The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “What does he mean?” Honath said.

  “Just this, Honath. When the seeding team set your people up in business on Tellura, they didn’t mean for you to live forever in the treetops. They knew that, sooner or later, you’d have to come down to the ground and learn to fight this planet on its own terms. Otherwise, you’d go stale and die out.”

  “Live on the ground all the time?” Mathild said in a faint voice.

  “Yes, Mathild. The life in the treetops was to have been only an interim period, while you gathered knowledge you needed about Tellura and put it to use. But to be the real masters of the world, you will have to conquer the surface, too.

  “The device your people worked out, that of sending criminals to the surface, was the best way of conquering the planet that they could have picked. It takes a strong will and courage to go against custom, and both those qualities are needed to lick Tellura. Your people exiled just such fighting spirits to the surface, year after year after year.

  “Sooner or later, some of those exiles were going to discover how to live successfully on the ground and make it possible for the rest of your people to leave the trees. You and Honath have done just that.”

  “Observe please, Jarl,” Adler said. “The crime in this first successful case was ideological. That was the crucial turn in the criminal policy of these people. A spirit of revolt is not quite enough, but couple it with brains and—ecce homo!”

  Honath’s head was swimming. “But what does all this mean?” he said. “Are we—not condemned to Hell any more?”

  “No, you’re still condemned, if you still want to call it that,” Jarl Eleven said soberly. “You’ve learned how to live down there, and you’ve found out something even more valuable: how to stay alive while cutting down your enemies. Do you know that you killed three demons with your bare hands, you and Mathild and Alaskon?”

  “Killed—”

  “Certainly,” Jarl Eleven said. “You ate three eggs. That is the classical way, and indeed the only way, to wipe out monsters like the dinosaurs. You can’t kill the adults with anything short of an anti-tank gun, but they’re helpless in embryo—and the adults haven’t the sense to guard their nests.”

  Honath heard, but only distantly. Even his awareness of Mathild’s warmth next to him did not seem to help much.

  “Then we have to go back down there,” he said dully. “And this time forever.”

  “Yes,” Jarl Eleven said, his voice gentle. “But you wont be alone, Honath. Beginning tomorrow, you’ll have all your people with you.”

  “All our people? But you’re going to drive them out?”

  “All of them. Oh, we won’t prohibit the use of the vine-webs too, but from now on your race will have to fight it out on the surface as well. You and Mathild have proven that it can be done. It’s high time the rest of you learned, too.”

  “Jarl, you think too little of these young people themselves,” Adler said. “Tell them what is in store for them. They are frightened.”

  “Of course, of course. It’s obvious. Honath, you and Mathild are the only living individuals of your race who know how to survive down there on the surface. And we’re not going to tell your people how to do that. We aren’t even going to drop them so much as a hint. That part of it is up to you.”

  Honath’s jaw dropped.

  “It’s up to you,” Jarl Eleven repeated firmly. “We’ll return you to your tribe tomorrow, and we’ll tell your people that you two know the rules for successful life on the ground—and that everyone else has to go down and live there too. We’ll tell them nothing else but that. What do you think they’ll do then?”

  “I don’t know,” Honath said dazedly. “Anything could happen. They might even make us Spokesman and Spokeswoman—except that we’re just common criminals.”

  “Uncommon pioneers, Honath. The man and the woman to lead the humanity of Tellura out of the attic, into the wide world.” Jarl Eleven got to his feet, the great light playing over him. Looking up after him, Honath saw that there were at least a dozen other Giants standing just outside the oval of light, listening intently to every word.

  “But there’s a little time to be passed before we begin,” Jarl Eleven said. “Perhaps you two would like to look over our ship.”

  Humbly, but with a soundless emotion much like music inside him, Honath took Mathild’s hand. Together they walked away from the chimney to Hell, following the footsteps of the Giants.

  KNOTWORK, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  When we married, my husband and I tied knots in ourselves and in each other.

  I am not from around here, and to me all knots mean special things. Where I come from, one moves through a lacework of knots; one learns to tie one’s own knots; one learns how knots limit one. I came here to get away from knotwork, and yet, four years after I arrived, I consciously brought my skills into play, and crafted a tangle to bind two people together, as local custom seemed to dictate.

  I thought the knots meant the same things to my husband that they meant to me. We had been seven years married, and somewhere along the way our wild mutual madness faded into something I found comfortable in its complex sameness. To me, the knots remained, even though the passion had died. To my husband.…

  “So, Nuala, what’s this we hear about your husband?” Marie asked me when I joined my three best friends for our weekly Tuesday lunch at Le Chèvre et Les Trois Framboises. This week Marie’s hair was purple and shellacked into a fountain of lazy curls. She was a live mannequin in the window of the largest department store in town, and this week the clothing she advertised was severe in pink and black. Everyone in the restaurant stared at her, which gave the others of us a measure of anonymity.

  I put my beaded purse on the table beside my place setting. “So what is it you hear?”

  Anika, who worked in the same corporate office as my husband—in fact, she was the person who had introduced me to my husband—said, “We hear he takes Jacy Hines, one of the associates, everywhere with him.”

  “He took her shopping in my store,” Marie said. “‘I saw them come in together from my window, and later I asked the clerks where they went. To fishing equipment. When’s the last time a man asked a woman to look at fishing equipment?”

  “Perhaps she knows something about it.” I had met Jacy at one of the firm’s office parties. She was a small pigeon woman, comforting and round, with short brown hair and bright brown eyes, ruddy of complexion and neat of hand, and I had liked her. She hadn’t borne any of the marks of threat one learns to look for when one leases her husband to a job for the bulk of the day. Jacy and I had discussed knotwork and the mysteries of coffee. If she had had the energy of a spouse-taker, wouldn’t I have felt it? I had given up several of my special senses when I bound myself, but not that one.

  “He took her out to buy you a birthday present last week,” Anika said. “Last year he sent his secretary. This year he took Jacy, and they shopped together.”

  My birthday celebration would happen on Saturday. It was something Hugh and I always did alone together. I hadn’t realized that selecting my gift was a task he delegated; the gifts I had received from him had been sensitive and thoughtful, and I had been touched.

  I had not smelled them closely enough. The stink of someone else must have been on them. I used my eyes too much these days; I had lost some of the vital information streams I used to fish.

  “He took her to coffee yesterday in my restaurant,” said Polly, who owned a diner two blocks from Le Chèvre. We never met at Polly’s for lunch; she liked to get away and eat somebody else’s food once in a while. “They sat on the same side of the booth instead of across from each other.”

  Hugh had taken Jacy to Polly’s restaurant? Then he intended me to know; he knew about my friendship with Polly, certainly knew she would tell me what she had seen. Perhaps the other things could be explained somehow; Jacy had special knowledge of fishing; Jacy had a woman’s feel for a gift. But to have coffee with her
in Polly’s place. Why?

  I had signed up for three new classes through community education this term, but I always signed up for classes. Hugh hadn’t wanted me to work when we married, and I was satisfied not to. Instead I taught myself the intricacies of housekeeping and mankeeping and cooking, which were not overnight things to learn, but now I had them mastered and had time for other things. I took classes: two of them this term were night classes, which meant I left him to sketchy dinners and his own company twice a week. Was that enough reason for him to slip my knots?

  I waited for him to come home that evening, even though I should have packed my portfolio for life drawing class and left before he pressed the garage door opener.

  Hugh came into the kitchen from the garage. I studied his dark suit, his strong, square hand around the handle of his briefcase, his dark hair disarrayed because he pulled it when stuck in traffic, the shadows under his blue-gray eyes: my first thought was fondness.

  “Oh! Nu! Still here?” he said.

  He must have seen my car in the garage. “Why pretend surprise?” I asked, more direct than usual. I did not want to take the time for our usual dance.

  “I know you have class tonight. I thought maybe one of your friends picked you up.”

  “This is only the second week. I have no friends in class yet. I understand you’ve been more friendly than you should be, though.”

  A flush of red touched his cheeks and was gone. “We said long ago that we would keep our old friends.”

  “And make new ones? The rule was we could keep our old friends, but the new ones we would make together or not at all.”

  “That was the rule,” he said. “You break it every time you take one of these classes.”

  “Those aren’t real friends. Those are driving-together-and-discussing-class-material friends. Any of them I want to keep, I introduce to you. And you always say no. And I always listen.” On occasion, I had listened with regret. I liked a boy from madrigals class. Hugh nixed him, and I unknotted him; not the easiest unlove I had ever done, either, since the origin of his attraction was natural rather than induced.

  “I’ve known Jacy longer than I’ve known you.” Hugh set his briefcase on the kitchen table and ran his hand through his hair.

  “Have you?”

  “We went to grade school together.”

  I twisted my hands in my lap. He had never told me. We told each other things of this sort; it was part of our pact.

  Our pact. Established in passion, a heat I thought would never die. Where had it run to? It had drained from us both as surely as snowmelt leaves mountains in summer.

  Eventually, I said, “If you have something to say to me, I wish you would just say it, rather than sending my friends as your messengers.”

  “I have nothing to say to you except what’s for supper?”

  A chill lodged in my heart. I opened the freezer compartment of the fridge. “You decide.” I grabbed my portfolio and left.

  That night at life drawing class we had a male model, a man who drove city busses during the day. He was an older man, in his fifties at a guess, with a black beard streaked with white, his hair thinning on top. He had folds of fat at his waist and kind eyes, and I liked drawing him much more than I had liked drawing the model last week, a Greek god who could not hold a pose more than a minute without wavering, and when I complained, he moved even more to spite me.

  I laid down line with my darkest, fastest pencil, trying to be pleased with the exercise, the model, everyone else in class looking at skewed views of this same pose, our instructor walking around to stand behind us for a while, then leaning forward to discuss technique with us when she sensed an opening.

  I laid down line. I could not stop thinking about the early days with my husband, how we had pledged our lives to each other, so deeply had we felt our love, how we had bound ourselves tight, thinking that what we wanted at the time was what we would want always.

  Now a small brown woman whom my husband had known before he had met me inched between us, though truth to tell there was a big enough gap between us that anyone could have fit into it.

  “Ouch,” said the model, dropping out of pose and clapping a hand to his buttocks.

  I looked at my picture, realized I had laid down the line of his buttocks with too much heat in my hand. Smoke rose from the page. My face burned. I touched the paper with my ice hand.

  This should not have happened. I had locked all these touch powers away when I had woven the vows that bound me to Hugh. Something had broken, and now my vows were coming unthreaded.

  I had done nothing. Hugh. It was Hugh.

  “Cramp?” the teacher asked the model.

  The model nodded. What else could he say? Or maybe he had experienced it as a cramp. He wouldn’t have a mental opening to experience a line of fire along his buttocks; what couldn’t happen couldn’t be called by its true name, a human law that allowed me to operate within this realm without too much risk of discovery.

  I set down my pencil and clasped one hand in the other, letting my hands speak to each other until both were in the middle of their range.

  I came here to find friends I could not discover where I lived before, and I had made these friends: Marie, Anika, Polly at college, young, naked, trusting as unfledged birds who opened their mouths for whatever a parent would put inside. I had shaped myself by learning what had shaped them, and how they operated in their worlds. Anything they did that produced a reaction I liked, I learned to do. They fed me a human character. I learned from the other people we spent time with, as well. The dorm, the cafeteria, classes, fraternity parties, football games, bars, the student union, road trips over the breaks. It was my perfect nursery.

  I watched my three friends fall in and out of love, and practiced a little myself. I met boys and enjoyed them, but none touched my heart.

  It was four years later, after we had left college for the world, that Anika introduced me to Hugh. When I first saw him, I felt a flare of heat that surprised me, and I judged I had waited long enough to try the rest of the accoutrements of love. I dropped some of my walls and let love consume me.

  It seemed to me that Hugh too lost himself in love. We were both mad in the best ways.

  “Nuala? Something the matter?” asked my art teacher.

  “My hands hurt.”

  She rubbed my shoulder. “Maybe you were holding the pencil too tight.”

  I smiled at her and picked up my pencil, then flipped to a fresh page. The model had dropped into a new pose, and I hadn’t drawn a line of it. These were five-minute poses, and I had no idea how much longer I had with this pose, so I scrawled lines quickly, flowed in the outline of where the model was. Pencilwork was one form of knotwork, though I had not let myself play with that before. I tried to keep these parts separate: knotwork from what everyone else did here. One of my vows to myself when I bound myself to Hugh had been that I would remain undiscovered.

  “Wow,” said the teacher. “I’ve never seen you work so fast and well.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at her, then looked at my drawing. I had let some of the other world out of my fingers, the merest caress of that which speaks touch-power. I set down my pencil again.

  “Don’t stop,” said the teacher. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your process.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m having trouble concentrating.”

  The madness had seeped out of our marriage so slowly I hadn’t noticed it leaving. One day I woke up after Hugh left for work, and I knew I didn’t care if I saw Hugh again that day. I couldn’t remember the last time joy leapt into my heart at the sight of him. I still had my vows and agreements, though, which I must honor, or I feared I would dissolve. So I looked around for other things here that could excite me. Classes woke up a sleeping part of me for moments at a time. Friends helped too. I settled into an existence that was gray with small spikes of color here and there. It was enough.

  So I thought. Eventually, H
ugh would die; my vows would end, and I could choose where to go next, whether back to my home where I could live as myself, to a new world, or somewhere else in this world, perhaps to find someone else, perhaps to try a different kind of sharing, a shorter one, or a more intricate one, or a more unbalanced one. The possibility of finding joy again existed. I had found it once.

  Waiting has always been one of my skills.

  I was not willing to wait while my husband betrayed me in public. Perhaps I could have let it go if he had been discreet. If he had been discreet, and our vows dissolved because of his actions, I could have moved on. But to do it so all my friends knew. This seemed a deliberate act.

  If he had nothing to say about it, I wondered if perhaps Jacy would tell me something.

  “Maybe you should always draw when you’re having trouble concentrating,” the art teacher told me. “This is wonderful.”

  “It’s a mistake.” I ripped the page off my easel and tore it to bits, severing the lines and their touch-power. Who knew what they had already carried to the model? At least he didn’t seem to be suffering.

  Or did he? He had held the pose surprisingly well for a long time while I thought things over. When I ripped up the page, he collapsed and breathed hard for a moment. He shook his head like a bull shaking off a bee, then slapped his face.

  “You okay?” the teacher asked.

  “I think I’m coming down with something,” the model answered. “Hot flashes, then this weird paralysis. Maybe I better take a break.”

  The teacher checked the clock. Half an hour earlier than the model’s scheduled break. “All right,” she said. “Everybody take ten minutes and then come back. Nuala?”

  I closed my pad. “I better go home,” I said. “I’m not feeling well either.”

  Hugh would not be expecting me home for forty-five minutes or an hour. I couldn’t decide if I would rather surprise him or wait. In the end, I stopped for coffee at the 24-hour coffee shop and sat in a booth, thinking about what to do.