Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “You’re wrong,” said the Captive Princess. “I am alive,” she said and then added because she knew it was true. “The Beast is alive.”

  “‘Beast’? Is this some sort of animal?” Jek asked.

  “It’s what imprisons me here. If you help me find and kill it, then we can all leave together. I will be merciful and overlook your attempted theft.”

  Kenson reached for the holster on his belt. “We don’t have time for thi—”

  The Captive Princess unleased the power of the scepter. It was all that remained of her royal heritage, but it belonged to her. No one else. The two men flew backwards several feet to land hard in the corridor. The Captive Princess continued to unleash her power until the two bodies stopped twitching.

  Well done, Highness, the Magician said.

  It was as she feared. She found the intruder’s vessel with no problem; they had entered through one of the many double-doored gates to the castle where she was held, but the vessel would not obey her.

  “The Beast is holding me here. Isn’t that right?”

  That is not the name it gives itself, Highness.

  “I don’t care! I want to be free.”

  Then you must do it yourself. I am forbidden.

  “I know that. Guide me to the Beast’s lair!”

  That, too, is forbidden.

  “You are sworn to serve me, Magician.”

  And so I do. I cannot help it that you do not understand how.

  She sighed. “You’re a useless old man. I’ll find the thing myself!”

  If there had been one single fear, one cause for hesitation greater than all others, it was the Captive Princess’s fear that, when the time came, she would not have the courage to do what she would have to do. She knew better now. She did not regret killing the two intruders. She did not feel remorse. Rather the opposite.

  “I can do this. I can kill the Beast.”

  The castle shuddered.

  “What’s happening?”

  The interlopers were not gentle. They damaged the castle while creating a hole in our gates. Attempting to compensate.

  Captive Princess didn’t understand what the Magician was talking about, nor did she care. There was a crackling sound and she saw the Beast. She had seen the Beast many times. She had never seen it before. The one who had seen the Beast was the Faerie Queen, not the Captive Princess. Yet she remembered. She knew the Beast for what it was.

  “Where are you?”

  The crackling died down, and the image of the Beast faded. But not before the Captive Princess saw something that she did not believe that the Faerie Queen had ever noticed—a panel. Glowing controls, like a pendant set with rubies and emeralds and diamonds. It glowed with its own light.

  “That is her magic. Magician, don’t tell me where the Beast is.”

  I wasn’t going to tell you.

  “Don’t be so literal. Just tell me where the magic is. Tell me where that slab set with jewels can be found.”

  And because there was no reason not to, the Magician told her. She took a staircase off the main corridor, a staircase she had never noticed before and would never have noticed. It led her up, far up into the castle. She saw many things on her journey to the place the magic was kept, things she did not understand. That was all right. She knew she was not meant to understand them, nor did they matter. Some were pretty, some were ugly, others merely strange, but none of them tried to prevent her from climbing.

  The castle shuddered again. For a moment she was seeing double, and it appeared to her that the magic was everywhere, that she had walked into a trap, and she screamed, but no harm came to her. In a few moments her vision cleared, and the stairs ended. She walked out into a large circular room, like the one in her dreams as the Faerie Queen, like the one in her vision as the Captive Princess.

  The Beast stood upright in a glass coffin in a nest of wires, like a spider’s web. Its black eyes were open, but Captive Princess did not think it saw her. The castle shuddered again.

  I misunderstood what the system was telling me. I didn’t realize. I am sorry.

  “What are you jabbering about now?”

  The thieves . . . .

  “They are dead.”

  They did this before you killed them. They started the shut-down sequence from the engineering section.

  “You’re talking gibberish.”

  They did what my programming would not allow me to do. You will be free soon, Highness. It can’t be stopped, now.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve come too far.”

  You don’t have to do this now.

  She smiled a grim smile. “Oh, yes, I do. I’ve earned it.”

  She gripped the scepter as the castle shuddered again. Just for an instant the doubled vision returned and she looked into the eyes of the Beast, who was looking into her own eyes, seeing the Captive Princess as she was and as she wanted to be with perfect recognition, seeing the Beast looking back at her, into her, knowing her for what she was, and knowing the Beast for who she was. The Captive Princess remembered the beginning, then. The ship, broken and lost between the stars. The endless, endless time.

  The Faerie Queen.

  “Just promise me something,” she said to the Magician.

  Yes, Highness?

  “I would be the Faerie Queen again. Just for a little while.”

  Yes, Highness. For a little while.

  The Captive Princess raised the scepter again and pointed it at the Beast, who saw the scepter pointed at her, and saw herself pointing it. In the next instant, the Captive Princess was free.

  The Faerie Queen’s maids, with their nimble silver fingers and mirrored, expressionless faces, set about their work. Soon the Faerie Queen was dressed for the ball. She was led to the throne in the ballroom and her courtiers were there. She saw them all, perfectly held in memory, perfectly rendered. No aging bodies, no failing control systems. In dark perfection, in perfect memory, no one was broken. No one was maimed or crippled by time. The Marquessa of Shadows smiled at her, and the Queen smiled back.

  They danced the first dance together, the last dance, all the dances until the Palace could no longer hold onto its memories, or to her, and one by one, the dancers winked out under the cold sky full of stars.

  About the Author

  Richard Parks has been writing and publishing fantasy and science fiction longer than he cares to remember . . . or probably can remember. His work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and several “Year’s Best” anthologies and has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. He blogs at “Den of Ego and Iniquity Annex #3”, also known as: www.richard-parks.com

  The Grandmother-Granddaughter Conspiracy

  Marissa Lingen

  Dr. Hannah Vang watched the cephalid turn the box over with his tentacles. She leaned forward, aware of the timer out of the corner of her eye without watching it. He was a smart beastie, she knew, and would get into the box to get the icthyoid in it. The question was whether he’d learned anything from last time. It was the same box, the same latching mechanism, everything as much the same as she could make it.

  The seconds ticked by. Finally the box sprung open, and Hannah sighed; seventy-two-point-three seconds. It had taken seventy-one-point-eight before.

  The squid-like alien did not remember. Probably it could not remember. And that was going to be a problem.

  Delta Moncerotis Four was home to a human colony of about twenty thousand. No one knew how many of the native cephalids there were, in seven different major species. They swarmed through the oceans, some of them phosphorescing merrily. They mingled with each other, except for the ones that didn’t seem to. They used things to pry into other things, if the other things were good to eat.

  The two things they did not seem to do were remembering and communicating with the alien monkeys who had invaded the part of their planet they weren’t using
anyway.

  Which would not have been important if the alien monkeys in question hadn’t wanted to gently but firmly kick the cephalids out of the waters around their city to build an isolated area for human-edible aquaculture.

  Hannah was sure that having the cephalids where they belonged would be good for the environment and good for the colonists. There was so much planet left to survey that the cephalid interactions with local coraloids and icthyoids might vary extremely, and, from her marine xenobiologist standpoint, interestingly. She had chosen a largely watery planet for a reason. But with an entire planet worth of oceans for the cephalids to inhabit, it was hard to convince the colony government that the specific area around the city was absolutely necessary for the continued well-being of anyone in particular.

  “We change planets when we settle,” the governor had told her. “That’s just how it is. If it was an intelligent species—”

  “They’re tool-users!” Hannah had protested.

  “They appear to be opportunistic tool-users. You know that as well as I do. They’ll pick something up and make it into a skewer or a pry bar, and then they’ll drop it in the silt and do the whole thing over again with a different piece of vegetation or rock next time they need the very same tool. If they could tell us they wanted to be where they are, we’d listen. We’ve had a good record of that since the third wave of colonies.”

  “I know. It’s just—even if they don’t remember things like us, they have their own interactions with their environment, that we barely know about yet!”

  The governor had sighed. “If you can get any form of communication with them, we’ll see what they have to say. But if we can’t talk to them, we’ll have to treat them like animals.” At her sad look, the governor said, “We treat animals better than we used to.”

  Still, even with the aquaculture developments well into development, Hannah found herself more determined, not less, that she would find some way to communicate. This was not proving easy with a species that seemed to figure everything out as if for the first time.

  On the other hand, it made them easy to keep entertained. She left the cephalid with a ring puzzle it had seen a dozen times before, busily trying the different ways to get the rings unhooked, and went home for the night.

  When the door slid open, Hannah could hear her mother’s voice in the living room. “You’re in my house, and you look like me, so you must be my daughter—no, granddaughter?”

  “That’s right, Granny Dee,” Lily said. “I’m your granddaughter. Lily.”

  “But I don’t remember you,” said Dee thoughtfully. Hannah closed her eyes and leaned against the door, letting them go through the ritual without her. It was best when Dee was not interrupted once she’d pulled the implant loose. The long pause was always the same. “And I remember that we’ve gotten good at curing genetic memory problems, so this isn’t the normal deterioration with age.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Lily. “You were in an accident. But we’ve got a device that can help you. You just have to plug this little cord back into the socket here, see?”

  The pause here was even longer, as it always was: Dee deciding whether she could trust her granddaughter, then agreeing, as always, to plug the augmenter back in. And then Dee’s voice was surer, just as analytical but with better data. “I’m sorry, Lily.”

  “Hey, no problem.” Hannah decided that was her cue to enter, just in time to see Lily kissing her grandmother on the cheek. “Could happen to anyone.”

  In fact, if it could happen to anyone, if it was common the way organic memory problems were, they might have a better design. Hannah had asked her mother three times if she wanted to move back to a larger colony, someplace where they had the personnel and equipment for a more permanent implant. But Dee’s response had been impatient.

  “This is your home,” she’d said. “And it’s my home, and more than all that, it’s Lily’s home. I don’t want to be somewhere else. We’ll plug it back in and go along with our lives, you and me and Brian and Lily. We’ll get by.”

  But Brian had left. He couldn’t stand dealing with Dee, and Hannah, when she was honest with herself, couldn’t entirely blame him. Her mother couldn’t live alone with the implant’s unreliability, and the colony wasn’t big enough to have facilities. But she wished things had been otherwise.

  “It’s easy for you,” Brian had said, throwing his clothes in his suitcase.

  Hannah had let her voice rise: “Easy?”

  For a moment he was the old Brian, the man she’d married. The one she’d counted on for Lily’s sake. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean easy. I know it’s not; she’s your mother. I know it’s not. But when you come home and she’s pulled the implant loose, she lets you talk her through to plugging it back in again. I don’t have time to deal with the constable every time I get back from work before Lily gets home from school! I don’t have the energy, Hannah. You know I always liked Dee, but—”

  “But,” Hannah agreed.

  “The good memories are getting soiled with every conversation with the constable,” said Brian. “With every time I have to justify my existence in my own house again.”

  Lily was like most of the colony kids, tough and talented, resilient, not afraid of work. She was not thrilled to have her father living across town. She was not thrilled to have to plug her grandmother back together every few days. But Hannah was proud to see that her daughter already understood that her life was not a series of endless thrills; Lily did what needed doing without a great deal of fuss about it.

  Hannah tried not to brood over dinner with her mother and her daughter. “Still nothing from the squids, huh?” said Lily.

  “Nothing,” said Hannah miserably. “I keep thinking I’ve got a chance at least, and then—” She wiggled her fingers in the air like tentacles. “They’re so clever. They’re so very good at figuring things out. If the other species are as clever as the pink ones, no wonder there’s sort of a squiddy feel to the whole ocean.”

  “But they’re still not clever enough to signal back and forth,” said her mother.

  “They’re not the right kind of clever. It’s not what they do,” said Hannah. “I’m really starting to think we’re on the brink of proving—to beyond a shadow of my doubt anyway—that this is just not what they do.”

  “But it’s what we do,” said Lily.

  Hannah sighed. “Exactly.”

  And if the alien species they encountered couldn’t bend far enough to do things the human way, would the humans bend enough to see how they were doing them instead? It had worked with some of the larger colonies of lichen-like species on Gamma Centauri Four, but elsewhere results were mixed. And on Earth, dogs and cats were immensely more popular as pets than squid and lichen.

  The cephalid did not grow easier over the next few weeks. Hannah watched her clever subject make his morning rounds. The pink tentacles groped along the tank, then slowed, delicately searching for something in the silt. Hannah’s heart skipped a beat: had he hidden something there for later? Would he remember after all?

  But no; after churning up the silt so that it wafted into the water, the cephalid resumed his exploration of the tank. He had likely been looking for a snack, and that was the sort of terrain in which juicy tidbits lurked. Instinct, not memory. Or perhaps they should think of it as species memory rather than individual memory? In that case, they’d be relying upon generations upon generations of mutation to teach the cephalids how to communicate with humans. Not, Hannah thought, heartening.

  She tried putting one of the remote machines into the tank with the cephalid and showing it how to do a few of the tricks she’d done. It repeated them, watching; there was something there that looked like short-term memory. But it didn’t last. No matter how many times she went back to the same puzzles, the cephalids didn’t recall how to work them after they’d been out of sight, or after even a few minutes had passed.

  Her return home was smooth and peaceful;
Dee’s implant had stayed plugged in, and she and Lily were frying tofu for dipping in nuoc leo sauce. Their hands were equally sure, and all the tofu came out soft in the middle and crisp on the outside, just perfect, just the way Hannah liked it, just the way she could never make it herself.

  Hannah watched Lily doing the dishes. She was nearing the age when colony kids found apprenticeships or went offworld to study. She wanted to ask Lily what she hoped to do, but she was afraid of the answer. Instead, she sought the mundane. “Got any plans for the weekend?”

  “I’m taking Grandma to the beach again tomorrow,” said Lily. “She liked it last time. And I have astronomy homework.”

  “Are you enjoying astronomy?” Hannah tried not to hold her breath for the answer. Astronomers traveled too much to keep close ties to their families on colony worlds; time dilation made it impossible.

  “It’s fine. Biology’s better,” said Lily. “Biology looks back at you.”

  “I think the astronomers would say that about astronomy.”

  Lily shrugged. “Then I guess I’m not an astronomer.”

  Hannah laughed and hugged her. “Have a good time at the beach with Grandma, then.”

  Lily smiled her self-contained little smile. “Oh, we will.”

  Later that night, when Lily was off typing homework answers into her handheld, Hannah sat down on the couch across from her mother’s armchair. Dee paused her book and looked expectant.

  “Do you remember that microscope you got me when I was a kid? Maybe five years younger than Lily, maybe more,” said Hannah dreamily. Dee made an encouraging noise, so Hannah went on: “It came with one of those books showing what you would expect to see, and I looked at a drop of water—we were on Alpha Moncerotis Six then, remember? And it was so different from in the book. The little unicellular creatures swimming around on Alpha Mon Six were totally different from the Earth ones.

  “And I loved it, I just loved it. I begged cultures from anybody who’d give me one. Cheek cells, hairs from whatever animal they were studying, plants from the colony, anything. It was the best present.”