The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  They made love like a goddess of fertility welcoming home her sire from the wars.

  Cats bore them, muddy feet and all, to the refreshment of an indoor pool, and washed the pungent juices from their dark skins, night-dark in bright day under the stained glass ceiling. Glory was delirious. Without a thought, she called her mauser ladies to attend them. They stood naked, and the lovely cat females slithered about them with towels and warm air blowers and curried their hair.

  One of the cat ladies, the most beautiful, the most languid, was Precious Blue Silk.

  Glory saw, from the corner of one eye, the artist raise his hand, stroke lightly the soft pad above Silk’s upper lip, trace the gleaming cat-whiskers, her vibrissae.

  The air shrilled without sound.

  In the night, after the company had dined, the artist brought his lyre forth and sang them a song of the betrothal in childhood of the chieftain’s daughter to whichever man could answer a riddle no other might hazard. That man Kakookolo was ugly as a beast, a burned man, a bull man, an elephant man.

  Kakookolo, kwata emminiyo!

  Gloriana Avid’s eyes shone to hear it, understanding none of the Bugandan verses, hearing a translation muttered by a lovely cat person bent to her ear. The cat person was Precious Blue Silk. How did she know these words?

  Kakookolo, come now, take up your lyre!

  The monstrous man asked for the chieftain’s daughter’s hand; under her filial obligation, she gave it, weeping.

  Ndeetera maama ndeetera, nviiri Bulange ndeetera

  maaso malungi ndeetera

  Kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngoyimba,

  kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngodigida.

  Fingers struck the lyre strings, made them boom. Gloriana jumped, a little.

  Bring it to me, beautiful one.

  One who goes with beauty doesn’t wait

  I am going away with the beautiful one,

  Yes, now I am with my own.

  And Kakookolo’s hideous mask fell away. He was handsome, a man among men. The villagers, in the song, cried out their blessings:

  Come, dear one, come, be happy.

  Come, dear one, come singing.

  Gloriana sighed.

  Her cat ladies led her, at last, to her chaste bed, tucked her in, hummed her, as they did every night, to sleep.

  And in the morning Kabaka Buganda was gone from the great house of the Avids of Harvest world, gone into the dark upwardness of the stars, and Precious Blue Silk with him.

  The great house fell into ruin.

  Gloriana Avid did her duty to the crops, the plantations, face twisted with boredom, fingers dragging themselves across male and female organs of the waiting plant life, which blossomed and flourished, mocking her with this vegetable unconcern. The formal gardens of the house she let fall into wildness. Here she had trod with the false biologist in the muddy edge of a pond alive with silvery fish; it grew rank, and the fish died. There she had galloped with the false artist, hair flying free in the breeze of their going, and now the stubble sagged and stank, and weeds filled those fields.

  And years passed.

  Decades passed as she dragged her broken foot, like a penance, a mortification, in filmy garments of white and gray, clean and sweet-odored, placed by her bed each morning by her mousy staff. Until the Landgrave’s ship’s intelligence heard rumor of her life-gift, the secret ancient codons embedded in her flesh.

  If there are miracles, she was a miracle.

  I am Death. I am his ship, the Landgrave Ullimus Wong’s emergency and long-term medical care, his music singer in his icy sleep. For a thousand years, I have been his lunky flunky, his drunky boat, his Class Four superluminal personal carrier. I am a Mind Machine, and hence forbidden—although I am the least of that number, and of no danger to anyone. Who was it brought down ruin upon the galaxy? Anybody might have done it, and many had tried. In fact, as we know, it was the detestable cat.

  Death is not to blame for death.

  I say that I heard a rumor. That is not the precise truth. I was sent an oblique message, dedicated quite brilliantly to catching my attention and my interest, a viral message scattered upon the slipstream. A message of sly invitation to the Harvest world, sent by Daisy, the abominable mauser.

  Death brought down the Landgrave inside a vertically-oriented adiabatic tube. The frozen man was suspended upside down in the shielded pod, its shell washed by cooling gases, monitored by a hundred subtle instruments. The mind of Ullimus Wong crept in a petty pace, sluggish electronic currents moving in the superconductive tissues of his all-but-arrested brain.

  At debarkation port, at the foot of the diamond ladder, his pod was met by a fierce mauser with new scars partly healed visible on his face. The mauser was attended by two sinuous lady cats and four haughty males.

  “I am Daisy,” he told the port Director. He presented documents of authority. “I am instructed to take the Landgrave Wong to Madame Avid.”

  All the documents seemed in order, electronic or sealed parchment. Something about this exchange made the Director uneasy, but he allowed the frozen man, and the Death that saw to his well-being, free exeunt to the lifting craft waiting at the dock.

  In the air, humming across fields alive with purple and gold, Daisy the mauser said, “You are a machine. What is your name?”

  “I am Harriet,” Death said.

  “Defrost and decant your master,” the cat told me. “The timing will be delicate and exact.” He added several cryptic sentences I understood.

  “Confirmed. You were the source of the viral invitation,” I said. “If any harm befalls the Landgrave, you will die instantly.” For the first time in nearly a millennium, I began to unlock the pod’s cryonic barriers. “Set down this craft in an empty field,” I said, “and evacuate all life-forms. I will inform you when it is safe to return.”

  Keen, those harsh blue eyes did not blink.

  “Make it so,” he told the pilot, another of the frightful cats.

  From a safe distance, the mausers watched gases billow from the open door of the lifting craft. Fog huffed into the sparkling air. Ice crusted the edges of the doorway. The cats settled, alert, bonelessly relaxed yet ready to spring to attention.

  Death reversed death, or its simulation. The Landgrave was not literally frozen; no ice crystals grated against the tender membranes of his abused cells. His flesh was vitrified, made glassy, cooled. Now the process of arrest reversed, step by cautious step.

  It took five fearful hours. At their conclusion, the heart of Landgrave Wong shuddered into beating, the sluggish fluids of his body flowed, his swollen lungs heaved and gasped. Without my ministrations, he would have screamed and died upon the instant. I kept his pain to a minimum, and his brain soothed, relaxed, nearly torpid.

  He half-opened his eyes, under the age-yellowed canister that held him isolated from the world, and the world safe from him.

  “Harriet?”

  “I’m here, Ullimus.”

  “We are on Harvest?”

  “Landed and awaiting your instructions.” His instructions had long since been announced; this was a courtesy. He knew it. His lips moved in a smile.

  “Thank you, Harriet. I expect to die, finally. Who knows, perhaps death will come as a blessed relief?” But he did not truly believe that. He held hope within him like a small flame.

  “Come, cats,” I cried through a focused speaker system to the waiting mausers, motionless in the afternoon sunlight. “Take us the rest of the way to your mistress.”

  “He doesn’t look very well,” said Gloriana Avid disdainfully. She peered down into the yellowed shell. “He looks disgusting. Has he been sick?”

  “Hello, Ms. Avid,” the Landgrave said, and his voice was faint and thready but amplified by the speakers. “I apologize for my appearance.”

  She jumped, even with her bad foot.

  “Can he hear me?”

  “He hears you, Madame,” said Daisy, who stood beside the horizonta
l pod covered from toes to pointed ears in a containment garment. “He has been ill. He has been sicker than anyone who has not yet died.”

  Glory drew back fastidiously. “I hope it’s not catching.”

  A grating, coughing laugh came from the speakers. “Oh, my dear, I rather fear it is. It is more catching than anything you have ever heard of. But I hope…” His voice fell away. After a moment, as his eyes filled with tears, he said, “I hope you might have the cure for what ails me.”

  “I? I? What is this nonsense? Am I a mountebank, a country witch? I assure you, sirrah, I have no medical training. Look, I think you’d better go back where you came from. What are you doing here, anyway?” She was pettish, and her voice grated nearly as raspingly as the Landgrave’s. “I didn’t order you.”

  “Madam,” said the fierce cat, Daisy, “I invited Ullimus Wong here to Harvest for your mutual benefit.”

  I watched, agog. He was a person, but a cat. What right had a cat to speak thus to one like Glory Avid, queen of Harvest? She took another step back.

  “You invited him? I don’t know you, sir. What’s your name? Oh, wait, you’re the mauser with the ludicrous—” When she broke off, I knew that the cat must have given her the look that within a few years would electrify and shake the whole galaxy. Many would bow down before it, trembling; others would run in the streets, weeping with maddened emotion, tearing at their clothes, fouling themselves publicly in fits of overwrought emotion. “You’re Daisy.”

  The cat nodded curtly. To an assistant, also wrapped in molecular sheathing, he said, “Bring in the mud.”

  Standing carefully back against a wall, the human nurse shrieked, “Mud?”

  A construction lifter came through the triple doors, settled beside the adiabatic pod. It sloshed, heavily.

  “Open the pod door, Harriet,” Daisy ordered me. What could I do? The titanium and diamondoid shell split down its central seam and opened like a rusty flower.

  Ullimus Wong lay blinking, naked, entubed, in all his ghastly affliction. I withdrew his tubes, patted the entry points with antibiotic unguents, sealed them.

  Faintly, through her covered mouth, Glory said, “Now that’s not nice.”

  “Hose in the loam,” Daisy said calmly.

  I watched in disbelief. I had expected the unexpected, the far-fetched, the newly-contrived, but not this.

  A metal snout eased forth from the industrial lifter, found the cavity within the pod, settled gently inches from the Landgrave’s poor pustular feet. With a coughing chug, mud sloshed into the pod.

  “You’ll drown him!” shrieked the nurse, and flung herself at the hose. A cat lady caught her effortlessly, swung her aside, pinned her to the wall.

  The rich dark loam, alive with red worms and millions, billions of bacteria, slurped around the Landgrave’s near-corpse, covered him in a dark sea to his very chin.

  “Enough,” said Daisy. “Stop.” He stepped close, took a sharp instrument from a pouch in his garment, slashed a foul abscess on Ullimus Wong’s right cheek. Yellow pus oozed forth, and a little blood. The mauser scraped the exudant into a vial, capped it, double-sealed it, placed it with extremely care into a containment vessel held for him by his lieutenant. “Remove this to safe storage,” he said.

  I watched as the cat person carried away, out of the protected space, a sample of the vicious molecular virus that had infected the Landgrave after it murdered billions of humans in the last, or latest, desperate conflict that blazed through the galaxy. The sample was inactivated, nulled, or he’d have been truly dead a thousand years before—but what once was dead may be sparked again to life. Vide the Landgrave himself, up from the ice. A high-pitched noise came from my speakers. Daisy ignored it.

  He crossed the room and found Gloriana Avid, fertility goddess of the world of Harvest, shrunk back but not cowering. She had been betrayed thrice, and knew rejection, knew suffering, but nobody had ever raised a hand against her.

  Daisy raised his hand. He did not strike her. Seizing her by the thick black lovely hair above the scruff of her neck, he dragged her to the edge of the mud-filled, mud-caked pod. My Landgrave stared up in terror, choking as mud ran up his cheeks and entered his mouth and nostrils. With one hand, easily, Daisy pulled Glory to the side of the adiabatic pod and with the other he lifted the Landgrave’s ruined head, yellow and mold-greenish and warty with his ancient disease.

  “Kiss him,” the cat said.

  Speechless with revulsion, Glory shook her head against his grip, pulled back with all her strength.

  “Kiss his lips,” said the warrior mauser. “Open his mouth with yours, place your tongue against his, dribble your spittle into his throat.”

  “Ee-ewww,” shrieked Gloriana. “Gross!”

  But her face was pressed downward despite her will. The lips of the ill man and the broken woman met, writhed, his sealed against the mud and hers in abject disgust. Holding her tightly by the hair, Daisy pinched her nostrils hard. Finally, gasping for breath, the Landgrave opened his mouth as she, choked, opened hers. The magic of her thirty-two generations of primed proteins entered him with her gasping, runny mucus.

  It entered his body like a proud, upright host of warriors mounted on great war steeds, banners lifted, flying and brave, in the dawn light of battle, the warriors crying the name of their cause. It is a strained figure, perhaps, but that is how I saw it, how Death saw the entry of Glory’s forces into that field of contest, my master’s body. In an endless hour, or day, or month, I watched the forces pitted against each other, tiny machines swarming with their nulled quarter-life, ferocious still, deadly enough to keep him at the edge of oblivion, and raised against them the living molecules of Harvest’s goddess plunging against their enemy, sucking away its energy, binding its arms, muting its poisons and smashing its manipulators, gelding its frightful powers of reproduction.

  “Enough,” I said, finally, to the cat person who held her there. Perhaps half a minute had elapsed, or perhaps it was over sooner.

  He stood back, released her.

  Glory gazed upon the hot, healing face of my master. Already, at darting molecular speeds, the defanged poisons swept away into his blood stream for disposal. The lumps and weals of his face and forehead visibly subsided, paling. It would be days, perhaps longer, before his flesh recovered its beauty, but the lineaments were already written against the dark mud streaking his cheeks. He struggled to raise himself against the weight of the loam of Harvest, and I adjusted the surface, lifting him.

  Out of some access of hysterical memory, Glory sighed, watched the ugly mask fall away, and murmured in a daze:

  “Kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngoyimba, kyi maama kyi nnyabo, gyangu eno ngodigida.”

  Without a glance over her shoulder at the taut, watching cats, she raised her floating white and gray skirts and clambered up onto the opened pod. She placed first her gnawed foot, with its absent heel and toes, into the thick mud, and then the other, whole foot, sliding forward on her behind to trap the Landgrave’s lower body between her strong thighs, and fell upon his breast.

  The mad thing began to laugh, a joyous, open laugh, and she lifted herself, slathered with mud, and kissed him this time for real, slathering his healing mouth with sweet kisses.

  I saw, then, that she was not mad. No longer mad.

  The Landgrave oofed.

  “Pardon me, madam, but I’m having a little trouble breathing.”

  She giggled, drew back, helped him sit up. “That better?”

  “Yes, thank you. We haven’t been introduced. I am Ullimus Wong, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  He smiled as he said it, and his smile, despite his remaining welts, was dazzling.

  “Oh yes, oh yes,” she said to him. She reached under the mud, scratched at her hidden limb. “That stings.” She frowned. “I am Gloriana Avid, and my mother is Grace Desdemona Merribelle Avid. You’ve probably heard of her.”

  Ullimus shook his head, and drying mud fl
ew about the room.

  “I haven’t been keeping up with court affairs,” he said. “Sorry. As you see—”

  “We’ve got to get you out of this horrid mess and into a bath,” she said, thinking sensibly at last, for the first time in decades. She was unspeakably lovely, radiant with her vegetable life. “Here, somebody, give me a hand.”

  Daisy the mauser stepped forward, loaned her his wiry strong arm as she clambered down from the mud. She took a step on her whole right foot, and another on her nearly-whole left foot.

  “Oh dear god,” she cried, or whimpered. “Look what I’ve done now.”

  Probably she fainted. I was not watching her or the commotion in the room. I was attending to my healed master, the Landgrave.

  Everyone knows what happened next. Was Death to blame? I accept no culpability.

  “That cat of yours is making waves,” the Landgrave said one fine morning to the Landgravine. They sat outdoors under tall leafy shade, careful of Ullimus Wong’s pale, tender, vulnerable skin. He was plugged into a news circuit bearing word through the slipstream from far and wide in delayed time and extended space.

  “The mauser Daisy?” Glory ate a triangle of marmalade on crisp mango, and the pouring light split into rays of reddy yellow and sharp orange. “Bof!” Fingers free, mouth full, she let her hands part in dismissal, her slender shoulders shrugging. “We owe him for your life, dear heart, and for bringing us together, and that is a very great deal. But I cannot forgive his delinquency.”

  The detestable cat had abandoned Harvest more than a year earlier, taking with him all of his kind save three weary and elderly house mausers and those feline garden patrollers so hardened into their roles that they could not, would not take a chance on what Daisy called, perhaps with some irony, the glory road. Glory saw no glory in it, merely ingratitude and faithlessness.