Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  My having shoveled Daltharee into the trash without searching for survivors or mounting even a cursory rescue effort was cause for imprisonment. My superior, the Research General, having had my callous act take place on his watch, was also liable. After three nerve-wracking days, I conceived of a way for us to save ourselves. In fact, it was so simple it astounded me that neither one of us, scientific minds though we be, didn’t leap to the concept earlier. Using Mando’s own process for creating diminutive humanity, we took his DNA from our genetic files, put it through a chemical bath to begin the growth process, and then tortured the cells into tininess. We had to use radical enzymes to speed the process up given we only had six weeks. By the end of week five we had a living, breathing Mando Paige, trapped under a drinking glass in our office. He was dressed in a little orange jump suit, wore black boots, and was in the prime of his youth. We studied his attempts to escape his prison with a jeweler’s loop inserted into each eye. We thought we could rely on the air simply running out in the glass and him suffocating.

  Days passed and Paige hung on. Each day I’d spy on his meager existence and wondered what he must be thinking. When the time came and he wasn’t dead, I killed him with a cigarette. I brought the glass to the very edge of the table, bent a plastic drinking straw that I shoved the longer end of up into the glass and then caught it fairly tightly against the table edge. As for the part that stuck out, I lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke up into the glass. I gave him five lungfuls. The oxygen displacement was too much, of course.

  Mrs. Trucy accepted our story and the magnified view of her lover’s diminutive body. We told her how he bravely took the shrinking ray for the sake of Science. She remarked that he looked younger than when he was full sized and alive, and the Research General told her, “As you shrink, wrinkles have a tendency to evaporate.” We went to the funeral out in the desert near her home. It was a blazingly hot day. She’d had his remains placed into a thimble with some tape across the top, and this she buried in the red sand.

  Later, as the sun set, the Research General and I ate dinner at a ramshackle restaurant along a dusty road right outside of Mateos. He had the pig knuckle with sauerkraut and I had the chicken croquettes with orange gravy that tasted brown.

  “I’m so relieved that asshole’s finally dead,” whispered the Research General.

  “There’s dead and there’s dead,” I told him.

  “Let’s not make this complicated,” he said. “I know he’s out there in some smaller version of reality, he could be filling all available space with smaller and smaller reproductions of himself, choking the ass of the universe with pages and pages of Mando Paige. I don’t give a fuck as long as he’s not here.”

  “He is here,” I said, and then they brought the martinis and the conversation evaporated into reminiscence.

  That night as I stood out beneath the desert sky having a smoke, I had a sense that the cumulative beams generated by the repercussions of my actions over time, harboring my inherent will, had reached some far flung boundary and were about to turn back on me. In my uncomfortable bed at the Hacienda Motel, I tossed and turned, drifting in and out of sleep. It was then that I had a vision of the shrinking ray, its sparkling blue emission bouncing off a mirror set at an angle. The beam then travels a short distance to another mirror with which it collides and reflects. The second mirror is positioned so that it sends the ray back at its own original source. The beam strikes and mixes with itself only a few inches past the nozzle of the machine’s barrel. And then I see it in my mind—when a shrinking ray is trained upon itself, its diminutive-making properties are cancelled twice and as it is a fact that when two negatives are multiplied they make a positive, this process makes things bigger. As soon as the concept was upon me, I was filled with excitement and couldn’t wait to get back to the lab the next day to work out the math and realize an experiment.

  It was fifteen years later, the Research General had long been fired, when Mando Paige stepped out of the spot where the shrinking ray’s beam crossed itself. He was blue and yellow and red and his hair was curly. I stood within feet of him and he smiled at me. I, of course, couldn’t let him go—not due to any law but my own urge to finish the job I’d started at the outset. As he stepped back toward the ray, I turned it off, and he was trapped, for the moment, in our moment. I called for my assistants to surround him, and I sent one to my office for the revolver I kept in my bottom drawer. He told me that one speck of his saliva contained four million Daltharees. “When I fart,” he said, “I set forth Armadas.” I shot him and the four assistants and then automatically acid washed the lab to destroy the Dalthareen plague and evidence of murder. No one suspected a thing. I found a few cities sprouting beneath my fingernails last week. There were already rows of domes growing behind my ears. My blood no doubt is the manufacture of cities, flowing silver through my veins. Crowds behind my eyes, commerce in my joints. Each idea I have is a domed city that grows and opens like a flower. I want to tell you about cities and cities and cities named Daltharee.

  © 2008 by Jeffrey Ford.

  Originally published in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. Crackpot Palace, a new collection of 20 stories, was recently published by Morrow/Harper Collins. Ford writes somewhere in Ohio.

  Purity Test

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  My feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them close and sell them in whatever town I find myself in.

  Provided I find a town. Provided I ever leave these woods.

  I have traveled for two days, surviving on puddle water and berries, hoping that the sounds I hear behind me aren’t my father, Roland, and the dogs.

  I was but a child when Sutton came to the Keep. He seemed like an old man even then, with a beard that trailed to his knees and white hair that fell about his shoulders. His fingers were long and fine, but his back was broad, like a laborer’s, and his skin was rough to the touch.

  His eyes frightened me. They were a pale blue, so pale that, in a certain light, they seemed clear. When I mentioned them to my mother—she was alive then: alive, vibrant, and beautiful—she laughed.

  “Of course, Micheline,” she said in her lilting accent, using—as she always did—her people’s version of my name. “He is magic. It is fitting he has devil’s eyes.”

  My father said my mother was a witch, but she had no true magic powers. She knew the gentle arts—herbs for healing, mostly—and she had an enchanting laugh. Men were drawn to her, and women too. She had a personality that overshadowed all others, and dwarfed my father’s.

  Apparently my father had once loved her. Perhaps he loved her still in the days surrounding Sutton’s arrival, but he did not trust her. If my brother and I had not had my father’s auburn hair and freckled skin, his green eyes and his hooked nose, he would have disavowed us as another man’s children, as he had done with my younger sister. She had the misfortune to look like our mother: nut-brown eyes, features delicate and small, and black hair so thick it hung in waves down her back.

  She was just a babe when Sutton arrived, and my father hadn’t yet denied her, but in hindsight, it is clear the poisoned thoughts were already in him, twisting him, marking him, making him a man incapable of warmth.

  My mother’s death the following year—giving birth to yet another dark-haired babe, a boy who would not live till dawn—completed my father’s transformation. From that night forward, I never saw him smile nor speak a kind word.

 
The Keep was my father’s. It had been his father’s, and his father’s father’s before him. A large, rectangular building with four small towers, it looked more like a castle or a fortress. But we called it the Keep because it had once been part of a larger complex, filled with granaries and great houses and stables.

  They had all crumbled before my father was born, but the ghosts of them remained, leaving their stone footprints on the property. A guard-tower, which had once been part of an acres-long wall, still stood, empty and dust-covered. My brother and I used to explore it before my father hired a nurse after my mother’s death—a nurse who taught me how to stitch and sit quietly and never, ever reveal my innermost thoughts.

  The guard-tower had four levels, and a winding staircase that made its way around the interior like braids on a maiden’s nape. The top level had an arching ceiling, and a view that extended for miles on all sides. My brother and I often hid up there from our mother, and she would pretend she could not find us, although our footprints littered the dust, and our giggles echoed through the levels below.

  My father gave Sutton the guard-tower as a home. Suddenly my brother and I were forbidden to go within sight distance of the place. We would sneak to the edge of the woods and watch as laborers brought all manner of strange things inside—tables made of shiny material we had never before seen, boxes of foul-smelling roots, and cloth so thin it seemed as if it weren’t woven at all.

  Later, the horses would arrive—and cats and dogs—never to be seen again. Other animals as well, things I didn’t recognize, with horns and snouts and short, stubby legs. They would vanish into the first floor of that tower, and sometimes we would hear cries and wails as if the very depths of hell had opened.

  But that was after Mother had died. Before, there were no animals, and Sutton would join us at feasts. My mother would tease him—“What miracle have we performed today, Mr. Sutton?”—and he would answer her, telling her of sparkling air or reading stray thoughts. One evening, she made the mistake of laughing at him, and from then on, he would disavow miracles, claiming he did simple magic and nothing more.

  My father believed Sutton’s magic was not simple. My father believed Sutton could return our family to its former glory—castles and land and serfs. My father would no longer be a small lord, but a great leader, a warrior-chieftain who might one day unite the other lords, and take on the name of King.

  My father never saw that goal—we still have warring lords, arguing tribes, and no unity at all—but he came close.

  He came desperately close.

  And then I ran away.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  There were years between my rebellion and my mother’s death, years in which my father grew harsher and colder and more ambitious; years in which the strangeness of Sutton’s Tower grew; years in which entire buildings appeared behind it, all of them emitting horrible yowlings and fetid odors, and sometimes, a river of blood.

  My father gave my sister to a convent when she was three. Years later, I asked him about her, and he claimed that while she was my sister, she was not his daughter, and he had no obligation to her. I visited the convent once, and no one had heard of her.

  She is lost. I do not know why or how.

  I asked my brother, but he no longer cared. He became a soldier after my mother’s death. At the age of ten, he wielded a sword twice his size. From then on, I saw my brother only at meals.

  He was not allowed to speak to me, and soon he refused to meet my eyes. The closeness we had felt vanished. He became a stranger who drank too much, laughed too hard, and fought recklessly.

  When my father started thinking of my brother’s marriage, using my brother’s life to establish alliances, I thought little of it. It is the way among lords—the firstborn must make a good match, whatever the cost.

  The women paraded before my brother were often not women at all. Some were mere children. The two years that separated my brother and I seemed like a gulf then. While I still spent time with my nurse learning demure ways to defer to my future husband, my brother had already seen our entire corner of the world.

  My father would hold feasts to honor the families who brought their daughters to the Keep seeking an alliance. I attended, but was not allowed to speak unless spoken to, and certainly could not discuss anything with the newcomers.

  I did not understand enough of life to fathom my father’s concern with purity. I believed him obsessed with pureness of heart. He did not care about anyone’s heart, having lost his own. He cared only that the woman who married his son was a virgin, and he did not trust doctors and midwives to determine it was so.

  So when the young women and their fathers left the feasting hall with my father and Sutton, I thought it a common enough custom. I did not understand the protestations of some lords, the unwillingness of many to even come to our small Keep.

  Once I overheard some soldiers speculating about my father’s determination. The soldiers believed that my father investigated the girl’s private parts the way a midwife would, while the girl’s own father looked on.

  But the soldiers were as naïve as I was, only in a different way. They did not understand what a midwife later told me—that a girl’s virginity could not always be determined with a look or a touch, that sometimes, a virgin had no proof of it, condemning the innocent girl to charges of promiscuity when, in truth, she had never lain with a man.

  The midwife who told me this also confided that she believed this happened to my mother. The wedding night, the midwife said, was a disaster. No blood had spilled on the white sheets, so everyone thought my mother’s maidenhood had not been intact at the time of the wedding.

  Yet for her entire marriage, my mother claimed she had never touched a man other than my father.

  I am exhausted. This forest seems to run forever. The wind echoes in here, whispering through the branches of the mighty oaks that hid the sun. The ground is rugged. I move slower now; my feet so sore that I limp even though I try not to.

  I can no longer run.

  I look at the tall trees, at the welcoming thick branches with their wide forks, and remember what it was like to be a child, hiding among the leaves.

  I think of hiding now. It would be so easy. I would tie what’s left of my shoes to the shreds of my dress, then wedge my bare feet against the rough bark. I would wrap my hands around an easy-to-reach branch, and climb, pulling myself upward until the leaves hide me from the ground below.

  My father wouldn’t find me. Neither would Roland or the others.

  But the dogs would. I’d seen them tree a cat many times at the edge of the forest, surrounding the trunk, their paws scraping against the bark, baying and howling and barking until someone came.

  I used to laugh at the dogs, but I do not now. I think of my father’s cleverness, his intense determination to get whatever he wants, and I shiver.

  I continue to stumble forward. I cannot hear the dogs.

  I am gaining a fragile hope. Perhaps they have returned to their pen. Perhaps my father has returned to his Keep.

  Perhaps this final humiliation will break him.

  But most likely, it makes him stronger. My father thrives in adversity.

  He made his greatest mistakes when he believed the world was his for the taking.

  She was tall, like my mother, a woman full grown. A few years older than my brother, she was still unwed. Her fiancé—a man of honor, her father said—had died on the battlefield, and she had mourned him, which was unusual in an alliance that had been arranged from birth.

  Her name was Opal, and I thought her the most beautiful creature I had seen. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, and it accented her chiseled cheekbones and sky blue eyes.

  She did not smile. She made it clear she had no desire to come to our little Keep and see our pretend kingdom. She did not want to be the lady of this land.

  She would, she told my father, eyes blazing in defiance, mourn her lost love for eternity.

/>   “Fine,” my father said to her, “I do not care how you feel, only that, should the alliance be made, you do your part and produce sons.”

  She spat at his feet.

  Her own father apologized for her. He believed the union advantageous to both families. We had adjoining property, and weaker lords on either side. We could mount an army, he said, and take even more land. He was too old to lead. He would leave that to my father, so long as both families shared in the spoils.

  The bargain was made before my brother ever saw his intended.

  Not that it mattered. He was smitten from the moment he first looked at that stunning face. She slapped him when he got too close, and after he recovered from his shock, he slapped her in return.

  My father laughed.

  “Passion,” he said. “It guarantees sons.”

  But there were no sons. There was no marriage. Opal would not submit to my father’s ministrations. Her own father pleaded, saying there could be no alliance without a guarantee, but she refused.

  My father came to me for the first and last time in my life.

  “Do you know your mother’s potions?” he asked.

  “Some,” I said. “I was too young to learn most of them.”

  “A sleeping potion is all I need,” he said.

  I could do that.

  I felt so pleased to help my father. Finally he had turned to me. Finally he had noticed me.

  I would do anything he wanted.

  I completed the potion in the space of a morning, and tested it on the nurse. She slept deeply, but continued to breathe—always a risk with a sleeping potion. Then I took it to my father.

  He thanked me, and said no more.