The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  The people on the beach think no more of him than a teenager with chlamydia gives thanks to Alexander Fleming. Most of them imagine that Rajit must be dead by now. None of them care either way.

  It is suggested that certain cancers have evolved or mutated to survive rebooting. Many bacterial and viral diseases can survive rebooting. A handful even thrive upon rebooting, and one—a strain of gonorrhea—is hypothesized to use the process in its vectoring, initially remaining dormant in the host body and becoming infectious only when the genitalia have reorganized into that of the opposite gender.

  Still, the average Western human life span is increasing.

  Why some freebooters—recreational Reboot users—appear to age normally, while others give no indication of aging at all, is something that puzzles scientists. Some claim that the latter group is actually aging on a cellular level. Others maintain that it is too soon to tell and that no one knows anything for certain.

  Rebooting does not reverse the aging process; however, there is evidence that, for some, it may arrest it. Many of the older generation, who have until now been resistant to rebooting for pleasure, begin to take it regularly—freebooting—whether they have a medical condition that warrants it or no.

  XI.

  LOOSE COINS BECOME KNOWN as coinage or, occasionally, specie.

  The process of making different or altering is now usually known as shifting.

  XII.

  RAJIT IS DYING OF prostate cancer in his Rio apartment. He is in his early nineties. He has never taken Reboot; the idea now terrifies him. The cancer has spread to the bones of his pelvis and to his testes.

  He rings the bell. There is a short wait for the nurse’s daily soap opera to be turned off, the cup of coffee put down. Eventually his nurse comes in.

  “Take me out into the air,” he says to the nurse, his voice hoarse. At first the nurse affects not to understand him. He repeats it, in his rough Portuguese. A shake of the head from his nurse.

  He pulls himself out of the bed—a shrunken figure, stooped so badly as to be almost hunchbacked, and so frail that it seems that a storm would blow him over—and begins to walk toward the door of the apartment.

  His nurse tries, and fails, to dissuade him. And then the nurse walks with him to the apartment hall and holds his arm as they wait for the elevator. He has not left the apartment in two years; even before the cancer, Rajit did not leave the apartment. He is almost blind.

  The nurse walks him out into the blazing sun, across the road, and down onto the sand of the Copacabana.

  The people on the beach stare at the old man, bald and rotten, in his antique pajamas, gazing about him with colorless once-brown eyes through bottle-thick dark-rimmed spectacles.

  He stares back at them.

  They are golden and beautiful. Some of them are asleep on the sand. Most of them are naked, or they wear the kind of bathing attire that emphasizes and punctuates their nakedness.

  Rajit knows them, then.

  Later, much later, they made another biopic. In the final sequence the old man falls to his knees on the beach, as he did in real life, and blood trickles from the open flap of his pajama bottoms, soaking the faded cotton and puddling darkly onto the soft sand. He stares at them all, looking from one to another with awe upon his face, like a man who has finally learned how to stare at the sun.

  He said one word only as he died, surrounded by the golden people, who were not men, who were not women.

  He said, “Angels.”

  And the people watching the biopic, as golden, as beautiful, as changed as the people on the beach, knew that that was the end of it all.

  And in any way that Rajit would have understood, it was.

  Excerpt from Stardust

  1998

  THE STAR HAD been soaked to the skin when she arrived at the pass, sad and shivering. She was worried about the unicorn; they had found no food for it on the last day’s journey, as the grasses and ferns of the forest had been replaced by gray rocks and stunted thorn bushes. The unicorn’s unshod hooves were not meant for the rocky road, nor was its back meant to carry riders, and its pace became slower and slower. As they traveled, the star cursed the day she had fallen to this wet, unfriendly world. It had seemed so gentle and welcoming when seen from high in the sky. That was before. Now, she hated everything about it, except the unicorn; and, saddle sore and uncomfortable, she would have even happily spent time away from the unicorn.

  After a day of pelting rain, the lights of the inn were the most welcoming sight she had seen in her time on the Earth. “Watch your step, watch your step,” pattered the raindrops on the stone. The unicorn stopped fifty yards from the inn and would approach no closer. The door to the inn was opened, flooding the gray world with warm yellow light.

  “Hello there, dearie,” called a welcoming voice from the open doorway.

  The star stroked the unicorn’s wet neck and spoke softly to the animal, but it made no move, stood there frozen in the light of the inn like a pale ghost.

  “Will you be coming in, dearie? Or will you be stopping out there in the rain?” The woman’s friendly voice warmed the star, soothed her: just the right mixture of practicality and concern. “We can get you food, if it’s food you’re after. There’s a fire blazing in the hearth and enough hot water for a tub that’ll melt the chill from your bones.”

  “I . . . I will need help coming in . . .” said the star. “My leg . . .”

  “Ach, poor mite,” said the woman. “I’ll have my husband Billy carry you inside. There’s hay and fresh water in the stables, for your beast.”

  The unicorn looked about wildly as the woman approached. “There, there, dearie. I won’t be coming too close. After all, it’s been many a long year since I was maiden enough to touch a unicorn, and many a long year since such a one was seen in these parts. .”

  Nervously, the unicorn followed the woman into the stables, keeping its distance from her. It walked along the stable to the furthest stall, where it lay down in the dry straw, and the star scrambled off its back, dripping and miserable.

  Billy turned out to be a white-bearded, gruff sort of fellow. He said little, but carried the star into the inn and put her down on a three-legged stool in front of a crackling log fire.

  “Poor dear,” said the innkeeper’s wife, who had followed them inside. “Look at you, wet as a water-nixie, look at the puddle under you, and your lovely dress, oh the state of it, you must be soaked to the bone.” And, sending her husband away, she helped the star remove her dripping wet dress, which she placed on a hook near the fire, where each drip hissed and fizzed when it fell to the hot bricks of the hearth.

  There was a tin tub in front of the fire, and the innkeeper’s wife put up a paper screen around it. “How d’you like your baths?” she asked, solicitously, “warm, hot, or boil-a-lobster?”

  “I do not know,” said the star, naked but for the topaz stone on the silver chain about her waist, her head all in a whirl at the strange turn that events had taken, “for I have never had a bath before.”

  “Never had one?” The innkeeper’s wife looked astonished. “Why, you poor duck; well, we won’t make it too hot, then. Call me if you need another copperful of water, I’ve got some going over the kitchen fire; and when you’re done with the bath, I’ll bring you some mulled wine, and some sweet-roasted turnips.”

  And, before the star could protest that she neither ate nor drank, the woman had bustled off, leaving the star sitting in the tin tub, her broken leg in its splints sticking out of the water and resting on the three-legged stool. Initially the water was indeed too hot, but as she became used to the heat she relaxed, and was, for the first time since she had tumbled from the sky, utterly happy.

  “There’s a love,” said the innkeeper’s wife, returning. “How are you feeling now?”

  “Much, much better, thank you,” said the star.

  “And your heart? How does your heart feel?” asked the woman.

  “My h
eart?” It was a strange question, but the woman seemed genuinely concerned. “It feels happier. More easy. Less troubled.”

  “Good. That’s good. Let us get it burning high and hot within you, eh? Burning bright inside you.”

  “I am sure that under your care my heart shall blaze and burn with happiness,” said the star.

  The innkeeper’s wife leaned over and chucked the star under the chin. “There’s a pet, such a duck it is, the fine things it says.” And the woman smiled indulgently and ran a hand through her gray-streaked hair. She hung a thick toweling robe on the edge of the screen. “This is for you to wear when you are done with your bath—oh no, not to hurry, ducks—it’ll be nice and warm for you, and your pretty dress will still be damp for a while now. Just give us a shout when you want to hop out of the tub and I’ll come and give you a hand.” Then she leaned over, and touched the star’s chest, between her breasts, with one cold finger. And she smiled. “A good strong heart,” she said.

  There were good people on this benighted world, the star decided, warmed and contented. Outside the rain and the wind pattered and howled through the mountain pass, but in the inn, at the Sign of the Chariot, all was warm and comfortable. Eventually the innkeeper’s wife, assisted by her dull-faced daughter, helped the star out of her bath. The firelight glinted on the topaz set in silver which the star wore on a knotted silver chain about her waist, until the topaz, and the star’s body, vanished beneath the thick toweling of her robe.

  “Now, my sweet,” said the innkeeper’s wife, “you come over here and make yourself comfortable.” She helped the star over to a long wooden table, at the head of which were laid a cleaver and a knife, both of them with hilts of bone and blades of dark glass. Leaning and limping, the star made it to the table and sat down at the bench beside it.

  Outside there was a gust of wind, and the fire flared up green and blue and white. Then a deep voice boomed from outside the inn, over the howl of the elements. “Service! Food! Wine! Fire! Where is the stableboy?”

  Billy the innkeeper and his daughter made no move, but only looked at the woman in the red dress as if for instructions. She pursed her lips. And then she said, “It can wait. For a little. After all, you are not going anywhere, my dearie?” This last to the star. “Not on that leg of yours, and not until the rain lets up, eh?”

  “I appreciate your hospitality more than I can say,” said the star, simply and with feeling.

  “Of course you do,” said the woman in the red dress, and her fidgeting fingers brushed the black knives impatiently, as if there were something she could not wait to be doing. “Plenty of time when these nuisances have gone, eh?”

  THE LIGHT OF the inn was the happiest and best thing Tristran had seen on his journey through Faerie. While Primus bellowed for assistance, Tristran unhitched the exhausted horses, and led them one by one into the stables on the side of the inn. There was a white horse asleep in the furthest stall, but Tristran was too busy to pause to inspect it.

  He knew—somewhere in the odd place inside him that knew directions and distances of things he had never seen and the places he had never been—that the star was close at hand, and this comforted him, and made him nervous. He knew that the horses were more exhausted and more hungry than he was. His dinner—and thus, he suspected, his confrontation with the star—could wait. “I’ll groom the horses,” he told Primus. “They’ll catch a chill otherwise.”

  The tall man rested his huge hand on Tristran’s shoulder.

  “Good lad. I’ll send a pot-boy out with some burnt ale for you.”

  Tristran thought about the star as he brushed down the horses and picked out their hooves. What would he say? What would she say? He was brushing the last of the horses when a blank-looking pot-girl came out to him with a tankard of steaming wine.

  “Put it down over there,” he told her. “I’ll drink it with goodwill as soon as my hands are free.” She put it down on the top of a tack box and went out, without saying anything.

  It was then that the horse in the end stall got to its feet and began to kick against the door.

  “Settle down, there,” called Tristran, “settle down, fellow, and I’ll see if I cannot find warm oats and bran for all of you.”

  There was a large stone in the stallion’s front inside hoof, and Tristran removed it with care. Madam, he had decided he would say, please accept my heartfelt and most humble apologies. Sir, the star would say in her turn, that I shall do with all my heart. Now, let us go to your village, where you shall present me to your true love, as a token of your devotion to her. . . .

  His ruminations were interrupted by an enormous clattering, as a huge white horse—but, he realized immediately, it was not a horse—kicked down the door of its stall and came charging, desperately, toward him, its horn lowered.

  Tristran threw himself onto the straw on the stable floor, his arms about his head.

  Moments passed. He raised his head. The unicorn had stopped in front of the tankard, was lowering its horn into the mulled wine.

  Awkwardly, Tristran got to his feet. The wine was steaming and bubbling, and it came to Tristran then—the information surfacing from some long-forgotten fairy tale or piece of children’s lore—that a unicorn’s horn was proof against . . .

  “Poison?” he whispered, and the unicorn raised its head, and stared into Tristran’s eyes, and Tristran knew that it was the truth. His heart was pounding hard in his chest. Around the inn the wind was screaming like a witch in her madness.

  Tristran ran to the stable door, then he stopped and thought. He fumbled in his tunic pocket, finding the lump of wax, which was all that remained of his candle, with a dried copper leaf sticking to it. He peeled the leaf away from the wax with care. Then he raised the leaf to his ear and listened to what it told him.

  “WINE, MILORD?” ASKED the middle-aged woman in the long red dress, when Primus had entered the inn.

  “I am afraid not,” he said. “I have a personal superstition that, until the day I see my brother’s corpse cold on the ground before me, I shall drink only my own wine, and eat only food I have obtained and prepared myself. This I shall do here, if you have no objection. I shall, of course, pay you as if it were your own wine I was drinking. If I might trouble you to put this bottle of mine near the fire to take the chill from it? Now, I have a companion on my journey, a young man who is attending to the horses; he has sworn no such oath, and I am sure that if you could send him a mug of burnt ale it would help take the chill from his bones . . . ?”

  The pot-maid bobbed a curtsey, and she scuttled back to the kitchens.

  “So, mine host,” said Primus to the white-bearded innkeeper, “how are your beds here at the back of beyond? Have you straw mattresses? Are there fires in the bedrooms? And I note with increasing pleasure that there is a bathtub in front of your fireplace—if there’s a fresh copper of steaming water, I shall have a bath later. But I shall pay you no more than a small silver coin for it, mind.”

  The innkeeper looked to his wife, who said, “Our beds are good, and I shall have the maid make up a fire in the bedroom for you and your companion.”

  Primus removed his dripping black robe and hung it by the fire, beside the star’s still-damp blue dress. Then he turned and saw the young lady sitting at the table. “Another guest?” he said. “Well-met, milady, in this noxious weather.” At that, there was a loud clattering from the stable next door. “Something must have disturbed the horses,” said Primus, concerned.

  “Perhaps the thunder,” said the innkeeper’s wife.

  “Aye, perhaps,” said Primus. Something else was occupying his attention. He walked over to the star and stared into her eyes for several heartbeats. “You. .” he hesitated. Then, with certainty, “You have my father’s stone. You have the Power of Stormhold.”

  The girl glared up at him with eyes the blue of sky. “Well, then,” she said. “Ask me for it, and I can have done with the stupid thing.”

  The innkeeper’s
wife hurried over and stood at the head of the table. “I’ll not have you bothering the other guests now, my dearie-ducks,” she told him, sternly.

  Primus’s eyes fell upon the knives upon the wood of the tabletop. He recognized them: there were tattered scrolls in the vaults of Stormhold in which those knives were pictured, and their names were given. They were old things, from the First Age of the world.

  The front door of the inn banged open.

  “Primus!” called Tristran, running in. “They have tried to poison me!”

  The Lord Primus reached for his short-sword, but even as he went for it the witch-queen took the longest of the knives and drew the blade of it, in one smooth, practical movement, across his throat . . .

  For Tristran, it all happened too fast to follow. He entered, saw the star and Lord Primus, and the innkeeper and his strange family, and then the blood was spurting in a crimson fountain in the firelight.

  “Get him!” called the woman in the scarlet dress. “Get the brat!”

  Billy and the maid ran toward Tristran; and it was then that the unicorn entered the inn.

  Tristran threw himself out of the way. The unicorn reared up on its hind legs, and a blow from one of its sharp hooves sent the pot-maid flying.

  Billy lowered his head and ran, headlong, at the unicorn, as if he were about to butt it with his forehead. The unicorn lowered its head also, and Billy the Innkeeper met his unfortunate end.

  “Stupid!” screamed the innkeeper’s wife, furiously, and she advanced upon the unicorn, a knife in each hand, blood staining her right hand and forearm the same color as her dress.

  Tristran had thrown himself onto his hands and knees and had crawled toward the fireplace. In his left hand he had hold of the lump of wax, all that remained of the candle that had brought him here. He had been squeezing it in his hand until it was soft and malleable.

  “This had better ought to work,” said Tristran to himself. He hoped that the tree had known what she was talking about.