by Bill Fawcett
If only . . . if only you could have returned to Earth as your true self this one time: But you always return as the small and weak and guilty you. And right now you wish that you could keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller until you just . . . disappeared.
You go back to the Dickhead and your mother’s room. Something is niggling at you. The yellow note pad. You pick it up and see the indentations like writing without ink on the top sheet. You know the trick of reading secret writing, so you take the pad back to your room, sit down at your built-in desk and ever so lightly rub a soft number-two pencil over the indentations.
Dear Mother,
I’m sorry I’m really sorry but I have to leave. You KNOW why and if you really don’t then you must be blind well then I just don’t know. Dick hurts me and he hurts Jon and I would have taken him with me if he hadn’t already run away somewhere. You should get
That’s all you can make out, but it’s enough, enough to let you know that it’s all your fault and that she thinks you ran away and left her with the Dickhead.
You hear the door open downstairs.
You’re shivering and your hands are shaking, but you go into your closet, reach up, up, stretching, and grab a hammer that you’ve hidden behind a bunch of stuff on the top shelf. It’s just a regular hammer, not a war hammer like the one you carried on Barsoom, but it will have to do. Quiet as a cat, you slip out of your room and down the hall. Your only chance is surprise. You’ll have to jump out and crack the Dickhead on the head before he knows what happened. Then you can . . . well, you’ll worry about what to do once he’s dead.
But it’s not the Dickhead. You can tell by the clattery-clack of your mother’s high-heeled shoes on the tiles. You see that she’s alone, and you drop the hammer onto the carpet. When she sees you, she shouts, “Oh, God, oh, thank God you’re all right,” and she drops her keys, patent leather handbag, and groceries, and smothers you with a hug. Then she pulls away from you, but doesn’t let go of your arms. Her eyes are glossy with tears, her usually clean and frizzy autumn brown hair is straggly and pulled back with an amberina comb, and her right eye and cheek are swollen and black and blue. “Wherewere you, Jon? I was so sick with worry.” She hugs you again, and you can smell a kind of sour- sweet perspiration on her blue cashmere sweater.
“I . . . I didn’t mean to be gone so long,” you say. “What day’s today?”
She looks at you the way she does when she thinks you’re telling a whopper. “It’s Wednesday. You’ve been gone four days. You must be starving.”
You are kind of hungry.
“Where’s the . . . where’s Dick?”
Your mother gets a closed, almost sly look . . . just like your sister’s. “You don’t have to worry about— He won’t be back. I promise.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.” She hugs you again and makes a wailing sound. When she’s done, you pick up her groceries and follow her into the kitchen. You notice that there are dirty dishes in the sink: She’s never left dirty dishes in the sink before.
“What about Julia?” you ask as you put the plastic grocery bags on the counter. Just saying her name makes you want to cry. But you don’t cry, even though it’s all your fault.
“Oh, she’s out. But she’ll be back soon.” Your mother doesn’t look at you when she says that. She takes a stack of frozen dinners out of one of the bags, puts them in the freezer, and then she looks at you. “Now, Jon, you must tell me where you’ve been. Did your stepfather try to . . . did anybody try to—” She sobs, and you don’t want to worry her, so you tell her that nobody tried anything and you ran away because you didn’t want to go to school. But you finally saw the light of reason and came back home. “But . . . where did you go? Where did you sleep? What did you eat?”
You make something up that doesn’t involve Tars Tarkas—you can’t say his name either without feeling like something hard has caught in your throat—and after dinner you promise that you’ll never, ever leave her again.
Even though you know that’s a lie.
The radium dial on your alarm clock glows 3:07 am thursday14 jun. Without bothering to dress, you get up and quietly go downstairs. You open the door to the garage, pull your 6061 aluminum- frame, eighteen-speed pearl white mountain bike off the wall rack, and then walk it back into the house and out the servants’ side door. It’s a chilly, moonless morning, and clouds obscure most of the stars. You look out over the Southern Ocean, but can’t see Barsoom. Even if you could, there would be no lights spinning and twinkling in Helium. You turn away, walk your bike over the lawn to the laneway, and you’re off, pedaling hard through the gears, now pedaling down O’Grady’s Ridge Road, and then Fish Creek Road. Half an hour later, you come to your turn-off. You go around the big sawhorses blocking the dirt road that winds its way to a high perch overlooking the sea. From there you can see everything.
It’s your secret place . . . yours and no one else’s.
When you reach the embankment, you lean your bike against a gum tree, throw your pajamas down beside it, shiver, and then walk over to the edge. Although you’ve never been able to jump from here—the sak of transformation only seems to work in the Dickhead’s sunken garden—you don’t care.
You gaze at the night-black water in the distance below, whisper a prayer in the sacred Thantian language, and then, arms outstretched, you lean out into the cool darkness.
You couldn’t save your sister.
Perhaps you can save yourself.
Jack Dann has written or edited more than seventy-five books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedral, which has been published in more than ten languages and was number one on the Age bestseller list. He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (three times), the Ditmar Award (four times), the Peter McNamara Achievement Award and also the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence, and the Premios Gilgames de Narrativa Fantastica. He has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society as an Esteemed Knight.
Jack’s latest novel, The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean, was published by HarperCollins Flamingo in Australia and by Morrow in the United States. A companion volume of stories entitled Promised Land has also been published in Great Britain. His other short story collections include Timetipping, Jubilee, Visitations, and The Fiction Factory. Recent publications include the short novel The Economy of Light (2008), the autobiography Insinuations, and a special reprint edition of his 1981 novel Junction.
He is also the coeditor of the groundbreaking anthology of Australian stories Dreaming Down-Under, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1999. He edited the Magic Tales anthology series with Gardner Dozois; and the anthology Gathering the Bones, of which he was a coeditor, was included in Library Journal’s Best Genre Fiction of 2003 and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. His anthology Wizards, coedited with Gardner Dozois and titled Dark Alchemy in Great Britain, was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. His latest anthology, Ghosts by Gaslight, coedited with Nick Gevers, which was listed as one of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten SF, Fantasy, and Horror Picks; won the Aurealis Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.; and was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award.
Jack lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and “commutes” back and forth to Los Angeles and New York. His website is www.jackdann .com.
The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin
MICHAEL SWANWICK
On Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head of Cerberus is an important book for me. I was twenty- two years old, determined to be a writer, and still eight years away from publication when I first encountered it, and it radically expanded my awareness of what fiction could be and do. Forty years later, it can still be reread with astonishment and wonder. As for Wolfe himself . . . he remains the best writer science fiction has ever produced and almost certainly the single best writer of our times. If I could, I’d arrange for his face to be carved on a m
ountainside, sixty feet high. A writer’s income being what it is, however, this story will have to do.
When I was a girl, my sister Susanna and I had to get up early whether we were rested or not. In winter particularly, our day often began before sunrise, and because our dormitory was in the south wing of the house, with narrow windows facing the central courtyard and thus facing north, the lurid, pinkish light sometimes was hours late in arriving, and we would wash and dress while we were still uncertain whether we were awake. Groggy and only half coherent, we would tell each other our dreams.
One particular dream I narrated to Susanna several times before she demanded I stop. In it, I stood before the main doorway to our house staring up at the marble bas-relief of a she-wolf suckling two infant girls (though in waking life the babies similarly feeding had wee chubby penises my sister and I had often joked about), with a puzzled sense that something was fundamentally wrong. “You are anxious for me to come out of hiding,” a rasping whispery voice said in my ear. “Aren’t you, daughter?”
I turned and was not surprised to find the she-wolf standing behind me, her tremendous head on the same level as my own. She was far larger than any wolf from ancestral Earth. Her fur was greasy and reeked of sweat. Her breath stank of carrion. Her eyes said that she was perfectly capable of ripping open my chest and eating my heart without the slightest remorse. Yet, in the way of dreams, I was not afraid of her. She seemed to be as familiar as my own self.
“Is it time?” I said, hardly knowing what I was asking. “No,” the mother-wolf said, fading.
And I awoke.
Last night I returned to my old dormitory room and was astonished at how small it was, how cramped and airless; it could never had held something so unruly and commodious as my childhood. Yet legions of memories rose up from its dust to batter against me like moths, so thickly that I was afraid to breathe lest they should fly into my throat and lungs to choke me. Foremost among them being the memory of when I first met the woman from Sainte Anne who was the last in a long line of tutors brought to educate my sister and me.
Something we had seen along the way had excited the two of us, so that we entered the lesson room in a rush, accompanied by shrieks of laughter, only to be brought up short by a stranger waiting there. She was long-legged, rangy, lean of face, dressed in the dowdy attire of a woman who had somehow managed to acquire a university education, and she carried a teacher’s baton. As we sat at our desks, she studied us as a heron might some dubious species of bait fish, trying to decide if it was edible. Susanna recovered first. “What has happened to Miss Claire?” she asked.
In a voice dry and cool and unsympathetic, the stranger said, “She has been taken away by the secret police. For what offenses, I cannot say. I am her replacement. You will call me Tante Amélie.”
“ ‘Tante’ is a term of endearment,” I said impudently, “which you have done nothing to earn.”
“It is not yours to decide where your affection is to be directed. That is your father’s prerogative, and in this instance the decision has already been made. What are your favorite subjects?”
“Molecular and genetic biology,” Susanna said promptly.
“Classical biology.” I did not admit that chiefly I enjoyed the wet lab, and that only because I enjoyed cutting things open, for I had learned at an early age to hold my cards close to my chest.
“Hmmph. We’ll begin with history. Where were you with your last instructor?”
“We were just about to cover the Uprising of Sainte Anne,” Susanna said daringly.
Again that look. “It is too soon to know what the truth of that was. When the government issues an official history, I’ll let you know. In the meantime we might as well start over from the beginning. You.” She pointed at Susanna. “What is Veil’s Hypothesis?”
“Dr. Aubrey Veil posited that the abos—”
“Aborigines.”
Susanna stared in astonishment, and then continued, “It is the idea that when the ships from Earth arrived on Sainte Anne, the aborigines killed everyone and assumed their appearance.”
“Do you think this happened? Say no.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“If it had, that would mean that we—everyone on Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix both—were abos. Aborigines, I mean. Yet we think as humans, act as humans, live as humans. What would be the point of so elaborate a masquerade if its perpetrators could never enjoy the fruits of their deceit? Particularly when the humans had proved to be inferior by allowing themselves to be exterminated. Anyway, mimicry in nature is all about external appearance. The first time an aborigine’s corpse was cut open in a morgue, the game would be over.”
Turning to me, Tante Amélie said, “Your turn. Defend the hypothesis.”
“The aborigines were not native to Sainte Anne. They came from the stars,” I began.
Susanna made a rude noise. Our new tutor raised her baton and she lowered her eyes in submission. “Defend your premise,” Tante Amélie said.
“They are completely absent from the fossil record.”
“Go on.”
“When they arrived in this star system, they had technology equal to or superior to our own, which, due to some unrecorded disaster, they lost almost immediately. Otherwise they would have also been found here on Sainte Croix.” I was thinking furiously, making it all up as I went along. “They rapidly descended to a Stone Age level of existence. As intelligent beings, they would have seen what was going on and tried to save some aspect of their sciences. Electronics, metallurgy, chemistry—all disappeared. All they could save was their superior knowledge of genetics. When humans came along, they could not resist us physically. So they interbred with us, producing human offspring with latent aboriginal genes. They would have started with pioneers and outliers and then moved steadily inward into human society, spreading first through the lower classes and saving the rich and best-defended for last. Once begun, the pro cess would proceed without conscious mediation. The aborigines would not awaken until their work was done.”
“Supporting evidence?”
“The policies of the government toward the poor suggest an awareness of this threat on their part.”
“I see that I have fallen into a den of subversives. No wonder your last tutor is no more. Well, what’s past is over now. Place your hands flat on your desks, palms down.” We obeyed and Tante Amélie rapped our knuckles with her baton, as all our tutors had done at the beginning of their reigns. “We will now consider the early forms of colonial government.”
Tante Amélie was the daughter of a regional administrator in a rural district called Île d’Orléans. As a girl, she had climbed trees to plunder eggs from birds’ nests and trapped beetles within castles of mud. She also gigged frogs, fished from a rowboat, caught crabs with a scrap of meat and a length of string, plucked chickens, owned a shotgun, hunted waterfowl, ground her own telescope lenses, and swam naked in the backwater of a river so turbulent it claimed at least one life every year. This was as alien and enchanting as a fairy tale to my sister and me, and of an evening we could sometimes coax her into reminiscing. Even now I can see her rocking steadily in the orange glow of an oil lamp, pausing every now and again to raise a sachet of dried herbs from her lap so the scents of lemon, vanilla, and tea leaves would help her memory. She had made it to adulthood and almost to safety before her father “inhaled his fortune,” as the saying went on our sister planet. But of the years between then and her fetching up with us, she would say nothing.
It may seem odd that my sister and I came to feel something very close to love for Tante Amélie. But what alternative did we have? We only rarely saw our father. Our mother had produced two girls and multiple stillbirths before being sent away and replaced with the woman we addressed only as Maitresse. None of the other tutors, even those who resisted the temptation to sample father’s wares, lasted very long. Nor were we allowed outside unaccompanied by an adult, for fear of being kidnapped.
There were not many objects for our young hearts to fasten upon, and Tante Amélie had the potent advantage of controlling our access to the outside world.
Our house at 999 rue d’Astarte doubled as my father’s business, and so was redolent of esters, pheromones, and chemical fractions: most particularly that of bitter truffle, for he held a monopoly over its import and used it in all his perfumes as a kind of signature. There were always people coming and going: farmers bringing wagons piled high with bales of flowers, traders from the Southern Sea bearing ambergris, slave artisans lugging in parts for the stills, neurochemists summoned to fine- tune some new process, courtesans in search of aphrodisiacs and abortifacients, overfed buyers almost inevitably accompanied by children with painted faces and lacetrimmed outfits. Yet Susanna and I were only rarely allowed beyond the run of the dormitory, classroom, and laboratory. Freedom for us began at the city library, the park, the slave market, and the like. Tante Amélie was a vigorous woman with many outside interests, so our fortunes took an immediate uptick at her arrival. Then we discovered quite by accident that she had opened a bank account (legal but interest-free) in hope of one day buying her freedom. This meant that she was amenable to bribery, and suddenly our horizons were limited only by our imaginations. The years that Tante Amélie spent with us were the happiest of my life.
For my sister, too, I believe, though it was hard to tell with her. That was the period in which her passion for genetics peaked. She was always taking swabs of cell samples and patiently teasing out gene sequences from stolen strands of hair or nail clippings. Many an afternoon I trailed after her, in Tante Amélie’s bought company, as she scoured the flesh market for some variant of Sainte Anne’s ape or rummaged in disreputable antique shops for hand-carved implements that might be made from— but never were— genuine abo bone.
“You think I don’t know what you’re doing,” I told her once.
