He took the new bridge at Ramnagar, hooting in derision at the gaudy, lumbering trucks. The drivers blared back, shouting vile curses at the girli-looking robotwallahs. Off A-roads onto B-roads, then to tracks and then bare dirt, the dust flying up behind the Hummer’s fat wheels. Rai itched in the passenger seat, grinning away to himself and moving his hands like butterflies, muttering small words and occasionally sticking out of the window. His gelled hair was stiff with dust.
“What are you looking for?” Sanjeev demanded.
“It’s coming,” Rai said, bouncing on his seat. “Then we can go and do whatever we like.”
From the word drive, Sanjeev had known where he must go. Sat nav and aeai did his remembering for him, but he still knew every turn and side road. Vora’s Wood there, still stunted and grey; the ridge between the river and the fields from which all the men of the village had watched the battle and he had fallen in love with the robots. The robots had always been pure, had always been true. It was the boys who flew them who hurt and failed and disappointed. The fields were all dust, drifted and heaped against the lines of thorn fence. Nothing would grow here for a generation. The mud walls of the houses were crumbling, the school a roofless shell, the temple and tanks clogged with windblown dust. Dust, all dust. Bones cracked and went to powder beneath his all-wheel drive. A few too desperate even for Varanasi were trying to scratch an existence in the ruins. Sanjeev saw wire-thin men and tired women, dust-smeared children crouched in front of their brick-and-plastic shelters. The poison deep within Ahraura would defeat them in the end.
Sanjeev brought the Hummer to a halt on the ridgetop. The light was yellow, the heat appalling. Rai stepped out to survey the terrain.
“What a shit hole.”
Sanjeev sat in the shade of the rear cabin watching Rai pace up and down, up and down, kicking up the dust of Ahraura with his big Desi-metal boots. You didn’t stop them, did you? Sanjeev thought. You didn’t save us from the plaguewalkers.
Rai suddenly leaped and punched the air. “There, there, look!”
A storm of dust moved across the dead land. The high sun caught glints and gleams at its heart. Moving against the wind, the tornado bore down on Ahraura.
The robot came to a halt at the foot of the ridge where Sanjeev and Rai stood waiting. A Raytheon ACR, a heavy line-of-battle bot, it out-topped them by some metres. The wind carried away its cloak of dust. It stood silent, potential, heat shimmering from its armour. Sanjeev had never seen a thing so beautiful.
Rai raised his hand. The bot spun on its steel hooves. More guns than Sanjeev had ever seen in his life unfolded from its carapace. Rai clapped his hands and the bot opened up with all its armaments on Vora’s Wood. Gatlings sent dry dead silvery wood flying up into powder; missiles streaked from its back silos; the line of the wood erupted in a wall of flame. Rai separated his hands and the roar of sustained fire ceased.
“It got it all in here, everything that the old gear had, in here. Sanj, everyone will want us; we can go wherever we want; we can do whatever we want, we can be real anime heroes.”
“You stole it.”
“I had all the protocols. That’s the system.”
“You stole that robot.”
Rai balled his fists, shook his head in exasperation.
“Sanj, it was always mine.”
He opened his clenched fist. And the robot danced. Arms, feet, all the steps and the moves, the bends and head nods, a proper Bollywood item-song dance. The dust flew up around the battle bot’s feet. Sanjeev could feel the eyes of the squatters, wide and terrified in their hovels. I am sorry we scared you.
Rai brought the dance to an end.
“Anything I want, Sanj. Are you coming with us?”
Sanjeev’s answer never came, for a sudden, shattering roar of engines and jet blast from the river side of the ridge sent them reeling and choking in the swirling dust. Sanjeev fought out his inhalers: two puffs blue, one puff brown, and by the time they had worked their sweet way down into his lungs a tilt jet with the Bharati air force’s green, white, and orange roundels on its engine pods stood on the settling dust. The cargo ramp lowered; a woman in dust-war camo and a mirror-visored helmet came up the ridge toward them.
With a wordless shriek Rai slashed his hand through the air like a sword. The bot crouched; its carapace slid open in a dozen places, extruding weapons. Without breaking her purposeful stride the woman lifted her left hand. The weapons retracted; the hull ports closed; the war machine staggered as if confused and then sat down heavily in the dead field, head sagging, hands trailing in the dust. The woman removed her helmet. The cameras made the jemadar look five kilos heavier, but she had big hips. She tucked her helmet under her left arm, with her right swept back her hair to show the plastic fetus-sex-toy-thing coiled behind her ear.
“Come on now, Rai. It’s over. Come on; we’ll go back. Don’t make a fuss. There’s not really anything you can do. We all have to think what to do next, you know? We’ll take you back in the plane; you’ll like that.” She looked Sanjeev up and down. “I suppose you could take the car back. Someone has to and it’ll be cheaper than sending someone down from Divisional; it’s cost enough already. I’ll retask the aeai. And then we have to get that thing … .” She shook her head, then beckoned to Rai. He went like a calf, quiet and meek, down to the tilt jet. Black hopping crows settled on the robot, trying its crevices with their curious shiny-hungry beaks.
The Skysailor’s Tale
MICHAEL SWANWICK
Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980 and in the twenty-seven years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award poll. In 1991 his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions in Time.” His other books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, and, most recently, Bones of the Earth. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time (a collection of his collaborative work with other authors), Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. He’s also published The Postmodern Archipelago: Two Essays on Science Fiction & Fantasy and a booklength interview, Being Gardner Dozois. Swanwick’s most recent book is a new novel, The Dragons of Babel. He’s had stories in our Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth through Twenty-fourth Annual Collections. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a Web site at www.michaelswanwick.com.
Here he takes us along on a strange and wonder-filled voyage, on a strange and wondrous ship … .
Of all the many things that this life has stolen from me, the one which bothers me most is that I cannot remember burying my father.
Give that log a poke. Stir up the embers. Winter’s upon us—hear how the wind howls and prowls about the rooftops, as restless as a cat!—and I, for one, could use some light and a little more warmth. There’ll be snow by morning for sure. Scoot your chair a bit closer to the fire. Is your mother asleep? Good. We’ll keep our voices low. There are parts of this tale she would not approve of. Things that I must say which she thinks you’d be better off not knowing.
She’s right, no doubt. Women usually are. But what of that? You’re of an age to realize that your parents were never perfect, and that in their youths they may have done some things which … well. Right or wrong, I’m going to tell you everything.
Where was I?
My father’s
burial.
I was almost a man when he finally died—old enough, by all rights, to keep that memory to my dying day. But after the wreck of the Empire, I lay feverish and raving, so they tell me, for six weeks. During that time I was an exile in my own mind, lost in the burning deserts of delirium, wandering lands that rose and fell with each labored breath. Searching for a way back to the moment when I stood before my father’s open grave and felt its cool breath upon my face. I was convinced that if I could only find it, all would be well.
So I searched and did not find, and forgot I had searched, and began again, returning always to the same memories, like a moth relentlessly batting itself against a lantern. Sometimes the pain rose up within me so that I screamed and thrashed and convulsed within my bed. Other times (all this they told me later), when the pain ebbed, I spoke long and lucidly on a variety of matters, sang strange songs, and told stranger tales, all with an intensity my auditors found alarming. My thoughts were never still.
Always I sought my father.
By the time I finally recovered, most of my life had been burnt to ashes and those ashes swept into the ash pit of history. The Atlantis of my past was sunk; all that remained were a few mountaintops sticking up out of the waters of forgetfulness like a scattered archipelago of disconnected islands. I remembered clambering upon the rusted ruins of a failed and demented steam dredging device its now forgotten inventor had dubbed the “Orukter Amphibolus,” a brickyard battle fought alongside my fellow river rats with a gang of German boys who properly hated us for living by the wharves, a furtive kiss in the dark (with whom, alas, I cannot say), a race across the treacherously rolling logs afloat in the dock fronting the blockmaker’s shop, and the catfish-and-waffles supper in a Wissahickon inn at which my mother announced to the family that she was to have a fifth child. But neither logic nor history unites these events; they might as well have happened to five separate people.
There are, too, odd things lacking in what remains: The face of my youngest sister. The body of equations making up the Calculus. All recollection whatsoever of my brother save his name alone. My father I can remember well only by contrast. All I know of him could be told in an hour.
I do not mourn the loss of his funeral. I’ve attended enough to know how it went. Words were surely spoken that were nothing like the words that should have been said. The air was heavy with incense and candle wax. The corpse looked both like and unlike the deceased. There were pallbearers, and perhaps I was one. Everybody was brave and formal. Then, after too long a service, they all left, feeling not one whit better than before.
A burial is a different matter. The first clods of dirt rattle down from the grave diggers’ shovels onto the roof of the coffin, making a sound like rain. The earth is drawn up over it like a thick, warm blanket. The trees wave in the breeze overhead, as if all the world were a cradle endlessly rocking. The mourners’ sobs are as quiet as a mother’s bedtime murmurs. And so a man passes, by imperceptible degrees, to his final sleep. There is some comfort in knowing that a burial came off right.
So I trod the labyrinth of my fevered brain, dancing with the black goddess of pain, she of the bright eyes laughing and clutching me tight with fingers like hot iron, and I swirling and spinning and always circling in upon that sad event. Yet never quite arriving.
Dreaming of fire.
Often I came within minutes of my goal—so close that it seemed impossible that my next attempt would not bring me to it. One thought deeper, a single step further, I believed, and there it would be. I was tormented with hope.
Time and again, in particular, I encountered two memories bright as sunlight in my mind, guarding the passage to and from that dark omphalos. One was of the voyage out to the Catholic cemetery on Treaty Island in the Delaware. First came the boat carrying my father’s coffin and the priest. Father Murphy sat perched in the bow, holding his hat down with one hand and with the other gripping the gunwale for all he was worth. He was a lean old hound of a man with wispy white hair, who bobbed and dipped most comically with every stroke of the oars and wore the unhappy expression of the habitually seasick.
I sat in the second dory of the procession with my mother and sisters, all in their best bonnets. Jack must have been there as well. Seeing Father Murphy’s distress, we couldn’t help but be amused. One of us wondered aloud if he was going to throw up, and we all laughed.
Our hired doryman turned to glare at us over his shoulder. He did not understand what a release my father’s death was for all of us. The truth was that everything that had gone into making John Keely the man he was—his upright character, his innkeeper’s warmth, his quiet strength, his bluff goodwill—had died years before, with the dwindling and extinction of his mind. We were only burying his body that day.
When he was fully himself, however, a better or godlier man did not exist in all the Americas—no, not on a thousand continents. I never saw him truly angry but once. That was the day my elder sister Patricia, who had been sent out to the back alley for firewood, returned empty-handed and said, “Father, there is a black girl in the shed, crying.”
My parents threw on their roquelaures and put up the hoods, for the weather was foul as only a Philadelphia winter downpour can be, and went outside to investigate. They came back in with a girl so slight, in a dress so drenched, that she looked to my young eyes like a half-drowned squirrel.
They all three went into the parlor and closed the doors. From the hall Patricia and I—Mary was then but an infant—tried to eavesdrop but could hear only the murmur of voices punctuated by occasional sobs. After a while, the tears stopped. The talk continued for a very long time.
Midway through the consultation, my mother swept out of the room to retrieve the day’s copy of the Democratic Press, and returned so preoccupied that she didn’t chase us away from the door. I know now, as I did not then, that the object of her concern was an advertisement on the front page of the paper. Patricia, always the practical and foresightful member of the family, cut out and saved the advertisement, and so I can now give it to you exactly as it appeared:
SIX CENTS REWARD
RANAWAY on the 14th inst., from the subscriber, one TACEY BROWN, a mulatto girl of thirteen years age, with upwards of five years to serve on her indenture. She is five feet, one inch in height, pitted with the Small Pox, pert and quick spoken, took with her one plain brown dress of coarse cloth. In personality she is insolent, lazy, and disagreeable. The above reward and no thanks will be given to any person who will take her up and return her to
Thos. Cuttington
No. 81, Pine street, Philadelphia
This at a time, mind you, when the reward for a runaway apprentice often ran as high as ten dollars! Mr. Thomas Cuttington obviously thought himself a man grievously ill served.
At last my father emerged from the parlor with the newspaper in his hand. He closed the door behind him. His look then was so dark and stormy that I shrank away from him, and neither my sister nor I dared uncork any of the questions bubbling up within us. Grimly, he fetched his wallet and then, putting on his coat, strode out into the rain.
Two hours later he returned with one Horace Potter, a clerk from Flintham’s countinghouse, and Tacey’s indenture papers. The parlor doors were thrown wide and all the family, and our boarders as well, called in as witnesses. Tacey had by then been clothed by my mother in one of Patricia’s outgrown dresses, and since my sister was of average size for a girl her age, Tacey looked quite lost in it. She had washed her face, but her expression was tense and unreadable.
In a calm and steady voice, my father read the papers through aloud, so that Tacey, who could neither read nor write, might be assured they were truly her deed of service. Whenever he came to a legal term with which she might not be familiar, he carefully explained it to the child, with Mr. Potter—who stood by the hearth, warming his hands—listening intently and then nodding with judicious approval. Then he showed her the signature of her former master, and her own mark a
s well.
Finally, he placed the paper on the fire.
When the indenture went up in flame, the girl made a sound unlike anything I have ever heard before or since, a kind of wail or shriek, the sort of noise a wild thing makes. Then she knelt down before my father and, to his intense embarrassment, seized and kissed his hand.
So it was that Tacey came to live with us. She immediately became like another sister to me. Which was to say that she was a harsh, intemperate termagant who would take not a word of direction, however reasonably I phrased it, and indeed ordered me about as if it were I who was her servant! She was the scourge of my existence. When she was seventeen—and against my mother’s horrified advice—she married a man twice her age and considerably darker skinned, who made a living waiting upon the festivities of the wealthy. Julius Nash was a grave man. People said of him that even his smile was stern. Once, when he was courting her and stood waiting below-stairs, I, smarting from a recent scolding, angrily blurted out, “How can you put up with such a shrew?”
That solemn man studied me for a moment, and then in a voice so deep it had often been compared to a funerary bell replied, “Mistress Tacey is a woman of considerable strength of character and that, I have found, is far to be preferred over a guileful and flattering tongue.”
I had not been looking to be taken seriously but only venting boyish spleen. Now I stood abashed and humbled by this Negro gentleman’s thoughtful reply—and doubly humiliated, I must admit, by the source of my mortification. Then Tacey came stepping down the stairs, with a tight, triumphant smirk, and was gone, to reappear in my tale only twice more.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 53
