Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  He wasn’t to know it was a land mine, and he didn’t.

  [#]

  One of the nuclear power companies sent an armored limo to pick Angus up after breakfast—a courtesy, the accompanying ping claimed. He sneered at the transparency of the gesture, and accepted the ride. At least it shielded him from the barracking of the sizable crowd (with a far larger virtual flash mob in spectral support) in front of the Hilton Conference Centre. He was pleased to note, just before the limo whirred down the ramp to the underground car park (which gave him a moment of dread, not entirely irrational), that the greatest outrage seemed to have been aroused by the title of the conference, his own suggestion at that: Greening Australia.

  Angus stepped out of the lift and into the main hall. A chandelier the size of a small spacecraft. Acres of carpet, on which armies of seats besieged a stage. Tables of drinks and nibbles along the sides. The smell of coffee and fruit juice. Hundreds of delegates milling around. To his embarrassment, his arrival was greeted with a ripple of applause. He waved both arms in front of his face, smiled self-deprecatingly, and turned to the paper plates and the fruit on sticks.

  Someone had made a beeline for him.

  “Morning, Valtos.”

  Angus turned, switching his paper coffee cup to the paper plate and sticking out his right hand. Jan Maartens, tall and blond. The EU’s man on the scene. Biotech and enviro portfolio. The European Commission and Parliament had publicly deplored Greening Australia, though they couldn’t do much to stop it.

  “Hello, Commissioner.” They shook.

  Formalities over, Maartens cracked open a grin. “So how are you, you old villain?”

  “The hero of the hour, I gather.”

  “Modest as always, Angus. There’s already a rumor the attentat was a setup for the sympathy vote.”

  “Is there indeed?” Angus chuckled. “I wish I’d thought of that. Regretfully, no.”

  Maartens’ lips compressed. “I know, I know. In all seriousness...my sympathy, of course. It must have been a most traumatic experience.”

  “It was,” Angus said. “A great deal worse for the victims, mind you.”

  “Indeed.” Maartens looked grave. “Anything we can do...”

  “Thanks.”

  A bell chimed for the opening session.

  “Well...” Maartens glanced down at his delegate pack.

  “Yes...catch you later, Jan.”

  Angus watched the Belgian out of sight, frowning, then took a seat near the back, and close to the aisle. The conference chair, Professor Chang, strolled onstage and waved her hand. To a roar of applause and some boos the screen behind her flared into a display of the Greening Australia logo, then morphed to a sequence of pixel-perfect views of the scheme: a translucent carbon-fiber barrier, tens of kilometers high, hundreds of kilometers long, that would provide Australia with a substitute for its missing mountain range and bring rainfall to the interior. On the one hand, it was modest: it would use no materials not already successfully deployed in the space elevators, and would cost far less. Birds would fly through it almost as easily as butting through a cobweb. On the other hand, it was the most insanely ambitious scheme of geoengineering yet tried: changing the face of an entire continent.

  Decades ago, Angus had got in early in a project to exploit the stability and aridity of Australia’s heart by making it the nuclear-waste-storage center of the world. The flak from that had been nothing to the outcry over this. As the morning went on, Angus paid little attention to the presentations and debates. He’d heard and seen them all before. His very presence here was enough to influence the discussion, to get smart money sniffing around, bright young minds wondering. Instead, he sat back, closed his eyes, watched market reactions, and worried about a few things.

  The first was Maartens’ solicitude. Something in the Commissioner’s manner hadn’t been quite right- -a little too close in some ways, a little too distant and impersonal in others. Angus ran analyses in his head of the sweat-slick in the handshake, the modulations of the voice, the saccades of his gaze. Here, augmentation confirmed intuition: the man was very uneasy about something, perhaps guilty.

  Hah!

  The next worries were the unsubstantiated unease he’d felt just before his sister’s call, and the content of that call. It would have been nice, in a way, to attribute the anxiety to some premonition: of the unusual and worrying call, or of the assassination attempt. But Angus was firm in his conviction of one-way causality. Nor could he blame it on some free-floating anxiety: his psychiatric ware was up to date, and its scans mirrored, second by second, an untroubled soul.

  Had it been something he’d seen in the market, but had grasped the significance of only subconsciously? Had he made the mistake that could be fatal to a trader: suppressed a niggle?

  He rolled back the displays to the previous afternoon, and reexamined them. There it was. Hard to spot, but there in the figures. Someone big was going long on wheat. A dozen hedge funds had placed multiple two-year trades on oil, uranium, and military equipment. Biotech was up. A tiny minority of well-placed ears had listened to voices prophesying war. The Warm War, turning hot at last.

  Angus thought about what Catriona had told him, about the undocumented, unannounced mitochondrial module in the EU’s next genetic upgrade. An immunity to some biological weapon? But if the EU was planning a first strike—on Japan, the Domain, some other part of the Former United States, Brazil, it didn’t matter at this point—they would need food security. And food security, surely, would be enhanced if Greening Australia went ahead.

  So why was Commissioner Maartens now onstage, repeating the EU’s standard line against the scheme? Unless...unless that was merely the line they had to take in public, and they really wanted the conference to endorse the scheme. And what better way to secretly support that than to maneuver its most implacable opponents into the awkward position of having to disown an assassination attempt on its most vociferous proponent? An attempt that, whether it succeeded or failed, would win Angus what Maartens had—in a double or triple bluff—called the sympathy vote.

  Angus’s racing suspicions were interrupted by a ringing in his ear. He flicked his earlobe. “A moment, please,” he said. He stood up, stepped apologetically past the delegate between him and the aisle, and turned away to face the wall.

  “Yes?”

  It was the investigator who’d spoken to him last night. She was standing on a beach, near the edge of a crater in the sand with a bloody mess around it.

  “We think we may have found your man,” she said.

  “I believe I can say the same,” said Angus.

  “What?”

  “You’ll see. Send a couple of plainclothes in to the Hilton Centre, discreetly. Ask them to ping me when they’re in place. I’ll take it from there.”

  As he turned back to face across the crowd to the stage he saw that Maartens had sat down, and that Professor Chang was looking along the rows of seats as if searching for someone. Her gaze alighted on him, and she smiled.

  “Lord Valtos?” she said. “I know you’re not on the speakers list, but I see you’re on your feet, and I’m sure we’d all be interested to hear what you have to say in response to the commissioner’s so strongly stated points.”

  Angus bowed from the waist. “Thank you, Madame Chair,” he said. He cleared his throat, waiting to make sure that his voice was synched to the amps. He zoomed his eyes, fixing on Maartens, swept the crowd of turned heads with an out-of-focus gaze and his best smile, then faced the stage.

  “Thank you,” he said again. “Well, my response will be brief. I fully agree with every word the esteemed commissioner has said.”

  A jolt went through Maartens like an electric shock. It lasted only a moment, and he’d covered his surprise even before the crowd had registered its own reaction with a hiss of indrawn breath. If Angus hadn’t been looking at Maartens in close-up he’d have missed it himself. He returned to his seat and waited for the police t
o make contact. It didn’t take them more than about five minutes.

  Just time enough for him to go short on shares in Syn Bio.

  Earth Hour copyright © 2011 Ken MacLeod

  EMMA BULL

  Emma Bull (born December 13, 1954) is an American science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. She has participated in Terri Windling's Borderland shared universe, which is the setting of her 1994 novel Finder. She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Bull wrote a screenplay for War for the Oaks, which was made into an 11-minute mini-film designed to look like a film trailer. She made a cameo appearance as the Queen of the Seelie Court, and her husband, Will Shetterly, directed. Bull and Shetterly created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. There are five Liavek collections extant.

  She was a member of the writing group The Scribblies, which included Will Shetterly as well as Pamela Dean, Kara Dalkey, Nate Bucklin, Patricia Wrede and Steven Brust. With Steven Brust, Bull wrote Freedom and Necessity (1997), an epistolary novel set during the 19th century United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Chartist movement.

  Silver and Gold, by Emma Bull

  Nebula Nomination for Best Novella 1992

  Moon Very Thin sat on the raised hearth—the only place in the center room out of the way—with her chin on her knuckles. She would have liked to be doing something more, but the things she thought of were futile, and most were undignified. She watched Alder Owl crisscross the slate floor and pop in and out of the stillroom and the pantry and the laundry. Alder Owl's hands were full of things on every crossing: clean clothes, a cheese, dried yellow dock and feverfew, a tinderbox, a wool mantle. She was frowning faintly all over her round pink face, and Moon knew that she was reviewing lists in her head.

  “You can't pack all that,” said Moon.

  “You couldn't,” said Alder Owl. “But I've had fifty years more practice. Now remember to cure the squash before you bring them in, or there'll be nothing to eat all winter but onions. And if the squirrels nest in the thatch again, there's a charm—”

  “You told me,” Moon sighed. She shifted a little to let the fire roast a slightly different part of her back. “If I forget it, I can look it up. It's awfully silly for you to set out now. We could have snow next week.”

  “If we did, then I'd walk through it. But we won't. Not for another month.” Alder Owl wrapped three little stoneware jars in flannel and tucked them in her wicker pack.

  Moon opened her mouth, and the thing she'd been busy not saying for three days hopped out. “He's been missing since before Midsummer. Why do you have to go now? Why do you have to go at all?”

  At that, Alder Owl straightened up and regarded her sternly. “I have responsibilities. You ought to know that.”

  “But why should they have anything to do with him?”

  “He is the prince of the Kingdom of Hark End.”

  Moon stood up. She was taller than Alder Owl, but under that fierce gaze she felt rather stubby. She scowled to hide it. “And we live in Hark End. Hundreds—thousands of people do. A lot of them are even witches. They haven't all gone tramping off like a pack of questing youngest sons.”

  Alder Owl had a great many wrinkles, which deepened all over her face when she was about to smile. They deepened now. “First, youngest sons have never been known to quest in packs. Second, all the witches worth their salt and stone have tried to find him, in whatever way suits them best. All of them but me. I held back because I wanted to be sure you could manage without me.”

  Moon Very Thin stood still for a moment, taking that in. Then she sat back down with a thump and laced her fingers around her knees. “Oh,” she said, halfway between a gasp and a laugh. “Unfair, unfair. To get at me through my pride!”

  “Yes, my weed, and there's such a lot of it. I have to go, you know. Don't make it harder for me.”

  “I wish I could do something to help,” said Moon after a moment.

  “I expect you to do all your work around here, and all of mine besides. Isn't that enough?” Alder Owl smoothed the flap down over the pack and snugged the drawstring tight.

  “You know it's not. Couldn't I go with you?”

  Alder Owl pulled a stool from under the table with her foot and sat on it, her hands over her knees. “When I travel in my spirit,” she said, “to ask a favor of Grandmother, you can't go with me.”

  “Of course not. Then who'd play the drum, to guide you back?”

  Alder Owl beamed. “Clever weed. Open that cupboard over the mantel-shelf and bring me what you find there.”

  What Moon found was a drum. It was nothing like the broad, flat, cowhide journey-drum, whose speech echoed in her bones and was like a breathing heartbeat under her fingers, whose voice could be heard in the land where there was no voice. This drum was an upright cylinder no bigger than a quart jar. Its body was made of some white wood, and the skins of its two heads were fine-grained and tufted with soft white hair around the lashings. There was a loop of hide to hold it with, and a drumstick with a leather beater tucked through that.

  Moon shook her head. “This wouldn't be loud enough to bring you home from the pump, let alone from—where are you going?”

  “Wherever I have to. Bring it to me.”

  Moon brought her the drum, and Alder Owl held it up by the loop of hide and struck it, once. The sound it made was a sharp, ringing tok, like a woodpecker's blow.

  Alder Owl said, “The wood is from an ash tree planted at the hour of my birth. The skins are from a ewe born on the same day. I raised the ewe and watered the tree, and on my sixteenth birthday, I asked them for their lives, and they gave them gladly. No matter how far I go, the drum will reach me. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound.

  “Tomorrow at dawn, I'll leave,” Alder Owl continued. “Tomorrow at sunset, as the last rind of the sun burns out behind the line of the Wantnot Hills, and at every sunset after, beat the drum once, as I just did. “

  Moon was a little shaken by the solemnity of it all. But she gathered her wits at last and repeated, “At sunset each day. Once. I'll remember.”

  “Hmph. Well.” Alder Owl lifted her shoulders, as if solemnity was a shawl she could shrug away. “Tomorrow always comes early. Time to put the fire to bed.”

  “I'll get the garden things,” Moon said. She tossed her cloak on and went out the stillroom door into the night.

  Her namesake was up, and waxing. Alder Owl would have good light, if she needed to travel by night. But it would be cold traveling; frost dusted the leaves and vines and flagstone paths like talcum. Moon shivered and sighed. “What's the point of having an able-bodied young apprentice, if you're not going to put all that ableness to use?” she muttered to the shifting air. The cold carried all her S's off into the dark.

  She pinched a bloom from the yellow chrysanthemum, and a stalk of merry-man's wort from its sheltered bed. When she came back into the house she found that Alder Owl had already fed the fire and settled the logs with the poker, and fetched a bowl of water. Moon dropped the flowers into it.

  “Comforter, guard against the winter dark,” Alder Owl said to the fire, as always, as if she were addressing an old friend. She stirred the water with her fingers as she spoke. “Helpmeet, nourisher of flesh and heart, bide and watch, and let no errant spark leap up until the sun should take thy part.”

  Firelight brushed across the seamed landscape of Alder Owl's face, flashed yellow in her sharp, dark eyes, turned the white in her hair to ivory. Tomorrow night, Moon thought, she won't be here. Just me. She could believe it only with the front of her mind, where all untested things were kept. The rest of her, mind and lungs and soles of feet, denied it.

  Alder Ow
l flicked the water from her hand onto the hearth, and the line of drops steamed. Then she handed the bowl to Moon, and Moon fed the flowers to the fire.

  After a respectful silence, Moon said, “It's water.” It was the continuation of an old argument. “And the logs were trees that grew out of the earth and fed on water, and the fire itself feeds on those and air. That's all four elements. You can't separate them.”

  “It's the hour for fire, and it's fire that we honor. At the appropriate hours we honor the other three, and if you say things like that in public, no educated person in the village will speak to you.” Alder Owl took the bowl out of Moon's hands and gathered her fingers in a strong, wet clasp. “My weed, my stalk of yarrow. You're not a child anymore. When I leave, you'll be a grown woman, in others' eyes if not your own. What people hear from a child's mouth as foolishness becomes something else on the lips of a woman grown: sacrilege, or spite, or madness. Work the work as you see fit, but keep your mouth closed around your notions, and keep fire out of water and earth out of air.”

  “But—”

  “Empty the bowl now, and get on to bed.”

  Moon went into the garden again and flung the water out of the bowl—southward, because it was consecrated to fire. Then she stood a little while in the cold, with a terrible hard feeling in her chest that was beyond sadness, beyond tears. She drew in great breaths to freeze it, and exhaled hard to force the fragments out. But it was immune to cold or wind.

  “I'd like to be a woman,” she whispered. “But I'd rather be a child with you here, than a woman with you gone.” The sound of the words, the knowledge that they were true, did what the cold couldn't. The terrible feeling cracked, melted, and poured out of her in painful tears. Slowly the comforting order around her, the beds and borders Alder Owl had made, stopped the flow of them, and the kind cold air wiped them off her face.

  At dawn, when the light of sunrise lay tangled in the treetops, Alder Owl settled her pack on her back and went out by the front door. Moon went with her as far as the gate at the bottom of the yard. In the uncertain misty land of dawn, Alder Owl was a solid, certain figure, cloaked in shabby purple wool, her silver and black hair tucked under a drunken-brimmed green hat.