The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  Fear-gifts, blood-gifts, bribes. Most days she left the lot of it to the snuffling shrine-dogs who prowled her hut to ensure her obedience – first subtracting maybe a few dried apples, maybe a bullet for a gun she may yet find, maybe some corpse’s stolen shoes – only to have new cairns rebuilt by eager hands during the night. After all, there was no other sword between the living and the ghosts than her; no other intercessor, no other keeper of the door. She could purge a poltergeist, send the shades of cradle-deaths to quicken fallow wombs, tether a ghost in place with salt to ward a scraggled field against the tithing of the crows. And it was she who gleaned the shards of histories and pieced them, tipped voice like sips of water down the throat of a dead world.

  And she’d gladly let the gifts rot down to mulch, and their givers along with them.

  But the bottle smelled cold and clean and salt as seas she knew were salt because the ghosts had told her so. The smell on it, and the whitegreen of the glass, put her in mind of licking icicles. Though the icicles she knew were riddled with flaws and streaks of grit, she believed the ghost who’d said the icicles of the Well-Before had frozen clear as windowpanes.

  (“As what?” Wasp had asked. “Windowpanes,” the ghost had repeated. Then, “Crystal,” it had offered to her blank look. “Plastic sheeting?” At last she’d understood. In her head – for she possessed neither paper nor the letters to put on it – she’d written windowpanes. Written crystal. And tipped the ghost out of its jar to go its way.)

  She turned the bottle back and forth in the light, watching how the glass warped the roll of paper within. Of course the ghosts had not brought it there, any more than the sea could bring her shells; only that their migrations had disinterred it from wherever it had been concealed and someone had found it, plucked it from the ground as though it might well bite, and brought it to the only person any of them knew who’d bite back harder.

  Also odd: the sheet of paper inside the bottle was nothing like the ones she’d seen from time to time on traders’ wagons or bound into books in the Songkeeper’s hut, burned or drowned or gnawed or sweet with rot. She sat on the rock that was her front step – gingerly, still sore from her last escape attempt, a week ago now by the moon – and studied it, flattened against the tamped-earth path to her hut. The paper unrolled to the length of one of Wasp’s long strides and was peppered with as many dots as there were windfalls in an orchard, skulls in a slagpit, or beans in a bowl.

  A map, thought Wasp, who had seen such things before. A map of stars.

  And then she grew very thoughtful, did Wasp with the ache still in her calves from the fleeing, with the rawness still in her lungs and a lattice of welts from the thornfield she had pushed through with the clamor of the hunt right on her heels, with the smell of the shrine-dogs still in her hair from the last time they’d run her down. With the scars on her ankles from the first time the Catchkeep-priest had had to drag her back, spitting and slashing, and smashed her feet between two stones. Sheer dumb luck, perhaps, or force of rage, she’d healed.

  The next day, hunting, she packed the saltlick and the fruit and blade and bells as usual, but left her jars behind. She brought the map instead.

  Catchkeep

  Area: 300.492 sq. deg. (appx. 0.73%)

  from the Dogwagon Chart: leather tooling, horsehide Autumn

  Sixteen stars: six major, ten minor, most of the latter representing teeth. This dog’s jaw is like a beartrap, too huge for her head, dwarfing even the massive barrel of her chest and the bulging muscles of her thighs. Even today it proves no challenge to see her as the crafters of this chart must have done, the ones who venerated her deeply enough to hold her fellow dogs in such high regard – the pistons of her legs, the forges of her eyes, the fey flux of that awful guileful grin – and in truth it remains almost instinctive in the modern heart to cheer her on each night as she runs the moon to earth behind the hills. But she is Catchkeep, ghostherder and sentinel, constant as the stars that shape her nightly steeplechase; and when the lot of us is done to dust, she will not miss our rallying.

  Of all this trickster’s stories – “Catchkeep Chases the Comet’s Tail,” “Catchkeep’s Biting Contest with Grandmother Shark,” etc. – the one that comes to us the most well-preserved by far is “Catchkeep’s Bequest,” wherein a few short paragraphs (or, more pertinent to the experience of its original audience, a few minutes’ telling) find that inimitable bitch whelping the First Litter, passing the Earth itself as afterbirth, then fashioning the world’s first people out of dogs’ skeletons rearranged to stand upright, inadvertently killing many when she tries to scruff those who dare disobey. It ends with Catchkeep commandeering the first makeshift vehicle of these people, who grew foolhardy or daft enough to try to tame her, and in so doing forming her sister constellation, the Empty Wagon (NQ3, fig. 2) – possibly a glorification of that people’s own wagons, constructed of rusted-out automobile chassis welded to whatever scaffolding and stretched with whatever rotten fabric or brittle leather was to hand?

  “The lot of you,” said Catchkeep, “can go screw.” And she took their wagon and drove it hard across the hills until all the dogs fell down dead in their traces, glowing bright as arclights through the ash. Then she lifted each of them in her great jaws and tossed them up into the sky, gently as a bitch tumbling pups, and they dug in their footholds on the dark and paced their circles and curled up to sleep the sleep of stars.

  What she is perhaps best known as, however, is a herder of spirits: both those of the dead and the unborn. In this aspect she earns the fear of the diseased, the chased, and the condemned, whose souls it is her charge to bear away; also the veneration of the fallow-wombed, whose custom it was to set out the choicest bits of meat after their evening meal, in hopes of luring Catchkeep to the door.

  Her former, baneful aspect is illustrated in a scrap of doggerel, perhaps a fraction of a larger piece of verse, found scrawled on a bit of scorch-edged paper rolled into a tube and tied off with a string, worn in a horsehide pouch as a crude little talisman against her inexorable teeth:

  Catchkeep [illegible], running free,

  Herding the souls out over the trees:

  Cold ghosts you are. Till ghost I be,

  You have no power over me.

  Similar formations in other charts: the Lurcher (Hothouse Chart, NQ4), the Hunt (Pennon Chart, NQ4).

  She turned the first four away with her blessing, for they were faceless, the height of her knees, and moved vaguely, as if underwater – but the fifth ghost Wasp saw up on the lightning-blasted ledge of Execution Hill was a tall one, easily a head higher than herself, and there was something about it that caught her eye. Not exactly awareness, never that; but a sort of daunted yearning that it broadcast, which she understood too well.

  Before she put out the saltlick, she sat her heels a moment to watch it. It fascinated her, the way the ghosts moved, pacing their confines like tethered dogs, sounding their boundaries, back and forth. She saw much of herself in them, so she never watched for long.

  This particular ghost was walking down a corridor she could not see, turning invisible doorknobs. Its mouth moved, shaping the same word again and again, but no sound came out. A name, Wasp thought. It could have been anyone’s. A lover’s, a child’s, a friend’s. Wasp’s mouth twisted: scorn or envy.

  She wondered what had done it in, this restive ghost. If she waited long enough she would probably get her answer, but she’d lost her stomach for that long ago.

  Hurriedly she laid the saltlick out and the ghost nosed forward, browsing at the air.

  She never knew quite why the saltlick worked. Never quite cared. Another fragment of the ritual, she figured, another step in the dance of call-and-response that kept her here – not exactly like the ghosts, for no Archivist trapped her in jars for questioning, and not exactly unlike them, for her path was prescribed in lines as clearly-drawn as any one of theirs. The saltlick worked, the Songkeepers said, because it put the ghosts in mind of the f
lesh they used to wear. The salt of sweat, of tears, of blood. It drew them. It made them remember. But there was no Archivist to lay a trail of salt for Wasp. Her rescue, or else her entrapment, was her own.

  The ghost reached the saltlick and began to feed.

  She gave it a moment.

  “I am the Archivist,” Wasp said, when the ghost had slowed. She gagged against the cloy of rote, but spat it anyway. “Catch-keep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones her stars. I greet you.”

  The ghost looked up at her. This part used to frighten her a little: the sea change in the ghosts’ eyes as the salt waylaid them, clogged their feet with the memory of clay. The look they’d wear, as though waking from a dream and seeing something wholly frightening which Wasp could not. It had not taken her long to learn that they were only seeing her.

  She set the rolled map on the ground and toed it toward the ghost, who for its part was not cowering as most did but instead had drawn itself up to its full height and was peering down its nose at her as at a turd in the path it would have to step around.

  Wasp hid her smile. She’d been lucky. She’d gone out to Execution Hill expecting to keep coming back a week, a month, before she’d found one quite like this. This was the sort of ghost that had retained or salvaged enough of itself to be searching for something, or someone, or somewhere, and the draw of it was stronger even than the salt. This one sought a someone, she was sure, and from the look of it, the days it’d lived out were long past. Then it was looking for a ghost. And it wouldn’t find it on its own.

  She hoped it was smart enough, or dumb enough, to bargain with.

  “You’re seeking,” she said. The other ghosts walked or flew or fell through their last moments to all sides of her, oblivious, but this one, this one heard. It eyed that map the way a half-starved dog eyes carrion, and she held it up at arm’s-length, keeping the salt between them; the ghost lunged and came up short, collared by the empty air. “Well. So am I.”

  The Cinder Girl

  Area: 1119.303 sq. deg. (appx. 2.71%)

  from the Sinkhole Chart: razor scarring, human skin Autumn

  Twenty-three stars: eight major, fifteen minor, including neither the visual binary blue supergiant representing her heart nor the nebula colloquially known as the Spool; while this latter’s representation remains the subject of some debate, it is generally agreed to be either the Girl’s navel or her womb. (If one can use agreed in fairness, conjuring as it does more a smiling accord over a glass of fine vintage than the panting stalemate reached by brawlers, each having succumbed less to his rival’s blows than to his own growing lassitude.)

  On some charts this constellation shares two major and one minor star with the Carrion Boy, whereas on others the Girl and Boy only border upon points (e.g. the Blood Quilt Chart, which depicts them handfast, or the Floodplain Chart, which shows them going at each other’s throats with shivs).

  The Lintel Chart (fig. 3) marks one striking departure: the two constellations are drawn together into one, torso to torso, while the stars designated elsewhere as the base of the Cinder Girl’s childbed-pyre, her right knee, and the Carrion Boy’s attendant crow are here shown to represent offerings – water, bullets, seed-fruit – heaped by persons unknown at their feet. The overall effect is that of a two-headed, four-armed monster god: arguably an attempt, in the spirit of the origin stories of the Well-Before, to explain away cases of severe mutation.

  Apparently a light- or fire-bringer, the Cinder Girl was – and in some few rough backwaters of the Waste-that-was, still is – called upon, with that wayworn trinity of incantation, song, and sacrifice, to conjure out the sun from where it floundered in its yearlong skirts of ash. In fact, whatever demarcating line is sketched in between sun and Girl is vague; most indications hint there’s no line there at all: she either is the sun, or else is swollen with it, as any mother is with any child.

  Consider then this chart: carved into the flesh, from soles to brow, of a girl of childbearing age – more: one who has recently borne a child – but with interruptions in the chart over the girl’s heart and abdomen, wherein are illustrated the binary blue supergiant called the Beartrap (see above) and the Spool Nebula, respectively. These breaks in the chart demonstrate a level of artistry ratcheted up several notches from that shown in the execution of its remainder, and the entirety of the scarring was performed very shortly before the death of its recipient via living interment in the ash.

  The suggestion of apotheosis is not a subtle one. Pared down to its particulars, what we have in the Sinkhole Chart is a pair of extraordinarily well-preserved corpses – those of the abovementioned girl and her infant – the former being illustrated with both the hallmarks of the constellation whose avatar she likely is and the chart in which that constellation may be found, the latter (we are given to conjecture) as a stand-in for the sun the Cinder Girl gives birth to, and which is her death by immolation. (It remains also a matter of supposition that the ash burial edged out the conflagration in the affections of this girl’s acolyte-executioners simply because they wished the chart to be preserved.)

  The observant eye will glean hints toward this circuit of ritual human sacrifice – for crops, for rain, for the fertility of barren wombs – from the story cycles “Bones and Coins,” “A Greener Grave,” and “Cinder Girl Tricks the Honey Thief.”

  Similar formations in other charts: the Bonewitch (Palimpsest Chart, NQ2), the Chooser (Fallows Chart, NQ2), the Queen (White Chart, NQ2).

  By that evening, Wasp had learned her letters. The next day she could spell her name.

  “Wasp,” the ghost sneered, chafing at its leash of salt. “What sort of name is that supposed to be?”

  “The one I was given,” she answered placidly. Wasp could understand the ghost’s frustration: it wasn’t like it had come all this way up from the world Below just to teach a teenage girl to read. Still, a bargain was a bargain. And she was turning out to be a fast learner. “Because I was a fool and I let them make me fight for the privilege of being Archivist.” She told it about the night that she was chosen out of all the novices and made to challenge the current Archivist for her place. All that training, all that bloodshed, just to be deemed strong enough, cutthroat and holy enough, to wring ghosts free of stories and with them piece the story of the world before.

  As she spoke she rubbed the ridged scar on her neck, shades paler, pinker than her skin, where the then-Archivist had drawn first blood. Wasp hadn’t been expected to get up from it. She smiled, remembering.

  “After that they called me Wasp. Because I’d poisoned my blade and I stabbed her full of holes with it.”

  “How fierce,” the ghost said, mocking. “How proud. All the thwarted dignity of a whipped dog. Have you ever seen a wasp? A live one?”

  She had not.

  “Nuisances,” the ghost said. “You’d like them. They can do nothing else but sting.”

  (You daft bitch, the Catchkeep-priest said in Wasp’s memory. You malapert. Why do we keep you? You’re no solace to anyone. You couldn’t unpuzzle a snarl in your hair.)

  (You keep me, Wasp had replied, because none of you can kill me.)

  Wasp gritted her teeth. Bent her head back to the map. Read spool. Read blue. Read trap. And dreamed of the constellation the Catchkeep-priest’s blood would make upon his clammy robes.

  The Carrion Boy

  Area: 487.012 sq. deg. (appx. 1.19%)

  from the Brainpan Chart: scrimshaw, whalebone Summer

  Ten stars: four major, six minor, and a further two to designate the eye and tail of the attendant crow toward which he is discovered making full-body placatory gestures. A random selection of charts lists the crow as either the Boy’s sidekick (the Holly Chart), his anima (the Chalk Hills Chart), his nemesis (the Gatekeeper Chart), or virtually anything between (both the Riot Shield and Blast Charts – fig. 4 – provide striking deviations). Even the Boy’s posture of deference, which rend
ers this constellation unmistakable in any sky – balanced on one foot, head down, arms up and out, hands open, palms heavy with offerings or bribes – is variously interpreted, beyond its face value, as either a game, a gambit, or a trap.

  More curiously still, six of this constellation’s stars belong to binary systems (two visual, one eclipsing), and as the stars shift back and forth by virtue of their mutual orbits, they completely change the shape this constellation describes upon the earth-bound viewer’s sky: slowly the crow’s wings shift to become the boy’s, and the crow vanishes altogether.

  Setting aside the sheer technical achievement that this chart represents – albeit carved, one suspects, with a blade not much at ease in service to the arts, still it covers, in nearly microscopic detail, the entire frontal bone plate of the skull of a juvenile male Orcinus orca, incidentally providing an embarrassingly large component of the bone record of a splendid creature long-extinct – it appears to have served as, or been associated with, an object of some ritual significance. The skull itself was found interred in ash, alongside the corpse of a young man staked down, apparently alive, to a stretch of barren, heavily irradiated slag.

  However, unlike what the host-canvas of the Sinkhole Chart (see above) experienced, this was no ash burial: what covered this chart and its – what? Ancillary? Chaperone? – was that which the winds had drifted in. One particularly intriguing aspect of this find was the presence of nine pairs of crows’ wings, affixed between the stakes and their victim’s flesh at wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and neck, presumably to buoy up his manumitted soul to whatever fairer skies awaited it. Another was the assorted heap of limbs that lay atop the corpse: some crudely hacked, some removed with surgical precision, but all well-muscled and apparently quite healthy up until the very moment of subtraction.