When it was finished, the last bandage neatly tied,and Stephan nearly drowned in wine and snoring happily, dawn was breaking. By the gray light she saw Campione accepting a cup of hot tea. But he didn’t drink it; he gave it to her. The whole house watched while she drank it, and then the women kissed her and rubbed her hands with cloths dipped in lemon water.
“Who’s this, then?” Old Marya nodded at the tall stranger.
“My servant,” Sofia said quickly, before she could think. “He helps me with my goats. And carries my things. He came to me in the rains, looking for work.” Was she talking too much? “He sleeps in the goatshed. I let him sleep there.”
“Is he mute?”
“Sometimes,” Campione answered.
Marya laughed, displaying all that was left of her teeth. “You should mend the healer’s roof. Just stand on a goat; you’re tall enough you don’t even need a ladder!”
Campione smiled thinly and ducked his head. Sofia could tell he’d barely understood one word.
The language was a mask that he put on, like those masks they had for the crazy torchlit parties on the streets of his old city, hiding his true face. Weirdly, masks transformed not only faces. When they tied theirs on, his graceful friends became tottering old men or prancing beasts, mincing maidens or loping fools. The mask went deep.
Not deep enough. He wanted true transformation: to lose the memory of torches, friends and streets—to forget there ever was a mask at all. To become the thing he mimed. To lose what he had been.
“When I was a girl, after my father died, I found a bird dead in the wood. I opened it with my knife, then and there, to see what was inside.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve never told anyone this.”
“Tell me.”
She did know other stories. The one about the girl whose lover came to her every night, strong and lovely in the dark. Her sisters scared her into burning him with light—and then began the girl’s sorrows, and her wanderings.
The girl in that story was a young thing, though, with friends and family she thought that she could trust. Sofia was a woman, and kept her own counsel.
The villagers asked him: How are you? and he said: Well. They asked him, Where is your lady? and he said: Garden.
They asked him, Where do you come from? and he said: I don’t understand.
“Where do you come from?”
It trembled on her tongue a hundred times a day, but she never let it take shape in the air between them, even in the dark when her tongue was velvet night on the star-spangled sky of his skin. Instead she said, “I am happy. I am so happy with you. I never thought I could be happy like this.”
He didn’t really have the words to argue, and finally he stopped trying.
On the other side of the world, on the other side of sleep, was a city he had loved with his whole heart. There came a time when his shadow began to stretch across it more and more, taking up too much room, until it wasn’t his city anymore. His city was one where he and his lover lurked, notorious and indecipherable.
They’d needed a place where they could be unknown again, the peerless swordsman and the mad aristocrat. A place that didn’t need them, didn’t care how they had held men’s lives in their hand; the swordsman, flawed, turned recluse, the nobleman, overreaching, turned rogue. They needed a place where they could matter only to each other. An island, with a house above the sea.
It had been sweet, so sweet. He thought he’d gotten it right, this time. He thought they could be happy, alone. Hadn’t they both been happy? Hadn’t they?
They brought him up from the sea, no blood no blood. The dead eyes would not look at him.
During the daylight, they were careful not to touch too much. Her cottage was isolated, but not remote. Anyone could come running up at any time—and that is what happened, on a bright, clear afternoon. Sofia was trying to mend a basket with reeds, so that she didn’t have to ask someone in the village to do it for her again, and Campione was indicating they might need to be soaked in water first, when they heard a rustle, and a cry, and it was young Antiope, wailing that her husband had fallen, fallen from a tree nearby, gone high in a tree to pick lemons that she fancied in her condition god help her, while everyone else was picking olives, and now—and now—
His friends brought Illyrian, staggering between them, gasping for air. Sofia got his shirt off, laid him down, felt his ribs. His chest moved in and out as it should—but he was choking. It was something inside him, something she couldn’t feel, something she couldn’t see. Illy’s lips began to turn blue. Unable to breathe he was drowning on dry land.
Campione was beside her, holding something. A book? Couldn’t he see it was too late for drawings and diagrams? He opened it. It was a case, a case full of exquisite knives.
“Please,” Campione said. “Hold.” He didn’t mean the knives; he meant Illyrian. Sofia took the boy’s shoulders. She watched in horror as Campione drove the little knife between the boy’s ribs.
Antiope screamed and screamed. Campione shoved a reed into the wound, and blood gushed out of it. But before anyone could attack the man, Illyrian breathed. A great whoosh of air into his lungs, and the color returned to his face, while the blood poured out the reed.
Campione shrugged. “Please,” he said again; “hold.”
He meant the reed, this time. Sofia took it from him, careful to keep it in place, watching, fascinated, as the young man breathed steadily and the blood drained out of his chest.
Illy’s young wife covered his face in kisses. Their friends stood a respectful distance from Campione, who took his knife to clean.
His hands shook, putting the knives away. He had his back to them all; they couldn’t see. They’d think that he had done all this before.
They moved Illyrian into her house to watch all night, watching his breath for when the blood returned, to unstopper the reed and let it out again. A rib had broken inside, and pierced a vein, it seemed. She fed him wine mixed with poppy, and as the dawn came, Illy’s color deepened, rosy, like the sky, his breath quiet as dawn wind, and the bleeding ended.
Campione sewed up the wound his knife had made. She felt sick, sick with love for him and sick with wanting to know all that he knew.
He’d taken up something new to study, now that he had time. How amusing, here on this island, to be the one who wielded the steel! The little instruments, sharp and precise. You needed sure eyes and a steady hand. He hardly dared to use them, but he read the books and tried. He wasted paper tracing the diagrams, slicing them with a scalpel taken from its velvet case, small and fine as a pen. He modeled chests and legs and stomachs out of wet clay, made his incisions and excisions, grumbling at how hard it was to clean the knives afterwards, while his lover laughed at him:
“You should have let me teach you the sword, back home, after all. It’s so much easier to clean.”
“For your man,” they said now, when they brought her a chicken, or some cheese, or a bottle of red wine. “Be sure you share it with the man with the knives.”
She did not ask to look at the knives again. He never took them out when she was there. But she knew the knives came out when she was gone. He would show her when he was ready, she thought. She could look at his books, and study them, and wait.
He cried, so, in his sleep.
His lover often went for walks at night; it was not much darker to him than day, and there were fewer people about. He liked to fight the wind.
Night, and the wind. He had not heard him leave the bed, had not felt his weight shift away.
Hadn’t they both been happy? Hadn’t they?
In his sleep, she learned his language from his dreams. She learned the words for No, and Stop. She heard him speak in tones she never heard him use by day, dry and acerbic, like powdered lime without any honey.
His lover was a swordsman, with nothing to fight now but the wind.
His lover could see nothing in the dark, and not much more by day.
/>
Had he seen where the rocks ended and the night sky began?
Had the wind caught him, challenged him, and won?
She did not mean to spy on him. It was a hot day. She had been weeding; he’d been washing clothes. He’d hung them out all over the big bushes of rosemary and thyme to dry sweetly in the sun, and he’d gone inside her thick-walled house to rest, she thought. After a while, she went herself, to get out of the heat.
She opened the door, and stopped.
Her love was sitting at her long table, the case of knives open before him.
She watched him pick up each knife in turn, hold it up to the light, and touch himself lightly with it, as if deciding which one should know him more deeply.
She watched him place the tip of one to his arm, and gently press, and watch the blood run down.
“Campione,” she said from the doorway.
He spoke some words she didn’t understand. He cut himself in yet another place.
“Bad?” she asked.
He answered her again in that other tongue. But at least he laid the knife aside as the words came pouring out of him, thick and fast and liquid.
“I understand,” she said; “I understand.”
“You don’t.” He looked at her. “You cannot.”
“You’re hurt,” she said. He shrugged, and ran his thumb over the shallow cuts he’d made, as if to erase them. “No, hurt inside. You see what is not bearable to see. I know.”
“I see it in my mind,” he muttered. “So clear—so clear—clear and bad, I see.”
She came behind him, now, and touched his arms. “Is there no medicine for your grief?”
He folded his face between her breasts, hearing her living heartbeat.
“Can I cure you, Campione?”
And he said, “No.”
“Can I try?” she asked.
And he said, “Try.”
They brought his lover up from the sea, from the rocks under their window. He hadn’t heard him fall, would never know if he had cried out in surprise, or silently let himself slip from the rocks and into the sea that surrounded them.
The man with the knives married her on midsummer’s day. There were bonfires, and feasting and dancing. He got pretty drunk, and danced with everyone. Everyone seemed happy in her happiness. They jumped over the dying fire, and into their new life together.
And, carefully, he placed the feel of her warm, living flesh over the dread of what he had left, buried, for the earth to touch, on the other side of the island; what he’d left, buried, for the earth to take of what he once had; for the earth to take away the beauty that had been taken away from him by a foot that had slipped, sure as it was always sure, out into the space that would divide them forever.
THE JAMMIE DODGERS AND THE ADVENTURE OF THE LEICESTER SQUARE SCREENING
CORY DOCTOROW
Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of the popular Boing Boing website (boingboing.net), a co-founder of the internet search-engine company OpenCola.com, and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). In 2001, he won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Science Fiction Age, The Infinite Matrix, On Spec, Salon, and elsewhere, and were collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More and Overclocked. His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award as Best First Novel, and was followed shortly by a second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, then by Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Little Brother, and Makers. Doctorow’s other books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, written with Karl Schroeder, a guide to Essential Blogging, written with Shelley Powers, and, most recently, Content: Selected Essays of Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. His most recent book is novel For the Win.
There is a phone, there is a phone, there is a phone like no phone that was ever hatched by the feverish imaginations of the world’s phone manufacturers, a phone so small and so featureful and so perfect for my needs that it couldn’t possibly have lasted. And it didn’t. And so now I hunt the phone, and now I have
found
the
phone!
I saw it sitting in the window of the Cash Converters in the Kentish Town High Street. This little pawn-shop was once a tube-station, believe it or not, used as a bomb-shelter during the Blitz, and you can still find photos of the brave Sons and Daughters of England sleeping in ranks on the platform rolled up in blankets like subterranean grubs waiting to hatch, sheltering from Hitler’s bombers as they screamed overhead. Now the top of the station is a pawn-broker’s, and around the back there’s a “massage parlour” that offers discreet services for the discerning gentleman.
I am no gentleman, but I am discerning. And what I was discerning right now is a HTC Screenparty Mark I phone, circa 2014, running some ancient and crumbly version of Google’s Android operating system and there, right there, on the back panel, is a pair of fisheye lenses: one is the camera. The other is the projector.
That’s the business, that projector. The Screenparty I was the first-ever phone ever delivered with a little high-powered projector built into it, and the only Android phone that had one, because ten minutes after it shipped, Apple dusted off some old patent on putting projectors in handheld devices and used the patent to beat the Screenparty I to death. And yes, there were projectors in the iPhones that followed, but you couldn’t do what I planned on doing with an iPhone, not with all the spyware and copyright rubbish that Apple’s evil wizards have crammed into their pocket-sized jailers.
I had to have that Screenparty. So I squared up my shoulders and pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, and I thought, You are a respectable fellow, you are a respectable fellow. You did not eat garbage this morning. You did not sleep in an abandoned building. You did not grow up on a council estate. You are a bloody toff. A deep breath—fog in the cold air—and I was through the door, winking back at the CCTV that peered down at me from the ceiling, then smiling my best smile at the lad behind the counter, who looks like any kid from my estate, skinny and jug-eared with too many spots that are the color that spots go when you pick at them.
“Hello there, my son,” I said, putting on the voice that a toff would use if he wanted to sound like he was being matey and not at all superior.
The lad grinned. “You like the phone, mister? Saw you lookin’ at it. Just got it in, that one.”
“It’s a funny little thing. I remember when they first came out. Never worked very well. But they were good fun, when they did.”
The lad reached into the window—the shop was that small, he didn’t even have to get off his chair—and plucked out the phone. I saw that it was absolutely cherry—mint condition, the plastic film still covering the screen. Which meant that the battery was almost certainly in good nick, too. That was good—no one made batteries for the Screenparty anymore. He handed it to me and fished behind the counter for a mains-cable, then passed that over, too. I plugged one into the other and hit the power button. The phone chimed, began to play its animation and then the projector lit up, splashing its startup routine on the ceiling’s grimy acoustic tiles, a montage of happy people all over the world watching movies that were being projected from their happy little phones and played against nearby walls.
I waited for it to finish booting up its ancient operating system with something like nostalgia, seeing old icons and chrome I hadn’t seen since I was a boy. Then I tapped around and finally said, “You won’t be wanting much for this, I suppose. A fiver?” It was worth more than five pounds, but I was betting that the lad didn’t really know what it was worth, and by starting the bidding very low, I reckoned I could keep the final price from going too high. (Well, it couldn’t go too high, since all I had in my pocket was ten pounds plus some change).
The boy shook his head and made to put the phone away. “You’re having a laugh. Something like this, worth a lot mor
e than five quid.”
I shrugged. “If that’s how you feel.” I sprinkled a little wave at him and turned for the door.
“Wait!” he said. “What about twenty?”
I snorted. “Son,” I said. “That phone was obsolete four years ago. It’s a miracle that it even works. If it breaks, no one’ll be able to mend it. Can’t even buy a battery for it. Five pounds is a good price for a little fun, a gizmo that you can amuse the boys with at the pub.”
He took the phone out of the window. “I got all the packaging and whatnot, too. Came in from a storage locker that went into arrears, the company sold off the contents for the back-rent. Will you go ten?”
I shook my head. “Five is my offer.” I had noticed something when I came into the shop, a little ace in the hole, and so now I fished it out. “Five, and a bit of information.”
The boy rolled his eyes. I upped my mental estimate of him a little. Pawnbrokers must get every chancer and twit in the world coming over their threshold with some baroque hustle or other.
“I’ll give you the information and you can decide if you think it’s worth it, how about that?”
The boy narrowed his eyes, nodded a fraction of an inch.
“That game back there, that old DSi cartridge in its box, just there?” I pointed, then quickly put my hand back down. I forgot about the new cuts there, a little run-in with some barbed wire, not the sort of thing a toff would have. The boy reached into his case and pulled it out: Star Wars Cantina Dance Off, he said, setting it down on the glass. The box was a little scuffed, but still presentable.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 31
