by Rich Horton
“D'ye see what this means, boy?” Fuzzleton's face was rapturous. “Hundreds of worlds! Thousands! An infinitude of ‘em! This is how the Empire was lost and why your capital city and mine are strangers to each other—it explains everything!”
We grabbed each other and danced a clumsy little jig. I remember that I hit my head upon a rafter, but what did I care? There would be statues of us in a myriad Londons and countless Philadelphias. We were going to live forever in the mind of Mankind.
* * * *
My brother-in-law once told me that in China they believe that for every good thing there is an ill. For every kiss, a blow. For every dream a nightmare. So perhaps it was because of my great happiness that we shortly thereafter took on board a party of near-naked savages, men and women in equal numbers, to question about the gold ornaments they all wore in profusion about their necks and wrists and ankles.
Captain Winterjude stood watching, his lady by his side and every bit as impassive as he, as the men were questioned by Lieutenant Blacken. They refused to give sensible answers. They claimed to have no knowledge of where the gold came from. They insisted that they didn't know what we were talking about. When the ornaments were ripped from their bodies and shaken in their faces, they denied the gewgaws even existed.
Finally, losing patience, Blacken lined the natives up against the starboard rail. He conferred with the captain, received a curt nod, and ordered two airshipmen to seize the first Indian and throw him overboard.
The man fell to his death in complete silence.
His comrades watched stoically. Blacken repeated his questions. Again he learned nothing.
A second Indian went over the rail.
And so it went until every male was gone, and it was obvious we would learn nothing.
The women, out of compassion I thought at the time, were spared. The next morning, however, it was found that by night all had disappeared. They had slipped over the side, apparently, after their mates. The crew were much discontented with this discovery, and I discovered from their grumbles and complaints that their intentions for these poor wretches had been far from innocent.
Inevitably, we turned south, in search of El Dorado. From that moment on, however, our voyage was a thing abhorrent to me. It seemed to me that we had made the air itself into one vast grave and that, having plunged into it, the Empire was now engaged in an unholy pilgrimage through and toward Death itself.
* * * *
When the Aztecs had been defeated at last and their city was ours, the officers held a banquet to celebrate and to accept the fealty of the vassal chieftains. Hob was chosen to be a serving-boy. But, because the clothes of a servitor were tight and thus revealing of gender, she perforce faked an injury, and I took her place instead.
It was thus that I caught the eye of Lady Winterjude.
The widow was a handsome, well-made woman with a black pony-tail tied up in a bow. She wore her late husband's military jacket, in assertion of her rights, and it was well known that she was Captain Blacken's chief advisor. As I waited on her I felt her eye upon me at odd moments, and once saw her looking at me with a shocking directness.
She took me, as her unwritten perquisite, into her bed. Thereby and instantly turning Hob into my bitterest enemy, with Captain Blacken not all that far behind.
Forgive me. No, I hadn't fallen asleep. I was just thinking on things. This and that. Nothing that need concern you.
At the time I thought of Lady Winterjude as a monster of evil, an incubus or lamia to whom I was nevertheless drawn by the weakness of my flesh. But of course she was nothing of the kind. Had I made an effort to see her as a fellow human, things might well have turned out differently. For I now believe that it was my very naivete, the transparency with which I was both attracted to and repelled by her, that was my chief attraction for the lady. Had I but the wit to comprehend this then, she would have quickly set me aside. Lady Winterjude was no woman to allow her weaknesses to be understood by a subordinate.
I was young, though, and she was a woman of appetites.
Which is all I remember of that world, save that we were driven out from it. Before we left, however, we dropped a Union Jack, weighted at the two bottom corners, over the side and into the ocean, claiming the sea and all continents it touched for Britain and Queen Titania.
Only an orca was there to witness the ceremony, and whether it took any notice I greatly doubt.
* * * *
The Empire crashed less than a month after we encountered the air-serpents. They lived among the Aurora Borealis, high above the Arctic mountains. It was frigid beyond belief when we first saw them looping amid the Northern Lights, over and over in circles or cartwheels, very much like the Oriental pictures of dragons. Everybody crowded the rails to watch. We had no idea that they were alive, much less hostile.
The creatures were electrical in nature. They crackled with power. Yet when they came zigzagging toward us, we suspected nothing until two balloons were on fire, and the men had to labor mightily to cut them away before they could touch off the others.
We fought back not with cannons—the recoil of which would have been disastrous to our fragile shells—but with rockets. Their trails crisscrossed the sky, to no effect at first. Then, finally, a rocket trailing a metal chain passed through an air-dragon and the creature discharged in the form of a great lightning-bolt, down to the ground. For an instant we were dazzled, and then, when we could see again, it was no more.
Amid the pandemonium and cheers, I could have heard no sound to alert me. So it was either a premonition or merest chance that caused me to turn at that moment, just in time to see Hob, her face as hate-filled as any demon's, plunge a knife down upon me.
* * * *
Eh? Oh, I'm sure she did. Your mother was never one for halfway gestures. I could show the scar if you required it. Still, I'm alive, eh? It's all water under the bridge. She had her reasons, to be sure, just as I had mine. Anyway, I didn't set out to explain the ways of women to you, but to tell of how the voyage ended.
We were caught in a storm greater than anything we had encountered so far. I think perhaps we were trapped between worlds. Witch-fires danced on the ropes and rails. Balloons went up in flames. So dire was our situation and sure our peril that I could not hold it in my mind. A wild kind of exaltation filled me, an almost Satanic glee in the chaos that was breaking the airship apart.
As Hob came scuttling across my path, I swept her into my arms and, unheeding of her panicked protests, kissed her! She stared, shocked, into my eyes, and I laughed. “Caroline,” I cried, “you are the woman or lass or lad or whatever you might be for me. I'd kiss you on the lip of Hell itself, and if you slipped and fell in, I'd jump right after you.”
Briefly I was the man she had once thought me and I had so often wished I could be.
Hob looked at me with large and unblinking eyes. “You'll never be free of me now,” she said at last, and then jerked away and was gone, back to her duty.
* * * *
For more than a month I wandered the fever-lands, while the Society for the Relief of Shipwrecked Sailors attended to my needs. Of the crash itself, I remember nothing. Only that hours before it, I arrived at the bridge to discover that poor dear old Fuzzleton was dead.
Captain Blacken, in his madness, had destroyed the only man who might conceivably have returned him to his own port of origin.
“Can you navigate?” he demanded fiercely. “Can you bring us back to London?”
I gathered up the equations that Fuzzleton and I had spent so many nights working up. In their incomplete state, they would bring us back to Philadelphia—if we were lucky—but no further. With anything less than perfect luck, however, they would smear us across a thousand worlds.
“Yes,” I lied. “I can.”
I set a course for home.
* * * *
And so at last, I came upon my father's grave. It was a crisp black rectangle in the earth, as dark and daunting as obli
vion itself. Without any hesitation, I stepped through that lightless doorway. And my eyes opened.
I looked up into the black face of a disapproving angel.
“Tacey?” I said wonderingly.
“That's Mrs. Nash to you,” she snapped. But I understood her ways now, and when I gratefully clasped her hand, and touched my lips to it, she had to look away, lest I think she had changed in her opinion of me.
Tacey Nash was still one of the tiniest women I had ever seen, and easily the most vigorous. The doctor, when he came, said it would be weeks before I was able to leave the bed. But Tacey had me nagged and scolded onto my feet in two days, walking in three, and hobbling about the public streets on a cane in four. Then, on the fifth day, she returned to her husband, brood, and anonymity, vanishing from my life forever, as do so many people in this world to whom we owe so much more than will ever be repaid.
* * * *
When word got out that I was well enough to receive visitors, the first thing I learned was that my brother was dead. Jack had drowned in a boating accident several years after I left. A girl whose face was entirely unknown to me told me this—my mother, there also, could not shush her in time—and told me as well that she was my baby sister Barbara.
I should have felt nothing. The loss of a brother one does not know is, after all, no loss at all. But I was filled with a sadness wholly inexplicable but felt from the marrow outward, so that every bone, joint, and muscle ached with the pain of loss. I burst into tears.
Crying, it came to me then, all in an instant, that the voyage was over.
The voyage was over and Caroline had not survived it. The one true love of my life was lost to me forever.
* * * *
So I came here. I could no longer bear to live in Philadelphia. The gems in my pocket, small though they might be compared to those I'd left behind, were enough to buy me this house and set me up as a merchant. I was known in the village as a melancholy man. Indeed, melancholy I was. I had been through what would have been the best adventure in the world, were it not ruined by its ending—by the loss of the Empire and all its hands, and above all the loss of my own dear and irreplaceable Hob.
Perhaps in some other, and better, world she yet survived. But not in mine.
Yet my past was not done with me yet.
On a cold, wet evening in November, a tramp came to my door. He was a wretched, fantastical creature, more kobold than human, all draped in wet rags and hooded so that only a fragment of nose poked out into the meager light from my doorway.
Imploringly, the phantasm held out a hand and croaked, “Food!”
I had not the least thought that any danger might arise from so miserable a source, and if I had, what would I have cared? A violent end to a violent life—I would not have objected. “Come inside,” I said to the poor fellow, “out of the rain. There's a fire in the parlor. Go sit there, while I warm something up.”
As the beggar gratefully climbed the stairs, I noticed that he had a distinct limp, as if a leg had been broken and imperfectly healed.
I had a kettle steaming in the kitchen. It was the work of a minute to brew the tea. I prepared a tray with milk and sugar and ginger, and carried it back to the front of the house.
In the doorway to the parlor I stopped, frozen with amazement. There, in that darkened room, a hand went up and moved the hood down. All the world reversed itself.
I stumbled inside, unable to speak, unable to think.
The fire caught itself in her red hair. She turned up her cheek toward me with that same impish smile I loved so well.
“Well, mate,” she said. “Ain't you going to kiss me?”
* * * *
The fire is all but done. No, don't bother with another log. Let it die. There's nothing there but ashes anyway.
You look at your mother and you see someone I do not—a woman who is old and wrinkled, who has put on some weight, perhaps, who could never have been an adventurer, a rogue, a scamp. Oh, I see her exterior well enough, too. But I also see deeper.
I love her in a way you can't possibly understand, nor ever will understand unless some day many years hence you have the good fortune to come to feel the same way yourself. I love her as an old and comfortable shoe loves its mate. I could never find her equal.
And so ends my tale. I can vouch for none of it. Since the fever, I have not been sure which memories are true and which are fantasy. Perhaps only half of what I have said actually happened. Perhaps none of it did. At any rate, I have told you it all.
Save for one thing.
Not many years later, and for the best of reasons, I sent for the midwife. My darling Caroline was in labor. First she threw up, and then the water broke. Then the Quaker midwife came and chased me from the room. I sat in the parlor with my hands clasped between my knees and waited.
Surely hours passed while I stewed and worried. But all I recall is that somehow I found myself standing at the foot of my wife's child-bed. Caroline lay pale with exhaustion. She smiled wanly as the midwife held up my son for me to see.
I looked down upon that tiny creature's face and burst into tears. The tears coursed down my face like rain, and I felt such an intensity of emotion as I can scarce describe to you now. It was raining outside, they tell me now, but that is not how I recall it. To me the world was flooded with sunshine, brighter than any I had ever seen before.
The midwife said something, I paid her no mind. I gazed upon my son.
In that moment I felt closer to my father than ever I had before. I felt that finally I understood him and knew what words he would have said to me if he could. I looked down on you with such absolute and undeviating love as we in our more hopeful moments pray that God feels toward us, and silently I spoke to you.
Someday, my son, I thought, you will be a man. You will grow up and by so doing turn me old, and then I will die and be forgotten. But that's all right. I don't mind. It's a small price to pay for your existence.
Then the midwife put you into my arms, and all debts and grudges I ever held were canceled forever.
There's so much more I wish I could tell you. But it's late, and I lack the words. Anyway, your trunk is packed and waiting by the door. In the morning you'll be gone. You're a man yourself, and about to set off on adventures of your own. Adventures I cannot imagine, and which afterwards you will no more be able to explain to others than I could explain mine to you. Live them well. I know you will.
And now it's time I was abed. Time, and then some, that I slept.
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CONTRIBUTORS
GREG EGAN was born in Perth, Australia, in 1961. He has published over fifty short stories in magazines and anthologies, seven novels, and three collections of stories. His novella “Oceanic” won the Hugo Award, the Japanese Seiun Award, the Locus Award, and the Asimov's Readers Award for best novella of 1998. A new far-future novel, Incandescence, was published earlier this year by Night Shade Books.
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BRUCE STERLING is an Austin-based science fiction writer and Net critic, and internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist. His novels Involution Ocean, The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, Islands in the Net, and Heavy Weather influenced the cyberpunk literary movement. He co-authored with William Gibson The Difference Machine, and is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY was born in New York City, but was carried away as a small child by loyal retainers who raised him in the wilderness of Ohio, where he still resides. His first story, “Footnotes,” published in 2001 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, caused confusion and bafflement. Somehow after that, he still managed to become a regular contributor to F&SF.
His stories have been reprinted in four different Year's Best volumes, and he and his stories have been finalists for four different awards. His first novel, The Prodigal Troll, and Wild Things, his first short story collection, containi
ng “Footnotes” as well as his award-nominated and Year's Best stories, both came out in 2005. In 2009, Del Rey will be publishing a new fantasy series, the Traitor to the Crown trilogy.
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KAREN JOY FOWLER is the author of five novels, including The Jane Austen Book Club, which was a New York Times Bestseller, and two short story collections, including Black Glass, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1999. A new novel, Wit's End, was published in April of 2008.
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JOHN BARNES was born a few months before Sputnik and will probably die before anyone walks on the moon again. He has published over twenty-five science fiction books and will probably keep doing it if nobody stops him. He was a theatre professor for a while. These days he works primarily as a consulting statistical semiotician, an occupation which he will explain at great length if you buy him a drink and let him get between you and the door, and often as a book doctor. His next novel will be his first mainstream book, Tales of the Madman Underground, coming from Penguin in 2009.
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EKATERINA SEDIA resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in July 2009. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom and Clarkesworld, as well as Japanese Dreams and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com
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PAUL DI FILIPPO has been writing professionally for over twelve-five years, and has twenty-five books in print to prove it. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his mate Deborah Newton, a chocolate-colored cocker spaniel named Brownie, and a calico cat named Penny Century.
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TIM PRATT's stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and have won a Hugo Award (and lost a Nebula). He lives in Oakland California with his wife and son.
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