She holds Mr. Naryan’s hand tightly, speaking quietly and intensely, her eyes staring deep into his.
“A billion years ago, our neighbouring galaxy collided with another, much smaller galaxy. Stars of both galaxies were torn off in the collision, and scattered in a vast halo. The rest coalesced into a single body, but except for ancient globular clusters, which survived the catastrophe because of their dense gravity fields, it is all wreckage. We were not able to chart a single world where life had evolved. I remember standing on a world sheared in half by immense tidal stress, its orbit so eccentric that it was colder than Pluto at its farthest point, hotter than Mercury at its nearest. I remember standing on a world of methane ice as cold and dark as the Universe itself, wandering amongst the stars. There were millions of such worlds cast adrift. I remember standing upon a fragment of a world smashed into a million shards and scattered so widely in its orbit that it never had the chance to reform. There are a million such worlds. I remember gas giants turned inside out—single vast storms—and I remember worlds torched smooth by irruptions of their stars. No life, anywhere.
“Do you know how many galaxies have endured such collisions? Almost all of them. Life is a statistical freak. It is likely that only the stars of our galaxy have planets, or else other civilisations would surely have arisen elsewhere in the unbounded Universe. As it is, it is certain that we are alone. We must make of ourselves what we can. We should not hide, as your Preservers chose to do. Instead, we should seize the day, and make the Universe over with the technology that the Preservers used to make their hiding place.”
Her grip is hurting now, but Mr. Naryan bears it. “You cannot become a Preserver,” he says sadly. “No one can, now. You should not lie to these innocent people.”
“I didn’t need to lie. They took up my story and made it theirs. They see now what they can inherit—if they dare. This won’t stop with one city. It will become a crusade!” She adds, more softly, “You’ll remember it all, won’t you?”
It is then that Mr. Naryan knows that she knows how this must end, and his heart breaks. He would ask her to take that burden from him, but he cannot. He is bound to her. He is her witness.
The crowd around them cheers as the sled rockets up from its cradle. It smashes into the habitat and knocks loose another piece, which drops trees and dirt and rocks amongst the spires of the palace roof as it twists free and spins away into the night. Figures appear at the edge of the habitat. A small tube falls, glittering through the torchlight. A man catches it, runs across the debris-strewn roof, and throws himself at Angel’s feet. He is at the far end of the human scale of the Shaped of this city. His skin is lapped with distinct scales, edged with a rim of hard black like the scales of a pine cone. His coarse black hair has flopped over his eyes, which glow like coals with reflected firelight.
Angel takes the tube and shakes it. It unrolls into a flexible sheet on which Dreen’s face glows. Dreen’s lips move; his voice is small and metallic. Angel listens intently, and when he has finished speaking says softly, “Yes.”
Then she stands and raises both hands above her head. All across the roof, men and woman turn towards her, eyes glowing.
“They wish to surrender! Let them come down!”
A moment later a sled swoops down from the habitat, its silvery underside gleaming in the reflected light of the many fires scattered across the roof. Angel’s followers shout and jeer, and missiles fly out of the darkness—a burning torch, a rock, a broken branch. All are somehow deflected before they reach the ship’s crew, screaming away into the dark with such force that the torch, the branch, kindle into white fire. The crew have modified the sled’s field to protect themselves.
They all look like Angel, with the same small sleek head, the same gangling build and abrupt nervous movements. Dreen’s slight figure is dwarfed by them. It takes Mr. Naryan a long minute to be able to distinguish men from women, and another to be able to tell each man from his brothers, each woman from her sisters. They are all clad in long white shirts that leave them bare-armed and bare-legged, and each is girdled with a belt from which hang a dozen or more little machines. They call to Angel, one following on the words of the other, saying over and over again:
“Return with us—”
“—this is not our place—”
“—these are not our people—”
“—we will return—”
“—we will find our home—”
“—leave with us and return.”
Dreen sees Mr. Naryan and shouts, “They want to take her back!” He jumps down from the sled, an act of bravery that astonishes Mr. Naryan, and skips through the crowd. “They are all one person, or variations on one person,” he says breathlessly. “The ship makes its crew by varying a template. Angel is an extreme. A mistake.”
Angel starts to laugh.
“You funny little man! I’m the real one—they are the copies!”
“Come back to us—”
“—come back and help us—”
“—help us find out home.”
“There’s no home to find!” Angel shouts. “Oh, you fools! This is all there is!”
“I tried to explain to them,” Dreen says to Mr. Naryan, “but they wouldn’t listen.”
“They surely cannot disbelieve the Puranas,” Mr. Naryan says.
Angel shouts, “Give me back the ship!”
“It was never yours—”
“—never yours to own—”
“—but only yours to serve.”
“No! I won’t serve!” Angel jumps onto the throne and makes an abrupt cutting gesture.
Hundreds of fine silver threads spool out of the darkness, shooting towards the sled and her crewmates. The ends of the threads flick up when they reach the edge of the sled’s modified field, but then fall in a tangle over the crew: their shield is gone.
The crowd begins to throw things again, but Angel orders them to be still. “I have the only working sled,” she says. “That which I enhance, I can also take away. Come with me,” she tells Mr. Naryan, “and see the end of my story.”
The crowd around Angel stirs. Mr. Naryan turns, and sees one of the crew walking towards Angel.
He is as tall and slender as Angel, his small, high-cheekboned face so like her own it is as if he holds up a mirror as he approaches. A rock arcs out of the crowd and strikes his shoulder: he staggers but walks on, hardly seeming to notice that the crowd closes at his back so that he is suddenly inside its circle, with Angel and Mr. Naryan in its focus.
Angel says, “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Of course not, sister,” the man says. And he grasps her wrists in both his hands.
Then Mr. Naryan is on his hands and knees. A strong wind howls about him, and he can hear people screaming. The afterglow of a great light swims in his vision. He can’t see who helps him up and half-carries him through the stunned crowd to the sled.
When the sled starts to rise, Mr. Naryan falls to his knees again. Dreen says in his ear, “It’s over.”
“No,” Mr. Naryan says. He blinks and blinks, tears rolling down his cheeks.
The man took Angel’s wrists in both of his—
Dreen is saying something, but Mr. Naryan shakes his head. It isn’t over.
—And they shot up into the night, so fast that their clothing burst into flame, so fast that air was drawn up with them. If Angel could nullify the gravity field, then so could her crewmates. She has achieved apotheosis.
The sled swoops up the tiered slope of the ship, is swallowed by a wide hatch. When he can see again, Mr. Naryan finds himself kneeling at the edge of the open hatch. The city is spread below. Fires define the streets which radiate away from the Great River; the warm night air is bitter with the smell of burning.
Dreen has been looking at the lighted windows that crowd the walls of the vast room beyond the hatch, scampering with growing excitement from one to the other. Now he sees that Mr. Naryan is crying, and clumsily tries t
o comfort him, believing that Mr. Naryan is mourning his wife, left behind in the dying city.
“She was a good woman, for her kind,” Mr. Naryan is able to say at last, although it isn’t her he’s mourning, or not only her. He is mourning for all of the citizens of Sensch. They are irrevocably caught in their change now, never to be the same. His wife, the nut roaster, the men and women who own the little tea houses at the corner of every square, the children, the mendicants and the merchants—all are changed, or else dying in the process. Something new is being born down there. Rising from the fall of the city.
“They’ll take us away from all this,” Dreen says happily. “They’re going to search for where they came from. Some are out combing the city for others who can help them; the rest are preparing the ship. They’ll take it over the edge of the world, into the great far out!”
“Don’t they know they’ll never find what they’re looking for? The Puranas—”
“Old stories, old fears. They will take us home!”
Mr. Naryan laboriously clambers to his feet. He understands that Dreen has fallen under the thrall of the crew. He is theirs, as Mr. Naryan is now and forever Angel’s. He says, “Those times are past. Down there in the city is the beginning of something new, something wonderful—” He finds he can’t explain. All he has is his faith that it won’t stop here. It is not an end but a beginning, a spark to set all of Confluence—the unfallen and the changed—alight. Mr. Naryan says, weakly, “It won’t stop here.”
Dreen’s big eyes shine in the light of the city’s fires. He says, “I see only another Change War. There’s nothing new in that. The snakes will rebuild the city in their new image, if not here, then somewhere else along the Great River. It has happened before, in this very place, to my own people. We survived it, and so will the snakes. But what they promise is so much greater! We’ll leave this poor place, and voyage out to return to where it all began, to the very home of the Preservers. Look there! That’s where we’re going!”
Mr. Naryan allows himself to be led across the vast room. It is so big that it could easily hold Dreen’s floating habitat. A window on its far side shows a view angled somewhere far above the plane of Confluence’s orbit. Confluence itself is a shining strip, an arrow running out to its own vanishing point. Beyond that point are the ordered, frozen spirals of the Home Galaxy, the great jewelled clusters and braids of stars constructed in the last great days of the Preservers before they vanished forever into the black hole they made by collapsing the Magellanic Clouds.
Mr. Naryan starts to breathe deeply, topping up the oxygen content of his blood.
“You see!” Dreen says again, his face shining with awe in Confluence’s silver light.
“I see the end of history,” Mr. Naryan says. “You should have studied the Puranas, Dreen. There’s no future to be found amongst the artifacts of the Preservers, only the dead past. I won’t serve, Dreen. That’s over.”
And then he turns and lumbers through the false lights and shadows of the windows towards the open hatch. Dreen catches his arm, but Mr. Naryan throws him off.
Dreen sprawls on his back, astonished, then jumps up and runs in front of Mr. Naryan. “You fool!” he shouts. “They can bring her back!”
“There’s no need,” Mr. Naryan says, and pushes Dreen out of the way and plunges straight out of the hatch.
He falls through black air like a heavy comet. Water smashes around him, tears away his clothes. His nostrils pinch shut and membranes slide across his eyes as he plunges down and down amidst streaming bubbles until the roaring in his ears is no longer the roar of his blood but the roar of the river’s never-ending fall over the edge of the world.
Deep, silty currents begin to pull him towards that edge. He turns in the water and begins to swim away from it, away from the ship and the burning city. His duty is over: once they have taken charge of their destiny, the changed citizens will no longer need an Archivist.
Mr. Naryan swims more and more easily. The swift, cold water washes away his landbound habits, wakes the powerful muscles of his shoulders and back. Angel’s message burns bright, burning away the old stories, as he swims through the black water, against the currents of the Great River. Joy gathers with every thrust of his arms. He is the messenger, Angel’s witness. He will travel ahead of the crusade that will begin when everyone in Sensch is changed. It will be a long and difficult journey, but he does not doubt that his destiny—the beginning of the future that Angel has bequeathed him and all of Confluence—lies at the end of it.
ELVIS BEARPAW’S LUCK
William Sanders
William Sanders lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. A former powwow dancer and sometime Cherokee gospel singer, he appeared on the SF scene back around the turn of the decade with a couple of alternate-history comedies, Journey to Fusang (a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award) and The Wild Blue and Gray. Sanders then turned to mystery and suspense, producing a number of critically acclaimed titles. He credits his old friend Roger Zelazny with persuading him to return to SF, this time via the short story form, making recent sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tales of the Great Turtle, and Wheel of Fortune. His story “Going After Old Man Alabama”—a prequel (sort of) to the one that follows—appeared in our Twelfth Annual Collection.
In the fast, funny, and fanciful story that follows, he shows us that sometimes you have to make your own luck—and sometimes you have to live with the consequences, too.
Grandfather Ninekiller said, “A man always has the right to try to change his luck.”
He said that right after I told him how my cousin Marvin Badwater had suddenly dumped Madonna Hummingbird, after both families had all but officially agreed on the match, and brought home a Comanche girl whose name nobody could even pronounce. Grandfather never had been one for that sort of gossip, but it was two years since he’d died and naturally he was interested in any news I might bring him when I came to put tobacco on his grave.
“The right to try to change his luck,” he said again, in a kind of distant satisfied way, as if he liked the sound of what he had said. That’s one thing about ancestors: they can be awfully repetitious. I guess they’ve got a lot of time on their hands in the spirit world, with nothing much to do but study up these wise-sounding little one-liners.
Anyway I said, “I don’t know about that, eduda. What about what happened to Elvis Bearpaw?”
“I said a man’s got the right to try,” Grandfather said, not a bit bothered by my disrespectful interruption. There was a time when he’d have taken my head off, but being dead seems to have mellowed him some. “Whether he succeeds or not, now, that’s another patch of pokeweed.”
He laughed, an old man’s spidery-dry cackle. “And then, too, it’s not always easy to know whether you’re changing it upward or down. As in the case of the said Elvis Bearpaw … remember that, do you, chooch?”
“How could I forget?” I said, surprised.
“Hey,” Grandfather said, “you were just a kid.”
* * *
I was, too, but I’d have gotten mad as a wet owl if anybody had said so at the time. I was all of twelve years old that spring, and I saw myself as for all valid purposes a full-grown Cherokee warrior—hadn’t the great Harley Davidson Oosahwe killed those three Osage slave-raiders when he was only thirteen? Warrior hell, I figured I was practically Council material, barring a few petty technicalities.
I might or might not have heard, in the days leading up to Game time, that Elvis Bearpaw was to be the Deer Clan’s player that year. If I did, it wasn’t something I paid much attention to. For one thing, being of the Anijisqua—Bird Clan—I had no personal interest in the matter; and for another, my mind was on a different aspect of the approaching Game days. This was the last year I was going to be eligible for the boys’ blowgun contest; next year I’d be in the young men’s class, and, unless Redbird Christie stepped on a rattlesnake in the next twelve months, getting my brains beat out like everybody else. So I was d
etermined to win this year, and I was practicing my ass off every spare moment.
But for all my puckering and puffing, I wasn’t exactly unaware of the goings-on around me. That would have been pretty damn difficult to say the least; back then, Game time still meant something, things were happening. Not like now.…
Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. Maybe everything just seems larger and more exciting when you’re a kid; or maybe a man’s memory likes to improve on reality. But it does seem to me that the Game time isn’t what it used to be. It’s almost as if people are merely going through the motions. Is it just me?
* * *
“Is it just me,” I said to Grandfather Ninekiller, “or has Game time gone downhill in the last few years? Of course I’m not talking about the Game itself,” I added hastily. You don’t want to seem to disparage sacred matters when you’re talking with an ancestor. “I mean, that’s still the center of the whole year, always has been, always will be—”
“Wasn’t always,” Grandfather interrupted. “Back in the old days, in the Yuasa times, it wasn’t at all like it is now. You know that, chooch.”
“Well, yes.” I knew, all right; he’d told me often enough, along with the other stories about the history of the People. Though there’s always been a sort of not-quite-real quality to those old tales, for me at least; I’ve never been sure how much of that Yuasa business to take seriously. They even say there was a time when the People didn’t have the Game at all, and who can imagine that?
“Anyway,” I went on, “I meant the whole affair—the dances, the contests, the feeds and the giveaways—all the stuff that goes on when the People get together for the Game. I can’t help feeling like there used to be a lot more to it, you know? But then I’ve noticed a lot of things seem to sort of shrink as you get older.”
The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995 Page 97
