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

by Various

  Two other cars hemmed us in, behind and before. Todds in Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts stepped out, unfazed by the cold. One climbed onto the hood of my Corvair. “Your services are still required.”

  Penauch whimpered again. I noticed that the Todd’s breath did not show in the sub-zero air.

  The air shimmered as a bending light enfolded us.

  Af-afterwards, it, uh, it didn’t m-matter so much. I m-mean, uh, you know? He smiled at me. Well, n-not an, uh, a smile. Not with that face. Like, a virtual smile? Th-then he was g-gone. Blown out like a candle. You know? Flame on, flame off.

  —RCMP transcript of eyewitness testimony. Edmonton, AB. November 16, 2015.

  I awoke in a dark place choking for air, my chest weighted with fluid. Penauch’s hand settled upon my shoulder. The heaviness leapt from me.

  “Where am I?”

  I heard a sound not unlike something heavy rolling in mud. It was a thick, wet noise and words formed alongside it in my mind. You are in—crackle hiss warble—medical containment pod of the Starship—but the name of the vessel was incomprehensible to me. Exposure to our malfunctioning—hiss crackle warble—mechanic has infected you with trace elements of—here another word I could not understand—viruses.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Penauch’s voice was low. “You’re not meant to. But once I’ve fixed you, you will be returned to the store.”

  I looked at him. “What about you?”

  He shook his head, the rigatoni of his face slapping itself gently. “My services are required here. I am now operating within my design parameters.”

  I opened my mouth to ask another question, but then the light returned and I was falling. Beside me, Penauch fell too, and he held my hand tightly. “Do not let go,” he said as we impacted.

  This time we made no crater as we landed. We stood and I brushed myself off. “I have no idea what any of this means.”

  “It won’t matter,” Penauch told me. “But say goodbye to the cats for me.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  “I liked your planet. Now that the—” again, the incomprehensible ship’s name slid entirely over my brain “—is operational once more, I suppose we’ll find others.” He sighed. “I hope I malfunction again soon.” He stretched out a hand and fixed me a final time.

  I blinked at him, and somehow, mid-blink, I stood in the center of Valencia Street.

  I walked into Borderlands Books, still wondering exactly how I was wandering the streets of San Francisco in an orange Hawaiian shirt and a pair of khaki shorts three sizes too large.

  A pretty girl smiled at me from behind the counter. “Hi Bill,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”

  I shrugged.

  A hairless cat ran in front of me, feet scampering over floors that were badly in need of a polish.

  “Goodbye,” I told it, but didn’t know why.

  Copyright © 2009 Jay Lake and Ken Scholes

  Books by Ken Scholes

  PSALMS OF ISAAK

  Lamentation

  Canticle

  Antiphon

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Long Walks, Last Flights, and Other Strange Journeys

  Driving Mimes, Weeping Czars, and Other Unusual

  Suspects

  Books by Greg Benford

  JUPITER PROJECT

  Jupiter Project

  Against Infinity

  GALACTIC CENTER

  In the Ocean of Night

  Across the Sea of Suns

  Great Sky River

  Tides of Light

  Furious Gulf

  Sailing Bright Eternity

  Deeper Than the Darkness

  If the Stars Are Gods

  Shiva Descending (with William Rotsler)

  Timescape

  Find the Changeling

  Time’s Rub

  Artifact

  The Heart of the Comet

  Under the Wheel

  Iceborn

  Beyond the Fall of Night

  Chiller

  A Darker Geometry

  Cosm

  The Martian Race

  Eater

  Beyond Infinity

  The Sunborn

  Foundation’s Fear

  Man-Kzin Wars VI

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  In Alien Flesh

  Matter’s End

  Worlds Vast and Various

  Immersion, and Other Short Novels

  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.

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Muscles tire. Words fail. Faith fades. Fear falls. In the Sixteenth Year of the Sixteen Princes the world came to an end when the dragon’s back gave out. Poetry died first followed by faith. One by one the world-strands burst and bled until ash snowed down on huddled masses whimpering in the cold.

  The Santaman came reeking of love into this place and we did not know him.

  This is his story.

  This is our story, too.

  Prelude

  The Santaman Cycle, Authorized Standard Version

  Verity Press, 2453 YD

  I buried my father on Dragon’s Mass Eve. I dug the grave myself, there on the hill overlooking our homestead, beside the grave he dug for my mother some thirty-five years earlier.

  As I worked the shovel, I tried not to cry. I failed. And I recited the Cycle, just the way he taught me, as I cut the sod and turned the dirt out into a pile.

  Muscles tire. It was as if he stood with me. I could hear his voice grumbling on the wind that rose as the sun dropped and the air cooled. “Pause, Melody Constance,” he said. “Feel what the writer intended with the words.”

  I felt my foot upon the shovel, my shoulders as I bent and lifted dirt. I felt the hollow empty place inside that tried to swallow me whenever my eyes wandered to the wagon and the red-wrapped body laying there.

  Words fail. Again, a hesitation, a waiting. Silence to honor the moments no words can carry.

  Like this one.

  Only, it didn’t feel like a moment—it felt like a year, in the cold, working the shovel. Alone. Orphanhood settled onto my back and shoulders with a weight I’d never felt before. I had no memory of my mother; she’d died the morning I was born. So it was a loss I assumed and grew into, never really knowing what I’d missed out on, other than those times I stayed with neighboring families when my father needed to travel. But even then, it was only the slightest taste of someone else’s life. Working the mine and farm with my father was my life. And so was Dragon’s Mass Eve—his favorite and only holiday—spent quietly at home in our red paper hats with our fruit salad and rice stew while the faithful gathered at church.

  Faith fades. Fear falls.

  My mind blurred with my eyes as the tears overpowered me. The questions began to rise even as the fear fell upon me. What will I do now? Where will I go? How will I ever learn to live around this vast hole in my heart?

  They were all things we’d talked about in passing when he talked in the midst of his illness about not getting better. And I knew that I would find the desk in his office perfectly organized with carefully written instructions for everything that needed to be done and everyone that had to be contacted. He’d learned to be meticulous during forty years working in the Bureaucracy’s supply chain, and he’d instilled it into me. I think I was six when he put the first of many carefully scripted lists into my hands and sent me off to do my chores.

>   But having a plan and executing said plan were not the same thing.

  My eye wandered to the wagon again and I tried to tell myself it was because I was measuring how much further I had to dig. But I knew better. It was because I was close to finished. And when I was done digging, when I eased my father into that hole, he would be gone. I would only ever see him again in memory and dreams, in the half-dozen photographs tucked into our leatherbound copy of the Cycle.

  This would be our last Dragon’s Mass Eve together. My last time reciting the words with him. Our conversation earlier that morning would be the last we ever had, and it broke my heart open even further.

  I went through the Cycle three times before I finished digging, from muscles tire to upon his back, a world, quoting from the Authorized Standard Version that my father had studied during the single year he spent in seminary. It was the version he’d memorized as a part of his training, and though he’d set aside his faith years before, he still felt it had enough merit that his daughter should know it. So now I said the words, felt none of them, and gentled my father into his grave.

  The night was clear and cold but I paid it no mind. The hymn might’ve promised that the Santaman’s grace would find us here, but the reality was I’d already seen at least a half-dozen clear and cold Dragon’s Mass Eves and the Santaman had yet to come back, reeking of anything, much less love. There had been, according to my father, over two hundred and thirty-seven cold, clear Dragon’s Mass Eves to be exact, to the great consternation of the few remaining theologians.

  We were on our own.

  I was on my own.

  I shoveled the earth over him and went through the Cycle another three times for good measure. But even as I did, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. It was my first lesson in grief—that there never, ever was enough when it came to those we lost.

  On my last Dragon’s Mass Eve with Father, the rice stew grew cold upon the stove and I did not kneel and pray to the north. Instead, I cried myself to sleep, still covered in the dirt and drying sweat of digging my father’s grave.

  If Dragon’s Mass Eve be cold and clear

  The Santaman’s grace may find us here.

  But if Dragon’s Mass Eve be clouded sky

  The Santaman’s grace may pass us by.

  Hymn #475, “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear”

  Hymns of the Dragon and his Avenger, Contemporary Edition

  Verity Music, 2623 YD

  “Like this,” my father told me, unfolding the red paper and then folding it again in a different place, pressing the new crease into it with his massive thumb.

  I watched, then took it from him and folded it again. It was my tenth Dragon’s Mass Eve and it had gone like all of the others I could remember. First, he pulled out the jars and cans he’d collected over the year, separating the fruit from the vegetables and the cans of potted meat. The fruit came to me along with a notation on my morning chores list and I mixed it into a fruit salad. His own list called for preparing the rice stew, and while it simmered, we moved on to the hats.

  “I can never get it right,” I said.

  He chuckled, and it was a low rumble in the brightly lit kitchen. “Getting it right isn’t always required.”

  I watched his hands as they moved over his own sheet of paper, a fold here and a fold there, followed by a dab of paste and a cotton ball. I looked at mine and sighed. “Yours is better.”

  Lifting the hat, he placed it on my head and then pushed up his glasses. Then, he swept my paper and cottonball away with a giant hand and started over with them. “Mine is a wreck,” he said with a toothy grin. He nodded to the hat I wore. “Yours looks pretty good, actually.”

  We laughed and after, he put the battered hat onto his head. “Now,” he said, “we are ready.”

  We stood and went outside into the night. We climbed the hill out behind the homestead and faced north, kneeling at my mother’s grave. The stone that marked it was plain, dark granite.

  Harmony Angelique Sheffleton-Farrelly, it read. Then, after the date of her birth and the date of her death: Public servant, beloved wife and mother.

  My knees were cold. “I don’t understand why we do this,” I said. Ten was the year that I mastered the art of the subtle complaint.

  “We do this,” he said, “because it’s important to remember where we come from.”

  Of course, I’d heard the story of how he and mother had met, and about their first Dragon’s Mass Eve together in the supply basement of the Bureaucracy. He’d been one of a small number of trolls in public service to the Bureaucracy, his trollishness coming in handy for safeguarding their supplies. My mother had been his replacement after thirty years in the supply chain, but meeting her had caught some part of him on fire and he’d decided to forgo retirement. They spent another decade improving efficiencies, easing the government back to some semblance of functionality. Then they’d ridden west with some of the world’s last hope lining the bottom of an old coffee can to seed a mine that had long before gone dry. They raised a litter of love, selling off each pup that survived, and made do on their pensions.

  Somewhere in the midst of it, they decided to have me, and that choice changed everything.

  I put my hand on the stone. “But we don’t believe in the Santaman,” I said.

  “No,” he said, and winked. “We don’t have to.”

  We said our prayer quickly as the wind rose to threaten our hats. When we finished, I looked up. “Clouded sky,” I said.

  Father chuckled again. “Yes.”

  “Last year was clear, though.”

  “Yes,” he said again. “There have been quite a few clear, cold Dragon’s Mass Eves.”

  I kicked the dirt. “The song got it wrong.”

  I felt his hand settle onto my shoulder. “Getting it right,” he said again, “isn’t required.” We went back into the house and I pulled the door closed. He went to the stove and ladled the rice stew into simple wooden bowls that came out each year just for this tradition. He didn’t speak again until we were seated at the table, the fire crackling nearby.

  “Besides,” he said as he tucked his napkin into his open-collared shirt, “they changed the song a long time ago. While I was in seminary there were a lot of people wanting to update the Cycle and the Hymnal. The song used to say ‘will,’ which implied a guarantee that the clergy couldn’t afford to underwrite once the cold, clear nights started showing up again.”

  I’d heard this one before and I nodded. “So they changed it to ‘may.’”

  He grinned, his broad face lighting up. “Yes.”

  I tried to imitate his deep, gruff voice. “So when we sing it, we sing it as it was written—“

  He joined in and we finished in unison. “—just as the writer intended it to be sung.”

  I paused, my spoon paused above the rim of the bowl. “But it isn’t true.”

  He paused, too. “No, it doesn’t appear to be.”

  “So aren’t the new words more…accurate?”

  He took a bite, swallowed, and thought for a moment. “Only if the underlying premise is accurate. I can sing about flying fish that might bring little girls vast wealth for Dragon’s Mass Eve, but if there are no flying fish….” Here, he shrugged.

  I smiled and mimicked his shrug. “And so we return to my initial question. Why do we do it?”

  My father sighed. “Someday, when you have a child, you’ll understand it better, I think.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I will.” Then, I wrinkled my nose. “And I don’t want a child.”

  “Ah,” he said, “but do you want your present?”

  I nodded. “But let me get yours first.”

  That was the year that I’d written him a story about the two of us fighting Black Drawlers in the north while we searched for the Santaman’s fabled sword. I’d written it out in my best penmanship, and Miss Marplesbee, the sole teacher at the small one-room school in town, helped me bind it between piece
s of cardboard with bright red yarn. I was particularly pleased with the cover—one of my better drawings of Father lopping the head off a Black Drawler, with me poised carefully on his back, a dagger clenched in my teeth.

  And it was the year that he gave me the picture of Mother, wearing the dress she wore when she met my father, leaning against a desk in the drab cubicle wasteland of the Bureaucracy’s fifth floor. He’d build the frame himself.

  I was pulling the paper aside when I woke up. I lay in bed for a minute and blinked the dream away. It was a good Dragon’s Mass Eve. But it was twenty-five years behind me now, and the truth I swallowed made my stomach hurt.

  I looked up to the picture of my mother that had hung above my bed since the night he’d first given it to me.

  I forced myself up and drew a bath. When I walked past my father’s open door I did not let myself look in upon his empty bed, upon the spectacles that lay on his nightstand, folded closed and never to be opened again by his large, clumsy fingers.

  Muscles tire. It’s all we really knew. The dragon’s back held up the world. The poetry and faith of the Singing Literocrats held up the dragon by the will of the Sixteen Princes. One Literocrat fell to the sword, another to plague, a third to famine. Halved in this way, the choir faltered in its song and the dragon caved in on its spindly legs. The Sixteen Princes had no time to act, to change the course of this sudden, sweeping end. They drank wine and spoke of lemon trees instead.

  We sat in the cold until the Santaman came.

  The Breaking of the Dragon’s Back

  The Santaman Cycle, Authorized Standard Version

  Verity Press, 2453 YD

  The first week crept by with varied weather. Storms of sorrow blew in at the slightest provocation—the smell of him on his clothes, his pen laid carefully to left side of his desk blotter, the notes he’d written and organized for me. And on the heels of the sadness, a calm and foreboding hollowness that I didn’t know I could feel. Followed suddenly by inconsolable rage that had no place to go but inward, or else it might burn down the world.