... until this moment.
Dark space outside. She wishes Ives were here.
“One minute.”
She remembers Mother, so frail in the hospital bed, in the Radcliffe’s terminal ward.
“Why did you call me Augusta, Mum?”
A long pause, then the tiniest of shrugs, from shoulders so emaciated her bones looked razor-sharp, attempting to cut through skin.
“Family tradition, pumpkin—”
It was days before Mother found final peace in death. But those were the last coherent words she spoke.
* * *
Now, Gus watches the stars. Blackness, sprinkled with diamond stars, across an invisible context whose mathematical reality she knows, but whose tangible qualities neither she nor anyone else can see.
Stardust, every one of us ...
Born in the nearest sun. But all those suns seem to murmur now, as long-forgotten technology once whispered to the girl she was: secrets she will never truly grasp.
“Ma’am ...”
“I see it.”
Silver dart. A tiny speck, orbiting fast, high above blueness, heading into ...
Gone.
One moment it was there; next, the vessel no longer existed.
“Insertion complete.”
Hopeful, that message from Observation Control. There was no explosion; with luck, it means—
Speck.
“Is that it?”
“Beg your—? Yes! Ma’am, they’re back.”
Shining light, growing.
The silver vessel gleams, broadcasting its report of success on all wavelengths.
“We saw it!” The captain’s voice. “Alpha Centauri, for sure. Spectrometer confirms. We were there!”
“Thank you,” Gus whispers.
The silver biographer-globe drops closer, and she frowns. Then she realizes she is lying down, though she cannot recall changing position.
Blackness, circling all around.
And the stars, so bright.
“ ... ma’am?”
Sounds, fading.
We made it, Mum.
And, for a moment, she sees it: the fractal Pattern, the mu-space reality which holds up our illusory cosmos—
Thank you.
Somewhere, a major blood vessel erupts. A crack, then relief.
Stars ...
A smile spreads across Gus’s lined face.
... fading ...
Her personal universe dwindles.
... to darkness.
Is gone.
The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing
KAGE BAKER
One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late ’90s, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s, and has since become one of that magazines most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-travelling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. Her second novel, Sky Coyote, was published in 1999, followed by a third and a fourth, Mendoza in Hollywood and The Graveyard Game, both published in 2001. Her most recent book is her first collection, Black Projects, White Knights, where the story that follows was originally published. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.
Here she shows us that sometimes no matter how isolated and remote a location you find in which to hide yourself away, it isn’t nearly isolated enough ...
There was just the five of us in the bar that night.
The lumber mills were all shut down for good and there hadn’t been a ship come up to the wharf in years. No more big schooners down there in the cove, with their white sails flying in at eye level to the bluff top like clouds. Dirty little steamers stayed well out on the horizon and never came in, going busily to San Francisco or Portland. Nothing to come in for, at Harlan’s Landing.
All this stuff the weekenders find so cute now, the gingerbread cottages and the big emporium with its grand false front and the old hotel here—you wouldn’t have thought they were much then, when they were gray wood beaten into leaning by the winter storms, paint from the boom days all peeled off. No Heritage Society to save us, no tourists with cash to spend. Nobody had cash to spend. It was 1934.
I couldn’t keep the hotel open, but after the Volstead Act was repealed I opened the bar downstairs and things brightened up considerably. Our own had some place to go, had sort of a social life now, see? We come that close to being a ghost town that everybody needed to know there was still a place with the yellow lights shining out through the windows, fighting to stay alive.
And it wasn’t like there was anyplace else to go anyhow, not with the logging road washed out in winter, which was the only other way to get here from the city back then. I felt I sort of owed the rest of them.
Especially I owed Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. I had that awful year in 1929 when Mama got the cancer and I lost Bill, that was my husband, he was one of the crew on the San Juan, see. They were real kind to me then. Stayed by me when I wanted to just die. Aunty Irina baked bread, and Uncle Jacques fixed the typewriter and told me what I ought to write to the damn insurance people when they weren’t going to pay. People who’ll help you clean your house for a funeral twice in one year are good friends, believe you me.
Then, if Uncle Jacques hadn’t kept the Sheep Canyon trail cleared we’d have had nothing to eat but venison, because there’d have been no way I could have got the buckboard through to Notley for provisions most of the time. It must have been hard work, even for him, just one man with an axe busting up those redwood snags; because of course Lanark was no use. But Uncle Jacques looked after all of us, he and Aunty Irina. They said it was a good thing to have a human community.
And, see, once I opened the bar, there was some place to go. Lanark didn’t have to stay alone in his shack watching the calendar pages turn brown, and Miss Harlan didn’t have to stay alone in her cottage hearing the surf boom and wondering if Billy was going to come walking up out of the water to haunt her. I didn’t have to sit alone in my room over the lobby, thinking how my folks would scold me because I hadn’t kept the brass and mahogany polished like I ought to have. And Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina had a nice little human community they could come down and be part of for a while, so they didn’t have to sit staring at each other in their place up on Gamboa Ridge.
I had it real cozy here. That potbellied stove in the corner worked then; fire inspector won’t let us use it now, but I used to keep it going all night with a big basket of redwood chunks, and I lit the room up bright with kerosene lamps and moved some of the good tables and chairs down from the hotel rooms. Uncle Jacques brought me a radio he’d tinkered with, he called it a wireless, and I don’t know if it ran on a battery or what it had in it, but we set it behind the bar and we could get it to pull in music and shows. We had Jack Benny for Canada Dry and Chandu the Magician, and Little Orphan Annie, and even Byrd at the South Pole sometimes.
So Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina would dance if there was music, and Miss Harlan would sit watching them, and I’d pour out applejack for everybody or maybe some wine. I used to get the wine, good stuff, from a man named Andy Lopez back in Sheep Canyon. Lanark would drink too much of it, but at least he wasn’t a mean drunk. We’d all be happy in the bar, warm and bright like it was, though the rest of the hotel was echoing and dark, and outside the night was black and empty too.
And that night it was black with a Pacific gale, but not empty. The wind was driving the sleet sideways at the windows, the wild air blustered and fought in the st
reet like the sailors used to on Saturday nights. Every so often the sky would light up horizon to horizon, purple and white lightning miles long, and for a split second there’d be the town outside the windows like it was day but awful, with the black empty buildings and the black gaps in the sidewalk where the boards had rotted out, and the sea beyond breaking so high there was spume flying up the street, blown on the storm.
You wouldn’t think we’d be getting any radio reception at all, but whatever Uncle Jacques had done to that thing, it was picking up a broadcast from some ballroom in Chicago. And damned if the band-leader didn’t play Stormy Weather! Aunty Irina pulled Uncle Jacques to his feet. He slipped his arm around her and they two-step shuffled up and down in front of the bar, smiling at each other. Miss Harlan watched them, getting a little misty-eyed like she always did at anything romantic, and she sang along with the music. Lanark was pretty sober yet and making eyes at me from his table, and I smiled back at him because he did still use to be handsome then, in a wrecked kind of way.
He had just said, “Damn, Luisa, you throw a nice party,” and I was just about to say something sassy back when the music was drowned out by a crack-crack-crack and screeching static, so awful Miss Harlan and me put our hands over our ears, and Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina stopped short and stood apart, looking like a couple of greyhounds on the alert.
Then we heard the call numbers and the voice out of the storm, telling us that some vessel called the Argive was in trouble, two aboard, and could the Coast Guard help? And I wondered how the radio had switched itself over to the marine band, but it was Uncle Jacques’s radio so I guess it might have done anything. They gave their location as right off Gamboa Rock, and I felt sick then.
See it out there? That’s Gamboa Rock. See the way the water kind of boils around it, even on a nice summer day like this, and that little black line of shelf trailing out from it? It used to be a ship-killer, and a mankiller too, and we all knew the Argive wasn’t ever going to see any Coast Guard rescue, if that was where she was. Not in weather like that.
And in the next big flash of lightning we could see the poor damned thing through the windows, looked like somebody’s yacht, rearing on the black water and fighting for sea room. I only saw her for a split second, but I could paint her to this hour the way she looked, almost on her beam-end with her sail flapping. Then the dark swallowed up everything again. There was just a tiny little pinprick light we could still see for a while.
The voice on the radio was high and scared and there wasn’t any Coast Guard answering, and pretty soon they began begging anybody to help them. They must have been able to see our light, I guess. It would have broken your heart to have to sit there and listen, the way they were asking for lifeboats and lines, which we didn’t have. We couldn’t have got to them anyway.
Lanark had lurched to his feet and was staring out into the storm, and I guess he was thinking how he could have made a try of it in the Sada if she hadn’t been rotting up on sawhorses ever since he’d lost his arm. Miss Harlan had put her fingers in her ears and was rocking back and forth, and I didn’t blame her; she didn’t take death too well. I was crying myself, and so was Aunty Irina, wringing her hands, and she was staring up at Uncle Jacques with a pleading look in her eyes but his face was set like stone, and he was just shaking his head. They murmured back and forth in what I guessed was their language, until he said “You know we can’t, Rinka.”
He sat her down and put his arms around her to keep her there. Lanark and I took a couple of lanterns and went out into the street, but the wind nearly knocked us over and there was nothing to see out there anyway, not now. We got as far as the path down the cliff before another burst of lightning showed us the sea coming white up the stairs, and the old platform that had been below torn away with bits of it bobbing in the surge, and the spray jumping high. I think Lanark would still have tried to go down, but I pulled him away and the fool paid attention for once in his life. Coming back I near broke my leg, stepping in a hole where a plank was gone out of the sidewalk. We were gasping and staggering like we’d swum a mile by the time we got back up on the porch here.
It was lovely warm in the bar, but the voice on the radio had stopped. All that was coming through the ether now was a kind of regular beat of static, pop-pop, pop-pop like that, just a quiet little death knell.
I said, “We all need a drink,” and poured out glasses of applejack on the house, because that was the only thing on earth I could do. Miss Harlan and Lanark came and got theirs quick enough, and he backed up to the stove to warm himself. Uncle Jacques let go of Aunty Irina and stood, only to have her reel upright and slap him hard in the face.
He rocked back on his heels. Miss Harlan was beside her right away, she said, “Oh, please don’t—it’s too awful—” and Aunty Irina fell back in her chair crying.
She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t bear sitting there and doing nothing again, when somebody might have been saved. Lanark and I were in a hurry to tell her that nobody could have done anything, that we couldn’t even get down into the cove because the stairs were washed out, so she mustn’t feel too bad. Uncle Jacques brought her a glass, but she pushed it away and tried to get hold of herself. Looking up at us as though to explain, she said, “We had a child, once.”
Uncle Jacques said, “Rinka, easy,” but she went on:
“Adopted. My baby Jimmy. We had him for eighteen years. He wanted to enlist. We thought, well, the war’s almost over, let him play soldier if he wants to. He’ll be safe. There wasn’t any record—but we didn’t think about the Spanish influenza. He caught it in boot camp in San Diego. Never even got on the troop carrier. They had him all laid out in his uniform by the time we got there ... Only eighteen.”
Real quiet, Uncle Jacques said, “There was nothing we could have done,” as though it was something he’d repeated a hundred times, and she snapped back:
“We should never have let him go! Not with that event shadow—” And she started crying again, crying and cursing. Miss Harlan offered her a handkerchief and got her to drink some of her drink, and when she was a little calmer led her off to the ladies’ lavatory upstairs to powder her nose. They took one of the kerosene lanterns to find their way, because it was pitch-black beyond the bar threshold. A fresh squall beat against the windows, sounding like thrown gravel.
Uncle Jacques dropped down heavy in his seat, and gulped his drink and what was left of Aunty Irina’s. Lanark drank too, but he was staring at Uncle Jacques with a bewildered expression on his face. Finally Lanark said, “Your kid died during the war? But ... how old are you?”
And I thought, oh, hell, because you couldn’t trust Lanark with a secret when he drank; that was why we’d never told him the truth about Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. Uncle Jacques and I looked at each other and then he cleared his throat and said:
“Irina was talking out of her head. It was her kid brother died in boot camp. We did adopt a baby once, but he died of diphtheria. She went a little crazy over it, Lanark. Most times you wouldn’t know, but tonight—”
“Oh,” said Lanark, and I could see the wheels turning in his head as he decided that was why Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina lived up there alone on Gamboa Ridge, and never had visitors or went up to the city for anything.
I said, “Have another drink, Tom,” and that worked like it always did, he came right away and let me fill his glass up. It never took much to get that man to stop thinking, poor thing. Just as well, too.
We turned the radio off and I had another drink myself, I was feeling so low, and Lanark drank a bit more and then said we ought to go out at first light to see if there were any bodies washed up at least, so we could bury them Christian until one of us could ride up to the Point Piedras light and have them pass the word to the Coast Guard about the wreck. Uncle Jacques roused himself from his gloom enough to say we’d need to notify the Coast Guard even if we didn’t find bodies, so at least the historical record would be correct.
I am not a screaming woman. I saw enough God-awful things in this town when it was alive to harden me up. You get some hideous accidents in a sawmill, which I’m sure those folks who eat lunch there now it’s a shopping arcade would rather not know about, and a redwood log that jumps the side of the flume doesn’t leave much of anybody who gets in its way. Then there’s the dead hereabouts, that hooker somebody killed in Room 17 who still cries, or poor Billy Molera who used to come up from the sea and go round and round Miss Harlan’s cottage at night, moaning for love of her, and leave a trail of seaweed and sand in her garden come morning. You get used to things.
But it did give me a turn, the white face out there beyond the glass, just glimpsed for a second with its black eyeholes and black gaping mouth. Where I was, perched up on my stool behind the bar, I had a good look at it, though neither Lanark nor Uncle Jacques could have seen the thing. I didn’t make a sound, just slopped my drink a little.
Uncle Jacques looked up at me sharply. He said, “What’s scared you?”
I wasn’t going to say, but then we heard it coming up the steps.
Two, three steps from the street onto the porch, it must have crossed right here where I’m sitting now, and pushed that door open, that I hadn’t bolted at night in ten years. Lanark lifted his head, just noticing it when the blast of cold air came in, and even he heard the floor creaking as it took the ten steps across the dark lobby. Then it was standing in the doorway of the bar, looking in at us.
Its wet clothes were half-shredded away. Water ran down from it onto the floor and it was white as a corpse, all right, except for the red and purple places, like crushed blackberries, where it must have been pounded on the rocks. It had taken a terrible beating. Its mouth was torn, jaw hanging open. But even while I was staring at it I saw the bruises swirling under the skin and fading, the wounds closing up. It lifted its white hand and closed its mouth; reset the jaw with a click, and the split cheek knit up into a red line that faded too.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 97