by Jack Dann
‘It happened,’ Niamh said. ‘It was no dream. But little was exactly as it seemed to you. I told you on the beach of the Island of Dancing. Certain powers are natural to us and one of them is the ability to confuse the minds of mortals.’
‘But I am not a mortal, or so you told me.’
‘I spoke the truth. But you are untrained, my love. Besides, you were only partly confused. As I hoped, you broke the glamour on every occasion, smuggling in your spears and beech boughs and ravens. Oisin, will you come with me or not?’
‘To where, lady? Where would I go with you after all this?’ Words of the embittered heart.
‘To my father’s city,’ she said.
‘What if I don’t?’
‘You will live forever, all the same — but time will weigh even heavier on your shoulders. What is it that you want in life that can keep you occupied forever? Dancing? Battles? Perhaps forgetfulness? You have experienced them, or their semblance, and you know now that they alone cannot sustain an immortal life. So what then? Do you want a life among the mortals, changing your name and your home each decade to avoid suspicion? You can have any of those things, if you seek them out, but I’ve taught you that they’re not what you really want — they’re not enough. Am I wrong about that, my love?’
‘By now, I’m too confused to answer.’
‘If I’m wrong, they’re all yours for the finding and taking — but they’re not for me. Not them alone.’
She stepped toward him, but he gestured her away angrily. Now they were both like fish floating deep in an icy pool, each waiting for the other to come to life. ‘How do I know this is not another trick?’ he said. ‘Another illusion? More glamour? How can I be certain of anything from now on?’
‘You can’t, Oisin, you can never be sure of things, though I tell you truly that none of our conversations were tricks and you’re not currently moved by glamour. But you’ll have to find a life for yourself in a universe where such things can be. Is that too much to ask of a hero?’
‘Then what was it all about?’ Everything was so clear, at one level of his thoughts. Yet Oisin understood none of it. It tortured him.
‘You have been gifted with three hundred years of feeling and experience,’ Niamh said, ‘in preparation for eternity — all packed into just as many days. All of us are put through that preparation when first we’re called to Tir na n-Og. It helps us to find out what we really want in an immortal life. My love, you’re stronger than ordinary men. You can shift your shape and become even stronger, more versatile, more beautiful.’ She shrugged. ‘You need never die. But, if you choose to prey on the mortal world with all your strength and your powers, you’ll have to say farewell to me.’
‘You think that’s what I want?’
‘It’s not for me to know, but understand that I could not go with you in the mortal lands, for I know what I want and it’s not what the great world is offering. Stay with me in Tir na n-Og.’
‘Must I decide now? Just like that?’
‘No. You can walk with me a while. Or walk behind me, I don’t mind. I’m going to see my father, Aengus.’
‘What happens then?’
She walked, and he followed, several steps behind. Over her shoulder, she said, ‘The world, the universe, is an infinite ocean of stars. I told you that before.’
‘So you did, lady.’
They walked for an hour. Silently. Then she turned and said, ‘I haven’t told you this, my love. The stars themselves are stranger than you think.’
A shudder went through him as he realised she must be right, that she spoke truthfully. He listened to her with care. Over the past hour, the anger had all gone out of him. Now he was merely numb. He needed to find some new feeling in himself.
And as she spoke, each new word seemed to find a place pre-set for it in his thoughts. Yes, it had to be like that, once you reckoned beyond the everyday appearances of things. ‘Oisin,’ she said, ‘there is a star that the Romans call Jupiter. On one of my father’s islands we have built an observatory — a place where we convene to study the sky.’ She walked backwards now, as she spoke to him, happier than he’d seen her since…when? Those first days on the Island of Dancing. ‘Do you know what, Oisin? There are starlets circling Jupiter, as the moon circles this Earth!’
He started to speak, but she gestured him to silence.
‘There’s even more. We can sharpen our own eyes, and add still more to their powers with lenses made of glass. When we observe the star called Saturn, it appears to have a moon flanking it, stationary, on either side as it faces us, though no one knows how that could be. One of our philosophers says that such starlets must always travel in circles. She says that there is a vast ring of innumerable tiny starlets all the way around Saturn. That might create the same kind of appearance. We see no motion, because there is no gap between starlet and starlet.’
Oisin caught up with her and took her arm, less gently than he might have, but not so roughly as he’d have done an hour before. ‘I told you I am a fighting man,’ he said. ‘Do you expect me to spend eternity gazing at the sky trying to understand the universe? It would be worse than the Island of Dancing.’
She winced in his grip, and he relaxed it, then let go entirely.
Niamh’s close-lipped smile was infinitely calm, infinitely joyous, infinitely sad. You could find anything and everything in her smile. ‘There is always something new, my love,’ she said. ‘Don’t you yet understand? Sometimes new stars appear in the sky. I have sharpened my own sight with shape shifting and glass instruments, and I’ve looked closely at the Earth’s moon. I’ve studied its surface like you’d survey a plain spread out below you from a hill.’
‘And seen what?’
‘I’ve seen great mountains and huge, round craters like strange dry seas! Perhaps the moon is a world like our own, one that died. No one knows among the Immortals. But we think that the Earth is itself a starlet dancing about the sun, which is only a star in the infinite ocean of stars that I told you of.’ Infinitely joyous, infinitely sad, her smile said, Come with me, Oisin. There’s so much to learn in a universe like this.
‘But I’m a warrior,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a warrior for all my years, since they trained me as a child. I can’t change now.’
She looked upward into his eyes, gesturing wildly, shaking her head. ‘Fifty years is nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s less than nothing.’ She grew taller — just slightly, the merest use of her powers. Then they were equally tall. ‘You can change and grow many times. You can lead many kinds of life, each more fascinating and intricate than you can think of. Would it really be so bad?’
He felt like his skin was hardening and cracking. Like a snake’s. Then he laughed. Another illusion. But it was painful to think about change.
‘The universe is large enough for heroes and for lovers to bloom in,’ Niamh said. ‘It’s mysterious enough that no hundred years need ever resemble the one before. And you need not be the self of a hundred years before.’ She laughed. ‘You can’t be a warrior all your life, my love, not with the length of life ahead of you. Eventually, you’ll have to grow up … or else put an end to your immortal life. It’s not so bad to grow up. And to grow up is not to be any one thing. Not just a dancer and a lover, not just a warrior. Do you understand? One faraway day your wiser self will look at your present-day self like you now look back at your childhood. And later still — another day — that wiser self will seem like a child in its turn.’
He couldn’t accept her words, not just like that. It was all too strange, and there were three hundred years of illusions behind him. Besides, there would always be uses for a warrior — surely! Uses more varied, less futile, than on the Island of Victories. But he had never seen so clearly as he was beginning to today.
Niamh’s hair, her eyes and lips, were beautiful — so he kissed her. She was warm and lovely and strong. They broke apart again, but he gave her his hand.
Together they walked to the s
ea, shedding their clothes and weapons. Everything would be safe here in Tir na n-Og. The sun was high overhead when they changed their shapes. Absurdly, he realised that, in all his time on the Island of Dancing, a hundred years of experience, he’d never learned to talk beneath the waves. They’d communicated with gestures and actions. Now they’d need to speak, as well, or something similar. He’d learn. There were so many things to learn. But he’d already mastered the breathing. The skills she’d taught him were real enough. No, it had not been wholly a dream — whatever else it had been. A preparation, she’d said. A time of testing and learning.
They swam, deeper and deeper, their bodies changing, and changing yet again. They touched each other’s strange, webbed hands.
They swam to her father’s city.
AFTERWORD
‘Manannan’s Children’ is based on the story of Oisin and Niamh from Irish mythology, perhaps best known via W.B. Yeats, who retold it in the magnificent verses of his great narrative poem, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. Much as I love Yeats, I’ve given the story an extra twist. I’ve taken its meditation on mortal and immortal lives, and re-examined its questions. For me, the poem asks, ‘What would make immortality bearable?’ or even, ‘What might make it good?’ At any rate, those questions haunt my characters; they’re a sub-text to all Oisin’s adventures with radiant, immortal Niamh. But I see no reason to give the usual rationalisations of death.
Can life go on forever? No, not forever, not even with the best science we could ever have … but is it really so bad (as we’re often told) to wish that it could? We live in a wonderful universe, and it would take many lifetimes to tire of it all. In fact, the wonder need never end.
— Russell Blackford
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THE FIFTH STAR IN THE SOUTHERN CROSS
MARGO LANAGAN
MARGO LANAGAN has published poetry, novels and speculative fiction short stories for adult, young adult, and junior readers. Her collection, Blade Juke, won two World Fantasy Awards, a Victorian Premier’s Award, two Ditmars and two Aurealis Awards, and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and made an honour book in the American Library Association’s Michael L Printz Award. The story ‘Wooden Bride’ was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr Award, and ‘Singing My Sister Down’ was nominated for many other awards. Her third collection, Red Spikes, published in Australia in October 2006, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection and is the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers. Margo lives in Sydney and has just completed a fantasy novel, Tender Morsels, which will be published in late 2008.
The dark and edgy story that follows is a disturbing and unforgettable dystopian vision of prejudice, alienness, sexuality, and the environment…
I had bought half an hour with Maika and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know? They pay attention. It almost doesn’t matter about their skin — the feel of it, a bit dry and crinkly, and the colour. They have the Coolights on all the time to cut that colour back, just like butchers put those purply lights over the meat in their shop, to bring up the red.
Anyway, I would say we were about two-thirds the way there — I was starting to let go of everything and be the me I was meant to be. I knew stuff; I meant something; I didn’t givva what anyone thought of me.
But then she says, ‘Stop, Mister Cleeyom. Stop a minute.’
‘What?’ I thought for a second she had got too caught up in it, was having too good a time, needed to slow things down a bit. I suppose that shows how far along I was.
‘Something is coming,’ she said.
I tensed up, listening for sounds in the hall.
‘Coming down.’
Which was when I felt it, pushing against the end of me.
I pulled out. I made a face. ‘What is it? Have I got you up the wrong hole?’
‘No, Mister Cl’om. Just a minute. Will not take long.’
Too late — I was already withering.
She got up into a squat with one leg out wide. The Coolight at the bedhead showed everything from behind: a glop of something, and then strings of drool. Just right out onto the bedclothes she did it; she didn’t scrabble for a towel or a tissue or anything. She wasn’t embarrassed. A little noise came up her throat from some clench in her chest, and that clench pushed the thing out below, the main business.
‘It’s a puppy?’ I said, but I thought, It’s a turd? But the smell wasn’t turd; it was live insides, insides that weren’t to do with digestion. And turds don’t turn over and split their skin, and try to work it off themselves.
‘It’s just a baby,’ Maika apologised, with that smile she has that makes you feel sorry for her — she’s trying so hard — and angry at her at the same time. She scooped it up, with its glop. She stepped off the bed and laid it on top of some crumpled crush-velour under the lamp. A white-ish tail dangled between her legs; she turned away from me and gathered that up, and whatever wet thing fell out attached to it.
This was not what I’d had in mind. This was not the treat I’d promised myself as I tweezered HotChips into artificial tulip stalks out at Parramatta Mannafactory all week.
The ‘baby’ lay there working its shoulders in horrible shruggings, almost as if it knew what it was doing. They’re not really babies, of course, just as Polar ‘girls’ aren’t really girls, although that’s something you pay to be made to forget.
Maika laughed at how my faced looked. ‘You ha’n’t seen this before, Mister Sir?’
‘Never,’ I said. ‘It’s disgusting.’
‘It’s a regular,’ she said. ‘How you ever going to get yourself new girls for putcha-putcha, if you don’t have baby?’
‘We shouldn’t have to see that, to get them.’
‘You ask special for Maika. You sign the — the thing, say you don’t mind to see. I can show you.’ She waved at the billing unit by the door.
‘Well, I didn’t know what that meant. Someone should have explained it to me exactly, all the details.’ But I remembered signing. I remembered the hurry I’d been in at the time. It takes you over, you know, a bone. It feels so good just by itself, so warm, silky somehow and shifting, making you shift to give it room, but at the very same time and this is the crazy-making thing, it nags at you, Get rid of me! Gawd, do something! And I wouldn’t be satisfied with one of those others: Korra is Polar too but she has been here longer and she acts just like an Earth girl, like you’re rubbish. And that other one, the yellow-haired one — well, I have had her a couple of times thinking she might come good, but seriously she is on something. A man might as well do it with a Vibro-Missy, or use his own hand. It’s not worth the money if she’s not going to be real.
The thing on the velour turned over again in an irritated way, or uncomfortable. It spread one of its hands and the Coolight shone among the wrong-shaped fingers, going from little to big, five of them and no thumb. A shiver ran up my neck like a breeze lifting up a dog’s fur.
Maika chuckled and touched my chin. ‘I will make you a drink and then we will get sexy again, hey?’
I tucked myself in and zipped up my pants. ‘Can’t you put it away somewhere? Like, does it have to be there right under the light?’
She put her face between me and it and kissed me. They don’t kiss well, any of these Offs. It’s not something that comes natural to them. They don’t take the time; they don’t soften their lips properly. It’s like a moth banging into your mouth. ‘Haff to keep it in sight. It is regulation. For its well-being.’ Her teeth gleamed in another attempt at smiling. ‘I turn you on a movie. Something
to look away at.’
‘Can’t you give the thing to someone else to take care of?’ But she was doing the walk; I was meant to be all sucked in again by the sight of that swinging bottom. They do have pretty good bottoms, Polars, pretty convincing.
‘I paid for the full half-hour,’ I said. ‘Am I gunna get back that time you spent… Do I get extra time at the end?’
But I didn’t want extra time. I wanted my money back, and to start again some other time, when I’d forgotten this. But there was no way I was going to get that. The wall bloomed out into palm-trees and floaty music and some rock-hard muscle star and his girlfriend arguing on the beach.
‘Turn the sound off!’
Maika did, like a shot, and checked me over her shoulder. I read it in her face clear as anything: Am I going to get trouble from this one! Not fear, not a drop of it, just, Should I call in the big boys? The workaday look on her face, her eyes smart, her lips a little bit open, underneath the sunlit giant faces mouthing on the wall — there was nothing designed to give Mister Client a bigger downer.
Darlinghurst Road was the same old wreck, and I was one loser among many walking along it. It used to be Sexy Town here, all nightclubs, back in history, but now it’s full of refugees. Down the hill and along the point is where all the fudgepackers had their apartments, before the anti-gay riots. We learned ‘em; we told ‘em where to stick their bloody feathers and froo-froos. That’s all gone now, every pillow burned and every pot of Vaseline smashed — you can’t even buy it to grease up handyman tools any more, not around here. Those were good times when I was a bit younger, straightening out the world.
It didn’t look pretty when we’d finished, but at least there were no ‘packers. Now people like me live here, who’d rather hide in this mess than jump through the hoops you need for a ‘factory condominium. And odd Owsians, off-shoots of the ones that are eating up the States from the inside, there are so many there. And a lot of Earth-garbage: Indians and Englanders and Central Europeans. And the odd glamorous Abbo, all gold knuckles and tailoring. It’s colourful, they tell us; it’s got a polyglot identity that’s all its own and very special. Tourists come here — well, they walk along Darlo Road; they don’t explore much either side, where it gets real polyglot.