Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

by James Patrick Kelly

  “Loving women is fundamental. It's natural as breeze. It's not some kind of shared diversion.”

  “Still. It's more than you'd have in common with Olin Nimble.”

  She paused, biting her lip. She was still transparently excited even though the conversation had begun to go badly.

  “Will you stay a while at least?” she asked. “You've slept dark for millennia. What's a little time in the light?”

  I scoffed and began to demand that she banish me back to the dark—but the scholar's excitement cast ripples in a pond that I'd believed had become permanently still.

  What I'd learned from the unrecognizable maps and scattered constellations was that the wage of eternity was forgetfulness. I was lonely, achingly lonely. Besides, I had begun to like Misa's fumbling chatter. She had reawakened me to light and touch—and even, it seemed, to wonder.

  If I was to stay, I told Misa, then she must understand that I'd had enough of worms and their attempts at magic. I did not want them crowding my time in the light.

  The corners of Misa's mouth drew downward in disapproval, but she answered, “The academy puts us at the crossroads of myriad beliefs. Sometimes we must set aside our own.” She reached out to touch me. “You're giving us a great gift by staying. We'll always respect that.”

  Misa and I worked closely during my first days at the academy. We argued over everything. Our roles switched rapidly and contentiously from master to apprentice and back again. She would begin by asking me questions, and then as I told her about what I'd learned in my matriline's locked rooms, she would interrupt to tell me I was wrong, her people had experimented with such things, and they never performed consistently. Within moments, we'd be shouting about what magic meant, and what it signified, and what it wanted—because one thing we agreed on was that magic was a little bit alive.

  Misa suspended her teaching while she worked with me, so we had the days to ourselves in the vast salon where she taught. Her people's magic was more than superficially dissimilar from mine. They constructed their spells into physical geometries by mapping out elaborate equations that determined whether they would be cylinders or dodecahedrons, formed of garnet or lapis lazuli or cages of copper strands. Even their academy's construction reflected magical intentions, although Misa told me its effects were vague and diffuse.

  “Magic is like architecture,” she said. “You have to build the right container for magic to grow in. The right house for its heart.”

  “You fail to consider the poetry of magic,” I contended. “It likes to be teased with images, cajoled with irony. It wants to match wits.”

  “Your spells are random!” Misa answered. “Even you don't understand how they work. You've admitted it yourself. The effects are variable, unpredictable. It lacks rigor!”

  “And accomplishes grandeur,” I said. “How many of your scholars can match me?”

  I soon learned that Misa was not, as she claimed, an unimportant scholar. By agreement, we allowed her female pupils to enter the salon from time to time for consultations. The young women, who looked startlingly young in their loose white garments, approached Misa with an awe that verged on fear. Once, a very young girl who looked barely out of puberty, ended their session by giving a low bow and kissing Misa's hand. She turned vivid red and fled the salon.

  Misa shook her head as the echoes of the girl's footsteps faded. “She just wishes she was taking from Olin Nimble.”

  “Why do you persist in this deception?” I asked. “You have as many spells in the library as he does. It is you, not he, who was asked to join the academy as a scholar.”

  She slid me a dubious look. “You've been talking to people?”

  “I have been listening.”

  “I've been here a long time,” said Misa. “They need people like me to do the little things so greater minds like Olin Nimble's can be kept clear.”

  But her words were clearly untrue. All of the academy's scholars, from the most renowned to the most inexperienced, sent to Misa for consultations. She greeted their pages with good humor and false humility, and then went to meet her fellow scholars elsewhere, leaving her salon to me so that I could study or contemplate as I wished.

  In the Land of Flowered Hills, there had once been a famous scholar named The Woman Who Would Ask the Breeze for Whys and Wherefores. Misa was such a woman, relentlessly impractical, always half-occupied by her studies. We ate together, talked together, slept together in her chamber, and yet I never saw her focus fully on anything except when she was engrossed in transforming her abstract magical theories into complex, beautiful tangibles.

  Sometimes, I paused to consider how different Misa was from my first love. Misa's scattered, self-effaced pursuit of knowledge was nothing like Rayneh's dignified exercise of power. Rayneh was like a statue, formed in a beautiful but permanent stasis, never learning or changing. Misa tumbled everywhere like a curious wind, seeking to understand and alter and collaborate, but never to master.

  In our first days together, Misa and I shared an abundance of excruciating, contentious, awe-inspiring novelty. We were separated by cultures and centuries, and yet we were attracted to each other even more strongly because of the strangeness we brought into each other's lives.

  The academy was controlled by a rotating council of scholars that was chosen annually by lots. They made their decisions by consensus and exercised control over issues great and small, including the selection of new mages who were invited to join the academy as scholars and thus enter the pool of people who might someday control it.

  “I'm grateful every year when they don't draw my name,” Misa said.

  We were sitting in her salon during the late afternoon, relaxing on reclining couches and sipping a hot, sweet drink from celadon cups. One of Misa's students sat with us, a startle-eyed girl who kept her bald head powdered and smooth, whom Misa had confided she found promising. The drink smelled of oranges and cinnamon; I savored it, ever amazed by the abilities of my strange, straw body.

  I looked to Misa. “Why?”

  Misa shuddered. “Being on the council would be…terrible.”

  “Why?” I asked again, but she only repeated herself in a louder voice, growing increasingly frustrated with my questions.

  Later, when Misa left to discuss a spell with one of the academy's male scholars, her student told me, “Misa doesn't want to be elevated over others. It's a very great taboo for her people.”

  “It is self-indulgent to avoid power,” I said. “Someone must wield it. Better the strong than the weak.”

  Misa's student fidgeted uncomfortably. “Her people don't see it that way.”

  I sipped from my cup. “Then they are fools.”

  Misa's student said nothing in response, but she excused herself from the salon as soon as she finished her drink.

  The council requested my presence when I had been at the academy for a year. They wished to formalize the terms of my stay. Sleepless Ones who remained were expected to hold their own classes and contribute to the institution's body of knowledge.

  “I will teach,” I told Misa, “but only women.”

  “Why!” demanded Misa. “What is your irrational attachment to this prejudice?”

  “I will not desecrate women's magic by teaching it to men.”

  “How is it desecration?”

  “Women's magic is meant for women. Putting it into men's hands is degrading.”

  “But why!”

  Our argument intensified. I began to rage. Men are not worthy of woman's magic. They're small-skulled, and cringing, and animalistic. It would be wrong! Why, why, why? Misa demanded, quoting from philosophical dialogues, and describing experiments that supposedly proved there was no difference between men's and women's magic. We circled and struck at one another's arguments as if we were animals competing over territory. We tangled our horns and drew blood from insignificant wounds, but neither of us seemed able to strike a final blow.

  “Enough!” I shouted. “You'v
e always told me that the academy respects the sacred beliefs of other cultures. These are mine.”

  “They're absurd!”

  “If you will not agree then I will not teach. Banish me back to the dark! It does not matter to me.”

  Of course, it did matter to me. I had grown too attached to chaos and clamor. And to Misa. But I refused to admit it.

  In the end, Misa agreed to argue my intentions before the council. She looked at turns furious and miserable. “They won't agree,” she said. “How can they? But I'll do what I can.”

  The next day, Misa rubbed dense, floral unguents into her scalp and decorated her fingers with arcane rings. Her quills trembled and fanned upward, displaying her anxiety.

  The circular council room glowed with faint, magical light. Cold air mixed with the musky scents favored by high-ranking scholars, along with hints of smoke and herbs. Archways loomed at each of the cardinal directions. Misa led us through the eastern archway, which she explained was for negotiation, and into the center of the mosaic floor.

  The council's scholars sat on raised couches arrayed around the circumference of the room. Each sat below a torch that guttered, red and gold, rendering the councilors’ bodies vivid against the dim. I caught sight of a man in layered red and yellow robes, his head surmounted by a brass circlet that twinkled with lights that flared and then flitted out of existence, like winking stars. To his side sat a tall woman with mossy hair and bark-like skin, and beside her, a man with two heads and torsos mounted upon a single pair of legs. A woman raised her hand in greeting to Misa, and water cascaded from her arms like a waterfall, churning into a mist that evaporated before it touched the floor.

  Misa had told me that older scholars were often changed by her people's magic, that it shaped their bodies in the way they shaped their spells. I had not understood her before.

  A long, narrow man seemed to be the focal point of the other councilors’ attention. Fine, sensory hairs covered his skin. They quivered in our direction like a small animal's sniffing. “What do you suggest?” he asked. “Shall we establish a woman-only library? Shall we inspect our students’ genitalia to ensure there are no men-women or women-men or twin-sexed among them?”

  “Never mind that,” countered a voice behind us. I turned to see a pudgy woman garbed in heavy metal sheets. “It's irrelevant to object on the basis of pragmatism. This request is exclusionary.”

  “Worse,” added the waterfall woman. “It's immoral.”

  The councilors around her nodded their heads in affirmation. Two identical-looking men in leather hoods fluttered their hands to show support.

  Misa looked to each assenting scholar in turn. “You are correct. It is exclusionist and immoral. But I ask you to think about deeper issues. If we reject Naeva's conditions, then everything she knows will be lost. Isn't it better that some know than that everyone forgets?”

  “Is it worth preserving knowledge if the price is bigotry?” asked the narrow man with the sensory hairs, but the other scholars’ eyes fixed on Misa.

  They continued to argue for sometime, but the conclusion had been foregone as soon as Misa spoke. There is nothing scholars love more than knowledge.

  “Is it strange for you?” I asked Misa. “To spend so much time with someone trapped in the body of a doll?”

  We were alone in the tiny, cluttered room where she slept. It was a roughly hewn underground cavity, its only entrance and exit by ladder. Misa admitted that the academy offered better accommodations, but claimed she preferred rooms like this one.

  Misa exclaimed with mock surprise. “You're trapped in the body of a doll? I'd never noticed!”

  She grinned in my direction. I rewarded her with laughter.

  “I've gotten used to the straw men,” she said more seriously. “When we talk, I'm thinking about spells and magic and the things you've seen. Not straw.”

  Nevertheless, straw remained inescapably cumbersome. Misa suggested games and spells and implements, but I refused objects that would estrange our intimacy. We lay together at night and traded words, her hands busy at giving her pleasure while I watched and whispered. Afterward, we lay close, but I could not give her the warmth of a body I did not possess.

  One night, I woke long after our love-making to discover that she was no longer beside me. I found her in the salon, her equations spiraling across a row of crystal globes. A doll hung from the wall beside her, awkwardly suspended by its nape. Its skin was warm and soft and tinted the same sienna that mine had been so many eons ago. I raised its face and saw features matching the sketches that the sculptor's assistant had made during our sessions.

  Misa looked up from her calclulations. She smiled with mild embarrassment.

  “I should have known a simple adaptation wouldn't work,” she said. “Otherwise, Olin Nimble would have discarded straw years ago. But I thought, if I worked it out…”

  I moved behind her, and beheld the array of crystal globes, all showing spidery white equations. Below them lay a half-formed spell of polished wood and peridot chips.

  Misa's quill mane quivered. “It's late,” she said, taking my hand. “We should return to bed.”

  Misa often left her projects half-done and scattered. I like to think the doll would have been different. I like to think she would have finished it.

  Instead, she was drawn into the whirl of events happening outside the academy. She began leaving me behind in her chambers while she spent all hours in her salon, almost sleepwalking through the brief periods when she returned to me, and then rising restless in the dark and returning to her work.

  By choice, I remained unclear about the shape of the external cataclysm. I did not want to be drawn further into the academy's politics.

  My lectures provided little distraction. The students were as preoccupied as Misa. “This is not a time for theory!” one woman complained when I tried to draw my students into a discussion of magic's predilections. She did not return the following morning. Eventually, no one else returned either.

  Loneliness drove me where curiosity could not and I began following Misa to her salon. Since I refused to help with her spells, she acknowledged my presence with little more than a glance before returning to her labors. Absent her attention, I studied and paced.

  Once, after leaving the salon for several hours, Misa returned with a bustle of scholars—both men and women—all brightly clad and shouting. They halted abruptly when they saw me.

  “I forgot you were here,” Misa said without much contrition.

  I tensed, angry and alienated, but unwilling to show my rage before the worms. “I will return to your chamber,” I said through tightened lips.

  Before I even left the room, they began shouting again. Their voices weren't like scholars debating. They lashed at each other with their words. They were angry. They were afraid.

  That night, I went to Misa and finally asked for explanations. It's a plague, she said. A plague that made its victims bleed from the skin and eyes and then swelled their tongues until they suffocated.

  They couldn't cure it. They treated one symptom, only to find the others worsening. The patients died, and then the mages who treated them died, too.

  I declared that the disease must be magic. Misa glared at me with unexpected anger and answered that, no! It was not magic! If it was magic, they would have cured it. This was something foul and deadly and natural.

  She'd grown gaunt by then, the gentle cushions of fat at her chin and stomach disappearing as her ribs grew prominent. After she slept, her headrest was covered with quills that had fallen out during the night, their pointed tips lackluster and dulled.

  I no longer had dialogues or magic or sex to occupy my time. I had only remote, distracted Misa. My world began to shape itself around her—my love for her, my concern for her, my dread that she wouldn't find a cure, and my fear of what I'd do if she didn't. She was weak, and she was leading me into weakness. My mind sketched patterns I didn't want to imagine. I heard the spirits
in The Desert Which Should Not Have Been whispering about the deaths of civilizations, and about choices between honor and love.

  Misa stopped sleeping. Instead, she sat on the bed in the dark, staring into the shadows and worrying her hands.

  “There is no cure,” she muttered.

  I lay behind her, watching her silhouette.

  “Of course there's a cure.”

  “Oh, of course,” snapped Misa. “We're just too ignorant to find it!”

  Such irrational anger. I never learned how to respond to a lover so easily swayed by her emotions.

  “I did not say that you were ignorant.”

  “As long as you didn't say it.”

  Misa pulled to her feet and began pacing, footsteps thumping against the piled rugs.

  I realized that in all my worrying, I'd never paused to consider where the plague had been, whether it had ravaged the communities where Misa had lived and loved. My people would have thought it a weakness to let such things affect them.

  “Perhaps you are ignorant,” I said. “Maybe you can't cure this plague by building little boxes. Have you thought of that?”

  I expected Misa to look angry, but instead she turned back with an expression of awe. “Maybe that's it,” she said slowly. “Maybe we need your kind of magic. Maybe we need poetry.”

  For the first time since the plague began, the lines of tension began to smooth from Misa's face. I loved her. I wanted to see her calm and curious, restored to the woman who marveled at new things and spent her nights beside me.

  So I did what I knew I should not. I sat with her for the next hours and listened as she described the affliction. It had begun in a swamp far to the east, she said, in a humid tangle of roots and branches where a thousand sharp and biting things lurked beneath the water. It traveled west with summer's heat, sickening children and old people first, and then striking the young and healthy. The children and elderly sometimes recovered. The young and healthy never survived.