Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Agnes slapped him as hard as she could.

  One side of Frederic’s face began slowly turning red. His voice remained mild, nevertheless. “I deserved that, I suppose. However, when we are married, you must not hit me again. It’s not conducive to marital harmony.”

  “Married!?”

  “Married.” Frederic stood. He was taller than Agnes, which had never been the case before, and when he took off his glasses, as he did now, he was not entirely unhandsome. He was, Agnes realized with a shock, an adult, a man. “This has nothing to do with your personal feelings. Or mine, really. Agnes, you are the only human capable of assuming the elf-queen’s role. But you have, as yet, no idea of how to wield power, and you know it. I, on the other hand, do; so we must be wed.”

  “It would be a loveless marriage.”

  “That will change,” said Frederic, “if we want it to. We need each other. Our strengths are complementary; the weaknesses of one can be negated by the other.” His face was as pale and expressionless as the moon. “As a basis for marriage, need is stronger than love.”

  Agnes thought back to all she had learned from the elf-queen’s advisors and political philosophers and realized that it was true: Need was a very strong bond indeed. Those same sources, however, had also taught that once needs were met, such bonds would dissolve like fairy dew.

  • • •

  Agnes prepared for battle. She was given, by the elven court, an armory shed at one end of the lists and two pages to dress her. They were pubescent boys, milky-skinned, beautiful, and naked. So far as she could tell, they were identical twins.

  The pages were removing her clothing when Frederic rolled in. He grabbed one by the scruff of the neck and forcibly ousted him. The second followed after.

  Agnes snatched up her blouse and struggled back into it. But Frederic did not so much as glance at her. He put down a cloth-wrapped package as long as a sword and started rummaging through the armor laid out for her. “She’s going to strike you three times,” he said. “First, on your upper right arm. So you’ll need a pauldron.”

  The pauldron covered her entire upper arm and was padded underneath. He strapped it on her, right over her blouse.

  “The second blow will strike you directly above your left knee. You’ll need a cuish.”

  “I feel unbalanced,” Agnes said, to hide her embarrassment, as he reached between her thighs to tighten the cinches. “And just a little foolish, too.”

  Frederic ignored her. “Neither of those blows will be lethal: They are intended to disable and unbalance you. The third and, potentially, the killing blow will come not from the elf-queen’s sword like the first two, but her spear. She’ll toss the sword aside and then flip the spear up into the air and catch it back-handed behind her, so that her arm is up and ready for the strike.” He held up his arm to demonstrate. “Then it will come down, and hard, right in the middle of your stomach.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve been studying. This sort of thing is all written down.”

  Frederic took from his kit a triple length of stiff brown leather. He wrapped it around and around Agnes’s abdomen so tightly she could barely breathe. Over it he placed a chain mail stomacher. Then, atop all, he strapped on an item of shaped metal he called a tace. “There,” he said at last. “She might knock the wind out of you, but she won’t kill you.”

  “What weapon should I use?”

  “None of these,” Frederic said, dismissing with a glance a gleaming selection of swords, spears, and morning stars. “They’re enchanted not to hurt her—you might as well try to take down a tank with a custard pie.” He unwrapped the package he had brought with him. “Use this instead.”

  Agnes laughed involuntarily.

  It was a baseball bat.

  “Take it,” Frederic said. “Try it out.”

  She swung the bat stiffly back and forth.

  “Put your back into it. Swing from the shoulders.” He grabbed the bat and showed her what he meant.

  Agnes took back the bat and swung again, with more strength. “I could never keep my eye on the ball. It’s so small and it comes at you so fast.”

  “It won’t be a ball. It will be Queen Melisaundre’s head, and it will be the size of a small melon, plenty big enough to see. Just think of how you have served her, over the years, and she you.”

  Agnes swung the bat with force.

  “I think you’re getting the feel of it.”

  “I wish I was a boy,” Agnes said. “I hope I don’t look as stupid as I feel.”

  To her profound surprise, Frederic grabbed her and kissed her full on the lips. Then he pushed her away and stared straight into her eyes. “You look like you’re going to free us from elven tyranny forever,” he said fervently. “You look like the very first human queen of all the world. I don’t wish you were a boy at all.”

  Then the heralds blew their clarions and the doors of the shed flung themselves wide.

  “Go,” Frederic said. “Set us free.”

  • • •

  Agnes did not so much stride out into the lists as stumble. Yet the throngs of elves (with, here and there, a human bobbing in the air; only she, it seemed, knew no magic) roared at the sight of her, as if she were an Amazon champion.

  Directly across the arena, Queen Melisaundre stepped down from her throne, looking every inch the warrior-queen. Her slim, powerful figure was clad in dazzling gold plate. A scarlet cape flew out behind her, lifted by a wind that did not exist for Agnes. Her helmet was adorned with wings, as if she were a Valkyrie, and so cut that her hair flowed out becomingly behind her.

  In her hand was a sword of moon-silver, harder than steel and lighter than a feather. At her back was a long spear.

  Agnes hoisted her baseball bat, feeling like a clumsy human yokel. She closed her eyes in silent prayer: Make this quick, she thought. Whether I win or whether I lose, make it quick.

  Somebody threw a cloth-of-gold scarf into the air. It fluttered lazily downward, drawing all eyes after it.

  When it touched the ground, Queen Melisaundre screamed like an eagle and ran straight toward Agnes. Her long legs carried her quickly and effortlessly across the green lawn. She was beautiful to watch.

  Agnes suddenly realized that she should be running too and began to lumber forward.

  They met.

  It all went as Frederic had said it would. Queen Melisaundre delivered a stinging blow to Agnes’s armored and padded shoulder, and a second to her leg that would have crippled her had it not been for the cuish. Then she tossed the sword aside as if it were a plaything she had tired of. One hand deftly undid the strap holding the spear to her back. The other reached behind her and flipped the spear up into the air.

  Queen Melisaundre caught the spear and froze for an instant, a goddess incarnate. Then, with her hair lashing and the battle-light blazing about her face, she drove the spear downward with every ounce of her strength.

  The spearhead pierced Agnes’s tace with a shriek of ripping metal. But the chain mail underneath held, and the wrapped layers of leather softened the blow.

  Somewhat.

  It felt like getting kicked in the stomach by a horse. All the breath flew out of Agnes and she was driven back a good three feet. But, though for an instant all the world went black and there was nothing in it but pain, she did not fall down.

  Then she could see again, and she was running forward, all in a rage, the baseball bat cocked and ready to swing. Take this, bitch, she thought. You with your perfect face and perfect legs and perfect everything else. With your courtiers and sycophants and lovers by the score. With your cruelty and power and the admiration of all the world and Richard too.

  A fierce blood-lust filled her. Take this for being everything I am not.

  It was that last thought that pulled Agnes out of her madness, for she recognized in it—as who would not?—the envy, jealousy, and spite that the elf-queen had so long been nurturing in her. And so recognizin
g it, she rejected it. She refused to let it be a part of her.

  It was not a rational decision, for on purely logical grounds she understood that she had to kill the queen. It was simple revulsion that caused her to pull back before her blow reached its target. The bat swung past the elf-queen, missing her by a whisker.

  Queen Melisaundre’s head shattered anyway.

  • • •

  Frederic led Agnes away from Melisaundre’s lifeless corpse toward the throne, whispering urgently in her ear. “You are the queen now. It’s important that you act the part. Speak slowly and clearly. Say that your rule will be benign but absolute. A new empire shall arise from the ashes of the old—a human empire. All magical talismans, potions, et cetera, are to be presented to the royal court that they may be made subject to your power. In this way all magicks will support the State and we need never fear rebellion. Finally, if it please you, your majesty, let us be married immediately. Announce that I am to be your consort and in no sense king. I will act in a purely advisory manner, subordinate to the throne. Do you understand?”

  Agnes nodded once, regally, and withdrew her arm from his. With the slightest flutter of the fingers of one hand she gestured him back into the crowd.

  Frederic backed away, struggling not to grin.

  She ascended to the throne.

  Everyone cheered, elves as well as the humans. Looking out over them, Agnes was surprised to see that the other children were all grown now. Some of them had children of their own.

  Human history has begun again, she thought. And this will be known forever as the Day of Two Queens.

  Agnes raised a hand for silence. “I am your new queen and my power is absolute. Does anyone here dispute that?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Well, then. My reign shall consist entirely of three edicts. The first is that Frederic shall search through the grimoires and books of spells to either discover a way to return the elves to their own world or, failing that, otherwise rid our world of their presence. That shall be his sole employment until his task is done, however many years it may take.”

  Frederic looked stricken.

  “The second is that until that happy day when they are gone, the elves shall be set to work restoring our world to what it was before they came. We will settle here and scour the wilderness for human survivors. When such are found, those who will may join us. Those who will not shall be left in peace.

  “The third and last edict is that henceforth we shall have no queens or absolute rulers of any kind. Form committees, hold elections, do whatever you like—but I will not tell you how to live your lives.” Mouths fell open. Eyes widened in shock. Frederic put his head in his hands.

  Agnes stepped down from the throne, a queen no more.

  • • •

  After her abdication, she went to see Richard.

  Agnes dressed as carefully for this meeting as ever she had in her life. Her clothing was deliberately modest. Yet it did nothing to disguise her newly adult shape. Her jewelry drew no attention to itself. She wore makeup, though she doubted that Richard, used as he was to Queen Melisaundre’s theatrical extravagance, would notice.

  The elf-queen’s tent smelled as always of incense, spices, and perfume. Yet the air felt strangely clean, for the cat-in-heat stench of the queen herself was gone. Beside her bed (sheeted in green and blue satins with foams of lace so that it was almost as vast and billowy as the sea itself) was a small obsidian box. In it rested Richard’s gemstone.

  When Agnes had laid out shirt and trews on the bed, she took the rock crystal gem and warmed it between her hands. It had been clear and ordinary once, but Richard’s soul had deepened its color into a golden-red topaz with hints of flame at its heart. Speaking a word she had often heard from the lips of Queen Melisaundre, she summoned Richard from its depths.

  He appeared, smiling sleepily, in the middle of the bed.

  When Richard saw that he and Agnes were alone, he sat up and donned the russet-colored clothing—first the trousers and then the sark. They fit him well and seeing him thus clad Agnes felt a sudden flush of desire that, paradoxically, she had not felt on beholding him naked.

  It was true, she thought. She genuinely had come of age, if Richard’s mere presence could disorder her thinking so.

  “Where is Melisaundre?” he asked.

  Agnes’s mouth felt dry. She could not form words with it at first. But at last she managed to croak, “There have been . . . I have made some changes.”

  Then she told him.

  • • •

  When Agnes emerged from the tent at last, her face was grim and a golden-red stone hung from a silver chain about her neck.

  Frederic was waiting for her. “What shall we do with that?” he asked, gesturing toward the tent.

  “Burn it,” she said. She knew she had surrendered all authority to give such a command. But listening to her own voice, she knew too that she would be obeyed. “Burn it to the ground.”

  Frederic nodded and two lovely young women whom Agnes realized with dull astonishment used to be the young Lexi and Latoya raised up hands that burst into fire. Stepping forward, they stroked the silks and velvets. Soft flames rose up the sides of the tent, merged, and became an inferno. When Agnes made no motion to get away from the heat, Frederic gently took her by the arm and led her toward the cool.

  Agnes could feel the flames at her back. Shadows leaped and cavorted before her.

  “What of Richard?” Frederic asked.

  She touched the gem. “He did not care to share our lives without Melisaundre,” she said. “I gave him permission to return to his crystal, to his oblivion.”

  Frederic crooked a sad smile. “‘He is not dead but sleeping,’” he quoted from one of Richard’s favorite books. “Perhaps he will reconsider someday, when we have remade the world into a pleasant place again. I . . . I will become the junior husband then, if that is what you wish.”

  Agnes looked at him evenly, and realized for the first time how much Frederic desired and even, in his own peculiar way, loved her. Raising her head, she looked into the future. The humans would not rebuild the cities in her lifetime, but there would be towns. The elves would one by one fade away, into wells, into trees, into small, pathetic beings who served mankind and were rewarded with dishes of milk. She would have children, and then grandchildren. She would grow old, and fat, and revered. She would desire Richard often. But she would never see him again.

  “No,” said Agnes firmly. “He’s gone forever. The time for fairy tales is past.”

  © 2009 by Eileen Gunn & Michael Swanwick.

  Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  Eileen Gunn is the author of the story collection Stable Strategies and Others and co-editor of The WisCon Chronicles Two. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and has been nominated/shortlisted for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy, and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. She edited and published the influential Infinite Matrix webzine, which the Science Fiction Encyclopedia describes as “one of the three leading online [SF] magazines at the start of the new millennium, establishing a plateau of quality, respectability, and achievement to which all others would aspire.” A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, she also served for twenty-two years on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and was instrumental in its survival and success. Her most recent story is “Hive Mind Man,” written with Rudy Rucker, in Asimov’s, Feb/2012. You can follow her on Twitter @eileen_gunn.

  Michael Swanwick is one of the most acclaimed and prolific science fiction and fantasy writers of his generation. He has received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years and has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and five Hugo Awards, as well as receiving nominations for the British Science Fiction Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His short fiction has app
eared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, and has been collected in Cigar-Box Faust, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Gravity’s Angels, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, and The Dog Said Bow-Wow. Michael’s latest novel is Dancing With Bears, a post-Utopian adventure featuring confidence artists Darger and Surplus. He is currently at work on two new novels. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

  NOVELLA

  The Lucky Strike

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate, sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them, it became an official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch called. “Come have a shot.”

  January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practicing your bombing up here, eh, Professor?”

  “Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

  “That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practicing.”

  Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”