The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (56 page)

Please don’t go.

It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and
the tantalizing smells of food – of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make – you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast – you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room, and you follow
her inside.

They’re watching you, both girls; the one you followed in, and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at – both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

In that one moment – staring at each other, suspended in time – you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools, the dismantled
machines, and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

This
is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind – every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms, that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this, and they will
never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic; they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.

Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

You raise a hand – it feels like moving through honey. You
speak – struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

“I know
about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”

To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.

DOWN THE WALL

Greer Gilman

Stilt-legs scissoring, snip-snap! the bird gods dance. Old craney-crows, a skulk of powers. How they strut and ogle with their long eyes, knowing. How they serpentine their necks. And stalking, how they flirt their tails, insouciant as Groucho. Fugue and counter-fugue, the music jigs and sneaks. On tiptoe, solemnly, they hop and flap; they whirl and whet their long
curved clever bills. A sly dance, a wry dance, miching mallecho. Pavane. They peacock, but their drab is eyeless, black as mourners, black as mutes. They are clownish, they are sinister, in their insatiable invention, their unending. Like the frieze in a Pharaoh’s nursery, like the knot-work in a chthonic gospel. In and out, untiring as wire, they weave a thorny hedge of selves, and in their eddering,
enlace their eggs, their moonish precious eggs. They gloat. And they go on. Like viruses, mere self engendering more self, they replicate. They tangle genesis in their inexorable braid.

The birds are phosphor in a box. They sift and sift across the screen; they whisper. They are endless snow or soot, the ashes of the old world burning. Elsewhere fire. The hailbox whispers, whispers. There is
no way to turn it off. No other channel but the gods. All day and night it snows grey phosphor, sifting in the corners of the air. The earth is grey with ash.

The children watch the box, they sprawl and gaze. They’re bored, locked in so many endless days. Mewed up. Where’s out? they ask. When’s never? Why? Their mam clouts and pinches, slaps and spells and grumbles, twisting bacca in a screw
of paper. She’s a wad of it, torn leaf by leaf away. Time sometime to get another book, ward and spell to steal it. Smoke it. Time enough.
See, paper’s upworld. Outwall. Paper swirls about the open streets, abandoned to the gods, all scrawled with stick-dance; paper’s layered, scrap on gaudy scrap, on upworld walls. It’s slagheaps in the towers of the burning world, the Outwith, where the Old
Crows breed. And their nests are sticks and souls.

They take souls fool enough to wander outwall, under sky. The sots that stumble from the trances of the underground. The wardless and unwary. Blink, blunder and they’re snatched. Like her awd man. Kids’ father. “Blind drunk,” she tells them, scornful. “Pissing out a window.”

She twitches at the curtains, net on net against the talons of the
numinous. Their seine is grey with ashes, hung with toys: green headless army men and dolls’ eyes, wired, blue. The window is brick. “Bad enough here, down t’Wall,” she says. “Living here. Gettin in wi’ this lot.” Mouth snecked and her eyes like iodine.

Boy’s mazy.

She takes the girl to dancing class, up Mrs. Mallecho’s.
And
pays good brass for it. Smoke. Spellcards. Takes her both ways, proper,
through the twisting maze of ginnels, and locks to do, undo, at every trance. Quells beggars with a look. In the cloakroom, in among the downy girls, she plucks at her daughter’s bits of swans-down, pluming out her tawdry dress. Tufts at her shoulderblades. Gosslyn. She’ll do. Girl dances lovely, well she’ll give her that. Not like that Dowsa Fligger, silk stockins til her arse, and all them
gilty bits ont never never. They says. Off her auntie’s bed, more like. Dancin on her back. Oh, she’s fly, is Mrs. Theek. Gosslyn’s mam clamps down a round comb, fanged and feathery, to crown her daughter’s hair; she screws her handkerchief and spits and scrubs.

Girl’s fratchety.

The mothers watch from the margins, fierce, aspiring, appraising: their arms crossed, bags clutched, their mouths
like paper cuts. They acknowledge haughtily with lifted chins: so much, no more.

“Mrs. Leathy.”

“Mrs. Fligger.”

“Mrs. Fligger.”

“Mrs. Theek.”

The hatchlings dance.

At home, behind the jaded couch, her children whisper. They have doorsteps and dark jam to munch; they have a bulwark of pillows. They have stubs of crayons and the wall. From behind them, they can hear the godbox and the skulking
music. Lunar tunes. And rising keening over that, a melancholy roar and drone, a pibroch with the fear note in it. Their mam’s doing Wednesday, she feeds the Oover north-northwest: three fag ends, a catseye marble, tea leaves. Widdershins: a doll’s shoe, a snarl of hairpins. East: a coin. It molochs them all up. West by south: she ties, unties her pinny, back to front, the old one with the faded
poppies.

“Black,” the boy says. “They must be black. And shriking.”

The girl is twirling a plastic ball on her palms, full of heavy water, bright plastic fish. The water whorls and rights itself. “Black’s used up.” She thinks. “There’s
holes
there. Outwall.” She swirls the ball; the fish dither.

“There’s rain,” he says.

The girl’s heard tell of it, old Pudfoot with his bottle, muttering. Like
slanting wires, he says: but not a cage, like music someways. Or a dancer in nailed boots, she says: they’ve heard it on the tin-roofed trances, hurried by. Sometimes it sleeks in at the corners, seeking with its slow tongues, twining. And they’re not to touch it, and it chokes on dust.

“There’s turnings,” says the girl.

Slowly their drawing grows, cracked eyries and a maze of faces. The wallpaper’s
scrawly like the godbox, but brown: all over and over, all the same. Crawlies and blotches. They’ve turned them into strange things: winged cats, birdheaded women. Owls with horns. Upworld things. A leafgirl by a hedge of bones, tossing up a golden ball. A hurchin boy, astride a cockerel. All pictures from their mother’s stash, all smoke.

Down the wall, down the end shop. The boy waits until
the Mrs. sees him, sleeving on the glass case that his breath has clouded. Fly cakes. Bacca. There’s a babby in there, under glass. Goss says. She says it’s Outwith, it can talk and fly. The boy rubs and peers. The black comes off in wrinkles. Ghostly, he can see his own face, in among the things to sell. Tin birds. Cards of hook-and-eyes. Pale buns. The ladies talk.

“Mrs. Spugget.”

“Mrs. Pithy.”

Her shop smells of sour milk and smoke and bacca, drowsy sweet; of mops and cabbages and fennel-at-the-door. And mice. There’s holes down there. Worn lino, brown like her toffee, on the sour splintery boards. He once found a birdsweet in a crack in a corner. Dusty licorice.

“… down Howly Street …”

“Large white and a tin of Brasso. Snatched?”

“Jumped. One and three.”

The bell rings to make
the birds scatter.

“Mrs. Pithy.”

“Mrs. Spugget.”

“Mrs. Harpic.”

“Mrs. Pithy.”

Their hair’s done Saturday. Grey snails and gilt snails, crisscross with iron pins. His mam jabs them in, she’s holy.

“… gone Outwith. In her nightdress …”

Sharp chin quirks at him. “… kid …”

“That one? Hears nowt. Pane shy of a glasshouse.” Fat chin creases, as she leans and whispers. “… far gone, she were.
Her mam, she took and …”

Far gone. He sees the lost girl, in among the towers and the sticks of crow’s nests, searching for an urchin bairn.

Mr. Hawkless the trancer got snatched. They hurry by his corner with the slashed spells, with the tins forlornly jangling. They burn fennel. Mr. Snipe is the trancer, and he helps the kids cross.

Marri from dancing’s gone. Her hook is bare, and the mothers
silent, their eyes like awls. Stitched mouths. They preen their daughters savagely, as if their frou frou were meringue, to beat. Still whiter and glassier, girls turn in the mirror. Spun fantasies. Pavlovas. None adroop: all stiff as sugar in their tinseled frills. Blackstick Mrs. Mallecho stumps up and down their line. White silence, like a cut before it fills with blood, spills over. But it
never bleeds, the girl thinks, posing in the First Ward. Clack! goes the woodbook, and the dancers pirouette. The music thumps and sniggers. The mothers’ will is like a cage of wires, strung with
dancers, bright as beads. They tell them like a rosary, an abacus of souls. They were five twos; they will make three threes.

Night. Matins. From her clutched grey bag, the mother takes a soft soft piece
of paper, wrinkled, scented, like a cheek held up to kiss. Green coin. She pleats it, snips it – there, a chain of craneycrows, as wick as if their own quick legs had scissored them. Just on time, the tune beginning as she lights the paper, lets it go: a flaring and a lace of ash. She marks her sleeping children: eyelids, palms.

The girl dreams of the stitch witch, putting children in her bag.
She prods them as she picks. She’s made of stuffing, grey stuff like the Oover’s belly, and her mouth’s sewn shut. There’s a black thread and a needle dangling from her lip, a tangle like a raven’s beard. She gluts on souls. Behind the railings, there are children crouching – Goss among them, hiding – in a heap of cushions stitched with rain. It twangles as they shift, they burrow. Ah, she’s hunting
for her ball, her shining ball, before the witch can take her. Down she gropes, amid the slather, deeper still. Then it’s changed, the dream, she’s riding rantipole with Marri, whirling round and round, and up and down, hold tight! until she breaks away and flies. The air is full of girls like leaves.

The boy wakes in the night. There are Old Ones storming; he can hear the hurl and crackle in
the air: not sound but fury. Something that restrings your bones. His mam is standing turning toward it. Tuning. She is blue in the godlight.

Morning. Thin and blue, lit flickering by the box. Their mam’s doing Thursday. She slamps her irons down and grutches; spits and dabs. The air’s full of scorch and muttering. The chairs are hung with ghosts, themselves outspread and suppliant. Vests. Petticoats.
Rue’s shirts. There’s rows of eggshells on the sills, all filled with ashes and with milk. Thwick! Thwick! She jabs the milk tops with her nail, pours out a measure to the Old Ones. Milk swirls on the step. She will string the silver, hang it jostling in the doorways.

“Rue.” His sister’s breath, not sound but stirring. Warm in his ear. It tickles. “Rue. I’ve getten keys.”

* * *

“Goss?”

The
girl’s far ahead in the trances, counting turnings. Her thread is words.

“Goss. Wait.” The boy calls after. “Is’t dead?” There’s a black thing in a runnel, stark. The girl turns back and prods it. Bone and wings? It slacks from its bent ribs. Nobbut wire and cloth. She grins. “It’s a dolly god, I think.” She pries it from the drain, awry and sagging, twirls it. Sword falls open into cup.

Rue
laughs. “It’s drunk,” he says, and makes it stagger.

“Go on. Yer have it, then.”

It pecks along the tunnels, rattles on the railings, swishes, scything down a host of shadows. It pokes at bins. Now and then, it twirls and wobbles, with a loose-stayed shimmy, like the Widow Twanky in a swoon.

Below them, they hear voices, children calling, running feet.

“Goss?” Tiled and echoing, a trance in
a maze of trances.

“Sneck up.” She’s biting at her lip and peering. What way is Out? They’re in a bridge above another passage, grinning with stained tiles. Dank water drips. It sidles over posters, over tilework scrawled with birds. Smashed lamps. Dark arches, cages full of coils and wheels and shards. Ratscuttle and the stench of ancient piss.

Round the bend, a soft voice calls. “Off to yon
rant?”

They stiffen. Goss yanks her brother round behind her.

“Leggo.”

“Hush. Nobbut an awd busker. I’ll fend.”

A beggar sits against the wall, knees up and watchful, idle. In their path. A tin whistle in her dangling hand, a bowl between her feet. Her clothes are like herself, her pelt; her jacket’s hairy on the inside, black, and rustling with paper. And she smells of ashes and of rain.
A little penknife of a smile, all bone and flick, her long eyes hidden in her shaggy greyblack hair. “Where’s thou bound?”