No more colorful, perhaps, than the traditions upheld in the veneration of any of these tricksters, although quite probably more grotesque, and considerably more infamous, is the custom in the cult of the Carrion Boy toward ritual self-mutilation.
As always it is difficult to ascertain whether it was the custom that shaped the way of life of its practitioners, or the way of life that shaped the custom; puzzlingly, some few seem to spring up like daisies on a slag-spit, self-engendered and unreasoning. This is one of those.
Owing most probably to the striking lack of sheltering features in the landscape where these people chose to settle, a large fraction of their cultural experience was warfare: preparation, avoidance, aftermath, glorification. Upon reaching physical maturity, all young men and women (with the exception of those pregnant, nursing, or convalescent) entered into a combat training regimen that only the most charitable would term rigorous. At the culmination of the training, those whose lives it had not claimed were made to choose a part of their own bodies for dedication to the Carrion Boy in a ritual taking place under that constellation’s ascendancy. The most common form this dedication took was amputation, but simple mangling of the flesh was also widely used. All these gentle ministrations were performed with the aid of song (“Carrion Boy Feeds the Crows” was a particular favorite) and vast quantities of scorchweed wine.
One would soon have little doubt whether one’s offering was deemed acceptable to the Boy: accounts still survive of bodies found turned literally inside out, bodies found tied literally into knots, bodies hanged from points quite inaccessible to human agency (see fig. 5 for artist’s interpretation).
Similar formations in other charts: the Scapegoat (Stairwell Chart, NQ2), the Juggler (Flotsam Chart, NQ2).
The slow burn of autumn congealed into winter, the edges of the map grew sticky with apple-juice and the dirt from underneath Wasp’s bitten nails, and the ghost was getting restless. “This is not a map to walk by, idiot,” it told her, standing by in silence as she lay out the saltlick and the apples and the little dish of blood. As she crammed ghosts into jars and took them back to the hut where she paced the tiny room of it nightlong, four paces by four, and questioned them. Each with its story of a long drop on a short rope, or a fall down the stairs, or a half-dozen bullets sinking themselves, wet as kisses, in its erstwhile flesh. Or of a strange deep sick-smelling sleep, stalked by the dreams of dreams. Or nothing. “Or can you fly now? It will lead you nowhere.”
Wasp said nothing. Not when the ghost berated her, not when the snow caved her roof in, not when she neglected her duties at the shrine and the dogs caught her at it and went to fetch the Catchkeep-priest, and the Catchkeep-priest came to lash her raw and lick the blood away. Blasphemy, for she was Catchkeep’s puppet, her blood the blood of stars. Even as the priest hissed his wet breath down her neck the dogs were tonguing up that holy blood from the floor where it had spattered. Half-dazed with pain and rage, she thought she saw one lift its head and smirk.
She could feel Catchkeep rising up in her, all teeth. Wasp steeled her mind and shoved her down. She’d free herself.
“I had to lie,” she told the ghost. “I thought I needed you to teach me how to read the map. So I could. So I.” Something tightened in her throat and she ground down on it hard. “But it’s just junk. A relic for the idiot Songkeepers. A few seconds of heat.” And she tossed it on the fire. “There’s nothing past here,” she said, eyes averted. “Only more.”
One evening she caught the ghost scratching at her door like a cat. She recalled how she had first seen it, walking down a hall she could not see, turning doorknobs. Even as she watched, it began to pace that hall again, two steps from her own door to the wall of the hut, then straight out through the wall. Sticking her head outside, she could count out twelve more paces in the snow before the ghost slammed into empty air at the end of its tether like a bird into a window. When its circuit snapped it back, the snow where it had walked was left unmarked by any prints. Until she fell asleep she watched it pace out through the wall into the snow and be returned, one arm outstretched, one hand rattling at locks that were not there.
Where the last light hit the ghost, it shone straight through.
The Bonesetter
Area: 442.122 sq. deg. (appx. 1.07%)
from the Railway Station Chart: spray paint, red brick Spring
Thirteen stars: four major, nine minor, and barely visible through its pall of ash (best seen, in fact, in a wind too foul to allow for comfortable viewing: it scuds the cover sideways off the stars, like prying up a scab).
This constellation is a strange one. Crouched low on the horizon, hulking and spidery at once, it tiptoes hunchbacked through the fallen cities, downbent as though searching, by which it earns itself the alternate appellation Ragpicker (the best extant example being found in the Lighthouse Chart, fig. 6); sinister yet oddly delicate, its stars are among the last to prick the darkling sky, among the first to be annihilated by the coming of the sun.
As is also the case with the One Who Got Away (see above), few clues survive regarding the figure behind this constellation. Unique to it, however, is that whatever evidence might have remained seems to have undergone systematic eradication, for reasons only guessed at, by people of whom nothing is known save their creation of the chart via which this constellation reaches our notice.
As always, uncertainty is hypothesis’s breeding-ground: here the theorists swarm like flies to carrion, all too eager to spawn fresh execrations upon the heretofore unsullied lap of scholarly intent. They hold that this evidence was destroyed out of pure fear of the Bonesetter’s return to earth out of the sky, where up until that point he had been chained, like many a chastised fellow-trickster from the stories of the Well-Before, by the very stars that outline him to mortal eyes.
They also hold that it is from this trickster that we get the songs “Marryings and Buryings” and “Scavengers’ Circus,” as well as the expression “a bonesetter’s gambit,” still in use today to describe apparently anything from anodyne to idiocy. But as the vast majority of these theories share an irritating tendency to go out on a limb and then saw it off behind them, all we can rely upon with any certainty is the chart itself; and, tricksterish in its own way, its lips are sealed.
Similar formations in other charts: the Ragpicker (Mural Chart, NQ1).
When the salt had worn it to translucence and a faint smell of copper, the ghost finally began to talk, though it told her nothing she did not already know. She’d netted enough ghosts by that point, left enough of them huddled in their terror on her shelf and telling each other tales of elsewhere to keep their longing for escape alive, to know just what it was about the map that drew it. Listening to it now she could almost see the pale ghost-roads that linked the stars; could almost see it walking them, both feet freed, heart light, and not alone.
She wondered after the other ghost, the one it sought. Had Wasp salted that ghost, caught it, crammed it in a jar, reeled its memories out hand over hand, and dumped it out amid the scorchweed and windfalls to wend its way back to its wandering? Or had it gone on, the way the tales said that they could go on, and left Wasp’s captive ghost behind? Even if she freed this ghost now, would it go on chasing the other as a dog chases its tail, or the sun the moon: reaching always, all unreached?
At least it has something important to search for, she thought. All I can think of to look for is a way out.
Wasp blinked. For a fraction of a second she had seen something like a dream. In it, a daisy-chain of Archivists went back and back and back, an ancient hut their jar, their holiness shackling them as sure as salt. She had forgotten what it was she sought before she only sought escape. If she’d sought anything at all.
The daisy-chain could knot her up into it and continue on. Or she could end it here.
Before she knew what she was doing, the knife was in her fist. She crossed the tiny room to where the ghost sat slumped. Kicked the salt clear from its feet.
Held out her hand.
It trusted neither her grin nor the glint in her eyes, but got up all the same.
The Archivist
Area: 65.002 sq. deg. (appx. 0.16%)
from the Ragtree Chart: plant-based pigment, human skin Winter
Four stars, all minor: hardly enough to reasonably discern the image of what this tiny grouping is meant to represent; namely, a woman with a knife in one hand and a sort of scroll in the other, frozen in the act of stepping forward.
This trickster’s status as culture-hero is provisional – her motives are dubious, her intentions suspect, the queues to her shrines no longer than the trails of corpses that rattle along in her wake through a half-dozen tales – but persistently widespread.
What makes it particularly strange is that she seems to have played culture-hero to the very spirits of the deceased.
If this woman truly was, as a fairly large body of conjecture suggests, one of the Archivists, the historian-priestesses of the bitch-god Catchkeep (see above), she would have been an extremely capable fighter, trained since early childhood to single combat and little else; and it is true her skybound avatar does hold her knife point-out, in brawling stance, against the vacuum of space.
But why the scroll? These priestesses are well known to us for their striking methodology, half clever, half quaint: while the quantities of information they gleaned from their informant ghosts was massive, nothing was committed to paper, for paper had they none. It is a reasonable supposition that to a one they were in fact illiterate. So this constellation, gazing blankly out at us from a face it does not have, begs the question – why should the ghosts have borne this woman any loyalty at all? Had she gone turncoat? Shirked her bound and holy duty to enslave them? Flouted Catchkeep’s law?
The only clue we have can be found in a strange fragmented text discovered with the Ragtree Chart, interred beneath that tree itself. (The tree in question is a crab apple, and a curious one. Thrice the size it ought to be, at one point it appears to have grown up through a sort of hut, its footprint approximately four paces by four, constructed of automobile parts and leather and stones: most of the leather is long gone, but the framework that once supported it, in minor part, remains.)
The text itself is in grievous disrepair, scrawled on a few palmsized fragments of scorched paper crushed into a glass bottle of palest green. Interestingly, it appears to have been penned by two different hands: first in a dire penmanship, blocky and childish, which peters out as though in great exhaustion midway through; the writing that continues after, while legible and even flowing, gives the observer the unmistakable impression that its scribe was able to maintain only through great concentration only the most tenuous grasp on his writing implement (which appears to have been a pin or needle dipped in blood) – as though he, or it, were made mostly of air.
If we are reading the text in its proper order, it tells us how an Archivist of Catchkeep, name of Wasp, in a total upheaval of all of the ritual structures of Catchkeep’s worship, challenged her keeper/overseer in single combat and bested him. Gravely wounded, she used the last of her strength to free all of the dead man’s captive ghosts and destroy every last one of the Archivist tools (see fig. 7 for a replica of a typical field kit) by which those ghosts and others had been hunted and enslaved.
It is not known what became of her – whether she died in her blood on the dirt floor of the priest of Catchkeep’s house or else somehow healed her wounds and went on to become the sort of patron saint for ghosts the evidence suggests.
In the end, every wildly disparate theory sinks its roots in the same pot: the proto-tale rather uninspiredly entitled “Archivist Wasp Frees the Ghosts.” Wherein, after destroying Catchkeep’s priest and all his tools, our mortally wounded heroine conjures Catchkeep herself down out of the sky and tricks the dog-god into suffering the newly-released ghosts to climb up upon Her back. From there they are borne, clinging on like barnacles, aloft into the night. Meantime, our retired Archivist and a single anonymous ghost (though some sources insist that there were two) remain to see that none are left behind, vowing to rejoin the others when their work on earth is done.
And if they’re not there yet, as every version of the story always ends, they are here still.
VALENTINES
Shira Lipkin
1.
The waiter’s name is Valentine. He has long, slim fingers, and he writes down my order instead of pretending to commit it to memory. I like that, his pen on the paper bringing forth one simple thing about me. My lunch. Just a tiny fragment of information. I honor him by doing the same. “The waiter’s name is Valentine,” I write in my battered notebook, “and he has long, slim fingers.”
Information is sacred. I don’t remember why, or who told me. But I know that information is sacred, so I write it down, scraps of knowledge and observations. I used to write in leatherbound journals with elegant heavy pens, but the fetish for elegance has fallen by the wayside in my rush to commit everything to paper. Now I use cheap marbled composition books, purchased by the dozen. The pen is still important, though. It must write in smooth lines of black, not catch on the page. There is too much to capture.
I order chai tea and butternut squash soup. I write that down as well, just after Valentine does. I watch him walk to the kitchen, slender and graceful, and I wonder what Valentine does when he is not refilling coffee mugs. I wonder if he dances. I write that down: “Perhaps Valentine dances.” I watch him flirt with the barista, their movements around each other a careful ballet of hot espresso and soup and witty banter, and I curl up in my armchair and wrap my hands around the mug of tea when Valentine brings it to me with his usual smile and nod. I observe. I record.
I write on the bus, on my way home. I write about the bus driver, and about the woman sitting across from me, wearing a too-heavy jacket (“perhaps she is sick”). I write about the barista and the patterns of her movement around the large copper espresso machine, the way she admires her reflection. When I get home, I carefully tear the pages from my notebook, and I tear fact from fact, isolating each bit of information, and I file them accordingly in the rows of small boxes nailed to my walls. Miniature pigeon coops filled with paper instead of birds. Facts. Ways to build the world. I copy things over when necessary, when I must file “perhaps Valentine dances” under both Valentine and Speculation. I must separate speculation, after all. My shreds and fragments of information comprise my image of Valentine (for example). I cannot allow speculation to color that. I can allow his grace, but not the possibility of his dancing.
With enough data, maybe I can figure out the world.
2.
The waiter’s name is Val. His hands are stained a burnished yellow from nicotine, and are guitar-callused. He is bored and impatient, waiting for his shift to end. He does not write down my order – which is fair because it’s just coffee and blackberry pie, and the pie is right at hand. He slices it and slaps it on the plate; it falls over just a bit, slides, and blackberry oozes out onto the plain white plate, the color almost shocking. I write that down, and the way the steam dances over the coffee mug. The mug is smooth and unadorned, the same bone-white, and the coffee is rich and dark and bitter. The diner is a diner, no more and no less, retro-50s tube with aproned waitresses and meat loaf and pie and Val, leaning forward by the register, staring at the door. Waiting for something else.
He talks to me. I think out of sheer boredom – I’m the only customer at the bar, the only person here alone. His dark hair is frosted blond at the ends, and his eyes are seaglass-blue. He is in a band, but he worries that now that the guys have day jobs, they’ll stop playing music. He doesn’t think he’s good enough to go solo. He shrugs a lot – he has developed his own fake-casual rolling shrug, a silent “whatever”. He asks why I care, and I tell him that these are the things that make him *him*. That we are collections of information. We are what we are because our dog died or our dad left or we won the lottery or whatever. And I like to figu
re out what people are by examining what they’re made of.
When I close my eyes, I imagine Val made of paper, all the little strips of paper I’ll file later under “music” and “loss” and “resentment,” cross-reference him with others, see if I can figure out “loss.”
See if I can figure out data loss.
When I open my eyes, Val has gone on to the next customer. I eat my pie and write.
3.
The waiter’s name is V. It’s a new restaurant, sci-fi themed; all of the waiters have names like Klaatu or Ripley. I point out that V is a series, not a character, and he laughs. “No one remembers character names from V. But everyone remembers the show. Everyone remembers the lizards.”
He writes down my order, and I write down that everyone remembers V. I will file it under “television” and “things everyone remembers”. “Things everyone remembers” is one of my bigger boxes; it is not nearly full. Not nearly as full as it needs to be.
Data loss. I do not remember the things everyone remembers. And I need to. In order to build a self, I need a foundation. So I write everything down, and I am always hoping that someone will let slip one of the things “everyone knows” or “everyone remembers.” V and the Challenger explosion and 9/11 and the Smurfs. Sometimes when I get home, after I file the day’s newly gathered information, I take the slips out of that box and spread them out on the floor to subcategorize them. Everybody knows this about politics. Everyone remembers that song.
My food arrives, a faux-Klingon dish I’ve already forgotten the name of. I must look it up later and record it. The drink V brings is not what I ordered – it’s a neon-blue thing in a Klein bottle with dry ice fuming out of it. V grins and drapes himself over the chair beside me. “You looked like you could use it.”
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women Page 29