“She’s cute,” a naked woman said to the magician’s wife, making it sound like a strike against me.
“You’re lucky to have an earthy husband,” another added.
“No, she’s just lucky his students will never be interested in him,” the first woman said with a laugh.
The magician’s wife cast an uncomfortable glance back at me; I pretended to be engrossed in the mechanics of unbuttoning my pants. There was some reason I shouldn’t be attracted to the magician?
“She’s a talented kid,” the magician’s wife said. “It’s been good for him to have a student like that again.”
The rest of the women drifted towards the heat of the fire as I struggled out of my layers of clothes. My legs shook and pimpled with goosebumps as soon as I slid off my pants. I ripped the rest of my layers off as fast as I could and sprinted for the fire, expecting relief. Instead, the heat of the fire hit me like a wall. I felt trapped between two walls, the fire-heat wall in front of me, and the ice-cold wall at my back. The women around me stood comfortably, laughing and chatting. They were warm. Again, I was on the outside of their society. The magician was probably just crawling out of bed right now, getting ready to go out to the cave and learn secrets. It seemed much more dignified than public nudity and women talking about me like I wasn’t even there.
“This ritual is hardest for people like us,” a voice said next to me. It was the woman who had caught my eye. Her arms were crossed over her breasts, like mine, and she shivered with cold. “Our element is too asleep to warm us. But we’re the most important. You’ve never done this before, have you?”
I felt like a kid on the first day of school, whose mom had dressed her and given her all the wrong advice. “Last year I went into a cave, with my teacher,” I said.
“He is a private man,” the woman said thoughtfully. “It’s good you’re here this year, even if you’re cold and confused and . . . distracted.”
“Distracted?” I said.
“Oh, you know. Earth women. Our blood runs hot, even when we’re freezing.”
She smiled when she said that, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore; she was embarrassed. I looked around the circle at all the naked women, orange and beautiful in the firelight. Heat flushed me as I gazed at them, a familiar, latent feeling; I wanted to hold them, to kiss them and see if my mouth still filled with dirt. Is this what the women had been talking about? How looking at them made me feel?
The magician’s wife lit herself on fire.
“Come on,” the other earth woman said, yanking me out of my daze. “We’re starting.”
She crouched and dug at the cold, frozen earth. She worked it with her hands until it softened and spread it over her body in messy handfuls. I crouched and followed her lead. The dirt was grainy and dry in my hands, but it stuck to my skin as if I were the other side of a magnet.
Time jittered. My hands pulled up dirt, but didn’t spread it. I dug, and then dug again. The magician’s wife lit herself on fire once, twice, too many times. She was consumed. She was extinguished. She burned steady, like a wick. Time blurred completely. I spent days spreading dirt on my shoulder, my thigh, my cheek. Every grain of dirt worked into my skin, mingling with it, transforming me. The circle joined hands and rotated around the fire. I had the earth woman’s clay hand in my left, and a wet, icy hand in my right. The air women blew counter-clockwise, driving the circle; they floated in the air and pulled the fire and water women with them. But the earth woman and I had stone feet, and we kept the circle bound to the frozen ground.
At the same moment, the earth woman and I were crouched on the ground, whispering our questions, hopes, and fears through our dirty fingers. Questions flowed out of me, and insight flowed in with perfect clarity. I understood roads, I understood rocks, I understood dirt and plants and even dared to ask about the hot, rushing lava beneath. The water women slept on their backs, arms splayed as if floating. The air women had climbed trees. And the magician’s wife, still aflame, stared at me with eyes full of disbelief, or perhaps anger, or perhaps sorrow, or the peculiar mixture of the three that comes when you discover the impossible thing you suspected was actually true.
Before I could react to her stare, I was back in the circle, and it turned faster and faster, the fire was driving it now, burning the ice off the water women, making the air women float to the sky, melting our stone feet to clay.
The water women’s ice melted, and now the circle moved so fast it flowed. We rushed around the fire, moving from creek to river to ocean to rain, my feet broke and I fell from high above—
The circle stomped its feet, STOMP STOMP STOMP. Wherever my feet fell, shoots of green sprung up; they would only die again in the cold; it was cruel and beautiful. We no longer moved, or flowed, or fell; we shook the ground and shouted with one voice, “WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP!”
This was not just a dance around a fire. The earth woman and I pulled the whole world around. We were the earth, and all these women shouted our name.
When the first line of light appeared on the horizon, the circle broke apart. The sun burned the magic off like a fog, and in the light of day we were sweaty, sooty, winded and undressed. The women hurried to douse the fire, to clean their bodies, to put on clothes. I stood stock-still as everyone else normalized around me, my thoughts racing, my heart crashing from an enormous high. The sky glowed blue in the east, and the earth opened its eyes.
Finally, the earth woman took my shoulder, and invited me to meet up with them at the local diner for pancakes and coffee. That reminder of the real world—coffee, breakfast, shiny red booths—shook me out of my trance. I shuffled back to the cannon and pulled clothes on, trying to put together what had just happened.
As I pulled my frozen hat off the cannon, the magician’s wife approached me. Fear filled me, though I couldn’t remember why. Something about fire. The sun was about to rise, and the light filled her singed, blackened hair. I could barely see her face.
“What did you think?” she said in a tone impossible to read.
I worked the hat in my hands, breaking off the frost. “It was—it was like nothing else.”
The magician’s wife crossed her arms. “Is that a good thing?”
“Yes!” I said. “I’d like to do . . . more magic, like this.”
“What kind have you been doing—” she began, then trailed off.
The answer to the question—sweaty limbs, coursing energy—leapt to mind, and I saw her staring at me across the fire again, that devastated look on her face. I took a step backwards before I remembered that I couldn’t run.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
Please don’t, I thought. “Sure,” I said.
She sighed, like she hadn’t thought up the question yet. Finally she said, “When my husband interviewed you, what did you see?”
I was overcome by the urge to lie, but I knew she expected me to. “A woman’s hip, under a dress,” I said.
The magician’s wife nodded. “And when you dream, what do you dream about?”
“Being underground,” I said.
This threw her. “Well, I don’t know what to make of that dream, but—”
“Before that,” I interrupted. “I dreamed about a house, and a naked woman who kissed me and choked my mouth with dirt.”
She fell silent, and looked at me. I wondered if I’d confessed too much. “Did you tell my husband about that dream?” his wife said.
“Yes,” I said.
“What did he tell you, after you told him?”
Again, an urge to lie; I pushed it away. “That it was . . . about sex.”
The magician’s wife laughed once, hard and sharp. “You hadn’t picked up on that on your own, had you?” she said.
Her words were a slap, both to me and to him. I grew angry. “Those dreams were terrifying,” I said. “He said he could help me.”
The magician’s wife looked at me. “Magic is supposed to be terrifying.”
<
br /> The sun broke the horizon and the light, in one moment, changed. The magician’s wife gave me another look, then walked away, to catch a ride to the diner. I waited until she was gone, and then I drove to the magician’s house.
The magician answered the door in his robe, his hair wet from the shower. It was so warm inside that I started to sweat under my coat. I stripped off layers in his kitchen, draping them over the counter across from the oven. I wondered what would happen if we opened it now.
He watched me peel off my winter clothes. His eyes were red from the smoke of the fire, and his shoulders hunched more than usual. I wondered what he’d asked the earth last night. I asked for some coffee.
Coffee, the drink for talking over. I had questions, and I was going to ask them. He pressed a mug into my hands and stood too close as I sipped it.
“Good solstice?” he said.
“Um. Yeah,” I said.
“I missed you last night,” he said.
Missed me! my brain sighed. I smothered the thought. “Look, I—” I began.
He pushed my coffee aside and kissed me. He pressed my hand against his bare chest, slid it down between the folds of his robe. His skin was warm and moist beneath my palm.
I dropped the mug on the counter, because otherwise I would throw it. I tore myself out of his arms and turned away.
“I’m pissed!” I said, clenching my arms around myself.
“What—what’s the matter?” he said.
“Are you really—helping me?”
The magician took a step towards me, then two. He put his hands on my shoulders. “I think you know that better than I do.”
I shook my head, then turned and buried my face in his shoulder. “I don’t.”
He stroked my hair, and I leaned into him. He tilted my face up to his and kissed me tentatively. When I returned the kiss, he put his hand behind my head and pressed me to him. His hands tangled with my shirt, the waist of my jeans; he slid the clothes from my body, then let his robe fall on the floor. He held me naked for a moment, the warmth of the sunlight on our skin. Then he led me down to the basement, where we were safe. He bent me over the couch and slid himself inside of me, fucked me hard as I braced my hands against the scratchy fabric. Then I was on my back, and he kissed my face as he climbed on top of me. I started to wrap my legs around him but he pushed them away and sat up as he fucked me, watching me from above with a face I couldn’t read. As he got closer, he doubled over me, moving his sweaty body against mine. I felt buried, underground. His breath was too hot on my shoulder as he came in a spurt on my stomach. He wiped it off and settled on top of me. I stroked his gray hair.
Before I could chicken out, I said, “I love you.” I wasn’t sure if I meant it, but I’d been wanting to say it for so long that I didn’t want to miss my chance.
“Don’t say that,” he murmured and kissed my ear.
After I left, I drove in circles around our town. I traced all the gray, groaning streets linking my neighborhood to the supermarket, the big box store, the pizza delivery place, the gas station, my high school. The parking lots were deserted this early in the morning, and the empty, anonymous buildings looked sinister without people. I didn’t want to stare at these places, but I didn’t know where to go. My house? Back to his? California? Where did you go, when you felt like this? I couldn’t put a name to the panic filling me; I couldn’t see straight.
The mailboxes still marked my tunnel, though the cornfield was frozen and the empty lot had a huge hole where the basement of a new house would be. Inside the tunnel, I found several flashlights, all of them dusty; I took the one shaped like a cartoon superhero. Its battery was low, but I could scry crumpled candy wrappers, gutted stuffed animals, a broken bicycle, a heap of frozen crayons. I had forgotten how disgusting kids were. I curled up on a pile of smudged dinosaur sheets, put my head on a lion leaking stuffing, and shut off the light.
No advice came to me from the just-woken earth, no visionary dreams. I cried, and the sleeve of my coat chafed my nose. A stash of fun-sized Halloween candy became dinner. In my sleep, a girl just like me threw up, over and over, into a hole in the ground.
When I pulled myself back above ground, it was already the middle of the morning. My cell phone was frozen from its night in the car; no missed calls. The magician’s number was at the top of my recently dialed; I called it.
The speech I had rehearsed underground flew out of my head as the phone rang once, twice, three, four times. I had steeled myself to leave a dignified message when the magician’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Hey,” I said. My voice was so rough I coughed, and then repeated, “Hey.”
“Hey,” he said.
Silence stretched out.
“I want to come over,” I said.
“Where are you?” he said. His voice was full of expectation. Maybe his wife still hadn’t come home.
“Look, I can’t—I don’t want to—I can’t, um, make out with you, okay?” I spat. I took a deep breath. “Can I just come over to talk?”
“Today isn’t good,” the magician said. “I’ll see you at our usual time. Call me later in the week.”
I was too shocked to respond. “Um. Okay,” I said.
He hung up, and I stared at my phone’s screen, as if an answer would appear to explain what had just happened. Nothing happened.
The car’s engine took several tries before it turned over and slid into gear with a groan. I wasn’t going to call him. I wasn’t going back at my usual time. I didn’t know what I was going to do. The car and I were moving; I hadn’t noticed. I had exhumed myself, or sprouted. Farm land rolled by outside my window. The cornfields were dead and frozen, but in the corner of my eye they were seething beneath the frost. The earth was awake. So was I.
BALANCING ACCOUNTS
JAMES L. CAMBIAS
Part of me was shopping for junk when I saw the human.
I had budded off a viewpoint into one of my mobile repair units, and sent it around to Fat Albert’s scrapyard near Ilia Field on Dione. Sometimes you can find good deals on components there, but I hate to rely on Albert’s own senses. He gets subjective on you. So I crawled between the stacks of pipe segments, bales of torn insulation, and bins of defective chips, looking for a two-meter piece of aluminum rod to shore up the bracing struts on my main body’s third landing leg.
Naturally I talked with everything I passed, just to see if there were any good deals I could snap up and trade elsewhere. I stopped to chat with some silicone-lined titanium valves that claimed to be virgins less than six months old—trying to see if they were lying or defective somehow. And then I felt a Presence, and saw the human.
It was moving down the next row, surrounded by a swarm of little bots. It was small, no more than two meters, and walked on two legs with an eerie, slow fluid gait. Half a dozen larger units followed it, including Fat Albert himself in a heavy recovery body. As it came into range my own personality paused as the human requisitioned my unit’s eyes and ears. It searched my recent memories, planted a few directives, then left me. I watched it go; it was only the third human I’d ever encountered in person, and this was the first time one of them had ever used me directly.
The experience left me disconcerted for a couple of milliseconds, then I went back to my shopping. I spotted some aluminum tubing that looked strong enough, and grabbed some of those valves, then linked up to Fat Albert to haggle about the price. He was busy waiting on the human, so I got to deal with a not-too-bright personality fragment. I swapped a box of assorted silicone O-rings for the stuff I wanted.
Albert himself came on the link just as we sealed the deal. “Hello, Annie. You’re lucky I was distracted,” he said. “Those valves are overruns from the smelter. I got them as salvage.”
“Then you shouldn’t be complaining about what I’m giving you for them. Is the human gone?”
“Yes. Plugged a bunch of orders into my mind without so much as asking.”
“Me
too. What’s it doing here?”
“Who knows? It’s a human. They go wherever they want to. This one wants to find a bot.”
“So why go around asking everyone to help find him? Why not just call him up?”
Albert switched to an encrypted link. “Because the bot it’s looking for doesn’t want to be found.”
“Tell me more.”
“I don’t know much more, just what Officer Friendly told me before the human subsumed him. This bot it’s looking for is a rogue. He’s ignoring all the standard codes, overrides—even the Company.”
“He must be broken,” I said. “Even if he doesn’t get caught, how’s he going to survive? He can’t work, he can’t trade—anyone he meets will turn him in.”
“He could steal,” said Fat Albert. “I’d better check my fence.”
“Good luck.” I crept out of there with my loot. Normally I would’ve jumped the perimeter onto the landing field and made straight for my main body. But if half the bots on Dione were looking for a rogue, I didn’t want to risk some low-level security unit deciding to shoot at me for acting suspicious. So I went around through the main gate and identified myself properly.
Going in that way meant I had to walk past a bunch of dedicated boosters waiting to load up with aluminum and ceramics. They had nothing to say to me. Dedicated units are incredibly boring. They have their route and they follow it, and if they need fuel or repairs, the Company provides. They only use their brains to calculate burn times and landing vectors.
Me, I’m autonomous and incentivized. I don’t belong to the Company; my owners are a bunch of entities on Mars. My job is to earn credit from the Company for them. How I do it is my business. I go where stuff needs moving, I fill in when the Company needs extra booster capacity, I do odd jobs, sometimes I even buy cargoes to trade. There are a lot of us around the outer system. The Company likes having freelancers it can hire at need and ignore otherwise, and our owners like the growth potential.
The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Page 34
