“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a crutch. And an axe, sort of.” He realized that he wasn’t very sure what to call it. “It’s mine,” he offered finally.
“It’s pretty,” said the old woman. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unusual. I bet you could make an interesting costume for the Festival around something that unusual.”
“What festival?” Lacuna asked.
“What do you mean, ‘What festival?’ The Festival. Only the biggest event of the year. You really must not be from around here. Once a year we have a celebration called the Festival of the Aurora Borealis. The great Aurora Borealis comes out and lights up the whole sky above the Kingdom. It’s an unbelievably dazzling light show, and everyone wears strange and unique costumes for the occasion. We all look up into the sky and at midnight the Aurora Borealis arrives in all its glory. The Festival is only a month and a half away. You watch, business will pick up around the time before the Festival. Everyone will be getting their mirrors polished so they can see the lights best.”
With that, the woman paid Lacuna, thanked him, and went on her way.
For the next few nights, he found it difficult to sleep. Thoughts circled in his head like his hand circled with its cloth when he polished someone’s mirror. He realized that since he had come to the Northern Kingdom he had barely spoken to a Mirrorless Person, and the only Mirror People he knew were those he met as he worked. Amazingly, he still felt lonely even though he was surrounded by people. He hated carrying his mirror around all day, and it took all his patience to keep from smashing it every time he thought about how foolish it all seemed. He wondered if he would go on forever at this job, living in a tiny room, and feeling alone. But the Festival of the Aurora Borealis was something to look forward to. Surely the Aurora Borealis would be at least as beautiful as Polaris. Lacuna wondered if he should really make a costume using the skeleton key crutch-axe as the old woman had suggested. Perhaps he would dress up as the Border Guard. He thought that it would be such a pity that he and all the Mirror People would have to watch the Aurora Borealis through these stupid mirrors. He had had the experience of witnessing Polaris up close with his own eyes, and he didn’t realize what a privilege that had been until this moment.
With these disjointed thoughts spinning in his head, Lacuna drifted off to sleep.
The Festival of the Aurora Borealis
He woke abruptly out of a startling dream, and immediately opened his eyes by reflex; instantly, the pain rushed in. He groped for his mirror, which lay beside the bed, and looked into it. By the time the mirror was safely in front of his eyes, he realized that he had already forgotten his dream.
Later in the day, while polishing an accountant’s mirror, Lacuna suddenly remembered what his dream had been about.
He had dreamt of a vast sheet of ice. Lacuna wore a pair of skates and glided effortlessly across the ice. He felt as if he were flying; he felt just as he did when Polaris carried him through the air out of the Great Swamp of Ink. Lacuna skated in large figure-eights, looping a broad curve, then arcing back across his previous path. His skates cut a massive figure into the ice that looked like this:
He skated and skated around and around on the ice. That was all.
When he remembered this dream, Lacuna stopped still in his polishing. An idea had finally come to him.
With his mirror, he looked up at the accountant sitting in the customer’s chair; the accountant wore a pair of wire-rim glasses. Lacuna quickly checked his pockets to see how much money he had on him. He handed the accountant back his mirror, so that they could see each other.
“Listen, sir,” Lacuna said, “can I buy those glasses from you? I’ll give you this.” He held out a week’s earnings to the accountant.
The accountant frowned and looked at the money, then back at Lacuna.
“That’s a lot of money. Why would you want to buy my glasses? If your eyesight is bothering you, you ought to go to the optometrist. You need to get glasses that work for you specifically. They’re unique that way, you know.”
Lacuna shook his head and thrust the money at the accountant.
“No, no, I don’t need them for that. Please take my money, it’s more than enough to buy a new pair. I just need your glasses right now.”
“Are you feeling alright?” the accountant said suspiciously. None of this made sense to him, and, after all, he had only wanted his mirror shined.
Lacuna was getting impatient and blurted out, “Look, I’m fine, I’m fine. Will you please sell me your glasses right away? Please? I mean, if you don’t want the money, I’ll find someone else.”
The accountant was reluctant, but he knew that the money was enough to buy a newer and better pair, and he really didn’t care much if a crazy mirror polisher wanted to throw his money away on foolish things. He took the money, and gave Lacuna his glasses, but waited around to see what this crazy mirror polisher was going to do with them.
Lacuna took the accountant’s glasses and immediately smashed the lenses out of them. The accountant shook his head, certain now that the poor boy had lost his mind. But then Lacuna carefully picked all the glass out of the frames of the spectacles until there was nothing but the wire rims. He lay his own mirror on the ground and picked up the skeleton key crutch-axe, which was at his side as always. He paused for a moment, remembering that the Border Guard had said the skeleton key crutch-axe was the sharpest blade in the whole world. He carefully pressed the blade of the axe against the glass of his mirror and cut out a small circle. The blade sliced easily through the glass, as easily as if he were dipping it into water. He gently lifted up the small circle of mirror and fitted it into one of the frames of the wire rims. The accountant watched speechlessly, and a small crowd began to gather. Lacuna put the small circle of mirror into the frame so that the mirror faced inward. Then he put on the glasses. His left eye stared directly into the mirror, while his right eye scanned the crowd, the buildings, and the sky directly; there was no pain because he had not broken eye contact with the piece of mirror with one eye, while his other eye was free to see the world plain.
The crowd grew until the whole corner was buzzing with people. The ones who had been there to witness the event were telling the newcomers, and people were talking to one another excitedly. Everyone was visibly awed, and some actually gasped when they heard the news that this young mirror polisher had figured out a way to see with one eye on and one eye off his cursed mirror.
The accountant, who had watched the whole spectacle, said, “Boy, will you make me a pair of glasses like that? I’ll give you double your money back.”
Suddenly, everyone pushed forward, some waving money at Lacuna, dozens of Mirror People asking him to make them a pair of the miraculous glasses. Right there on the street, he set about to making dozens of pairs of glasses for those who had the money and the frames. In less than an hour, he had made more money than he had ever dreamed of. The accountant offered Lacuna his financial services, which he accepted because he was too busy making glasses to handle the great crowd. The accountant organized the excited Mirror People into a line-up. By the end of the day, Lacuna had made enough money to live in leisure for years.
In the next few weeks, Lacuna opened up a shop and hired the accountant as his personal assistant. He used his idea and his skeleton key crutch-axe-glasscutter to accumulate for himself a small fortune. In the days leading up to the Festival of the Aurora Borealis, business, as the old woman had predicted, boomed. Everyone wanted the new glasses; everyone wanted to see the world directly with at least one eye, and without the medium of their cursed mirror. In time, he knew, other people would take his idea and start their own businesses with ordinary glasscutters, but he had already firmly established himself.
On the eve of the Festival of the Aurora Borealis, Lacuna and the accountant dressed up for the event, the accountant in a dazzling rented costume of silver and gold, Lacuna in a tailored blue approximation of the Border Guard
’s uniform. The two partners strutted out into the night to join the greatest celebration of the year in the Northern Kingdom. As they walked through the crowd, Lacuna thought about how fortunate he had been. Many of the Mirror People walked around in the glasses that he had made for them, excited to see their first Festival inside the city with one good eye. It was true that there were Mirror People who still held the old, large mirrors – those who couldn’t afford to buy his new innovation – but he generally avoided looking at them. There were also the ones outside the walls of the city. He had learned that it was a tradition for many Mirror People to leave the city on this night to watch the Aurora Borealis from the countryside where they didn’t need their cursed mirrors. There, some Mirror People had always gathered together to create their own Festival. He wondered about them, and he wondered about the ones who still held their large, cumbersome mirrors. He even wondered what the Mirrorless People thought about all the recent changes he had sparked. He wondered about these things, but his thoughts just circled in his head, round and round like the alabaster walls of the city.
At midnight, the Aurora Borealis arrived. It was beautiful, and everyone in the crowd gasped and cheered at its wavering colours. The lights danced and weaved across the sky, and everyone, in their brilliant and bizarre costumes, began the traditional dances that imitated the vacillations and the shimmer of the Aurora Borealis itself.
Lacuna stood still, among his people, looking up, gaping at the motion of the lights with one half of his vision, staring at his own open eye with the other.
SECTION IV
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ALIEN
The largest grouping of stories centres on encounters with the alien. “The Forgotten Ones” by Karin Lowachee explores questions of vengeance, dispossession, and land settlement through the perspective of the struggle of a small group of freedom fighters. The title of Greg Van Eekhout’s “Native Aliens” captures the paradox at the heart of his story as a Dutch Indonesian boy in the present and a Brevan-Terran boy in the future both face relocation. Celu Amberstone picks up the theme of relocation in her story “Refugees” during a planet-wide apocalyptic future. “Trade Winds” by devorah major is an examination of the two very different world-views of the exchange of goods and services. Carole McDonnell’s “Lingua Franca” explores the cultural gains and losses when a new society faces the powerful economic force of the Earthers. And Ven Begamudré’s “Out of Sync” gives us a widow’s transgressive yet hopeful love on a planet facing a looming bloodbath between humans and aliens.
Karin Lowachee was the winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 2001 with Warchild, which was also a finalist for the Prix Aurora Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2003 and her second novel, Burndive, a sequel, was published that same year and debuted at number seven on the Locus Bestseller List. Her third novel, Cagebird, will be released in 2005. She was born in Guyana, South America, and grew up in Ontario, Canada.
The Forgotten Ones
Karin Lowachee
In the twilight, my brother Hava’s eyes glow red. Before the old women of Rumi village were washed from this life, they said it was the spirit of blood in him, my twin. I do not have such spirit. I am the silent breath, the old women said, she who walks behind the blood and is last in the sand before death. Death is the final hand that smooths your tracks beneath the waves. And before death there is the silent breath, and before the silent breath there is the blood. And my brother’s eyes glow red with it.
In the twilight, hidden by broad leaves that bend over the shore and give shadow, we wait. We lie on our stomachs, Hava and I and all of our twenty soldiers, chins to the dark earth, smelling the spring richness of new growth. The wind plays a song above us in the trees. The scampering feet of the little animals up and down the trunks and across the floor of the forest are a low drumbeat, a thudding of tiny hearts. I could go to sleep here, like I used to do with Hava on the fallen trunks of lightning-struck trees. Before the Lopo came and killed our parents. Lopo from across the waters.
When I first saw them with their guns and their tall hats, I was afraid. But now I have seen them without their hats. I have taken their guns and felt the power of their shouts like a storm come in from the sea. The power in my hands, from their guns. And though the Lopo sit in our villages and sharpen their knives on our stone and rest their boots on our tables, I have seen them at my feet, in blood, and it flows as dark and thick as what runs out of me in that week of womanhood.
The Lopo keep coming from across the waters, and though we are half their size, barely thirteen strides along the sands of life, we drive them back. We, Hava and I and our twenty soldiers, have forced the Lopo to huddle in our villages, to sharpen their knives on our stone and beat their boots on our tables in frustration. Eventually, Hava says, their blood will flow to the waters and become one, until nothing will be left but the waters. And us, the children of the dead ones. We who have been here for as long as the old women remembered. We who were here first.
“Sister,” Hava whispers to me. “Go tell Umeneni to climb the father tree. I think I see them on the waters.”
I slither backward, deeper into the forest, until the glow of moonlight on the water disappears. The earth is damp beneath my knees as I scamper to the left, where Umeneni waits on his belly, chin to the ground. Broad chair-leaves arc over his back and narrow shoulders. The black mud in his deep red hair smells like starberries. We crush the sour buds into the earth until their juices create the paste. For a moment I think of our morning together and the feel of his coarse hair through my fingers when I twisted them with mud. He sat on a rock and cleaned his killing knife and the sun was strong on his brown shoulders and the back of my neck. His eyes are not spirit red, but blue like the waters. My father would have liked Umeneni. We would have had a child by now, if not for the Lopo.
Tonight he might die and I hate the Lopo. When I look at Umeneni and think of the children we do not have, I can kill the Lopo as viciously as Hava. I can slice their skin from their sinew and throw them to the sharks. My bones are tired with the feeling of it.
“Ara,” Umeneni whispers, his breath against my cheek.
“Hava says to climb the father tree. The Lopo might be on the waters now. You must count how many, and where.”
I see his mud-locks bob up and down in shadow, and then he is gone, leaving nothing behind but the twitch of a sheltering leaf and the scent of starberries.
We do not know why the Lopo came. We do not know why we were forced to flee our homes as children and hide among the trees, prey for the big cats and the Lopo alike. One morning when Hava and I were only ten strides across the sands of life the Lopo landed on our shores with their long boats and their guns and their tall hats. Their shiny booted feet left deep imprints in the ground that filled up with rain but never washed away. The old women in our village, the ones who were there to remember and to carve, cursed at the Lopo and called them by names I had never heard. And the Lopo said, “That was long before our time and the agreement means nothing.” Somehow they knew our language. And I understood them perfectly, though their words made no sense.
But it did not matter. Their weapons were their words.
I wait beside Hava. The waves roll into shore like a mother’s gentle breath, rippling the skin of the earth. Moonlight flitters on the waters as if it is calling for the fish to surface. Yet it calls the Lopo and when the Lopo come they bring only ruin. They row in as silent as the forest when a hunter is on the prowl. And all the world knows that death sits among it.
“Something is wrong,” Hava says. I see the moon line of his profile in the near-dark. The corners of his eyes are red as though he bleeds tears. But it is only the glow of his blood spirit.
A hand touches my heel and I look back over my shoulder. Umeneni crawls up between us and lays down on his belly. His shoulder touches mine and it is warm from his climb on the father tree. Mine is cool from
the night.
“There are lights,” he whispers. “Far out along the horizon. But they come closer and they are fast.”
“How many?” Hava asks. “How fast?”
Umeneni’s voice is a shudder. “Too many and too fast.”
Umeneni has the best sight among us. He has always spied far and wide. Once he saw a line of five Lopo hunters winding furtive and silent through the path of the big cats, covered in leaves and soil. Yet Umeneni saw them.
My brother says, “Maybe they come in different boats. Maybe they have new boats.”
“Maybe,” Umeneni says.
Hava knows the Lopo. He’s tasted their golden blood.
“We will wait,” Hava says. “And hide.”
Umeneni says nothing, but I feel his gaze in the dark just as close as his skin. The disturbance in my brother’s voice wafts through me like a shiver.
Before our attacks on the Lopo, Hava would always draw our positions in the sand, in the earth. We and our soldiers, fifty strong as they once were, and even now when they are twenty, we all gathered around this map of our close futures and Hava would take his finger and trace patterns in the ground. His touch glided through the fine grains like the gods must sift our lives, separating some, pushing others together. We knew at some time the waters or the rain would wipe these marks away, but we never stayed long enough to see it. And so the lines of life that Hava traced in the earth would remain in our minds, marked deep and true. And we took them with us into battle. Lines like the grooves on the skin of our palms. Lines like the veins that run beneath our skin.
So Long Been Dreaming Page 17
