This house had even been the site of a breeding pair of auxicaps, who had built their nest in a molecular Hedge for six years running, producing a whole flock of new birds that bred in turn.
The auxicaps had been thought to be an endangered species. They were the most selective, and would never go just anyplace. They avoided most fully built-up areas. But they had always seemed to like Pioneer Pines. It was now quite a center for them—another reason why people had been encouraged to move away. So far Lute, always a city girl, had never seen an auxicap, except in a book or on a screen.
In the fading light, Lute sat by her little portofire, cooking her hamburger in a responsible way, the prewashed salad in its bowl, the glass of sparkling Plancola to hand.
Now and then she touched the guitar. She didn’t play it.
Not yet. One day. When I can.
She had been promising that for months.
The rob scuttled around. It had taken a dislike to the harmless white rats now. Whenever one appeared, the rob would launch itself off its resting pad and trundle toward the rat over the roots and broken floor. She would have to reprogram it in the morning. A city machine. It had clearly gotten hysterical out here.
Machines did have personalities, robs definitely, especially if they were with you a long time. She had argued about that such a lot with—
Such a lot with—
With Cholan.
Lute thought about Cholan. Let herself do it. The memories poured in like a sea gushing from a giant faucet, drowning her. Before Cholan, despite her many friends—none of whom had been close—she had been alone. Her parents had left her college in loco parentis and had “gone home” to Earth.
Then, a year ago…
He’d come to see her at the stadium, one more fan of double-line soccer, with a program for her to sign. She was the Green Tigers’ main striker, and she’d spun three balls in the net. She always tried to be decent to any fan. Happy with her score, she was laughing and joking with all of them. Then Cholan was in front of her. Lute had fallen silent.
He held out the program in his long, dark-fingered hand. She signed, and glanced up into his face, and he smiled. Lute smiled back. At first she wasn’t sure she’d be able to. It was as if she recognized him—knew him. But they’d never met before. Their fingers brushed as he took the program back from her, and they both started. “Electric,” he said. Lute nodded. That was it.
Few things had been so simple. So good.
That year. That perfect almost-year. With Cholan.
She saw him nearly every day, and in the evenings they went dancing at the rinks, or drank sodas, or sat listening to music in the clubs. Cholan taught her how to really play a guitar. He would move her hands, and where he placed them on the instrument, she could suddenly make music—music that shone. He, too, could play guitar, and asera, drums, sax, and seventeenth-century mandolin. They sang together. His voice—velvet, dark as coffee.
The ones who knew about them figured that, once Cholan and she were seventeen—their birthdays were only five days apart, hers first—they’d marry.
Simple.
They even talked about it sometimes, but it didn’t seem to matter. Being together mattered. But the strange thing was, Lute felt she was with him even when they were apart. Somehow.
They seldom argued, except about things like robots, or soccer tactics.
Once he said to her, standing in daylight under the city clock, “You’re like a part of me, Lute.” And she replied, “Me, too.”
She’d left him only two hours before. She was sitting up in her bed, reading a novel that never after would she remember, when something happened inside her head.
It scared her stupid. It was like a light going out. A kind of blindness.
She jumped out of bed, ran halfway across the floor, wishing that her parents had not left her on-planet without them, wishing that someone in the sorority house was someone she could really confide in. She thought of her friends. They all seemed like cardboard cutouts. All but Cholan. But where she looked for him in her mind, she couldn’t see him anymore. He had vanished.
That was when she knew he was dead.
An automated door on the city’s overhead train had given way. Such an accident had never happened before, was thought impossible. Two or three people had been slightly hurt. Cholan was killed.
It was that simple.
Lute wrapped herself in steel. She was cool and hard and distant. No one could get in. She didn’t want them in.
She wanted Cholan, and he was gone. Forever.
Her friends, teachers, teammates, all the people she knew, they were concerned about her, tried to help, grew tired with trying and with her new steel surface. They gave up.
On her own, Lute seldom cried, and then only quietly, not wanting to be heard.
She began to hate the city. The city had killed him. She would leave, go somewhere she could cry really loud if she wanted, somewhere she could scream, and no one would hear.
Odd, though, now she was here in Pioneer Pines, she couldn’t cry at all. She had held it back so long, the pain, too, had changed to steel.
For several days Lute camped in the house on Pine Street that had had such famous people grow up in it.
She explored the town, striding up into the hills, which were going back to grass now, blue as Todd Ariano’s famous eyes.
She was okay if she kept busy.
At night, worn out from her long treks, she let the rob run her a bath in the portable unfolding tub, cooked supper, ate it. Reprogrammed, the rob was now sulky. It knew it had been stopped from doing what it wanted, which was to have hysterics every time a rat walked past or the foxile trotted up the stairs.
Once Lute saw two felinxes down among the crumbled stores on Main Street. They paid her no attention.
It wasn’t till twelve days had gone by that Lute saw her first auxi.
The bird flew in out of the green sky and landed in the pine tree. But the needles weren’t to its liking, obviously. After a moment it sailed down to the back porch.
Strange birds, the auxies. Weird.
And then the song began.
Twindle-twindle tweety trrr.
Lute stared at the auxi. Her eyes bulged. She stood up, her mug falling to the floor, spilling the hot tea.
Twindle-twindle—
“No,” said Lute. “I’m not going out of my mind. No. I’m just—imagining—”
“You’re not,” said the auxicap, poised in the open doorway. “You can hear me perfectly plainly. I said, ‘Hi, there.’”
Lute shook her head. She turned in horror to stumble away.
That was when she felt the edge of the auxicap’s wing brush, gentle and smooth, over the surface of her brain. Immediately Lute grew calm. Her eyes cleared.
She gazed back at the bird.
Twindle, it said.
No. It said, “That’s more comfortable, I hope.”
“I don’t—”
“Most humans we talk to don’t hear the words. They just pick up the ideas. But we can help them to feel a little better, if they’re receptive. You, though, Lute, are very receptive. You have the musician’s ear. Maybe that’s why.”
Lute sat down.
The bird hopped slowly through the room. Meeting the rob—which had frozen to the spot just as Lute had—the auxi tapped it with its beak. The rob let out a little twitter, went to its resting pad, and sat still.
“Machines sometimes respond, too,” said the auxi.
“Uh—good…”
The auxi perched beside her. It began to tell her of many things about the past of the planet. And of its own kind. Higher Intelligent life existed here. It was the animals who were intelligent, all of them to varying degrees. But the strongest minds existed among the auxicaps. “That isn’t our name, of course. Would you care to know the real name of my kind?”
“Y-es—”
“Naturally it’s in a different language from those of your own planet, b
ut I think you do hear me in your own language? Good, then. The real name for the auxicaps, what we call ourselves, is the Human Race. Shall I tell you,” it added, gentle and somehow smiling there in her ears and her mind, “what we call this planet?”
“What?” whispered Lute.
“Earth,” said the human auxicap. “It’s what most species call their own home place, you know.”
When the bird went away, flying off into the sky, Lute still felt calm. But she told herself she’d been dreaming.
That night she did dream. She dreamed she and Cholan were flying together on broad wings over the sky. When she woke, she cried for hours. It was like rain after a dry season.
She saw the auxi—the human—only once more. It perched neatly on the top of the unprotesting rob, and told her that, along with the ability to help, its kind—the human kind of this planet—could often bring out the talents of the other humans, the colonists who had settled here. It told Lute she already had a major talent for music.
“I can’t play anymore,” said Lute.
She thought, Here I sit, confiding in a bird.
It’s all right.
The human auxi said, “Is that since Cholan died?”
“Yes. I should forget—I should get over it—but I can’t—how can I?”
“You will never forget Cholan, or loving him,” said the auxi softly. “So your job now is to make all the world know and love and remember him, with you. Even all those he never met.”
“How?” she asked.
“Through your talent. How else? Through songs you’ll write and sing. Through the music of your guitar. Your love can’t die, even though Cholan died. Let it live, then. Tell it to the world. That’s your future—think! Even your name is a musical instrument of your Earth—isn’t it? A lute. Play it, then. Play all your music for him.”
As she rode back toward the city, new shiny songs ran through Lute’s mind.
She saw the rolling hills and plains, the prairies starred with fire-colored flowers under the wide green sky.
Pioneer Pines was full of humans again—auxi humans.
Who would ever believe it? No one. Don’t try to tell.
The rob stirred in the back of the hoverjet.
Twindle, said the rob. Twindle tweety trrr.
Are we there yet? the rob had asked her, like a child. And she had understood.
“Soon, rob. Only a few hours. Go to sleep now.”
See, Cholan, see, they’re kind of alive, too. And maybe you’re alive? Someplace else?
He was with her again. She could feel he was, there in her brain that the auxicap had brushed with its wing and opened up like a planet to new songs and new dreams. Cholan was with her. She wasn’t alone.
TANITH LEEwas born in 1947 in London, England. She was unable to read until almost the age of eight and began writing at the age of nine. After she left school, she worked as a library assistant, shop assistant, a filing clerk, and a waitress. She spent one year at art college.
To date she has published almost eighty novels, thirteen short-story collections, and well over 250 short stories. Four of her radio plays were broadcast by the BBC and she wrote two episodes of the BBC TV cult SF series Blake’s Seven. She has twice won the World Fantasy Award for short fiction, and was awarded the August Derleth Award in 1980 for her novel Death’s Master.
Tanith Lee lives with her husband, the writer and artist John Kaiine, on the southeast coast of England.
Her Web site is www.tanithlee.com.
AUTHOR ’S NOTE
The idea for this story came, like about half of what I write, out of “nowhere.” First I got the image of the place—green sky, small township growing and then going back to the wild. Then the three heroines arrived, complete with their names and characters. Zelda is named for the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lute for her music…Harrington, I’m not sure. I think I just liked the sound of a girl with a guy’s name! I wrote the story in a few days. But I really want to go back to that planet. So sometime it will feature in a longer work.
Pamela Dean
COUSINS
Kisandrion’s mother was fond of saying that water always rolled downhill. When Dri was smaller, this fondness had led to a number of juvenile attempts to cause water to do something else. Only twice had the water done anything else.
On the first of these occasions, Dri’s older brother chose a sandy hill, and the water at once sank into the sand without a trace. After the argument about whether sinking down into the sand was the same thing as rolling downhill, and the conclusion that sinking was not rolling and that straight down for—here came a subsidiary argument about how far water would sink into sand—that straight down was not the same as downhill, the four of them, Dri and her older brother and younger brother and sister all took the broiling paved road to the top of Mystery Hill. There they conducted an argument about whether it might not be better just to drink the water, which was sensibly resolved by drinking most of it but leaving a spoonful for the experiment.
Dri was nine years old at the time, and believed firmly that any place called Mystery Hill must surely cause everything to behave differently from usual. The water, however, ran down into a crack in the pavement, and its faint trail had dried entirely by the time the other three were done rehashing the argument about how much more water they should have saved.
Later that day, while their mother was putting smeary stuff on their sunburns, she remarked, “You do know that’s a metaphor, don’t you?”
“It’s an analogy, surely?” said their father.
Then it was necessary to go get out their books to find out what an analogy was; and the next day to go call upon a friend who worked in the Levar’s Library. When they finally had the matter sorted out to their own satisfaction, Dri’s mother attempted to explain over their usual Sunday dinner of fish and sea grass that when she said “water rolls downhill,” she meant, roughly, that many small things could invisibly join together to suddenly fall on one’s head in a surprising fashion, and that one might be less surprised if one bore this in mind.
The eldest child, Kiffen, and the youngest child, Sinja, had agreed, but Dri and Melandin, the middle children, as well as their father, argued that while resentment or a failure to react promptly might well be mitigated by bearing such things in mind, the initial moment of sheer surprise could not be so easily affected. The experience of Kiffen, who was a newly trained member of the Scarlet Guard, was sifted in the course of this discussion, as well as that of a neighbor who was a retired City Guard. The discussion alone proving unsatisfactory, Dri and Melandin spent a week leaping out at the other members of their family from dark corners and from under the stairs and, once or twice, from behind trees or walls far from home, and then pointing out triumphantly that their beleagured family members ought to have expected them to do so by now and yet were still surprised. No conclusions were reached, but a house rule had to be made about leaping out at people while they were carrying fragile or liquid loads, and another about following family members about the city to surprise them while defaulting on one’s own academic or professional duties.
Nobody else’s family argued so much as the Dorlianishes did. The upstairs neighbors, who took a dim view of all the discussion even though very little of it involved shouting, felt that the Hrothvekan origins of Dri’s mother must explain the Dorlianish family’s strange tendency to talk so much and so directedly. Dri had once tried to tell them that her aunts hardly talked at all, let alone directedly, but the upstairs neighbors were too pleased with their own reasoning to notice that they were being argued with.
It was her experience with arguments that got Dri a position in the Red Temple. After a year or so in the Scarlet Guard, Kiffen became an enthusiastic convert to the Faith of the Twin Forces. There was not much religion in Dri’s family. A visiting nonarguing aunt had once opined that argument was their religion. As a small child, Dri had found priests of any temple rather unnerving. They all dressed alike and l
ooked so full of concentration. Seeing them made her feel as if a collection of painted soldiers had grown to life size and was looking for her.
Kiffen, however, came home from his training overflowing with enthusiasm. “They give you your very own spiritual adviser!” he informed his intrigued family over their usual Rainday meal of potboil. “And she has to listen to whatever you say about yourself! And she has to figure you out! And if you don’t argue she tells you to do it!”
“How would you know what she does if you don’t argue?” said Melandin.
“Jairy told me. Jairy makes a mussel look wide open.”
“Why does Jairy talk to you, then?” inquired Sinja.
“Because I just keep saying things until he can’t keep still anymore.”
“Goodness, child, what do you say?” asked his mother.
“I say nice things about people he hates,” said Kiffen, with a limpid look.
“How do you know he hates them, if the only way you can get him to talk is to—”
“I observe his expressions.”
“When I hate people,” remarked Dri, “I don’t let them have any expressions of mine.”
“Why, Dri,” said her mother, “whom do you hate, and why?”
Dri was thinking of a certain fruit merchant who did not fall in with the usual City custom of letting children take the bruised fruit without paying. But Kiffen said, “She hates our aunt Mininu.”
“I certainly do not!”
“You certainly do,” said Kiffen. “Whenever she comes to visit, your face looks just like a statue.”
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