Uncanny Magazine Issue 41

by Lynne M. Thomas

  On the cusp of reunion, that bone-setting, that reunion of broken parts, which is what a high school math teacher had told her algebra meant, she asked her father if it was the right thing to do. And she told him, “I need your voice, Daddy” because the voice in her head, always directing her, always giving her the answer, had exhausted her. And she had expected him to say something like “Listen to your heart” or “What does your gut tell you” like everyone else or maybe he would tell her about how special she always was, how different, how brightly she burned, and that it would be that other person’s honor to be a part of her life.

  “I used to think that tip of the tongue,” he said, “and that feeling of knowing were two different things. Tip of the tongue, well, that’s lexical access, shows it happens in stages. You remember syllabic stress or maybe a homonym. You know the word you’re looking for starts with the letter b and ends with r. And, finding that word eventually, you go on this journey from anguish to relief. Could take you two seconds, could take you twenty years. Then, feeling of knowing, that’s something else entirely, right? You feel like you know something, you know you know something, you just can’t quite find it in your head. But one thing your mother taught me was that sometimes to find the thing you’re looking for, you have to look around. You have to look away. And maybe the thing in your head is that thing just out the corner of your eye. That thing you can only catch by glancing at it sideways. You almost see it. And the whole time, it feels like something you’re trying to reach, but sometimes, it’s the thing that’s trying to reach you.”

  He talked like that more and more, like a proof missing some of its connective tissue, his sentences stars dotting the sky with no lines drawn between them to articulate constellations. So Sam let the paragraph her father had murmured to her on his front porch sit in her head for years and years and years and had forgotten it even as she gave birth to her and Angela’s child, a beautiful, brown bundle of fire. And Sam’s father’s words lay dormant in Sam throughout the girl’s adolescence and even as she declared her major in college, then later into her career as a particle physicist, and one day Sam was sitting in her father’s chair on her father’s front porch with Angela and their daughter had come to visit and Sam was listening to their daughter talk about time and the future and the past and scientific breakthroughs and new modes of communication and how some day it would be possible to communicate directly with one’s ancestors, to peer into their minds, to witness them, that, even within the bounds of the Novikov self-consistency principle, human agency, human life was possible.

  Sam listened to the rhythm of the words, catching only a few concrete thoughts here and there, smiling at the sound of a familiar. Something almost heard, a sound just out the corner of her eye, and she wondered, as she closed her eyes to the sun, if maybe this is what her granddaughter might one day sound like.

  © 2021 Tochi Onyebuchi

  Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of Riot Baby, which won the New England Book Award for Fiction, an Alex Award, and is a finalist for the Nommo, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. His young adult novels include the Beasts Made of Night series and the War Girls series. He holds degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and Sciences Po, and his short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Omenana Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, among other places. His most recent book is the non-fiction (S)kinfolk.

  Immortal Coil

  by Ellen Kushner

  [Marlowe] persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and his ministers

  Marlowe is going to outlive him. Of this, he is sure.

  He has seen him on the streets of Blackfriars, of Southwark, in Bladder Lane, near Aldgate…

  He can pretend to be anything, young Kit. Not so young Kit. The two men are of an age: born the same year (though not under the same stars, not at all), Marlowe the elder by two months and always made much sport of it, saying that in the span of a poet’s brief life, two months equaled two years of a common man’s: witness the glorious successes of his Dido, Queen of Carthage and his Tamburlaine the Great, both on stage with the Lord Admiral’s Men when young Will was still acting messengers and third citizens while sharpening his quill on… Was it that o’ermatched shrew in Verona, that first was played? Or the two gentlemen of Padua (not to mention their dog)?

  But Kit looks the younger now. He looks like the man Will knew fifteen long years ago, the last time he saw him, in the spring of 1593.

  This is what happens when you make the Bargain, Will.

  He is not imagining things. This, Marlowe told him himself, when Will finally cornered him like a fox in his lair, which happened to be a bench in the back of the Boar’s Head Tavern.

  Will has been chasing him since that first sighting in the churchyard of St Mary le Bow. The days were shortening to winter. The congregation spilled forth from the packed church hungry for fresh air and a sight of what was left of the blue sky after the sermon by a famous preacher. Will joined the many milling about, commenting on the sermon, the weather, the tombs in the churchyard… Only one man stood, quite still, leaning against the side of Bowe-church, ostentatiously waiting for Will to spot him before he disappeared between one tombstone and the next in the lee of a merchant whose wide-spread cloak was too large by an ell for his station, rot him.

  But Will had seen him, seen that little fox face with the lion’s mane—obscured, somewhat, by a great growth of beard, but nothing changed in the set of the shoulders, the length of the stride—a small man, showing the world how he bestrode it with each step.

  He saw him again the next day at noon—no ghost, therefore, since ghosts vanish at cockcrow. When Will left his lodgings for a meeting with Burbage, Kit was standing by the corner house, beckoning like the ghost in Hamlet, in the exact manner that Will had played him at the Globe last week. Knowing full well that he was being toyed with, Will still dutifully picked up Horatio’s lines: “Stay! speak! speak! I charge thee, speak!”

  Kit put a finger to his lips, swirled a non-existent cloak and vanished—through the simple expedient of walking around the corner. Will followed apace—but since the play demanded it, Will did not seek too hard to find him when he proved nowhere in sight. Marlowe would appear to him again in the form and time of his choosing.

  Will emerged from a morning rehearsal at Blackfriars, and there was Marlowe, reading a book against a wall like a man lounging by his own chimney corner. It took no scryer to read it as an invitation to Paternoster Row, where stall after stall of booksellers offered everything from solemn tracts to stolen scripts to new plays, badly-remembered by ill-paid players, ill-set by unscrupulous printers.

  The clues were books, today, then, and Will followed a stall or two behind Marlowe, asking each bookseller what the bushy-bearded man in sober black had perused (sans buying). The titles read him Marlowe’s missive:

  NEWS FROM HELL

  ATHEISM CONQUERED

  That was Marlowe in his humour, Marlowe who scorned Hell and God at once, a definitely notorious possible atheist always just one patron ahead of the hangman. Had Kit discovered God, now? More likely the Devil—but proof of the one as easily as the other would conquer any man’s atheism.

  At the next stall, the fox had lingered long over three titles. So far, all plays, all duly registered with the stationer’s office, including this one:

  THE LONDON PRODIGAL

  This was easy enough to parse: his friend had been gone from London and was now returned. But how, prodigal? Had he been prodigal with his funds? His talents (which, to be nice about it, the Gospel parables named one and the same)? And did this prodigal son now expect to be fed the fatted calf? Welcomed by his loving, grieving father?

  A TRICK TO CATCH THE OLD ONE

  Was Will “the Old One” now? Or was that another reference to Old Nick? This was a play of Middleton’s, a city comedy about a young man in debt, ruine
d by his spendthrift habits. Prodigal, indeed.

  THE MALCONTENT

  Plain enough, as was the next:

  IF YOU KNOW NOT ME, YOU KNOW NOBODY

  The best thing about Heywood’s semi-comedy, semi-history had been its title. Will thumbed the quire open, read: Tis bad to do evil, but worse to boast of it: yet He above knows that sometimes as soon as I have come from Bowe-church, I have gone to a Bawdyhouse.

  Kit had revealed himself to Will in the Bowe-church yard. But disappearing thence to a bawdyhouse? Not if he expected to be followed by his friend. He snapped the pages shut, returned it to the table, and crossed the yard, as Marlowe just had, to find:

  A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS

  Kit was leaning heavily on Middleton. Well, Middleton did come up with good titles. Thomas Middleton, a fine playwright, who had been a lad of 13 years when Marlowe died, stabbed in a tavern in Deptford. The world lost to him, and he lost to the world, save the six dramas he had penned himself, and the many he’d had a hand in, because Kit wrote fast and was always in need of funds.

  He moved on to:

  WHAT YOU WILL

  There was his own name, at last.

  Will wondered if he should be relieved or offended that none of the titles Marlowe chose had been his. But which of William’s plays’ titles lent themselves to this riddling? Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Anthony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth… the names of dead kings, dead generals, dead heroes. Only a few of Will’s own titles would fit this game. If he could lay them out, Will reflected, his reply to Marlowe might run something like this:

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

  AS YOU LIKE IT

  MEASURE FOR MEASURE

  …And of course,

  LOVE’S LABORS LOST

  These made a pretty reply. When he caught Marlowe, he would tell him so. He might tell him now, if he were swift: there was Marlowe at the stall opposite, holding a book upside-down, miming his inability to make it make sense, to the annoyance of the bookseller.

  As he viewed the pages, Marlowe’s mobile face slackened; slowly he shook his bearded head over and over, as though he were some country bumpkin overwhelmed by city wit, and moved away, leaving the field—the text—to Will:

  WHEN YOU SEE ME, KNOW ME

  Those words were clear enough. His mopping and miming were an extra piece of Kit’s deviltry: Marlowe must know how Henslowe had spiced up a production of Kit’s Dr Faustus with bits of Rowley’s silly play back in ’02, right before the old queen’s death.

  Will rounded the corner into Pope’s-Head Alley just in time to see young Marlowe strolling away from the stall of Master George Loftes with nary a glance behind him, sure that his old friend followed.

  It meant losing his quarry, but Will could not resist the lure of learning the next book’s title, on his life he could not. Besides, he knew Master Loftes—or was known to him—and it would be discourteous to ignore the bookseller’s greeting; still more discourteous, when he heard that “your man, that lately passed this way, and if ye’d been a bit more speedy ye’d have o’ertaken him” had commanded a book to Master Shakespere’s account, and would he like to take it and pay for it now?

  Will kept his countenance and received the pamphlet, a small folio of sewn pages, gravely.

  “Will you want it bound, sir?”

  Why bound, and thus obscured, when the title grinned up at him from the naked title page?

  LOOKE TO IT: FOR, I’LL STABBE YE

  A threat? He flicked the pages lightly, reflecting on the previous titles: The Prodigal, The Malcontent… Those had been Kit himself, the man to the life. If you know not me, you know nobody. That was addressed to Will. So too might I’ll stab you be?

  He opened the book to the first page, where a poem declared:

  There is a Humour us’d of late,

  By eve’ry Rascall swagg’ring mate,

  To give the Stabbe: Ile Stabbe (sayes hee)

  Him that dares take the wall of me.

  If you to pledge a health deny,

  Out comes his Poniard; there you lie…

  If you demand the Debt he owes,

  Into your guts his Dagger goes.

  Into his guts, indeed. His guts, his heart, his head—he’d heard it was one, the other, and worse, the wound that had felled Kit Marlowe in the widow’s house in Deptford that spring of 1593. There were as many reasons given as wounds. Which humour was used to give the stabbe to Christopher Marlowe? A debt unpaid, a toast undrunk, respect withheld…? No one knew. Well, the killers would know. Or those who’d set them on. Say rather, nobody was foolish enough to tell, or brave enough to find out.

  Marlowe wasn’t dead, then, was that the message of this Look to It doggerel? That he was somehow instead living a life of such ease that it did not age him? Will would not put it past Kit to have written this very verse, sleek-paced and pointed—credited to one “S. R.,” but that meant nothing. It might even be another riddle.

  Will gave up the chase for the day, went home via a cookshop, ate his meat as he perused the book Marlowe had caused him to buy.

  If you demaund the Debt he owes,

  Into your guts his Dagger goes.

  Death seeing this, doth take his Dart,

  and he performes the Stabbing part.

  he spareth none, be who it will:

  his licence is the World to kill.

  He spareth none, be who it will.

  Be who? It Will.

  So, Kit, you are dead, yet licensed to roam the World—great news from Hell indeed—to tell me what? That I am next? To tempt me to your strange, atheist-disproving damnation?

  The day with the titles had unsettled him. A game of words, the kind he liked so well that, he must confess, it might all just be his own fancy run wild. Was it truly Marlowe, he began to wonder. Or just a young man who resembled him—a son of his body, even—a man with a roguish wit and invention, leading the ageing writer a merry dance for the sheer joy of it? How could it be Marlowe, in sooth? Will taxed himself with these thoughts in the watches of the night. His brain was overheated, his liver cold… His mother’s late death quick followed upon by the birth of his daughter’s first child making him brood on mortality, lending to an idle shape the name of Christopher Marlowe. He missed Kit still, he did. They’d meant to vie each for Fame and the even more elusive Greatness together. There is no one like the friend who knew you when you first began to know yourself.

  He was not seeking Marlowe when at last he found him. On the street, a light touch on his shoulder—a pick-pocket’s trick, and Will clapped his hand to his purse—but it was Kit.

  “Good day, Will.” Kit’s voice was gentle. He knew that voice as he knew his own name. “Shall we walk out of the sun?”

  And so he found himself in the Boar’s Head Tavern, where he knew no one and was known to none, on a bench deep at the back, far from everything, facing Marlowe across the table. The two men were silent, just taking each other in.

  The scar on Kit’s forehead was still there: a small thing that bit off the corner of his right eyebrow. Some said it was there he had received his death wound in Deptford.

  But Will had been present when his friend had taken the blow that caused the scar: a jesting duel between Marlowe and the actor Ned Alleyn, each armed with a wooden sword, debating how the ancient Romans had fought in truth, and how to render it onstage. Alleyn struck an unhappy blow. Kit reeled. As the blood from his forehead flooded his face, Kit had roared and roared, caught between his terror at his drowned vision and the hilarity of Ned’s apologies, an actor’s words borrowed from all the parts he knew, that grew more lush and self-abasing with Marlowe’s every holloa.

  In the end, it was nothing. Head-wounds bleed, and when this one was finally staunched, it left the mark, the very mark Will gazed on now. No question, then, but that he beheld his friend in truth.

  The little fox gazed earnestly at him. “You look older. But of course, you are.”
/>   “And you, somehow, are not?”

  “As you see.” Marlowe showed him one smooth palm, turned it over and back again, a conjuror at a fair displaying the same trick over and over: the ball you see, the ball that you do not.

  Will saw a young man’s hand, unmarked with labor. What he did not see was the stain of any ink.

  He held his own hand out for contrast. It looked as though it had been dipped in the stuff—he must needs forebear to take out his handkerchief and scrub at it. The forefinger and thumb, twin graspers of the pen nib—the streaks of gall between them, and then the bump on the side of the third digit, the seat of Jupiter, above the mount of Saturn, where the quill rubbed ever against it.

  “You do not write,” Will stated.

  “Never a word. Your chariot has out-paced mine, sweet William. Five-and-thirty plays to my six—and never mind all that verse.”

  “I’ve had more time than you, my gentle ghost.”

  “I am no ghost.” Kit reached his clean white hand across the table. But Will had no desire to take it. “I go too fast,” Marlowe said.

  “An old, old fault.”

  “If you won’t take my hand, will you still drink with me? Two men, ale from one pitcher, and we’ll see who needs must rise to piss first.”

  “I never knew a ghost who pissed.”

  “And do not know one now. Listen—it’s true I left the writing life. But I am well-paid in return.”

  “And, thus, in returning?”

  Kit laughed delightedly. “There’s my gentle Will. I am as I was at the moment before my death. And will remain so always. Ho, boy!” he called to the potman. “Ale for my friend and me, and no spitting in the jug!”

  “How do you live?”