My gorge rising, I made obeisance and placed the tray on the small granite table Isabel had ordered from a quarry in New Hampshire, just weeks before New Hampshire was closed off. “It reminds me of Beyond,” she would say. “It is my flotsam from the wreck of History.”
It is also a beautiful table.
My visitor had been interrogating, in English, one of the chipmunks who feed on our offering plants. Perhaps he had tried Chipmunk unsuccessfully. I heard the interlaced threads of “How many kilograms do you eat in one lifetime?” “What is your lineage?” “Do you find the weather conducive to health?” and something about sports that I didn’t quite follow. One thread was soprano, two were alto, but one of those a flat monotone, and the last was a falsetto. Just the tones that get on my nerves.
The chipmunk did not, in my view, take these questions very seriously.
I followed the ritual of “garden tea in the morning after a long voyage,” but was not acknowledged until after I had withdrawn to the bench and sat down. There was quiet for a time, and because I should have been busy preparing my mind to deal with the stranger, I instead busied my mind preparing to kill Isabel, and if possible before she heard anything of this visitor in the garden she claimed as hers even though it belonged to the people.
Isabel had never adapted to the concept of sharing, finding it “just too inconvenient.” Her attitude would have given me ample excuse to kill her, if we were living during one of the many Revolutions that enlivened history before the New People put a stop to all that. Now her attitude was merely stupid and selfish, neither of which warranted death, or even a sound whipping.
I still would have to kill her, however. That seemed certain.
I missed the first syllables of my visitor’s introductory comment, but my minder replayed them, making footnote remarks as it went. The visitor wished me to know that its name would be of no use to me, so I should merely use the second honorific; it wondered how I felt about the hairstyle of Blake’s Visionary Head of Friar Bacon; it asserted that it found the asymmetry of the hydrogen sulfite molecule “troubling;” and it wished to know if my testicles had always been so tiny.
My minder observed that it could not extract a theme from the four remarks, but mentioned that each had been set to a passage from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one passage from each Season, then transposed into D-sharp, and pitched down a fifth.
“In the winter of my life, Hermikiti Talu and Highness, this man’s fruit shrivels; not as it was in the spring when I might have studied the pencil drawings of Blake, but instead learned only the architecture of his predecessor, Inigo Jones, whose partial reincarnation Blake might have been, I suppose, and it would not do to fall into the trap of remarking on what I so ill understand; and not as the molecule you cite, which is ever the same from century to century, from summer to autumn to winter and is perhaps symmetrical in time, which is a form of beauty, is it not?” I said.
The visitor sat, uncovered and arrogant, its arm seething as though maggots teemed beneath, and did not respond. It withdrew its right foot from its sandal, cut off a toe, and carefully lifted a stone out of the garden wall and dropped the toe into the hole. It rotated the stone and dropped it back into the wall, askew.
This unnerved me, and my brain went completely blank. My minder could make nothing of it, either, and asked for permission to consult the net. I authorized the consultation, but nothing useful came in. I had twenty minutes to contemplate my sickening guest before it made any further remark.
There is no point in relating the bizarre elements of that exchange. Simply, it asked me to come with it, and I did. We walked out of the garden, across the deserted parade ground, and up the terraces to the section of Wall that runs along Toothpick Ridge. It sang to itself as it walked, setting my teeth on edge repeatedly. My knees throbbed with the unexpected climbing, but I would have died rather than complain.
It had pulled considerably ahead of me by the time we came to the Wall. Instead of stopping, as I had expected, it climbed the closest stair to the top and waited for me there.
I had wanted to get my visitor away from the house, and had wanted to go to the Wall, and here we were, away from the house and on the Wall. Instead of being pleased, I chose this opportunity to throw away everything. I succumbed to peevish resentment.
The Hermikiti Talu and Highness, may it burn both in this life and another, had taken position on the battlement about one meter from the top of the stairs, which did not leave room for me to pass. Rather than walk thirty meters along the path to the next stairway and then thirty meters back, I chose to bow into the pose of “patient obeisance and humiliation,” three meters from the top of the stairs, until this New Person bothered to notice.
I spent some six minutes in that uncomfortable position, my knees throbbing and my right heel feeling like a hot needle was being driven into it. Too much time to think, and to build resentment. Not enough time, alas, to work through this to calmness.
Finally the visitor made its music, indicating that I should come up the stairs, into its space, and stand beside it. My minder indicated that this was an insincere, merely formal invitation, so I remained still. The minder had been misinformed, however, for the visitor shortly spoke again, indicating in three of its threads that I should get up on the Wall immediately.
I unlocked my joints and staggered up the last stairs, nervously taking my place within reach of the loathsome creature, if creature it is of That which is Above, which I doubt. At that distance I could hear the shifting of those hideous scales, a low, syncopated whispering. It nauseated me, despite my training in meditation and bodily control. I tried to distract myself with humor, asking myself the question “Surely this is not as bad as dining with your first mother-in-law?” For the first time in my adult life, the answer could not be negative. This experience made that one pale by comparison.
I concentrated on the view, for the visitor said nothing. What lay before my eyes was the valley of the Fish River and the hillside beyond, hundreds of acres of forest. Nestled into a dell on the side of that hill was a small farm, with fields of Indian corn growing tall. Why they grew corn on these machine-run farms had never been clear. Perhaps they fed it to animals in other zoos.
I did not see the forest as forest, though, or the field as field. I saw a world denied to me. I would never walk in that forest, or see the valley beyond the far ridge, or any other part of the world, unless it was the confines of another human enclave. I saw the whole vast universe that was outside the Morgantown Sector, which meant outside the prison the New People had made for me. Even the name “Sector” had become a lie, for the Knoxville, Huntington, and Lexington sectors of the Westylvania Enclave had long since been detached, then shrunken, and finally shut down. My sector, all that remained of the Enclave, had been reduced to nine thousand square kilometers.
I saw not the forest, but the loss of my true last name, that I had been forbidden to speak or write ever again. The New People had found, in Confucius, the concept of the Rectification of Names, and had imposed this virtuous program on us all. As I made fancy leather bindings for private editions of art books, I became Bookbinder.
I saw the loss of meaning in that trade, as the only bindings I made were for the official histories that each community had begun keeping. Modern Domesday Books, written for descendants that might, someday, care about the last generation of humankind that had once lived outside the Walls. The real human economy, and real jobs, had ceased to be. We were provided almost all we asked for, except military weapons. They even allowed us dueling pistols and the rapier style of swords. With everything provided, our employments had been reduced to mere hobbies.
Instead of the cornfield, I saw the loss of culture. There were no rows in that field, because their machines did not use tractors that needed to drive through them. The stalks were closely spaced in hexagonal distribution, the seeds shot into the ground by a hovering planter, and thus there was no angle at which the eye could see thro
ugh a grown field. That morning the field said to me, I am not a human field. I am not for you. I am new.
My clothes illustrated the loss of culture. I had been raised a Congregationalist, in Little Falls, New York. I wore American suits and ties at work, and jeans and Pendleton shirts at home, until the New People decided that the ideal attire for human beings must be the robes and burnoose of Persia in the sixteenth century. My Amy Vanderbilt manners have been replaced with the extreme formalism of second century Shansi, with touches of fourteenth century Japan, and with completely invented New People additions thrown in. I have learned court poses, and formal mudras, and my native English has been replaced with the Sanskrit the New People decided was our best language. I am proficient in sign-speech; not because I, or a relative, needed it, but because They don’t care to listen to our gabble; and so we must sign whenever more than three of us are together.
My religion had been replaced with The Wisdom, which seemed cobbled from Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism.
For years I had thought of myself as a highly cultured person, an artist and an intellectual. As each challenge, each adaptation had been presented by the planet’s new owners, I had risen to meet it, to exceed the standards required of us. I had been willing to commit murder, and commit it that very day, as part of my coping, my rising to meet a difficult and awkward transition. Standing on that Wall, that day, I lost my persona. Lost my reinvented, carefully maintained, safe, obliging self. I looked across the Fish with the eyes of a caged animal.
I fought down the urge to push the visitor off the Wall, but only because I knew the attempt would be futile. Human reflexes are not fast enough to touch them, much less knock one over, and their bodies far too easily repair themselves.
Perhaps it sensed some part of my feelings, for it chose that moment to gesture in the direction of the corn field and utter two full minutes of discordant four-theme lyrics. I was surprised to find myself following the gist of the speech, even though I found the meaning too bizarre and too awful for words. Still, I let the minder repeat the contents, while the visitor took a brief stroll down the battlements, awaiting my reply.
There may have been artistry in the monster’s presentation, but I will not dignify it with a repetition. The essence was twisted and brutal.
It wondered if I was knowledgeable on the ancient religions which practiced the annual sacrifice of the Corn God Ritual.
Surely, it observed, an artist such as myself must deeply respect the great power of Archetypes.
It noted that my lover, my Isabel, was distantly, and morganatically, related to royalty.
It wished me to know that of all the versions of human sacrifice it had learned of from our history, the Saturnalia and Corn God sacrifices seemed the most noble, the most pleasing, and the most interesting.
The New People had decided to revive the practice, and study its effects.
Did I not expect better crops as a result?
Would I not be proud to know that she had been given to the gods in such an artistic way? Or would sadness prevail?
They hoped, it assured me, that scientific and philosophical study of the sacrifice and its outcome would allow them to perfect human civilization; would clarify for them our ideal culture; would help them bring us to our just and rightful reward.
“These sacrifices,” I asked, “are held in mid-winter, or the spring, were they not? Some months from now, yes?”
Indeed they were, but she would be taken and prepared now, and sacrificed later.
My response was not in complex sentences. “Sadness would prevail,” I said. “You are vile to do this. You are vile even to think of it.”
* * *
She had been taken while we stood on that Wall, was already gone when I returned, alone.
The neighbors came, saying the inadequate things they could think to say, doing the little things that got me through the first week. I did not tell them, then, that the New People had taken her before I could find the courage to put her beyond their reach. I had planned to kill Isabel to spare her from whatever the next step was, though I never imagined something like this; and that peaceful, private death had been forestalled. I did not need to tell them that Isabel had once been delightful, proud, and generous—that she had only turned cranky and peevish lately, adapting poorly to a completely altered world. We all knew it.
I worked in the bindery, because it is what I do, though there is no real sense in it. The New People had done to me what they do: taking away the most beloved, and claiming it to be for our own good. There is even less sense in that.
I worked in the bindery, and mulled over my despair. I mulled it over in my native language, in English, which my visitor found adequate for addressing a chipmunk. I found myself rusty in it, after all these years thinking in Sanskrit. Mostly, I closed escape hatches. I decided not to indulge myself in going mad; not to commit suicide; nor to make them kill me by excessive resistance; not to attempt a futile escape over the Wall, or an act of senseless violence. I decided not to escape into mysticism, and not to convince myself that some god would help after failing so miserably up to this point, may all that is Above get itself in fucking gear.
I decided that only one act of defiance might be of any use at all. I wrote this tale, and am inserting it into this binding and all my other bindings, on the backing papers and in a microchip, with the hope that the recording of what the New People have done will someday bring their acts back upon them.
Perhaps this will protect some other planet from their gentle ministrations. I am not, however, altruistic in this act. I am hoping that with them, soon—as with me, now—sadness will prevail.
West to East
JAY LAKE
The late Jay Lake was a highly talented and highly prolific writer who during his tragically short career seems to have managed to sell to nearly every market in the business, appearing with short work in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Jim Baen’s Universe, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction to fill five different collections: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, Dogs in the Moonlight, The Sky that Wraps, and, most recently, the posthumously released Last Plane to Heaven. Lake was also an acclaimed and prolific novelist, who wrote the novels Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, Escapement, Green, Endurance, The Madness of Flowers, Pinion, and Kalimpura, as well as four chapbook novellas, Death of a Starship, The Baby Killers, The Specific Gravity of Grief, and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh. He was the coeditor, with Deborah Layne, of the six-volume Polyphony anthology series, and also edited the anthologies All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles; Other Earths, with Nick Gevers; and Spicy Slipstream Stories, with Nick Mamatas. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake died in 2014.
The powerful tale that follows is probably Lake’s last published story, a short meditation about the acceptance of inevitable death by the crew of a shuttle ship crashed on an impossibly hostile planet, and the capability of the human spirit to find moments of pure joy even under those circumstances.
I wasn’t looking forward to dying lost and unremarked. Another day on Kesri-Sequoia II, thank you very much.
“Good morning, sir,” said Ensign Mallory from her navcomms station at the nose of our disabled landing boat. She was a small, dark-skinned woman with no hair—I’d never asked if that was cultural or genetic. “Prevailing winds down to just under four hundred knots as of dawn.”
“Enough with the weather.” I coughed the night’s allergies loose. Alien biospheres might not be infectious, but alien proteins still carried a hell of a kick as far as my mucous membranes were concerned. I had good English lungs, which is to say a near-permanent sinus infection under any kind of respiratory stress. And we’d given up on full air recycling weeks ago in the name of power management—with the quantum transfer chamber damaged in our uncontrolled f
inal descent, all we had were backup fuel cells. Not nearly enough to power onboard systems, let alone our booster engines. The emergency stores were full of all kinds of interesting but worthless items like water purifiers, spools of buckywire, and inflatable tents.
Useless. All of our tech was useless. Prospero’s landing boat smelled like mold. Our deck was at a seven-degree angle. We’d been trapped down here so long I swear one of my legs was shortening to compensate.
Mallory glanced back at the display. “I’m sure you know best, sir.”
* * *
Just under four hundred knots pretty much counted as doldrums on the surface of Kesri-Sequoia II. Since the crash we’d regularly clocked wind gusts well in excess of nine hundred knots. Outside the well-shielded hull of the landing boat Ensign Mallory and I would have been stripped to the bone in minutes. Which was too bad. Kesri-Sequoia II didn’t seem to be otherwise inimical to human life. Acceptable nitrogen-oxygen balance, decent partial pressure, within human-normal temperature ranges—a bit muggy perhaps. Nothing especially toxic or caustic out there.
It was the superrotating atmosphere that made things a bitch.
There was life here though, plenty of it—turbulent environments beget niches, niches beget species radiation, species radiation begets a robust biosphere. Just not our kind of life, not anything humans could meaningfully interact with.
Kesri-Sequoia’s dryland surface was dominated by giant sessiles that were rocky and solid with lacy air holes for snaring microbiota from the tumbling winds. They were a kilometer long, two hundred meters tall, less than two meters wide at the base, narrowing as they rose. The sessiles were oriented like shark fins into the airflow. Mallory called them land-reefs. We could see four from our windscreen, lightning often playing between them as the winds scaled up and down. Approaching one expecting communication would be like trying to talk to Ayers Rock.
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 59
