by Tim Pratt
“A message?” Milena turned to him. “Will you bind it to my leg with golden thread?”
“No.” Ventsei opened his pocket knife and slid the blade under the red and white threads. He cut through the martenitza. He could have tied it to a fruit tree, giving it health and luck, or he could have buried it under a stone. Instead, he wrapped it about Milena’s wrist. “May each spring be lovelier than the last.”
“Leka nosht, Ventsei.”
Good night.
“Dovizdhane, Milena.”
Farewell.
When not scribbling, Lisa Mantchev can be found on the beach, up a tree, making jam or repairing things with her trusty glue gun. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Aeon, and Abyss & Apex. More will be appearing soon in Japanese Dreams and Electric Velocipede. She is currently at work on the third novel in the Théâtre Illuminata trilogy. You can Taste the Bad Candy at her website, www.lisamantchev.com
EXCERPT FROM A LETTER BY A SOCIAL-REALIST ASWANG
Kristin Mandigma
I apologize for this late reply. Our mail service has been erratic recently due to a spate of troublesome security-related issues. I don’t think I need to elaborate. You must have read the latest reports. These government spooks are hopelessly incompetent but they (very) occasionally evince flashes of human-like logic. I expect it will only take them a matter of time before they figure it out, with or without their torturous diagrams, at which point I may have to seriously consider the advisability of having one of our supporters open another German bank account. As a diversion, if nothing else, and I have had nothing entertaining to watch on cable television (which I believe has also been bugged because it persists in showing me nothing but Disney) for a while. Just between the two of us—I do believe that if fatuous, single-minded politicians were not an irrevocable fact of life, like having to use the toilet, we would have to invent them.
Now, to your letter. I confess to having read it with some consternation. I am well acquainted with your penchant for morbid humor and yet the suggestion that I might write a short “piece” for a speculative fiction magazine struck me as more perverse than usual. What on earth is speculative fiction anyway? I believe you are referring to one of those ridiculous publications which traffic in sensationalizing the human imagination while actually claiming to enrich it by virtue of setting it loose from the moorings of elitist literary fiction? Or whatever? And by elitist substitute “realist,” I suppose. You argue that speculative fiction is merely a convenient “ideologically neutral” term to describe a certain grouping of popular genre fiction, but then follow it up with a defensive polemic on its revolutionary significance with regard to encapsulating the “popular” Filipino experience. To which I ask: As opposed to what?
I believe, Comrade, that you are conflating ideology with bourgeois hair-splitting. When it comes down to it, how is this novel you sent along with your letter, this novel about an interstellar war between monster cockroaches and alienated capitalist soldiers, supposed to be a valid form of social commentary? I do not care if the main character is a Filipino infantryman. I assume he is capitalist, too. Furthermore, since he is far too busy killing cockroaches in godforsaken planets on a spaceship (which is definitely not a respectable proletarian occupation), his insights into the future of Marxist revolution in the Philippines must be suspect, at best. And this Robert Heinlein fellow you mention, I assume, is another imperialist Westerner? I thought so. Comrade, I must admit to being troubled by your choice of reading fare these days. And do not think you can fob me off with claims that your favorite novel at the moment is written by a socialist author. I do not trust socialists. The only socialists I know are white-collar fascist trolls who watch too many Sylvester Stallone movies. Sellouts, the lot of them. Do not get me started on the kapre, they are all closet theists. An inevitable by-product of all that repulsive tobacco, I should say.
With regard to your question about how I perceive myself as an “Other,” let me make it clear that I am as fantastic to myself as rice. I do not waste time sitting around brooding about my mythic status and why the notion that I have lived for five hundred years ought to send me into a paroxysm of metaphysical Angst for the benefit of self-indulgent, overprivileged, cultural hegemonists who fancy themselves writers. So there are times in the month when half of me flies off to—as you put it so charmingly—eat babies. Well, I ask you, so what? For your information, I only eat babies whose parents are far too entrenched in the oppressive capitalist superstructure to expect them to be redeemed as good dialectical materialists. It is a legitimate form of population control, I dare say.
I think the real issue here is not my dietary habits but whether or not my being an aswang makes me any less of a Filipino and a communist. I think that being an aswang is a category of social difference—imposed by an external utilitarian authority—like sexuality and income bracket. Nobody conceives of being gay just as a literary trope. Do they? To put it in another way: I do not concieve of my biological constitution as a significant marker of my identity. Men, women, gays, aswang, talk show hosts, politicians, even these speculative fiction non-idealists you speak of—we are all subject to the evils of capitalism, class struggle, the eschatological workings of history, and the inevitability of socialist relations. In this scheme of things, whether or not one eats dried fish or (imperialist) babies for sustenance should be somewhat irrelevant.
I would also like to address in more depth your rather confused contention that the intellectual enlightenment of the Filipino masses lies not in “contemporary” (I presume you meant to say “outdated” but were too busy contradicting yourself) realistic literature, but in a new artistic imaginative “paradigm” (again, this unseemly bourgeois terminology!). As I have said, I would emphatically beg to differ. Being an aswang—not just the commodified subject, but the fetishistic object of this new literature you speak of—has not enlightened me in any way about the true nature of society, about modes of production, about historical progress. I am a nationalist not because I am an aswang, but despite of it. You only have to consider the example of those notorious Transylvanian vampires. No one would ever call them patriots, except insofar as they speak like Bela Lugosi.
Before I end this letter, I must add another caveat: my first reaction upon meeting Jose Rizal in Paris during the International Exposition was not to eat him, as malicious rumors would have you believe. In fact, we spoke cordially and had an extended conversation about Hegel in a cafe. I do think that he is just another overrated ilustrado poseur—brilliant, of course, but with a dangerous touch of the Trotskyite utopian about him. I prefer Bonifacio, for obvious reasons.
In closing, let me say, as Marx does, that “one has to leave philosophy aside.” You must inure yourself against these pernicious novels about cockroaches and spaceships (and did you mention dragons? all dragons are either Freudians or fascists) for they can only lead you to a totalizing anthropogenetic attitude towards the world. Concentrate on the real work that needs to be done, Comrade.
(For all that, let me thank you for the sweaters. I can only hope you did not buy them in that cursed cesspool of superexploitation, SM Shoemart. It is getting quite cold here in America, hivemind of evil, and it has been increasingly impractical for me to fly out without any sort of protective covering.)
Long live the Philippines! Long live the Revolution!
Kristin Mandigma lives in Manila, Philippines where she works as a research analyst. She also helps out with a small non-profit called Read Or Die (also known as First World Imperialists Please Send Books), which promotes literacy and literary awareness in the Philippines, and maintains a website on Filipino literature at http://libro.ph.
THE RIVER BOY
Tim Pratt
There once was a woman who wanted more than anything to have a child. She was old, and had outlived her own sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, too, and since her grandchildren had all been excessively taken with
modern ideas and upstart temperance religions, there were no great-grandchildren. Her family name—which was very beautiful and meant “those who dwell on the banks of the great river” in an old forgotten language—was withered and almost gone, and she could not bear to be the last of her line. She knew many secrets and mysteries—that was how she’d achieved such long life, a life that had seemed a boon when she was young, but was more and more now a misery—and so she made a plan.
A few months before the snows were due, she left her cottage on the cliffside, with its medicinal garden and curmudgeonly half-wild goats, and hiked two slow days through the woods. She fended off wolves with her walking stick and highwaymen with her glares, and by shaming them with the names of their mothers—one of her many powers was to know the name of everyone’s mother, even yours, little one.
Finally she reached the bank of the river where her ancestors had been born, a mighty water so vast and long that for most of its length it had no need for a name other than “The River” or sometimes “Big River.” She had, in her youth, traveled the river, from source (a bubbling crack between two rocks in the mountains) to mouth (a fishing village that had grown into a vast port during the decades of her middle age). But this modest spot, a bend in the river with bare trees and browning long grass, was the particular place where she came from, so she made camp, and dipped her toes in the muddy placid reedy water’s edge, scaring frogs and prompting the slow process of alarm that passes for startlement in turtles.
“Oh river,” she said, “You are all the family I have left. Your waters flow in my blood, and I’m sure the blood of my many relations runs diluted in you. I am too old to bear more children of my own, and stealing away bright children from unfit parents can have troublesome consequences. Please, great river, if it be in your power, give me another child, and I will devote myself to him forever.” She knelt on knees creaking from her long journey and drank the silty cold water of the river until her belly was cold and hard as a stone. Then she rolled over, wrapped herself in a cloak by the fire, and slept.
When she woke, it was no longer autumn, or even winter, but spring, and the sun shone down on her grassy bed surrounded by purple wildflowers, and a tiny baby boy dozed placidly on her chest. She sat up, ravenous, but pulled the baby to her chest with old instincts, baring her breasts. The baby nuzzled, clutched, and latched, sucking. The old woman was amazed she could produce milk at all, though she supposed that was no more miraculous than the fact of the babe himself. But when he dropped his head down, sated, she saw a trickle not of colostrum or milk but of clear cold water from her breast. She shivered, rose unsteadily to her feet, and looked at the wide empty channel of cracked earth where the river had been. She looked down at her baby, and he opened his eyes. They were the rich deep brown of river mud.
“Drought,” she said firmly, scowling at the riverbed. “A little rain will put it right, I’m sure.” She looked at the baby, her expression softening, and whispered “You’re mine.” She began the long hike back to her cottage, baby clutched close.
The old woman named her son River, and he grew quick as marsh reeds. His eyes were changeable, brown to blue and back again, and he loved it when she sang him all the songs of her youth, and the songs learned in her many travels from delta to tributaries to alluvial plains. She sang him the songs boatmen sang, and the songs dock loaders sang, and fisherman songs, frog gigger songs, washer-woman songs. He drank the water from her breasts until he was old enough for goat’s milk, and later honey from her hives and vegetables from her garden, and he sang, too, almost even before he could speak. The old woman felt dry places inside her blossom, felt fissures in her spirit heal, every time the boy called her “mother.”
And she never, ever thought about the land beyond her mountain cleft, and she never, ever ventured over the hills to the river valley beyond.
When River was ten years old, he began to have nightmares. He would wake, shouting, and the old woman would rush from her pallet to his hammock, where he would twist and gasp like a fish in a net. At first, he was simply inconsolable, but after three nights he began to tell her about his dreams. “I see boats titled on dry sand,” he said. “I see women with cracked lips. I see strong men sitting idle on heaps of crates. I see lines and hooks twisted in tree limbs, and an empty city, and a dozen dead villages, and more, and more, and more.”
The old woman closed her eyes. It was possible, she knew, to grow as old as she had grown and yet still not become wise. But she was wise, even if she had let her knowledge guide her to troubling places. “Tomorrow,” she said, “We’ll take a journey, and see what we see.”
River was excited, as boys will be, at the prospect of a trip. It was spring, so there were no hungry wolves, only songbirds and butterflies, and River whistled at the one and chased the other, all nightmares forgotten. After two days they reached the spot where River had been born, or gifted, and the flowers were dead, the trees dying, the bare riverbed a stretch of misplaced desert.
“Ten year drought,” she said, and River yawned mightily.
“I’m so sleepy,” he said.
“It was a long journey. Come, lay down here in this dry place.” She led him to the center of the riverbed, and he followed, trusting as always. She returned the bank and watched him settle to the ground, expecting a miracle in reverse. But he just slept, and she thought perhaps her own power was too strong, that she’d doomed the land of her ancestors with her own one life’s need. She wept then, and the tears rolled in clear fresh rivulets down her cheeks, breaking into waves when they struck the dry earth, and in moments the riverbed was filled bank to bank with a welter of mother’s tears, and her boy sank without a ripple.
“My son is drowned,” she thought, and sat unmoving as night fell, seeing no need to rise from that spot ever again, knowing even her own long life would end in time if she did not eat or drink.
The water lapped the bank in a long slow rhythm, and frogs—already frogs!—began a counterpointed croaking, and with a slow dawning kind of awe she realized the river and the frogs were, in a way, singing; an old song of consolation for men and women whose loved ones had died and been sent floating down the river; a song she had taught her son just that winter, one cold and windy night.
When she wept again, the tears were salty human tears of relief.
Years passed, and people came back to the river, and fished, and gigged frogs, and sailed boats, and washed clothes. Some of those people were so grateful for their new lives that they took a new name to go along with them, a name that means “those who dwell on the banks of the great river” in a fine old language. That’s what our name means, and where it comes from, little one.
Some say that old woman made a raft and sailed up and down the length of her son the river, singing to him and hearing songs in return, as proud of him as any mother could ever be of her son, as proud as I will be of you someday, I think. Some say that old woman still sails to this day, and when the water birds and frogs make music, it is the river, singing his mother a lullaby he learned long ago at her breast.
Close your eyes, little one. Listen to the river. Listen to him sing.
For my son
Tim Pratt lives in Oakland California with his wife Heather Shaw and their son River. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and last year his story “Impossible Dreams” won a Hugo Award. Just lately he’s been publishing a series of urban fantasy novels under the name T.A. Pratt, which include Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, and Spell Games.
ACID AND STONED REINDEER
Rebecca Ore
The reindeer were stoned. Flat Nan, Ken, Ro, some other girls and boy who’d just discovered sex and I were chasing mammoths off the summer range so the horses could eat in peace and so we’d have some hazel nuts left for the winter. We didn’t hunt mammoths until snow fell which made tracking them like following a herd of Buicks. Mammoths always looked
surprised when we found them so I don’t think they were that smart.
Centuries later, I was at a loft party in New York City, having gone back to see how some people I’d met in 2001 had gotten that way. It was easy to wrangle invitations to parties in the early 1970s if you were a presentable boy, and I’ve always been a presentable boy. The loft was full of painters with real gallery shows, of famous painters’ future, present, and ex-wives and boyfriends, of the kinds of people who showed up to be at a party with famous painters, poets, and the various entertainments people who threw loft parties had to offer. Dancers danced. Painters chatted up art critics. Poetry professors chatted up graduate students past, present, and future. And I felt both in place and out of place, remembering parties in places that must have been Rome that felt like this, or which could have been provincial capitals pretending to be as vicious as Rome. Clothes change; bodies and poses don’t. I was maneuvering for the drinks table when someone said, “If you want to try acid, the punch is spiked.”
If I was going to get drunk, I was going to be pinned down in time for the duration anyway, just like being sleep, so I might as well try something new. To lock me to the party time, I drank two big glasses of white wine, which was the screw-neck bottled cheap Chablis available at all bohemian party those years. Then I took a drink of the punch. I’d heard about acid, like rye fungus without the fingers dropping off, and I was feeling reckless, which happens when you spend a couple of centuries being really cautious after seeing a lover hanged, and your caution starts to recoil. Stonewall marked the change; New York was full of possibilities those days. The revolution hadn’t quite faded.
