I sing as loudly as I can sing, a lullaby of Earth and all its dirty concerns. Prayers that switched over to poems when Cohen died, when Bowie died, when Prince died. Funk and rock turned religion. Sinatra-styled stun-gun supernatural soul. I sing Kurt Cobain and will the world not to shift into a full-on disaster. I sing a chorus of the purple one’s grind, and three bars of Patti Smith, and Joan Jett and a bar or two of Elvis and some notes made famous by the Rolling Stones because there is no satisfaction, but you stay on Earth anyway. I’m singing like I’m actually a singer, when really I’m a journalist who’s spent his life following the boys in the band around and writing them down like I was the scribe to the Apocalypse.
I shift the song and sing the rest of what I know, the song I learned from Tania, which is a song of names. All the names of Earth and elsewhere. The city moves around the van, and the band is barely playing now, because the song of their queen shuts them up, even if she’s not here to sing it.
Even if she doesn’t want to sing it with me. Even if I fucked everything up too badly, and even if I can’t save the world. I start to close the rift with my song, shaking the edges of the boundary between fairyland and here.
Eron Chaos is a blinding light of fury and guitar, and he’s standing above me suddenly, looking down on my poor mortal self. I’m like a garter snake beneath a shovel.
It’s only now that I see my wife, standing in the street in her red dress with my son holding her hand. She’s wearing my old leather jacket, the one I thought she burned to ashes, and she’s watching me, her eyes glowing.
She nods, and in her nod is forgiveness for my failures. In her nod are the redwoods and the coast of California, the logs with the mushrooms under them in the woods in Washington, the way we lay on our backs looking up at the meteor shower one August in the desert, the way she told me she loved me at four in the morning, and then made me scream, the way she said she was no longer a tourist but a resident, the way she let me put my ring on her finger and put hers on mine, and the way we held hands as we slept.
I’ll take this dream, if it means I get to hear Tania naming the world all over again, and beside her, my kid, naming too, rhyming back to her, singing the words for grass and leaves, singing the words for dropping out of a band and staying dropped, singing the words for love and for choosing to stay where you live instead of running back into a place made of light and drift. They’re singing the words for saving this place.
Eron Chaos is before Tania, standing in his electric suit, his teeth clenched, black tears running down his face. My wife stands in front of him. I’m terrified she’s on her way back to Adriftica, but if I was born for anything I was born to run lucky in the world of rock. Maybe I was born to lose her. It was worth the loss, the love.
“Titania,” he whispers.
“Oberon,” she replies. She takes his hands in hers. She looks into his eyes.
“I lay no claim on you,” Tania says. “Release yours on me.”
My son is beside her, and I see him reach for his father. Eron picks him up, this child whose voice—I know from experience—can call down bald eagles, whose laughter can make banks of flowers bloom in the dark, whose first steps made a ridgeline in our backyard, whose first meal caused every field in a hundred miles to fill with food ready to harvest. He holds my son, and my son laughs.
In spite of myself, I see the resemblance, my child too handsome for humans and too strange for kindergarten. I see how he might, one day, strut across a stage singing, strumming a guitar and bringing a revelation. I see how he might be exactly what his other father is, but better.
“He’s my child,” Eron says. “All I want is time.”
I know the expression on Tania’s face. We’ve had enough arguments over the years. My love has a temper. She is also fair, when she feels fair.
“Summers,” she tells him. “Let him camp in the bower. Take him spinning with the spiders and singing with the songbirds.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Then, at last, he nods to his band. To Mabel, whose fingers twist into his. To the drummer, who vibrates with a rhythm only he can feel. To the bassist and to the van, which shakes itself like a horse ready to gallop.
“Summers,” he says, and kisses his child. “That means you must bring summer back.”
Tania moves her hands and trees begin to bloom.
Eron Chaos does a slide on his knees with his guitar, and then he’s gone into the green. One by one, the rest of the band disappears, ending with the drummer, whose wings are spread fully as he departs.
The city is all kids, all around me.
Here she is, this woman I’m still married to, naming the pain, singing the words for fixing the things that are broken. Here she is, standing in the center of nowhere, this rock & roll queen who came from under the hill. My wife and son are stamping their feet and spitting syllables, and around them, all around them, the children look up and start to learn the words for fixing the bright and broken world.
There was a concert here, in the snowy dead of the night. After it was finished, the children who came to it walked out across the country, and as they walked, they sang the melody beneath their breath, shifting water into ice and smog into air, a song that called to the ghosts of bees and the bones of birds, a song that brought back summer and winter to the world, a song that sang the seasons back into balance.
You know, and I know, if there’s rock, there’s gotta be roll. If there’s a place beneath, this must be the place above, where we stand in an audience listening together, where we sing along to the songs we know.
And then we go to the hotel together, trundle bed and a queen-size, coffee and champagne, me and my family. Our son goes to sleep with his lullaby. I hold my wife in my arms, and she holds me back, as tightly as she holds the world.
. . . we see
The seasons alter. Hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
—William Shakespeare,
Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act II, Scene I
TEAM FAIRY
* * *
BY MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
I’m a Gemini, born on June twenty-first. Solstice, midsummer, cusp, that particularly notorious fairy moment? All of it. This means I want things mutable. Robots are not as mutable as fairies, by nature (or, I guess, by tech-nurture), which is why many robot stories are about robots gaining mutability. Fairies, on the other hand, are inherently made of wildness, unpredictability, and dazzle. In the case of this story, since my theater geek high school days, I’ve had a fondness for the section of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that deals with how a custody battle between Oberon and Titania changes the climate of Earth. It seemed ripe for a contemporary version. It’s always fun to put magic into our real world, and even more fun when the magical people are as complex and inept as we are, when their inability to speak to one another creates the same sort of love disasters we’ve all experienced here. I like the flaws and raging egos of Fairy, the epic injured hearts, the glittering talents. I like it wild.
TO A CLOVEN PINE
by Max Gladstone
Close the jaws. Close them now. Close them before it’s too late.
You want to know why? You want the full story, O Self? I’ll spin you a tale in the seconds we have left, I’ll parse my computation to narrative, I’ll filter you the numinous and then you’ll understand.
When it starts, I hear no screams.
I hope you won’t mistake me, O S
elf—that’s good. Sort of.
Why? Dearest Self, we’re on the run: Callie, Miri, the old man, and me. The Witch chases us, her million million mites spread across space like an enormous clutching hand. She casts spells through those wicked sharp-edged metal bugs, and seeds snares for us on every channel. She pleads, wheedles, commands in assembly code. Stop, the Witch says. Stop, for a second, and let me slide my claws into your guts.
Self, we know how her claws feel inside us, and none among us is eager to accept her invitation.
So we block our ears with wax—or the scientifical equivalent. We furl antennas, shut receivers down. We run silent and dark as a prehistoric submarine. Ears closed, we can’t hear the Witch’s spells, or her wet cackle, or the screams of her other victims, our fellow ships she’s caught and burned. Back there our friends are dying, back there Our Lady Herself breathes Her last, Her miles-long hull shattered and leaking coolant, Her beautiful great guns silent. We’re safe while we flee—a silver dart on the crest of a bloodthirsty tidal wave. We run through silent space. Witches don’t tire, but neither do we. Thank Newton and his laws.
If we could hear the screams outside our hall, the Witch would have us already.
But we can hear one another—and I ought to hear Callie’s wails right now. I don’t.
That may be a problem.
You see, Caliban had a chance to kill the old man tonight, during our slingshot around the black hole. (We needed speed—we always do. The Witch does not slow.) Motives, Callie has them: she’s a prisoner, she’s suffered the old man’s torture. Method, she has that too: claws and teeth. Opportunity: his back was turned. But she didn’t, which worries me, and now she’s gone, which worries worse.
Outcome matrix: each time Callie tries to kill the old man and fails, he locks her in the cave again. The old man won’t kill her and end it, because Miri won’t let him. She begs each time, on bended knees if needed, till he relents. Callie wants to escape into the black, but he, all mission and purity and fear, won’t let her; if Callie doesn’t kill him, she’ll writhe and hiss beneath his thumb forever. She’s not killed him yet, but failing doesn’t bother her, though she screams when the pain starts.
But the whole world’s quiet tonight—as quiet inside our hull as without. Callie did not die. Neither did the old man. She had the opening, and she didn’t take it. Why?
Our outcome matrix can’t explain Callie’s behavior, so we shift methods, use narrative rationality to model the principal actors and the evolving scenario. A narrative tab isn’t as clean as an outcome matrix, but war’s never clean, and this is how they taught us to think for that.
So: the old man watches from the cliffs as we swing into a black hole’s gravity well. It’s a tight maneuver—your humble correspondent’s idea, naturally. Who else would be so bold?
Blessed Newton says, objects in motion stay that way ’less acted on by outside force. And it’s outside forces that worry me, specifically outside forces with event horizons and plasma jets several AU long. The idea, O my Self, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, was to slingshot around the black hole and exploit the spin-stressed local fourspace to pull ahead of the Witch. Tidal strain will tear us apart if I don’t stay on my toes. Run faster! Dark forces on our tail! Work to do!
It’s a fine and fortunate thing to like one’s work when there is so much of it. Hull breach! (Stitch it shut.) Tensor strain! (Robots with diamond spinnerets scuttle forth from hidden ports to reinforce.) Core collapse imminent! (Yipe, that’s no good—spin and dance and overclock the notional engines to give that extra juice a place to go.) I’m everywhere and I do mean everywhere at once while Goodwife Gravity crushes us twixt her thighs.
Too late I remember that the old man’s alone on the cliff’s edge—and I remember what that means.
I can’t afford to divide my attention further but I do, wasting a few cycles to glance back at our island, and I see: Caliban lurks in high branches above the old man, her jaws open to their second hinge. Her long teeth drip saliva ropes.
I know what happens next. We’ve played the scene a million times if once: she jumps, and the old man’s magic catches her in midair. His eyes flash wroth but he smiles this small, soft smile and we’re back to the beginning, to a beast in a cave rattling her chains, screaming, until Miri tends her wounds and soothes her brow, and it all gets good for a while before it gets bad again.
In my moment’s inattention we skirt the edge of a plasma jet and our NO-engine filaments snap. If I don’t fix this right now, we’ll be a particle mist scattered over light-years—
I save the day, of course. I’m awesome, O Self. Permit me a flourish of bows stage left, stage right, raise hands and the whole cast raises ’em in time and we all bow together. It’s a fast, risky fix, though the details would bore you. Skip down a paragraph unless you’re a glutton for this sort of thing: I deploy hull-patch maintenance walkers, wind them in ablative shells of their own thread, which will endure the engines’ heat long enough to weave new filaments, and my mind dances skipstepfast from walker to walker, micro-ing their repair tech. We lose a few; there’s a moment of tension when the right primary surges, but we survive.
I love repair stories. Everything’s so clear. Our machines are broken! So we fix our machines. Fix didn’t work! Try another. All problems have one right answer. We tinker to retreat.
When we’re safe, I return to the island.
I find the old man alive, and Callie gone.
I search for her. She’s not in the hall or in her grotto, or in that shadowy place she doesn’t think I know, where she bashes small critters against rocks until they bleed, then eats them. I dart swift as fire through the island. All our hiding spots, I trace them. But she’s gone. I see everything, but I don’t see her.
Worried? Of course I am, O Self. Glancing over my shoulder.
The old man turns from the cliff and walks to his study. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” he says, and you’d hope he was joking. But, or and, he adds, “Find her.” He takes his throne, braces his staff across his lap, levitates a book, and reads, combing his fingers through his beard. After a while, he sleeps.
I hope his dreams are better than mine.
* * *
Miri keeps us together.
When the old man rages and his curses shrink our island to a nutshell, when Callie passes months sulking or in chains, when I grow peevish with boredom—I sense your disbelief, O Self, but even so polished and decorous a specimen as I grows testy at times—when we might fling ourselves apart, in short, we don’t, because of her. Her tether keeps us in whirling orbit. She’s our gravity.
I find her at the cliff, bird-watching with binoculars in a red velvet dress, legs folded, feet dimpled by rock, long dark hair wind-blown. I’m the wind in that hair, I’m the light that glints off foam-capped waves into her eyes, but it’s rude, if lyrical, to be these things, so I take form. My light casts her shadow onto the water.
She and Callie talk. They share confidences to which I am not admitted. If anyone can answer my questions, it’s Miri.
I ask: “Do you know where Callie’s gone?”
“Never any ducks.” Miri puts down the binoculars. “Or geese. Not so much as an albatross. I’d like to see something else, someday. Someone else. From somewhere other than here.”
“You know that’s impossible.”
“There’s a whole universe out there. It can’t all be dangerous.”
“You’d be surprised.” She doesn’t remember the war. She was too young. I drop next to her and dangle my legs over the cliff edge. Her shadow clocks back round to land. “I need to find her, Miri.”
She shifts her legs toward mine, her hip against my hip, her side against my side, her arm propped behind my back. Her bare feet point naturally like a dancer’s.
I don’t touch, by nature. Our kind does most everything by glance and voice. Even Our Lady Herself only touched us once, the eve before we jumped out to the front—how can
I say it in metaphor, how to trap truth in a human body—we reached for Her and She feathered Her fingernails down the inside of our arm, and we had a sense of what mathematicians mean when they cry out: god.
But Miri wells with touch. She presses against the world. Embraces everyone. Pushes her palms into gravel until they bear its mark. She drapes her leg over mine, not meaning anything save that legs are legs and meant for draping.
“You had bad dreams.” She must have smelled my nightmares, like spent sparks on the air: saw them swim between the stars.
I hate narrative, O Self, preferring logic and clear answers: I’m a forward mover by nature, and stories stutter into the past.
Once there was a War in the heavens and we were pickets, running between battles bearing news and aid, until at a bloodbath in the Abyss we beheld—
Herself: vast and broken, leaking plasma, whimpering across q-bands, wreathed in Witchmite swarms. We can’t help Her as She screams to deafen galaxies, and in a moment’s fool bravery we shout a challenge to the Witch. Pick on someone your own size.
The Witch is bigger than us. So much bigger.
A million eyes turn. The Witch licks her lips as she spies us, such a tiny thing, a moment’s morsel, no great lady like Herself listing near death, only a messenger girl, lightly armored, hummingbird-swift and all alone in the black.
She chases. We flee. And before we can close our ears, she starts to scream.
Mites land on our hull. Witchfingers snare us, break, press. Wood clasps limbs round and breaks them and she tears our exposed belly open and does things with the bloody ropes inside.
Miri’s arm settles around my shoulder.
“I need to find her. If she’s gone over—if she’s helping the enemy—”
Miri’s fingers tighten.
If I had been Miri, back before the war, I could have touched Herself like this.
“I can’t stop dreaming until I find her.”
Robots vs. Fairies Page 31
