Asimov's SF, March 2007
Page 6
Sabatier shook his head, feeling despair.
"However,” the old man added, “my own soul—which often hears God's private words as well—urges me to have you crush the lion's tooth and then drink it with the milk that a lamb drinks."
"Why, Messieur?"
"You will know when it is time to know."
"How?"
"By the words of those around you. By rumors from Paris. By the excitement and fear."
Sabatier returned home, not understanding, but did as he was told, crushing the lion's tooth with an apothecary's mortar and pestle, mixing it with ewe's milk, and then drinking it. Though he slept well that night, and though the visions ceased for three days, they did resume and with greater disruption of his life. He did not know when a vision would strike him like a seizure and he would be unable to work for an hour or a day; and the more this happened, the more afraid his wife became and the more the people of the village shunned him, believing him possessed. Only when, months later, word of the insurrections in Paris reached his village and everyone was speaking of them did he remember the monk's words; and remembering them, felt a great relief and a terrible longing to be in Paris, to be present for—what had the monk said?—the excitement and fear.
It was with this very longing one hot night a week later, and for the very first time—in the room where the four of them slept, his wife beside him—that Sabatier became the lion.
As he lay on their bed, he found that he could hear what he should not have been able to hear: people snoring in nearby houses, a dog running in the street outside, bats swooping for insects in the night sky. He found that he could see, even in the darkness of the room, what no man should be able to see: The faces of his wife and children, their eyelashes, the trembling of a lip in a dream. He found that he could smell them, too—the blood and flesh that made their bodies bodies. His chest was rumbling strangely; and when he touched his own face, it was not with fingers, but with a paw as big as a child's head; and though it had no fingers, he could feel with it the hair on his face and the muzzle that his mouth had become.
Lest his wife feel the difference and wake, he pulled away from her and remained as still as he could until his hearing became a comfortable deafness, his sight a familiar blindness, his nostrils full of his own sweat and nothing more, and the rumbling gone at last, so that he might sleep.
* * * *
The first man he had killed as a lion had taken no planning. He had found the man in a fabric shop in an alley in Provins-Gare, where he had gone to buy a pig and was late returning home. The man was beating his own son, a child of love, an innocent. Upon seeing the father's attempt to kill within the child a thing God surely loved, he had become the lion again. It had taken only a moment, and he had barely felt it. The lion had snarled once, and then, unable to help itself, had killed the father, pulling his entrails from him and dragging them through the alley as neighbors watched—even as the boy watched. The boy had not screamed, though the neighbors had. The boy had looked on mutely as if understanding: The duty of love to kill that which might kill love. It was a miracle, one that the city would speak of for years: A lion appearing from nowhere to kill a man who beat his son every day until the boy could no longer speak.
In the darkness of the alley, far from the boy's neighbors, he had become a man again, just as easily, and returned empty-handed to his village. When his wife asked him about the blood on his hands and face, he had lied, of course, telling her he had been beaten by ruffians—the same ones who had stolen his pig. Accepting his story, she had washed him lovingly, and in bed that night he had wept silently, though he was not certain why.
* * * *
Every night Paris had pulled at him with a strange longing, but he had resisted. He did so for the simple reason—one that needed only his obeisance—that other miracles were needed before he could go; that there were other men and women he would need to find first:
A woman who ran a brothel in Monte Cellini, on the southeastern border, who, when her girls were with child, let them die under a doctor's filthy tool and paid the man for each death.
A cousin of the dauphin who poisoned the grain of a village simply on a bet, killing everyone.
A captain of the Parisian Cavalry who raped children before he sold them.
And all the others he would need, as a lion, to kill in God's name, and so did.
When in July the longing grew too intense and he could neither eat nor sleep, he left for Paris at last. He would not see his wife and sons again—this he knew—and he fought his tears; but he had no choice. He needed to be in Paris, living on the streets as a man, homeless, waiting.
* * * *
The lion pulled itself to the edge of the grotto's floor, into the unbearable heat of day, and, eyes barely seeing, looked into the pool of water by its feet, the water that could have washed so much away were it right to do so. Would it be right? He did not know. He tried to see the battlefield, but through the blood could not. He could still hear what no man would—swords slicing quietly through bone, the whispers of torn throats, even the straining hearts of the combatants—but he could not see.
He shook his head and blood flew from it; and for a moment he could see the insurrectionaries, some dead, some still standing in a stupor, in street clothes, waving their muskets and pistols and swords. And the bodies of the Guard in their red and white and blue uniforms. These bodies did not move or, if they did, they moved with the same pain that made his own legs so heavy.
Is it enough to kill for what you believe, if what you believe is only a king—while those you kill are willing to die for what may be closer to what a God loves?
He could not hear God's answer, nor did he know whether God heard him, or even whether the question had an answer. Men died. Men killed each other and died, and a lion who was a man and a man who was a lion would die today. Of that there was no doubt. Was it any more than this?
Is it enough to be a lion in the name of God?
He did not know. The battlefield called to him, whispering. It was where he was meant to die, not here in the grotto. Nostrils flaring, he rose slowly on four legs with what breath he had and, stumbling past the pool of water that whispered to him, too, made his way toward the palace, to the first bodies, where he lost his strength and fell. There, on the hands and knees of a man, eyes blind again, he touched a corpse with fingers that had, for most of the battle, been an animal's paw, talons, hair. With his fingers he felt cloth and metal and slick blood, touched another body, one that moved, that made a sound like the word “Mére!” and then another, this one still as well; and the next, one that squirmed weakly. For neither the still nor the moving could he do a thing except touch them and mutter a prayer.
Then, with a strength that might have been the lion's or the man's or something else entirely, he got up, steadied himself, and began to walk through the bodies. And this, the sight of a simple man—a blind butcher with a broken spear through his still-beating heart as he walked among the fallen—would, he saw now, be forgotten, even as the lion—the miracle any God would have chosen—would be remembered forever.
Copyright (c) 2007 Bruce McAllister
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BOTTLES by Greg Beatty
When I was young,
my grandfather built ships
in bottles. A disappointment
at first; when dad said
Grandpa was building boats
I imagined him with a gun,
firing hot rivets into iron.
* * * *
Still, the bottles offer
their own pleasure, and
the ships were a surprise:
space, not sail. Some
the great galactic ladies
of fiction: The Enterprise,
of course, Lying Bastard,
Rama, and a minute Skylark.
* * * *
Some were not fictional per
se, but instead hypothetical:
Gr
andpa's version of a light
sail, gossamer belly cast from
reworked Frisbees, anomalous
bean stalks built of popsicle sticks.
* * * *
When I was young,
the ships were the wonder.
Now that I'm not,
it's the bottles.
There's something wondrous
about a hyperspace shunt
inside a two liter Dr. Pepper,
a ramjet inside a Classic Coke.
* * * *
I used to wonder at the ships.
Now I wonder at the nature
of the bottles that contain them.
Are they simply material,
glass and plastic bent from
original consumer purposes to
hold visionary beasts?
Or are they symbolic, serving
to mark the confines of
gravity, society, and perhaps
the fabric of spacetime:
improvised Kleins
with everything and
nothing inside?
—Greg Beatty
Copyright (c) 2007 Greg Beatty
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PUBLIC SAFETY by Matthew Johnson
Mathew Johnson's first story for us, “The Ninth Part of Desire,” appeared in our June 2006 issue. Other publications include stories in Strange Horizons, Tesseracts Ten, and Fantasy Magazine. Matthew is currently working on a novelization of Byzantine chess, and, in “Public Safety,” he certainly offers us a Byzantine view of reality.
Officier de la Paix Louverture folded Quartidi's Pére Duchesne into thirds, fanning himself against the Thermidor heat. The news inside was all bad, anyway: another theater had closed, leaving the Comedie Francaise the only one open in Nouvelle-Orleans. At least the Duchesne could be counted on to report only what the Corps told them to, that the Figaro had closed for repairs, and not the truth—which was that audiences, frightened by the increasing number of fires and other mishaps at the theaters, had stopped coming. The Minerve was harder to control, but the theater-owners had been persuaded not to talk to their reporters, to avoid a public panic. No matter that these were all clearly accidents: even now, in the year 122, reason was often just a thin layer of ice concealing a pre-Revolutionary sea of irrationality.
On the table in front of him sat his plate of beignets, untouched. He had wanted them when he had sat down, but the arrival of the group of gardiens stagieres to the café made him lose his appetite. He told himself it was just his cynicism that caused him to react this way, his desire to mock their pride in their spotless uniforms and caps, and not the way they looked insolently in his direction as they ordered their cafés au lait. Not for the first time Louverture wondered if he should have stayed in Saint-Domingue.
The gardiens stagieres gave a cry as another of their number entered the café, but instead of heading for their table he approached Louverture. As he neared, Louverture recognized him: Pelletier, a runner, who, despite being younger than the just-graduated bunch across the room, had already seen a great deal more than they.
"Excuse me, sir,” Pelletier said. Though it was early, sweat had already drawn a thick line across the band of his cap: he must have run all the way from the Cabildo. “Commandant Trudeau needs to see you right away."
Louverture nodded, glanced at his watch: it was three eighty-five, almost time to start work anyway. “Thank you, Pelletier,” he said; the young man's face brightened at the use of his name. “My coffee and beignets just arrived, and it seems I won't have time to enjoy them; why don't you take a moment to rest?” He reached into his pocket, dropped four deci-francs in a careful pile on the table.
"Thank you, sir,” Pelletier said; he took off his cap, revealing a thick bristle of sweat-soaked blond hair.
Louverture tapped his own cap in reply, headed for the west exit of the Café du Monde; he lingered there for a moment, just out of sight, watched as Pelletier struggled to decide whether to sit at the table Louverture had just vacated or join the group of young gardiens who were, assuming that out of sight meant out of hearing, now making sniggering comments about café au lait and Creole rice. When Pelletier chose the empty table, Louverture smiled to himself and stepped out onto Danton Street.
It had grown hotter, appreciably, in the time since he had arrived at the café; such people as were about clung to the shade like lizards, loitering under the awnings of the building where the Pasteur Brewery made its tasteless beer. Louverture crossed the street at a run, dodging the constant flow of velocipedes, and braced himself for the sun-bleached walk across Descartes Square. He walked past the statue of the Goddess of Reason, with her torch of inquiry and book of truth; the shadow of her torch reached out to the edge of the square, where stenciled numbers marked the ten hours of the day. He doffed his cap to her as always, then gratefully reached the shadows of the colonnade that fronted the Cabildo, under the inscription that read RATIO SUPER FERVEO.
"Commandant Trudeau wishes to see you, sir,” the gardien at the desk said. The stern portrait of Jacques Hébert on the wall behind glowered down at them.
Louverture nodded, went up the stairs to Trudeau's office. Inside he saw Trudeau at his desk, looking over a piece of paper; Officier de la Paix Principal Clouthier was standing nearby.
"Louverture, good to see you,” Trudeau said. His sharp features and high forehead reminded those who met him of Julius Caesar; modestly, Trudeau underlined the resemblance by placing a bust of the Roman emperor on his desk. “I'm sorry to call you in early, but an important case has come up, something I wanted you to handle personally."
"Of course, sir. What is it?"
Trudeau passed the paper to him. “What do you make of this?” It was a sheet of A4 paper, on which were written the words Elle meurt la treiziéme.
"'She dies on the thirteenth,'” Louverture read. “This is a photo-stat. There is very little else I can say about it."
"Physical Sciences has the original,” Clouthier put in. His round face was redder than usual, with the heat; where Trudeau let his hair grow in long waves, Clouthier kept his cut short to the skull, like a man afraid of lice. “They barely consented to making two copies, one for us and one for the Graphologist."
"And Physical Sciences will tell you it is a sheet of paper such as can be bought at any stationer's,” Louverture said, “and the ink is everyday ink, and the envelope—if they remembered to examine the envelope—was sealed with ordinary glue. They will not tell you what the letter smells like, or the force with which the envelope was sealed, because these things cannot be measured."
"Which is why we need you,” Trudeau said. “Concentrate on the text for the moment: the other parts will fall into place in time."
"I take it there was no ransom demand?” Louverture said; Trudeau nodded. That was why they had called him, of course: his greatest successes had been in finding the logic behind crimes that seemed, to others, to be irrational. Crimes they thought a little black blood made him better able to solve.
"No daughters of prominent families missing, either, so far as we know,” Clouthier said. “We have gardiens stagieres canvassing them now."
Louverture smiled, privately, at the thought of the group at the café being called away on long, hot velocipede rides around the city. “Of course, the families of kidnap victims often choose not to inform the police—though rationally, they have much better chances with us involved. Still, I do not think that is the case here: if a kidnapper told the family not to involve the police, why the letter to us? Tell me, Commandant, to whom was the letter addressed? Did it come by mail or was it delivered by hand?"
"By hand,” Clouthier said before Trudeau could answer. “Pinned on one of the flames of Reason's torch—a direct challenge to us."
"Strange, though, that they should give us so much time to respond,” Trudeau mused. “The thirteenth of Fructidor is just under two décades away. Why so much warning? It seems irrational."
"And let him think he's cowed us?” Clouthier said.
"The Corps de Commande is not cowed,” Trudeau said gently. “We judge, sanely and rationally, if something is an accident or a crime; should it be a crime, we take the most logical course of action appropriate. But in this case, Officier Louverture, I think we must respond. If you are correct, ignoring this person would only lead him to do more in hopes of getting a response from us. If you are incorrect, then we certainly must take action, do you agree?"
"Of course, Commandant,” Louverture said.
"Very good. I have the Lombrosologist working on a composite sketch; once you have findings from him, Graphology, and Physical Sciences, the investigation is yours. I expect daily reports."
Louverture nodded, saluted the two men, and stepped out into the hall. Clouthier closed the heavy live-oak door after he left, and Louverture could hear out his name being spoken three times in the minute he stood there. He hurried down the steps to the cool basement where the scientific services were and went into the Lombrosology department, knocking on the door as he opened it.
"Allard, what do you have for me?” he called.
"Your patience center is sorely underdeveloped,” a voice said from across the room. “Along with your minuscule amatory faculty, it makes for a singularly misshapen skull."
The laboratory was a mess, as always; labeled busts on every shelf and table, and skulls in such profusion that without Allard's cheerful disposition the place would have seemed like a charnel house. Instead it felt more like a child's playroom, the effect magnified by the scientist's system of color-coding the skulls: a dab of red paint for executed criminals, green for natural deaths, and a cheery bright blue for suicides. In the corner of the room, Allard sat at the only desk with open space on it, carefully measuring a Lombroso bust with a pair of calipers and recording the results.