Jenny thought about Ben and his sharp tongue. It really hurt her, it made her feel small and foolish and insignificant. Were they going to be all right in Jamaica? Was that even a possibility? Was there really any chance of it at all?
* * * *
Richard meanwhile was looking out of the window at abandoned industrial estates.
“No one sees this. No one sees this except for me.”
He looked at ruined factories and warehouses and engine sheds.
“I know who'll show up now,” he thought with an inward sigh.
And sure enough there was Steel Man, with its iron hands, suspended by magnetic forces in the orange city sky. And of course it spotted Richard at once, regarding him intently with its burning eyes.
Richard turned away uncomfortably, like a child avoiding the gaze of an adult who once told him off. He hunched down in his seat, with a wince and a tightening of his lips, and turned his attention determinedly to the smoke-blackened walls of Victorian tenement buildings, with buddleia sprouting from the chimney stacks, and to old billboards with their fading and peeling ads for obsolete products. (No one would ever again be bothered to paste up wrinkly paper images. Any day now advertisers would be able to use the Urban Consensual Field to put pictures in the sky.)
“If it wasn't for me,” muttered Richard Pegg out loud, glancing at the opaque goggles that covered Jenny's eyes and avoiding the gaze of Steel Man. “This would all just...”
He broke off.
A tear had rolled out from under Jenny's bug eyes, a mascara-stained tear. Richard watched, fascinated and profoundly moved, as it rolled down her right cheek.
Jenny flipped down the opacity of her bugs and began to fumble in her bag.
But Richard beat her to it, retrieving a squashed packet of tissues from under the notebook in his right anorak pocket, and leaning forward to offer it to her.
Jenny lifted her bugs right off her eyes, smiled at him, accepted the packet from him.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling out a tissue and dabbing at her eyes, “thank you so much. That's very kind of you.”
Richard laughed.
“It was an invisible man,” he offered.
“Sorry?”
“Riding on the back of that deer. An invisible man with horns.”
He didn't normally speak of such things, but Jenny he knew he could trust.
“Wow,” Jenny exclaimed. “That sounds like quite something.”
Richard laughed.
“It was,” he said. “That's why the Need woke me. It was an atomic truth.”
Jenny smiled, handed him back his tissues. Then more tears came, and Richard handed the tissues back again and watched her, fascinated, uncomprehending, but full of tenderness while she once more dried her eyes.
“I'll tell you something,” Jenny sniffled. “I'm going to have a good time in Jamaica, whatever old misery guts decides to do. I'm going to have a good time no matter what.”
She smiled.
“Is that an atomic truth, do you reckon?”
Richard laughed loudly.
At the far end of the carriage someone else laughed too, but it was nothing to do with Richard or Jenny, nothing to do with anything that was physically present at all.
“Thank you,” Jenny said again. “You really are very kind.”
She had done with crying. She passed Richard his packet of tissues, smiled at him one more time, and pulled her goggles back down over her eyes.
Richard settled into his seat, trying to avoid looking at Night Man, who he couldn't help noticing was out there hovering over the dark fields like a giant owl, and staring gloomily in at him with its enormous eyes. Gloomy old Night Man he could do without, but he felt he'd had a good day all the same.
Copyright © 2009 Chris Beckett
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Novelette: THE ARMIES OF ELFLAND
by Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick
Eileen Gunn tells us the following tale “is one of several stories that Michael and I drafted online, in real time, as part of the Clarion West Write-a-thon in 2007. As stunts go, it was pretty much as exhilarating as wing-walking on a bi-plane, without being quite so physically dangerous. Not to say that collaborating with Michael is without its dangers....” Eileen is a short story writer who lives in Seattle. She is also editor of the Infinite Matrix, the Flying Dutchman of online magazines. Her work has received the Nebula award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan. The multiple award-winner Michael Swanwick's most recent novel, The Dragons of Babel, is just out in paperback from Tor Books. The Best of Michael Swanwick, a collection of Michael's stories, came out late last year from Tachyon Publications.
It was the middle of the night when the mirrors came out of the elves. With a sound like the cushioned patter of an ice storm, the tiny mirrors fell to the ground, leaving a crust of glitter behind the marching elf-army. They bled, of course, but the elven blood restored the dry land, undoing the effects of the drought, and moss emerged green from the ground in the troops’ wake.
The sight of the moss brought forth the drought-starved humans and their pathetic get to the mouths of their caves.
“Stay here!” the new father commanded. Not one of the children was his. But all the real fathers were dead, so they had no choice but to obey him or be beaten.
“Don't go,” Agnes wanted to say. “Don't trust them.” But Richard gently touched her lips to silence her. Richard was the oldest of the children, indeed almost an adult himself, and he did what he could to protect the others.
The adults fell on the damp moss, tearing it up by the double-handful like so much bread dough. They sucked the moisture from it and crammed its substance down their throats. Briefly, all seemed well. One of the new father's wives was raising an arm to beckon the children down when the minute mirrors they had ingested suddenly expanded to ten, a hundred, a thousand times their original size. Jagged shards of mirror erupted from their flesh as horns, tusks, and spines. Blood fountained into the air and pooled on the ground, glimmering in the moonlight. The adults splashed through it, lurching grotesquely, writhing and howling in pain.
The children hid their eyes and turned away. The littlest ones cried.
Then, suddenly, there was silence. That was the hardest to bear of all.
But though the adults had ceased screaming, they did not fall. Brutally sharp glass fragments jutted from every inch of their bodies, holding them upright and rigid.
Nothing that was human remained of the adults. They had turned to crystal.
“We've got to bury them,” Agnes said firmly. “We can't just leave them standing like that.”
“How?” Richard asked. “We can't even touch them.”
The children had no shovels, but even with shovels they would have had a tough time trying to dig graves on the dry, barren beach. Where they stood had once been the shore of a small arm of the Pacific Ocean. But then the ocean had dried up and become a low, mountainous land of cliffs and sudden rifts, blanketed with dead fish and rotting seaweed. The sun had baked the wasteland that the elves had first created and then crossed as black and hard as obsidian. There would be no burials there.
“We can throw stones,” Frederic said. He was the youngest of the children. He hadn't spoken until he was three, which was over five years ago. When he did start to speak, however, his first words were, “Things are not as they once were.” Followed, after two days of intense thought, by, “In any case, they could be arranged better.” He came up with ideas nobody else could have.
So they did as he suggested, smashing the starlight-glittery figures from a distance until they were nothing but mounds of broken glass. Richard, who had read a lot back when there were books, said, “In ancient times when men were warriors and carried spears, they buried their dead in mounds of rocks called cairns. This was an honorable form of burial. Even kings and queens were buried that way.” Then he turned to Agnes. “You're good with word
s,” he said. “Please. Say a few words over the dead.”
Agnes took a deep breath. At last she said, “The adults were stupid.” Everybody nodded in agreement. “But the elves are cruel, and that's worse.” Everybody nodded again. “I'm sick of them, and I'm sick of their war.” She raised her voice. “I want to have enough food to eat! All the food I want, every day of my life. I'm going to get it, too. I don't know how. But I do know that I'm never going to be fooled by the elves or their mirrors or their green moss ever again!”
She spat on the ground, and everyone else followed suit.
“Amen,” she said.
She had no idea how futile her vow would prove.
* * * *
During the Alien Invasions, as they were called before the world learned that the armies of Elfland came not from someplace unimaginably far away but from somewhere impossibly nearby, the children and their parents had been vacationing on a resort near Puget Sound. So shocked were the parents that at first they didn't think to shield the children from their television sets. So the children saw the slaughter—what happened to the people who resisted the elves, and then what happened to the people who didn't. When the elves came to Seattle, they left the television stations untouched, and courteously escorted the cameramen to Volunteer Park to broadcast their victory celebration to whoever might still be watching.
Under the guidance of their ghastly, beautiful queen, the invaders flayed their prisoners. This they did with exquisite skill, so that all were still alive when the work was done. Then they roasted them over coals. Troubadours wandered up and down the rows of scorched and screaming flesh, playing their harps in accompaniment. Elf-lords and elf-ladies formed quadrilles on the greensward in front of the band shell and danced entrancingly. Afterwards, they threw themselves down on the grass and ate heaping platters of roasted human flesh, while goblin servants poured foaming wine into sapphire goblets.
Then they torched the city.
* * * *
The children understood cruelty far more intimately than did the adults, who had the army and the police and a hundred other social institutions to shield them from schoolyard beatings, casual theft, and having bugs and other vermin dropped into one's food or mouth or clothing simply because somebody larger was bored. But they had never before seen such cruelty as this. What shocked them was not the deeds in themselves—they had imagined much worse—but that nobody took pleasure from them. These cruelties were not done with fiendish playground glee. There was no malice behind them, no glorying in the cruelty of what was done. Just a string of horrifying and senseless images running night and day on the television, until one day the transmitters stopped and there were no more.
That was when Frederick told the children that they had to go into the caves, and Richard led them all there. When the adults came to bring them back to the rental bungalows, Richard led the children deeper into the darkness and the adults followed. Thus it was that they few survived when every building on the island simultaneously burst into flames. It was cold in the caves, but at night the adults went out and foraged for food and blankets and fuel. Every now and then some of them didn't return.
Months passed.
When the elves changed the weather and shrank the seas, the grasses and crops dried up. There was little to eat, and the adults weren't anything like they used to be. Hunger made them unpredictable, violent, and impulsive.
It was no wonder, then, that the elves were able to catch them by surprise.
* * * *
The adults were dead. Human history was over.
In the wake of the elves, grass returned, and then flowers. Trees rocketed to the sky. Some bore fruit. Agnes was roasting apples in the coals of a campfire one morning, when Richard sat down beside her, the sun bright in his golden-red hair. “We need weapons,” he said. “For when the elves return. I tried making a bow and arrows. But it's just a toy. It wouldn't kill anything larger than a sparrow.”
Agnes thought. “We can make spears, like the ones the cairn-people had. Spears are easy to use, and almost anything sharp would do for a head.”
Richard laughed with delight. “If you were older, I'd kiss you!” he cried, and hurried off to look for materials.
Leaving Agnes with the strangest feeling. Almost, she wished she was older. Almost, she wished he would kiss her.
That afternoon the elves returned and took them all prisoner.
This time, they killed nobody. Lean elves with long, stinger-tipped abdomens, like yellow-jackets, injected venom into the children's bodies. They were immobilized and stacked like cordwood on a long wooden tray, then flown by winged elves back to their camp. There, they were dumped to the ground and dosed with antivenom. As they came back to life, the smaller children began to cry.
Not Agnes, however. Her body ached from being stung, but she was far more concerned about what was going to happen next. She looked around carefully. The elven camp was made up of brightly colored tents, far loftier than the ones people used for camping, with long silk pennons flying from their tips. They stood on a hilltop and the tents went on forever below them, like a field of flowers that had no end.
There was a groan behind Agnes, and somebody clutched her shoulder. With a shriek, she whirled about, only to discover Richard groggily staggering to his feet. “Oh!” she cried. “You scared me!”
A bamboo whip cut across her back.
It was just a single blow, but it was stunning in its effect. Agnes fell to her knees. Looking up through brimming tears, she saw an elegant and fearsomely beautiful grey-skinned elf in armor of ice lowering his whip. He made a gesture, lightly squeezing his own lips shut. Then he raised his eyebrows questioningly: Do you understand?
Richard started forward, fists clenched, as if to attack the elf, but Agnes flung her arms around him and held him back. When he twisted angrily toward her, she shook her head. Then, facing the elf, she nodded.
The elf made a sweeping gesture that encompassed all seven children. Gracefully, he gestured with his whip up a broad grassy avenue between the tents: Go that way.
They obeyed. Agnes went first, keeping her head down submissively, but secretly observing all that she could and filing it all away for future use. A half-step after her came Richard, head high and face stony. Next were the three middle children, Lexi, Latoya, and Marcus. Last of all came Frederic and Elsie, who were the youngest. If Agnes dawdled or started to glance behind herself, she felt a light flick of the grey elf's whip on the back of her neck. It was just a reminder, but a potent one. Agnes hoped the littler children were being more circumspect than she, but she doubted very much that they were.
They were marched past a corral where centaurs fought with fists and hooves for the entertainment of their elven captors, and then by a knackery where unicorn carcasses were hung on meat-hooks to cure. Under an arch made of two enormous ivory tusks they went, and around a pyramid of wine barrels being assembled by red-bearded dwarves only half as tall as the hogsheads were. At last they came to their destination.
It was a tent as wide and bright as the sunset, whose billowing walls of silks and velvets burned ember red and blood ochre, shot through with molten golds and scarlets that shimmered as if they came from a spectrum alien to human eyes. Banners and swags of orange and purple and black flew from the tops of the tent poles, kept permanently a-flutter by small playful zephyrs that smelled of cinnamon, cardamom, and hot peppers. She could not read the sigils on the flags, but she did not need to. By the psychic wind of terror and awe that gushed from the doorway to the tent, she felt, she sensed, she knew who lay within.
It could only be the dreadful Queen of Elfland.
At the castle-tent's salient, the younger children were marched down a passage to the left, while Richard and Agnes were gestured inside. Almost, she cried after them. But the ice-armored elf raised his whip in warning. So Agnes made no sound, though she stretched out her arms toward the little ones as they disappeared from her ken.
* * * *
Entering the tent was like stepping into another world. Gone were the somber reds and sullen crimsons, exchanged for sprightly greens and yellows and blues. Hummingbirds darted here and there. There was a tinkling of small bells, like wind chimes in a summer breeze. The sun shone brightly through the silk walls making luminous the embroidered draperies showing scenes of war and feasting, of love-making and animal-hunting, and of things for which Agnes had no words. They wavered with every movement of the air, so that the figures seemed to be alive and in motion, pleading to be freed.
Their guard came to a stop. Overcome with dread, Agnes seized Richard's hand. He squeezed hers back, reassuringly.
A gong sounded. The air shattered like the surface of a pond after a frog leaps into its center, and when the reverberations stopped and the air was still again, the elf-queen was simply there.
She reclined casually on the air just above a brocade-covered divan in the center of the tent. She wore a cream-colored man's Brioni suit, cunningly re-tailored to fit her elegant body, an apricot silk blouse open to the navel, from which peeked a teardrop-shaped rock-crystal pendant, and no shoes. Her skin was the color of polished bronze, with hints of verdigris and subtle green depths. Her cheekbones were high and sharp. Her eyes were set at an angle, and they flashed jungle-green, an emerald effulgence from a star that did not shine in the night sky of this world. Unbidden a name popped into Agnes's mind: Melisaundre.
Queen Melisaundre was beautiful. Even Agnes could see that.
Beside her, Richard was transfixed.
“We came here by accident,” the elf-queen said casually, as if returning to a conversation already in progress. “We didn't know your world even existed here on the marches of Avalon, that fey land we set out to conquer. Imagine our surprise and delight! A realm of possibilities opened before us! As it happened, of course, we destroyed your lands and killed your people. But, well ... we were bored, pure and simple. What else could we have done? What other would any sensible being have done in our position?”
Asimov's SF, April-May 2009 Page 16
