Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology)

by Tim Pratt

  When you go to see the doctor the following day, you lift up your shirt and he pinches you with cold metal on your stomach, your back, your thighs.

  He frowns. “This can’t be right,” he says. He looks confused. He stares at you. He helps you stand up and takes you over to the scales. He fiddles with the weights for a few minutes, but no matter what he does it still says the same thing. You smile your secret little smile, the one you smile sometimes when your face is too tired for the other one, the one others can see, and you know that the instrument is correct. You know it, but it’s just not official until a doctor says so. No—the Doctor. Capital D. You can’t wait to hear him say it. You can’t wait to hear him say it, you can’t wait to hear him say it. You can’t wait. What the hell is he waiting for?

  “Abigail,” he says, finally giving up on the scale, “I don’t understand it. How can you be six-two, weigh only fourteen pounds, and still be alive?”

  You smile at him with the other smile, the external one, even though the effort threatens to prematurely wear you out. “I know, doctor. I amaze even myself sometimes.”

  You strut a little as you walk out of the office.

  Six weeks later, you meet the man of your dreams: a multibillionaire prince in exile, who makes his home in Connecticut now that the royal family of—wherever, you were never good at geography—has fallen out of favor. What makes him so special, though, is that you like him for who he is, and he likes you for who you are. It’s not your body—so perfect now, after all of your hard work—or his money and his title. No, it’s the little things that make the two of you work so well together, like how each of you can’t help but smile when you see the other and how you never run out of things to talk about. You know, the important stuff.

  In fact, both of you were madly, wildly, truly in love (with the stars in your eyes and that warm glow in your hearts) well before it registered in your brains: it was the crotch-area that caught on first, you joke to all of your jealous friends.

  Someday, if they’re lucky, maybe they can find a catch half as good. The poor plain things.

  Two months after you meet him, the day finally arrives. The day, the one you both worked so hard to obtain: your wedding day. You have on a simple white dress, no train, with very little lace work around the top. It accentuates your augmented bosom, and the rail-thin, rock-hard abdomen you sweated blood and tears and money to earn. The one extravagance in the simple ensemble is the veil—so large, airy, and white it looks like a cloud-halo around your head. That’s why you bought it. He always calls you his little angel.

  You step out of the limo on the big day and begin walking up the steps to the church. You take your time, resting every few steps and swallowing caffeine pills for energy when necessary. It’s hard to do something so physical now that you’ve perfected your body, but the thought of your prince waiting for you at the top gives your blood all the strength and vigor it needs—until it happens.

  Damn the veil. It would never have happened without the veil. You’re so thin, so perfect! There would have been no purchase for the wind. But you are wearing the veil, and you can’t take it back now even though you scream as the gust of air slams into you from the side and lifts you up into the sky.

  The veil spreads out, all fifty thousand dollars of it, and it catches the wind almost as though it had been designed to do so from the very beginning, almost as though you really are an angel and the veil is your wings. You rise up into the air, higher and higher, and for a second your strained heart beats so fast that you are afraid it will burst. So you hold off on the caffeine pill you were about to swallow until it slows down again.

  Your prince sees it all happen from the chapel, and he races from the church to his car. His driver speeds off while he makes a call on his cell phone, and for two whole minutes you see nothing of him at all until—it comes. The private helicopter. You smile when you see that your prince himself is there within it, right beside the pilot, shouting orders and gesturing wildly at you, his love. His princess. His angel.

  The chopper closes in, but it doesn’t work. You’re far too light now, and the veil is far too efficient at catching the wind. Whenever the helicopter rises up to meet you, the gusts created by its whirling blades do nothing but send you higher and higher into the atmosphere.

  Eventually the air is too thin for the helicopter to follow. You watch as it recedes, shrinking beneath you, becoming smaller and smaller—a dot—until finally, it is gone. The whole of planet Earth takes its place in stretching out beneath your feet, and you wave hello.

  I’m queen of the world, you think. Smiling, you reach out with your arms and grab hold of the moon, pulling it to your bosom and snuggling close.

  You wish mom were alive to see you, but she isn’t and doesn’t, and in fact, no one ever sees you again. Not ever. But late at night, your many friends and the adoring public that fawned so jealously after your fairy tale wedding to the prince of—wherever—often look up into the sparkling sky. Up at your legend, to stare and silently wonder at which light above was added on that blustery, almost wedding day in March.

  All of them, you say in your secret voice. All of them.

  But they don’t hear you. And every time you think of using your other voice, the one they could hear, it hardly seems worth the effort.

  Jeremiah Sturgill lives and writes in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “Flight” is his second published story. The first, “Songbird,” was published by Baen’s Universe in late 2006. In 2005, he graduated from Mary Washington University and started Son and Foe, a fiction e-zine that crashed and burned a year later with spectacular predictability (but not before publishing a number of really great stories). In late 2007, he stopped talking at parties about this novel he planned on writing, and he began talking about this novel he’d finished. Sometime in the next twenty years, he hopes to actually sell the damn thing.

  CAPTAIN’S LAMENT

  Stephen Graham Jones

  My name is Quincy Mueller, but since the merchant marines I’ve been known almost exclusively as Muley. It has nothing to do with my character, however. Far from being obstinate or contrary, I’m in fact liberal and engaging. A more enthusiastic conversationalist you’re not likely to find; sailors are lonely, I mean, and hungry for company. If anything, I suppose—and this just because I’m honest to a fault—I err toward the overbearing, as isolation is something I’ve had my fill of.

  And yes, if you detect a hit of defensiveness in my voice, you’re not far from the mark. That so much should have come from a simple misunderstanding, one night twenty years ago, is so far beyond comprehension that it’s actually amusing, I think, or at least revealing of human nature.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Never mind that you already know my story. That you more than likely grew up with it.

  To begin, then, twenty years ago I was thirty-eight, salty and fully-bearded, recovering from a near-fatal accident which had left me convalescing for nearly fourteen months. During those weeks upon weeks in bed, the room uncomfortably still—I hadn’t been landlocked for more than two consecutive months since my twenty-second year, when I thought marriage was the cure for loneliness—I could feel my skin growing pale and translucent, my lips becoming tender without salt to rime them. Because of the injuries to my throat, too, the doctors wouldn’t allow me any tobacco; I couldn’t even chew upon my pipe.

  I’ll spare you the fates I wished upon those doctors—curses I picked up in ports all over the world—but, looking back, I see of course that they more than likely wanted me out of their hospital as much as I wanted out myself.

  Since the ninth month, I had said so little, even, that they called for a battery of tests to gauge my psychological health. Though I tried to tell them all I needed was a view of the sea, the smell of brine, still, they poked and prodded my mind until I did in fact shut down. I’m not proud of it, but, like the tarpon on the deck, his side still bleeding from the gaff, I’d flopped around as long as I co
uld, and found that useless, so was now just staring, waiting for this ordeal to be over.

  The nurses took turns rolling me from side to side to ministrate my sores and perform other indignities.

  In my head, though, I was sailing. On the open sea, a boat pitching beneath me, I was beyond the reach of their needles and swabs and catheters and small, polite questions.

  As the days passed, they came to my room less and less, content that my body would either heal itself in time or that I would, one day when they weren’t looking, simply stop trying.

  To them, I mean, even twenty years ago I was already an antique, a throwback to another century, another way of life.

  And, if I’m to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps because it knows more than you do—knows that, past this experience, a whole new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt with one by one.

  That’s all in the future, though.

  Right then, on my back in bed, miles from the shore, dose upon dose of antibiotic and painkiller pulsing through my veins, it was hard not to feel sorry for myself. To let that consume me.

  It was finally a nurse by the name of Margaret whom I woke to one day. She was dabbing the wetness away from the corners of my eyes, and adjusting the various lines that went into and out of me.

  “Does it hurt?” she said, her fingertips light on my right forearm.

  I closed my eyes, made her disappear.

  The next time I woke, however, she was there again. Evidently she’d been talking for some minutes, telling me about her social life, her family, her dreams and aspirations. I let her words flow over me like water and studied the cursive letters of her name, and watched as, in slow motion, like picture cards flipping one after the other, she pointed a syringe into one of the tubes that fed me.

  How long this went on, I don’t know. If I’d first seen her on a Wednesday though, her badge still new enough to be hand printed, then this was at least a Monday.

  What she talked about the most was a certain boy named Billy, I think. How he’d wronged her and was continuing to wrong her, but she was going to show him.

  I opened my mouth to tell her something but only emitted a rusty creak, my voice broken from dis-use.

  She smiled, pursed her lips, patted my tender right arm and asked if I wanted to see the ocean?

  Though I couldn’t talk, still, she saw the answer in my eyes—I’ve always had expressive eyes—and, with the help of another nurse, maneuvered my atrophied body into a gleaming silver wheelchair, pushed me down hall after hall, my heart beating intentionally for the first time in months, the fingers of my left hand gripping the brown plastic armrest, her subdued laughter behind me tittering out between her closed lips.

  If I could have spoken, I was going to tell her how, if she wanted, I might name my next ship the Margo, after her, and all the rest after that as well: Margo II, Margo III, Margo IV, a fleet of Margos fanned out across the shipping lanes from here to the South Pacific.

  But of course that was just talk—I’d never owned my own ship before, and didn’t have one waiting for me when I got better.

  And anyway, where she was taking me was a joke of sorts.

  She finally stopped our perambulations in the waiting room, with my chair pushed up to a small aquarium with exotic fish, and, every ten seconds, a treasure chest that would burp air up to the surface.

  I closed my eyes, woke again to Margaret’s hand on a syringe, then slept and slept and slept.

  The next time I came to she was stroking the top of my left hand and talking about Billy again.

  Evidently I was supposed to have forgotten about the waiting room, about the ocean.

  I can remember ever shoal in every port I’ve ever drawn water in, though.

  I shut my eyes and shut my ears and let her have my hand. Just that.

  How long this cycle repeated itself, I don’t know. My guess would place it at two months; after a while Margaret became a practiced-enough nurse that she could haul me into my chair herself, just by leveraging me with her hips and the brakes on my bed, and I was a practiced-enough patient to believe that what she was shooting into me syringe by syringe was salt water, and that the dreams I had were just the ocean inside, bending itself to the moon.

  Instead of going to the waiting room now, she was walking me outside, her voice drifting around me. The air was supposed to be good for me, I think. It was stale, though; there was no salt in it, no spray, and the horizon was forever blocked by trees and buildings, the sky empty of properly-winged birds.

  One day, as had to happen, I suppose, Margaret asked her question again: Did I want to see the ocean?

  I tried to move my left hand to indicate that I got this joke, yes, thank you, how nice, but I don’t think she was looking anyway.

  Back in the room this time, instead of pushing the sharp nose of the syringe into the line that went into my injured arm, she instead emptied it an inch into my mattress.

  “I don’t want you going to sleep just yet,” she said, winking.

  It made my heart beat, not with fear, but, in spite of what I knew, hope.

  That night—I could tell it was night by the window—she came back for me. Her shift was over; she had her overcoat on over her thin cotton uniform.

  I opened my mouth to ask a question but she just patted my shoulder and swung me down into my chair.

  As you’ve by now of course guessed, we weren’t going to the waiting room and we weren’t going to the paved walking path, but the back door, and, past that, Margaret’s large car.

  She folded me into the passenger seat, my chair in the trunk.

  “Wher—?” I tried to get out, but she guided my hand back down to my lap, eased her car down the slope of the parking lot.

  Across the road there were sirens, and, walking through a pool of light, a police officer with a dog on a leash.

  Margaret tensed and smiled at the same time.

  “One of the slobbering maniacs, Mr. Mueller,” she said, nodding to the woods. “Probably just wanted to see the ocean, right?”

  “Muley,” I tried to tell her.

  Even though the road we took was more downhill than up, which is to say we were heading generally closer to sea-level, I had no illusions. After the aquarium in the waiting room, I knew I was going to be lucky to even smell the salt through her air conditioner vents, much less feel any spray on my face.

  At the same time, however, if this was to be an end to my suffering, then so be it.

  I pushed my back into the cup of her passenger seat and waited for whatever was to come.

  As I’d expected, instead of following signs to the marina or some other place of portage, she instead wound us through a maze of residential streets I could never retrace. Billy wasn’t down any of them, though, in spite of her muttering his name. Vaguely, I had the idea that her intent was to induce pity in him by pretending I was her war-addled uncle; that, for a few minutes, he was going to have to pretend to be who I was supposed to be expecting him to be. Which is to say Margaret’s.

  The profanity seeping over from the driver’s side of the car, too, though vituperative and heartfelt, still it was light, amateurish. I’d heard worse in Morocco at fourteen years of age, and just over a bow line tied improperly. How that Moroccan sailor might have cursed had his intended been with someone else, it burns my ears just to think about it, and makes me smile a little too. Other people’s suffering can be comical, I mean, when seen from a distance. Even mine, I suppose.

  That’s not to say I can’t still remember the fear that rattled up through me, however, when Margaret took her car from asphalt to gravel, and then from gravel to dirt. The trees crowded around us, made the sky small. I started breathing faster, so that she had to look over, narrow her eyes.

  “This isn’t a good time for this,” she said.

  I closed my eyes.

&nb
sp; Under her thigh was a hunting knife, the kind with a rosewood handle and a brass finger guard.

  At a certain point on the dirt road, she turned the lights of her car off, and, when we saw the tail lights she evidently knew, she turned her car off as well, coasted into a slot between two large trees.

  For a long time then we just sat there, the two of us, and, slowly, I tuned into a new set of sounds: the woods. And, unless as I was mistaken—as it turned out, I wasn’t—the taste of salt in the now-still, un-air-conditioned air.

  The sea. She was close.

  I tried not to let this knowledge flash across my face.

  In her lap now, Margaret had a rope. She was trying to tie a knot but making a complicated job of it. My left hand floundered over almost on its own, guided the end of the rope up and under and back on itself. She appreciated this, pulled the knot tight, nodded a reluctant thank you to me and then would no longer meet my eye. Such is the way we treat the rabbit we’re about to carve for dinner, I suppose.

  It had felt good though, the rope against my skin again.

  Margaret patted the noose she now had and stood from the car, locking all four doors before walking away into the darkness.

  What did she need me for then? The knot?

  I stared at the spot she’d disappeared into but couldn’t figure it out, and finally consoled myself trying to roll my window down to bring the sea nearer. It was electric, though, and I had no keys.

  How long I sat there after she left, I have no idea. If I slept, it was only for minutes, and if I hummed, it was only to hear my own voice. In the absence of monitors and pumps and footsteps, the world was rushingly quiet, and not close enough.

  At some point, anyway, Margaret strode across a bare place between the trees. The rope was no longer across her shoulder, and the knife was held in her fist, low.

  I tried rolling my window down again, and was still clattering away at the button when she was suddenly at my door with the car keys.