Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 115

by Neil Clarke

  I looked at Winter. His face had gone slack, except for his mouth: he looked as though he were biting down on something hard.

  “He’s going to cut the other ones, too,” he said. He didn’t sound disbelieving or sad or even angry; more like he was saying something everyone knew was true, like It’ll snow soon or Tomorrow’s Sunday. “He’ll pay the twenty thousand dollar fine, just like he did down in Kennebunkport, he’ll wait and do it in the middle of the night when I’m not here. And the trees will be gone.”

  “No he will not,” said Vala. Her voice was nearly as calm as Winter’s. There was a subdued roar as the motorboat’s engine turned over, and the Boston Whaler shot away from the dock, towards the Ice Queen.

  “No,” Vala said again, and she stooped and picked up a rock. A small gray rock, just big enough to fit inside her fist, one side of it encrusted with barnacles. She straightened and stared at the ocean, her eyes no longer sky-blue but the pure deep gray of a stone that’s been worn smooth by the sea, with no pupil in them; and shining like water in the sun.

  “Skammastu peî, Thomas Tierney. Farthu til fjandanns!” she cried, and threw the rock towards the water. “Farthu! Låttu peog hverfa!”

  I watched it fly through the air, then fall, hitting the beach a long way from the waterline with a small thud. I started to look at Vala, and stopped.

  From the water came a grinding sound, a deafening noise like thunder; only this was louder than a thunderclap and didn’t last so long, just a fraction of a second. I turned and shaded my eyes, staring out to where the Boston Whaler arrowed towards Tierney’s yacht. A sudden gust of wind stung my eyes with spray; I blinked, then blinked again in amazement.

  A few feet from the motorboat a black spike of stone shadowed the water. Not a big rock—it might have been a dolphin’s fin, or a shark’s, but it wasn’t moving.

  And it hadn’t been there just seconds before. It had never been there, I knew that. I heard a muffled shout, then the frantic whine of the motorboat’s engine being revved too fast—and too late.

  With a sickening crunch, the Boston Whaler ran onto the rock. Winter yelled in dismay as Alford’s orange-clad figure was thrown into the water. For a second Thomas Tierney remained upright, his arms flailing as he tried to grab at Alford. Then, as though a trap door opened beneath him, he dropped through the bottom of the boat and disappeared.

  Winter raced towards the water. I ran after him.

  “Stay with Vala!” Winter grabbed my arm. Alford’s orange life vest gleamed from on top of the rock where he clung. On board the Ice Queen, someone yelled through a megaphone, and I could see another craft, a little inflated Zodiac, drop into the gray water. Winter shook me fiercely. “Justin! I said, stay with her—”

  He looked back towards the beach. So did I.

  Vala was nowhere to be seen. Winter dropped my arm, but before he could say anything there was a motion among the rocks.

  And there was Vala, coming into sight like gathering fog. Even from this distance I could see how her eyes glittered, blue-black like a winter sky; and I could tell she was smiling.

  The crew of the Ice Queen rescued Alford quickly, long before the Coast Guard arrived. Winter and I stayed on the beach for several hours, while the search and rescue crews arrived and the Navy Falcons flew by overhead, in case Tierney came swimming to shore, or in case his body washed up.

  But it never did. That spar of rock ripped a huge hole in the Boston Whaler, a bigger hole even than you’d think; but no one blamed Alford. All you had to do was take a look at the charts and see that there had never been a rock there, ever. Though it’s there now, I can tell you that. I see it every day when I look out from the windows at Winter’s house.

  I never asked Vala about what happened. Winter had a grim expression when we finally went back to his place late that afternoon. Thomas Tierney was a multi-millionaire, remember, and even I knew there would be an investigation and interviews and TV people.

  But everyone on board the Ice Queen had witnessed what happened, and so had Al Alford; and while they’d all seen Winter arguing with Tierney, there’d been no exchange of blows, not even any pushing, and no threats on Winter’s part—Alford testified to that. The King’s Pine was gone, but two remained; and a bunch of people from the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club and places like that immediately filed a lawsuit against Tierney’s estate, to have all the property on the old Packard Farm turned into a nature preserve.

  Which I thought was good, but it still won’t bring the other tree back.

  One day after school, a few weeks after the boat sank, I was helping to put the finishing touches on Winter’s house. Just about everything was done, except for the fireplace—there were still piles of rocks everywhere and plastic buckets full of mortar and flat stones for the hearth.

  “Justin.” Vala appeared behind me, so suddenly I jumped. “Will you come with me, please?”

  I stood and nodded. She looked really pregnant now, and serious.

  But happy, too. In the next room we could hear Winter working with a sander. Vala looked at me and smiled, put a finger to her lips then touched her finger to my chin. This time, it didn’t ache with cold.

  “Come,” she said.

  Outside it was cold and gray, the middle of October but already most of the trees were bare, their leaves torn away by a storm a few nights earlier. We headed for the woods behind the house, past the quince bush, its branches stripped of leaves and all the hummingbirds long gone to warmer places. Vala wore her same bright blue rubber shoes and Winter’s rolled-up jeans.

  But even his big sweatshirt was too small now to cover her belly, so my mother had knit her a nice big sweater and given her a warm plaid coat that made Vala look even more like a kid, except for her eyes and that way she would look at me sometimes and smile, as though we both knew a secret. I followed her to where the path snaked down to the beach, and tried not to glance over at the base of the cliff. The King’s Pine had finally fallen and wedged between the crack in the huge rocks there, so that now seaweed was tangled in its dead branches, and all the rocks were covered with yellow pine needles.

  “Winter has to go into town for a few hours,” Vala said, as though answering a question. “I need you to help me with something.”

  We reached the bottom of the path and picked our way across the rocks, until we reached the edge of the shore. A few gulls flew overhead, screaming, and the wind blew hard against my face and bare hands. I’d followed Vala outside without my coat. When I looked down, I saw that my fingers were bright red. But I didn’t feel cold at all.

  “Here,” murmured Vala.

  She walked, slowly, to where a gray rock protruded from the gravel beach. It was roughly the shape and size of an arm.

  Then I drew up beside Vala, and saw that it really was an arm—part of one, anyway, made of smooth gray stone, like marble only darker, but with no hand and broken just above the elbow. Vala stood and looked at it, her lips pursed; then stooped to pick it up.

  “Will you carry this, please?” she said.

  I didn’t say anything, just held out my arms, as though she were going to fill them with firewood. When she set the stone down I flinched—not because it was heavy, though it was, but because it looked exactly like a real arm. I could even see where the veins had been, in the crook of the elbow, and the wrinkled skin where the arm had bent.

  “Justin,” Vala said. I looked up to see her blue-black eyes fixed on me. “Come on. It will get dark soon.”

  I followed her as she walked slowly along the beach, like someone looking for sea glass or sand dollars. Every few feet she would stop and pick something up—a hand, a foot, a long piece of stone that was most of a leg—then turn and set it carefully into my arms. When I couldn’t carry anymore, she picked up one last small rock—a clenched fist—and made her way slowly back to the trail.

  We made several more trips that day, and for several days after that. Each time, we would return to the house and Vala w
ould fit the stones into the unfinished fireplace, covering them with other rocks so that no one could see them. Or if you did see one, you’d think maybe it was just part of a broken statue, or a rock that happened to look like a foot, or a shoulder blade, or the cracked round back of a head.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask Vala about it. But I remembered how the Boston Whaler had looked when the Coast Guard dragged it onshore, with a small ragged gash in its bow, and a much, much bigger hole in the bottom, as though something huge and heavy had crashed through it. Like a meteor, maybe. Or a really big rock, or like if someone had dropped a granite statue of a man into the boat.

  Not that anyone had seen that happen. I told myself that maybe it really was a statue—maybe a statue had fallen off a ship, or been pushed off a cliff or something.

  But then one day we went down to the beach, the last day actually, and Vala made me wade into the shallow water. She pointed at something just below the surface, something round and white, like a deflated soccer ball.

  Only it wasn’t a soccer ball. It was Thomas Tierney’s head: the front of it, anyway, the one part Vala hadn’t already found and built into the fireplace.

  His face.

  I pulled it from the water and stared at it. A green scum of algae covered his eyes, which were wide and staring. His mouth was open so you could see where his tongue had been before it broke off, leaving a jagged edge in the hole of his screaming mouth.

  “Loksins,” said Vala. She took it from me easily, even though it was so heavy I could barely hold it. “At last . . . ”

  She turned and walked back up to the house.

  That was three months ago. Winter’s house is finished now, and Winter lives in it, along with Winter’s wife.

  And their baby. The fireplace is done, and you can hardly see where there is a round broken stone at the very top, which if you squint and look at it in just the right light, like at night when only the fire is going, looks kind of like a face. Winter is happier than I’ve ever seen him, and my mom and I come over a lot, to visit him and Vala and the baby, who is just a few weeks old now and so cute you wouldn’t believe it, and tiny, so tiny I was afraid to hold her at first but Vala says not to worry—I may be like her big brother now but someday, when the baby grows up, she will be the one to always watch out for me. They named her Gerda, which means Protector; and for a baby she is incredibly strong.

  First published in Wizards: Magical Tales From the Masters of Modern Fantasy, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, 2007.

  About the Author

  Elizabeth Hand is the bestselling author of thirteen award-winning novels and four collections of short fiction. Her critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” have been compared to those of Patricia Highsmith. She is a longtime critic and book reviewer whose work appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, the Boston Review, among many others, and writes a regular column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her books and short fiction have been translated into numerous languages and optioned for film and television. She teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London, where she is working on the fourth Cass Neary novel, The Book of Lamps and Banners.

  Silver Machine:

  Hawkwind’s Space Rock Journey

  throughout Science Fiction and Fantasy

  Jason Heller

  From Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds to Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth, a handful of music albums have adapted entire works of science fiction/fantasy. This month, the long-running British space-rock band Hawkwind will do the same with the release of The Machine Stops—an album that musically interprets E. M. Forster’s dystopian novelette of the same name, published in 1909.

  Although Forster was better known for his realistic, contemporaneous novels, most famously A Passage to India, the Nobel-nominated author imbued “The Machine Stops” with a prescience that rivals the most forward-thinking science fiction classics. In it, the post-apocalyptic civilization of the future has been driven underground; people interact virtually through electronic devices and rely on the omnipotent Machine for all their needs.

  Not only does Forster’s screed against technocracy bear chilling parallels to the most pessimistic views of the Internet today, it’s perfect material for Hawkwind. Since forming in the London neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove in 1969—sparked in part by Pink Floyd’s spacey songs of the ’60s like “Astronomy Domine,” “Interstellar Overdrive,” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”—the cult outfit has been one of rock music’s foremost champions of SFF.

  Their best-known song, 1972’s British Top-Ten single “Silver Machine,” turned hypnotic, brutally psychedelic riffs into a vessel for extraterrestrial exploration, one that “flies sideways through time”—part of a “shamanistic space ritual,” as Rob Young calls it in Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, a description that echoes the title of Hawkwind’s epochal 1973 album Space Ritual Live Alive in Liverpool and London.

  As willfully primitive as Hawkwind sounded, they incorporated cutting-edge synthesizers, playing them with rudimentary gusto rather than trying to make them sound neoclassical like so many of their progressive rock peers, such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. As Dave Brock—co-founder of Hawkwind and the band’s only consistent member throughout its existence—said in 1990, “I prefer to be a barbarian with the machines as it were, and just muck around.”

  That mucking around with emerging technology produced some of the most visceral yet cerebral rock ‘n’ roll ever made—a volatile alchemy that influenced electronic music as well as punk and heavy metal. That the band’s bassist and occasional lead vocalist in the early ’70s was Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister—who would go on to front the legendary metal trio Motörhead before passing away in December of 2015—certainly didn’t hurt in that regard.

  Hawkwind isn’t the first band to have paid musical tribute to Forster’s The Machine Stops: The British jazz-pop group Level 42 released a song in 1983 titled “The Machine Stops” whose lyrics are based on the story. And Hawkwind’s The Machine Stops isn’t the first time Brock and crew have devoted an entire record to the work of a single science fiction/fantasy author. The Chronicle of the Black Sword, released in 1985, draws from the Eternal Champion stories of Michael Moorcock, specifically the characters Elric of Melniboné and Jerry Cornelius, with Moorcock receiving a songwriting credit for his lyrics on the track “Sleep of a Thousand Tears.” Ten years prior, Hawkwind plumbed the same source for much of their 1975 album Warrior on the Edge of Time; Moorcock’s concepts and poetry are incorporated into four of the record’s songs, including the eerie spoken-word track “The Wizard Blew His Horn.”

  It only made sense that Moorcock’s words and ideas wound up on Hawkwind records. The author was not only a fan of Hawkwind—first seeing them perform in the early ’70s with one of his New Worlds cohorts, the young M. John Harrison, in tow—he wound up playing with Hawkwind. Moorcock also lived in Ladbroke Grove, then a melting pot of rock’s underground subculture, and befriended Brock, Nik Turner, Robert Calvert, and the rest of Hawkwind. Before long, Moorcock was collaborating with the band, not only bringing lyrics to the band but joining them from time to time onstage.

  The track “The Black Corridor” from Space Ritual—an eerie, spoken-word piece laden with echoes and cosmic doom—was adapted from Moorcock’s 1969 SF novel of the same name (a collaboration with his then-wife Hilary Bailey); on the same album, “Sonic Attack,” was an original set of Moorcock lyrics recited by Calvert through oscillating, disorienting effects. “Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,” Calvert warns, and he doesn’t sound like he’s joking.

  Moorcock also formed his own group called Michael Moorcock & the Deep Fix, aided by various Hawkwind personnel (including Simon House, who would go on to play with rock’s
most successful exponent of SFF music, David Bowie, not to mention contributing the memorable violin part to one of best SF-themed songs of the ’80s, Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science”). As Moorcock remembers in London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction, “I think it was Dave Brock who encouraged me to do a demo of two songs I’d written, ‘Dodgem Dude’ and ‘Starcruiser’”—which led directly to The Deep Fix getting a recording contract of their own.

  The Deep Fix’s resulting album, 1975’s New Worlds Fair, was named after New Worlds, the revolutionary SFF magazine Moorcock edited; that year he played banjo on Calvert’s second solo album, Lucky Leif and the Longships. Moorcock went on to play guitar on Calvert’s next solo album, 1981’s Hype. Also in ’81, he wrote lyrics for four songs on Hawkwind’s album Sonic Attack, one of them a revamp of the Sonic Ritual track.

  Calvert, Moorcock’s closest friend in Hawkwind, left the band in 1979, suffering from bipolar disorder, which impaired his ability to make music collectively. Moorcock’s association with Hawkwind effectively ended three years later with his lyrics for Choose Your Masques. The 1982 album also featured Calvert’s last set of lyrics for the group, leftover from 1978 and titled “Fahrenheit 451” (based on the canonical Ray Bradbury novel). Moorcock’s association with the band continued, including a memorable concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1985—a lavish stage reenactment of the Elric storyline from The Chronicle of the Black Sword—during which Moorcock himself appeared onstage. In Ian Abrahams’ Hawkwind: Sonic Assassins, Moorcock recounts, “I distributed a bunch of Elric books, throwing them into the audience, and was shocked when people tore them to bits trying to get to them!”

  Hawkwind wasn’t the only rock band Moorcock wrote for. His lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult aren’t as numerous as his output for Hawkwind—but they do boast the BÖC song “Veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars,” which appear in the animated SFF film Heavy Metal. That said, the song reuses a Moorcock line from one of Hawkwind’s earlier, Eternal Champion-themed tracks, “Standing at the Edge.”