If that makes sense.
But Mr. Barraine looked at me for a long time, and said, “Sit down, Sophie.”
So I did.
And he went on:
“My job, Sophie, is to prepare you for your final review. These people you’ll be meeting are some of the smartest people in the world: politicians, technologists, advertisers, financiers. But the reason they want to meet with you is because that kind of smartness is no longer very valuable. Smartness is what computers have. And nowadays people are very expensive, and computers are very cheap. What’s valuable today, Sophie, is the ability to read human beings—to decipher their moods, their desires, their deepest longings and needs. That is the key to effective public relations. That is what recruiters want. That is the kind of skill the holoscore is meant to assess, and that is what your holoscore said you could do. It is what made you a competitive student, and what helped you attract so much investment, and what got you admitted to this institution.
“Now, Sophie. What message do you think it will send if I let you meet with those recruiters, a graduating student of this college, and explain to them that after three million dollars and many years of top-tier education... well, what do you think they’ll say when they learn that, as you told me today, you befriended a sexual predator in your second year? When they find out you sabotaged the LEO business mentorship experience for a group of our top performers? When they see how your peers have been voting against you? Finally, what will they think when they look at your responses to these literary works, and learn how prone you are to empathizing with the wrong kinds of people?
“Sophie.” He leaned forward. “I’m afraid I can’t approve you for graduation at this time.”
I looked at Mr. Barraine, and I was feeling several feelings. Firstly, about how I was apparently a terrible person, but no one had told me in all this time. Second, how in my interacting with Roman and Damaris and others, I had misread all their social cues. Finally, how all those smart people were waiting to give me my review, and they had invested so much money in my education, and how would they feel when they found out the person they’d been educating had turned out to be selfish and cruel and biased?
Mostly, though, I thought about Mr. Barraine. How in that video on his Perma-Me profile, when one of his little girls got scared by the ducks, she turned and hid her face in his shirt. And it was like Mr. Barraine didn’t even need to think. He just kept smiling and tossing out breadcrumbs, and with his arm he held her to him.
The next thing I knew, alarms were ringing, and Mr. Barraine was jumping away, wide-eyed and shouting and pounding on his palmscreen. And I saw how without even thinking about it, I had gotten out of my chair and pressed my face against his chest.
“I need to report,” Mr. Barraine said, “a violation of the Interpersonal Conduct Code, class 25B, section H12. Note: nonsexual contact was initiated by the student during an approved private meeting. Repeat note: contact was student-initiated and nonsexual. I have disengaged and am now departing the location.”
He moved to the door, holding out his palmscreen to record how carefully he was keeping his distance from me. And I could see the tears on his shirt and face as he said, “Sophie, how could you? Of all the things to try and... I have daughters. I have a family.”
Then, just before he left, he tapped his palmscreen. And the last thing I remember is looking at my own palm, and seeing the effect of the assessment he had given me, which was my Pro/Con holoscore, glowing a bright, ugly red.
IT FEELS STRANGE to be in a home for Con women. Everyone here is deep in the red, a confirmed negative influence on society. Yet during the day-to-day, you hardly know. We have meals and watch TV. One woman here was a daycare worker who took care of learning-disabled children. One day she passed out during her duties, and one of the children had a fall and died. She doesn’t talk, but some of us take turns sitting with her. Then there is a woman who attempted suicide four times, and a drug addict, whose name is Tina. One time, I told Tina about my struggles with Pro/Con voting, and she said:
“Oh, man, my people never gave me no votes. If they had feelings, they just acted on ’em. Ha, ha, yeah, they hit you soft, that means they only hate you a little. But if they hit hard, well, then they must really love you.” Then Tina laughed, looking at my face, and said, “Oh, Sophie, that’s why I like you, girl, you always take things so serious.”
She said she wanted me to know they were all giving me Pro votes around here, though admittedly, given their own scores, it wouldn’t count for much.
Nobody can understand why I’m in this place. To be honest, I don’t understand either. I used to be at the top of the Pro ratings, attend a prestigious university, go to meetings with the country’s biggest business leaders. What I want now is for my narrative to be a help to others, and aid them in avoiding the pitfalls I have taken. There are times, though, when I feel like I will never understand, and always be deep in the red, no good to anyone.
As for what transpired after my meeting with Mr. Barraine? That particular time is hard to recall. They say that when the officials came, I was sitting in a chair in his office, and wouldn’t move. For weeks after, I wouldn’t speak or do anything. They had to bring me to a hospital and take care of me. I remember I was there when my mother came, and told me she was sorry for everything, and reminded me that while it is very easy to fall into the red, it can be very difficult to climb back out. Some of the underwriters of my education also came, and reminded me about the opportunities I could still have if I remembered my responsibilities and pulled myself together. But mostly I just sat there, doing nothing, except falling ever deeper into the red.
I thought about the negative scores I had given people in my life, and the friends I had voted out of my peer network, and how one time my mother had wanted to talk about my father, and I had slammed the door. But mostly I thought about the reason this all started, which is the one thing I haven’t talked about, because to be truthful it still feels so weird.
This was in seventh grade, when they introduced an autistic boy into our school, as part of an experimental program. He was seriously autistic, so nobody wanted to be near him, because he would do things like grabbing you when you didn’t expect. But there were some people he liked, and one of those people was me.
Then one day, some other kids were doing something to the autistic boy, and suddenly he started to howl and ran across the lunchroom, throwing his arms around me from behind. I don’t know what the other kids had done. All I knew is, the autistic boy was hugging me in a way where I couldn’t breathe. That was the day everything changed. Because people began to panic and shout, as there had been prior incidents. And the more they shouted, the harder the boy squeezed, until my head began to go dark.
But instead of struggling, I whispered to the boy, and reached up a hand and stroked his arm. After a while he loosened his grip. I felt very calm. And I turned around and hugged him back. It surprised everyone. When the boy’s parents saw the videos that had been taken, they started a Pro-Vote campaign on my behalf, even though the boy had to go into an institution because of what he did. And the campaign took off, and before I knew it, the Pro votes came in, millions of votes from around the world. And that was what made my holoscore go so deep into the green, and what made me seem like such a promising student, and why so many investors wanted to put their money into my Child Development Program. And that was why everything turned out the way it did.
But what I remembered, while I was lying all that time without moving, was how it actually felt, when the autistic boy grabbed me. How I was so scared I wanted to scream. But I was also so scared I couldn’t scream. He was so much bigger than me, and he wouldn’t let go, and people were screaming about how I might die. I couldn’t even say why I did what I did. It was like there was a different person inside me, who lifted up a finger and gently brushed his hands. When he responded, I knew what to do, and I stood and put my arms around him. Everyone became silent. I rem
ember him shaking, and making puffing noises, like a cat when it can’t stop sneezing. Then he began to quiet down, and I stroked my hands along his back, and put my cheek against his cheek. It was like there was no one else. It was like there was just us two. I felt it go through him, a kind of hum, like a vibration I could feel in my hands. That was when I knew, just by the feel of him breathing—I knew he would be peaceful, this person in my arms.
THE SMOKE OF GOLD IS GLORY
Scott Lynch
Scott Lynch (www.scottlynch.us) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978. He is the author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels, and his short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies. In 2016, Scott traded the plains of Wisconsin for the hills and valleys of Massachusetts and married his longtime partner, fellow SF/F writer Elizabeth Bear.
SAIL NORTH FROM the Crescent Cities, three days and nights over the rolling black sea, and you will surely find the tip of the Ormscap, the fire-bleeding mountains that circle the roof of the world like a scar. There in the shallows, where the steam rises in a thousand curtains, you’ll see a crumbling dock, and from that dock you can still walk into the scraps and tatters of a blown-apart town that was never laid straight from the start. It went up on those rocks layer after layer, like ten eyeless drunks scraping butter onto the same piece of bread.
The southernmost Ormscap is still called the Dragon’s Anvil. The town below the mountain was once called Helfalkyn.
Not so long ago it was an enchantment and a refuge and a prison, home to the most desperate thieves in all the breathing world. Not so long ago, they all cried out in their sleep for the mountain’s treasure. One part in three of every gleaming thing that has ever been drawn or dredged or delved from the earth, that’s what the scholars claimed.
That’s what the dragon carried there and brooded over, the last dragon that will ever speak to any of us.
Now the town’s empty. The wind howls through broken windows in roofless walls. If you licked the stones of the mountain for a thousand days, you wouldn’t taste enough precious metal to gild one letter in a monk’s manuscript.
Helfalkyn is dead, and the dragon is dead, and the treasure might as well have never existed.
I ought to know. I’m the man who lost a bet, climbed the Anvil, and helped break the whole damn thing.
I tell this story once a year, on Galen’s Eve, and no other. Some of you have heard it before. I take it kindly that you’ve come to hear it again. Like any storyteller, I’d lie about the color of my eyes to my own mother for half a cup of ale-dregs, but you’ll affirm to all the new faces that to this one tale I add no flourishes. I deepen no shadows and gentle no sorrows. I tell it as it was, one night each year, and on that night I take no coin for it.
Heed me now. Gather in as you will. Jostle your neighbors. Spill your drinks. Laugh early at the bad jokes and stare at me like clubbed sheep for all the good ones, and I shall care not, for I am armored by long experience. But this bowl of mine, if we are to part as friends, must catch no copper or silver, I swear it. Tonight pay me in food, or drink, or simple attention.
With that, let me commence to tell:
FIRST, HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CHARMING LUNATICS WHO ENDED MY ADVENTURING CAREER
IT WAS THE Year of the Bent-Wing Raven, and everything went sour for me right around the backside of autumn.
One week I was in funds, the next I was conspicuously otherwise. I’m still not sure what happened. Bad luck, worse judgment, enemy action, sorcery? Hardly matters. When you’re on the ground getting kicked in the face, one pair of boots looks very much like another.
I have long been candid about the nature of my previous employment. Those of you who find this frank exchange of purely historical details in any way disturbing are of course welcome to say a word or two to Galen on my behalf, and I shall thank you, as I doubt an old thief can really collect such a thing as too many prayers. In those days I would have laughed. Young thieves think luck and knee-joints are meant to last forever.
I started the summer by lifting four ivory soul lanterns from the Temple of the Cloud Gardens in Port Raugen. Spent a few weeks carving decent wooden replicas and painting them with a white cream wash, first. I made the switch at night, walked out unnoticed, presented the genuine articles to my client, and set sail on the morning tide as a very rich man. I washed up in Hadrinsbirk a few weeks later with a pounding headache and a haunting memory of money. No matter. I made the acquaintance of an uncreatively guarded warehouse and appropriated a crate of the finest Sulagar steel padlocks. I sold the locks and their keys to a corner-cutting merchants’ guild, then sold wax impressions of the keys to their bitter rivals for twice that sum. So much for Hadrinsbirk. I cast off for the Crescent Cities.
There I guised myself as a gentleman of leisure, and wearing that mask I investigated prospects and rumors, looking for easy marks. Alas, the easy marks must have migrated in a flock. I took the edge off my disappointment by indulging all the routine questionable habits, and that’s when the bad time crept up behind me. The gaming tables turned. Easy credit went extinct. All the people who owed me favors locked their doors, and all the people I needed to avoid were thick in the streets. Before I knew it I was sleeping in a stable.
I stretched a point of courtesy then, and slipped an appeal to the local practitioners of my trade. My entreaty was coolly received. There was a sudden plague of honesty in the land, and schemes simply weren’t hatching, or so they claimed. Nobody needed to arrange a kidnapping, or a vault infiltration, or have a barrow desecrated.
This was a bind, and I confess that I partly deserved it. For all my hard-earned professional fame, I was still an outsider, and doubtless should have paid my respects to the thieves of the Crescent Cities a few weeks earlier. Now they were wise to me and watchful for the sorts of jobs I might pull on my own. The wind was sharpening, my belly was flat, and my belt was running out of notches. I needed money! Yet honest employment was out of the question too, as word of my presence spread. Who would make a caravan guard of Tarkaster Crale, bane of a dozen caravan runs? Who’d set Crale the Cracksman to stand guard over a money-changer’s strongboxes? Awkward! I couldn’t beg for so much as an afternoon hauling wash-buckets behind a tavern. A larcenist of my caliber and experience? Any sensible local thief would assume it had to be a cover for some grand scheme, which they would have to interrupt.
It’s hard to be poor at the best of times, but in my old line of work, to be poor and famous—gods have mercy.
I had no prospects. No friends. I could have won an empty-pockets contest against anyone within a hundred miles. All I had left was youth and a sense of pride that damn near glowed like banked coals.
These were the circumstances that led me to seriously consider, for the first time in my life, the words of the Helfalkyn Wormsong.
I can see some of you nodding, those of you without much hair left. You heard it, too. Nobody repeats it these days, the fortunes of Helfalkyn having diminished so profoundly. But in my youth there wasn’t a child in any land who didn’t know the Wormsong by heart. It was a message from the dragon itself, the last and greatest of them, the Shipbreaker, the Sky Tyrant. Glimraug.
It went like this:
High-reachers, bright-dreamers, bright-enders,
Match riddlesong, venom, and stone.
Carry ending and eyes up the Anvil,
Carry glorious gleanings back home.
Isn’t that a fine little thing?
Friends, that’s how a dragon says, “Why not climb up my impenetrable treasure mountain and let me kill you?”
From the first day Glimraug claimed the Anvil, it took pains to welcome and entice us. Don’t mistake that for a benevolent and universal hospitality, for of course Glimraug raided half the earth and spread dismay for centuries. No dragon ever deigned to smelt its own gold. But even as Glimraug fell on caravans and broke castles like eggs, it tolerated a small community of outcasts and lunatics in the shad
ow of its home. Once in a rare while it would even seize someone and haul them to the crest of the Anvil, to make a show of its growing treasure, then set them free to sing the Wormsong louder than ever.
Thousands of people accepted the dragon’s invitation over the years. None of them lived. Some very canny customers in that crowd, too, great heroes, names that still ring out, but none of them were ever quite a match for riddlesong, venom, and stone. Still, for every one that dreamed the impossible dream and cacked it hard, two more showed up. The Dragon’s Anvil was the last roll of the dice for those who’d played their lives out and bet poorly. It was equally attractive to the brilliant, the mad, and the desperate. I was at least two of those three, and by that simple majority the vote carried. I was on a ship that night, the Red Swan, and I scrubbed decks and greased ropes to pay for my passage to the end of the world.
That’s what Helfalkyn looked like when I finally saw it—like the last human habitation thrown down by the last human hands at the far end of some mad priest’s apocalypse. The sun was the color of bled-out entrails, edging the hulking mountain, and the bruised light showed me a gallimaufry of dark warrens, leaning houses, and crooked alleys down below. We sailed in through veils of warm breath from the mountain’s underwater vents, and the air was perfumed with sulphur.
Many of you must be thinking the same thing I was as I trod the creaking timbers of the Helfalkyn docks—how did such a place ever come to thrive? The answer lies at the intersection of greed and perversity. Here came the adventurers, the suicides, the mad ones intent on climbing the mountain and somehow stealing the treasure of ten thousand lifetimes. But were they eager to go all at once? Of course not. Some needed to lay their plans, or drink their brains out, or otherwise work themselves into fits of enthusiasm. Some waited days, or weeks, or months. Some never went at all, and clung to Helfalkyn forever, aging sourly in the shadows of failed ambition. After the adventurers came the provisioners, of inebriation and games and rooms and warm companionship, and the town became a sputtering, improvised machine for sifting the last scraps of currency from those who would surely never need them again. The captains of the few ships that made the Helfalkyn run had a cordial arrangement with the town. They would haul anyone there for the price of a few days’ labor, and charge a small fortune in real valuables for passage back to the world. Any newcomer trapped in Helfalkyn would thus be forced to try the mountain, or toil for years to the great advantage of the town’s masters if they ever wanted to escape.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12 Page 37
