The Very Best of F & SF v1 (52 page)

A woman’s
solitude in the auntring is, of course, based firmly on the presence of others
at a little distance. It is a contingent, and therefore human, solitude. The
settled men are connected as stringently to the women, though not to one
another; the settlement is an integral though distant element of the auntring.
Even a scouting woman is part of the society—a moving part, connecting the
settled parts. Only the isolation of a woman or man who chooses to live outside
the settlements is absolute. They are outside the network altogether. There are
worlds where such persons are called saints, holy people. Since isolation is a
sure way to prevent magic, on my world the assumption is that they are
sorcerers, outcast by others or by their own will, their conscience.

I knew I was
strong with magic, how could I help it? and I began to long to get away. It
would be so much easier and safer to be alone. But at the same time, and
increasingly, I wanted to know something about the great harmless magic, the
spells cast between men and women.

I preferred
foraging to gardening, and was out on the hills a good deal; and these days,
instead of keeping away from the man’s-houses, I wandered by them, and looked
at them, and looked at the men if they were outside. The men looked back.
Downriver Lame Man’s long, shining hair was getting a little white in it now,
but when he sat singing his long, long songs I found myself sitting down and
listening, as if my legs had lost their bones. He was very handsome. So was the
man I remembered as a boy named Tret in the auntring, when I was little, Behyu’s
son. He had come back from the boygroup and from wandering, and had built a
house and made a fine garden in the valley of Red Stone Creek. He had a big
nose and big eyes, long arms and legs, long hands; he moved very quietly,
almost like Arrem doing the untrance. I went often to pick lowberries in Red
Stone Creek valley.

He came along
the path and spoke. “You were Borny’s sister,” he said. He had a low voice,
quiet.

“He’s dead,” I
said.

Red Stone Man
nodded. “That’s his knife.”

In my world, I
had never talked with a man. I felt extremely strange. I kept picking berries.

“You’re picking
green ones,” Red Stone Man said.

His soft,
smiling voice made my legs lose their bones again.

“I think nobody’s
touched you,” he said. “I’d touch you gently. I think about it, about you, ever
since you came by here early in the summer. Look, here’s a bush full of ripe
ones. Those are green. Come over here.”

I came closer to
him, to the bush of ripe berries.

When I was on
the ship, Arrem told me that many languages have a single word for sexual
desire and the bond between mother and child and the bond between soulmates and
the feeling for one’s home and worship of the sacred; they are all called love.
There is no word that great in my language. Maybe my mother is right, and human
greatness perished in my world with the people of the Before Time, leaving only
small, poor, broken things and thoughts. In my language, love is many different
words. I learned one of them with Red Stone Man. We sang it together to each
other.

We made a brush
house on a little cove of the creek, and neglected our gardens, but gathered
many, many sweet berries.

Mother had put a
lifetime’s worth of nonconceptives in the little medicine kit. She had no faith
in Sorovian herbals. I did, and they worked.

But when a year
or so later, in the Golden Time, I decided to go out scouting, I thought I
might go places where the right herbs were scarce; and so I stuck the little
noncon jewel on the back of my left earlobe. Then I wished I hadn’t, because it
seemed like witchcraft. Then I told myself I was being superstitious; the
noncon wasn’t any more witchcraft than the herbs were, it just worked longer. I
had promised my mother in my soul that I would never be superstitious. The skin
grew over the noncon, and I took my soulbag and Borny’s knife and the medicine
kit, and set off across the world.

I had told Hyuru
and Red Stone Man I would be leaving. Hyuru and I sang and talked together all
one night down by the river. Red Stone Man said in his soft voice, “Why do you
want to go?” and I said, “To get away from your magic, sorcerer,” which was
true in part. If I kept going to him I might always go to him. I wanted to give
my soul and body a larger world to be in.

Now to tell of
my scouting years is more difficult than ever. CP! A woman scouting is entirely
alone, unless she chooses to ask a settled man for sex, or camps in an auntring
for a while to sing and listen with the singing circle. If she goes anywhere
near the territory of a boygroup, she is in danger; and if she comes on a rogue
she is in danger; and if she hurts herself or gets into polluted country, she
is in danger. She has no responsibility except to herself, and so much freedom
is very dangerous.

In my right
earlobe was the tiny communicator; every forty days, as I had promised, I sent
a signal to the ship that meant “all well.” If I wanted to leave, I would send
another signal. I could have called for the lander to rescue me from a bad
situation, but though I was in bad situations a couple of times I never thought
of using it. My signal was the mere fulfillment of a promise to my mother and
her people, the network I was no longer part of, a meaningless communication.

Life in the
auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be
dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. So for the
young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of
course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally
always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man,
another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to
think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware.
To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of
the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the
fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the
high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the
shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths,
endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new.

So at last I
came back home. I had been gone about four years.

Hyuru had moved
into my old house when she left her mother’s house. She had not gone scouting,
but had taken to going to Red Stone Creek Valley; and she was pregnant. I was
glad to see her living there. The only house empty was an old half-ruined one
too close to Hedimi’s. I decided to make a new house. I dug out the circle as
deep as my chest; the digging took most of the summer. I cut the sticks, braced
and wove them, and then daubed the framework solidly with mud inside and out. I
remembered when I had done that with my mother long, long ago, and how she had
said, “That’s right. That’s good.” I left the roof open, and the hot sun of
late summer baked the mud into clay. Before the rains came, I thatched the
house with reeds, a triple thatching, for I’d had enough of being wet all
winter.

My auntring was
more a string than a ring, stretching along the north bank of the river for
about three kilos; my house lengthened the string a good bit, upstream from all
the others. I could just see the smoke from Hyuru’s fireplace. I dug it into a
sunny slope with good drainage. It is still a good house.

I settled down.
Some of my time went to gathering and gardening and mending and all the dull,
repetitive actions of primitive life, and some went to singing and thinking the
songs and stories I had learned here at home and while scouting, and the things
I had learned on the ship, also. Soon enough I found why women are glad to have
children come to listen to them, for songs and stories are meant to be heard,
listened to. “Listen!” I would say to the children. The children of the auntring
came and went, like the little fish in the river, one or two or five of them,
little ones, big ones. When they came, I sang or told stories to them. When
they left, I went on in silence. Sometimes I joined the singing circle to give
what I had learned traveling to the older girls. And that was all I did; except
that I worked, always, to be aware of all I did.

By solitude the
soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from
boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be
irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail
so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can
do, I think.

I helped Hyuru
have her baby, a girl, and played with the baby. Then after a couple of years I
took the noncon out of my left earlobe. Since it left a little hole, I made the
hole go all the way through with a burnt needle, and when it healed I hung in
it a tiny jewel I had found in a ruin when I was scouting. I had seen a man on
the ship with a jewel hung in his ear that way. I wore it when I went out
foraging. I kept clear of Red Stone Valley. The man there behaved as if he had
a claim on me, a right to me. I liked him still, but I did not like that smell
of magic about him, his imagination of power over me. I went up into the hills,
northward.

A pair of young
men had settled in old North House about the time I came home. Often boys got
through boygroup by pairing, and often they stayed paired when they left the
Territory. It helped their chances of survival. Some of them were sexually
paired, others weren’t; some stayed paired, others didn’t. One of this pair had
gone off with another man last summer. The one that stayed wasn’t a handsome
man, but I had noticed him. He had a kind of solidness I liked. His body and
hands were short and strong. I had courted him a little, but he was very shy.
This day, a day in the Silver Time when the mist lay on the river, he saw the
jewel swinging in my ear, and his eyes widened.

“It’s pretty,
isn’t it?” I said.

He nodded.

“I wore it to
make you look at me,” I said.

He was so shy
that I finally said, “If you only like sex with men, you know, just tell me.” I
really was not sure.

“Oh, no,” he
said, “no. No.” He stammered and then bolted back down the path. But he looked
back; and I followed him slowly, still not certain whether he wanted me or
wanted to be rid of me.

He waited for me
in front of a little house in a grove of redroot, a lovely little bower, all
leaves outside, so that you would walk within arm’s length of it and not see
it. Inside he had laid sweet grass, deep and dry and soft, smelling of summer.
I went in, crawling because the door was very low, and sat in the
summer-smelling grass. He stood outside. “Come in,” I said, and he came in very
slowly.

“I made it for
you,” he said.

“Now make a
child for me,” I said.

And we did that;
maybe that day, maybe another.

Now I will tell
you why after all these years I called the ship, not knowing even if it was
still there in the space between the planets, asking for the lander to meet me
in the barren land.

When my daughter
was born, that was my heart’s desire and the fulfillment of my soul. When my
son was born, last year, I knew there is no fulfillment. He will grow toward
manhood, and go, and fight and endure, and live or die as a man must. My
daughter, whose name is Yedneke, Leaf, like my mother, will grow to womanhood
and go or stay as she chooses. I will live alone. This is as it should be, and
my desire. But I am of two worlds; I am a person of this world, and a woman of
my mother’s people. I owe my knowledge to the children of her people. So I
asked the lander to come, and spoke to the people on it. They gave me my mother’s
report to read, and I have written my story in their machine, making a record
for those who want to learn one of the ways to make a soul. To them, to the
children I say: Listen! Avoid magic! Be aware!

Return to Table of
Contents

Fairly early in Michael Swanwick’s
career—after he had published a novel or two—an editor told him he wasn’t
applying his talents enough. Instead of competing with the writers of his
generation, said the editor, Michael ought to be gunning for the giants in the
field. The advice was well-heeded and Mr. Swanwick began publishing a string of
extraordinary stories and novels, including “The Edge of the World,”
Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon’s
Daughter
, “Radio Waves,” and “Mother
Grasshopper”... along with many more stories yet to come.

In
the year
One, we came in an armada of a million
spacecraft to settle upon, colonize, and claim for our homeland this giant
grasshopper on which we now dwell.

We dared not
land upon the wings for, though the cube-square rule held true and their most
rapid motions would be imperceptible on an historic scale, random nerve firings
resulted in pre-movement tremors measured at Richter II. So we opted to build
in the eyes, in the faceted mirrorlands that reflected infinities of flatness,
a shimmering Iowa, the architecture of home.

It was an impossible
project and one, perhaps, that was doomed from the start. But such things are
obvious only in retrospect. We were a young and vigorous race then. Everything
seemed possible.

Using shaped
temporal fields, we force-grew trees which we cut down to build our cabins. We
planted sod and wheat and buffalo. In one vivid and unforgettable night of
technology we created a layer of limestone bedrock half a mile deep upon which
to build our towns. And when our work was done, we held hoe-downs in a thousand
county seats all across the eye-lands.

We created new
seasons, including Snow, after the patterns of those we had known in antiquity,
but the night sky we left unaltered, for this was to be our home... now and
forever. The unfamiliar constellations would grow their own legends over the
ages; there would be time. Generations passed, and cities grew with whorls of
suburbs like the arms of spiral galaxies around them, for we were lonely, as
were the thousands and millions we decanted who grew like the trees of the cisocellar
plains that were as thick as the ancient Black Forest.

I was a young
man, newly bearded, hardly much more than a shirt-tail child, on that Harvest
day when the stranger walked into town.

This was so
unusual an event (and for you to whom a town of ten thousand necessarily means
that there
will be strangers
, I despair of explaining) that children came out to shout and run
at his heels, while we older citizens, conscious of our dignity, stood in the
doorways of our shops, factories, and co-ops to gaze ponderously in his general
direction. Not quite
at
him, you understand, but over his shoulder, into the flat, mesmeric
plains and the infinite white skies beyond.

He claimed to
have come all the way from the equatorial abdomen, where gravity is three times
eye-normal, and this was easy enough to believe, for he was ungodly strong.
With my own eyes I once saw him take a dollar coin between thumb and forefinger
and bend it in half—and a steel dollar at that! He also claimed to have walked
the entire distance, which nobody believed, not even me.

“If you’d walked
even half that far,” I said, “I reckon you’d be the most remarkable man as ever
lived.”

He laughed at
that and ruffled my hair. “Well, maybe I am,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

I flushed and
took a step backward, hand on the bandersnatch-skin hilt of my fighting knife.
I was as feisty as a bantam rooster in those days, and twice as quick to take
offense. “Mister, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”

The stranger
looked at me. Then he reached out and, without the slightest hint of fear or
anger or even regret, touched my arm just below the shoulder. He did it with no
particular speed and yet somehow I could not react fast enough to stop him. And
that touch, light though it was, paralyzed my arm, leaving it withered and
useless, even as it is today.

He put his drink
down on the bar, and said, “Pick up my knapsack.” I did.

“Follow me.”

So it was that
without a word of farewell to my family or even a backward glance, I left New
Auschwitz forever.

That night, over
a campfire of eel grass and dried buffalo chips, we ate a dinner of refried
beans and fatback bacon. It was a new and clumsy experience for me, eating
one-handed. For a long time, neither one of us spoke. Finally I said, “Are you
a magician?”

The stranger
sighed. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe I am.”

“You have a
name?”

“No.”

“What do we do
now?”

“Business.” He
pushed his plate toward me. “I cooked. It’s your turn to wash.”

Our business
entailed constant travel. We went to Brinkerton with cholera and to Roxborough
with typhus. We passed through Denver and Venice and Saint Petersburg and left
behind fleas, rats, and plague. In Upper Black Eddy, it was ebola. We never
stayed long enough to see the results of our work, but I read the newspapers
afterward, and it was about what you would expect.

Still,
on the whole
, humanity
prospered. Where one city was decimated, another was expanding. The
overspilling hospitals of one county created a market for the goods of a dozen
others. The survivors had babies.

We walked to
Tylersburg, Rutledge, and Uniontown and took wagons to Shoemakersville,
Confluence, and South Gibson. Booked onto steam trains for Mount Lebanon, Mount
Bethel, Mount Aetna, and Mount Nebo and diesel trains to McKeesport, Reinholds
Station, and Broomall. Boarded buses to Carbondale, Feasterville, June Bug, and
Lincoln Falls. Caught commuter flights to Paradise, Nickel Mines, Niantic, and
Zion. The time passed quickly.

Then one
shocking day my magician announced that he was going home.

“Home?” I said. “What
about your work?”

“Our
work, Daniel,” he said gently. “I expect you’ll do as good a job as
ever I did.” He finished packing his few possessions into a carpetbag.

“You can’t!” I
cried.

With a wink and
a sad smile, he slipped out the door.

For a time—long
or short, I don’t know—I sat motionless, unthinking, unseeing. Then I leaped to
my feet, threw open the door, and looked up and down the empty street. Blocks
away, toward the train station, was a scurrying black speck.

Leaving the door
open behind me, I ran after it.

I just missed
the afternoon express to Lackawanna. I asked the stationmaster when was the
next train after it. He said tomorrow. Had he seen a tall man carrying a
carpetbag, looking thus and so? Yes, he had. Where was he? On the train to
Lackawanna. Nothing more heading that way today. Did he know where I could rent
a car? Yes, he did. Place just down the road.

Maybe I’d’ve
caught the magician if I hadn’t gone back to the room to pick up my bags. Most
likely not. At Lackawanna station I found he’d taken the bus to Johnstown. In
Johnstown, he’d moved on to Erie and there the trail ran cold. It took me three
days hard questioning to pick it up again.

For a week I
pursued him thus, like a man possessed.

Then I awoke one
morning and my panic was gone. I knew I wasn’t going to catch my magician
anytime soon. I took stock of my resources, counted up what little cash-money I
had, and laid out a strategy. Then I went shopping. Finally, I hit the road. I’d
have to be patient, dogged, wily, but I knew that, given enough time, I’d find
him.

Find him, and
kill him too.

The trail led me
to Harper’s Ferry, at the very edge of the oculus. Behind was civilization.
Ahead was nothing but thousands of miles of empty chitin-lands.

People said he’d
gone south, off the lens entirely.

Back at my
boarding house, I was approached by one of the lodgers. He was a skinny man
with a big mustache and sleeveless white T-shirt that hung from his skinny
shoulders like wet laundry on a muggy Sunday.

“What you got in
that bag?”

“Black death,” I
said, “infectious meningitis, tuberculosis. You name it.”

He thought for a
bit. “I got this gal,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you could...”

“I’ll take a
look at her,” I said, and hoisted the bag.

We went upstairs
to his room.

She lay in the
bed, eyes closed. There was an IV needle in her arm, hooked up to a drip feed.
She looked young, but of course that meant nothing. Her hair, neatly brushed
and combed, laid across the coverlet almost to her waist, was white—white as
snow, as death, as finest bone china.

“How long has
she been like this?” I asked.

“Ohhhh...” He
blew out his cheeks. “Forty-seven, maybe fifty years?”

“You her father?”

“Husband. Was,
anyhow. Not sure how long the vows were meant to hold up under these conditions:
can’t say I’ve kept ’em any too well. You got something in that bag for her?”
He said it as casual as he could, but his eyes were big and spooked-looking.

I made my
decision. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll give you forty dollars for her.”

“The sheriff
wouldn’t think much of what you just said,” the man said low and quiet.

“No. But then, I
suppose I’ll be off of the eye-lands entirely before he knows a word of it.”

I picked up my
syringe.

“Well? Is it a
deal or not?”

Her name was
Victoria. We were a good three days march into the chitin before she came out
of the trance state characteristic of the interim zombie stage of Recovery. I’d
fitted her with a pack, walking shoes, and a good stout stick, and she strode
along head up, eyes blank, speaking in the tongues of angels afloat between the
stars.

“—cisgalactic
phase intercept,” she said. “Do you read? Das Uberraumboot
zuruckgegenerinnernte. Verstehen? Anadaemonic mesotechnological conflict
strategizing. Drei tausenden Affen mit Laseren! Hello? Is anybody—”

Then she
stumbled over a rock, cried out in pain, and said, “Where am I?”

I stopped,
spread a map on the ground, and got out my pocket gravitometer. It was a simple
thing: a glass cylinder filled with aerogel and a bright orange ceramic bead.
The casing was tin, with a compressor screw at the top, a calibrated scale
along the side, and the words “Flynn & Co.” at the bottom. I flipped it
over, watched the bead slowly fall. I tightened the screw a notch, then two,
then three, increasing the aerogel’s density. At five, the bead stopped. I read
the gauge, squinted up at the sun, and then jabbed a finger on an isobar to one
edge of the map.

“Right here,” I
said. “Just off the lens. See?”

“I don’t—” She
was trembling with panic. Her dilated eyes shifted wildly from one part of the
empty horizon to another. Then suddenly, sourcelessly, she burst into tears.

Embarrassed, I
looked away. When she was done crying, I patted the ground. “Sit.” Sniffling,
she obeyed. “How old are you, Victoria?”

“How old am....?
Sixteen?” she said tentatively. “Seventeen?” Then, “Is that really my name?”

“It was. The
woman you were grew tired of life, and injected herself with a drug that
destroys the ego and with it all trace of personal history.” I sighed. “So in
one sense you’re still Victoria, and in another sense you’re not. What she did
was illegal, though; you can never go back to the oculus. You’d be locked into
jail for the rest of your life.”

She looked at me
through eyes newly young, almost childlike in their experience, and still wet
with tears. I was prepared for hysteria, grief, rage. But all she said was, “Are
you a magician?”

That rocked me
back on my heels. “Well—yes,” I said. “I suppose I am.”

She considered
that silently for a moment. “So what happens to me now?”

“Your job is to
carry that pack. We also go turn-on-turn with the dishes.” I straightened,
folding the map. “Come on. We’ve got a far way yet to go.”

We commenced
marching, in silence at first. But then, not many miles down the road and to my
complete astonishment, Victoria began to
sing!

We followed the
faintest of paths—less a trail than the memory of a dream of the idea of
one—across the chitin. Alongside it grew an occasional patch of grass. A lot of
wind-blown loess had swept across the chitin-lands over the centuries. It
caught in cracks in the carapace and gave purchase to fortuitous seeds. Once I
even saw a rabbit. But before I could point it out to Victoria, I saw something
else. Up ahead, in a place where the shell had powdered and a rare rainstorm had
turned the powder briefly to mud, were two overlapping tire prints. A motorbike
had been by here, and recently.