The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Too early," he said. "It's too early, Sorrel, it can't be coming yet." Only seven months had passed, and they weren't in the mountains. They weren't safe yet.

  "Babies come when they will," someone said, and Quartz looked up to find a woman in front of them, staring at them in the fading light. She was wearing a red kerchief, and immediately the color made him yearn for blood. "What's that your wife's holding in her arms?"

  Quartz swallowed. "An infant, we—"

  "She's so big with one child, and has another so small?"

  "Wet-nurse," Sorrel said, her voice somewhere between a whisper and a moan. "My sister's child. I had a baby died, and my sister died and I took hers, and then we made this one who's coming, see. Goodwife, I need to lie down now."

  Quartz had no idea if the woman in red had been convinced by Sorrel's explanation or not, although it was far cleverer than anything he'd have been able to invent, quick brain or no. "I can work," he said, his voice tight. "To pay for any help you give us. I'm good with my hands. I can thatch roofs, slaughter animals."

  No one was listening to him. The woman in red had taken Sorrel's arm, with a clucking sound, and was leading her towards one of the houses. Quartz followed numbly. How many people lived here? All he had seen so far was the one woman, whose kerchief looked so much like blood, and he could kill her sure, could wring her scrawny neck as if she were only a chicken. He let himself picture that for a moment, imagine how her spine would feel snapping under his hands. He let the lust for pain fill him. And then Sorrel screamed.

  Sorrel screamed, and he ran to follow the sound, found himself standing in one corner of a lamplit room as the woman carried in towels and basins of water and Sorrel thrashed on the bed, moaning, and now the woman was doing something between Sorrel's legs and now Sorrel was screaming again and now the woman was pulling her wrap away, trying to give her more freedom of movement maybe, pulling away her clothing to reveal her heart beating there, her heart pounding on her chest, just as Quartz had seen it that day so many years ago when Sorrel had sat in the ditch, battering herself with the jagged rock.

  He had to protect her. He had promised. He had promised, and he had never failed in that promise, whatever else he had done or not done. He had promised that only he would hurt her, no one else. The woman with the red kerchief was reaching for Sorrel's heart as Sorrel screamed, and Quartz leaped forward, tears choking him, and a rush of blood and something else poured out of Sorrel—blood, too much blood—and the woman grabbed Sorrel's heart and Quartz tackled her, made her let go of Sorrel, dragged her as far away from the birthing bed as he could to protect the beating heart there. And then he strangled the woman in the red kerchief, killed her as he had wished to do since the moment he first saw her; he dug his fingers into her throat and felt her own heart stop beating. This wasn't even cruelty. It was justified. She had reached for Sorrel's heart before ever he reached for hers.

  The lamp had gone out, kicked over or snuffed by the wind of the fight. Quartz smelled blood and shit, heard only a thin wailing cry. "Sorrel?" he said. He could not hear her heart. "Sorrel!" He began crawling towards the bed on all fours, afraid that he would trip and fall on her, hurt her, if he tried to walk in this crowded, wet darkness. "Sorrel, can you hear me?"

  And then he saw flickering light outside, heard voices and footsteps, and here were more lamps now, held by a group of men who pressed in through the door, who had cudgels and knives—Quartz could see the metal shining in the lamplight—and they were surrounding him and surrounding the bodies, and he heard someone say, "The baby's alive. Little girl. Looks normal, but who can tell? The mother wasn't."

  "We heard the screaming," one of the men said to Quartz, and Quartz did not know why his voice was so kind. "We came to help you. You got them, didn't you? Nobody right's lived in this place for years, so when we heard voices, we knew it must be freaks."

  "What?" Quartz said. The man who had spoken to him was holding up the red kerchief; someone else kicked the dead body, and through the gaps between people's legs, Quartz saw now that there had been no hair or skull under that kerchief, but only brain, a grey wrinkled thing that maybe had pulsed once like Sorrel's heart, but now was still. A foot came down and ground the brain into slimy mush.

  "Freak," someone said, and Quartz closed his eyes. The woman in the red kerchief had been reaching for Sorrel's heart in love or joy or anyway knowledge, not hatred. She had been reaching out to claim one of her own. He had understood nothing he had seen.

  "Must've holed up here to have the whelp," someone grunted. "Some sicko raped her maybe, or she got knocked up by one of her own who didn't want her, and this one came too, to help her." They hadn't connected Quartz to the women yet. Of course not; he looked normal.

  Now someone was talking to him. "You found them here and took care of them, right? Good man. Wish we'd gotten here in time to help."

  "Give me the baby," Quartz said. He forced himself to stand up. "Give me the baby, if she's normal." How was he going to feed her? "Give me the baby. She's mine. My spoil for what I've done, for killing those two." The words caught in his throat. "Give me the baby and bring me some milk. There are animals here. Find one I can milk."

  "You want to raise a freak-whelp? Be a while before you can use her." Laughter.

  But they brought her, the tiny mewling naked thing: someone had cut the cord that had bound her to her mother, as Sorrel had so long ago wanted to cut the cord that held her to her own heart. The baby was howling, and Quartz took off his shirt and wrapped her in it and looked down at her, knowing that he was truly a freak now too, because now he held his own heart in his hands. He cradled in his arms what was most precious and fragile, what could most easily be taken from him: what, if it was hurt, would cause him the deepest and most unending pain. He must not weep, because the men around him would not understand. He bent and kissed the baby's forehead; and when they snickered, felt the old blood-fury seize him.

  Urdumheim

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick's (www.michaelswanwick.com) first two short stories were published in 1980, and both featured on the Nebula ballot that year. One of the major writers working in the field today, he has been nominated for at least one of the field's major awards in almost every successive year, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Locus awards. He has published six collections of short fiction, six novels—In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Jack Faust, and Bones of the Earth—and a Hugo Award-nominated book-length interview with editor Gardner Dozois. In recent years Swanwick has also established himself as the modern master of the short-short story, publishing several hundred short-shorts, most notably "The Periodic Table of Science Fiction" and "The Sleep of Reason." His most recent books are new short story collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow, and major new fantasy novel The Dragons of Babel.

  Swanwick is a consummate master of the short story, as the rich, strange novelette that follows clearly shows.

  Every morning King Nimrod walked to the mountain, climbed its steep sides to the very top, and sang it higher. At noon ravens brought him bread and cheese. At dinner time they brought him manna. At sunset he came down. He had called the granite up from under the ground shortly after Utnapishtim the Navigator landed the boats there. First Inanna had called upon her powers to put the rains to sleep. Then Shaleb the Scribe had picked up a stick and scratched a straight line in the mud, indicating simply: We are here. Thus did history begin.

  But before history existed, before time began, King Nimrod led the People out of Urdumheim. Across the stunned and empty spaces of the world they fled, through the plains and over the silent snowy mountains, not knowing if these places had existed before then or if their need and desire had pulled them into being. The land was as large as the sky in those days, and as unpopulated. But in no place could they linger, for always their enemies were close on their heels, eager to return them to slavery.

&nbs
p; So came they at last to the limitless salt marshes that lay between the land and the distant sea. It was a time of great floods, when the waters poured endlessly from the heavens and the grass-choked streams were become mighty rivers and there was no dry ground anywhere to be seen. They built shallow-drafted reed boats then, well-pitched beneath, and set across the waters, where no demon could follow. Skimming swiftly over the drowned lands, they drove into the white rains, seeking refuge. Until at last they came upon what was then an island barely distinguishable from the waters. Here they settled, and here they prospered.

  They were giants, that first generation, and half the things in the world were made by them first. Utnapishtim invented boats and navigation. Shaleb invented writing and record-keeping. Inanna invented weaving and the arts of lovemaking. Nimrod himself was responsible for bridges, houses, coins, and stoneworking, as well as cultivation and animal husbandry and many other things as well. But greatest of all his inventions was language. The People could not speak before he taught them how.

  I was a boy when the winged lion came. That morning, Ninsun had set me to work pitting cherries. It was a tedious, fiddling chore, and because Ninsun had gathered four bushels, it lasted for hours, but there was no way out of it. So as I labored, I asked her questions about the way things used to be and why things were as they are now. Of all the First, she was the least closed-mouthed. Which is not to say she was at all talkative.

  "Why is there work?" I asked.

  "Because we are lucky."

  It didn't seem lucky to me to have to work, and I said so.

  "Work makes sense. You labor, you grow tired. You make something, you're better off than you were before. Imagine the world if it weren't that way."

  "What was the world like before the People came here?"

  "There are no words to describe it."

  "Why not?"

  "Because there was no language. Nimrod invented language as a way for us to escape from Urdumheim."

  "What was Urdumheim like?"

  "King Nimrod gave it that name afterwards so we could talk about it. When we lived there, it wasn't called anything."

  "But what was it like?"

  She looked at me without answering. Then abruptly she opened her mouth in a great O. The interior of her mouth was blacker than soot, blacker than midnight, black beyond imagining. That horrible hole in reality opened wider and wider, growing until it was larger than her face, larger than the room, until it threatened to swallow me up and along with me the entire village and King Nimrod's mountain and all the universe beyond. There were flames within the darkness, though they shed no light, and cold mud underfoot. My stomach lurched and I was overcome by a pervasive sense of wrongness. It seemed to me that I had no name and that it was thus impossible to distinguish between myself and everything else, and that therefore I could by definition never, ever escape from this dreadful and malodorous place.

  Ninsun closed her mouth. "It was like that." The clay pot where we dumped the discarded pits was full, so she tossed them out the window. "This is almost done. When we're finished here, you can run along and play."

  I don't think that Ninsun was my mother, but who can tell? We had not invented parentage at that time. No one had ever died, and thus no one had foreseen the need to record the passing of generations. Children were simply raised in common, their needs seen to by whoever was closest.

  Nor was I the child Ninsun thought me. True, when she released me at last, I did indeed react exactly as a child would in the same circumstances. Which is to say, I was out the door in an instant and hurtling across the fields so fast that a shout to come back would never have reached my ears. My reasons, however, were not those of a boy but of a man, albeit a young one still.

  I plunged into the woods and cool green shadows flowed over my body. Only when I could no longer hear the homely village noises of Whitemarsh, the clang of metal in the smithy and the snore of wood at the sawyer's, did I slow to a walk.

  Whitemarsh was one of seven villages on an archipelago of low hills that rose gently from the reeds. On Great Island were Landfall, Providence, and First Haven. Further out on islands of their own were Whitemarsh, Fishweir, Oak Hill, and Market. Other, smaller communities there were, some consisting of as few as three or two houses, in such profusion that no man knew them all. But the chief and more populous islands were connected by marsh-roads of poured sand paved with squared-off logs.

  By secret ways known only to children (though I was no longer a child, I had been one not long before), I passed through the marshes to a certain hidden place I knew. It was a small meadow clearing just above the banks of one of the numberless crystal-clear creeks that wandered mazily through the reeds. In midday the meadow lay half in sun and half in shade, so that it was a place of comfort whatever the temperature might be. There I threw myself down on the grass to await Silili.

  Time passed with agonizing slowness. I worried that Silili had come early and, not finding me there, thought me faithless and left. I worried that she had been sent to Fishweir to make baskets for a season. A thousand horrid possibilities haunted my imagination. But then, at last, she stepped into the clearing.

  I rose at the sight of her, and she knelt down beside me. We clasped hands fervently. Her eyes shone. When I looked into those eyes, I felt the way the People must have when the first dawn filled the sky with colors and Aruru sent her voice upward to meet them and so sang the first song. The joy I felt then was almost unbearable; it filled me to bursting.

  We lay together, as we had every day for almost a month, kissing and fondling each other. Silili's skin was the color of aged ivory and her nipples were pale apricot. Her pubic hair was light and downy, a golden mist over her mons. It offered no more resistance than a cloud when I ran my fingers through it. She stroked my thighs, my chest, the side of my face. Then, blushing and yet not once taking her eyes from mine, she said, "Gil . . . I'm ready now."

  "Are you sure?" It is a measure of how deeply I loved Silili that I asked at all instead of simply taking her at her word. And a measure of how much I wanted her that when I asked I did not stop stroking her gently with one finger, over and over, along the cleft between her legs, fearful that if I removed my hand her desire for me would go with it. "I can wait, if you want."

  "No," she said, "now."

  We did then as lovers always do.

  Afterwards, we lay together talking quietly, sometimes laughing. Inevitably, our conversation turned to what we would be wearing when next we saw each other.

  Children, of course, go everywhere naked. But after this, Silili and I would need to wear clothing in public. Tonight she would go to Inanna and beg enough cloth to make a dress, and thus claim for herself the modesty of a grown woman. Like any male my age, I had already made a shirt and trousers and hidden them away against this very day.

  Silili brushed her hands down the front of her body, imagining the dress. "What color should it be?" she asked.

  "Green, like the forest. Reddish-orange, like the flames of the sun."

  "Which am I to be, then—forest or sun? You are as inconstant as the sky, Gil."

  "Blue," I said, "like the sky. White, like the moon and the clouds. Red and yellow and blue like the stars. Orange and purple like the sunset or the mountains at dawn." For she was all things to me and, since in my present frame of mind all things were good, all things in turn put me in mind of her.

  She made an exasperated noise, but I could tell she was pleased.

  It was at that instant that I heard a soft, heavy thump on the ground behind me. Lazily, I turned my head to see what it was.

  I froze.

  An enormous winged lion stood on the bank of the stream opposite us. Its fur and feathers were red as blood. Its eyes were black from rim to rim.

  Silili, who in all her life had never feared anything, sat up beside me and smiled at the thing. "Hello," she said. "What are you?"

  "Hello," the great beast replied. "What are you? Hello. Hellohello
hello." Lifting its front paws in the air, it began to prance about on its hind legs in the drollest manner imaginable. "What are you are what. You are what you are what you are. Hello? Hellello. Lo-l o-lo-lo-lo! Hell you are lo you are. What what what!"

  Silili threw back her head and laughed peals of silvery laughter. I laughed as well, but uneasily. The creature's teeth were enormous, and it did not seem to me that the cast of its face was at all kindly. "A lion?" Silili asked. "A bird?"

  "A bird a bird a bird! A lion a lion a bird!" the beast sang. "You are a lion you are hello what are a bird hello you are a what a what hello. Bird-lion bird-lion lion lion bird!" Then he bounded up into the air, snapped out his mighty wings, and, flapping heavily, flew up and off into the sky, leaving nothing behind him but a foul stench, like rotting garbage.

  We both laughed and applauded. How could we not?

  But when later I returned to Whitemarsh, and my sister came running out from the village to meet me, I raised my hand in greeting and I could not remember what word I normally used in such circumstances. I wracked my brain for it time and again, to no avail. It was completely gone. And when I tried to describe the beast I had seen, I could remember the words for neither "bird" nor "lion."

  Still, that strange incident did not stay long in our minds, for that was the summer when Delondra invented dancing. This was an enormous event among our generation not only for its own sake but because this was the first major creation by anyone who was not of the First. As adults we had to spend our days in labor of various sorts, of course, but we met every evening on the greensward to dance until weariness or romance led us away.

  Music had been invented by Enlil years before and we had three instruments then: the box lute, the tabor, and the reed pipe. When the evening darkened, we lit pine-tar torches and set them in a circle about the periphery of the dancing ground and so continued until the stars were high in the sky. Then by ones and twos we drifted homeward, some to make love, others to their lonely beds, and still others to weep and rage, for our hearts were young and active and no way had yet been invented to keep them from being broken.