“So that’s it,” he said at last, and closed his laptop.
“Are you going to put it on YouTube?” asked Zach.
“No,” he replied wearily. The boys exchanged a look, but for once remained silent.
“Well.” Emery stood and stretched his arms, yawning. “Time to pack.”
Two hours later they were on the road.
The hospice was a few miles outside town, a rambling old white house surrounded by neatly kept azaleas and rhododendrons. The boys were turned loose to wander the neighborhood. The others walked up to the veranda, Leonard carrying his laptop. He looked terrible, his gray eyes bloodshot and his face unshaved. Emery put an arm over his shoulder and Leonard nodded stiffly.
A nurse met them at the door, a trim blonde woman in chinos and a yellow blouse.
“I told her you were coming,” she said as she showed them into a sunlit room with wicker furniture and a low table covered with books and magazines. “She’s the only one here now, though we expect someone tomorrow.”
“How is she?” asked Leonard.
“She sleeps most of the time. And she’s on morphine for the pain, so she’s not very lucid. Her body’s shutting down. But she’s conscious.”
“Has she had many visitors?” asked Emery.
“Not since she’s been here. In the hospital a few neighbors dropped by. I gather there’s no family. It’s a shame.” She shook her head sadly. “She’s a lovely woman.”
“Can I see her?” Leonard glanced at a closed door at the end of the bright room.
“Of course.”
Robbie and Emery watched them go, then settled into the wicker chairs.
“God, this is depressing,” said Emery.
“It’s better than a hospital,” said Robbie. “Anna was going to go into a hospice, but she died before she could.”
Emery winced. “Sorry. Of course, I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay.”
Robbie leaned back and shut his eyes. He saw Anna sitting on the grass with azaleas all around her, bees in the flowers and Zach laughing as he opened his hands to release a green moth that lit momentarily upon her head, then drifted into the sky.
“Robbie.” He started awake. Emery sat beside him, shaking him gently. “Hey—I’m going in now. Go back to sleep if you want, I’ll wake you when I come out.”
Robbie looked around blearily. “Where’s Leonard?”
“He went for a walk. He’s pretty broken up. He wanted to be alone for a while.”
“Sure, sure.” Robbie rubbed his eyes. “I’ll just wait.”
When Emery was gone he stood and paced the room. After a few minutes he sighed and sank back into his chair, then idly flipped through the magazines and books on the table. Tricycle, Newsweek, the Utne Reader; some pamphlets on end-of-life issues, works by Viktor Frankl and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
And, underneath yesterday’s newspaper, a familiar sky-blue dustjacket emblazoned with the garish image of a naked man and woman, hands linked as they floated above a vast abyss, surrounded by a glowing purple sphere. Beneath them the title appeared in embossed green letters.
Wings for Humanity!
The Next Step is OURS!
by Margaret S. Blevin, Ph.D.
Robbie picked it up. On the back was a photograph of the younger Maggie in a white embroidered tunic, her hair a bright corona around her piquant face. She stood in the Hall of Flight beside a mockup of the Apollo Lunar Module, the Wright Flyer high above her head. She was laughing, her hands raised in welcome. He opened it to a random page.
…that time has come: With the dawn of the Golden Millennium we will welcome their return, meeting them at last as equals to share in the glory that is the birthright of our species.
He glanced at the frontispiece and title page, and then the dedication.
For Leonard, who never doubted
“Isn’t that an amazing book?”
Robbie looked up to see the nurse smiling down at him.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, and set it on the table.
“It’s incredible she predicted so much stuff.” The nurse shook her head. “Like the Hubble Telescope, and that caveman they found in the glacier, the guy with the lens? And those turbines that can make energy in the jet stream? I never even heard of that, but my husband said they’re real. Everything she says, it’s all so hopeful. You know?”
Robbie stared at her, then quickly nodded. Behind her the door opened. Emery stepped out.
“She’s kind of drifting,” he said.
“Morning’s her good time. She usually fades around now.” The nurse glanced at her watch, then at Robbie. “You go ahead. Don’t be surprised if she nods off.”
He stood. “Sure. Thanks.”
The room was small, its walls painted a soft lavender-gray. The bed faced a large window overlooking a garden. Goldfinches and tiny green wrens darted between a bird feeder and a small pool lined with flat white stones. For a moment Robbie thought the bed was empty. Then he saw an emaciated figure had slipped down between the white sheets, dwarfed by pillows and a bolster.
“Maggie?”
The figure turned its head. Hairless, skin white as paper, mottled with bruises like spilled ink. Her lips and fingernails were violet; her face so pale and lined it was like gazing at a cracked egg. Only the eyes were recognizably Maggie’s, huge, the deep slatey blue of an infant’s. As she stared at him, she drew her wizened arms up, slowly, until her fingers grazed her shoulders. She reminded Robbie disturbingly of a praying mantis.
“I don’t know if you remember me.” He sat in a chair beside the bed. “I’m Robbie. I worked with Leonard. At the museum.”
“He told me.” Her voice was so soft he had to lean close to hear her. “I’m glad they got here. I expected them yesterday, when it was still snowing.”
Robbie recalled Anna in her hospital bed, doped to the gills and talking to herself. “Sure,” he said.
Maggie shot him a glance that might have held annoyance, then gazed past him into the garden. Her eyes widened as she struggled to lift her hand, fingers twitching. Robbie realized she was waving. He turned to stare out the window, but there was no one there. Maggie looked at him, then gestured at the door.
“You can go now,” she said. “I have guests.”
“Oh. Yeah, sorry.”
He stood awkwardly, then leaned down to kiss the top of her head. Her skin was smooth and cold as metal. “Bye, Maggie.”
At the door he looked back, and saw her gazing with a rapt expression at the window, head cocked slightly and her hands open, as though to catch the sunlight.
Two days after they got home, Robbie received an email from Leonard.
Dear Robbie,
Maggie died this morning. The nurse said she became unconscious early yesterday, seemed to be in pain but at least it didn’t last long. She had arranged to be cremated. No memorial service or anything like that. I will do something, probably not till the fall, and let you know.
Yours, Leonard
Robbie sighed. Already the week on Cowana seemed long ago and faintly dreamlike, like the memory of a childhood vacation. He wrote Leonard a note of condolence, then left for work.
Weeks passed. Zach and Tyler posted their clips of the Bellerophon online. Robbie met Emery for drinks ever week or two, and saw Leonard once, at Emery’s Fourth of July barbecue. By the end of summer, Tyler’s footage had been viewed 347,623 times, and Zach’s 347,401. Both provided a link to the Captain Marvo site, where Emery had a free download of the entire text of Wings for Humanity! There were now over a thousand Google hits for Margaret Blevin, and Emery added a Bellerophon t-shirt to his merchandise: organic cotton with a silk-screen image of the baroque aircraft and its bowler-hatted pilot.
Early in September, Leonard called Robbie.
“Can you meet me at the museum tomorrow, around eight-thirty? I’m having a memorial for Maggie, just you and me and Emery. After hours, I’ll sign you in.”
“
Sure,” said Robbie. “Can I bring something?”
“Just yourself. See you then.”
He drove in with Emery. They walked across the twilit Mall, the museum a white cube that glowed against a sky swiftly darkening to indigo. Leonard waited for them by the side door. He wore an embroidered tunic, sky-blue, his white hair loose upon his shoulders, and held a cardboard box with a small printed label.
“Come on,” he said. The museum had been closed since five, but a guard opened the door for them. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
Hedges sat at the security desk, bald and even more imposing than when Robbie last saw him, decades ago. He signed them in, eying Robbie curiously, then grinning when he read his signature.
“I remember you—Opie, right?”
Robbie winced at the nickname, then nodded. Hedges handed Leonard a slip of paper. “Be quick.”
“Thanks. I will.”
They walked to the staff elevator, the empty museum eerie and blue-lit. High above them the silent aircraft seemed smaller than they had been in the past, battered and oddly toylike. Robbie noticed a crack in the Gemini VII space capsule, and strands of dust clinging to the Wright Flyer. When they reached the third floor, Leonard led them down the corridor, past the Photo Lab, past the staff cafeteria, past the library where the Nut Files used to be. Finally he stopped at a door near some open ductwork. He looked at the slip of paper Hedges had given him, punched a series of numbers into the lock, opened it, then reached in to switch on the light. Inside was a narrow room with a metal ladder fixed to one wall.
“Where are we going?” asked Robbie.
“The roof,” said Leonard. “If we get caught, Hedges and I are screwed. Actually, we’re all screwed. So we have to make this fast.”
He tucked the cardboard box against his chest, then began to climb the ladder. Emery and Robbie followed him, to a small metal platform and another door. Leonard punched in another code and pushed it open. They stepped out into the night.
It was like being atop an ocean liner. The museum’s roof was flat, nearly a block long. Hot air blasted from huge exhaust vents, and Leonard motioned the others to move away, toward the far end of the building.
The air was cooler here, a breeze that smelled sweet and rainwashed, despite the cloudless sky. Beneath them stretched the Mall, a vast green gameboard, with the other museums and monuments huge gamepieces, ivory and onyx and glass. The spire of the Washington Monument rose in the distance, and beyond that the glittering reaches of Roslyn and Crystal City
“I’ve never been here,” said Robbie, stepping beside Leonard.
Emery shook his head. “Me neither.”
“I have,” said Leonard, and smiled. “Just once, with Maggie.”
Above the Capitol’s dome hung the full moon, so bright against the starless sky that Robbie could read what was printed on Leonard’s box.
MARGARET BLEVIN
“These are her ashes.” Leonard set the box down and removed the top, revealing a ziplocked bag. He opened the bag, picked up the box again and stood. “She wanted me to scatter them here. I wanted both of you to be with me.”
He dipped his hand into the bag and withdrew a clenched fist; held the box out to Emery, who nodded silently and did the same; then turned to Robbie.
“You too,” he said.
Robbie hesitated, then put his hand into the box. What was inside felt gritty, more like sand than ash. When he looked up, he saw that Leonard had stepped forward, head thrown back so that he gazed at the moon. He drew his arm back, flung the ashes into the sky and stooped to grab more.
Emery glanced at Robbie, and the two of them opened their hands.
Robbie watched the ashes stream from between his fingers, like a flight of tiny moths. Then he turned and gathered more, the three of them tossing handful after handful into the sky.
When the box was finally empty Robbie straightened, breathing hard, and ran a hand across his eyes. He didn’t know if it was some trick of the moonlight or the freshening wind, but everywhere around them, everywhere he looked, the air was filled with wings.
THE MIRACLE AQUILINA
MARGO LANAGAN
Margo Lanagan has published three collections of short stories, White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes, and a novel, Tender Morsels. She is a four-time World Fantasy Award winner (for best novel, novella, short story, and collection), has also won four Aurealis and four Ditmar awards, and two of her books were Printz Honor Books. Her work has also been nominated for Hugo, Nebula, International Horror Guild, Bram Stoker, and Theodore Sturgeon awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and twice been placed on the James Tiptree, Jr. Award honor list. She attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1999,has taught at Clarion South three times, and will teach at Clarion West in 2011. Margo lives in Sydney. She is currently working on her fourth collection, Yellowcake, and on a novel about selkies based on her World Fantasy Award-winning novella “Sea-Hearts.”
You’d have thought the bread-dough was the Captain’s head, the way I went at it, squashing any mouth or eye that opened. Bringing shame upon us—smush, I smeared that mouth shut. No daughter of mine—punch, that one too. Daughter of his? I was my own self; he did not own me. If I was anyone else’s I was Klepper’s; he owned more parts of me than Father did, than Father wanted to know about. I was married to Klepper in all but name; part of him floated in me, growing slowly into a bigger shame—
Thump, squash—I shook the thought out of my head. Reddy was spinning one of her stories—of a fisher-girl and a kingmaker, this one—to keep Amber and Roper quiet at their needlework, and I began to listen too, to stop from thinking more, from caring, from fearing. And I was almost lost in the poor girl’s story—how insolent she was to the king, and how lucky he did not have her hanged for it!—when the Captain strode in, all leathered-plate and rage. He had his helmet on, even; he was only indoors for a moment.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll show you.” He came for me, and so swiftly I didn’t even flinch away. He grasped my arm; he tore me off the dough and pushed me to the door, my hands all floury claws. “I’ll show you how girls end up, that don’t do as they’re told.”
Reddy was half up, and Amber and Roper turned in their seats, a matched pair, but they would do nothing, only gape there. They would never defy him, or question; they would never save me. Then we were out on the bright street, and me all aproned and floury. I shook him off, but he caught my elbow again, hard, that everyone should see he was in command of me.
“This woman.” He muttered it as if woman-ness itself were an evil. “She worships wooden saints—you’ve seen them. She prostrates herself before those foolish things. Which would be bad enough.”
There was a law, that those people be left at peace in their beliefs. Even if our Aquilin gods were richer and more clearly seen—for their stories and families were all written down strand for strand, and painted on walls for those of us who couldn’t read, and taught in church and school—still we were to indulge the saint-followers, allow them their shrines and mutterings, only jeer among ourselves.
“She was one of ours, from a faithful family, but her nurse impressed her to the saints-belief, corrupted her.” Ah, that was the cause of his bitterness, was it?
“She’s to be punished for that?” I said, because I was not sure what the law was, for our people gone over to the saints’ ways, but I did not think we could call it exactly a crime.
“No!” He pushed me to the right, through the council portico, along the colonnade there, people glancing at us but too important about their own business to accost us. “She refused the King himself, is her offence!”
“Refused him what?” I struggled as much as I could without making a scene. “Let go of me! I will walk with you!”
“You will,” he said, “you will.” And did not let go. “Refused him herself. Her hand, or failing that her body. Wife or concubine he offered her. Wife! Out in the fields with her
sheep, she was! Who knows what vermin were on her; who knows what lads had been at her willy-nilly? And our King says I will have you, I will save you, you are beautiful enough to be queen or mistress to me! And No!, she says! She would rather turn to leather out there on the hillside, making her signs on herself, chattering to her pixies. A madwoman, or at the least imprudent! You will see, though.” He shook me, and I staggered. “You will see how imprudence is dealt with, and wilfulness.”
We were going down the backs now, where it was unpaved, and smelt, and was narrow. He pushed me ahead of him. There was the barracks, with soldiers smoking at the upper windows, grinning down, and the woman-houses, the crones at the doors watching us shrewdly as we passed. Then we turned the corner, and there was the prison, blind of windows, its wall-tops all spikes and potsherds.
The guard at the entry-way saluted my father, staring hard at nothing. For a moment I felt the bitterness of belonging to a Captain. This guard’s respect was for my father’s rank only; the Captain the man was as nothing to him. I was as nothing, a parcel or a document the Captain brought with him to his place of work.
In we went, and along in the blind stony darkness, farther in and along again, until we were deep in the place. He was imprisoning me? He was placing me in a cell, to teach me this lesson? I would not learn it, no matter what weight of stone and military he put about me, no matter how long he kept me from the world.
Finally we came to a door that stood open; here the guard gave me a look of alarm, even as he sharpened his stance for my father. From inside came the sound of a whip through the air, like a little outraged shout, and a slap on something wet.
The chamber was vast, yet not airy. Evils were done here, it was easy to tell; their equipments reared and languished in the shadows, away from the men grouped torchlit in the middle of the room.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5 Page 38
