“Who—” their father began, but stumbled over his own feet and went down hard on his hands and knees.
Maggie rushed toward him, reaching his side simultaneously with Michael.
“You’re dead,” said their father, staring up at Maggie. “You’ve gone to your reward.”
“No!” said Michael. “This isn’t your wife, this is your daughter. And she shouldn’t be here!”
This close to the edge of the pit, Maggie nearly staggered under an overwhelming kerosene scent. An orange glow lit the bottom of the trench, but she turned away from it without looking, the wonders of the Voluntary State holding no appeal for her at the best of times. The deep voice rolled up again, though. “These are your children! She told you they would come!”
“Maggie? Michael?” said their father. He seemed bewildered, those wrong-colored eyes darting back and forth as he looked from one to the other and back again.
“We’ve got to get him out of here, now!” said Michael. “Japheth and the others are barely holding the gate.”
Eyes the color of river water . . .
“We’re too late,” said Maggie, voicing the realization even as she had it.
“What? What do you mean?” asked Michael, frantic.
“The Federals, they gave him up,” said Maggie. “He couldn’t fight it either.”
“These are the words of the Psalmist,” said their father, struggling to his feet. “‘Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south.’ Notification has been sent.”
A horrified expression came to Michael’s face, though whether it was on hearing Maggie’s words or their father’s, Maggie could not say. For once, she had no idea how Michael felt. Only how she did.
“He’s infected?” Michael asked.
The coal mole spoke again. “Our captors have tested him in many ways. He has sought to protect himself by constructing an exaggerated simulacrum of his own personality. He is an odd creature, now, this man. He is . . . bifurcated.”
Maggie’s thoughts raced. She remembered the vision of her father immersing himself in the Ohio of her imagination, and wondered if it had meant something else altogether from what she had decided it meant.
“There has to be a way to get him back,” Michael said.
Maggie shook her head. “No, Michael. We can’t get our father back. But we might be able to save him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael said, his voice breaking.
“He just told us,” Maggie said. “Didn’t you, Daddy? Whether you meant to or not. There’s only one way out of this captivity.”
There was a loud chattering noise from the front gate, and the sounds of screams.
“Your friends will retreat soon, I think,” said the coal mole.
“Come on, help me,” Maggie said, taking her father by one arm and indicating that Michael should take the other. “I came in from the river gate, and there are no guards.”
“How did you even get there?” asked Michael, as they hustled their father away from the pit.
“I had help,” said Maggie.
When they reached the dock, the river woman was standing on the rippling surface at its end, a statue of flowing water, simultaneously in motion and unmoving.
Theodore Hammersmith, his gait grudging to begin with, came to a halt. He tore away from Maggie’s hand and pointed. “Shake off that visage, demon. You are not my wife, but an apostate of hell.”
Michael was staring, too, and Maggie realized this was the first time he had actually seen the river woman.
“My family,” said the woman in the water. “Oh, my family.”
“That’s not her,” said Michael, sounding his old complaint. “It can’t be her.”
“It’s what she’s become,” said Maggie. “It’s who she’s become.”
“A demon, like he says. Athena’s creature.”
“No,” said Maggie. “She’s escaped. And Daddy can, too.”
“You want him to die?” Michael implored.
“I want him to be born again,” said Maggie, and took her father’s arm once more. “Daddy, that is no demon. That is Maria Galdeana, your loving wife. You have to go and be with her now.”
Tears swam in his eyes, and Maggie thought for a moment that behind those tears she saw a hint of blue. But then he blinked, and they were green again.
“Is this the River Jordan?” he asked. “Have I come to the Holy Land at last?”
Maggie was crying, too. “It’s the Ohio River, and Kentucky isn’t the Holy Land. It’s a between place, a border state, and you’re going to a between place, too.”
Unexpectedly, he smiled, and for a moment, despite the patriarchal beard and the lines around his wrong-colored eyes, he looked like the man who had raised them. “Neither at the right hand, nor the left, then,” he said.
He walked to the edge of the dock and held out both hands. His wife took them in hers, and water flowed over him. He was lifted up.
“Will you come, too?” asked their mother.
Michael looked aghast, but Maggie only shook her head. “No,” she said. “We have a race to finish.”
At the barn, Maggie stood awkwardly astride Michael’s bicycle and asked her brother once more, “You won’t come with me?”
Michael, in his cloak of black feathers like all the other women and men in Japheth’s band, smiled sadly. “I abandoned the race, Maggie. I’m going to carry on his work. You weren’t the only one who had dreams . . . but mine were different. They were about crows, about me with the crows. No going back for me.”
No going back for any of us, thought Maggie.
She clipped her shoes onto the pedals and stood up, balanced for a moment like a track racer waiting for the start gun. Poised at the end of something, or the beginning.
Michael waved his hand back and forth, mimicking the motion of a race director signaling that the stage had begun. And, though it hurt to leave him, she rode away.
Her radio had apparently shorted out when she was immersed in the river, or else it had been so long since everyone else finished that there was nothing being broadcast, either on the general race channel or the team’s.
She passed no stragglers on the road. No spectators lined the route. No camerastats buzzed around her. She had no idea what sort of welcome would await her, if the team would even allow her to return. But when she crossed the finish line, one race official was still stationed there to mark her time.
His voice muffled by his owl helmet, the race director said, “Congratulations. You have done remarkably well.”
Maggie said, “I finished last.”
The owl shrugged. “You finished. Lydia and your teammates will be very glad to see you.” He pointed toward the team busses.
Maggie started to ride that way, but then hesitated. “Did Nicholas win?” she asked.
“Win?” asked the owl. “Oh. The bicycle race. Yes.” He turned away.
Lydia Treekiller stood up from the camp chair outside the bus where she’d obviously been waiting. There were raucous sounds coming from all the team’s encampments, but none of the parties were louder than the one Team America was apparently throwing.
“We started without you,” said Lydia.
“You finished without me, too,” said Maggie.
“No,” said Lydia. “The team isn’t finished until the last one of us crosses the line. Are we finished now or is Michael still coming in?” She looked down at the machine Maggie had just dismounted. “On your bicycle, for some reason?”
“No,” said Maggie. “Michael has gone home.” Wherever that was for him, now. “I suppose I’ll be heading home myself.”
The thought of her well-loved house, it wasn’t the comfort she expected. How could it feel like home, with only her and her memories to live in it?
Lydia shook her head. “No time for that, I’m afraid. I just got word from the UCI. We’ve been selected to participate in a race in Spain and we have to leave first thing in the mor
ning.”
Maggie said, “I thought . . .” But choked on the next word.
“I’m looking forward to see how you do on those climbs in the Pyrenees,” said Lydia. “Now those are a place to prove yourself a Queen of the Mountains.”
Maggie didn’t know what to say.
“Come on,” said Lydia. “Let’s get some champagne.”
So they left Michael’s bicycle there, leaning against the side of the bus, and went to join the rest of the team.
These are the ways that Maggie came to love the world.
Maggie loved bicycles, those extraordinary conveyances that turned her effort and her will into speed and motion. She loved the way they looked, the elegance and strength of their lines, and as much as she loved racing them, she loved them more for themselves. Maggie was not a philosopher, but if one had told her she loved bicycles because they were democratic machines, she would not have disagreed.
And oh, how Maggie loved mountains. The high passes and cols of Europe became her usual workplace, yes, but there were mountain roads to climb in Colorado, where she came to make her home, and in Colombia and the other Andean states of South America where she loved to train at altitude. Once, years after she had retired, then come out of retirement to race again, and then took Lydia’s place leading Team America, she even rode in a dirigible over the ice-cloaked mountains of Antarctica, and though she never rode up them, she loved those mountains, too.
Maggie loved her team, changing as it was, because Maggie came to be a great lover of people of purpose and good will. She found, as she grew older, that her antogonists were rarely her enemies, and was thankful that she lived a life where that was possible.
Maggie loved her brother, oh, how fiercely she loved him, though she rarely heard from him and even more rarely saw him once he took up with Japheth Sapp and the band of people who did everything they could to protect the very world they were rebelling against. Wherever she went, and she went many places, she carried a crow’s feather.
And though she never again received a telephone call from the Voluntary State, or a letter from beyond the grave, or even a mysterious dream, Maggie loved the rivers of the Bluegrass. “Everwhere we look there’s water, water,” she would sing when she went there.
And every time the waters ran clear.
Publication History
“The Contrary Gardener,” Eclipse Online, October 2012.
“Another Word For Map is Faith,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction, August 2006.
“The Jack of Coins,” tor.com, May 2013.
“The Unveiling,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2015.
“Nowhere Fast,” Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, 2011.
“Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms,” Twenty Epics, 2006.
“Gather,” The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2008.
“The Force Acting on the Displaced Body,” Trampoline, 2003.
“The Voluntary State,” SciFiction, May 2004.
“The Border State” is published here for the first time.
Acknowledgments
The stories in this book were all developed and improved by their original editors, to whom I owe a great debt. They are Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant, Susan Marie Groppi, Kelly Link, David Moles, Jonathan Strahan, Gordon Van Gelder, and Sheila Williams. Gavin and Kelly also edited this collection as a whole, and published it, for which I offer thanks.
As a writer, and as a person, I have benefited enormously from my association with several workshops. I first learned to take myself seriously as an artist and to think carefully about the crafting of stories at the Clarion West Workshop in Seattle in 1996. I completed my formal training as a writer under the tutelage of Derek Nikitas at the Bluegrass Writers Studio of Eastern Kentucky University. Most of all, though, I here acknowledge the sincere thanks I owe to those many colleagues who read and critiqued most of these stories at the annual Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop, now guided by my best unbeaten brother, Richard Butner.
Finally, all who read these stories should know that almost none of them would have been even begun, much less been finished and published, if it weren’t for the essential, indispensable contributions to my art and to my life made by my wife, Gwenda Bond. Whatever I have accomplished as a storyteller in the 21st century, I could not, would not, have done without her.
About the Author
Christopher Rowe has published a couple of dozen short stories, and been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His work has been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, praised by the New York Times Book Review, and long-listed in the Best American Short Stories. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writer’s Studio. Christopher and his wife Gwenda Bond co-write the Supernormal Sleuthing Series for children, and reside in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky.
Also Available from Small Beer Press
A Stranger in Olondria
World Fantasy Award winner · British Fantasy Award winner · Crawford Award winner
Jevick, the pepper merchant’s son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home—but which his mother calls the Ghost Country. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick’s life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. Just as he revels in Olondria’s Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.
“Samatar’s sensual descriptions create a rich, strange landscape, allowing a lavish adventure to unfold that is haunting and unforgettable.” — Library Journal (*starred review*)
“Mesmerizing—a sustained and dreamy enchantment. A Stranger in Olondria reminds both Samatar’s characters and her readers of the way stories make us long for far-away, even imaginary, places and how they also bring us home again.” — Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
paper · $16 · 9781931520768 | ebook · 9781931520775
Also by Sofia Samatar:
Tender: Stories
The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized many times including in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.
Tender includes two new stories, “An Account of the Land of Witches” and an expansive novella, “Fallow.”
“These stories are windows into an impressively deep imagination guided by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful mastery of language.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
Hardcover· $24 · 9781618731265 | ebook · 9781618731272
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