Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I laughed. “So I’m right, am I? You’re already beginning to make me into an idea. A difficult decision rendered by a great man. Well, stop now. This is only difficult because you make it so. All you have to do is break your vow and spare my life.”

  “Menelaus and Odysseus would take the armies and bring them to march against Mycenae. Don’t you see? I have no choice.”

  “Don’t you see? It should never have been your choice at all. My life isn’t yours to barter. The choice should have been mine.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that you want me to pity you for my death.”

  Wind whistled through my brain. The edges of the tent rustled. Sand stirred. Strands of mother’s hair blew out from her braids.

  “You know, I never believed what Helen told me. Did he look like Orestes, father? Did my elder half-brother look like Orestes when you dashed him to the rocks?”

  You glowered at my defiance. “This is how you beg me to save your life?”

  “Is it sufficient?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. I inhaled deeply. “Don’t kill me.”

  I had forgotten how to beg.

  * * *

  With almost nothing of myself remaining, I found myself reconsidering my conversation with Helen. Without my ego to distract me, I concentrated on different details, imagined different motivations behind her words. Did I think Helen was arrogant because that was what everyone said about her? Was she boastful or simply honest?

  As Helen sat beneath the olive tree, watching me admire her face, she sighed. I’d always believed it was a sigh of pride. Perhaps it was weariness instead. Perhaps she was exhausted from always having to negotiate jealousy and desire when she wanted to do something as simple as holding her niece’s hand.

  “You’ll be beautiful one day, too.” Was she trying to reassure me?

  “Not as beautiful as you,” I demurred.

  “No one is as beautiful as I.”

  Her voice was flat. How must it have felt, always being reduced to that single superlative?

  After she told me the terrible things about my father, I fled into the crowd to search for my mother. I found her holding a stern conversation with one of Helen’s women. She wouldn’t budge when I tried to drag her away. She dabbed my tears and told me to find Iamas so he could calm me down.

  It wasn’t until I crumpled at her feet, distraught and wailing, that she realized I was suffering from more than a scrape.

  She slipped her arms around me and helped me to stand, her embrace warm and comforting. She brought me to her rooms and asked what was wrong.

  I repeated Helen’s words. “It isn’t true!” I cried. “She’s mean and vain. Why would she lie about something like that? Tell me she’s lying.”

  “Of course she is,” said mother, patting me vaguely on the head. “No one would be monstrous enough to do that.”

  She pulled the blanket to my chin and sat beside me and stroked my hair (oh, mother, did you never learn another way to comfort a child?). I fell asleep, head tilted toward her touch.

  Later, I woke to the sound of voices in the corridor. They drifted in, too quiet to hear. I tiptoed to the door and listened.

  “I’m sorry,” said Helen, her voice raw as if she’d been crying. “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

  “Well, you did. She’s inconsolable. She thinks her father kills babies.”

  “But Clytemnestra—”

  “Stories like that have no place in this house. I don’t understand what was going on in your head!”

  “He’s a killer. How can you stand to see him with that sweet little girl? I think of my nephew every time I look at her. He’s a monster. He’d kill her in a moment if it suited him. How can you let him near her?”

  “He won’t hurt her. He’s her father.”

  “Clytemnestra, she had to know.”

  “It wasn’t your decision.”

  “It had to be someone’s! You can’t protect her from a little sadness now, and let him lead her into danger later. Someone had to keep your daughter safe.”

  Mother’s voice dipped so low that it was barely more than a whisper. “Or maybe you couldn’t stand to see that I can actually make my daughter happy.”

  Helen made a small, pained noise. I heard the rustling of her garment, her footsteps echoing down the painted clay corridor. I fled back to mother’s blanket and tried to sleep, but I kept imagining your hands as you threw a baby down to his death on the stones. I imagined your fingers covered in blood, your palms blue from the cold in your heart. It couldn’t be true.

  * * *

  You called two men to escort me to Calchas. One wore his nightclothes, the other a breastplate and nothing else. Patchy adolescent beards covered their chins.

  Mother wept.

  You stood beside me. “I have to do this.”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  The soldiers approached. In a low voice, you asked them to be gentle.

  My emotions lifted from me, one by one, like steam evaporating from a campfire.

  Fear disappeared.

  “Don’t worry, mother,” I said. “I will go with them willingly. It is only death.”

  Sadness departed.

  “Don’t grieve for me. Don’t cut your hair. Don’t let the women of the house cut their hair either. Try not to mourn for me at all. Crush dandelions. Run by the river. Wind ribbons around your fingers.”

  Empathy bled away.

  “Father, I want you to think of all the suffering I’ve felt, and magnify it a thousand times. When you reach the shores of Troy, unleash it all on their women. Let my blood be the harbinger of their pain. Spear them. Savage them. Let their mother’s throats be raw with screaming. Let their elder brothers be dashed like infants on the rocks.”

  Love vanished. I turned on my mother.

  “Why did you bring me here? You saw him kill your son, and still you let me hold his hand! Why didn’t you remember what he is?”

  I pushed my mother to the ground. Orestes tumbled from her arms. Bloody fingers on blue hands flashed past my vision in the instant before mother twisted herself to cushion his fall.

  I forgot resignation.

  “Why did you write that letter? Am I worth less to you than the hunk of wood they used to make your staff of office? Would it have been so bad to be the man who stayed home instead of fighting? Let Menelaus lead. Let him appease Artemis with Hermione’s blood. If a girl must die to dower Helen, why shouldn’t it be her own daughter?

  “Did you raise me only so that you could trade me in for the best offer you could get? A wealthy husband? Influential children? A wind to push you across the sea?

  “Mother, why didn’t you take me to the hills? Helen went! Helen ran away! Why didn’t we follow Helen?”

  You uttered a command. The soldiers took my elbow. I forgot how to speak.

  * * *

  Your soldiers escorted me through the camp to the temple. Achilles found me on the way. “You’re as beautiful as your aunt,” he said.

  The wind of my forgetfulness battered against him. Effortlessly, Achilles buffeted against its strength.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “It takes courage to walk calmly to your death. I wouldn’t mind marrying you. Talk to me. I only need a little persuasion. Tell me why I should save your life.”

  Voiceless, I marched onward.

  * * *

  I forgot you.

  They washed and perfumed me and decked me with the things that smell sweet. You came before me.

  “My sweet Iphigenia,” you said. “If there was anything I could do to stop it, I would, but I can’t. Don’t you see?”

  You brushed your fingers along my cheek. I watched them, no longer certain what they were.

  “Iphigenia, I have no right, but I’ve come to ask for your pardon. Can you forgive me for what I’ve done?”

  I stared at you with empty eyes, my brows furrowed, my body cleansed and prepared. Who are you?
asked my flesh.

  * * *

  They led me into Artemis’s sacred space. Wild things clustered, lush and pungent, around the courtyard. The leaves tossed as I passed them, shuddering in my wind. Sunlight glinted off of the armor of a dozen men who were gathered to see the beginning of their war. Iamas was there, too, weeping as he watched.

  Calchas pushed his way toward me as if he were approaching through a gale, his garment billowing around him. I recognized the red ribbons on his headband, his indigo eyes, his taut and joyless smile.

  “You would have been beautiful one day, too,” she said.

  Not as beautiful as you.

  “No one is as beautiful as I.”

  His breath stank with rotting fish, unless that was other men, another time. He held a jeweled twig in his hand—but I knew it would be your hand that killed me. Calchas was only an instrument, like Helen, like the twig.

  He lifted the jeweled twig to catch the sun. I didn’t move. He drew it across my throat.

  * * *

  My body forgot to be a body. I disappeared.

  * * *

  Artemis held me like a child holds a dandelion. With a single breath, she blew the wind in my body out of my girl’s shape.

  I died.

  * * *

  Feel me now. I tumble through your camp, upturning tents as a child knocks over his toys. Beneath me, the sea rumbles. Enormous waves whip across the water, powerful enough to drown you all.

  “Too strong!” shouts Menelaus.

  Achilles claps him on the back. “It’ll be a son of a bitch, but it’ll get us there faster!”

  Mother lies by the remnants of the tent and refuses to move. Iamas tugs on her garment, trying to stir her. She cries and cries, and I taste her tears. They become salt on my wind.

  Orestes wails for mother’s attention. He puts his mouth to her breasts, but she cannot give him the comfort of suckling. I ruffle his hair and blow a chill embrace around him. His eyes grow big and frightened. I love him, but I can only hug him harder, for I am a wind.

  Achilles stands at the prow of one of the ships, boasting of what he’ll do to the citizens of Troy. Menelaus jabs his sword into my breeze and laughs. “I’ll ram Paris like he’s done to Helen,” he brags. Odysseus laughs.

  I see you now, my father, standing away from the others, your face turned toward Troy. I blow and scream and whisper.

  You smile at first, and turn to Calchas. “It’s my daughter!”

  The priest looks up from cleaning his bloody dagger. “What did you say?”

  I whip cold fury between your ears. Your face goes pale, and you clap your hands to the sides of your head, but my voice is the sound of the wind. It is undeniable.

  Do you still want forgiveness, father?

  “Set sail!” you shout. “It’s time to get out of this harbor!”

  I am vast and undeniable. I will crush you all with my strength and whirl your boats to the bottom of the sea. I’ll spin your corpses through the air and dash them against the cliffs.

  But no, I am helpless again, always and ever a hostage to someone else’s desires. With ease, Artemis imposes her will on my wild fury. I feel the tension of her hands drawing me back like a bowstring. With one strong, smooth motion, she aims me at your fleet. Fiercely, implacably, I blow you to Troy.

  Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind, by Rachel Swirsky

  The last word ever spoken by a human is said in a language derived from Hindi. The word is trasa. Roughly translated: thirst or desire.

  #

  The second-to-last human to die is a child who lives in the region that was once called the Blue Mountains of Australia. She has the strange light eyes that children are occasionally born with, the way they are sometimes born as triplets or with white hair or with another baby’s empty body growing from their bellies. Her mother calls them water eyes, a sign that the child shares the changeable spirit of the ocean which can shift from calm to storm in the space of a breath.

  On the last day of her life, the light-eyed child finds a pair of ancient skeletons exposed in the silt by the river near her camp. She pulls out the ribs with a sucking noise, loosing the foul stench of trapped gas. Pelvic bones lie in the mud below, tangled with metal things no one can make anymore. As she teases them free, the light-eyed child unearths rusted chains and hollow disks the diameter of her wrist.

  The light-eyed child rinses the bones clean in the river. She runs her hand over the long femurs, marveling. People no longer grow so tall.

  The light-eyed child sets the bones in a loose pile underneath a scribbly gum tree. The skulls preside on top, regarding her with hollow eyes. The light-eyed child kisses each in the center of its caved-in forehead.

  Goodnight, Grandpa Burn, she says. Goodnight, Grandma Starve.

  #

  The last major art movement is invented near Lake Vättern in Sweden. With the help of enough processing power to calculate the trajectories of a beachful of sand over a millennium, the artist taps a feeder loop directly into her brain and uses it to shape a three-dimensional holographic image of her father. For the first time, human thought patterns take direct, physical form. Her father’s projection repeats sequences of fragmented memories. His limbs trail into images of people and places he loved when he was alive; his hair winds into the tapestries he was famous for weaving; his face flickers cyclically from youth to gray. It’s not my father, the artist explains. It’s how I think of my father, his imago.

  Within five years, her invention revolutionizes art. Artists show the world how they conceive of childbirth, fire, finches, walk bodies, urtists, religion, synthesis and death.

  Within twenty years, the technology to create such work is destroyed. Art falls backward. Humanity falls farther.

  #

  The man who will survive to be the last human lives in the region once called Nepal. Amid the still-falling ash from a series of volcanic eruptions, he and his son dig their way free of a cave-in.

  Ravens perched on branches overhanging the cave mouth observe their progress. When the son grows weak, the last man tries to scatter the birds by throwing stones. They flap a short distance into the naked trees and witness the boy’s death from there, watching events unfold the way birds do: turning their heads to look first with one eye, then the other, to see which version of life is more appealing.

  #

  The last scientific discovery excites the neurons of an amateur stargazer. Even before the cataclysm, she is the last of an increasingly rarefied breed - air and light pollution have made ground telescopes useless, so she has to pay for satellite time to peer out in an era when almost all of humanity’s technological eyes are aimed inward. One lonely night when all her mates and children are away, she trains her screen to watch the cloud bands on Jupiter’s gaseous surface and glimpses a city-sized object hurtling toward the earth.

  Oh, God, she says, an asteroid.

  #

  With near-earth space increasingly militarized, it’s been years since government telescopes have been dedicated to anything but scrutinizing the actions of other nations. The scant handful of under-funded astronomers confirms that the object’s path will bring it into contact with earth.

  The astronomers agree: there’s nothing to be done. A century of attrition has withered space programs. Early iterations of space-faring technology were cannibalized to fund defense and weapons aimed at earthly targets. Remaining resources are primitive and useless. The object is too close to fire missiles at or deflect or drag into the gravity well of the sun.

  #

  Wealthy global governments convene. If they can’t stop the asteroid, they agree to let it hit. Calculations demonstrate it will impact near the southern tip of Chile. Industrialists working on technology for deep-sea exploration believe they can adapt their pressure shield mechanisms to protect a few major cities from the global fires, earthquakes and tidal waves that will result from impact. With nuclear, wind, and solar power operating at full capacity,
there should be enough energy to protect key sections of Asia, Europe and North America. First world populations that live outside protected urban centers are herded in en masse, crowding like cattle into emergency shelters.

  As for those who won’t be included in the rescue plan, global leaders mumble about regrettable losses then do what they have always done: sacrifice the good of the many for the good of themselves.

  #

  The last act of malice lights in the eyes of a pathologist who works in a secure facility in a dome on an island in an untraveled sea. When it becomes clear their government has abandoned them, the other scientists drink and screw on the lab tables. He unlocks his deadliest specimens, flees the building to the rhythm of unheeded alarms, and looses genetically manipulated spores like fairy dust onto the wind.

  #

  The last heroes desert their homes in wealthy nations and travel south to stand with their impoverished brothers and sisters.

  Like everyone else, they die.

  #

  By the time the cataclysm strikes, more words have been forgotten over the course of human history than remain known.

  #

  The city-sized object hits.

  #

  Wealthy northerners watch the event through cameras on surviving satellites. Milliseconds after impact, their screens go black as the asteroid’s collision displaces earth and rock in a hundred mile radius. Radioactive waste illegally buried in poverty-stricken Puerto Natales flies into the air, joining the plume of dirt that whirls into the chaotic weather systems caused by impact. Soil sewn with radioactive dust distributes across the globe in a storm that blocks the sun for three months.

  Human folly has made a bad natural occurrence into an untenable one. It is as if the planet has gone to global nuclear war. Toxic heavy metals rain into the surface water systems and poison the springs of civilization.

  Pressure shields are helpless against nuclear fallout. For those not killed by the fiery rains of impact, dying lingers. Bones weaken; teeth fall out; skin loosens in long, slender strips like fruit peels.

  Before she dies, the Swedish artist tries to redraw her father’s imago on a flat sheet of pulped tree. Her shaking hand is raw and bleeding, but her lines fall true. The drawing fails anyway. She can’t remember what her father looked like. She can only remember her art.