The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Hush,” Hamilton said. “You did what you had to. Stop tormenting yourself. Talk about more practical things.”

  He shook his head, still groggy. For the longest time, he had been kept on beta endorphins, unable to feel a thing, unable to care. It was like being swathed in cotton batting. Nothing could reach him. Nothing could hurt him. “How long have I been out of it?”

  “A day.”

  “A day!” He looked about the austere room. Bland rock walls and laboratory equipment with smooth, noncommital surfaces. To the far end, Krishna and Chang were hunched over a swipeboard, arguing happily and impatiently overwriting each other’s scrawls. A Swiss spacejack came in and spoke to their backs. Krishna nodded distractedly, not looking up. “I thought it was much longer.”

  “Long enough. We’ve already salvaged everyone connected with Sally Chang’s group, and gotten a good start on the rest. Pretty soon it will be time to decide how you want yourself rewritten.”

  He shook his head, feeling dead. “I don’t think I’ll bother, Beth. I just don’t have the stomach for it.”

  “We’ll give you the stomach.”

  “Naw, I don’t…” He felt a black nausea come welling up again. It was cyclic; it returned every time he was beginning to think he’d finally put it down. “I don’t want the fact that I killed Ekatarina washed away in a warm flood of self-satisfaction. The idea disgusts me.”

  “We don’t want that either.” Posner led a delegation of seven into the lab. Krishna and Chang rose to face them, and the group broke into swirling halves. “There’s been enough of that. It’s time we all started taking responsibility for the consequences of—” Everyone was talking at once. Hamilton made a face.

  “Started taking responsibility for—”

  Voices rose.

  “We can’t talk here,” she said. “Take me out on the surface.”

  They drove with the cabin pressurized, due west on the Seething Bay road. Ahead, the sun was almost touching the weary walls of Sommering crater. Shadow crept down from the mountains and cratertops, yearning toward the radiantly lit Sinus Medii. Gunther found it achingly beautiful. He did not want to respond to it, but the harsh lines echoed the lonely hurt within him in a way that he found oddly comforting.

  Hamilton touched her peecee. Putting on the Ritz filled their heads.

  “What if Ekatarina was right?” he said sadly. “What if we’re giving up everything that makes us human? The prospect of being turned into some kind of big-domed emotionless superman doesn’t appeal to me much.”

  Hamilton shook her head. “I asked Krishna about that, and he said No. He said it was like…Were you ever nearsighted?”

  “Sure, as a kid.”

  “Then you’ll understand. He said it was like the first time you came out of the doctor’s office after being lased. How everything seemed clear and vivid and distinct. What had once been a blur that you called ‘tree’ resolved itself into a thousand individual and distinct leaves. The world was filled with unexpected detail. There were things on the horizon that you’d never seen before. Like that.”

  “Oh.” He stared ahead. The disk of the sun was almost touching Sommering. “There’s no point in going any farther.”

  He powered down the truck.

  Beth Hamilton looked uncomfortable. She cleared her throat and with brusque energy said, “Gunther, look. I had you bring me out here for a reason. I want to propose a merger of resources.”

  “A what?”

  “Marriage.”

  It took Gunther a second to absorb what she had said. “Aw, no…I don’t…”

  “I’m serious. Gunther, I know you think I’ve been hard on you, but that’s only because I saw a lot of potential in you, and that you were doing nothing with it. Well, things have changed. Give me a say in your rewrite, and I’ll do the same for you.”

  He shook his head. “This is just too weird for me.”

  “It’s too late to use that as an excuse. Ekatarina was right—we’re sitting on top of something very dangerous, the most dangerous opportunity humanity faces today. It’s out of the bag, though. Word has gotten out. Earth is horrified and fascinated. They’ll be watching us. Briefly, very briefly, we can control this thing. We can help to shape it now, while it’s small. Five years from now, it will be out of our hands.

  “You have a good mind, Gunther, and it’s about to get better. I think we agree on what kind of a world we want to make. I want you on my side.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You want true love? You got it. We can make the sex as sweet or nasty as you like. Nothing easier. You want me quieter, louder, gentler, more assured? We can negotiate. Let’s see if we can come to terms.”

  He said nothing.

  Hamilton eased back in the seat. After a time, she said, “You know? I’ve never watched a lunar sunset before. I don’t get out on the surface much.”

  “We’ll have to change that,” Gunther said.

  Hamilton stared hard into his face. Then she smiled. She wriggled closer to him. Clumsily, he put an arm over her shoulder. It seemed to be what was expected of him. He coughed into his hand, then pointed a finger. “There it goes.”

  Lunar sunset was a simple thing. The crater wall touched the bottom of the solar disk. Shadows leaped from the slopes and raced across the lowlands. Soon half the sun was gone. Smoothly, without distortion, it dwindled. A last brilliant sliver of light burned atop the rock, then ceased to be. In the instant before the windshield adjusted and the stars appeared, the universe filled with darkness.

  The air in the cab cooled. The panels snapped and popped with the sudden shift in temperature.

  Now Hamilton was nuzzling the side of his neck. Her skin was slightly tacky to the touch, and exuded a faint but distinct odor. She ran her tongue up the line of his chin and poked it in his ear. Her hand fumbled with the latches of his suit.

  Gunther experienced no arousal at all, only a mild distaste that bordered on disgust. This was horrible, a defilement of all he had felt for Ekatarina.

  But it was a chore he had to get through. Hamilton was right. All his life his hindbrain had been in control, driving him with emotions chemically derived and randomly applied. He had been lashed to the steed of consciousness and forced to ride it wherever it went, and that nightmare gallop had brought him only pain and confusion. Now that he had control of the reins, he could make this horse go where he wanted.

  He was not sure what he would demand from his reprogramming. Contentment, perhaps. Sex and passion, almost certainly. But not love. He was done with the romantic illusion. It was time to grow up.

  He squeezed Beth’s shoulder. One more day, he thought, and it won’t matter. I’ll feel whatever is best for me to feel. Beth raised her mouth to his. Her lips parted. He could smell her breath.

  They kissed.

  The Changeling’s Tale

  Fill the pipe again. If I’m to tell this story properly, I’ll need its help. That’s good. No, the fire doesn’t need a new log. Let it die. There are worse things than darkness.

  How the tavern creaks and groans in its sleep! ’Tis naught but the settling of its bones and stones, and yet never a wraith made so lonesome a sound. It’s late, the door is bolted, and the gates to either end of the Bridge are closed. The fire burns low. In all the world only you and I are awake. This is no fit tale for such young ears as yours, but—oh, don’t scowl so! You’ll make me laugh, and that’s no fit beginning to so sad a tale as mine. All right, then.

  Let us pull our stools closer to the embers and I’ll tell you all.

  ***

  I must begin twenty years ago, on a day in early summer. The Ogre was dead. Our armies had returned, much shrunken, from their desperate adventures in the south and the survivors were once again plying their trades. The land was at peace at last, and trade was good. The tavern was often full.

  The elves began crossing Long Bridge at dawn.

  I was awakened by the sound of th
eir wagons, the wheels rumbling, the silver bells singing from atop the high poles where they had been set to catch the wind. All in a frenzy I dressed and tumbled down from the chimney-loft and out the door. The wagons were painted with bright sigils and sinuous overlapping runes, potent with magic I could neither decipher nor hope to understand. The white oxen that pulled them spoke gently in their own language, one to the other. Music floated over the march, drums and cymbals mingling with the mournful call of the long curling horn named Serpentine. But the elves themselves, tall and proud, were silent behind their white masks.

  One warrior turned to look at me as he passed, his eyes cold and unfriendly as a spearpoint. I shivered, and the warrior was gone.

  But I had known him. I was sure of it. His name was…A hand clasped my shoulder. It was my uncle. “A stirring sight, innit? Those are the very last, the final elven tribe. When they are passed over Long Bridge, there will be none of their kind left anywhere south of the Awen.”

  He spoke with an awful, alien sadness. In all the years Black Gabe had been my master—and being newborn when my father had marched away to the Defeat of Blackwater, I had known no other—I had never seen him in such a mood before. Thinking back, I see that it was at that instant I first realized in a way so sure I could feel it in my gut that he would someday die and be forgotten, and after him me. Then, though, I was content simply to stand motionless with the man, sharing this strangely companionable sense of loss.

  “How can they tell each other apart?” I asked, marveling at how similar were their richly decorated robes and plain, unfeatured masks.

  “They—”

  A fire-drake curled in the air, the morning rocket set off to mark the instant when the sun’s disk cleared the horizon, and my eyes traveled up to watch it explode. When they came down again, my uncle was gone. I never saw him again.

  ***

  Eh? Forgive me. I was lost in thought. Black Gabe was a good master, though I didn’t think so then, who didn’t beat me half so often as I deserved. You want to know about my scars? There is nothing special about them—they are such markings as all the am’rta skandayaksa have. Some are for deeds of particular merit. Others indicate allegiance. The triple slashes across my cheeks mean that I was sworn to the Lord Cakaravartin, a war-leader whose name means “great wheel-turning king.” That is a name of significance, though I have forgotten exactly what, much as I have forgotten the manner and appearance of the great wheel-turner himself, though there was a time when I would happily have died for him. The squiggle across my forehead means I slew a dragon.

  Yes, of course you would. What youth your age would not? And it’s a tale I’d far more gladly tell you than this sorry life of mine. But I cannot. That I did kill a dragon I remember clearly—the hot gush of blood, its bleak scream of despair—but beyond that nothing. The events leading to and from that instant of horror and—strangely—guilt are gone from me entirely, like so much else that happened since I left the Bridge, lost in mist and forgetfulness.

  Look at our shadows, like giants, nodding their heads in sympathy.

  ***

  What then? I remember scrambling across the steep slate rooftops, leaping and slipping in a way that seems quite mad to me now. Corwin the glover’s boy and I were stringing the feast-day banners across the street to honor the procession below. The canvases smelled of mildew. They were stored in the Dragon Gate in that little room above the portcullis, the one with the murder hole in the floor. Jon and Corwin and I used to crouch over it betimes and take turns spitting, vying to be the first to hit the head of an unsuspecting merchant.

  Winds gusted over the roofs, cold and invigorating. Jumping the gaps between buildings, I fancied myself to be dancing with the clouds. I crouched to lash a rope through an iron ring set into the wall just beneath the eaves. Cor had gone back to the gateroom for more banners. I looked up to see if he were in place yet and realized that I could see right into Becky’s garret chamber.

  There was nothing in the room but a pallet and a chest, a small table and a washbasin. Becky stood with her back to the window, brushing her hair.

  I was put in mind of those stories we boys told each other of wanton women similarly observed. Who, somehow sensing their audience, would put on a lewd show, using first their fingers and then their hairbrushes. We had none of us ever encountered such sirens, but our faith in them was boundless. Somewhere, we knew, were women depraved enough to mate with apes, donkeys, mountain trolls—and possibly even the likes of us.

  Becky, of course, did nothing of the sort. She stood in a chaste woolen night-gown, head raised slightly, stroking her long, coppery tresses in time to the faint elven music that rose from the street. A slant of sunlight touched her hair and struck fire.

  All this in an instant. Then Cor came bounding over her roof making a clatter like ten goats. He shifted the bundle of banners ’neath one arm and extended the other. “Ho, Will!” he bellowed. “Stop daydreaming and toss me that rope-end!”

  Becky whirled and saw me gawking. With a most unloving shriek of outrage, she slammed the shutters.

  ***

  All the way back to the tavern, my mind was filled with thoughts of Becky and her hairbrush. As I entered, my littlest cousin, Thistle, danced past me, chanting, “elves-elves-elves,” spinning and twirling as if she need never stop. She loved elves and old stories with talking animals and all things bright and magical. They tell me she died of the whitepox not six years later. But in my mind’s eye she still laughs and spins, evergreen, immortal.

  The common room was empty of boarders and the table planks had been taken down. Aunt Kate, Dolly, and my eldest sister, Eleanor, were cleaning up. Kate swept the breakfast trash toward the trap. “It comes of keeping bad company,” she said grimly. “That Corwin Glover and his merry band of rowdies. Ale does not brew overnight—he’s been building toward this outrage for a long time.”

  I froze in the doorway vestibule, sure that Becky’s people had reported my Tom-Peepery. And how could I protest my innocence? I’d’ve done as much and worse long ago, had I known such was possible.

  A breeze leapt into the room when Eleanor opened the trap, ruffling her hair and making the dust dance. “They gather by the smokehouse every sennight to drink themselves sick and plot mischief,” Dolly observed. “May Chandler’s Anne saw one atop the wall there, making water into the river, not three nights ago.”

  “Oh, fie!” The trash went tumbling toward the river and Eleanor slammed the trap. Some involuntary motion on my part alerted them to my presence then. They turned and confronted me.

  A strange delusion came over me then, and I imagined that these three gossips were part of a single mechanism, a twittering machine going through predetermined motions, as if an unseen hand turned a crank that made them sweep and clean and talk.

  Karl Whitesmith’s boy has broken his indenture, I thought.

  “Karl Whitesmith’s boy has broken his indenture,” Dolly said.

  He’s run off to sea.

  “He’s run off to sea,” Kate added accusingly.

  “What?” I felt my mouth move, heard the words come out independent of me. “Jon, you mean? Not Jon!”

  How many ’prentices does Karl have? Of course Jon.

  “How many ’prentices does Karl have? Of course Jon.”

  “Karl spoiled him,” Kate said (and her words were echoed in my head before she spoke them). “A lad his age is like a walnut tree which suffers not but rather benefits from thrashings.” She shook her besom at me. “Something the likes of you would do well to keep in mind.”

  Gram Birch amazed us all then by emerging from the back kitchen.

  Delicate as a twig, she bent to put a plate by the hearth. It held two refried fish, leftovers from the night before, and a clutch of pickled roe. She was slimmer than your little finger and her hair was white as an aged dandelion’s. This was the first time I’d seen her out of bed in weeks; the passage of the elves, or perhaps some livening property of the
ir music, had brought fresh life to her. But her eye was as flinty as ever. “Leave the boy alone,” she said.

  My delusion went away, like a mist in the morning breeze from the Awen.

  “You don’t understand!”

  “We were only—”

  “This saucy lad—”

  “The kitchen tub is empty,” Gram Birch told me. She drew a schooner of ale and set it down by the plate. Her voice was warm with sympathy, for I was always her favorite, and there was a kindly tilt to her chin. “Go and check your trots. The head will have subsided by the time you’re back.”

  My head in a whirl, I ran upbridge to the narrow stairway that gyred down the interior of Tinker’s Leg. It filled me with wonder that Jon—gentle, laughing Jon—had shipped away. We all of us claimed to be off to sea someday; it was the second or third most common topic on our nighttime eeling trips upriver. But that it should be Jon, and that he should leave without word of farewell!

  A horrible thing happened to me then: With the sureness of prophecy I knew that Jon would not come back. That he would die in the western isles. That he would be slain and eaten by a creature out of the sea such as none on the Bridge had ever imagined.

  I came out at the narrow dock at the high-water mark. Thoughts elsewhere, I pulled in my lines and threw back a bass for being shorter than my forearm. Its less fortunate comrades I slung over my shoulder.

  But as I was standing there on the dark and slippery stones, I saw something immense and silent move beneath the water. I thought it a monstrous tortoise at first, such as that which had taken ten strong men with ropes and grappling hooks to pull from the bay at Mermaid Head. But as it approached I could see it was too large for that. I did not move. I could not breathe. I stared down at the approaching creature.

  The surface of the river exploded. A head emerged, shedding water. Each of its nostrils was large enough for a man to crawl into. Its hair and beard were dark, like the bushes and small trees that line the banks upriver and drown in every spring flood. Its eyes were larger than cartwheels and lusterless, like stone.