Asimov's SF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I still think of Kinbel's actions. And I still have no idea whether things happened as she intended. For, although she showed every evidence of knowledge, I cannot believe that she would have submitted to events had she really known what was to come. But even I knew, and I did nothing—I watched her walk down that hillside toward her city, and her fate. Around this point my suffering mind still revolves.

  The climb away from Dhiol on that cold spring morning was hard: for me, who had been too long at leisure in my cell—and for my mute and blind companions, who found themselves suddenly evicted into a place of wild, high air and jagged drops. But I could see, and they could feel and climb, and between us we made our way higher and higher across a maze of icy rock. We were all soon exhausted, and bleeding, but, hand over hand, and arm over arm, flesh against flesh, we still hauled ourselves up.

  It was a bright, clear day. By noon, with no bay of hounds, shout of humans or grunt of hobs to signal pursuit, we took time to breathe. I looked down. Dome upon dome, tower upon tower, Dhiol was a perfect jewel. The river's ice-flecked rush was like a curl of shining hair. I had never been a lover of cities, but the place seemed beautiful to me now that I knew I could never return to it.

  Perhaps I had allowed myself to briefly forget about Kinbel—monster, aberration, that I am. But even as I gazed down at it, the city breathed out a great and glittering clamor, a rush of trumpet and voices, a seethe of processions and flags. Then the noonday Sun blazed in an incredible beam through parting strands of clouds as if the Gods really were at work, and that beam found focus on hilo's dreadful topmost spire that rose above the halls of my trial. The air that I gazed across seemed to shudder, and my blind companions gathered and trembled and touched hands. I felt as if I could see everything—as if I, too, were a God—and that which I could not see, I could feel, and that which I could not feel, I heard. It was, above all, the sounds of Kinbel's screams that filled that great space through all the long and terrible afternoon. I hear them still. After all the labor and expense that had gone into constructing it, I imagine that the priests decided that their machine must be used. And if not on me, what better choice than my consort—the one who had engineered my escape and who, even in the terror of her excruciation, still refused to denounce me? Sometimes in my musings, I can briefly make it seem as if Kinbel's return to Dhiol and her prolonged death were inevitable. But I still like to pride myself on the rigor of my intellect, and I know that I could have taken Kinbel's fate from her, and that agonized death was something that I was certainly worthy of, just as certainly as she was not.

  But I still cannot leave those events alone. They gnash their blades as if some machine of excruciation has formed itself inside my head. I wonder, for example, at the ease of my escape. After such time and investment, and on that of all nights, were the priests really so neglectful? Perhaps they saw the truth as clearly as I did, and knew that I bore no more responsibility for the worsening seasons than did the swallows, and that my death would cause nothing to change. Yet rash promises had been made about the many miracles the Gods would grant upon my death. The ice would retreat, the warm days return, the crops grow, the God River herself would flow with beneficent calm again. And, as they began to consider the consequences of all those unfulfilled promises, perhaps it occurred to them that it might be better and easier to let me escape, and uselessly sacrifice a scapegoat instead?

  * * * *

  Ideas, theories—you see how I still cannot let them go. But life continues, and I, to my shame and disappointment, find small satisfactions—even hints of something resembling happiness—in observing the habits of the increasing numbers of hobs who have come to reside here in the Roof of the World. The ice tombs, ravaged though they are, provide a ready source of materials—even of food, for the frozen produce of lost offerings can, if properly heated and cooked, provide useful nourishment. Then there are all the stones, and the tools, and the furnishings. Hobs, despite all the sayings, are industrious, and they know how things work in a way no human has ever done. But rarely is anything put to the use for which it was originally intended. A funeral bed makes shelter for an entire tribe. A sarcophagus becomes a trough to feed the animals they so cleverly manage to raise here—once its previous occupant has been evicted, I might add. These changed ruins seem like some dream of the human world in which everything is twisted and transformed.

  As well as being industrious, the hobs are intelligent. They understand that these funerary supplies will only last for a few years. And after that, I believe they will survive just as well. Already, parties go out to hunt for boar, goat, and deer, and to collect the berries that still grow in what passes for summer. Sometimes, they even risk venturing into the lower lands around Dhiol, which are now mostly empty of civilized life, either human or hob. Hobs are used to hard times, and to difficult work. Above all, though, I believe that they will prosper because this cold land belongs far more to them than it ever did to us humans.

  In the times when I permit myself to think in terms of my old theories, I feel an understanding of how humans and hobs came to live as we have done. Just as in the priestly myths, we humans, with our dark flesh, thinner limbs and intolerance of cold, came from the warm south. We spread slowly north in the time when the ice sheets were in retreat as the world grew warm; moving across and around the Bounded Ocean, toward the lands where my family eventually prospered on the trade of the Great North Water. There, we encountered our near relatives who, with their thicker-framed bodies and lighter skins, coped more easily with a colder Sun. We called these strange, half-familiar creatures—with their red hair, thick jaws and beetle brows, who signed and grunted instead of speaking, and wore half-rotted furs for clothing—hobs.

  Perhaps there were times of co-operation and understanding. More likely, there was fear and distrust. Almost certainly, there would have been conflict as our numbers increased and resources grew more precious. But we humans won, and the hobs were subjugated, and we began to use and exploit them as they are used and exploited still. As to why it was that way around, and not some other, I cannot tell. Life, as I still see it, is ruled as much by chance as any other process. Perhaps there is some other version of our world where the hobs triumphed, and we humans worked for aeons to build hob cities. There may even be a world where, in a spate of even greater vindictiveness, we humans destroyed the hobs entirely, and their existence passed into records in the rocks in the way of many other lost creatures. But if that had happened, if the hobs vanished and we humans came to thrive alone, I struggle to imagine a better world than the one that I have known. Hard work would still have to be done, and I doubt if its burdens would have been shared equally. I shudder, indeed, to think of the means we would have used to divide humanity between the rulers and the ruled, the watchers and the workers, the fat and the poor, were it not for the convenient presence of hobs. It may have been something as ridiculous as skin color, or the simple accidents of geography and birth.

  * * * *

  The hobs in this high retreat treat me mostly with distance, and a kind of respect. Sometimes, admittedly, there are small abuses and bullyings—they are as aware as the humans in my trial of the accusation of my being a hob lover, and seem to regard the idea with almost equal disgust. But they find me food, and supplies such as this papyrus. They even let me forage on my own, secure in the knowledge that I would die if I wandered off too far in this jagged place of bitter cold. Mostly, though, I keep to my cave, which was once the anteroom of a large tomb. In many ways, it isn't so different from my cell in Dhiol.

  It suits them, I think, to have me as their willing captive almost as well as it once suited the priests of the Moon. Word sometimes reaches us from the hobs who flee here of human doings in the lowlands, and it seems my name has become an even bigger curse. I'm responsible now not just for the changing climate, but for the wars that have set human against human as the shortages increase. Of course, when I say human against human, I still mostly mean hob against ho
b, but the numbers of hobs who will unquestioningly do human bidding is decreasing, even if they are still in the millions. Our world is changing in more ways than simply by growing cold.

  The other name of which I still hear, as if it didn't torment me enough already, is Kinbel's. The hobs revere her for reasons that I find too complex to fully understand. They say, for example, that through her suffering no further sacrifice will ever be necessary, although I'm certain that plenty of hob sacrifice still goes on. Odder still, it's even signed in whispers that there are some humans who revere her as well. Could it be that Kinbel's death really wasn't in vain? Is it possible that what she did might somehow signal through history that hob and human can live together, not as slave and master, but as equals?

  Again, my mind rambles, but I'm almost sure that humanity would have prospered better if we'd had to do things for ourselves. Maybe our temples wouldn't have been quite so huge or our gardens so elaborate, but we might have been pushed instead toward inventions that allowed more to be done with less effort. I remember the times when I was alone in my homestead with that broken leg, and how the hobs bore me about with the contortion known as the hob carpet, when it seemed as if I was walking unaided even though I was supported almost entirely by their work. That, it seems to me now, is how all of humanity has lived for far too many centuries. We imagine that we do it all ourselves, when in fact we do nothing.

  My hands are turning numb. Soon, I will find a place in the ice to consign these scrolls in the vain hope that they will be found and read. Are you there, reader? Are you human, or hob? Are you even from this particular world? Or perhaps you're from some other place, where humans worked so hard and alone that they heated the very air so warmly that they stopped the glaciers from their terrible return. Nothing but fantasies. This real world fades. My teeth chatter. My bones hurt. I sense the coming of another fever. Perhaps my final excruciation does not lie so very far off.

  But the seasons still change, and life will go on. And sometimes things will be good, and sometimes they will be terrible, and most often they will be both at once with much that is neither intermingled. The hobs who come to our redoubt all bear their scars and stories of the horrors of the lowlands. Sometimes they arrive with other burdens as well. There is a young hob who reached here two dozen Moons ago. She was female and pretty (there, I've said it), if exhausted by her long flight. And she was noticeably pregnant.

  I watched her with the same distant curiosity with which I watch most things as her belly grew and her term approached. One night, and not so very far from my cave, I heard the unmistakable commotion of a birth. The hobs were too preoccupied to notice my presence as I watched. A baby was held up, mewling and screaming, still dripping from its caul. Then came a second, which is as unusual with hobs as it is with humans. I thought at first that the even greater uproar that ensued was simply down to that. But the two babies were very different. The first one was pale-skinned, and already had a fetching crest of red hair. The second was thinner, and longer. Its skin was dark.

  The debate that transpired was too quick for me to follow, but the result was plain. Even as the new mother nursed the child with the crest of red hair, the darker, more human-seeming baby was taken out along the smoky lamplit tunnels toward the snow-teeming night. Hobs, as I've long since discovered, may not practice ritual sacrifice or eat their young, but they are not afraid of bringing death. I ran after them. I signed. I yelled.

  Maybe I've saved or helped other creatures during my human existence, but I cannot honestly recall when, or how. Abstract theories and good husbandry are fine enough things in their way, but I've long grown sick of intellectual pride along with all other kinds of pomp. Through what I'm still convinced was my intervention, the dark-skinned child was allowed to survive. She's in her thirteenth Moon now, and is learning to sign, and to walk. Perhaps because of my special interest, she's less afraid of me than most of the other young hobs are. Her mother sometimes even lets her squat in my cave, and I try talking to her using human words, and she gargles some of them back in return. She's a sweet thing, precious beyond jewels, and has a hob name which I cannot record with these written symbols, but I call her Kinbel, and I've noticed that a few of the hobs have started signing to her by their own version of that name, as well.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Ian R. MacLeod

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  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS

  by Peter Heck

  THE DRAGONS OF BABEL

  By Michael Swanwick

  Tor, $25.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-1950-0

  wanwick's new novel takes place in the world of his Iron Dragon's Daughter, where magic and technology interact in what one might as well call a Swanwickian manner. I don't know if anyone's used the word as an adjective before, but I think it's about time we broke it out and put it to work.

  The story begins in a backwoods village, a hick town that has all the trappings of a farm community in a fantasy world—the kind of place heroes are supposed to come from. But Swanwick throws the reader a twist almost at the beginning—the town is part of a country caught up in a high-tech war, except that the tech here is a kind of magic, with iron dragons playing the role of bombers. When one crash-lands near the village, the protagonist, Will, finds his whole life changing.

  The dragon, damaged but still dangerous, moves into the village and begins to control its inhabitants. It decides to make Will its agent for controlling the others. Horrified at the demands of the role, the boy eventually escapes and goes on a long journey that brings him to the capital city, Babylonia. Along the way, he becomes the guardian of a girl—at least, that is what she looks like—named Esme. He also becomes the protege of a con artist named Nat Whilk, who introduces him into the ways of the city.

  Will's career in the city takes up much of the course of the book, and Swanwick has built his city from a wildly heterogeneous set of materials. The city is a hodgepodge of ancient and modern, with allusions to dozens of mythologies, from Sumerian to Rastafarian—appropriate to a city that is synonymous with the fragmentation of the human race into all the different languages and cultures of the world. Will begins his career as a rebel, literally in the underground, hunted by the powers that be. He graduates, under Nat's tutelage, into a political hireling, doing dirty jobs for a series of officials.

  Esme, who comes and goes in Will's life, turns out to be someone who has gotten the gift of eternal youth at the cost of forgetting everything almost immediately. Her greatest talent is the ability to find someone to take care of her, whatever situation she finds herself in. But it seems to be Will's fate to have her constantly turning up in his life, just as he has moved to a new phase of it. Not quite his daughter, Esme remains one of the few people whom Will can call family.

  Swanwick leads Will through a series of adventures culminating in his rise to the pinnacle of Babylonian society, encountering new layers of danger at every step. As always in Swanwick's stories, the journey is full of the unexpected, much of it wryly allusive to a whole spectrum of myth and legend—including, for example, a cameo appearance of Ellen Kushner's swordmaster St. Vere to deliver a wonderfully cynical observation on the society Will is trying to become part of.

  Witty, constantly inventive, written with enormous flair, this is one of Swanwick's most complex and rewarding novels.

  * * * *

  END OF THE WORLD BLUES

  By Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Bantam Spectra, $12.00 (tp)

  ISBN: 978-0-553-58996-2

  A near-future thriller with a strong fantastic element, set partly in Japan, partly in England. The story has two protagonists, one an expat Englishman who isn't entirely at home in either country, and a homeless girl whose apparent Japaneseness turns out to be a cover for something much more esoteric.

  The story begins in Tokyo; Kit Nouveau, owner of an Irish bar whose clientele consists largely of outlaw bikers, encounters Lady Neku, a teenage runaway wh
o apparently lives on the fringes of society—yet somehow has come into the possession of large sums of money. Kit is living on the edge himself, carrying on an affair with the wife of a rich Japanese businessman, a woman to whom he is supposedly giving English lessons.

  The trouble begins when Kit, on his way home from a tryst, is robbed at gunpoint, then unexpectedly saved by Neku, who almost without any effort disarms and kills the gunman. By the time Kit sorts out this event, he is late getting home, and his wife Yoshi, a renowned pottery artist, has been stuck taking care of the bar instead of going for an overnight visit to her sister. They argue; he goes outside in the night, and behind him the building explodes into flames. It burns to the ground, killing his wife.

  Kit's problems are just beginning. It turns out that, under Japanese law, the two were never married, his Japanese wife not having registered the marriage, which took place abroad. He therefore doesn't own the property on which the bar stood, which is suddenly prime territory for development. He is also a prime suspect in the burning of the bar, which the police are treating as arson—and possibly murder.

  Meanwhile, we are beginning to get a glimpse of who Lady Neku really is in the world from which she comes—a strange castle that keeps changing shape in an off-world habitat called Nawa-No-Ukiyo or Floating Rope World. Here, she is part of a rich and powerful family, which has arranged her marriage to the son of a rival clan. Grimwood feeds the reader pieces of her story, gradually creating an image of the life from which she is escaping by coming to our world—and a hint of why she might want to.