The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  Sometimes he lays his head on my lap and lets me comb his lovely hair for him; his combings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet. His hair falls down over my knees. Silence like a dream in front of the spitting fire while he lies at my feet and I comb the dead leaves out of his languorous hair. The robin has built his nest in the thatch again, this year; he perches on an unburnt log, cleans his beak, ruffles his plumage. There is a plaintive sweetness in his song and a certain melancholy, because the year is over—the robin, the friend of man, in spite of the wound in his breast from which Erl-King tore out his heart.

  Lay your head on my knee so that I can’t see the greenish inward-turning suns of your eyes anymore.

  My hands shake.

  I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them.

  Then she will open all the cages and let the birds free; they will change back into young girls, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats.

  She will carve off his great mane with the knife he uses to skin the rabbits; she will string the old fiddle with five single strings of ash-brown hair.

  Then it will play discordant music without a hand touching it. The bow will dance over the new strings of its own accord and they will cry out: “Mother, mother, you have murdered me!”

  Sara Gallardo (1931–1988) was born to an aristocratic family in Buenos Aires and was related to the Argentine soldier, historian, and president Bartolomé Mitre, the writer Miguel Cané, and the scientist and politician Angel Gallardo. She traveled extensively, worked as a journalist, and published five novels and one collection of stories, and children’s books as well as essays. After Argentina suffered a military coup d’état in 1966, military dictatorship, and the U.S.-backed “Dirty War” of 1974–1983, many writers’ works became more radical in content, but Gallardo’s fiction avoided being openly political. Nonetheless, her stories of marginalized people and nonhuman characters offered a view of the world very much in contrast not only to the country’s rulers but also to her own upper-class origins. “The Great Night of the Trains” was first published in Land of Smoke in 1977.

  THE GREAT NIGHT OF THE TRAINS

  Sara Gallardo

  Translated by Jessica Sequiera

  AROUND THE TIME man first set foot on the moon, it rained hard in Buenos Aires. The trains put out to die dripped and water ran unceasingly down the windowpanes.

  The government had decided to amputate the railway lines, just as doctors dry out unhealthy veins from the calf. It put the old trains on one side of the tracks to die.

  Most of the wagons’ windows were broken, and puddles formed on the seats and on the floors. The thistles formed a forest, their little heads hitting the glass like a crowd cheering a king. The earth gave way and the trains felt they were sinking. If they didn’t feel water seeping into their core it was because they were made of the hardest wood in the world, from India.

  The rebellion of the trains took place that month. There were two causes: the lack of sun, and the purchase of yellow trains by the government.

  The insufficiency of sunlight in those months, to talk like an academic, undermined the moral energies of the trains put out to die. During that time they were unable to wake from their dreams. In addition, there was none of the heat that usually radiated through the planks, the same way a smile radiates. There was no blue.

  When there is blue, tatters can wave without feeling wretched; they can feel they are banners or anything else. Maybe the term “tatter” will surprise someone who remembers the old train roofs’ blackness, a superb blackness. But the roofs were made of cloth, as was evident when, after a period of abandonment, they began to turn gray and tear.

  It must be understood that trains dream, just like the whole world apart from hens.

  The dreams of the trains put out to die were long as a result of their leisure, and wide-ranging as a result of their age. The first-class wagons with leather seats didn’t have the same dreams as the wagons in second with wooden seats. But their memories were of equal importance to them.

  One had been a restaurant with tablecloths, dinner service and waiters. Another had been a sleeping car.

  Those were their memories. Their dreams were more varied, more confusing, and more difficult to explain.

  These dreams worked as leavening for the rebellion.

  Without sun, the trains didn’t wake up. Nor did they have the usual activity around them that makes life acceptable, not even plants. The buzz of bees can be important in certain circumstances.

  What they did have were months of water, thunder, water, more water, more thunder, more water. The roads became tongues of mud no one would travel, not men, not trucks, not cattle, not anything. Everything was loneliness, leaking, dripping, silence. The trains put out to die felt something awful was going to happen.

  Twice a week the diesels returned them to the world. There had never been conflicts with the diesels, or if there had been, there’s no need to call attention to conflicts that are natural in any new start. For years they had shared the service equally. The flaming hues of the diesel-powered trains had gradually toned down to the earthy dispositions more appropriate to real trains; that alone was enough to make them trustworthy. Also, even without an engine worthy of the name, they carried out their duty with spirit.

  During the watery months, it was they who reminded the trains put out to die of their condition as denizens of this world. Twice a week they shook off the density of their dreams. They were the ones that revealed that the government had purchased the yellow trains.

  This was the second cause of the rebellion. But one must not think the yellow trains had the slightest contact with or were even aware of the existence of the trains put out to die. They only serviced the lines traveling immediately north, the ones we use when we go to place a bet in San Isidro, sunbathe in Olivos, or ride the ferry in Tigre. This note does not imply they are frivolous. Thousands of people live in the zones they pass through, and I believe even newspapers have taken it upon themselves to photograph the excessive work they must do, the bunches of people hanging off their sides or piling up on their roofs during their daily route.

  None of which can even be imagined on the lines of the south, where the rebellion happened. There, it’s common for a train to stop because a cow is asleep on the rails. On those journeys, setting your bag down on the nettings sometimes sends up a cloud of thistle flowers, which land softly on the clothes of the nearest passenger.

  No one knows how the rebellion was organized. It’s unclear whether or not the diesel engines played an active role. Since they continued to be used, one might believe they had no pressing motives. But alerted to a terrible fate by their friends put on the railway sidings, it is probable that they participated surreptitiously.

  It seems the rail carts were more involved than one later knew. Maybe because of their contact with the rail-repair crews, men much given to bragging, the carts often made cutting remarks at the trains put out to die. As the carts lack windows, doors and, to put it plainly, everything else, it didn’t upset them to see the shades pulled off the trains, those that could once be lowered over the windows to sift the light. Dust would dance through the air of the wagons in ceremonial displays, stairways of light and shadow created by the blinds, so gorgeous that a journey of seven hours could pass in a single breath for an attentive traveler. It did not pain the carts either to see the panes broken on some of the doors, smoked glass that had featured sketches and railway initials, made at a time decoration was considered one of the obligatory pleasures of life. Rapid and impudent, with nothing to lose, they made an effort to encourage the spread of the mutiny, helping place certain locomotives, delivering news.


  In those days a few wagons were set on fire near Constitucion. The aim was to take advantage of their iron and steel. You’ve seen them: a criminal impression. It couldn’t have happened at the stations farther away, where the country folk are poor because the trains pass so rarely and no one thinks of making off with a seat or mirror for their ranchos.

  Little is certain, but it’s known that the trains’ meeting place was a station on the abandoned line to Magdalena.

  It was a good place because of its isolation and because it was a symbol.

  It is still there; anyone who likes can go and see it today. Thistles, wind, a shed at each lonely station. The wooden brackets through which once cows, rearing their heads and pushing one another, boarded the trains, stand empty. Only the swallows, if they feel like it and it’s summer, or perhaps the bats, happy at sundown, go through them. If I could fly, I’d go take a look too. Not otherwise. At the ticket booth, a written sign sways in the wind. A door opens, closes, makes the heart beat faster, but there’s nothing to worry about; it’s just a door the wind bangs shut. There are devices in the offices, stuck at settings of their own choosing. Truth is they are not really interested in any setting at all. As for the tale about a puma that dwells at the stationmaster’s, it’s false. There haven’t been any pumas in the region for almost a century. I’m ready to believe, yes, the one about the dead ewe, stinking on the oaken staircase. Also, that an occasional calf can suddenly burst out of the waiting room. Now, if you wish to think it’s a wild cat rather than a puma, you will probably be right. You could possibly find a tramp too, although they are not as abundant there as in other parts, westward.

  What I wouldn’t give to have seen that night, the great night of the trains.

  La Indómita hurtled from the broken sheds of Ranelagh station, belching smoke. It was raining that night, and smoke pressed itself against the sides and wheels of the train. The lights looked yellow in the nocturnal steam.

  There was La Olga, license number 7.897, her radiance different from that of all the rest. Crowned by her ray of light, she appeared, a knower of snows, one who, sheathed in whiteness, had arrived at the platforms of Bariloche and Neuquén. She used to tell stories that were as true as they were hard to believe.

  La Rosa arrived in the beam of a headlight. There was a moment of respectful observance. More than all the others, it is she I would like to have seen, tearing through the gates of Circunvalación station and advancing surrounded in sparks that the rain put out and put out again. Her license plate, sadly erased, dragged long strands of vines. In 1918, when she was still new and terrible, she challenged the army and police. Driven by rioting anarchists, flags screaming in the wind, she swept down the line like a black bonfire.

  La Morocha came and waited for orders. She knew a thing or two, after having pulled the wagon with couches used by the President of the Republic, and also the trains used during the sugar harvest, full of Indians from Bolivia who played the flute on human bones. Once she transported the second elephant that had ever come to the country, which never lost its dignified manner despite its distrust of rail travel. It was thanks to La Morocha’s serenity that there were so few deaths in the derailment of February ’46. Now she made her way in silence; her whistle was too well known.

  And among them the main one moved, silent.

  How much work it must have been, and how difficult, how much coming and going.

  To call together those locomotives, some active but blind, others enthusiastic but stripped of a vital part. The rail carts came and went, the diesel engines ambled along. And the trains put out to die in the rain in the ferment of their dreams, wanted to wake from everything, straining with a groan that shook them to their very core.

  And wake they did.

  The rails were slippery that night, as well they might have been. Imagine the skidding, the difficulties braking, the challenges getting started. Also, everyone was fed up with the rain, which was an advantage. Hardly anyone poked a head out of their house, and after every thunderbolt a little old lady lying in bed said, “Lord, protect the walkers.”

  As to whether there were crashes, yes there were, and this was anticipated. No one could control the signals. The express from Bahia Blanca was destroyed, and La Rosa along with it, a wheel turning blindly on the side where the Anarchist flag had waved in ’18.

  On the Samborombón Bridge, where fishermen have planted poplars for shade, for some unknown reason one of the biggest trains, full of sleeping cars, derailed. Usually there is little water there; its riverbed seems intended for ten rivers just like it. Despite the rains it was only half empty. But there was enough water to rush into the splintered berths at the bottom of the gorge.

  Ah, but let’s imagine the trains put out to die.

  To feel once again the hitch, the sound of irons, the violent shake that joins one wagon, then another, then another. A groaning noise. Some planks split, something else is smashed in.

  Some couldn’t get away. They crashed or slipped in the night, without the light of fireflies because of the rain.

  But many could.

  It is because of those I would have liked to be there. To see them back on the rails, breathing once more, the engine at the lead, the telegraph posts whisking past. Being trains again.

  Yes, it is because of them I wish I’d been there.

  The rebellion of the trains was great. Why it failed and who informed on it will never be clear. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the flame that rises and is dampened and rises once again.

  Great was that night, very great indeed.

  Why it wasn’t reported in the newspapers, I have already told you. Man had just walked on the moon, and the newspapers had no space for anything else.

  Samuel R. Delany (1942– ) was born in Harlem and first gained attention as a science fiction writer, winning four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards by the age of twenty-seven. The massive, challenging, and bestselling Dhalgren (1975) signaled an end to the first phase of Delany’s career and the beginning of something new: novels challenging in both form and content, influenced by contemporary philosophy, often sexually explicit. The collection Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) (which includes “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers”) began a series of four books that mix sword and sorcery fantasy with questions of history, language, economics, and identity. The third of the books, Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), includes the novel-length story “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” one of the first works of fiction to address the AIDS crisis. Since publishing The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction in 1977, Delany has been an influential critic of both literature and culture, with Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), and About Writing (2005) proving particularly popular. His most recent publications include the novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), the Locus Award–winning story “The Hermit of Houston” (2017), In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany, Volume 1 (2017), Voyage, Orestes!: A Surviving Novel Fragment (2019), and Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters (2019).

  THE TALE OF DRAGONS AND DREAMERS

  Samuel R. Delany

  1

  WIDE WINGS DRAGGED on stone, scales a polychrome glister with seven greens. The bony gum yawned above the iron rail. The left eye, fist-sized and packed with stained foils, did not blink its transverse lid. A stench of halides; a bilious hiss.

  “But why have you penned it up in here?”

  “Do you think the creature unhappy, my Vizerine? Ill-fed, perhaps? Poorly exercised—less well cared for than it would be at Ellamon?”

  “How could anyone know?” But Myrgot’s chin was down, her lower lip out, and her thin hands joined tightly before the lap of her shift.

  “I know you, my dear. You hold it against me that I should want some of the ‘fable’ that has accrued to these beasts to redound on me. But you know; I went t
o great expense (and I don’t just mean the bribes, the gifts, the money) to bring it here…Do you know what a dragon is? For me? Let me tell you, Myrgot: it is an expression of some natural sensibility that cannot be explained by pragmatics, that cannot survive unless someone is hugely generous before it. These beasts are a sport. If Olin—yes, Mad Olin, and it may have been the highest manifestation of her madness—had not decided, on a tour through the mountain holds, the creatures were beautiful, we wouldn’t have them today. You know the story? She came upon a bunch of brigands slaughtering a nest of them and sent her troops to slaughter the brigands. Everyone in the mountains had seen the wings, but no one was sure the creatures could actually fly till two years after Olin put them under her protection and the grooms devised their special training programs that allowed the beasts to soar. And their flights, though lovely, are short and rare. The creatures are not survival oriented—unless you want to see them as part of a survival relationship with the vicious little harridans who are condemned to be their riders: another of your great-great aunt’s more inane institutions. Look at that skylight. The moon outside illumines it now. But the expense I have gone to in order to arrive at those precise green panes! Full sunlight causes the creature’s eyes to inflame, putting it in great discomfort. They can only fly a few hundred yards or so, perhaps a mile with the most propitious drafts, and unless they land on the most propitious ledge, they cannot take off again. Since they cannot elevate from flat land, once set down in an ordinary forest, say, they are doomed. In the wild, many live their entire lives without flying, which, given how easily their wing membranes tear through or become injured, is understandable. They are egg-laying creatures who know nothing of physical intimacy. Indeed, they are much more tractable when kept from their fellows. This one is bigger, stronger, and generally healthier than any you’ll find in the Falthas—in or out of the Ellamon corrals. Listen to her trumpet her joy over her present state!”