Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (21 page)

hoping Marshall grows tired of talking soon so she can get back to

• 174 •

• Caitl
Í
n R. Kiernan •

her quarters and pop a few pinks for six or seven hour’s worth of

sleep.

“Down on the north end of Cattarinetta Boulevard—in Scarlet

Quad—there’s a brothel. Probably the best on the whole rock. I

happen to know the proprietress.”

Nix isn’t so much an angel she’s above the consolation of whores

when away from Shiloh. All those months pile up. The months

between docks, the interminable Phobos reroutes, the weeks of red

dust and colonist hardscrabble.

“Her name’s Paddy,” he continues, “and you just tell her you’re a

high fella to Marshall Mason Choudhury, and she’ll see you’re treated extra right. Not those half-starved farm girls. She’ll set you up with the pinnacle merch.”

“That’s kind of you,” and she stands. “I’ll do that.”

“Not a trouble,” he says and waves a hand dismissively. “And

look, as I said, don’t you fret over the cargo. Terra’s no different than aluminum and pharmaceuticals.”

“It’s
not
my first goddamn terra run. How many times I have to—”

But she’s thinking,
Then why the extra seven-percent hazard

commission, if terras are the same as all the rest?
Nix would never ask such a question aloud, anymore than she can avoid asking it of

herself.

“Your Oma, she’ll—”

“Fella, I’ll see you later,” she says, and walks quickly towards the cafeteria door before he can get another word or ten out. Sometimes, she’d lay good money that the solitudes are beginning to gnaw at the man’s sanity. That sort of shit happens all too often. The glare in the corridor leading back to the housing module isn’t quite as bright as the lights in the cafeteria, so at least she has that much to be grateful for.

Muddy, sweat-soaked, insect-bitten and insect-stung, eyes and lungs

and nostrils smarting from the hundreds of millions of gametophytes

• 175 •

• The Road of Needles •

she breathed during her arduous passage through each infested

isotainer, arms and legs weak, stomach rolling, breathless, Nix

Severn has finally arrived at the bottom of the deep shaft leading

down to Oma’s dormant CPU. The bzou has kept up with her the

entire, torturous way. Though she didn’t realize that it was a bzou

until halfway through the second ’tainer. Sentient viruses are so rare that the odds of Oma’s crash having triggered the creation (or been

triggered by) bzou has a probability risk approaching zero, at most a negligent threat to any transport. But here it is, and the hallucination isn’t a hallucination.

An hour ago, she finally had the presence of mind to scan the

thing, and it bears the distinctive signatures, the unmistakable byte sequence of a cavity-stealth strategy.

“A good quarter of an hour’s walk further in the forest, under

yon three large oaks. There stands her house. Further beneath are

the nut trees, which you will see there,” it said when the scan was

done. “Red Hood! Just look! There are such pretty flowers here! Why

don’t you look round at them all? Methinks you don’t even hear how

delightfully the birds are singing! You are as dull as if you were going to school, and yet it is so cheerful in the forest!”

Oma knows Nix’s psych profile, which means the bzou knows

Nix’s psyche.

Nix pushes back the jumpsuit’s quilted hood and visor again—

she’d had to lower it to help protect against a minor helium leak near the shaft’s rim—and tries to concentrate and figure out precisely

what has gone wrong. Oma is quiet, dark, dead. The holo is off, so

she’ll have to rely on her knowledge of the manual interface, the

toggles and pressure pads, horizontal and vertical sliders, spinners, dials, knife switches . . . all without access to Oma’s guidance. She’s been trained for this, yes, but AI diagnostics and repair has never

been her strong suit.

The bzou is crouched near her, Shiloh’s stolen eyes tracking her

every move.

“Who’s there?” it asks.

• 176 •

• Caitl
Í
n R. Kiernan •

“I’m not playing this game anymore,” Nix mutters, and begins

tripping the instruments that ought to initiate a hard reboot. “I’m

done with you. Fifteen more minutes, you’ll be wiped. For all I know, this was sabotage.”

“Who’s there, skycap?” the bzou says again.

Nix pulls down on one of the knife switches, and nothing happens.

“Push on the door,” advises the bzou. “It’s blocked by a pail of

water.”

Nix pulls the next switch, a multi-boot resort—she’s being stupid,

so tired and rattled that she’s skipping stages—which should rouse

the unresponsive Oma when almost all else fails. The core doesn’t

reply. Here are her worst fears beginning to play themselves out.

Maybe it was a full-on panic, a crash that will require triple-caste post-mortem debugging to reverse, which means dry dock, which

would mean she is utterly fucking fucked. No way in hell she can hand pilot the
Blackbird
back onto the rails, and this far off course an eject would only mean slow suffocation or hypothermia or starvation.

Nix speaks to the bzou without looking at it. She takes a tiny

turnscrew from the kit strapped to her rebreather (which she hasn’t

needed to use, and it’s been nothing but dead weight she hasn’t dared abandon, just in case).

Maybe she
isn’t
through playing the game, after all. She takes a deep breath, winds the driver to a 2.4 mm. mortorq bit, and keeps

her eyes on the panel. She doesn’t need to see the bzou to converse

with it.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s assume you have a retract sequence, that you’re a benign propagation.”

“Only press the latch,” it says. “I am so weak, I can’t get out of bed.”

“Fine. Grandmother, I’ve come such a very long way to visit you.”

Nix imagines herself reading aloud to Maia, imagines Maia’s rapt

attention and Shiloh in the doorway.

“Shut the door well, my little lamb. Put your basket on the table,

and then take off your frock and come and lie down by me. You shall

rest a little.”

• 177 •

• The Road of Needles •

Shut the door. Shut the door and rest a little . . .

Partial head crash, foreign-reaction safe mode. Voluntary coma.

Nix nods and opens one of the memory trays, then pulls a yellow

bus card, replacing it with a spare from the console’s supply rack.

Somewhere deep inside Oma’s brain, there’s the very faintest of hums.

“It’s a code,” Nix says to herself.

And if I can get the order of questions right, if I can keep the bzou
from getting suspicious and rogueing up . . .

A drop of sweat drips from her brow, stinging her right eye, but

she ignores it. “Now, Grandmother, now please listen.”

“I’m all ears, child.”

“And what big ears you have.”

“All the better to hear you with.”

“Right . . . of course,” and Nix opens a second tray, slicing into

Oma’s comms, yanking two fried transmit-receive bus cards.
She

hasn’t been able to talk to Phobos. She’s been deaf all this fucking time.

The CPU hums more loudly, and a hexagonal arrangement of startup

OLEDs flash to life.

One down.

“Grandmother, what big eyes you have.”

“All the better to see you with,
Rotkäppchen.
”

Right.
Fuck you, wolf. Fuck you and your goddamn road of stones
and needles.
Nix runs reset on all of Oma’s optic servos and outboards.

She’s rewarded with the dull thud and subsequent discordant chime

of a reboot.

“What big teeth I have,” Nix says, and now she
does
turn towards the bzou, and as Oma wakes up, the virus begins to sketch out, fading in incremental bursts of distorts and static. “All the better to
eat
you with.”

“Have I found you now, old rascal?” the virus manages between

bursts of white noise. “Long have I been looking for you.”

The bzou had been meant as a distress call from Oma, sent out

in the last nanoseconds before the crash. “I’m sorry, Oma,” Nix says, turning back to the computer. “The forest, the terra . . . I should

• 178 •

• Caitl
Í
n R. Kiernan •

have figured it out sooner.” She leans forward and kisses the console.

And when she looks back at the spot where the bzou had been

crouched, there’s no sign of it whatsoever, but there’s Maia, holding the storybook . . .

••

The New York Times
recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include
The Red Tree
(nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards)

and
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
(winner of the James Tiptree, Jr.

Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus,

Shirley Jackson, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction

has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently
Confessions
of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best

of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One),
and
The Ape’s Wife and Other
Stories.
Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series
Alabaster
for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel,
Red Delicious.

••

• 179 •

•

“Lupine” grew from grafts to the fairy tale rootstock most of

us received as children. Here’s one addition: the blue-petaled

wildflower for which the heroine is named was once thought to

deplete the soil, ravaging it like a wolf (there’s an etymological

connection); a nitrogen-fixer, lupine actually enhances it. Here’s

another addition: when in the company of a desperate crush we

often act idiotically, in direct opposition to our own best interests.

Here’s a third: a character in Peter S. Beagle’s awe-worthy novel
The
Last Unicorn
curses another by saying: “I’ll make you a bad poet with dreams!” This caused
Nisi Shawl
to think about what makes a curse truly terrible to its victims and to devise her own—strictly for literary uses.

•

•

Once there was a little girl whose mother hated her. The mother

was not a bad woman, but she had not wanted a child, and so

she put her daughter into a secret prison and pretended she did not

exist. The father was deceived, for he and the woman parted long

before he would have learned she was to have a child. Soon after

they separated, the mother’s love for him languished and died. As

for her daughter, the mother felt nothing toward her but the deepest loathing.

The little girl, on the contrary, loved her mother very much,

because she was born to love, and in her prison she knew no one

else. Lupine, as she was called, had not even a kitten or a cricket

to love, not even a doll to play with. The wind from the mountains

blew seeds into her lonely tower, and she nourished these into plants: flowers and downy herbs.

When her mother brought food and water, Lupine always lavished

kisses on her; however, these only strengthened the woman’s hatred

of her beautiful child. “She is young and has her whole life ahead of her. My life is passing by, faster and faster, and soon I will be dead,”

the mother thought. To fill Lupine’s years with misery was the object of her private studies, and one day she found an answer that would

serve.

She gave it to Lupine as medicine, but it was really a potion

containing an evil spell. Lupine suspected nothing, but complained

• 185 •

• Lupine •

bitterly of its awful taste. Then she coughed, her eyes rolled back into her head, and she fell to the floor as if dead.

The mother laughed with delight and eagerly awaited Lupine’s

return to wakefulness. When the daughter’s eyes opened she no

longer wore her usual sweet smile; instead, her face was ugly with

disdain. The purpose of the potion’s spell was to make her act

hatefully toward those she loved and lovingly toward those she hated.

Lupine reached up to throttle her mother’s neck.

The woman easily eluded her and ran gleefully down the prison’s

stairs and out of the waste with which it was surrounded. She led

Lupine into the thick of civilization, where her daughter would

suffer the most.

So this little girl with eyes like stars and hair like the night’s soft breezes grew up the plaything of bullies and the despised enemy