The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  After a minute I said “Well, there will be another one, right?” Mother had never made any secret that there were other girls before us, that they had gone out in the world. Like Ruth, probably. I wondered if they met up together and talked about the old days, the warm spots on the roof and the way the birds called at night.

  Susan stared at me.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. Her voice was odd and slow, as if she was only now understanding it herself. “There’s no baby to take care of. We can go.”

  “Go!” I said. “Go where?”

  “Anywhere. To town. To the green land. Up north. Someplace that isn’t here.”

  I literally could not understand what she was saying at first. Then the idea began to take root in me, slowly, like a seed unfurling and sinking down runners into the earth.

  To leave. To go away. To walk into the trees and keep walking, not turning around.

  Was that possible?

  “Why did we never leave before?” asked Susan savagely. “Why didn’t we? I don’t know! Is it an enchantment, do you think?”

  “But … but we’ll starve, won’t we? If we don’t have the garden? We’ll get lost … and Mother …”

  “Damn Mother!” hissed Susan.

  Her blasphemy was too astonishing. I gaped at her like a fish pulled from the stream. The dark birds’ call rose and fell like breathing.

  “Susan! You can’t!”

  “I can,” she said. “You’re coming with me.”

  • • • •

  If we had gone then, this story would be different.

  If we had gone then, perhaps Susan would be telling it instead of me.

  But we went back to the house, because Susan thought we would need supplies, and Mother was waiting in the shadow of the woodshed.

  Her hands were enormous, as large as Susan’s head. She plucked her from the ground like a woman pulling weeds.

  “What are you up to, girl?” she growled, as Susan spluttered and struggled. “You were sneaking around last night and getting into things you shouldn’t.”

  “Mother!” I cried. “Mother, put her down!” I grabbed uselessly at her arms.

  “Do you think I’m a fool?” hissed Mother. “You think I don’t see you slinking around here? Thinking you’re being oh-so-clever?”

  She shook her on every word, and I heard the click of Susan’s teeth meeting as her head snapped back and forth.

  Perhaps if Susan had denied everything, we might have come through. But Susan was never the peacemaker, never the one to smooth things over, and when Mother stopped shaking her, she raised her head and shouted “Why didn’t you tell us it was a boy?!”

  There was a little silence around those words. No one breathed.

  And then, from under the earth, Father said “Aaaaaauuuhhh …?”

  “Oh-die-will!” screamed the dark birds in unison.

  Mother transferred her grip to Susan’s neck and slapped me aside with her free hand.

  She strode into the house, dragging my older sister behind her, to the trap door on the root cellar. I ran beside her, grabbing at her, my head still ringing from the slap, trying to slow her down. “Mother—Mother—stop, stop!”

  She flung back the door and went down the ladder one-handed. I stood at the top, my mouth hanging open, and I heard Father laughing in the darkness.

  “Thaaaaaaat time?” he gurgled. “Aaaauhhh …”

  “No!” snarled Mother. ”Not that time! Now eat and shut up!”

  I heard Susan scream, and then I heard a sound like when Father ate the mangel-beets, but worse.

  The screaming stopped.

  Mother’s head appeared in the hatchway of the trap door. I grabbed the wooden door and slammed it downward with all my strength.

  I was only trying to stop her climbing. I did not expect to hit her. The wooden door bounced off the top of her skull and she let out a roar like Father when he was hungry and put up one arm and tore the trap door off its hinges.

  I ran.

  I bolted out the door and around the corner, knowing nothing, thinking nothing, only trying to get away. I was halfway up the ladder to the roof before I thought This is stupid, where do you go, there’s no other way down—but it was too late.

  The ladder was small enough that she had to be careful climbing it. The top rung banged rhythmically against the edge of the roof.

  I scrambled backward. If I had to, I would jump. There was nothing else that I could do.

  Her face came over the edge.

  The dark birds struck her in a wave of bodies, like crows mobbing a hawk. She slapped at her face and I heard their wings crunching, but there were more and more, going for her eyes, cackling high, and she rocked on the too-small ladder, her arms windmilling as she jerked backward.

  And she was gone.

  “Oh-die-will!” screamed the dark birds. “Oh-die-die-die-die-will!”

  I crept to the edge of the roof.

  Mother lay stretched out in the garden, surrounded by dark birds living and dead. She had struck her head on the millstone. Her blood mixed with the blood of the dark birds and the earth slowly turned black beneath them.

  • • • •

  I had to jump down to the water barrel and I scraped my hands and my shins doing it. I should have gone at once, immediately, but I thought of Susan in the root cellar, and thought perhaps that Father would have known better than to eat her, and maybe he had realized what she was. Maybe she was lying wounded in the dark now.

  I had to check.

  I came down three rungs of the ladder and whispered “Susan?”

  “All gone,” said Father. His voice was thick and burbling with disuse. “All gone. None for you.”

  I felt as if I were hanging in the air, and if I moved up or down the ladder, even one rung, the words would strike, and I would understand them. If I understood them, I would have to feel them.

  If I felt anything … anything at all … I would die or faint or fall off the ladder and be eaten up.

  “Mother’s dead,” I said sharply.

  “Is she? Ahhh …” I could hear him moving, a rustle of flesh, a clink of chain. “Yes. As it should be. When they start … throwing boys … it’s time.”

  “Time?” I said blankly.

  “For a new Mother,” he said.

  I was silent. There was only his breathing and outside of the house, the screams of the dark birds.

  “Usually … it’s a Ruth …” he said, and laughed. “You’re only the second … Baby … to take her place …”

  I told you at the beginning that not all the Ruths were fools. It had not occurred to me then that some of them might be monsters.

  “Drag … the old one … down here,” he suggested. “I’ll eat her … when I’m hungry …”

  “You want me to be the new Mother?”

  He laughed again. I could hear his teeth scraping against the foundations.

  “What else … did you think … you were for?”

  I went back up the ladder.

  Mother lay in the garden. I looked at her and wondered if she had been a Ruth or a Susan or if it mattered.

  There was a dark bird on top of the millstone. It looked at me with moonlight eyes, and there was something about the way its head was tilted, as if it were waiting …

  “Susan?” I whispered.

  The flock descended. They perched on my shoulders, on my head, along my arms. Their hard black feet prickled like sewing needles. My sisters. A hundred Ruths and Susans and Babys.

  Was one of them Lily? Was it only ogre’s daughters that, once devoured, became the dark birds instead?

  How many of them had been Mothers?

  I took a shuddering breath, but I had no time to cry. I could not risk Father knowing what my plans were.

  I went to the woodpile and began to drag the firewood out, log after log, piled around the house.

  I did not know what would happen after I lit the flame. Perhaps the smoke would
suffocate him. Perhaps the fire would cook him slowly. Perhaps the floor would burn away and the chains that held him would melt and he would escape into the world.

  I did not want to be there to find out.

  The Susan-bird called once, imperious.

  “Yes,” I said. I knelt and blew on the spark until it caught, then rose and dusted splinters from my hands. “Yes, I know. I’m coming.”

  * * *

  Ursula Vernon is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Mythopoeic Awards. She has written a number of children’s books, short stories, and comics, and writes for adults under the name T. Kingfisher. She likes fairy-tale retellings, gardening, and has strong opinions about heirloom beans. You can find more of her work at redwombatstudio.com.

  Waiting On a Bright Moon

  By JY Yang

  The body arrives during the second refrain. It slaps on the receiving dial with the wet sound of rendered flesh, and the processing officer, a young woman fresh from the originworld, screams.

  It’s the scream that alerts you. You didn’t see the body come in, didn’t witness its ungainly, sprawling materialisation through the white of the portal. When you lift your voice in concert with your song-sister on the originworld, the act consumes you. 怒发冲冠、凭栏处。You are in rapture. You see nothing and hear nothing but the music your twinned voices produce. 抬望眼、仰天长啸、壮怀激烈。Your existence dissolves from the throat outwards while you deform the shape of the universe: 三十功名尘与土、八千里路云和月。You are no longer a person, but ansible, transmitting matter and energy across light-years through your song.

  Like a clawed hand, the woman’s scream shreds into this ecstasy. It tears you out of verse and chorus. You look, and there lies the thing on the dais: naked, skin flayed, flesh laid open in petals. It came through the portal you and your song-sister created across the yawning gaps of space. A man, eyes open and filmy. There’s no blood.

  You scream. That too is a kind of song, of fear expressed in unorchestrated keys.

  The fear brings feet running through the door. First in are two rank-and-file in security red, gun muzzles up. Their faces go tight when they see the body.

  Then comes a buzz like a tide, low and inexorable. The processing officer goes stiff beside you. Everyone on the colony knows that sound.

  The starmage arrives ready for a fight, her suit lit up and crackling, the shapes of dragons swarming over its surface. Your heart stalls when you see her face. Officer Ouyang Suqing carries herself with laser intensity, focused and terrible. She throws a barrier around the body, a translucent shape of magebright, glass-thin and fire-white. Without a word she goes to one knee, her back to you, studying the mutilated corpse. You watch her raise her arm and pass it over the top of the barrier. Suit pieces flutter and reassemble over the elegant lines of her wrist, capturing the skew of the viscera below. Silence reigns but for the hum of the suit, cycling in concert to the starmage’s pulse.

  The security officers keep their guns alert and fixed on you. You understand their fear and suspicion: after all, the Imperial Executioner arrives on the colony this week to mete out his punishment to rebellious elements. He comes to end the life of one Traitor, but who knows how many heads will roll before he leaves? Any lapse in the accepted order could prove fatal. Better you than them that gets the blame, right? You are merely ansible, a replaceable unit.

  Officer Ouyang rises to her feet. Standing, the starmage considers the body for agonising moments more. Your heartbeat stutters like a frightened child. She turns to you, her eyes dark and wide in her duty mask. “Are you alright?”

  The mask distorts her voice and it comes out sawbuzz, rounded vowels turned to square waves. You had expected interrogation, and your mouth had been ready to offer fact and statement, situation and report. It opens and closes rhythmically, like ventricular flaps.

  The starmage frowns and retracts the mask, exposing the sculpted bones of her cheeks. “Ansible Xin. Are you alright?”

  Dumbly you nod, a lie.

  She takes your left hand in her suited ones and applies pressure. Her gift flares and pushes a wave of calm through you, warmth spreading from your wrist towards the heart. Everything grows heavy. Your breathing slows and the world thickens to honey. Her suit-buzz settles deep and languid in your chest.

  “You should rest,” Officer Ouyang says. “This must be upsetting for you.”

  She turns to the security officers. “At ease. There is no danger here.”

  The security officers hesitate, but only for a moment. A starmage’s word is law, and this one carries the name of Ouyang. They understand who her father is, and by extension, who her father’s mother is. Their guns, holstered, return to neutrality. Their expressions do not. The man on the left asks: “Will we open a murder investigation, then?”

  Officer Ouyang frowns. “There will be an investigation, but no murder has been committed here.” She points to the magebright-encased corpse. “This man was killed long before he arrived here. Other jurisdictions will become involved.”

  She looks back at you, and the processing officer. “Which jurisdiction are you connected with?”

  Your tongue is too sleepy to reply, so the processing officer does: “Great one, we connect with the originworld on fifth-days. Everyone knows that.”

  “Of course.” The starmage looks away. Her face registers coldness, or maybe offense.

  The processing officer swallows. “Great one, I apologise. I did not mean—”

  “At ease,” the starmage says. Her face is so carefully controlled as to be unreadable. She turns to you. “Ansible, are you able to speak?”

  You fight the blanket of slowness she has thrown over you, and nod. “This humble one can.”

  “That’s good,” she says. She does not ask you to speak again. Instead she says: “You will be taken off duty so you can recover.”

  Your wrist still tingles from the starmage’s touch, nerves carrying an afterimage of her fingers. You wonder what is happening on the other side of the broken connection. How did the body get here? Your song-sister Ren on the originworld, how does she fare?

  The two rank-and-file are still nervous, still exchanging glances. “Great one,” the one on the left says, “will this affect the execution?”

  Officer Ouyang casts her glance over the contained corpse. “It will not. I will speak with the Starmage General and he will decide the best course of action.” She frowns. “But mind you don’t spread word of this to others. The hearts of the people are unsettled enough.” Starmage’s word is law. The two officers bow their heads.

  • • • •

  满江红, the river bleeds red as the moon-tides: This is the twinning song your cluster learns in the temple. The eight of you—Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin—sit in an octagon around Ren while you practice, the sun warm in the room, the sky a circle of blue through the acrylic window.

  怒发冲冠、凭栏处、潇潇雨歇

  抬望眼、仰天长啸、壮怀激烈

  三十功名尘与土、八千里路云和月

  莫等闲白了少年头、空悲切

  Ren is your center, the spoke through which the rest of you are threaded, the one who must stay on the originworld and sing to the Eight Colonies. You keep your eyes open while you sing, so you can watch Ren’s lips, painted red, shaping the sounds of the first words: nu, ah, ong, an. Over the months the shape of those lips have grown in appeal. The shape of her eyes, the shape of her bosom. The soft oval of her face. You sing eight hours a day, taking breaks to drink and eat and wash and please one another. At night the cluster sleeps in the same bed, skin against skin against skin against skin. Murmuring the song, murmuring sentiments of rage and patriotism.

  This is what it is, to be ansible. To be the same in song and in sex and in sisterhood. When you walk across the temple grounds as a cluster—no ansible walks alone, for there is no such thing as an ansible alone—the starmages stare at you. Whether in curiosity or in pi
ty, you do not know.

  • • • •

  When the starmage visits, unsuited and unannounced, she brings with her a basket of tropical stonefruit, plump and ripened: Smooth-peeling lychee, blood-red rambutan, dusky-skinned dragoneye with flesh that breaks between the teeth. The crate came in with the originworld shipment two days ago, passed through before the corpse’s interruption. An officer’s perquisite.

  “I wanted to make sure you were alright,” she says.

  You sit on the single stool by your table, your knees pressed together like a pilgrim’s palms, gaze fixed on her splendid silhouette, bright against the unfinished metal walls of your room. Penned in your quarters, she is close enough that you can see, in exquisite detail, the interfacing implants lining the length of her neck. A queue of coin-sized circles breath soft and green, vanishing under the curve of her shirt collar. Outside of the mage suit she looks oddly tangible.

  “This humble one is alright,” you lie. The corpse visits your dreams at night, its filmy eyes blank and unreadable. Sometimes it sits up from the dais, innards spilling like cutlery, and it tells you secrets with its grey tooth-filled mouth. That knowledge abandons you when you wake.

  “The investigation has ended,” the starmage says. “This was a triad affair. Nothing to do with us. The victim ran up insurmountable gambling debts on the originworld.”

  “Then it won’t affect the execution?”

  “Let us hope not.” She looks uneasy. The prospect of the Imperial Executioner’s arrival frightens even someone like her.

  “Why did they send it here?” You shouldn’t be asking questions of a starmage and an officer, and yet you are.

  “As a warning. They have a relative on the colony. Do you know Quartermaster Lu?”

  You twitch your shoulders. You know the name, possibly the face, but not the person.

  “This was his cousin.”

  “It is a great pity.”

  The starmage cracks a rambutan in her mouth. Its soft thick hairs curl around her lips as she sucks in the collected juices. “I’ve put you on three weeks’ leave,” she says.