Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
Edited by
Claude Lalumière
Copyright © 2008
All individual contributions copyright by their respective authors
E-Book Edition
Published by
EDGE Science Fiction and
Fantasy Publishing
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
CALGARY
Notice
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author(s).
* * * * *
This book is also available in print
* * * * *
Foreword
I’m a writer, so I have a lot of friends who read. I’m also a Canadian, so I have a lot of friends who are Canadian. In these many Canadian readers’/writers’ homes, the series of anthologies that each of them has at least one of is Tesseracts. It is the only currently running series of spec-fic anthologies that focuses entirely on Canadian writers. And, for that, we should be thankful. We all know that there should be more. But the publishing business hangs on to the idea that anthologies don’t sell particularly well — which sucks for those of us who love short stories.
I’ve been publishing short fiction at my webzine, ChiZine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words, since 1997, and I was lucky to secure a sponsorship deal that enabled me to just buy the stories and concentrate on the editorial side of things. Most webzines — and print zines, for that matter — aren’t so lucky. Unlike anthology editors, I don’t need to worry about “the bottom line.” So long as I can show that people are coming to the site, my sponsors are happy. Subscriber bases for print zine editors and “numbers of copies” sold for anthology editors are less nebulous markers that make it incredibly difficult for editors to convince publishers to take a chance on short stories. Novels are potentially the big money-makers, and novels are fine, but the short story gets short shrift, so we lovers of the form have to embrace it wherever it thrives.
And it thrives in the Tesseracts series.
I won’t go into the star-studded cast of past volumes’ editors because, if you’re reading this, you probably already know all the names. And, excuse my French, but adding Claude Lalumière to that list is a great idea.
When Claude asked me to do the foreword to this year’s volume, I was taken aback. I mean, Tesseracts is science fiction, isn’t it? Or, okay, maybe it’s SF and fantasy, and here’s me with my dark, weird, surreal, disturbing back catalogue of dare-I-say-it horror short stories and novels. So, despite being incredibly honoured and flattered to have been asked, I was also a bit confused. But then I thought about it and realized that the genre lines in the series aren’t nearly so clear cut — and I knew they would be even less so in Claude’s hands. If anyone was going to buy fiction that blurred those lines, it would be Claude.
Okay, so Claude and Tesseracts are helping keep the battle-fatigued arena of short fiction alive for one more year. Wonderful. I couldn’t be happier. But then I find out Claude’s going one step further — he’s going to put together an anthology of novellas. If there’s one kind of fiction that’s even harder to market than short-story anthologies, it’s novellas. Publishers reading this right now are crossing themselves and shuddering violently just seeing the word in print. A dirtier word I do not think they know. So I’m not sure what kind of black magic Claude used on the publishers of Tesseracts to get them to agree to this, but I’m certainly glad it worked. The world needs more novellas. Some tales don’t fit into short stories, nor do they need to languidly spread out into novels. For some story arcs, the novella is the baby bear of lengths.
The novellas on offer here are strange and fascinating tales, each one stamped with its author’s specific brand of storytelling. These — as with all other Tesseracts stories over the past 20+ years — are not stories that could have been written by anyone else. They belong in this book, edited by this editor, told at this length, and read by this audience: you, the ones who have enabled this series to continue to flourish as it has — and hopefully will for many years to come.
As a Canadian writer and reader, I couldn’t be prouder of this series, nor more thankful to Claude, who has assembled an incredibly varied and remarkable bunch of novellas that, hopefully, will encourage more publishers to take a chance on this length of fiction. But, even if none ever do, we have this one.
Strip away the names of the publisher, the editor, and the authors and forget about the word count — we’ll still have these stories.
And it is for that which I am most thankful.
Brett Alexander Savory
Toronto, March 2008
Ancients of the Earth
Derryl Murphy
Through the frozen streets of Dawson, Samuel runs from two cavemen.
They’re well-dressed, these cavemen, one of them even in tie and tails. But their hair is long and scraggly, and Samuel would almost swear that their brows protrude slightly; aside from the already out-of-place fancy dress, they’re a neanderthalian version of your typical northerner, not at all worried about the niceties of polite society, here at the ass end of the nineteenth century.
Except that most northerners, even trappers and prospectors who spend almost all of their time alone in the bush, can speak in more than grunts and gibberish, and Samuel doubts even the most ruthless of them would be so keen to smash in his skull.
It is late in the evening, and the temperature is most certainly below minus twenty. Samuel rounds a corner, skidding on packed snow and patches of ice, but he retains his balance. Down an alley to his right he catches a glimpse of two more, one a cavewoman, resplendent in a glittering evening gown, which is up around her waist as the male apparently has his way with her from behind. They both yell inarticulately as Samuel passes them by but do not break off their primeval assignation.
Another yell tells him the first two cavemen are back on his trail.
He rounds another corner, and the door to a dilapidated cabin swings open. From the blackness within a voice quietly calls to him. “Quickly! Inside!”
Samuel does as he is bid, and the door closes behind him. It is darker inside than out; he can see nothing, but outside, over the pounding of the blood in his temples, he hears the footsteps of the two cavemen going past and strains to listen as they fade into the distance.
He hears his rescuer stand and shuffle over to the window. In the sliver of light allowed in from outside, he can see now who it is. “How’d you get here?” he asks.
She puts a finger to her lips and holds up her other hand, and pretty soon two more sets of footsteps go running by, accompanied by words in a guttural, prehistoric tongue. When they’re gone she sits on the floor beside him. “They saw me when they first arrived, but I don’t think they’re after me. Still, I came here to stay safe until they’re gone.”
Samuel frowns. “How do you get to be so lucky? The moment they saw me I could see they wanted to get all over me like sled dogs on a bone.”
She takes his hand and feels at the makeshift bandage he still has wrapped there. “I think you know.”
Twenty-Two Days Earlier
Two miners managed to melt and dig their way through a patch of ice and permafrost at the bottom of a stub of a cliff, and there they found the remains of a strange and large creature. News spread round the town, and soon a gaggle of onlookers stood in the mud surrounding the site, watching as the still-frozen remains were dug up.
Once the creature was finally completely disinterred from its grave of ice and soil, several of the bystanders allowed that they thought it looked something like an elephant. Perhaps a circus had come through town, one time long before anyone there could remember, and one of the beasts had passed on and been taken out into the bush and pitched over the edge of the cliff and then had somehow been missed by the wolves and crows until it had finally been swallowed by the frozen earth.
No, by consensus that didn’t seem at all likely.
Standing in the cold wind, staring down at the remains of an alien creature that looked as if it could have died just yesterday, one of the miners had the idea to fetch Samuel. He was book smart, was Samuel, a former schoolteacher who’d come north to make his fortune in a fashion that involved as few personal ties and relationships as possible.
Unlike the miners who had discovered the creature, when the gold rush had petered out Samuel had given up on his stake and settled into his one-room cabin, writing the odd dispatch for the local rag and tutoring ill-lettered prospectors in exchange for flakes of gold dust or odd fossils that they felt had no value. Once Fanny Alice had even given him a molar from what Samuel assumed was a mammoth, one that she’d been given by a customer, and that tooth — larger than his fist, yellowed and dirty and well-worn from an apparently long life of grinding down vegetation — held a special place of pride in his small collection. She had told him that it had special “properties,” but he had dismissed that as exaggeration.
It so happened that Samuel was just bidding farewell to one of his students — scraggly and unkempt, smelling of tallow and burnt caribou flesh, as they all did — when a small crowd seemed to spontaneously form on the icy patch of road beside his sagging grey front stoop. He blinked in surprise at the sight of so many people, wondering if perhaps he’d drunkenly promised a group lesson the other night while consuming his self-assigned monthly allotment of alcohol.
“We need you to come see somethin’, Samuel,” said a trapper named Ozark who had a line not too far from town and who would come into town for drinks himself. “Mick and Temple come up with some strange creature while they was diggin’ at their claim, and we figure you’re the man who can tell us what the hell it is.”
Samuel scratched his head. “A creature, you say. How do you mean, like a bear or something?”
“Nope,” said Fanny Alice, who was out pretty early in the day considering the line of work she was in. “Bigger than that. Looks somethin’ like a smaller version of Jumbo the elephant.”
It turned out to not be an elephant. At least, not exactly.
The creature was still young, that much was apparent. Not just the fact that it was only about five feet tall at the shoulder, but also that there was something ineffably youthful about its appearance, like how a puppy could easily be distinguished from an adult dog. Excepting, of course, that this creature was not actually a dog.
It had a trunk, just like an elephant, but its ears were small and its tusks were still just ivory nubs, and it was covered with thick reddish-brown fur. It lay on its side in the partially frozen mud, and Samuel could see that a puddle was beginning to form below its belly as it thawed in the weak mid-day sun, which was soon to disappear behind the small overhang immediately behind Samuel.
After a moment or two of searching, Samuel found his voice. “That’s no elephant,” he said, and he jumped down into the mud beside the beast. “It’s a woolly mammoth.” He grinned up at Fanny Alice. “A young one probably of the same type as the one that tooth you gave me last year came from.”
“A woolly what?” asked one of the miners.
“Mammoth,” said Samuel. “Probably an ancestor or distant cousin of the elephant, from many — many — thousands of years ago.” He looked back down at the animal’s corpse. “Maybe even longer.”
“An antediluvian beast somehow washed up on our frozen and landlocked shores,” said Pete Marliss, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Pete was a town councilman, a large and florid man with a full thatch of white hair and an equally white and bristly beard. He was also a local hotelier as well as a lapsed Presbyterian minister who still sometimes exhibited signs of that faith. “Certainly anything older than the time of Noah is, of course, impossible. It seems obvious to me that this poor unfortunate beast was unlucky enough to step off the edge of the ark one unfortunate night, perhaps as the result of a stumble when the vessel bumped up against an iceberg. Its poor mate likely spent the rest of its days alone and despondent, aware that she was the last of her kind.”
Samuel glared at Pete for a moment, astonished by his delusional line of reasoning, but after searching for the right words he finally shrugged in response. He knew from tired experience that there was no sense in stepping into an argument with Pete. Instead, he turned his attention back to the baby mammoth and put his hand on its shaggy coat and instantly felt the shock of ages drift past and run up through his arm and through his body, grappling with his memories all the way. For a fraction of a second he saw and smelled a different world, enormous stretches of gleaming white punctuated by small oases of green, and then he felt himself stumble as a dreadful pain lanced into his right side.
He snatched his hand away and sat down hard on the mud beside the creature, rubbing his ribs until the ghost pain died away. When he finally thought to once again pay attention to his surroundings, he saw that Fanny Alice was bending over and had her hands on his face, trying to get his attention.
“I’m with you,” he said, and gingerly he stood again. “Sorry about that. I don’t know what happened there.”
Now, it was widely accepted that Fanny Alice was not the best-looking woman ever to practice her trade, but it was also well known that she had some conjuring skills and that some of those skills involved activities in the non-marital bed. But other skills of hers had nothing to do with physical bliss, and she was often useful that way, seeing the magic in life when others might have completely missed it.
This, Samuel was sorry to realize, appeared to be one of those times.
“Somethin’s reached out and touched you,” she said, and she herself reached out and put a hand on his side, where he’d felt the sharp pain. “I don’t know that I recognize it, but I can tell you that I don’t like it. It looked like very old magic, and very powerful as well. Certainly different than the magic in that tooth I gave you.”
Samuel’s own experiences with magic had been low-key and usually from a great remove. He was disinclined to think that this had been anything other than sheer imagination, him working himself into a state of great agitation and excitement over such a discovery. At worst, though, it could only have been an echo of something from thousands of years before, long dead and forgotten but still hanging in the fabric of the world, like ripples at the edge of a large pond long after the rock had been dropped. So he smiled and shook his head in disagreement. “I’m just fine, Fanny Alice, and you can be assured that there was no magic involved. Only me being overwhelmed by the idea of reaching across millennia and touching flesh that could as easily have been alive only days before.” He walked away from her and from the corpse of the mammoth, stepping gingerly even though the pain had long since faded. “I’ll tell Ed he should get down here and take a picture for the paper. And maybe we should consider getting word out to some scientists somewhere.” Suddenly completely and mind-numbingly exhausted, Samuel raised his hand to bid them all farewell and shuffled back to town and to his cabin, fighting the urge the whole way to look back over his shoulder in case he was being followed.
>
No, not followed. Stalked.
The herd is in a panic, spread out across the open land, any hope of working together defensively gone, scattered to the cold winds as effectively as each member of the herd. He runs, terror crushing his heart and his breathing ragged and punctuated by desperate pleas to his mother, to any of the aunties, but none of them answer.
He risks a turn of his head and sees that the two-legs are still after him, coming up the side of the hill. They raise their sticks, and some are thrown at him. He feels a horrible pain in his side and stumbles and bleats in fear and pain but regains his feet and continues running. But then one of the aunties comes to his rescue and heads off the creatures running hard on his heels. A toss of her head sends several of them flying through the air, and he is free of them, still running, still feeling that agonizing pain in his side but unwilling to stop while fear remains.
The ground gives way, and he first stumbles and then falls and falls some more. Pain returns, but after a few moments that fades away, as does everything else.
Weird dreams plagued Samuel’s night, and he awoke with the pain in his right side renewed. He lay there for a spell, unwilling to jump from his warm cocoon of a bed and dash for the stove to rekindle the fire before having to make an even madder and colder dash to the corner to piss in his bucket. Staring at the ceiling, though, all he could think of was that dead animal and the fact that he was likely the only one in town who knew just how significant and important it was.
Having an interest in things prehistoric, Samuel fancied himself knowledgeable about fossils and such. But he thought it pretty obvious that you didn’t need to have even a marginal interest to know that a find such as the frozen body of the baby mammoth would be of vital importance to scientists and to newsmen. Pretty obvious often didn’t cut through the fat up here, though, since you could never tell just how capable any one person was at recognizing what was required of them in a social situation.
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction Page 1
