by Kelly Robson
Kiki shot Minh a bookmark.
Follow my lead.
And then Kiki started to sing.
Minh sped through the bookmark. It was the same feed she’d sent Minh earlier, along with the pottery workshop and the children learning to write. Two people lounging in an alcove. It made no sense. Kiki was concussed. She wasn’t thinking properly.
But neither was Minh. And ignoring Kiki hadn’t turned out well in the past.
She put the feed in front of her eye and gave it her full attention. The old person was obviously sick, possibly dying. The young one was singing as they held hands. An intimate moment. Loving. Caring.
Kiki lay in the dirt. She held Hamid to her chest, gripping his fingers with one hand and patting his blood-caked hair with the other as she sang.
A slow melody and simple syllables: lu - lu - lo - shu - sha - glo - to - eh. Even Minh could follow along. She never sang, but she did now, tuneful as a gas blockage in a sewage pipe. She slid closer to Kiki and took Hamid’s other hand between both of hers.
The old farmer lowered her shovel.
You’re tough, boss, but I always knew you cared, said Hamid’s fake.
The crowd didn’t know where to look: The singing monsters, the four gurneys rising into the sky, Susa’s howling attendants, or the king standing among them, his face a mask of confusion and dismay.
Minh threaded a leg around Kiki’s waist, another around her shoulders, bracing her so she could sit up. She circled Hamid’s chest with another and held them both close. She wasn’t going to let them go. They were all she had to hang on to.
Minh stroked Kiki’s back.
“I think we’re stuck here,” she said softly.
Kiki wrapped her fingers around one of Minh’s toes and squeezed.
The crowd fragmented. Shulgi and his soldiers stood under the rising gurneys, watching them disappear into pinpoints among the clouds. A few people slid into the ditch to examine the Peach. Some retreated to the river, to Susa’s barge, while others made their way across the fields to the road.
A few people stayed with Minh, Kiki, and Hamid in the melon patch, where the warm morning air was sweet with the fragrance of melon juice. They sat among the buzzing flies, the chirping birds. Their faces were shaded with curiosity and confusion.
One woman, a few meters away, was dressed in pink. She was playing with the laces of her leather wrist cuff and watching Minh closely.
The falconer. Her bird circled overhead.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Minh said to her. “Nowhere at all.”
Minh met the falconer’s frank gaze and dipped her head from side to side, like she’d seen on the feed. No idea what it meant, exactly, but did it matter? I’m here with you. I’m listening. I’m trying to understand. Something like that.
The falconer dipped her head in return.
Shulgi walked toward them through the knee-high grain, trailed by his soldiers. The wind rustled the stalks. When he got close, the falconer ran to join him. He looked shattered, as if Susa’s defection had split his world apart. The falconer murmured a few words; he bent close to listen, and then turned to face Minh.
Minh stayed on the ground. If she died, so be it. She could see the river, and Hamid and Kiki were at her side.
Shulgi leaned down and held out his hand.
Acknowledgments
Lucky Peach would not have existed without the support of many people. First, and always, thanks go to my wife, Alyx Dellamonica, the best person I know. I’m so lucky to share my life with you.
Thanks to Bill, Rhonda, and Kendal Robson, Sue Christie, Sherelyn Tocher, Linda Carson, Caitlin Sweet, Peter Watts, Rebecca Stefoff, Jessica Reisman, Alexandra Renwick, Claude Lalumière, Nicki Hamilton, Denise Garzón, Charlene Challenger, Titus Androgynous, Margo MacDonald, Ming Dinh, Elaine Mari, Jeremy Brett, Dawn Marie Pares, Ryan Abbott, Zane Grant, Usman Malik, Jordan Sharpe, Dominik Parisien, Chris Szego, Madeline Ashby, David Nickle, Kellan Szpara, Keph Senett, Connie Willis, Walter Jon Williams, Sheila Williams, Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, Clarence Young, Anna Tambour, Jeffe Kennedy, and especially Michael Bishop. I appreciate your gifts of encouragement, inspiration, and love.
Thanks to communities physical and virtual: PubQ, ChiSeries Toronto, the SFWA chat room, and Taos Toolbox 2007. Your companionship is no small thing.
Thanks to my wonderful editor, Ellen Datlow, and the lovely people at Tor.com for being with me from end to end.
Thanks to my dad, Bill Robson, long gone. I wish you could read this. I know you’d be proud.
For practical help, thanks to Usman Malik, who kindly fielded medical questions on the fly, and Daniel Potter, whose presentation at the 2016 SFWA Nebulas conference provided me with the teratomas. Neither are responsible for mistakes I’ve made and science I’ve stretched.
Finally, thanks to ESSA, the Vancouver environmental consulting company that appears here in entirely fictional form. Your road is high and rocky. I admire you more than you know.
About the Author
Photograph by Maxwell Ander
KELLY ROBSON’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Clarkesworld magazine, and several anthologies. Her Tor.com novella Waters of Versailles won the Aurora Award, and she has also been a finalist for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, Sunburst Award, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her stories have been included in numerous year’s best anthologies, and she is a regular contributor to the “Another Word” column at Clarkesworld.
Kelly grew up in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and competed in rodeos as a teenager. From 2008 to 2012, she was the wine columnist for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. After many years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A. M. Dellamonica, now live in Toronto.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH
Copyright © 2018 by Kelly Robson
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Jon Foster
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Ellen Datlow
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-16384-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-16385-1 (trade paperback)
First Edition: March 201
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