Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  "It’s not the profit. It’s the publicity. We’d generate a lot of new business. We could even go public."

  Jill frowned. "You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?"

  Mom swam around to face Jill. "Sweetheart, our child is ready to be a grownup."

  "She wants to be a boy."

  "So what? Are you going to stop loving her?"

  Jill didn’t answer. Her face tightened.

  In that moment, something crystallized—all the vague unformed feelings of a lifetime suddenly snapped into focus with an enhanced clarity. Everything is tethered to everything else. With people, it isn’t gravity or cables—it’s money, promises, blood, and feelings. The tethers are all the words we use to tie each other down. Or up. And we whirl around and around, just like asteroids cabled together.

  We think the tethers mean something. They have to. Because if we cut them, we go flying off into the deep dark unknown. But if we don’t cut them…we just stay in one place, whirling around forever. We don’t go anywhere.

  I could see how Mom and Jill were tethered by an ancient promise.

  And Mom and I were tethered by blood. And Jill and I—were tethered by jealousy. We resented each other’s claim on Mom. She had something I couldn’t understand. And I had something she couldn’t share.

  I wondered how much Mom understood. Probably everything. She was caught in the middle between two whirling bodies. Someone was going to have to cut the tether. That’s why she accepted this contract—so we could go to the marble. She’d known it from the beginning. We were going to ride Janis all the way to Earth.

  And somewhere west of the terminator, as we entered our braking arc, I’d cash out my shares and cut the tethers. I’d be off on my own course then—and Mom and Jill would fly apart. No longer bound together, they’d whirl out and away on their own inevitable trajectories. I wondered which of them would be a comet streaked across Earth’s black sky.

  Take me to the light

  Take me to the mystery of life

  Take me to the light

  Let me see the edges of the night

  ~ from Body Slave by Janis Ian

  (Back to TOC)

  East of the Sun, West of Acousticville

  Judith Tarr

  Welcome to the place where time stands still

  You can drink your blues neat or on ice

  You can pay your dues any way you like

  Welcome to Acousticville

  ~ from Welcome to Acousticville by Janis Ian

  The music had stopped.

  The sun came up over the bluffs and shot long rays across the dry land. In the worn and grimy buildings below the red cliffs, where the plaint of strings had never paused, there was silence. The wind blew without a sound. It sent weeds tumbling down the long, long road, but they tumbled mutely, with no hiss or skitter of thorns on the cracked asphalt.

  It wasn't much of an afterlife to look at, unless your dream of heaven is a Motel Six. The inmates were so drunk on music that they could be in the Garden of Allah and never notice, except for an occasional grab at a houri. The music poured through them out of the empty sky and the barren desert. It soaked into the paper-thin walls and lapped over the grubby carpets, and the pool overflowed with the pure article. The dead swam in it for inspiration, and for the high.

  The whole world was music. This morning it had stopped. The silence was as deep as eternity.

  One by one the dead came out of their rooms. Their eyes were blinking and their steps were slow. The visitors in the annex, the little brown men and women who had come up the road at about the time I came down it, tried to speak but found that their voices were gone.

  I'd been sitting on the bare hillside, watching the sun come up. I was still new to death, and still surprised that there were sunrises here, and nights with stars.

  This was not supposed to be my afterlife. Mine was a green isle and a cold ocean. But I died in the desert between sea and sea, and woke in the dry land. The long road had brought me here. The music snared me, and I stayed until my feet got around to breaking me loose and carrying me on again. It wasn't a music I'd ever known or thought I cared to know, but I'd been high on it ever since I saw that ugly little place under the red cliffs and heard the beauty that came out of it.

  There had always been a lull just at dawn. New songs were born then, and came up with the light. This morning the sun brought only stillness.

  I came down from the hill as quickly as I could. My feet made no noise, no matter how hard I scuffed or stamped. Sound had been sucked out of the world.

  All the dead were out by the pool. The water was flat and still. They were dead, but they lived by sound. Once it was taken away from them, they were only mute shades. Some of them had already begun to fade. I could see the cracked wall through old Willie's shirt.

  I looked around for the Lady, but there was no sign of her. Sometimes she coiled like a cobra by the pool, and the little brown people worshipped her. Other times she sat behind the counter in the lobby, looking as ordinary and faintly seedy as anybody else, except for the suggestion of scales on her arms and cheeks, and her long, sharp teeth when she smiled. When I first met her, she was naked except for her long iron-grey hair, and she spoke in a slow Southwestern drawl with a hint of a hiss. She checked me in and gave my key and finished her transformation, slithering away toward the pool and her congregation.

  Snakes are deaf, they say. I'd thought it strange to find one as the keeper of this place. Now I wondered what she had to do with this plague of silence.

  She wasn't there to ask. Someone had had the bright idea to raid the office for paper and pencils. I was surprised that he'd found any. He brought back an armful and passed them out to whoever would take them.

  Not everybody would, or could. Some of them refused. Others were already too faded. If they tried to take a pad or a pencil, their hands passed helplessly through.

  Wild-haired Jimi had got hold of an artist's sketchpad. Maybe he'd conjured it out of the air; I wouldn't put it past him. On it he'd written in purple crayon, MUST ACT FAST. LOOK WHO'S FADING.

  I'd seen. All the old ones, the great ones, were losing substance. It wasn't just Willie. Furry's edges were fraying. Libba and Sippie were hanging on, but I could see they did it by pure willpower.

  One of the young ones, whose name I hadn't learned, drew the question in the dust for all of us: WHY?

  No one knew. From the oldest to the newest, which would be me, we had no faintest idea. We didn't even know what was happening, let alone how to undo it.

  I scanned faces. Others were doing the same. I looked to the youngest ones, wondering if one of them had brought in a curse. There was a wild red-haired vixen who could sing the vultures down out of the sky, and a thin and quiet man with silver dollars on his eyelids, and a crowd of forgettable faces that, I'd been assured while their voices could still be heard, were determinedly mediocre. They were happy just to be here. I couldn't imagine them cursing the music out of this place.

  The guests from the annex had supplied themselves with brushes and inks and stone palettes. They were painting on the deck by the pool. I drifted with some of the others to see what they were doing.

  A procession of birds and animals and human figures, or parts of them, marched up and down the deck. The guest who looked oldest painted fastest, and his paintings twitched and wriggled into life while I stared at them. They shaped themselves into words.

  This is a curse. We know the smell of it. Rahotep felt it in the night, creeping like a snake through the dark. We were unable to stop it. It is very strong.

  I spread my hands and widened my eyes, inviting him to explain. His brush flew over the tile. We know curses. We invented them. You must track this one to its source and break it, or this afterlife will dissolve into silence.

  Jimi was standing next to me with his tablet. CAN YOU HELP? he wrote.

  Maybe some of us can, the visitor answered.

  DO IT, Jimi wrote, pre
ssing so hard the crayon splintered.

  I saw Libba and Sippie behind him. They were still hanging on—literally: they were arm in arm. The red-haired woman and the man with coins on his eyes stood with them.

  I felt myself moving closer to them. My feet were unsticking, now the music wasn't holding me. I could think of moving on, but at the same time I could feel the determination rising. I wanted to find the thing that had killed the music. I needed to know why, and how to get it back.

  We decided it just like that, or it was decided for us. It was never easy to tell in this life after death. The visitors settled just as quickly: they exchanged glances, some nodded and some frowned, and the old man stood up and stowed his inks and brushes in a bag and tucked his palette under his arm.

  He was ready; so were we. We didn't need food or drink, except for the pleasure. Nobody had a change of clothes. Jimi had his guitar. The rest of us were empty-handed.

  I looked back once after we left the pool. Its water level had dropped a good two inches since the last time I looked, and the people beside it were noticeably faded. Time meant nothing here, but they were fast running out of it.

  ~~~~~

  The little brown man put himself in the lead. He seemed to know where he was going. The rest of us shrugged and straggled along after.

  The road ran along the bluff and then headed up it, zigzagging from ledge to ledge. I'd come the other way, off the dunes. This was a rougher country. The track was steep and narrow; in some places it was little more than a series of hand- and footholds.

  Hunger and thirst couldn't touch us, but the deep ache in the bones could. We were all glad to come to the top and look out over a wilderness of rock and sand and empty sky. We were the only things here that lived or had once been alive.

  Sound came back as we trudged away from the bluff. At first I was barely aware of the whisper of wind in my ears. Then I realized that my feet were crunching in the gravel. My toe caught a shard of rock and sent it clattering off to the side. None of us breathed unless we wanted to, and our hearts didn't beat, but I heard Jimi gust a sigh, then let out a whoop that echoed off the rocks.

  He unslung his guitar and attacked the strings. His hands were shaking like a junkie's.

  The strings were dead. He opened his mouth to sing. A strangled croak came out.

  We had sound, but the music was still gone. Jimi was grey and shaking, but I thought it was a hopeful sign. Whatever had cursed us hadn't been able to affect the rest of this country. We might even get the music back, if we traveled far enough.

  ~~~~~

  The brown man's name was Ay. It was the simplest sound in the world, and could be either an affirmation or a cry of pain. He claimed not to be the oldest of the world's dead, but he was old. His people had learned long ago to travel through the afterlives, learning and studying and sometimes even teaching if anyone was looking to know what they knew. They knew a lot, after all this time.

  He didn't know what had cursed us. "A curse leaves a trace," he said, "somewhat like a smell and somewhat like a slug's trail. Sometimes we can tell who cast it, but for the most part we settle for tracking it to its source."

  "You could scry," Sippie said. I don't know what she sounded like in life, but in death her voice was like warm molasses. Even if she couldn't sing, when she talked, her words were full of music.

  "We could scry," Ay agreed, "but we would only see a little way ahead."

  "Do you know that?" Jimi said. "Have you tried?"

  Ay shrugged.

  There was no water or ink to scry with, and no crystal ball, and none forthcoming, either. All we had was dust and rock. Sippie got down on her knees and gathered a handful of pebbles and cast them. They fell in the shape of an arrow pointing in the direction we were going. Insofar as there were points of the compass here, we could say it was north—left hand to the sunset, right hand to the sunrise.

  Sippie sighed. Libba and I helped her up. Ay was already walking where the pebbles pointed.

  ~~~~~

  The sun was following us. It had been midway up the sky when we started, but once the sound came back it stopped, hanging directly overhead. It stayed there as we went on, never moving.

  Ay stopped suddenly. I'd been hearing it for a while, and thinking the wind was blowing loud in the rocks and spires ahead of us. Completely without warning, the ground dropped away in front of us. We looked down into a pit so deep its bottom was lost in darkness, writhing with what looked like a million million ants, and every one of them screaming.

  "Malebolge," said the red-haired woman. It was the first word I'd heard her say.

  "The pit of hell," Jimi said. He looked from side to side and then ahead. There was no end to it in any direction. "What do we do? Fly over it?"

  "Pass through it," Ay said. He didn't seem as light-hearted as usual. "The only way out is down."

  "Oh, no," said Jimi. "I'm not going down there. That's hell, man. I didn't get out of it just so I could end up at the bottom of it."

  "There is no other way," said Ay. "Unless you would see the music die."

  Jimi shuddered so hard his teeth rattled. "There isn't any other way?"

  "None," Ay said.

  ~~~~~

  It was a long way down. As long as we stayed on the road we were safe. The dead couldn't see us; the watchers were blind to us, or didn't care that we were there.

  They were every bit as terrifying as I'd heard. They towered over the damned souls. No two of them were exactly alike, but they had a certain common theme of horns and fangs. They amused themselves by plucking individual souls off the rocks and pulling them apart like beetles, nibbling tender bits and tossing the rest. The scattered parts would scuttle toward one another, meld together, and grow into human shape again, screaming louder than ever.

  "Don't look," Ay said, too late for me. It was all I could do to stay on the road. It ran in a knife-edge down along the tiers of hell, with sudden switchbacks and ledges that looked down sheer cliffs into measureless immensity.

  I wasn't counting levels, but there seemed be nine. Somewhere along about the seventh from the top, the road came to an abrupt end. An enormous beast squatted across it. It looked a little bit like the infernal guards and somewhat like a three-headed dog, but it was hard to tell exactly what it was: it blurred whenever I tried to focus. All I could be sure of was that it was big.

  It spoke on so low a note that I felt it more in my stomach than in my ears. "Will you pass?"

  "We will pass," Ay replied.

  "Pay," said the beast.

  "There is no toll on this road," Ay said.

  "Now there is," the beast said.

  We looked at one another. The only money any of us had was the nameless man's two silver dollars. He made no move to offer them.

  "What will you take?" Jimi asked the beast.

  It growled almost below the threshold of sound. "Souls," it said in a long sigh.

  "For what? To live here?"

  The beast didn't answer.

  The red-haired woman pushed past us. She looked up into that monstrous face and said, "I'll stay with you if you let the others go."

  "You can't do that," Jimi said.

  She wasn't listening. She reached 'way, 'way up to touch the end of the beast's nose. "You don't eat souls. Do you? You're lonely. Whoever put you here never thought of what you wanted. I'll stay with you. I'll sing to you when the music comes back. I'll—"

  The beast shuddered. The road shook; a crack opened in the cliff.

  "The way is not around you," the woman said. "It's through you. I'll stay, if you let the others go on."

  "Why?" said Jimi. "What are you—"

  "Just go," she said. "Don't look around you. Don't look back."

  The beast opened its mouth in a yawn as wide as the pit of Malebolge. The stink of it was even worse than the stink of hell. There were things moving in it, small pale writhing things. They were screaming.

  I'd never thought I'd see anything tha
t made hell look like a better choice. But there was no choice now. Ay was already walking through the gate of ivory fangs. Libba and Sippie followed, and the silver-dollar man. Jimi and I were the last, except for the red-haired woman.

  She caught hold of us both and pitched us into the beast's maw. Just before it snapped shut on us, I saw her red hair streaming in the wind from hell, and her eyes all wild. For the briefest instant I could swear I heard her voice singing. If she'd won back the music, and taken it away from us—

  We fell together onto a floor so cold it froze the blood in our nonexistent veins. It was ice, colder than cold, stretching as far as the eye could see. Things were frozen in it—things that had once been alive. There was no sign of the pit or the hordes of the damned. The beast and the red-haired woman were gone.

  We untangled ourselves and helped each other up. We slipped and slid on the ice, but nobody fell.

  I looked up. A wall loomed over us, rising sheer toward the darkness overhead. It took me a while to understand what my eyes were telling me.

  It wasn't a wall. It was a thing like a man, but not a man. I couldn't have told its size exactly, but it was immense. It was frozen in the ice from the midsection downwards. I could see the huge hairy navel, big as a cave, and the enormous bulk of the torso. Far above us, I just made out the jut of a bearded chin.

  "Great Satan," Sippie said. It wasn't an oath—Sippie never swore. She was naming the thing in the ice.

  I knew the way out of Malebolge. I'd read the book, too.

  "He better not have crabs," Jimi said.

  I wondered if Malebolge had ever heard a soul laugh before. I went down first, laughing harder than the joke every deserved. Then Libba caught it, then Sippie. Jimi and Ay rolled on the ice. Only the silver-dollar man stayed expressionless.

  There was an advantage in being dead: no hiccups. We stopped laughing eventually, and we all felt better for it.

  ~~~~~

  There weren't any crabs. There was a stink that, Sippie said, reminded her of an old billygoat. I didn't even want to know what parts of the Devil we were climbing over. The thick goaty hair gave good handholds.