The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
Page 11
At seven, she returned, and Clarie Jurat took Vellitt to a tiny house of blue-and-white clapboard, with a bedroom hardly larger than the bed it contained, a green-tiled bathroom, and the rest of the space a single room that was kitchen and dining room, living room and entry. Clarie talked as she poured iced black-currant tea, proud of the house, the little wooden kitchen table and matching chairs; the little laptop she had purchased the week before—“It does everything,” she said reverently, and couldn’t help laughing at herself—the thrift-store dresser on newspapers in the center of the room, which she was refinishing based on videos she had found online. There were no signs of a man’s presence. She showed everything to Vellitt Boe, and Vellitt said nothing, and wept inside for Clarie Jurat.
At last Clarie said, “Shall we order a pizza? Then we don’t have to go anywhere. We can eat in the kitchen. I have beer.”
“Of course,” Vellitt said. “I was driving and I suddenly thought Canadian bacon, but I don’t know what it is, except as something that goes on pizza.”
Clarie’s smile was golden and lovely as sunrise. “Yeah, so many things I woke up knowing without ever experiencing them.”
She ordered pizza and brought two beers from her refrigerator. Vellitt tasted one: bitter, thin, and fizzy. Perhaps she made a face, for Clarie said apologetically, “I know it’s not as good as the ale from the Pshent, is it? Beer here is pretty bad, so far as I can tell. So, Professor. How, why?”
“You may as well call me Vellitt. Where is the man who brought you here?”
Jurat sighed a little. “Oh, Stephan. He didn’t bring me here. He’s from Missoula—that’s west of here, it’s all mountains and pine trees—so that’s where we went, and when we split up, I came east. Four months ago, now. Wow, it seems longer.”
“I’m sorry for the loss,” Vellitt said, because that was a thing that should be said.
Jurat looked rueful but shrugged. “It was me. I got here, the waking world, and he was—just irrelevant. So small, compared to everything he might be. Everything I had imagined. I thought I was in love with him until I got here.” She shook her head. “It’s strange, how things are: people are together and then they’re not, and you can’t explain any of it.”
Vellitt said, “It wasn’t him, was it? That you loved. It was this.” She gestured: the room, Miles City, the waking world.
Clarie nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I work in a coffee shop. People here don’t even see it; it’s like this boring job for them—but every day people say hello to me; every day I meet someone new, who is round and bright and—scattery, made out of parts, plans and fears and love and worry and I don’t even know what. I don’t know how to explain it. Random and meaningful and beautiful. I know that doesn’t make sense.” She gave a little laugh, half defiant.
“I know,” said Vellitt. “I do know. I arrived yesterday—in Wisconsin, so I’ve been driving. No one here tells people what they mean, what their world means.”
Clarie picked at the bottle’s label. “And there are women everywhere and people in different colors, and it’s all amazing. Science. Geography. Do you know that math makes sense here? Look at this.” She stretched out her tattooed arm. A number wrapped around and around her arm, beginning at her wrist and vanishing into the short sleeve of her shirt. 3.141592653589793 . . . “Pi,” she said. “It never changes here. The rules never change, Professor. Vellitt. Here, physics is just cause and effect, and the moon orbits the Earth on a schedule. They know years in advance where it will be.”
Vellitt waited, a skill learned in decades of tutorials and classes. Jurat had been her best student. She would get to it.
Clarie continued, “And they have colleges everywhere, and universities, Professor. Vellitt. I can study Mathematics here. Or anything. They have sciences we’ve never even heard of.”
Vellitt waited.
“Did you come to take me back to Ulthar?” Clarie said finally. “Because I won’t go.”
“I am so sorry,” said Vellitt, and she told her of a small god who tossed restless and rousing on his couch; that if he awoke to find Clarie Jurat gone from his world, he would destroy Ulthar and the Skai valley.
“That’s ridiculous,” Clarie said. “I’m nothing there, just a third-year at University.”
Vellitt pulled Clarie upright and led her to the mirror of the dresser, and looked over her shoulder at the girl, radiant, long-eyed and narrow-nosed and shiningly beautiful. “Clarie, you’re not like other people. You know this, though you very properly take no advantage of the knowledge. You are the granddaughter of a god.”
Clarie shook her head. “No. There are no gods.”
“Not here. But there. Gods and gods and gods, and every one of them capricious, tiny, and powerful. Your grandfather is one.”
“Fuck him,” said Clarie Jurat; the word sat strangely in the mouth of a College woman. “When has he ever been anything to me? Fuck them all. I will not go back.”
Vellitt waited. There had been an expression that would move across Clarie’s face when she was working some difficult proof in a tutorial, intent and inward; she had that look now, and Vellitt waited. All the Ulthar women, the students and scholars and Fellows: Therine Angoli and Raba Hust, Derysk Oure and Yllyn Martveit, Gnesa Petso and the Bursar; the rest of the University and her father and every other man and woman and child of Ulthar, and beyond it Nir and Hatheg-town and the glowing green plains of the river Skai.
“This is what life is, then,” said Clarie into the stretching silence, anger and despair mingled in her voice. “Doing things you hate. I thought if I came here, maybe it would be different, I could be something amazing.”
“Clarie—”
Three little chimes rang.
“That’s the doorbell,” Clarie Jurat said. “The pizza.” She started to cry and could not stop for a time. In the end, it was Vellitt who went to the door and paid the man.
* * *
Vellitt Boe and Clarie Jurat sat long, eating pizza and drinking the terrible beer. They did not speak much. Clarie was clearly full of dark thoughts—and Vellitt as well, hating herself for her quest.
But Clarie put down her beer and said, finally, with a small, twisted smile, “I’ll do it. Of course. I should have said that earlier, right? That’s what Ulthar Women’s College women do, isn’t it? The right thing. Except that I don’t know how to go back.”
Vellitt said, slowly, “It’s not so hard from this side. You sleep. I think your grandfather’s blood will call you home.”
“And you’ll be with me.” It was half a question.
Vellitt stood and crossed to the window, looked out on the sunset sky, her gug parked on the street behind Clarie’s rusty Toyota. “I cannot.”
Clarie’s voice behind her trembled: surprise, anger. “What? Why should I return if you will not?”
“Not ‘will not.’ Cannot. I’ve known since Hatheg-Kla. I hoped it wouldn’t be true, but as I climbed into this world—it’s clear now; I’ve become an object for the gods, searching for you. They’ll destroy Ulthar for my sake, hating me.” She turned to face Clarie. “I could go back and be killed, and I’d do it if that ended it. But I think it’s more likely that I would be spared for a time—so that I could watch Ulthar razed, burning. A glassy plain.”
“The gods would do that?”
“You know they would, Jurat. Think of Irem. Think of Sarnath. Like the children’s rhyme—Sarnath, Sarkomand, Khem, and Toldees. This is what the gods do, is destroy.” Vellitt turned back to watch the shadows pool. “I lived there for so many years, Jurat, and never thought of it as home. It was just an endpoint to my journeys—I could not keep travelling, so I stopped and it happened to be Ulthar. And now that I can’t go back, I realize it became home, anyway.” Vellitt exhaled something that might have been a laugh.
There was a silence.
“No,” Clarie said, after eternity. Her voice was changed: strong as steel. She walked to the window to stand beside Vellitt and together the
y looked out: Miles City and the long shadows, the cars. “It’s not his blood that calls me home—not in the way you mean. If I am a god’s granddaughter, then I am a god, right? So I can save Ulthar. Some people change the world. And some people change the people who change the world, and that’s you.” She turned, and all the attention of this altered Clarie Jurat focused on Vellitt Boe, and she fought the impulse to faint from the stress of that regard.
Clarie went on, “I’ve seen a world without gods, and it’s better. You: stay, and I will return and fix our world. There have to be ways to counter them. To fight them. I am one of them. I can do it.” She laughed and for a moment it seemed as though the little house was filled with thunder and the earth beneath them shuddered.
Vellitt stumbled backward. Clarie pivoted to look at her; her eyes reflecting the kitchen lights seemed filled with flame. “Do you doubt me?”
“No,” Vellitt said. “No.”
* * *
They fell asleep at last, Clarie Jurat in her little bedroom and Vellitt Boe on the sofa, wrapped in a crocheted afghan Clarie had found in a thrift store. Vellitt found herself on a marble terrace, but the terrace looked out on nothing but darkness and the clustered urns were filled with black roses that smelled of dust; and she knew how to read these signs. Clarie Jurat was beside her: brilliant, strong-willed, beautiful, with long fierce eyes and her hair a glowing crown. They descended together the seventy steps to the Gate—and just visible beyond was a cavern like a secret garden, with fungi like willow trees, and mosses like grasses; and on the tessellated path was a man with violet robes and a heavy spade-shaped black beard: Reon Atescre who was now Nasht.
The gate was secured with a lock, shining like gold. They had no key, but Clarie said in a god’s voice, “I will enter,” and the Gate burst open. “Live without gods,” she said to Vellitt, and stepped onto the silver pavement.
“Wait—” said Vellitt, remembering a thing suddenly. She felt in her pocket for the Bursar’s little lined notebook, filled with expenditures. “Take this back to the College when you can.” She extended her hand through the opened Gate and felt the dream lands buzzing at her skin. Clarie took it before turning back to Reon, who had fallen to his knees before her.
“Do not kneel,” said Clarie Jurat in a voice like thunder, like earths breaking and stars forming. “No more gods.”
* * *
And Vellitt Boe awoke, shoutingly awake on the couch in what had been Clarie’s house, and she was alone.
She stood, feeling an ache in her lower back, too old to sleep on couches. A beer bottle on the unfinished dresser had left a white ring; at some point in their sleep, the mirror had broken into shards that lay scattered across the floor. She glimpsed movement in one, but it was only her reflection as she stretched and looked about.
Clarie Jurat was gone and already the rooms seemed as though they had been emptied of life, embedded in the impenetrable amber of the past. Would there be unanswered texts, an unfilled shift at the coffee shop in Main Street, a missing-persons report, and her Toyota rusting until it was towed; or would the waking world reseal itself over the place that had been Clarie Jurat, and leave no signs she had ever been there?
She walked outside. Birds sang in the shrubs beside the door, and flared up and across the street as she walked down the steps. The sharp smell of gasoline came crisp from the neighbor’s driveway, where he filled his lawnmower’s tank from a red poly gas can, and he nodded a greeting. Light glowed from street and tree and lawn and house, and over everything shone the brightening sky, godless and unfigured. The Buick slept beneath the oak tree by the street, lean-haunched and gray and beautiful to her; and on the hood, as precisely as a statue, sat the small black cat, her tail curled about her feet. When she saw Vellitt, she made a sound and stood in a complicated fluid movement that was back-arch and leg-stretch and tail-twist and head-butt into Vellitt’s cupped hand.
“You’re staying?” she asked aloud. The cat meowed again.
Infinities away, Clarie Jurat walked down the seven hundred steps into the dream lands to change her world. And Vellitt Boe picked up the cat and sat on the Buick’s hood and said, “Well, this is us, then. Now what?”
Acknowledgments
Thank you, as always and ever, to Elizabeth Bourne, Chris McKitterick, and Barbara J. Webb; and to Jonathan Strahan and John Myers Myers’s Silverlock, for the incitement. And I must of course acknowledge Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whether I could make adult sense of it.
About the Author
KIJ JOHNSON’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards, among others. In the past, she has worked in editorial and project-management capacities for Tor Books, Wizards of the Coast/TSR, Dark Horse Comics, and Microsoft. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Kansas and associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.
You can sign up for email updates here.
Also by Kij Johnson
The Fox Woman
Fudoki
Dragon’s Honor (with Greg Cox)
COLLECTIONS
At the Mouth of the River of Bees
Thank you for buying this Tor.com ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters.
For email updates on the author, click here.
TOR•COM
Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.
*
More than just a publisher's website, Tor.com is a venue for original fiction, comics, and discussion of the entire field of SF and fantasy, in all media and from all sources. Visit our site today—and join the conversation yourself.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Begin Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kij Johnson
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.
THE DREAM-QUEST OF VELLITT BOE
Copyright © 2016 by Kij Johnson
Cover art by Victo Ngai
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Map by Serena Malyon
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
All rights reserved.
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associate, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8651-9 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9141-4 (trade paperback)
First Edition: August 2016
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.