Fuck this,” I say, and go outside.

  * * * *

  I wake, body stiff and cold. Dawn's gauzy light spills onto the passage wall, and the tang of the sea is strong. A clanging sound echoes from the chamber. I rub my bleary eyes, discard my covers, and get up. The man is banging his metal bowl against the floor. I wonder if he's tried to walk yet. Perhaps he's perfectly capable of walking and he's disguising it, so that one day he might up and leave without my knowledge.

  Will I end up chaining him?

  "I'm here. What is it?"

  He levers himself back onto the bed and sits cross-legged. He gets stronger every day, gaunt lines of his face slowly disappearing, ribs no longer so visible. He makes a handwriting motion.

  I'll tell you, he writes.

  I'm wide awake, night's cloak thrown clear off. I feel my eyes large and greedy as if I'm a child who's spied a slice of cake.

  Then you take me back.

  My anticipation deflates like a pierced balloon.

  An exchange. His identity for passage back.

  A bleakness rushes through me. I am paralysed. To live this life, to feed this man, to be able to do this day in day out for the rest of my days, I must know him.

  But to know him means to lose him.

  * * * *

  "I'll do it."

  What choice do I have? Could I lie to him? Tell him I'll take him back and then go back on my word after he tells me who he is. No. Could I chain him up like an animal and still live with myself, live with him? No. I will be true even if it leads to death.

  On the paper, he draws the banshee.

  "You want to show me something?"

  He nods. I pass him the crutches I have fashioned from the branches of the dead hardwoods. He leans them agains
t the bed, keen for me to read something else before we leave.

  Nobody must know. He grabs my hand and presses it over my heart. He's crushing my fingers, gaze like lasers.

  "I swear,” I say, afraid. “This stays with me."

  He lets go, and hobbles out. I follow, rubbing my hand.

  We hug the coastline for the first hour, the ocean glittering to the right, brilliant chalk cliffs to the left. I don't speak. I can still feel his hand around mine. At a long delta he indicates to head inland. The banks of the streams are flush with new life, lime shoots and bursts of reeds. The tributaries coalesce into a slow moving river which flows through a foggy moorland. I can barely see the ground below, but the man seems to know the land intimately, using landmarks invisible to me to guide us.

  He motions to set down and I land on a craggy rise, the engines momentarily scattering the mist before it shrouds us again. We trek, my pack empty save for torch, fish oils, and rope. Our path descends and I find the mossy walls of a steep ravine rising up around us.

  The man stops. He points to a thin cleft in the rock, a pitch black scar like a rift into another reality.

  "Here?” I ask, uncomfortable. I hate the claustrophobic dark—it brings back too many bad memories from time aboard the ship. A sickly sweet smell like rotting flowers emanates from the fissure.

  The crutches clatter against the rock. The man drops to his knees and heaves himself in, the calloused soles of his feet disappearing last. I glance up and down the ravine. My eyes alight on the purple petals of a climber plant that blooms from a crack in the rock. I wonder if it will be the last living thing I'll see.

  The shaft is narrow and angles downwards. Underneath, the damp passage undulates as if eroded over the aeons by running water. The sides are more ragged. From time to time I hit my shoulder against a jagged edge and curse aloud. The ebb and flow of air causes a regular whining noise that makes me imagine the earth itself is wheezing.

  Eventually, I bring my arm forward and slam into the man's leg. He turns around and I feel his hand grasping my own and helping me to my feet. I delve into the pack and fish out the torch. We're stood in a low-ceilinged chamber, phosphorescent algae dappling the walls. The ground ahead is a perfect glassy black like a lidless eye. I only realize it is water when I step forward.

  I twist around, raising the torch, half expecting the man to be rushing me. He isn't. He is securing the rope to a thick stalagmite. “What now?” I ask, betraying my nerves.

  He finishes tying the rope, removes his clothes, and smears the fish oils over his body. Then he dives into the inky pool. When the rope goes taut I do likewise.

  The water is icy. Its first touch causes me to gasp. Pockets of air bubble upwards. I surface, take another breath, and dive again. My body quickly numbs, the only sensation the rough feel of the twine, first in one hand, then in the other. I count my strokes. Five...ten...fifteen...I feel my muscles tire...twenty...lungs begin to burn...twenty-five...panicking...twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight...lights above...twenty-nine...I crash through the surface and draw a mighty breath. The man is there for me. His skin is slick and warm. His forearms slide over my waist, seeking purchase, before he hauls me onto the shore.

  The ground is slimy like the muddy bank of a river. Above, lights twinkle—a product of my dizziness, I think. I shake my head, expecting them to fade but they remain. I'm beneath the boughs and foliage of a tree.

  A grand, ancient, monster of a tree.

  Canopy stacked upon canopy, a cathedral of nature. On the lowest layer, where the branches are thickest, enormous pods hang.

  I get up, bandy legged from both the swim and the spectacle. “A tree? Underground?” I cough. Some of the pods have fallen to the mire, their skins broken like cracked eggshells. I approach the nearest one. It is a sickly yellow colour, constructed from fibrous threads, and about half a man's height in length. Inside, a distinct shape is imprinted like a pottery mould.

  Suddenly, I see it for what it is. I scrabble backwards, but my heels can't get a foothold in the mud and I slip over.

  It's a mould of a human curled up like a foetus.

  A cocoon.

  I struggle away, kicking mud everywhere, limbs flailing like a demented insect turned upside down. This is too much. I need air. I need light.

  I turn onto my front and jump up...only to come face to face with the man.

  * * * *

  We fly over the brackens, the mist dispersed, the majestic landscape clear all the way to the horizon. Everywhere I see renewal, growth. Dazzling brooks, blooms of water lilies in blue lakes. My eyes flitter between the terrain and the man beside me.

  They are one and the same.

  "One and the same,” I say, giggling like a child.

  He's been born many times—as many times, and in as many guises, as the number of races who've settled on the planet.

  Call him an avatar.

  A caretaker.

  The joke of an ancient race.

  The planet's fortunes mirror his own. Kill him and you murder the planet. Wound him and you scar it. Poison him and toxins will course the veins of every piece of vegetation, rotting and sickening the land. It is the ultimate test of a society's health; how does a civilization treat its lowest common denominator, its average citizen?

  Not very well, apparently. Not even amnesty from a natural death has prevented his demise thus far.

  He'll always come back though. Come back when the next race drops by.

  Hope springs eternal, I guess.

  So, he is no longer the nameless man.

  He is Aquestria.

  When we return to the cave on the cliff face, while he sleeps, using the sledgehammer that sits propped against the passageway wall, head rusty from an age of sea air, I break both his legs.

  * * * *

  I couldn't let him go back, could I? To let him go back would be to kill us all. I may be a monster, but I'm not that great a monster.

  And I have kept my other promise.

  My promise to never abandon him. To always care for him so long as it is in my power to do so. Like him the land is crippled. But crippled is still alive, and alive is better than dead.

  Sometimes, when I indulge myself, I think that the poor harvests and the stunted animals might be a great leveller for the two sides—that I have actually helped contribute to the fragile peace. But that is only sometimes.

  I grow old while he doesn't age. One day I'll be too frail to prevent him escaping. Of course by then he'll have been forgotten and will just be another refugee from across the border.

  I hope my people treat him better that time.

  Copyright (C) 2010 Stephen Gaskell

  * * * *

  * * * *

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  BOOK ZONE—Various Book Reviews

  * * * *

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION

  James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, eds

  * * * *

  Reviewed by Andy Hedgecock

  Once I'd recovered from my exasperation at the editors’ pompous and fatuous introduction and picked the book up from where I'd flung it, I was utterly absorbed by Kelly and Kessel's collection. Almost every one of the 19 stories collected here is well crafted, provocative and crammed with vivid imagery. So I'm going to take a leaf out of master lyricist Johnny Mercer's songbook and spread joy up to the maximum. I'll deal with bringing gloom down to the minimum in due course.

  The collection covers 40 years of writing by glittering stars in the sf firmament, such as Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, as well as sf stories by the likes of Steven Millhauser, Don DeLillo and T.C. Boyle—writers lauded by mainstream critics in spite of a predilection for the fantastic. The editors set out to present a historical sweep, and the stories are printed in order of publication.

  The book opens with ‘Angouleme', a tale of urban anomie, violence and teenage disaffection from Thomas Disch's deeply dystopian 334 saga. Set in a society b
lighted by overpopulation and class division, the tale has lost none of its impact since it first appeared in New Worlds in 1971.

  The next story is another classic, Ursula Le Guin's fable ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', which concerns a shining utopia with a dark secret at its heart. I loved it when I read it 30 odd years ago and, again, it still packs a punch. More alert readers will already appreciate that the ‘Secret History’ of the collection's title does not relate to the undiscovered nature of the authors or their stories.

  Carter Scholz's ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ offers a more accessible version of a philosophical game on the theme of plagiarism played by Borges 40 years earlier. If Scholz lacks the philosophical rigour of Borges, he did, at least, make me laugh.

  One of the most harrowing tales in the collection is ‘Salvador’ by Lucius Shepard. First published in 1984, six years before the film Jacob's Ladder dealt with a similar theme, the story features US combat troops fuelled by hallucinogenic drugs and struggling to distinguish reality from chemically induced perception.

  The book closes with ‘The Wizard of West Orange', Steven Millhauser's tale of a nineteenth century VR machine, the development of which is driven by hunger for knowledge and lust for sensation. Millhauser's image rich but precision-pared prose paints a picture of spiritual growth and moral corrosion, capturing perfectly the complex psychological impact of tools and technologies.

  The collection also includes fine stories by Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Kate Wilhelm, Jonathan Lethem and Connie Willis.

  The value of this collection is that it showcases some of the best work by some of the most influential exponents of fantastic fiction over the last four decades. If I have a quibble with the make-up of the collection it's that some of the stories will be familiar to older readers, particularly the well established classics from the 1960s and 1970s.

  If only the editors hadn't treated themselves to a lengthy, irritating and utterly irrelevant introduction setting out the purpose of the collection. This is, it seems, to demonstrate genre boundaries are crumbling: apparently the best sf is informed by developments in literary fiction and the literary mainstream has been revivified by genre influences. Come on guys, this isn't a secret: anyone likely to lash their cash out on this collection will take this idea for granted. If only the editors, and the burgeoning ranks of sf manifesto writers, subscribed to the view expressed here by Steven Millhauser: “I'm fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another... I want it to exhilarate me..."