Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35

by Nina Allan

  Apprentice takes a step forward and curtseys, pinching her pajama legs as if they were a skirt.

  “Journeyman, as The Mysterious Guide and the Pedestrian!”

  Journeyman—who, unlike the actor in the play, is unbothered by his nudity—makes an elegant court bow.

  “The Eccentric Owner and the King, played by our beloved Nestor!”

  Nestor hops forward, grace belying his aged face.

  “And finally,” Rosella steps forward, “Nameless Actress and Rosella, played by myself. I am Director, and I hope you have enjoyed our show this evening, whoever you are and wherever you may be.”

  They bow again. The trees whisper.

  Apprentice goes to bed with a stomachache. Vivi’s character clings to her like grime. All Vivi wants is another rough fuck from that Pedestrian. She’s such a nasty cluster of control fantasies and boredom.

  “Is anyone even watching?” Apprentice asks as they lie in their sleeping bags.

  “Of course,” says Nestor. He scratches his upper lip with a dry noise. The King’s moustache gives him a rash.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Oh, I hear them sometimes, rustling their confectionery bags.”

  Apprentice peers out into the darkness, the trees, the pinprick stars between their branches.

  The next day, they are at the bottom of the sea. Director has decided on a straightforward play: The Prince and the Abyssal Queen. Journeyman is the Prince of Yr, and Director the Queen of the Abyssal Plain; Apprentice is The Sly Fish and Nestor the God of the Abyss.

  The play begins as the fish has lured the fair Prince into an enchanted boat, which dives down into the ocean depths, the Sly Fish gleefully pulling it along on a string. The Prince is distraught, of course: He’s been abducted, he’s afraid of water and the dark. Three little anglerfish keep pace with the boat, lighting it with their lanterns. One of the smaller anglerfish tries to attach itself to the biggest one. It must be mating season.

  The Prince reaches the bottom, treads onto the Abyssal Plain, and becomes the Queen’s consort. He’s snared by her spells and stays there for a year before the spell is broken. He begs the Sly Fish to help him flee to the surface; the fish agrees, in exchange for the Prince’s promise of the first living thing he loves. In a very striking scene, the Queen appeals to the God of the Abyss for aid, and he grants her the Harp of the Deep. The Queen sits on her throne, playing her harp to lure the Prince back.

  Of course, there are twists. Quickly rising to the surface, the Prince’s ears are so damaged by the pressure changes that he is rendered deaf. He returns to the kingdom of Yr, where he enters into an arranged and unhappy marriage, but has a son he loves dearly. Over the years, he forgets about his promise to the Sly Fish, and one day brings his family to the beach. When the boy takes his first steps into the ocean, the Sly Fish pulls him under. But as soon as the boy’s head comes under the surface, the Harp of the Deep claims him; it’s in his blood to return to the Abyssal Plain. Thus the Sly Fish loses as it always must, and the Queen receives something but not what she asked for, and the Prince of Yr pays for his idiocy in blood.

  They make camp under the boat, which is much more roomy when turned upside down. Two of the anglerfish have disappeared off to somewhere, leaving the third one to float alone under the ceiling. Director and Journeyman embrace in the fore, both moved to tears by the story’s unbearably sad conclusion. Nestor is sound asleep at the aft, chin reduced to a rashy mess from the ocean god’s beard. Apprentice lies in the middle, still in her fish costume, listlessly flopping her ventral fins. The Sly Fish’s dreams of love, just a little love, insist on crowding her thoughts. It’s the loneliest creature in the ocean. She eventually falls asleep, lulled by the sound of blood rushing in her ears and the rhythmic rasp of the anglerfish’s lantern scraping the hull.

  Apprentice wakes with flailing arms. Her hand hits something soft, and Nestor mutters irritably in his sleep. Disturbed by the motion, silt tickles her arms. It’s crept up on her while she slept. In the pale light of the anglerfish’s lantern, everyone else seems to be asleep. Apprentice is wide awake. She gently catches the anglerfish in her hand and crawls out from under the upended boat.

  The water outside is crushingly cold, pressing down with the weight of the world. Outside of the tiny sphere of light the weakly struggling anglerfish gives off, darkness is absolute. Apprentice slowly steps out onto the abyssal plain, back bent under kilometers of sea. She can just about see her own feet shuffling through the silt, sometimes disturbing the odd object: a Roman coin, a blackened silver fork. Blind and transparent fish appear in the gloom. Some of them follow, the wanderers between the depths, those who still have eyes; they flash arcane patterns at her in fluorescent blue and green. In the utter silence, Apprentice thinks she hears the sound of flutes far away, a discordant piping.

  Eventually something winks in the distance, like a star, or another swinging lantern. Apprentice strides toward it.

  It’s a bathyscaphe, round like a fruit, with a porthole out of which spills a warm yellow light. The winking light comes from a small headlight at the top. There’s a face in the porthole that doesn’t belong to anyone in the company. It’s a stranger. A woman. She motions for Apprentice to walk around to the other side of the bathyscaphe, to where a little airlock protrudes from the sphere. Apprentice turns the wheel, stops inside, closes the door and watches the water drain out. The inner door opens, releasing a puff of warm air.

  The woman is in her fifties. She’s dressed in dungarees and a knitted sweater, one of those sweaters with a pattern that stops at the waist, because the rest is for tucking inside the dungarees. She’s barefoot. Apprentice wonders if the pattern belongs to a particular family.

  “Hello,” says the woman and peers at Apprentice. Her eyes are a little glassy and unfocused.

  “Hello,” says Apprentice.

  They look at each other in silence.

  “You’re dressed like a fish,” the woman remarks.

  “I play the Sly Fish.” Apprentice flaps a ventral fin.

  The woman nods slowly. “All right. I’m Ada.” She extends a hand.

  Apprentice shakes it. “Apprentice. Are you the audience?”

  “Apprentice what?”

  “Just Apprentice.”

  “I see. And what are you doing here? It’s the bottom of the ocean.” Ada tilts her head. “I expect you’re a hallucination. I must be suffocating already.”

  “You’re very pink,” says Apprentice. “People who suffocate are blue. Anyway I’m here with the troupe. Are you the audience?”

  “Troupe?”

  “Yes, the troupe! We’re here!”

  Ada shakes her head. “What do you do exactly?”

  “We …” Apprentice falters. “It’s we who play the stories.”

  “Never heard of you.”

  “So you’re not here to watch?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place.” She extends a hand to caress a cluster of tubes running down the inside of the wall. “This is the Laika. I thought it was a fitting name. Small, round, and lonely, you know?” Ada chuckles to herself. “Anyway, I was taking her for a test drive. Checking the systems and such. We were going into the Mariana Trench, eventually. Not the Challenger Deep, mind. Not yet. Anyway, I knew there was a risk. Should have known better than to christen her Laika. I’m Laika, really.”

  “Uh,” says Apprentice. “Who’s Laika?”

  “She was a dog that … oh never mind. The point is, the cable snapped and so did the oxygen line.” Ada pauses. “Actually I’m not sure. I think maybe something chewed on it. It’s gone, anyway. I’m done for.”

  “Oh,” says Apprentice absently. She swallows at the knot that’s suddenly formed in her throat.

  “I’m just waiting for the oxygen to run out.” Ada sighs. “Didn’t expect to meet anyone down here, though. Nothing like you. So I’m probably hallucinating already. I should be grateful, I suppose.”


  Wet warmth spills down Apprentice’s face.

  “Oh, come on,” says Ada. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”

  Apprentice wipes her face with her fin, her stupid fish fin. “I …” The word drowns in a sob. She tries again. “I thought you were here to watch.” She pulls snot back into her nose. “I keep telling Nestor, what if there’s no one who’s watching, and he says of course they are, but I was always unsure, and now that you were here I thought … but you’re not. You’re just here to die.”

  Ada’s expression goes from surprise to faint disgust to a sad smile. She pats Apprentice on the shoulder.

  “You know, I’d love to watch a play.”

  Apprentice returns to the boat, waking the rest of the troupe up with her shouts: “We have an audience! We have an audience! A real one!”

  “We always have an audience,” mumbles Nestor.

  “Not like this. I promise.”

  They walk the boat over to Ada’s bathyscaphe, and there’s Ada in the window, smiling and waving. Under the cover of the boat, Director slips into the Queen’s regalia, Nestor fastens his beard and Journeyman combs his long hair.

  In variation number two of The Prince and the Abyssal Queen, the Prince regrets his return to the surface. Deafened from his journey upward, he can hear nothing but the whisper of the ocean, which fills him with longing. The daylight is too bright, the air too dry, the servants too clumsy. One moonlit night, he wades out into the sea where the Sly Fish comes to fetch him.

  “Where is my present?” says the Sly Fish in the silent language spoken on the ocean floor. “You must keep your part of our agreement.”

  “You will have it soon,” says the Prince.

  Of course he has no present for the Fish; he has not yet fallen in love, but he is trying to buy time, so that the Fish will at least deliver him to the Abyssal Plain.

  The moment his feet touch the silt, the Queen appears.

  “I miss the sea,” says the Prince, “but I will not be your slave. I will stay here as your courtier.”

  “Very well,” says the Queen. “I have treated you unfairly. As compensation, you may stay in my court for a year.”

  As the Prince takes the Queen’s pale hand and looks into her transparent eyes, he finally realizes the truth. “I love you,” he says. “You need no spell but your own self.”

  The Sly Fish collapses in horror. Of all the living things the Prince loved first, it had to be the Queen. And as the Queen created the Sly Fish out of her own flesh, it would be like promising the Fish to itself, which is impossible. The bargain is null and void, and the Fish once again thwarted. Apprentice lives out the Sly Fish’s misery in an exquisite dance.

  Ada watches through her porthole the whole time. As the ensemble take their bows, she claps her hands soundlessly. She is beginning to look a little tired, but nods with a smile when Director mimes her an offer of another variation.

  When the God of the Abyss has deus ex machinaed, and the Sly Fish’s devilish attempt at toppling the Queen has been averted, and the Queen and the Prince live happily ever after, Ada has slumped forward with her forehead against the glass. Her broken eyes stare blindly into the ocean gloom. The Company takes one last bow.

  “We had a spectator,” says Apprentice.

  “We always have spectators,” says Nestor. “But this time we had a spectator up close.”

  “Can we do it again?” says Journeyman.

  Director nods.

  They perform all the varieties of the Abyssal Plain stories, including some where the Sly Fish also gets to live happily ever after, until they have no more and Journeyman is so suffused with the Prince’s feelings he cannot speak his lines and Director must hold him while he cries. By then most of the anglerfish have left.

  “I think it’s time to move on,” states Director.

  They bring the bathyscaphe, Apprentice tugging it along on a string. Ada is such a good and appreciative audience, and they have many more plays for her to enjoy. Transporting the bathyscape on land will be a problem for later.

  © 2013 Karin Tidbeck.

  Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and writes in Swedish and English. Her stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Shimmer, Unstuck Annual, and the anthologies Odd? and Steampunk Revolution. She has published a story collection and a novel in Swedish; a collection in English, Jagannath, came out in November 2012. She blogs at karintidbeck.com.

  Dinner in Audoghast

  Bruce Sterling

  “Then one arrives at Audoghast, a large and very populous city built in a sandy plain… . The inhabitants live in ease and possess great riches. The market is always crowded; the mob is so huge and the chattering so loud that you can scarcely hear your own words… . The city contains beautiful buildings and very elegant homes.” Description of Northern Africa, Abu Ubayd al-Bakri (1040-1094 A.D.)

  Delightful Audoghast! Renowned through the civilized world, from Cordova to Baghdad, the city spread in splendor beneath a twilit Saharan sky. The setting sun threw pink and amber across adobe domes, masonry mansions, tall, mud-brick mosques, and open plazas thick with bristling date-palms. The melodious calls of market vendors mixed with the remote and amiable chuckling of Saharan hyenas.

  Four gentlemen sat on carpets in a tiled and whitewashed portico, sipping coffee in the evening breeze. The host was the genial and accomplished slave-dealer, Manimenesh. His three guests were Ibn Watunan, the caravan master; Khayali, the poet and musician; and Bagayoko, a physician and court assassin.

  The home of Manimenesh stood upon the hillside in the aristocratic quarter, where it gazed down on an open marketplace and the mud-brick homes of the lowly. The prevailing breeze swept away the city reek, and brought from within the mansion the palate-sharpening aromas of lamb in tarragon and roast partridge in lemons and eggplant. The four men lounged comfortably around a low inlaid table, sipping spiced coffee from Chinese cups, and watching the ebb and flow of market life.

  The scene below them encouraged a lofty philosophical detachment. Manimenesh, who owned no less than fifteen books, was a well-known patron of learning. Jewels gleamed on his dark, plump hands, which lay cozily folded over his paunch. He wore a long tunic of crushed red velvet, and a gold-threaded skullcap.

  Khayali, the young poet, had studied architecture and verse in the schools of Timbuktu. He lived in the household of Manimenesh as his poet and praisemaker, and his sonnets, ghazals, and odes were recited throughout the city. He propped one elbow against the full belly of his two-string guimbri guitar of inlaid ebony, strung with leopard gut.

  Ibn Watunan had an eagle’s hooded gaze and hands calloused by camel reins. He wore an indigo turban and a long striped djellaba. In thirty years as a sailor and caravaneer, he had bought and sold Zanzibar ivory, Sumatran pepper, Ferghana silk, and Cordovan leather. Now a taste for refined gold had brought him to Audoghast, for Audoghast’s African bullion was known throughout Islam as the standard of quality.

  Doctor Bagayoko’s ebony skin was ridged with an initiate’s scars, and his long, clay-smeared hair was festooned with knobs of chiselled bone. He wore a tunic of white Egyptian cotton, hung with gris-gris necklaces, and his baggy sleeves bulged with herbs and charms. He was a native Audoghastian of the animist persuasion, the personal physician of the city’s Prince.

  Bagayoko’s skill with powders, potions, and unguents made him an intimate of Death. He often undertook diplomatic missions to the neighboring Empire of Ghana. During his last visit there, the anti-Audoghast faction had conveniently suffered a lethal outbreak of pox.

  Between the four men was the air of camaraderie common to gentlemen and scholars.

  They finished the coffee and a slave took the empty pot away. A second slave, a girl from the kitchen staff, arrived with a wicker tray loaded with olives, goat-cheese, and hard-boiled eggs sprinkled with vermilion. At that moment, a muezzin yodeled the evening call to prayer.

  “Ah,” said Ibn Watunan, hesitating. “Just as we were getting s
tarted.”

  “Never mind,” said Manimenesh, helping himself to a handful of olives. “We’ll pray twice next time.”

  “Why was there no noon prayer today?” said Watunan.

  “Our muezzin forgot,” the poet said.

  Watunan lifted his shaggy brows. “That seems rather lax.”

  Doctor Bagayoko said, “This is a new muezzin. The last was more punctual, but, well, he fell ill.” Bagayoko smiled urbanely and nibbled his cheese.

  “We Audoghastians like our new muezzin better,” said the poet, Khayali. “He’s one of our own, not like that other fellow, who was from Fez. Our muezzin is sleeping with a Christian’s wife. It’s very entertaining.”

  “You have Christians here?” Watunan said.

  “A clan of Ethiopian Copts,” said Manimenesh. “And a couple of Nestorians.”

  “Oh,” said Watunan, relaxing. “For a moment I thought you meant real feringhee Christians, from Europe.”

  “From where?” Manimenesh was puzzled.

  “Very far away,” said Ibn Watunan, smiling. “Ugly little countries, with no profit.”

  “There were empires in Europe once,” said Khayali knowledgeably. “The Empire of Rome was almost as big as the modern civilized world.”

  Watunan nodded. “I have seen the New Rome, called Byzantium. They have armored horsemen, like your neighbors in Ghana. Savage fighters.”

  Bagayoko nodded, salting an egg. “Christians eat children.”

  Watunan smiled. “I can assure you that the Byzantines do no such thing.”

  “Really?” said Bagayoko. “Well, our Christians do.”

  “That’s just the doctor’s little joke,” said Manimenesh. “Sometimes strange rumors spread about us, because we raid our slaves from the Nyam-Nyam cannibal tribes on the coast. But we watch their diet closely, I assure you.”

  Watunan smiled uncomfortably. “There is always something new out of Africa. One hears the oddest stories. Hairy men, for instance.”

  “Ah,” said Manimenesh. “You mean gorillas, from the jungles to the south. I’m sorry to spoil the story for you, but they are nothing better than beasts.”