I sat up, turning to face him. He smiled. He’d taken off his borrowed shirt somewhere along the way. His mandala glowed, gently spinning. His hands kept on moving, caressing my thighs.
I looked down at the tent in his borrowed trousers. “Rub me all over,” I insisted.
The next time I woke, it was nearly dawn. I felt … human. I lay on my side and the warmth at my back wasn’t welts. It was Fox, his body spooned around mine. He was snoring, each breath ever so faintly stirring the hair on the nape of my neck.
I marveled, refusing to move. I wanted that moment to last. It might have to, the way things were going. My desensitization treatments had all failed. Unless and until something new came through, I’d be living like this the rest of my life.
At least I wasn’t allergic to him.
I smiled. With Rey, it was like bedding a virgin. I guess he was so used to having the piercings, the implants and such … well, for one thing, he had to be careful. Those things can tear skin off. But when he had to do without them, it seemed to throw him off his rhythm. His tentative moves were incredibly gentle, however, and I couldn’t help but respond in kind. His attitude, too, was so sweet. He was almost childlike about his discoveries. Lying there, I started feeling vaguely guilty about the whole thing, as if somehow I were taking advantage of him and his innocence.
A disturbing thought. It was interrupted by a tickle, then a sneeze. Then another. Monster sneezes. I wound up on the floor, with Rey’s arm around me as I convulsed again and again. As my Mexican yaya would say, “¡Que romantico!”
“What is it? You need something? Cortisone? Huh? Do you have an inhaler?” He was in full panic mode, ready to start mouth to mouth. “Is it … is it me?”
I shook my head. “No.” I was wheezing a bit, but it wasn’t because of congestion, which it would be if this were a chemical thing. It was more of a physical prickling, way up inside my nose somewhere. I blew my nose, hard, and got no relief at all. That’s when I remembered my skin itching so badly, all on account of the Bi’Ome’s infection.
What was happening this time? And where?
We found a good eighteen inches of snow on the ground when we tumbled out the front door. No fair. The snow should have been rain, this late in the season.
The drifts had nearly buried Rey’s bike, though the sky above us was perfectly clear by then. In the east, I could see dawn’s light edging the Sierra Nevada with an ethereal white lacework of fresh powder. Beautiful—almost beyond words.
Until, that is, something fluttered right into my face, grabbing at me with tiny claws. I flailed at it, knocking the thing off my nose. Then another one came at me.
What were they, owls? Bugs?
I snatched up Rey’s discarded, now frozen, towels and swung them at the pesky creatures, trying to keep them at bay. Not so, Rey. He climbed up on the porch railing, peering at the roofline as more of them fluttered around the house.
“What are they?” I whispered, half-afraid I’d draw them my way again if I spoke any louder. I could hear faint squeaking as it was, like tiny fingernails on a blackboard.
“Stay there,” answered Rey.
What?
He swung off the porch and climbed up the access ladder built into the siding. That took him up to a vent near the roof, a triangle opening into the attic space. Like so much of the house, the vent resembled its organ of origin—my nose. While I watched, the small fluttering forms flew at it. They folded up into smaller shapes as they reached its nostrils. Then they vanished altogether.
Scritch scritch … Achoo!!
I sneezed so hard, I blew one of the little airborn devils backward by nearly a yard. That finally scared the buggers off! They veered away from me and joined their fellows upstairs.
Rey climbed back down again. He was grinning.
I demanded, aloud this time, “What?”
He laughed, not exactly at me, but I still didn’t take it well. “Love,” he said, “you’ve got bats in your belfry. Your sinuses, anyway!”
I didn’t buy it at first, but when daylight arrived, Rey went back up the ladder and opened the vent’s screen. He reached inside and plucked one of them off its roost. When he brought it back down, I was startled to see just how small it was, bodily. With the wings all folded up, it was mouse-size. A baby mouse.
“See that chipmunk stripe down its back?” Rey said. “That’s not a natural species. It’s a nu-bat. They’re gene-gineered, like the house. They’ve had some human alleles added so they’re resistant to white-nose fungus, and rabies too. Replacements for what’s gone extinct.”
“But … but … what is it doing here?”
He grinned. “My guess is, they found a nice, warm, comfy cave in the attic that literally smells like them, like home. You have a whole colony of them,” Rey told me. “It’s easy to fix, though. All you need is screens with a smaller mesh size.”
I nodded, thinking dire thoughts about bat guano. No wonder my sinuses felt congested so much of the time, in spite of my living way up here.
Then revelation dawned.
“How ‘human’ are they?” I asked Rey. “Could they catch other viruses? Like, say, chicken pox?”
The company rep tried to pooh-pooh the notion, but Rey sent in bat samples, using a sterilized trap/container they lowered to us the same way as the calamine lotion. A couple days later, there was no doubt. My bats had the chicken pox, all right. And nu-bats were clearly the vector that had spread it throughout almost all of the Bi’Omes in northern California. That led to the mass eviction of nu-bats by means of a saline sinus wash and some speedy replacement of natural filters with metal jobs, at least until they could tweak the Bi’Omes’ phenotypes. The nu-bats’ too, for all I know.
In another week’s time, the rash faded away, healing almost as rapidly as it had bloomed. I reveled in my relief from both itching and sinus congestion. My major concern by then was the fast-approaching end of our quarantine.
Rey couldn’t wait for a chance at a steak dinner. I couldn’t quite make myself say farewell. When the day came, though, he seemed reluctant to go.
“It’s been … interesting,” he told me. “I never imagined …,” he started to say, but then stopped, blushing so furiously, his mandala’s colors began to fade in comparison.
“Haven’t you ever done it au naturel?” I asked gently.
He frowned. Slowly, thoughtfully, he said, “I got my first piercing when I was twelve. My first implant. …” He shut himself off, then said, simply, “No.”
So I gave him a rueful smile. “You know those things were only meant to help people when they have problems. Or when they want to synchronize things exactly. For a treat? But two normal, wholly organic and natural people don’t need enhancement. They don’t really need anything but each other, and. …”
My petite sermon was cut short by Rey’s lips attaching themselves to my earlobe. When we came back up for air, an hour later, he told me, “You shouldn’t be so alone up here.”
All I could do was shrug.
“What about online support groups?” Rey asked.
I shrugged again. “Who needs ’em? What? Do they make it all better? Make everything go away? Make things like they were before?”
“No, but—”
“Whining about it is useless,” I blurted, unable to shut off the tap once the seal was cracked. “I’ve dealt with it, okay? I’ve got my Bi’Ome. I’ve rebuilt my life. Now I’ve got to get on with it. I’ve just got to go on. …”
I fell silent, but not from exhaustion. I was suddenly, acutely aware of how empty my Bi’Ome was. There were no bowling trophies, no Niagara Falls souvenirs, no clutter of toys. No family photos hung from my soft pink walls. Well, why look at what you can’t have? I demanded, but Self wasn’t fooled for a moment. The walls, and the rooms, and the shelves were all empty of everything I’d walked away from.
To save yourself, I told me sharply.
Yeah, right, Self answered. You’re saving yourself �
�� for what?
Rey stroked my hair. “Do you … d’you think you’d mind a visitor? Y’know, prob’ly just on weekends or holidays. I couldn’t—”
I answered him with a kiss. By the time all new business was concluded, I’d offered to build him a bath house, outside the Bi’Ome, with heaters and hot water, towels and slippers, and pure cotton clothes he could wear in the house. If he wanted to wear anything at all.
He laughed. “I think I’d better take this one step at a time.”
I couldn’t agree more, though I didn’t say so. All choked up, I simply clung to him. Finally, though, we sealed the deal with one last lingering smooch. Then I had to let him go. It should have been a simple matter of opening my front door. But it wasn’t. The doorknob fought back.
So I tried again. No go.
I took a step backward, and finally noticed the bright salmon-pink flush adorning the wall. An odd distortion on either side of the door jamb made the whole wall panel curve outward. Bulge, in fact.
Cautiously, I reached out and traced the curve on the right side with my fingertips. Hot. Fever-hot. Sore, too. I could feel it, an unpleasant ache/tickle on either side of my own throat.
Oh, no.
I turned and stared at Reynard.
He queried the smartnet. Didn’t take long. A good thing, since I’d just about quit breathing under the onslaught of sympathy symptoms.
He shook his head, and gave me this sad, sheepish sort of a smile. “I, uh … I can’t be sure, but it looks like the house might—”
“What?” I demanded. “What is it this time?”
Rey waved at the swollen door glands. He shrugged helplessly. “Mumps.”
Oh my god!
For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again
MICHAEL SWANWICK
Michael Swanwick (www.michaelswanwick.com) lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His seventh novel, The Dragons of Babel (2008), was a sequel to his fantasy novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993). His eighth novel, Dancing with Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger & Surplus, was published in 2011. His eighth fiction collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, appeared in 2008—there are seven previous story collections, and he continues to publish several stories each year, often more than one good enough to be reprinted in Year’s Best volumes. In other words, he’s still a pretty hot writer, and one of the finest conscious craftsmen in genre fiction today.
“For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again” was published in Asimov’s. The protagonist is a young Irish American eager to find his future in space, which alien conquerors have made possible. He’s visiting Ireland to take a last look at his world. And he is unknowingly in danger of being trapped by the past, politics and sentiment and all.
Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich the,
For of saynte chairité
Come ant daunce with me
In Irlaunde.
(anon.)
The bullet scars were still visible on the pillars of the General Post Office in Dublin, almost two centuries after the 1916 uprising. That moved me more than I had expected. But what moved me even more was standing at the exact same spot, not two blocks away, where my great-great-grandfather saw Gerry Adams strolling down O’Connell Street on Easter morning of ’96, the eightieth anniversary of that event, returning from a political rally with a single bodyguard to one side of him and a local politico to the other. It gave me a direct and simple connection to the tangled history of that tragic land.
I never knew my great-great-grandfather, but my grandfather told me that story once and I’ve never forgotten it, though my grandfather died when I was still a boy. If I squeeze my eyes tight shut, I can see his face, liquid and wavy as if glimpsed through candle flames, as he lay dying under a great feather comforter in his New York City railroad flat, his smile weak and his hair forming a halo around him as white as a dandelion waiting for the wind to purse its lips and blow.
“It was doomed from the start,” Mary told me later. “The German guns had been intercepted and the republicans were outnumbered fourteen to one. The British cannons fired on Dublin indiscriminately. The city was afire and there was no food to be had. The survivors were booed as they were marched off to prison and execution, for the common folk did not support them. By any conventional standard it was a fiasco. But once it happened, our independence was assured. We lose and we lose and we lose, but because we never accept it, every defeat and humiliation only leads us closer to victory.”
Her eyes blazed.
I suppose I should tell you about Mary’s eyes, if you’re to understand this story. But if I’m to tell you about her eyes, first I have to tell you about the holy well.
There is a holy well in the Burren that, according to superstition, will cure a toothache. The Burren is a great upwelling of limestone in the west of County Clare, and it is unlike anyplace else on Earth. There is almost no soil. The ground is stony and the stone is weathered in a network of fissures and cracks, called grykes, within which grow a province of plants you will not find in such abundance elsewhere. There are caves in great number to the south and the east, and like everywhere else in that beautiful land, a plenitude of cairns and other antiquities to be found.
The holy well is one such antiquity, though it is only a round hole, perhaps a foot across, filled with water and bright green algae. The altar over it is of recent construction, built by unknown hands from the long slender stones formed by the natural weathering of the limestone between the grykes, which makes the local stone walls so distinctive and the walking so treacherous. You could tear it down and scatter its component parts and never hear a word spoken about your deed. But if you returned a year later you’d find it rebuilt and your vandalism unmade as if it had never happened. People have been visiting the well for a long, long time. The Christian overlay—the holy medals and broken statues of saints that are sometimes left as offerings, along with the prescription bottles, nails, and coins—is a recent and perhaps a transient phenomenon.
But the important thing to know, and the reason people keep coming back to it, is that the holy well works. Some holy wells don’t. You can locate them on old maps, but when you go to have a look, there aren’t any offerings there. Something happened long ago—they were cursed by a saint or defiled by a sinner or simply ran out of mojo—and the magic stopped happening, and the believers went away and never returned. This well, however, is charged with holy power. It gives you shivers just to stand by it.
Mary’s eyes were like that. As green as the water in that well, and as full of dangerous magic.
I knew about the holy well because I’d won big and gotten a ticket off-planet, and so before I went, I took a year off in order to see all the places on Earth I would never return to, ending up with a final month to spend wandering about the land of my ancestors. It was my first time in Ireland and I loved everything about it, and I couldn’t help fantasizing that maybe I’d do so well in the Outsider worlds that someday I’d be rich enough to return and maybe retire there.
I was a fool and, worse, I didn’t know it.
We met in the Fiddler’s Elbow, a pub in that part of the West which the Bord Failte calls Yeats Country. I hadn’t come in for music but only to get out of the rain and have a hot whiskey. I was sitting by a small peat fire, savoring the warmth and the sweet smell of it, when somebody opened a door at the back of the room and started collecting admission. There was a sudden rush of people into the pub and so I carried my glass to the bar and asked, “What’s going on?”
“It’s Maire na Raghallach,” the publican said, pronouncing the last name like Reilly. “At the end of a tour she likes to pop in someplace small and give an unadvertised concert. You want to hear, you’d best buy a ticket now. They’re not going to last.”
I didn’t know Maire na Raghallach from Eve. But I’d s
een the posters around town and I figured what the hell. I paid and went in.
Maire na Raghallach sang without a backup band and only an amp-and-finger-rings air guitar for instrumentation. Her music was … well, either you’ve heard her and know or you haven’t and if you haven’t, words won’t help. But I was mesmerized, ravished, rapt. So much so that midway through the concert, as she was singing “Deirdre’s Lament,” my head swam and a buzzing sensation lifted me up out of my body into a waking dream or hallucination, or maybe vision is the word I’m looking for. All the world went away. There were only the two of us facing each other across a vast plain of bones. The sky was black and the bones were white as chalk. The wind was icy cold. We stared at each other. Her eyes pierced me like a spear. They looked right through me, and I was lost, lost, lost. I must have been half in love with her already. All it took was her noticing my existence to send me right over the edge.
Her lips moved. She was saying something and somehow I knew it was vastly important. But the wind whipped her words away unheard. It was howling like a banshee with all the follies of the world laid out before it. It screamed like an electric guitar. When I tried to walk toward her, I discovered I was paralyzed. Though I strained every muscle until I thought I would splinter my bones trying to get closer, trying to hear, I could not move nor make out the least fraction of what she was telling me.
Then I was myself again, panting and sweating and filled with terror. Up on the low stage, Mary (as I later learned to call her) was talking between songs. She grinned cockily and with a nod toward me said, “This one’s for the American in the front row.”
And then, as I trembled in shock and bewilderment, she launched into what I later learned was one of her own songs, “Come Home, the Wild Geese.” The Wild Geese were originally the soldiers who left Ireland, which could no longer support them, to fight for foreign masters in foreign armies everywhere. But over the centuries the term came to be applied to everyone of Irish descent living elsewhere, the children and grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren of those unhappy emigrants whose luck was so bad they couldn’t even manage to hold onto their own country and who had passed the guilt of that down through the generations, to be cherished and brooded over by their descendants forever.
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