Elemental (12 page)

Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental

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BY JULIET MARILLIER

Juliet Marillier is the author of the award-winning Sevenwaters trilogy (
Daughter of the Forest
,
Son of the Shadows
,
Child of the Prophecy
) and the Saga of the Light Isles novels (
Wolfskin
and
Foxmask
). Her latest book,
The Dark Mirror,
is the first in the Bridei Chronicles. She has also published short fiction in various venuesâher “In Coed Celyddon” appears alongside fellow Australian writers Garth Nix and Isobelle Carmody in the YA anthology
The Road to Camelot,
edited by Sophie Masson.

“Tough Love 3001” arose from Marillier's first experience of running a critique group in which she had a mixed bunch of authorsâincluding one fantasy novelist and several people with literary pretensions. “Ultimately, without a natural gift as a storyteller and that essential quality I call âheart,' no amount of literary technique is going to make a person a good writer,” she says. “I learnedâpainfullyâthat making something positive out of a critique group is less to do with understanding structure, style, characterization, and so on, and far more to do with breaking down prejudices and tending to wounded egos. The rampant snobbery about so-called genre fiction was a challenge to deal with. Eventually I decided I'd better stop beating myself up after class and release some of my feelings into a piece of writing. When I showed the story to the critique group, the only one who âgot it' was the fantasy writer.”

Marillier lives in a hundred-year-old cottage by the Swan River in Guildford, Western Australia. You can learn more about her work on her Web site:
http://www.julietmarillier.com/
.

This story is dedicated to the eight participants in
the 2004 Tough Love critique course held at the
Katharine Susannah Prichard Writer's Centre
in Western Australia.

It's also dedicated to Neil Gaiman, a prince among
storytellers.

Ground rules,
I said, suppressing a sigh of exasperation. The buzz of eight Unispeak Translators died down and a small sea of eyes, bulging,
faceted, retractable, feline, globular, turned in my direction. There was a silence of complete incomprehension.

“Ground rules allow us to maximize the value of our limited number of sessions.” The sigh came out despite me. Of all the groups I'd been given for Tough Love since they brought me here from the twenty-first century to run it, this was the motleyest crew of students I'd ever clapped eyes on. I suspected the short course they'd come from all over the galaxy to attend would be just long enough to make a slight dent in the shining armor of false expectations each of them wore today. Who the hell were they? What did they imagine they would get out of this? Not for the first time, I pondered the wisdom of quitting a tenured position at the University of Western Australia for this. I had burned my bridges. Time travel being what it is, there was no going back. The
Intergalactic Voyager
did have state-of-the-art teaching facilities. It did have a bar stocked with every alcoholic drink this side of Alpha Centauri. Its students, on the other hand â¦

An attenuated, multiocular creature was saying something. The Unispeak model I have is the V28: it's programmed to convey style as well as meaning when it translates. This voice was genteel and nervous.

“You mean, keep left? Wash hands after using the facilities? No walking on the syntho-turf?”

I found a smile. “Those are rules, certainly. We might start with something about respecting one another's work, or not interrupting.”

They considered this awhile. The one who had spoken quivered her antennae anxiously.

I said, “Perhaps we could go around the circle, and everyone could think of one ground rule.”

Silence. For a bunch of individuals who were supposed to be writers, this was not a promising start.

“Be on time?” I suggested. “Wear pink socks?”

They looked blank; I had baffled them. A few seconds passed, then a creature of robust build with a mass of tentacles began to quiver uncontrollably, emitting a series of guttural sobs. “Ah-ha-ha-ho-ho!” my
Unispeak translated. “Very good! Pink socks! I so adore the humor of the absurd! May I contribute?”

“Be my guest,” I said, marker pen at the ready. I make a point of using antique technology (repro, that is) for my Tough Love classes. The students find my pens and whiteboard as fascinating as I would quills and parchment. I could see it was going to take more than a few colored Textas to get this lot's creative juices flowing.

“Um,” said Tentacles, “let me see now. Be courteous to the teacher? Bow on entry?”

I wrote,
Be courteous
, on the whiteboard. They could all read English; it was a requirement of entry to my course. Unfortunately, some of them were anatomically incapable of speaking it. “Thank you,” I said. “âBowing is perhaps too culture-specific. Any more?'”

“Even when bored witless, one should not sleep in class,” offered a participant whose appearance was markedly sluglike.

I wondered if the Unispeak had been programmed with a sense of humor; insouciance touched with ennui made this voice sound like those old recordings of Noel Coward. “Indeed,” I said, writing it on the board. “You won't be getting much sleep at night, either. I'll be setting you daily writing and reading tasks, and you'll all have a piece ready for critique by your allocated session.” I wrote,
Do your homework
. “Now,” I said, turning to face their expectant eyes, “we're going to go around the circle and introduce ourselves.”

There was a ripple of movement which I took to indicate agreement.

“Good. I'm Annie Scott, and as you know I was headhunted from the early twenty-first to run this course. Back then I was a university lecturer in creative writing and literary criticism. This is quite similar.”

A collective sigh; the eyes rolled, blinked, flashed in what I decided to interpret as appreciation.

“Your turn,” I said, glancing at Tentacles, who seemed the boldest.

He gave his name. Even via the Unispeak it was unpronounceable. “Difficult, I know,” he said politely. “You may call me Dickens, if you prefer. I am a fervent admirer of that great writer, Charles Dickens.”

“Dickens. Right,” I said.

The introductions went on. Dickens had started a trend for literary pseudonyms. By the time we were around the circle we had BrontÃ«, the one with the antennae; Seth the slug; Saramago, whose maniacal grin displayed three rows of pointed teeth; terribly tall, one-eyed Atwood; and Winton, who was vaguely humanoid. Two retained their own names: K'gruz and Armahalon. Armahalon had just sung us a formal greeting of a profoundly cerebral kind when I realized there was a ninth chair in the circle, and that it, too, was occupied. The table at which my students sat had obscured this final attendee; only the tips of its ears could be seen above the edge. I moved closer and peered down, trying not to seem rude. Eight students was standard. That was all they were paying me for.

The creature sat quietly. It was pea-green and slightly fuzzy, like a cheap velour toy. There was a look about it that suggested a dog, or perhaps a corporeally challenged elephant, or one of those things you used to see in wildlife documentaries clinging to trees and looking helpless. The ears were enormous, fragile and winglike. The eyes were liquid and mournful. I had absolutely no idea whether it was an aspiring writer or some trendy kind of lap pet.

“Er â¦” I ventured, “whose is this?”

The students peered down, and the little creature turned its forlorn gaze up at them.

Atwood shuddered. “I'm here to critique, not to be shed on,” she murmured.

“If we're talking lap pets,” Saramago put in, “give me a Zardonian bog-troll any day. Best alarm system in the Galaxy. And they keep your feet so warm at night.”

“What will we discuss today, Teacher?” asked Seth in a voice like a bubbling mud pool.

“Call me Annie, please. Tomorrow we'll start critiquing one another's work. Today we'll practice on a piece by an established author, to ease you in. Critiquing is like walking on a wire. Some writers are utterly
delusional about the nature and quality of their own work. Be honest, but temper your honesty with compassion. When someone critiques your writing, it can feel as if they're hurting your beloved child.”

“Ah, yes,” enthused Dickens, swirling his tentacles in a show of agreement. “Beloved child, yes. Better if we tell soothing lies?”

“You must tell truths expressed with understanding and kindness,” I told him.

K'gruz was wearing a full-body protective suit with a filter mechanism; his Unispeak appeared to be hard-wired directly into his head. The voice emerged from a speaker. “I cannot be kind about Saramago's work!” K'gruz exclaimed. “He writes by hand, and he uses green ink secreted from his own disgusting glands. How can one take such a writer seriously? The presentation is entirely unprofessional. As for his
oeuvre
itself, it stinks more richly than the filth with which he sets it down. The concepts, the themes, the woeful lack of punctuation â¦ where can I start?” If K'gruz had possessed eyebrows, at that point they would have arched extravagantly. As it was, he managed an expressive shrug that made his suit and its contents ripple.

I opened my mouth to intervene before Saramago decided to use his teeth, but the ladylike BrontÃ« cut in.

“Ink? Ink is nothing! There is no point to any of it if we cannot divine a
resonance
, a
truth
, a
transcendence
, aâ”

“Don't kid yourself,” growled K'gruz. “Your own work is nothing more than an inflated piece of fluff, hardly good enough for a quickvid on a short-hop interplanetary transit of the less salubrious kind. You're in no position to question literaryâ”

“Friends, friends!” Seth was trying to make peace. “Ground rules, pleaseâ” but nobody was listening. Saramago was snapping his teeth, BrontÃ«'s antennae were trembling with indignation, Armahalon had one foot on the table, revealing scythelike toenails that were none too clean, and Winton was leaning back in his chair, laughing hysterically. Atwood was taking notes.

“Excuse meâ” I said.

“Class, pleaseâ” I cried out.

“Stop acting like a bunch of spoiled infants!” I yelled.

“Alas, teacher,” Dickens spoke in my ear, “I fear this Tough Love is no more than a battleground for exhausted ideas.”

Under different circumstances I'd have complimented him on his turn of phrase. Things were getting nastier by the second. Saramago had sunk his teeth into the nearest available object, which was BrontÃ«'s hand; she was emitting little shrill cries of outrage. K'gruz was fiddling with a dial on his protective suit, from which a thin stream of evil-smelling yellow vapor was hissing forth. Seth and Armahalon were locked in an embrace that had nothing at all to do with interspecies attraction. Even Winton was getting in a random uppercut here and there. Atwood's digits were tapping away overtime on her Personal Recording Device (PRD). She had the new model, the one that communicates direct with a Unispeak and reads your work back to you in your language of choice. So much for green ink. I was being paid a fortune to run this, and my class had degenerated into a whistling, shrieking, punching, gasping free-for-all.

The stream of sound pierced my skull at a decibel level designed to induce rapid-onset insanity. It was clear from the sudden stillness and agonized expressions of the others that it had hit them the same way.

The agony ended. Wincing, we took our hands off our aural receptors.

“Who did that?” I asked shakily. It had been the most unthinkable kind of interruption, a violent mind-assault of the kind generally employed only in situations of military interrogation. I hadn't thought I'd need to put
No torture
in the ground rules.

Eight sets of eyes swiveled toward the handbag-sized creature,
which turned its liquid gaze on me and spoke in a tone now mellow and musical.

“Sorry, Teacher. I considered you a damsel in distress, and was compelled to attempt a rescue.”

I wrote
No mind-blasts
on the whiteboard. “And your name is?” I snapped.

“Ne'il.” The sound was delivered on a mournful, falling cadence. A neat glottal stop divided it into two clear syllables.

“Neil?” asked Atwood. “Who Neil?”

“O'Neill?” suggested Seth. “Eugene O'Neill?”