Swift action: to hesitate would be to falter and fail, to turn and walk away, back down the Valley of the Kilns and the Ten Thousand Steps. I rattle the ceramic chimes. From inside, a huff and sigh. Then a voice: worn ragged, stretched and tired, but unmistakable.
“Come on in. I’ve been expecting you.”
PLATE 11: V crepitant movebitvolutans. Wescott’s Wandering Star. A windmobile vine, native of the Exx Palisades, that grows into a tight spherical web of vines which, in the Venerian Great Day, becomes detached from an atrophied root stock and rolls cross-country, carried on the wind. A central calx contains woody nuts that produce a pleasant rattling sound as the Wandering Star is in motion.
Cut paper, painted, layered and gummed. This papercut contains over thirty layers.
The Seer’s Story
TEA?
I have it sent up from Camahoo when the stickmen make the return trip. Proper tea. Irish breakfast. It’s very hard to get the water hot enough at this altitude but it’s my little ritual. I should have asked you to bring some. I’ve known you were looking for me from the moment you set out from Loogaza. You think anyone can wander blithely into Glehenta?
Tea.
You look well. The years have been kind to you. I look like shit. Don’t deny it. I know it. I have an excuse. I’m dying you know. The liquor of the vine – it takes as much as it gives. And this world is hard on humans. The Great Days – you never completely adjust – and the climate: if it’s not the thin air up here it’s the moulds and fungi and spores down there. And the ultraviolet. It dries you out, withers you up. The town healer must have frozen twenty melanomas off me. No I’m dying. Rotten inside. A leather bag of mush and bones. But you look very well Ida. So Patrick shot himself. Fifteen years too late, says I. He could have spared all of us... enough of that. But I’m glad you’re happy. I’m glad you have someone who cares, to treat you the way you should be.
I am the Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, and I am dying.
I walked down that same street you walked down. I didn’t ride, I walked, right through the centre of town. I didn’t know what to expect. Silence. A mob. Stones. Bullets. To walk right through and out the other side without a door opening to me. At the very last house, the door opened and an old man came out and stood in front of me so that I could not pass. “I know you.” He pointed at me. “You came the night of the Javrosts.” I was certain then I would die, and that seemed not so bad a thing to me. “You were the merciful one, the one who spared our young.” And he went into the house and brought me a porcelain cup of water and I drank it down and here I remain. The Merciful One.
They have decided that I am lead them to glory, or more likely to death. It’s justice, I suppose. I have visions you see – pula flashbacks. It works differently on Terrenes from Thents. Oh, they’re hard-headed enough not to believe in divine inspiration or any of that rubbish. They need a figurehead – the repentant mercenary is a good role, and the odd bit of mumbo-jumbo from the inside of my addled head doesn’t go amiss.
Is your tea all right? It’s very hard to get the water hot enough this high. Have I said that before? Ignore me – the flashbacks. Did I tell you I’m dying? But it’s good to see you; oh how long is it?
And Richard? The children? And Grangegorman? And is Ireland... of course. What I would give for an eyeful of green, for a glimpse of summer sun, a blue sky.
So, I have been a conman and a lover, a soldier and an addict, and now I end my time as a revolutionary. It is surprisingly easy. The Group of Seven does the work: I release gnomic pronouncements that run like grassfire from here to Egayhazy. I did come up with the Blue Empress motif – the Midnight Glory – blooming in the dark, under the breath of the high snows. Apt. They’re not the most poetic of people, these potters. We drove the Duke of Yoo from the Valley of the Kilns and the Ishtar Plain: she is resisted everywhere but she will not relinquish her claim on the altiplano so lightly. You’ve been in Egayhazy – you seen the forces she has up here. Armies are mustering and my agents report ’rigibles coming through the passes in the Palisades. An assault will come. The Duke has an alliance with House Shorth – some agreement to divide the altiplano up between them. We’re outnumbered. Outmanoeuvred and outsupplied and we have nowhere to run. They’ll be at each other’s throats within a Great Day but that’s a matter of damn for us. The Duke may spare the kilns – they’re the source of wealth. Matter of damn to me. I’ll not see it, one way or other. You should leave, Ida. Pula and local wars – never get sucked into them.
Ah. Unh. Another flashback. They’re getting briefer, but more intense, Ida, you are in danger. Leave before night – they’ll attack in the night. I have to stay. The Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl can’t abandon his people. But it was good, so good of you to come. This is a terrible place. I should never have come here. The best traps are the slowest. In you walk, through all the places and all the lives and all the years, never thinking that you are already in the trap, and then you go to turn around and it has closed behind you. Ida, go as soon as you can... go right now. You should never have come. But... – oh, how I hate the thought of dying up here on this terrible plain! To see Ireland again...
PLATE 12: V volanti musco: Air-moss. The papercut shows part of a symbiotic lighter-than-air creature of the Venerian highlands. The plant part consists of curtains of extremely light hanging moss that gather water from the air and low clouds. The animal part is not reproduced.
Shredded paper, gum.
HE CAME TO the door of his porcelain house, leaning heavily on a stick, a handkerchief pressed to mouth and nose against the volcanic fumes. I had tried to plead with him to leave, but whatever else he has become, he is a Hyde of Grangegorman and stubborn as an ould donkey. There is a wish for death in him; something old and strangling and relentless with the gentlest eyes.
“I have something for you,” I said and I gave him the box without ceremony.
His eyebrows rose when he opened it.
“Ah.”
“I stole the Blue Empress.”
“I know.”
“I had to keep it out of Patrick’s hands. He would have broken and wasted it like he broke and wasted everything.” Then my slow mind, so intent on saying this confession right, that I had practised on the space-crosser, and in every room and every mode of conveyance on my journey across this world, flower to flower, story to story: my middle-aged tripped over Arthur’s two words. “You knew?”
“All along.”
“You never thought maybe Richard, maybe Father, or Mammy, or one of the staff?”
“I had no doubt that it was you, for those very reasons you said. I chose to keep your secret, and I have.”
“Arthur, Patrick is dead, Rathangan is mine. You can come home now.”
“Ah, if it were so easy!”
“I have a great forgiveness to ask from you, Arthur.”
“No need. I did it freely. And do you know what, I don’t regret what I did. I was notorious – the Honourable Arthur Hyde, jewel thief and scoundrel. That has currency out in the worlds. It speaks reams that none of the people I used it on asked to see the jewel, or the fortune I presumably had earned from selling it. Not one. Everything I have done, I have done on with a reputation alone. It’s an achievement. No, I won’t go home, Ida. Don’t ask me to. Don’t raise that phantom before me. Fields of green and soft Kildare mornings. I’m valued here. The people are very kind. I’m accepted. I have virtues. I’m not the minor son of Irish gentry with no land and the arse hanging out of his pants. I am the Merciful One, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl.”
“Arthur, I want you to have the jewel.”
He recoiled as if I had offered him a scorpion.
“I will not have it. I will not touch it. It’s an ill-favoured thing. Unlucky. There are no sapphires on this world. You can never touch the Blue Pearl. Take it back to the place it came from.”
For a moment I wondered if he was suffering from
another one of his hallucinating seizures. His eyes, his voice were firm.
“You should go Ida. Leave me. This is my place now. People have tremendous ideas of family – loyalty and undying love and affection: tremendous expectations and ideals that drive them across worlds to confess and receive forgiveness. Families are whatever works. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted me to be. I forgive you – though as I said there is nothing to forgive. There. Does that make us a family now? The Duke of Yoo is coming, Ida. Be away from here before that. Go. The town people will help you.”
And with a wave of his handkerchief, he turned and closed his door to me.
I WROTE THAT last over a bowl of altiplano mate at the stickmen’s caravanserai in Yelta, the last town in the Valley of the Kilns. I recalled every word, clearly and precisely. Then I had an idea; as clear and precise as my recall of that sad, unresolved conversation with Arthur. I turned to my valise of papers, took out my scissors and a sheet of the deepest indigo and carefully, from memory, began to cut. The stickmen watched curiously, then with wonder. The clean precision of the scissors, so fine and intricate; the difficulty and accuracy of the cut absorbed me entirely. Doubts fell from me: why had I come to this world? Why had I ventured alone into this noisome valley? Why had Arthur’s casual accepting of what I had done, the act that shaped both his life and mine, so disappointed me? What had I expected from him? Snip went the scissors, fine curls of indigo paper fell from them on to the table. It had always been the scissors I turned to when the ways of men grew too much. It was a simple cut. I had the heart of it right away, no false starts, no new beginnings. Pure and simple. My onlookers hummed in appreciation. Then I folded the cut into my diary, gathered up my valises and went out to the waiting spider-car. The eternal clouds seem lower today, like a storm front rolling in. Evening is coming.
I WRITE QUICKLY, briefly.
Those are no clouds. Those are the ’rigibles of the Duke of Yoo. The way is shut. Armies are camped across the altiplano. Thousands of soldiers and javrosts. I am trapped here. What am I to do? If I retreat to Glehenta I will meet the same fate as Arthur and the Valley people – if they even allow me to do that. They might think that I was trying to carry a warning. I might be captured as a spy. I do not want to imagine how the Duke of Yoo treats spies. I do not imagine my Terrene identity will protect me. And the sister of the Seer, the Blue Empress. Do I hide in Yelta and hope they will pass me by? But how could I live with myself knowing that I had abandoned Arthur?
There is no way forward, no way back, no way around.
I am an aristocrat. A minor one, but of stock. I understand the rules of class, and breeding. The Duke is vastly more powerful than I, but we are of a class. I can speak with her; gentry to gentry. We can communicate as equals.
I must persuade her to call off the attack.
Impossible! A middle-aged Irish widow, armed only with a pair of scissors. What can she do; kill an army with gum and tissue? The death of a thousand papercuts?
Perhaps I could buy her off. A prize beyond prize: a jewel from the stars, from their goddess itself. Arthur said that sapphires are unknown on this world. A stone beyond compare.
I am writing as fast as I am thinking now.
I must go and face the Duke of Yoo, female to female. I am of Ireland, a citizen of no mean nation. We confront the powerful, we defeat empires. I will go to her and name myself and I shall offer her the Blue Empress. The true Blue Empress. Beyond that, I cannot say. But I must do it, and do it now.
I cannot make the driver of my spider-car take me into the camp of the enemy. I have asked her to leave me and make her own way back to Yelta. I am writing this with a stub of pencil. I am alone on the high altiplano. Above the shield wall the cloud layer is breaking up. Enormous shafts of dazzling light spread across the high plain. Two mounted figures have broken from the line and ride towards me. I am afraid – and yet I am calm. I take the Blue Empress from its box and grasp it tight in my gloved hand. Hard to write now. No more diary. They are here.
PLATE 13: V. Gloria medianocte: The Midnight Glory, or Blue Empress. Card, paper, ink.
LITTLE SISTERS
Vonda N. McIntyre
VONDA N. MCINTYRE (www.vondanmcintyre.com) writes science fiction. Her novel Dreamsnake won the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Pacific Northwest Booksellers awards. The Moon and the Sun won the Nebula. The film version, from Bill Mechanic’s Pandemonium Films, stars Pierce Brosnan, Fan Bingbing, and Kaya Scodelario, and was directed by Sean McNamara. It will be released in 2016. “Little Sisters” was published by Book View Café, and is a companion piece to “Little Faces,” nominated for the Nebula, and reprinted by BVC, which also digitally publishes McIntyre’s backlist.
DAMAGED NEARLY TO extinction by a war it had won, Qad’s Piercing Glory tumbled through deep space, its engines dead, deceleration impossible. Glory’s Mayday shrieked, insistent, while Qad, beset by nightmares, slept in his transit pod. Glory focused its failing resources on keeping Qad alive.
Decades later, in the nearest shipyard, Executives registered the cry for help. They created an account for this new consumer and dispatched space boats with gravity tractors.
A millennium later, the space boats returned. The ship floated obediently in their tractor nets, its tumbling damped, its momentum slowly, inexpensively reduced from interstellar speeds. The boats minimized energy expenditure and Executive attention, guided by Artificial Normals. The rescue required little intelligence, and had not been marked as emergency or priority. The estimated account expenditure reached neither level. The boats put the disabled ship into a repair bay and signaled for awakening.
Qad woke in the cold and dark, surprised to wake at all. He had expected to freeze in the wilderness of deep space, or burn in the brilliance of starbirth. He pulled out the transit pod catheters and intravenous supply lines, indifferent to leaks or smells. Cleaning was the job of Artificial Stupids. He ignored their jobs; he barely noticed their existence.
He felt his way to the darkened bridge. Glory’s viewscreen displayed the unlit interior of the repair bay in real time, showed him the rescue and approach in past time, and offered him the repair agreement. He accepted it. What choice did he have? Light flooded the bay and the bridge.
The Artificial Normal shaved him clean, gave him a fashionably architectural haircut, and painted the faces of the little sisters. It offered him a display of fashionable clothing and guided him to a selection that flattered him and the new haircut. He paid, on credit, the licensing fee for the patterns and waited while Glory created them.
He preferred to dress himself, but he had to let the Normal fasten the hundred buttons down the back of the open-fronted coat, and tie the bow of his modesty apron. It laid out his sword belt, scabbard, and blade. He checked the edge and strapped on the weapon. Finally, the Artificial opened his drawer of medals and pinned them on in their proper order. The two he had recently designed remained in their presentation boxes. He hoped and expected the Executives to accept them, to award them, to reward him.
At the access tube, a leader light waited to guide him into the shipyard. He followed it. His boots rang on metal grating. Gravity increased, making the horizontal walkway feel like a steep climb. Qad wondered if standards had changed, or if the Glory had miscalculated his sleep therapy. He could hardly meet the Executives with sweat dripping down his face. He paused for a moment to slow his heavy breathing. The leader light stopped with him, then oscillated before him, urging him to continue.
The eldest little sister squeaked with hunger, and the others joined the cry, a demanding quartet. They expected to be fed when he woke, but the invitation of the Executives took precedence. He opened himself to the sisters so they could take sustenance from him. No matter his exhaustion, he must withstand the drain on his resources in order to distract and quiet the little sisters during his meeting.
The leader light lost patience and skittered down the grating. Qad followed, ignoring the pain and f
atigue in his thigh muscles.
He reached the executive chamber not a moment too soon. The double doors opened.
Three Executives sat on a dais at the far end of the chamber. Qad strode toward them, stopped a proper five paces before them, and bowed.
“It’s time,” said the central Executive.
“My report: I took my Piercing Glory on a mission to explore and claim new worlds. I found two systems with suitable planets. I cleared them.” Qad held out his two medal boxes.
The Chief Executive beckoned him forward. Qad approached and placed the medals on the table. The Executive leaned over his huge belly, concealed by an embroidered lace modesty apron, and reached with spidery, sinewy arms to open the boxes.
Qad was proud of his designs. They displayed the position of the conquered worlds, the level to which he had cleared them, the potential of their remains. The medals would hang prominent on his chest. Impressive, but not too overwhelming.
The Executive inspected each one, reading them easily.
“Adequate,” he said. On either side of him, the other Execs murmured agreement.
Qad suppressed a frown. He had expected compliments, not an edge of criticism.
“And the damage to your ship?”
“Piercing Glory behaved with great courage in clearing the second planet. It was nearly destroyed. The inhabitants had nearly reached the danger zone, with powerful weapons. They would have achieved interstellar flight soon, and threatened our civilization. My ship has sent the proof to you.”
“You cleared the worlds to the third level of evolution.”
“We did.”
“While the directives limit clearing to second level.”
“Those directives are new,” Qad said. “Many years behind my expedition.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 48
