by Mike Allen
He crawled forward, slow but sure, traversing the track in-between. He passed another globe and another, closing in on his prey shining with the bliss of its being.
One final globe and at last he was there. Now all he had to do was stall it. He needed to wedge something into the mechanism to hold it steady. This way he would give John Avery those hours he’d asked for.
The Tailor stood upright on the tracks with the gaping void on either side of his feet. His ankle shook and nearly gave way, and he had to wave his arms out straight on either side of his body to keep himself right.
He stabilised, and let out a slow breath that was too passionate for a sigh.
The globe, by now, was rotating closer and closer to night. Soon it would slip its mooring and sail off along the track to where the other used-up days sat, their coats faded from the harshness of the spotlights. Soon, soon the day would be done, and the Tailor’s promised unaddressed. And he had come so far, climbed so far, was even now perched precariously above the sheer drop that emptied out to nothing but a grey horizon.
In his pockets were all manner of implements and needles and miniature tools to mend the machine. His pockets, however, were all in the coat he’d left on the floor of his room.
He took a moment to curse.
Then he leaned over the globe and found the tiny mechanical catch that kept it isolated, and he wedged his thumb against it—that lean, learned thumb that had been used to pinch and hold and size the demands of thousands of years of sewing.
Almost too late he realised that wasn’t the right spot. A latch opened outside his hand and he had to swiftly move to keep it from closing. There was a grinding noise as the globe attempted to dislodge, and the whole world quivered and seemed as though it would topple.
But it held, the clicking latch pressed back on the Tailor’s sinewy thumb. It held and the bank of globes behind him waited dutifully, and the globes in front continued to bounce along, oblivious.
For one full rotation he waited. Then he waited another and another, averting his face from the dull glare of the spotlights (dimmed but not extinguished, signifying night.) He held himself in place with one strong hand gripping the appendage that kept the lights and plinth together.
The cloth grew faded.
Slowly at first, then like a day where the sun refuses to rise or set, the cloth faded as if smog covered the world. He should let go. Soon he should let go. One more moment, one more . . .
Brown patches of burn appeared gently, the soft cloth falling to ash. By then his thumb was so stiff with the weight of the latch that he couldn’t even be sure he was holding it anymore. And finally with a click, the globe rolled off.
For a moment, no globe took the plinth.
The tailor had to haul himself bodily over the spot, convinced he would fall, his knees so stiff and shoulders so weak he couldn’t feel when he was touching the track and when he wasn’t. He moved out of the way, willing the next globe into place.
Sure enough, the next globe rolled onto the plinth, latches and catches working perfectly to hold it steady.
The Tailor was too spent to even breathe a sigh of relief. He made to lower himself to the track, reaching out a shaking hand and bending to an awkward squat. He offered a silent acknowledgment for John Avery and his daughter, hoping it had been enough. Surely it had been enough.
He was so wrapped in his thoughts that at first he didn’t realise his hand had missed the track. His own hand, on which he relied every day, and now it fell beyond safety with an almost pre-ordained determinism. It dropped in something akin to slow-motion and pulled the rest of him with it.
His inside elbow scraped the track, following his hand. His chin snagged, but it wasn’t enough to hold him.
And then he was falling.
Head first, body unfolding behind, swooping with an uncanny grace. Plummeting through grey.
He fell and—
He fell and—
He fell.
Nothing caught or saved him. He plunged into the gap afforded by the precipice. He dropped towards a grey void that could’ve been anything but ultimately turned out to be stone and earth.
He fell and hit the hard ground.
He died.
The impact shook free the Tailor’s soul, which blossomed and ballooned above his crumpled form and then spread thin like a bubble exploding.
When it rose past the windows of the place that used to shelter him, only one witness was there to see it. Not the tyros, still busy at their work in the Tailor’s room, bald heads bobbing almost in time to the needle on the great machine.
It was the Engineer who leaned from the window, round-eyed with bemusement, reaching with short, stocky fingers for the suds of the Tailor’s soul. She rubbed with finger and thumb at the smooth stickiness it left on her skin. She frowned and gazed and wondered what other force could call her tailor-man away, and to where. What higher force could there be, she thought, than an engineer?
As he drifted from her reach and travelled, uncertain at first, then with increasing urgency into the grey-blank sky, she merely stood, paying heed to the last of her lost man.
The Engineer seemed—seemed, only—more human than her fellow occupants in this strange place. Were it not for the blank, calculating eyes and the permanent downturn of her mouth, she might be mistaken for a child of—what?—seven or eight. But she moved with the steely calculation of an intellect that had observed thousands of years.
One more Tailor, she calculated, had just been lost. The best one yet. One more disappearance, one more example of the only remaining mystery in a world she once believed herself to have built. It frustrated her. But frustration, like all emotions, was barely more than an intellectual effect. What benefits others received from emotions, she had never determined.
The remnants of the Tailor were all but gone, a bare shimmer in the distant air. The Engineer dismissed the sight, turning from the window. She slid to a seated position with her back against the stone wall, and pulled out a strip of plain cloth and a white tailor’s pencil. She looked thoughtfully to one corner of the ceiling.
Then, balancing the cloth on her knee, she wrote:
‘The Tailor hopes . . .’
In bulky, childish script.
She licked the tip of the pencil and chewed her lip and thought. She drummed her thumbs on the bones of her knee. Then she continued,
‘. . . hopes there were dragon flies and mud and spoke rattles for your bike and more—’
And more.
Then she crumpled the note in her fist, since cloth and pen marks cannot travel through whispers and rumours. John Avery and the unmet girl, Bella—if they were to be reached at all—must be sought in the traditional way, through muted words and the spaces in-between the words.
The Engineer leaned back to feel the smoothness of the wall behind her and to wonder idly, idly, what places she might visit. That is, if she could travel whispers and rumours, beg favours and elicit curses, roll across silence, across water-coloured skies. She wondered what more there was and more there could be.
ROOT AND VEIN
by Erin Hoffman
In the time before time, when the world was young and spirits now ancient walked the earth on their first legs, there lived a dryad of the green wood. In those days the trees had not yet their stillness, and roamed on curling roots dexterous as acrobat hands, searching.
The dryad gave her first heart to an alchemist. She watched him at his work; his blunt-fingered hands were soft and clever with herb and glass, and surely he would know how to care for living wood. With a paring knife she opened her chest, golden sap blackening as it ran in rivulets to her waist, and cut away the soft spring green of her first heart.
The two that remained skipped a beat, leaving a lingering moment of promised silence.
The alchemist accepted the heart as he would a great treasure, and studied it. “No,” he said at last, rueful. “I am afraid I can find no use for this. What purpose may i
t serve, needing so much care? A thing of value would live on its own. Imagine wood that creates its own light, and feeds upon air! Truly this one is quite plain.”
As the heart withered on the alchemist’s shelf, the dryad’s roots slowly stiffened. The packed earth of the town’s road confounded her footing, and she returned to the soft forest loam, where she found a painter who spoke of the hearts of trees with great reverence. He walked among the shells of the first stilled, spirits of trees whose roots had fled forever into the dark safety of the soil, silent monuments to love that feared and failed. Their branches, crowned with sunset stars in the crisp fall wind, whispered a requiem for their questing.
Under the shade of her brethren the dryad rested, and the painter remained, reciting his legends of arboreal beauty. He spoke of the glory of twilight, of the everlasting merit of shadow.
The dryad’s second heart was the color of falling leaves. When she pulled it from her ribs it gave a crack as of an autumn apple bitten at its ripest perfection, and her next breath was shallower than her last.
“How beautiful,” the painter said. “It is my greatest treasure, beyond my deserving.”
He crafted a pedestal and painted it white, the better to contrast the heart’s crimson veins and bronze wood. And there the heart rested in its loveliness, but under the elements, with time, began to fade. “I will travel to the white rivers of the far mountains and bring a font of crystal water,” the painter said. But this was a great undertaking and there were many things he must do first.
While he planned the heart began to dwindle, its crimson veins collapsing slowly to rust powder; the painter wept for it, but his tears were of salt that could not quench its thirst, and at last it died. The painter remained captured by the memory of its beauty, and stayed by the pedestal singing songs of its loss. His high voice haunted the whispering forest, and the dryad, with a deep quiet spreading through her, could not remain.
Beyond the borders of the forest thick snows had blanketed the roads, so the dryad did not stumble, and in their stiffness her feet no longer felt the cold. In time it seemed that the brightness of the snow under the dove grey sky was soothing and complete. Why not linger with the ice, succumb to the quietude that filled two thirds of her hollow breast? To her last heart the silent arms of the still forest beckoned.
But it could not be, for nothing mythical can rest, and there remained only the road ahead and the one behind. She was a creature of nature, and hers was not to retreat, though the forest with its dark warmth compelled. With no sun in the sky she followed the road, and with time the shadows of the still forest faded behind her.
Across her path passed a cloaked traveler, and his charcoal steed was an old work horse. They shared the road, and in that companionship the cloaked man told of his travels, and asked the dryad of hers. For the first time she tested a throat that had known no sound, and learned her voice.
“How old is the sky?” she asked him, when the stories of their travels were done. For it seemed as though she had walked the earth for centuries, and the sky had always been there.
The traveler thought on this for many miles. Finally he said that he did not know, and though he had met many wise men on his travels, none had been older than the sky. But he spoke of places where the sky had been the burning scarlet of young flame, or painted with strokes of colors so luminous they had no names. And he spoke of what he did know, of trees that swayed beneath autumn ghost moons, and of the stars that had been his compass.
The dryad’s third heart came forth so red that it was almost black, the color of summer grapes in the shade, and of winter pomegranates. The traveler’s dark eyes were serious as his weathered hands closed around it. Many more leagues they traveled together, the cloaked man, the dryad, and the grey horse.
“It grows dry,” the cloaked man said of the heart one day, and from a skin at his saddle he poured a careful measure of water upon it. Its wood drank deeply and stretched, growing two slender limbs that reached to the sky. Deep in her empty chest the dryad surged with life, cool and heady. This sustained the heart, and something within the dryad began to awaken. But the traveler with this was not satisfied. “It needs the sun,” he said, indicating buds that dotted the heart’s reaching arms, the color of polished wood, and his eyes. “We will go west, to the summer country.”
After three days the clouds broke and branches of sunlight reached down to melt the snow. As it ran away in rivulets that etched the spongy ground the dryad felt startled warmth returning to her feet.
And when the sun touched the dryad’s heart, its buds grew palest spring green before exploding into violet flowers. Its blooming arms lengthened, and downward stretched roots that found the ground and grew steady upon it. At last it opened eyes of charcoal grey, eyes that shone with the newness of spring. Within the dryad’s chest new life bloomed, a new warmth that carried its own sunlight within, and fed upon the air.
The dryad and her daughter did not have much time, for the younger could not remain still, even in the warmth of the summer country. The older dryad warned of alchemists that would measure a dryad’s heart and find it wanting, of painters that lived trapped in an image worshiped greater than life. And she told her of gentle travelers, who knew what it was to seek the sun. The traveler told the new dryad of the ways of the road, and the importance of caring for one’s steed. With this advice they were rueful, for they knew as they watched her that her heart was her own, neither spring green nor the violet of winter pomegranates, and it would require its own language, a language of sun and snow and withering.
As they watched the dryad’s daughter begin her journey south, the traveler shed his cloak and folded it across the grey horse’s saddle. “You dryads are fortunate to have three hearts,” he said. “Men have but one, and it can never leave us.”
“Then it should be carefully tended,” the dryad said, and placed his hand in hers. Beneath the traveler’s skin a new life stirred, life that had grown a dryad’s heart. “For it must last through all the seasons of the world.”
PINIONS
The Authors
Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, Oracles and A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards, and the World Fantasy Award. She currently lives in Northeastern Ohio with her partner and two dogs. She says, “I began writing ‘The City of Blind Delight’ after reading several medieval legends of the land of Cockaigne. I was fascinated by the details, such as the roasted calf and the houses of cakes. How do you live in the land of plenty? What is desire there? Add to this that trains are one of my constant obsessions, and you have Gris and his ticket. I want these places to be real, I want them to have always been real, as real as any other city on the railroad, and as accessible.”
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David Sandner has published in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, the Mammoth Book of Sorcerer’s Tales, and Baseball Fantastic, among other odd gatherings of words. He is Associate Professor of English at Cal State Fullerton, where his purview is Romanticism, children’s literature and the fantastic. He wrote The Fantastic Sublime and edited Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. He wrote “Old Foss is the Name of His Cat” in honor of the complete nonsense of Edward Lear who, he hopes, needs no introduction but is, nevertheless, too often in the shadow of that other famous nonsense poet of the Victorian era. Like Mr. Lear, David knows what it is to be friends with a cat, what it means to fear losing someone, and what it is to be unable to stop contemplating the ever-present mystery of impossible things and other such realities.
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John Grant is author of some seventy books, of which about twenty-five are fiction, including
The Far-Enough Window, The World, and The Dragons of Manhattan. His “book-length fiction” Dragonhenge, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was The Stardragons. His first story collection, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 2004. He is editor of the recent anthology New Writings in the Fantastic. Among his nonfictions are The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Clute), Masters of Animation, and The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, as well as the recent Discarded Science and Corrupted Science; he is currently working on a companion volume to these two, Bogus Science, on a book about film noir, and on “a cute book for kids about a velociraptor.” His powerful mosaic novel Leaving Fortusa is to be published by Norilana in the fall of 2008.
As John Grant he has received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award and a number of other international literary awards. Under his real name, Paul Barnett, he has earned for his editorial work a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award. He says that, like many of his stories, “‘All the Little Gods We Are’ owes its genesis to one of those little fancies that pass through one’s head a dozen times a day and are mostly forgotten before they’ve even come out the other ear, as it were. In this instance, I had an image of dialing a phone number and being answered by myself. Who knows how many times that notion must have been used by fantasy writers? Whatever, the rest of the story just flowed from there.”
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After growing up in Texas, Santiago, Kansas, Mexico City, and Indiana, Cat Rambo wandered through Baltimore, Bloomington, and Brooklyn before beating the B curse to settle in the Pacific Northwest. “I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, which does feature a ‘Dew Drop Inn Restaurant Lounge’ on Lafayette Street that was once just the Dew Drop Inn. I was always amused by the expansion, and when I was accosted in a Seattle coffee shop by a woman who thought I was her blind date, the two concepts interacted with each other and became ‘The Dew Drop Coffee Lounge.’” Other stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories, is available from her website at http://www.kittywumpus.net. Yes, it is her real name.
