The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  Outside, the five Grown Up Parrotishes surrounded the children, clutching them as well as Edward in tight embraces while they whistled their pleasure. When they turned to leave the clearing, beckoning him to follow, Edward hesitated. “Uh . . . Excuse me please?”

  They stopped. “Uh . . . excuse me please?” the leader said.

  “Let me just fetch my wagon.” He turned back to the cave. He plunged back into the darkness, spear held loosely. Softly padding to the wagon, he lifted its handle and tugged. A growl rose up behind him and he spun around, dropping the handle with a clang.

  “Uh. Terribly sorry to have awakened you. I think I’ll just slip out now. Please, go back to sleep.”

  The hair mound became a creature nearly twice his size, short back legs supporting a massive torso and long arms. A horn slowly sprouted from the head and saliva splattered the floor from a wide, tooth-lined mouth. The other stirred now, as well, and Edward tried another approach.

  “This,” he said with a squeak, “Is just a dream you’re having. It will be over soon enough so —”

  The first beast sprang, tumbling Edward to the ground. He rolled himself into a ball as best he could.

  Edward knew he should run but his paws closed over the spear. He couldn’t leave without the wagon. He managed what he thought was a fierce growl and leaped to his feet. The creature barked loudly, scooping up a large, heavy-looking stick. Swinging the club, the monster charged, and Edward thrust the spear forward with all his strength, feeling it hesitate against skin before breaking through the beast’s shoulder. The beast shrieked in pain, dropped the club, and lashed out with a long arm.

  Hidden talons tore into the side of Edward’s face, dropping him to the floor. He kept his tentative hold on the spear and dragged it down with him, opening a larger gash in the beast. Out of the corner of his eye, Edward saw its companion watching the fight for an opportunity to jump in.

  The wounded creature pounced, fastening its mouth on the top of Edward’s head while its talons raked his torso and belly. The spear broke beneath the weight with a loud snap.

  Edward heard a low murmur that crescendoed to a loud shriek. He knew, in a distant way, it was himself. His paws scrambled over the stinking, matted hair as he tried to roll over and away. Fire flashed its way deep into each wound and bits of fur and toy-gel stung his eyes. His paw closed over the sharpened end of his broken spear, and in a panic, he gripped it and thrust it upward into the soft throat of his adversary.

  It howled, talons working fiercely, mouth opening and closing on Edward’s head. Then it went limp.

  Edward struggled free, rose shakily to his feet, and roared. The other beast slammed into him before he could turn to face it. He went down hard. He vaguely heard angry hoots and whistles racing down the tunnel before cotton filled his ears. He vaguely saw five forms burst into the den, rocks clutched tight in small fists. When the lights stopped flashing in his head, a muddled darkness descended.

  He awoke to sunlight and pleasant smells and eight faces staring down at him. He tried to sit up but gentle hands pushed him down.

  “I’m a bit of a mess,” the Parrotish leader said, mouth working carefully around the words. “I’m on an Expotition, you know.” It sounded hollow and far away.

  Edward noticed that one of his ears, stained yellow with crusty toy-gel, now decorated the leader’s headband. He also noticed the lacerations on its arms and chest. The others crowded around him, too, and he could see they fared no better. Two of them held horns that dripped blood. Another held a steaming handful of something that looked like mud. It began dabbing the mud on Edward’s head.

  Turning his head slowly, he took in his surroundings. He lay in the clearing outside the cave. Nearby, the red wagon hummed and bobbed on air. An owl swooped down and perched at his feet.

  “Oh, it’s you.” Edward tried to smile but couldn’t find the strength.

  “You’d better hurry,” the owl said. “You haven’t much Time.”

  Edward nodded.

  “Oh, it’s you,” the Parrotish leader said.

  Edward slept.

  The pain licked him and chewed him in his dreams, ever in the background.

  Large metal whales swam across the night while children slept safe inside. A pig and a bear went round and round a bush. A spinning top moved in slow motion around a blue-green marble. A bear and a rabbit sat down for cakes and milk. Eyes stared empty at the ceiling, hands clutched blankets.

  “Tell them about the children.” The boy became an old woman who became an empty balloon discarded in the sand.

  He awakened to movement. Somehow they’d tied him to a bed of ferns on top of the pack and he rode the wagon as they took turns pulling.

  “Hello?” They stopped and looked down at him. His head pounded and his arm felt like jelly as he raised his paw. The mountain could be seen looming above the tree-line, squatting in its purple nest. “There. I need to go there.”

  The Parrotishes paused, huddled, and a lively debate ensued. Edward tried to make up dialogue to go with their gibberish but gave up. It hurt too much to think.

  After a few minutes, they turned and broke from the cover of the forest. Edward lay back and closed his eyes.

  Time rushed like a brook over pebbles, daylight fading into dusk, dusk giving way to dark and dark becoming dawn. The Parrotishes only stopped to force water or honey into his mouth. He spat most of it onto his chest, unable to hold it down. At one point, one of the children gave him a doll made from the purple prairie grass. It looked something like a bear, and he clutched it with his good arm as best he could.

  Gradually, it grew cold, but even when Edward saw his breath he still felt like he was on fire. A cold bit of mud to roll in would be quite nice, he thought.

  As they climbed, he saw a pig throwing snowballs at a baby kangaroo. They both paused to wave at him; he waved back. Later, a tiger bounced over and kept pace with him long enough to ask how he felt. The tiger bounced away before he could say “Terrible, thanks.”

  At some point, two of the Parrotishes came around to his feet and pushed the wagon while two pulled. The three children and one of the others, Edward realized, weren’t with them any longer. In the fog of his fever they had left the Expotition and he hadn’t noticed.

  Tirelessly, they pushed on. With one last shove and yank, the wagon skipped across the slightly rounded summit and came to a halt. Edward began tugging at the vines that held him in place and the Parrotish leader helped untie him, but when Edward tried to stand he wobbled. They crowded in to steady him, and he sat heavily in the loose-packed snow. “Bother,” he said.

  His right arm didn’t work and neither did his left leg. And the missing ear had bobbed in front of him every time the Parrotish leader leaned over to check on him during the journey.

  From where he sat, he waved to the pack and then pointed to the highest point of the summit. They unstrapped it and carried it over, propping it up in the snow. When he tried to stand again, they caught him up beneath the arms and carried him to it.

  His left paw lingered over the green button. He felt he should say Something Quite Clever. He closed his eyes and sighed. “For the children.”

  The chorus rang out around him: “For the children.”

  Then he pushed the button and sagged back against his friends.

  He was a bear, and his name was Edward, and he lay against a snow-clad rock watching the ocean swallow the sun far away. A pink flash of fading light on metal caught his eye below where the gray water met the white beach. He tried to make up a song about the Nancy Bell but couldn’t. His friends, the Parrotishes, stood aloof and talked in low tones. They had tried a half dozen times to load him into the empty wagon. He’d waved them off and finally had snapped at one them, growling as he did.

  He finally felt cool, but weariness soaked him through like bread in condensed milk.

  “Hello, Bear!” The boy sat down beside him.

  “Oh. Are you here now?”

>   “No. Neither are they.” The boy waved to a line of animals that stood at a respectable distance. Tears ran down the pig’s face.

  “Well then. I’m afraid I don’t quite—I mean, if you’re not here now, then exactly who is talking to me right now?”

  “No one. You’re talking to yourself.”

  Edward thought about this. “I see,” he said, but didn’t really see at all. He tried to twist his head back to the pack. With his good ear he could hear it twittering and bleeping into the sky. “Did I finish the Expotition?”

  The boy smiled. “You did. You’re a Very Brave Bear.”

  He sighed, the words making him quite comfortably warm. “Well,” he said in a satisfied sort of voice, “I suppose I am Somewhat of a Somebody now.” He coughed violently.

  “Yes, you are. You’re a Hero, Bear.” The boy packed a snowball and sent it flying out over the rim of the mountain. “Someday Everyone Who Is Anyone will know all about Edward Bear and how he saved the children. Someday there’ll be statues of you and stories and —”

  “— And pomes and songs?”

  He laughed. “And poems and songs.”

  Edward smiled. “I especially like songs about honey.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence before the boy spoke again. “Do you understand what’s happening to you?”

  Edward couldn’t help it; the sob escaped him before he could grab it and hold it in. “I-I’m broken.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why all of you are here now but Not Here.”

  “Yes. We’re a part of your sub-brain. For Comfort and for Calm in Times of Great Distress.”

  He waited, watching as the last sliver of sun fell into the sea. He felt a tear slip out. “Am I dying?”

  The boy nodded twice slowly.

  “And there’s Nothing To Do for it?”

  “I’m sorry, Bear.”

  Edward heard the sound of crunching snow and turned his head. The Parrotish leader squatted next to him. It untied the decorated headband and then re-tied it around Edward’s head. “I’m Edward Bear.” The leader then handed him the purple doll.

  Edward took it and nodded. The leader turned and re-joined the group. Tugging the wagon, they trudged away, disappearing downward.

  “So this is the End of Me?” He felt something heavy squeezing inside him and he choked back another sob.

  The boy nodded. “It is. For this you, anyway.”

  “But I was Brave?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  “And a Hero?”

  “A Hero, yes.”

  He smiled and closed his eyes. “I’m very tired.”

  “Then go to sleep.”

  “I will but . . .” He peeked at the boy.

  “But what?”

  “Will you stay with me and hold my hand and tell me about Someday again, only very slowly, until I fall asleep?”

  The boy looked at him, and Edward saw that his eyes sparkled with love and tears. “Silly Old Bear, of course I will.”

  As the boy talked quietly about statues and stories and poems, the familiar sound of a song drifted up to Edward Bear from somewhere down below.

  About the Contributors

  Barth Anderson lives in Minnesota with his wife and children. He has written short fiction in numerous publications and anthologies, and six of his stories have received honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He was the winner of the Spectrum Award for best short fiction in 2004. His first two novels, The Patron Saint of Plagues and The Magician and the Fool, were published by Bantam books.

  Jennifer Rachel Baumer lives, writes, runs and dreams in Northern Nevada. Some of her favorite story sales were to Talebones. By day she’s a not-so-mild-mannered reporter (at least she writes a lot of nonfiction). By night she writes science fiction. In between, she runs in the desert. In addition to Talebones, Jennifer has sold stories to On Spec, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Aoife’s Kiss and a variety of genre anthologies and magazines.

  Marie Brennan is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. Her short stories have sold to more than a dozen venues, including Talebones, On Spec, and Intergalactic Medicine Show. She is currently working on a series of historical fantasy novels centering on the faerie court of London: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, and A Star Shall Fall, which debuted this past September. More information can be found at www.swantower.com.

  Mike Brotherton teaches astronomy at the University of Wyoming and conducts research specializing in observational investigations of quasars. He uses a variety of ground and space-based telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, Keck Observatory, the Very Large Array, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Wyoming Infrared Observatory, and many others. He has sold a variety of short fiction to magazines and anthologies, and is a graduate of the Clarion West workshop. His first novel, Star Dragon, was published by Tor Books in 2003 to excellent reviews. A second hard science fiction novel, Spider Star, came out in 2008. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming with his fierce cat, Sita. He blogs at www.mikebrotherton.com and runs the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers (www.launchpadworkshop.org).

  Jack Cady was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana and Kentucky. He worked in a wide variety of jobs, including as a tree high-climber, an auctioneer, a long-haul truck driver, and in the U.S. Coast Guard. He taught writing at the University of Washington, Clarion College, Knox College, the University of Alaska at Sitka, and Pacific Lutheran University. Over a more than thirty-year career, the quality and diversity of his fiction brought many honors, including the Atlantic Monthly “First” Award, the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award (Special Citation). Jack Cady died in January 2004.

  Stephen Couch is a computer programmer, a cover band vocalist, an award-winning audio drama producer, and a lifelong Texan. His short fiction has appeared in such markets as Neo-Opsis, Dark Recesses Press, Tales of the Unanticipated, and the Stoker Award-finalist Horror Library Vol. 3. Visit him online and poke him with virtual sticks at www.stephencouch.com.

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a job as a computer engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction informed by her love of history and mythology, with a special interest in Mesoamerica and Ancient China. Her novel Servant of the Underworld, set in the same universe as “Safe, Child, Safe,” has been published by Angry Robot, with a sequel forthcoming in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Asimov’s, Interzone and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Visit http://aliettedebodard.com for more information.

  Eric Del Carlo’s short fiction has appeared recently in Strange Horizons and Futurismic, and many other publications over the years. He is the coauthor, with Robert Asprin, of the Wartorn fantasy novels. A final book with Asprin and Teresa Patterson, a New Orleans murder mystery entitled NO Quarter, has been released by DarkStar Books. Eric has many fond memories of Talebones. More info available at ericdelcarlo.com.

  Alan DeNiro is the author of the story collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead (Small Beer Press) and the novel Total Oblivion, More or Less (Spectra). He lives outside St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of five books and dozens of short stories, some of which have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise, and Sturgeon awards. He’s married to novelist Rae Carson and lives in Ohio. If he had to choose between a sweet potato pie and rhubarb crisp, he’d flip a coin and hope that it landed on edge: www.ccfinlay.com.

  James C. Glass is a retired physics and astronomy professor and dean who now spends his time writing, painting, traveling, and playing didgeridoo or Native American flute. He made his first story sale in 1988 and was the Grand Prize Winner of Writers of the Future in 1991. Since then he has sold six novels and two short story collections, over forty short stories to magazines such as Analog, and had seven stories published in Talebones. For details, see his website at www.
sff.net/people/jglass. He now divides his time between Spokane, Washington and Desert Hot Springs, California with wife Gail, who is a costumer and healing dancer.

  Anne Harris’s inspiration for “Still Life with Boobs” came one night when a friend rejected a particular outfit saying, “When I wear that I feel like my breasts are having conversations with other people without my knowledge.” Anne wondered what would happen if that were true. The story went on to become a Nebula finalist, a first for both Talebones and the author. Since then Anne, overwhelmed by the media onslaught, has gone into hiding and now writes under the names Pearl North and Jessica Freely.

  Barb Hendee grew up just north of Seattle, Washington. She completed a master’s degree in composition theory from the University of Idaho and then taught college English for ten years in Colorado. She and her husband, J.C., are coauthors of the best selling Noble Dead Saga. They live in a quirky little town near Portland Oregon with two geriatric and quite demanding cats.

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman is the author of several novels, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Thread That Binds the Bones, A Fistful of Sky, A Stir of Bones, Spirits That Walk in Shadow, Fall of Light, and Catalyst, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, and F&SF, and in numerous anthologies, such as Firebirds, The Coyote Road, and Redshift. Her work has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula Award four times each. Her newest book is Thresholds.