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

by Various

  The fight came to fast-moving claws against restrained purpose. His ice made glittering edges that bent the vision of the mesh-mind. The blood of his sacrifices confused their scent. He moved, as he had on the street that day, with the brutal grace of one raised to war, working his magic even as he wielded his yatagan. The glumper’s chest was laid open. Cinnamon-woman had her ear shorn off. Sage-man’s thought were flayed by a dream of mountain fire that slipped through the mesh-mind.

  But for every round of blows the hunt took, they landed at least one in return. Claws raked the shaman’s cheek with the sound of roses blooming. A kick traced its arc in blurred colors on their sight to snap bones in his left hand. A brand was shoved still burning brightly sour into his hair, so the grease there smoldered and his spells began to crack with the distraction of the pain.

  The hunt moved in for the kill.

  The Dancing Mistress once more emerged from the blurred glow of the hunt to find herself with claws set against the shaman’s face. The cinnamon-woman twisted his right arm from his shoulder. She looked up at the herbalist, who dangled bleeding like so much meat in the slaughterhouse, and thought, What are we now?

  “Wait,” she shouted, and with the pain of forests dying tore herself free from the mesh-mind.

  Cinnamon-woman stared, blood streaming from the stump of her ear. The look sage-man gave the Dancing Mistress from his place bending back the shaman’s legs would have burned iron. Their mouths moved in unison, the mesh-mind croaking out the words,“He does not deserve to live!”

  “He does not have a right to our power,” she countered. “But we cannot judge who should live and who should die.”

  The shaman bit the palm of her hand, his tongue darting to lick the blood, to suck her down to some last, desperate magic.

  Steeling herself, the Dancing Mistress leaned close. Her claws were still set in his face. “I will take your wisdom as you have taken the wisdom of so many others. But I shall let you live to know what comes of such a price.”

  “Wait,” he screamed through her enclosing palm. “You do not underst—”

  With a great, terrible heave, she tore his tongue out with her claws. “We will not have the Duke back,” the Dancing Mistress whispered venomously. She slit into him, plucking and cutting slivers from his liver and lights. The hunt kept the shaman pinned tight until blood loss and fear erased his resolve. Then the remainder of mesh-mind collapse. The cinnamon-woman began to tend to the glumper and the herbalist. Sage-man rebuilt the fire before ungently sewing shut the slits that the Dancing Mistress had made in the shaman’s chest and belly.

  Ice from the walls turned to steam as the Dancing Mistress fried the organ meats, the tongue and two glistening eyes in a tiny black iron pan graven with runes. The blinded shaman wept and gagged, spitting blood while he shivered by the fire.

  When the bits were done the Dancing Mistress dumped them to the blood-slicked mess that was the floor. She ground the burnt flesh to mash beneath her feet, then kicked it into the coals. The shaman’s weeping turned to a scream as his wisdom burned away.

  “Our water matter is discharged,” she whispered in his ear. “If your Duke’s ghost comes to you seeking restoration, send him to knock at my door.”

  Then the Dancing Mistress gathered the herbalist into her arms. Cinnamon-woman and sage-man brought the glumper between them. The shaman they left to his fate, blind, mute and friendless among the lonely gods.

  * * *

  The Duke of Copper Downs was still dead, the Dancing Mistress reflected as the night faded around her. Oddly, she remained alive.

  She sat at the door of the herbalist’s hut. The woman slept inside, mewing her pain even amidst the thickets of her dreams. There was a new water matter here, of course. The ties among her people ever and always were broad as the sea, swift as a river, deep as the lakes that lie beneath the mountains. She was bound for a time to the herbalist by the steam that the hunt had burned from the shaman’s icy walls.

  That man did not have much of life left to him, but at least she had not claimed it herself. Her people had the right of things in centuries past, when they gave up their power. She only hoped that rumor of the hunt was small and soon forgotten by the citizens of Copper Downs.

  The shadows beneath the rotten willows lightened with the day. The spiced scent of cookery rose around her, tiny boiling pots and bumptious roasts alike. The Dancing Mistress rose, stretched, and went to tend her patient.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jay Lake.

  Books by Jay Lake

  Rocket Science (Fairwood, 2005)

  Green (Tor, 2009)

  Death of a Starship (MonkeyBrain, 2009)

  CITY IMPERISHABLE

  Trial of Flowers (Night Shade, 2006)

  Madness of Flowers (Night Shade, 2009)

  THE MAINSPRING SERIES

  Mainspring (Tor, 2007)

  Escapement (Tor, 2008)

  Pinion (Tor, 2010)

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  Greetings from Lake Wu (Wheatland, 2003)

  Green Grow the Rushes-Oh (Fairwood, 2004)

  American Sorrows (Wheatland, 2004)

  Dogs in the Moonlight (Prime, 2004)

  The River Knows Its Own (Wheatland, 2007)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Polyphony 1 (editor, with Deborah Layne) (Wheatland, 2002)

  Polyphony 2 (editor, with Deborah Layne) (Wheatland, 2003)

  Polyphony 3 (editor, with Deborah Layne) (Wheatland, 2003)

  Polyphony 4 (editor, with Deborah Layne) (Wheatland, 2004)

  Polyphony 5 (editor, with Deborah Layne) (Wheatland, 2005)

  Polyphony 6 (editor, with Deborah Layne) (Wheatland, 2006)

  All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (editor, with David Moles) (Wheatland, 2004)

  Tel: Stories (editor) (Wheatland, 2005)

  Spicy Slipstream Stories (editor, with Nick Mamatas) (Lethe, 2008)

  Other Earths (editor, with Nick Gevers) (DAW, 2009)

  Footprints (editor, with Eric T. Reynolds) (Hadley Rille, 2009)

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  “Light goes by at the speed of time,” Marlys once told me.

  That was a joke, of course. Light can be slowed to a standstill in a photon trap, travel on going nowhere at all forever in the blueing distance of an event horizon, or blaze through hard vacuum as fast as information itself moves through the universe. Time is relentless, the tide which measures the perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2 GHz hum of creation counts the measure of our lives as surely as any heartbeat.

  There is no t in e=mc2.

  I’d argued with her then, missing her point back when understanding her might have mattered. Now, well, nothing much at all mattered. Time has caught up with us all.

  ***

  Let me tell you a story about Sameera Glasshouse.

  She’d been an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech, certifications from several middle-tier authorities, bouncing from contract to contract in trans-Belt space. Ten thousand women, men and inters just like her out there during the Last Boom. We didn’t call it that then, no one knew the expansion curve the solar economy had been riding was the last of anything. The Last Boom didn’t really have a name when it was underway, except maybe to economists.

  Sameera had been pair-bonded to a Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the surname long after she’d dropped Roz from her life. For one thing, “Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese grandm
other, which was a reward in itself.

  She was working a double ticket on the Enceladus Project master depot in low orbit around that particular iceball. That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded housing allocation and a fatter pay packet for her trouble. The E.P. got to schlep one less body to push green inside their habitat scrubbers. Everybody won.

  Her spare time was spent wiring together Big Ears to listen for the chatter that flooded bandwidth all over the solar system. Human beings are—were—noisy. Launch control, wayfinding, birthday greetings, telemetry, banking queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out there, multiplied and ramified beyond comprehension by the combination of lightspeed lag, language barriers and sheer, overwhelming complexity.

  Some folks back then claimed there were emergent structures in the bandwidth, properties of the sum of all that chatter which could not be accounted for by analysis of the components. This sort of thinking had been going around since the dawn of information theory—call it information fantasy. The same hardwired pareidolia that made human beings see the hand of God in the empirical universe also made us hear Him in the electronic shrieking of our tribe.

  Sameera never really believed any of it, but she’d heard some very weird things listening in. In space it was always midnight, and ghosts never stopped playing in the bandwidth. When she’d picked up a crying child on a leaky sideband squirt out of a nominally empty vector, she’d just kept hopping frequencies. When she’d tuned on the irregular regularity of a coded data feed that seemed to originate from deep within Saturn’s atmosphere, she’d just kept hopping frequencies.

  But one day God had called Sameera by name. Her voice crackled out of the rising fountain of energy from an extragalactic gamma ray burst, whispering the three syllables over and over and over in a voice which resonated down inside the soft tissues of Sameera’s body, made her joints ache, jellied the very resolve of the soul that she had not known she possessed until that exact moment.

  Sameera Glasshouse shut down her Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks, dumped the memory, then made her way down to the master depot’s tiny sacramentarium.

  Most people who worked out in the Deep Dark were very mystical but not the least bit religious. The sort of spiritual uncertainty that required revelation for comfort didn’t mix well with the brain-numbing distances and profound realities of life in hard vacuum. Nonetheless, by something between convention and force of habit, any decent sized installation found space for a sacramentarium. A few hardy missionaries worked their trades on the E.P. just like everyone else, then spent their off-shifts talking about Allah or Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path.

  It was as good a way as any to pass the time.

  Terrified that she’d gotten hold of some true sliver of the Divine, or worse, that the Divine had gotten hold of some true sliver of her, Sameera sought to pray in the manner of her childhood. She was pretty sure the sacramentarium had a Meccascope, to point toward the center of world and mark the times for the five daily prayers.

  She ached to abase herself before the God of her childhood, safely distant, largely abstract, living mostly in books and the minds of the adults around her. A God who spoke from the radio was far too close.

  Slipping through the sacramentarium’s hatch amid the storage spaces of corridor Orange-F-2, Sameera bumped into a man she’d never seen before.

  He was dark skinned, in that strangely American way, and wore a long linen thawb with lacing embroidered around the neck. He also wore the small, round cap of an al-Hajji. In one hand he carried a leatherbound book—actual paper, with gilt edges, worn through long handling.

  A Quran, she realized. A real one, like her grandmother’s.

  The man said something in a language she did not understand, then added, “My pardons” in the broken-toned Mandarin pidgin so commonly spoken in the Deep Dark.

  “My mistake,” Sameera muttered in the same language.

  “You have come to pray. In search of God?”

  “No, no.” She was moved to an uncharacteristic fit of openness. (Her time as Mrs. Glasshouse had left her with an opaque veneer she’d not since bothered to shed.) “I’ve found God, and now I’ve come to pray.”

  His expression was somewhere on the bridge between predatory and delighted.

  “You don’t understand,” Sameera told him. “She spoke to me, out of the Deep Dark.”

  Another crazy, his face said, but then he hadn’t felt the buzzing in his bones.

  ***

  It doesn’t matter what happened next. All that matters was that she told the imam. Revelation is like that. Put a drop of ink in a bowl of water, in a moment all the water takes on that color. The ink is gone, but the water is irreversibly changed.

  That was the beginning of the end.

  Or, for a little while, the end of the beginning.

  Marlys found it funny, at any rate.

  Another thing she used to tell me was that we are all time travelers, moving forward at a speed of one second per second. The secret to time travel was that everyone already does it. The equations balance themselves.

  Time has to be more than an experiential matrix—otherwise entropy makes no sense—but there’s nothing inherently inescapable about the rate at which it passes. If human thoughts moved with the pace of bristlecone pines, we would never have invented the waterwheel, because rivers flash like steam in that frame of reference. Likewise if we were mayflies—flowing water would be glacial.

  So much for the experiential aspect of time. As for the actual pace, well, life goes by at the speed of time. I don’t think Marlys was looking for a way to adjust that, it was just one of those things she said, but her words have always stayed with me.

  ***

  In 1988 the Soviet Union spent a considerable and extremely secret sum of money on a boson rifle. Only the Nazis rivaled the Soviets for crackpot schemes and politically-filtered science. America under the Republicans was in its way crazier, but all they truly wanted was to go back to the fifties when middle-aged white men were safely in charge. The Soviets really did believe in the future, some friable concrete-lined version of it where the eternally -withering State continued to lead the workers toward a paradise of empty shelves and dusty bread.

  Their boson rifle was pointed at the United States, of course. Figuratively speaking. The actual device was buried in a tunnel in Siberia. More accurately, it was a tunnel in Siberia, a very special kind of linear accelerator running through kilometer after kilometer of carefully -maintained hard vacuum hundreds of meters beneath the blighted taiga.

  A casual misreading of quantum mechanics, combined with Politburo desperation for a way out of the stifling mediocrity that had overcome solid Marxist-Leninist thought, had led to it. An insane amount of rubles went down that hole, along with a large quantity of hard currency, not to mention the lives of hundreds of laborers and the careers of dozens of physicists.

  In the end, they calibrated it to secretly attack the USS Fond du Lac on patrol in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the boson rifle’s firing plan, the submarine should have roughly tripled in mass, immediately sunk with a loss of all hands, and no culpability pointing back to Moscow.

  Nothing happened, of course, except a terrific hum, several dozen cases of very fast moving cancer among the scientists and technicians who were too close to the primary accelerator grids, and the plug being pulled on the universe.

  Though we didn’t know that last bit for almost a hundred years.

  ***

  Inventory of the sample bag recovered from the suit of the deceased taikonaut Radogast Yuang on his return from the First Kuiper Belt Expedition (1KBE). See specification sheet attached for precise measurement and analysis.

  -

  Three (3) narrow bolts approximately seven centimeters long, with pentagonal heads, bright metallic finish, pitted surfaces

  -

  One (1) narrow bolt approximately two centimeters long, damaged end, dull metallic finis
h, heavily corroded

  -

  One (1) flexible tab approximately eleven centimeters long, plastic-like substance, pale blue under normal lighting, pitted

  It is to be noted that these finds do not correspond in materials or specification to any known components of the TKS Nanjing or any of the 1KBE’s equipment and supplies. It is also to be noted that the China National Space Administration never officially acknowledged these finds.

  ***

  Lies go by at the speed of time. The truth bumbles along far behind, still looking for its first cup of coffee, while the whole world hears some other story.

  All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God’s dreaming.

  But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptotically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese-twinned to its precursor.

  That’s what we who remain tell ourselves. Why would I deny it?

  There has been a neutron bomb of the soul, cleansing the solar system, and thus the universe, of the stain that was the human race. Some of us remain, befuddled by the curse of our survival.

  No corpses surround us. We survivors don’t swim amid the billion-body charnel house of our species. They are gone, living on only in the dying power systems and cold-stored files and empty pairs of boots which can be found on every station, the deck of every ship, in the dusty huts and moldering marble halls on Earth and Luna and Mars.

  The lie that was revelation became truth, and the speed of time simply stopped for almost everyone except the few of us too soul-deaf to hear the fading rhythm of the universe. Sometimes I am thankful that Marlys could hear the music that called her up. Sometimes I curse her name for leaving me behind.