“When have I criticised you? When have I claimed I would have done something different?”
Fabbro gave a short laugh.
“Think, Tawus, think. Stop indulging your anger and think for a moment about the situation we are in. How could I say that I would have done something different? What meaning could such a claim possibly have when you and I were one and the same person at the beginning of all this?”
“We began as one person, but we are not one person now. Origins are not everything.”
Fabbro looked down at his hands, large and long-fingered as Tawus’s were.
“No,” he said, “I agree. It must be so. Otherwise there would only ever be one thing.”
“You made your choice,” Tawus said. “You should have stuck to it and stayed outside.”
“Hence the armies, hence the striding like a colossus at their head, hence the plan to seek me out and destroy me?”
Fabbro looked up at Tawus with an expression that was half a frown and half a smile.
“Yes,” Tawus said. “Hence all those things.”
Fabbro nodded.
“But where are the armies now?” he asked. “Where is the striding colossus? Where is this “we” you speak about? An awful lot of the energy has dissipated, has it not? The nearer you got to me, the faster it all fell away. They’ve all come back to me, you know, your armies, your brothers, your sisters. They have all come to me and asked to become part of me once again.”
Some of the eyes on the cloak glanced inquiringly upwards at Tawus’s face, others remained fixed on Fabbro, who had lifted his binoculars and was once again looking at bird life out on the lake.
“Fire the gun and you will be Fabbro,” the Peacock Cloak told its master. “You will be the one to whom the armies and the Five have all returned. Your apparent isolation, your apparent diminishment, is simply an artefact of there being two of you here, two rival versions of the original Fabbro. But you are the one I shield and not him. You are the one with the weapon.”
Fabbro laid down his field glasses and turned towards the man who still stood stiffly apart from him.
“Come Tawus,” he coaxed gently, patting the surface of the log beside him. “Come and sit down. I won’t bite, I promise. It’s almost the end, after all. Surely we’re both too old, and it’s too late in the day, for us to be playing this game?”
Tawus picked up another stone and flung it out into the lake. The ripples spread over the smooth surface. Quack quack went the ducks near to where it fell, and one of them fluttered its wings and half-flew a few yards further off, scrabbling at the surface with its feet.
“The armies are irrelevant,” Tawus said. “The Five are irrelevant. You know that. For these purposes they are simply fields of force twisting and turning between you and me. The important thing is not that they have come back to you. No. The important thing is that I have not.”
Fabbro watched his face and did not speak
“I made their world for them,” Tawus went on, beginning to pace restlessly up and down. “I gave them progress. I gave them freedom. I gave them cities and nations. I gave them hope. I gave them something to believe in and somewhere to go. You just made a shell. You made a clockwork toy. It was me, through my rebellion, that turned it into a world. Why else did they all follow me?”
He looked around for another stone, found a particularly big one, and lobbed it out even further across the lake. It sent a whole flock of ducks squawking into the air.
“Please sit down, Tawus. I would really like you to sit with me.”
Tawus did not respond. Fabbro shrugged and looked away.
“Why exactly do you think they followed you?” he asked after a short time.
“Because I was in your image but I wasn’t you,” Tawus answered at once. “I was like you, but at the same time I was one of them. Because I stood up for this world as a world in its own right, belonging to those who lived in it, and not simply as a plaything of yours.”
Fabbro nodded.
“Which was what I wanted you to do,” he said.
The day was moving into evening. The eastern ridge of peaks across the water glowed gold from the sun that was setting opposite them to the west.
“After the sun sets,” Fabbro calmly said, “the world will end. Everyone has come back to me. It’s time that you and I brought things to a close.”
Tawus was caught off guard. So little time. It seemed he had miscalculated somewhat, not having the benefit of the Olympian view that Fabbro had enjoyed until recently, looking in from outside of Constructive Thought. He had not appreciated that the end was quite as close as that.
But he was not going to show his surprise.
“I suppose you are going to lecture me,” he said, “about the suffering I caused with my wars.”
As he spoke he was gathering up stones from the beach, hastily, almost urgently, as if they had some vital purpose.
“I suppose you’re going to go on about all the children whose parents I took from them,” he said.
He threw a stone. Splash. Quack.
“And the rapes that all sides perpetrated,” he said, throwing a stone again, “and the tortures,” throwing yet another stone, “and the massacres.”
He had run out of stones. He turned angrily towards Fabbro.
“I suppose you want to castigate me for turning skilled farmers and hunters and fishermen into passive workers in dreary city streets, spending their days manufacturing things they didn’t understand, and their evenings staring at images on screens manufactured for them by someone else.”
He turned away, shaking his head, looking around vaguely for more stones.
“I used to think about you looking in from outside,” he said. “When we had wars, when we were industrialising and getting people off the land, all of those difficult times. I used to imagine you judging me, clucking your tongue, shaking your head. But you try and bring progress to a world without any adverse consequences for anyone. You just try it.”
“Come on, Tawus,” Fabbro begged him. “Sit with me. You know you’re not really going to destroy me. You know you can’t really reverse the course that this world, like any world, must take. It isn’t only your armies that have fallen away from you, Tawus, it is your own steely will. It has no purpose any more.”
But the cloak offered another point of view.
“Destroy Fabbro and you will become him,” it silently whispered. “Then you can put back the clock itself.”
Tawus knew it was true. Without Fabbro to stop him, he could indeed postpone the end, not forever, but for several more generations. And he could rule Esperine during that time as he had never ruled before, with no Fabbro outside, no one to look in and judge him. The cloak was right. He would become Fabbro, he would become Fabbro and Tawus both at once. It was possible, and what was more, it had been his reason for coming here in the first place.
He glanced down at Fabbro. He looked quickly away again across the lake. Ten whole seconds passed.
Then Tawus reached slowly for the clasp of the Peacock Cloak. He hesitated. He lowered his hand. He reached for the clasp again. His fingers were trembling because of the contradictory signals they were receiving from his brain, but finally he unfastened the cloak, removing it slowly and deliberately at first, and then suddenly flinging it away from him, as if he feared it might grab hold and refuse to let him go. It snagged on a branch of a small oak tree and hung there, one corner touching the stony ground. Still its clever eyes darted about, green and gold and black. It was watching Tawus, watching Fabbro. As ever, it was observing everything, analysing everything, evaluating options and possibilities. But yet, as is surely proper in a garment hanging from a tree, it had no direction of its own, it had no separate purpose.
Across the lake, the eastern hills shone. There were sheep up there grazing, bathed in golden light that picked them out against the mountainside. But the hills on the western side were also making their presence felt, for their shadows
were reaching out like long fingers over the two small figures by the lake, one standing, one seated on the log, neither one speaking. Without his cloak, in a simple white shirt and white breeches, Tawus looked even more like Fabbro. A stranger could not have told them apart.
A flock of geese came flying in from a day of grazing lower down the valley. They honked peaceably to one another as they splashed down on the softly luminous water.
“When I was walking up here,” Tawus said at last, “I met three children, and they reminded me of some other children I saw once, or glimpsed anyway, when I was riding past in a tank. It was in the middle of a war and I didn’t pay much heed to them at the time. I was too busy listening to reports and giving orders. But for some reason they stuck in my mind.”
He picked up a stone, tossed it half-heartedly out into the lake.
“Their ruined home lay behind them,” he went on, “and in the ruins, most probably, lay the burnt corpses of their parents. Not that their parents would have been combatants or anything. It was just that their country, their sleepy land of Meadow Lee, had temporarily become the square on the chessboard that the great game was focussed on, the place where the force fields happened to intersect. Pretty soon the focal point would be somewhere else and the armies would move on from Meadow Lee and forget all about it until the next time. But those children wouldn’t forget, would they? Not while they still lived. This day would stain and darken their entire lives, like the smoke darkened and stained their pretty blue sky. What could be worse, when you think about it, than filling up a small mind with such horrors? That, in a way, is also creating a world. It is creating a small but perfect hell.”
He snatched up yet another stone, but, with a swift graceful movement, Fabbro had jumped up and grasped Tawus’s wrist to stop him throwing it.
“Enough, Tawus, enough. The rebellion is over. The divisions you brought about have all been healed. The killed and the killers. The tortured and the torturers. The enslaved and the enslavers. All are reconciled. All have finally come back.”
“Everyone but me.”
Tawus let the stone fall to the ground. His creator released his hand, sat down again on the log and once again patted the space beside him.
Tawus looked at Fabbro, and at the log, and back at Fabbro again. And, finally, he sat down.
The two of them were completely in shadow now, had become shadows themselves. The smooth surface of the lake still glowed with soft pinks and blues, but the many birds on its surface had become shadows too, warm living shadows, softly murmuring to one another in their various watery tongues, suspended between the glowing lake and the glowing sky. And more shadow was spreading up the hillside opposite, engulfing the sheep one after another, taking them from golden prominence to peaceful obscurity. Soon only the peaks still dipped into the stream of sunlight that was pouring horizontally far above the heads of the two men.
“Everyone but you,” Fabbro mildly agreed, reaching down for his binoculars once more so he could look at some unusual duck or other that he’d noticed out on the water.
Tawus glanced across at his Peacock Cloak, dangling from its tree with the gun still hidden in its pocket. That tawdry thing, he suddenly thought. Why did I choose to hide myself in that? The cloak was shimmering and glittering, giving off its own light in the shadow, and its eyes were still brightly shining, as if it was attempting to be a rival to those last brilliant rays of sunlight, or to outglow the softly glowing lake. It was all that was left of Tawus’s empire, his will, his power.
He turned to Fabbro.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he began. “I don’t in any way regret what . . .”
Then he broke off. He passed his still trembling hand over his face.
“I’m sorry, Fabbro,” he said in a completely different voice. “I’ve messed it all up, haven’t I? I’ve been a fool. I’ve spoiled everything.”
Fabbro lowered his binoculars and patted Tawus on the hand.
“Well, maybe you have. I’m not sure. But you’re quite right, you know, that I did just create a shell, and it was your rebellion that made it a world. Deep down I always knew that rebellion was necessary. I must have done, mustn’t I, since whatever you did came from somewhere inside me? Rebellion was necessary. I’d just hoped that in Esperine it would somehow take a different path.”
Only the highest tips of the peaks were still shining gold. They were like bright orange light bulbs. And then, one by one, they went out.
AMARYLLIS
Carrie Vaughn
New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn is the author of a wildly popular series of novels detailing the adventures of Kitty Norville, a radio personality who also happens to be a werewolf, and who runs a late-night call-in radio advice show for supernatural creatures. The Kitty books include Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday, Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand, Kitty Raises Hell, Kitty’s House of Horrors, and Kitty Goes to War. Vaughn’s short work has appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Wild Cards: Inside Straight, Warriors, Songs of Love and Death, Realms of Fantasy, Paradox, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and elsewhere. Her most recent books are Voices of Dragons, her first venture into Young Adult territory, and Discord’s Apple, a fantasy. Coming up are the novels Steel and After the Golden Age; a new Kitty novel, Kitty’s Big Trouble; and a collection of Kitty stories, Kitty’s Greatest Hits. She lives in Colorado.
In the powerful tale of multigenerational family relations and personal redemption against the odds that follow, she pulls off the difficult trick of managing to show a diminished, ecologically distressed near-future without being bleak or despairing about it – people are adapting and getting by, life goes on as best it can. And if you lose your family, you can, with luck, make another one for yourself.
I NEVER KNEW MY mother, and I never understood why she did what she did. I ought to be grateful that she was crazy enough to cut out her implant so she could get pregnant. But it also meant she was crazy enough to hide the pregnancy until termination wasn’t an option, knowing the whole time that she’d never get to keep the baby. That she’d lose everything. That her household would lose everything because of her.
I never understood how she couldn’t care. I wondered what her family thought when they learned what she’d done, when their committee split up the household, scattered them – broke them, because of her.
Did she think I was worth it?
It was all about quotas.
“They’re using cages up north, I heard. Off shore, anchored,” Nina said. “Fifty feet across – twice as much protein grown with half the resources, and we’d never have to touch the wild population again. We could double our quota.”
I hadn’t really been listening to her. We were resting, just for a moment; she sat with me on the railing at the prow of Amaryllis and talked about her big plans.
Wind pulled the sails taut and the fiberglass hull cut through waves without a sound, we sailed so smooth. Garrett and Sun hauled up the nets behind us, dragging in the catch. Amaryllis was elegant, a 30-foot sleek vessel with just enough cabin and cargo space – an antique but more than seaworthy. She was a good boat, with a good crew. The best.
“Marie — ” Nina said, pleading.
I sighed and woke up. “We’ve been over this. We can’t just double our quota.”
“But if we got authorization — ”
“Don’t you think we’re doing all right as it is?” We had a good crew – we were well fed and not exceeding our quotas; I thought we’d be best off not screwing all that up. Not making waves, so to speak.
Nina’s big brown eyes filled with tears – I’d said the wrong thing, because I knew what she was really after, and the status quo wasn’t it.
“That’s just it,” she said. “We’ve met our quotas and kept everyone healthy for years now. I really think we should try. We can at least as
k, can’t we?”
The truth was: No, I wasn’t sure we deserved it. I wasn’t sure that kind of responsibility would be worth it. I didn’t want the prestige. Nina didn’t even want the prestige – she just wanted the baby.
“It’s out of our hands at any rate,” I said, looking away because I couldn’t bear the intensity of her expression.
Pushing herself off the rail, Nina stomped down Amaryllis’ port side to join the rest of the crew hauling in the catch. She wasn’t old enough to want a baby. She was lithe, fit, and golden, running barefoot on the deck, sun-bleached streaks gleaming in her brown hair. Actually, no, she was old enough. She’d been with the house for seven years – she was twenty, now. It hadn’t seemed so long.
“Whoa!” Sun called. There was a splash and a thud as something in the net kicked against the hull. He leaned over the side, the muscles along his broad, coppery back flexing as he clung to a net that was about to slide back into the water. Nina, petite next to his strong frame, reached with him. I ran down and grabbed them by the waistbands of their trousers to hold them steady. The fourth of our crew, Garrett, latched a boat hook into the net. Together we hauled the catch onto the deck. We’d caught something big, heavy, and full of powerful muscles.
We had a couple of aggregators – large buoys made of scrap steel and wood – anchored fifty miles or so off the coast. Schooling fish were attracted to the aggregators, and we found the fish – mainly mackerel, sardines, sablefish, and whiting. An occasional shark or marlin found its way into the nets, but those we let go; they were rare and outside our quotas. That was what I expected to see – something unusually large thrashing among the slick silvery mass of smaller fish. This thing was large, yes, as big as Nina – no wonder it had almost pulled them over – but it wasn’t the right shape. Sleek and streamlined, a powerful swimmer. Silvery like the rest of the catch.
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