Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe

by Bill Fawcett

  Instead, the Cengar darted forward two steps before turning. His axe came up and around, parrying the lunge of a blade that had doubled in length. He knocked it high, and then drove toward the warmage. He closed fast, but Praetor leaped away more quickly.

  The warmage hunched in a conventional guard, the blade having returned to its scabbarded length. “Yes, so very quick.” The gold ring flashed. “And now I am quicker.”

  Praetor closed in, his blade aimed at Kellach’s heart. The Cengar brought the axe up to parry, but the blade’s tip curled back. The parry missed. The sword’s tip then snapped down and thrust toward Kellach’s belly.

  The large man twisted to the left. The blade skittered over ring mail before catching in a link. The armor popped. The blade’s metal shifted and curled in toward Kellach’s guts. It pierced flesh, burning as if it were red hot. It sought to go deeper.

  Kellach kicked out with his right foot, catching the warmage high on the thigh. The booted foot broke Praetor’s momentum and knocked him back a step. The sword came free, the tip bloodied. The warmage smiled at that.

  The Cengar didn’t give him a chance to decide if drawing first blood was an ill omen or good. Kellach swept his axe in a cross-cut blow, waist-high. It should have split the warmage up from down. It would have, save that the axe struck the magick box at Praetor’s right hip. The axe crushed the buckle and severed the tongue. Still, the blow’s force pitched Praetor halfway across the dais. He landed heavily on his knees and caught himself with his hands.

  His sword skittered farther away, to the dais’s edge behind him.

  Kellach made to spring at his foe. Praetor glanced up. He gestured. The ring glowed. The puddle beneath Kellach’s foot froze slick. The large man slipped, smashing his left knee into the stone. The jolt carried up into his hip and numbed the entire leg.

  “A slip and a fall. How ignominious. Felled by magick. By rights, I should finish you with it.” The warmage struggled to his feet and retrieved his sword. “But you are a warrior, so a warrior’s death I’ll grant you.”

  Kellach growled and brandished the axe.

  Hellish light flared from the sword’s runes. “I’ll cleave through it and through you.”

  Yet before Praetor had advanced a single step, a golden fireball shot past Kellach. It blasted the warmage from the dais and out into the lake. As Praetor splashed down, the dying gold man gave out with a satisfied grunt. It tailed into a dying rasp.

  The warmage sank beneath the dark water.

  Kellach levered himself up and limped to the dais’s edge. He threw aside his axe as Praetor bobbed to the surface once before vanishing. At least in the water my dead leg won’t slow me.

  Praetor came up again, but this time sucked in as much water as air. Bubbles marked the spot where he went down. His gloved hand clawed through them as fingers disappeared. Kellach quickly bent, unbuckled his belt, shucked off his mail, and leaped into the lake with longknife in hand.

  The cold water was no more than a dozen feet deep, and becoming more shallow with each heartbeat. More chilling than it was the sight of Praetor, churning the bottom muck, weakly digging at his belt buckle with gloved hands. Beside him sediment swirled, being drawn through a vortex into the box at his belt. As with the mages of old, he could not lift the flood it had sucked in.

  Praetor looked up. His expression asked for mercy in equal measure with disgust at being trapped. He clearly hoped for better treatment than he’d offered.

  Kellach thrust his longknife deep through the warmage’s belly. He twisted, and then yanked it roughly free. The dying man’s hands hung suspended. The dark leakage from his wound streamed down into the box.

  Kellach peered at him for a moment. No pity, just a desire to make sure the man was truly dead. Satisfied, he stripped the gold ring off his finger and struck for the surface. As he climbed from the lake and pulled himself back up on the dais, he discovered he was not alone. Serinna had reemerged from the tunnel. She’d reached the gold man’s side. A knife lay beside her.

  Kellach recovered his axe and, dripping lake water, approached but did not intrude. The old man raised a hand and caressed the girl’s cheek. Her tears had already made the sigils on her cheeks run, but the old man gave no sign of noticing.

  She held his other hand while he yet breathed, and then a bit longer. She looked up at Kellach with red-rimmed eyes. “He waited his whole life for another like him. I was the only one who came. He killed the warmage to save me.”

  “And you brought the knife to save him.” Kellach nodded. “His act saved me. I owe him a debt.”

  “You said you owed me one, too. That didn’t stop you from leading that Yag-Ktheru here.”

  Kellach leaned heavily on his axe and rubbed at his knee. “As you asked, I convinced your parents that I would lead you off and murder you. As you asked, I followed you here to see you arrive without interruption. After you’d descended, I discovered that the warmage had tracked you.”

  “You should have killed him in his sleep.”

  “He slept.” Kellach pointed to the cave’s ceiling, where the cloak dripped like mucus. “His cloak did not. It was an evil thing. Your man here saw that.”

  “Ataldin was his name.” She kissed the old man’s hand, then laid it on his chest.

  “Will you remain here?”

  Serinna rose and spread her arms. “There no longer is a here. The sanctuary has been violated. My brethren have fled. They carry with them what they can, including the tale of what happened. They will go to other underrealms.”

  “Will you follow?”

  She thought for a moment. “The stories you told me of snowfolk among your people. Were they true? Are there cities of them who are all like me?”

  “I have never seen them. I trust those who said they have.”

  She smiled. “Is the debt you owe me sufficient to have you conduct me there?”

  “The debt to you, no.” Kellach shook his head. “The debt to Ataldin, yes.” He handed her Praetor’s ring. “As you grow into power, this may be of aid.”

  Serinna slipped it onto her right thumb. She held it up, admiring it for a moment, turning the crest inward so it would remain unseen. “Help me straighten his limbs and lay him to rest, then we are bound for these fabled cities of snowfolk.

  “It will not be an easy journey. In the land where mountains stab the sky, there are things from which I have run. Those things stand between us and our goal. I do not know if those things would fear a snowchild, but I think it is best we contrive to make certain they do.”

  Michael A. Stackpole is a New York Times bestselling author of more than forty-five novels, best known among them being Rogue Squadron and I, Jedi. He has won awards for game design, computer game design, novel writing, editing, podcasting, screenwriting, and graphic novels. He has an asteroid named after him (#165612). Because this planet lacks the means to convey him to that asteroid, he contents himself with writing, dancing, and playing indoor soccer (the latter two of which would be much easier on said asteroid).

  Tourist Trap

  A Companion Piece to “The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton” by Gene Wolfe

  MIKE RESNICK AND BARRY MALZBERG

  On Gene Wolfe: Gene has a worldview and a way of expressing it that is uniquely his own. He has never genuflected to the so-called needs of the field, but has, over the course of his admirable career, made the field genuflect to him and his unique voice. There are worse legacies.

  —Mike

  On Gene Wolfe: I’ve been reading Gene Wolfe since “Trip, Trap” appeared in an early Orbit. We began to publish at about the same time; he’s been far more successful . . . but then again I am eight years younger. His magnificent short story “Cues” was the subject of one of my earliest essays, which was published in Andrew Porter’s Algol pulp four de cadesago.

  —Barry

  I was just bringing Lame Hans his lunch when he looked up at me excitedly.

  “What do you see?” he d
emanded.

  “I see a lame man waiting for his meal,” I answered.

  He shook his head vigorously. “The game,” he said. “What about the game?”

  “Same as always,” I said. “You’re sitting in your cell, the computer is right outside it, you’re playing white, and since the computer is an empty shell, you’re playing black, too.”

  “No!” he yelled. “It moved on its own!”

  “Hans, even if it still had a brain, it’s not plugged in.”

  “I don’t care! It moved its Knight to King’s Bishop three!”

  “Hans, it hasn’t moved a damned thing since you hid poor Gretchen inside it when you and Professor Baumeister attempted to defraud the others. And we all know that she suffocated. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Just look!” yelled Lame Hans. He pushed his Queen’s Bishop forward, leaving her Rook unprotected—and while he held his hands up in the air to prove he wasn’t touching anything or leaning on the board, the Black Queen slowly slid on the diagonal and took the Rook.

  “There’s someone inside,” I said with certainty.

  “Look!” he urged me.

  I pulled out the side panel, and could see nothing, but remembering how cleverly they had concealed Gretchen, I walked around the other side, removed that panel, found that I could see clear through to the far well, and then felt around inside it. There was no one there and, of course, no mechanical brain.

  “Well?” demanded Lame Hans.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” I admitted.

  “I didn’t do anything!” he shouted at me. “The machine’s alive.”

  He pushed a Pawn forward, and the machine responded by taking it with its Knight.

  “I am the best chess player in all Bavaria,” said Lame Hans. “The machine is not only alive—it’s brilliant!”

  Brilliant, I thought, but did not say. If the machine was indeed brilliant, then why was Lame Hans in his ongoing competition ahead by one hundred and sixty games to twenty-two? Why, time and again, did the machine succumb to Knight forks and fianchettoed Bishops, stumble into doubled Pawns two games out of three? The machine had its instances, to be sure—twenty-two of them in fact— but it was impossible to conceive of it as anything other than a dull refraction of Lame Hans’s madness.

  Or so I thought. The thoughts of a jailer are not, however, profound by nature, and it is possible that I misunderstood the situation. Perhaps the brilliant Lame Hans had created a machine persona cunning enough to deliberately lose eight-ninths of the time, thereby inflating the already enormous ego of its perpetrator. Summers were hot in Bavaria, at the time of which I am writing, even hotter than they are now, a peak of solstice that fried brains and damaged reputations. The thoughts of a jailer are not to be dismissed; we see aspects of prisoners that they do not see themselves.

  “It is time for another game,” Lame Hans said deliberately. “Please redistribute the board. I will not ask you this again. If your mind is to drift, let it be when you are not in my presence.”

  Clumsily—I have never quite understood the initial posting of the thirty-two chess pieces even after all this time—I bent to the task. Lame Hans regarded me indolently, perched in the shadows of the cell. He called it his “Plato’s Cave.” Under no circumstance have I pursued this subject. It has something to do with idealization as opposed to the grim actuality furnished within the Bavarian compass, but I am not a reflective person (no jailer possibly could be and keep his position), and I leave Lame Hans to his own speculations. With some difficulty (“Queen takes her own color; Knights adjoin the Rooks on the first line,” I mumble subvocally) I completed the formation and pushed the board into proximity to the prisoner. Rubbing his hands, he contemplated the fresh formulation with delight. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Of course I am ready. Go ahead.”

  “Not this time,” Lame Hans said. “It is time now for you to play. You have the white pieces. Move.”

  The invitation was unprecedented. Hans had never before asked my participation. I admit that I looked at him with some confusion. “I don’t understand,” I said. “It is your move. Both times.”

  “This is the second series,” Lame Hans said. He moved in spindly, erratic fashion from the deep shadows to the front of his cage. “In the second series there are two participants. The previous series has reached its conclusion. It was mediated that the winner would be the first to achieve one hundred and sixty victories, and I have now done so. The machine is therefore eliminated, and it is time for you to take its place.”

  This announcement was dismaying. I barely knew the rules of chess, as I have made clear—and in the role of human, entrapped opponent, Gretchen suffocated. While I am sturdier than Gretchen and considerably less naive, I have my own disability as well as only the shakiest command of chess. “I would rather not,” I said. “This was never provided.”

  Perhaps I should explain the conditions. Bavarian tenets and folkways can be mystifying to tourists or the uninitiated. Through the years we have had occasional wavelets of visitors, some of them interested in mountain passages, others in hearty adventures in the local pubs and resorts. A few of them have been drawn by news of the legendary Lame Hans and his bizarre penitentiary in the aftermath of Gretchen’s horrible but rather necessary death. We are obliged to enact this strange tournament for their edification and ours. It is a laborious and stultifying circumstance, but I assumed my role without complaint. It had been my plan to abscond to the North and somehow change my life, but I had been embarrassingly caught at the border and returned in chains and humiliation to the authorities and, after a perfunctory trial, to my rather peculiar fate. I had not objected. There were worse penalties. The delectable Gretchen, for instance, had been sentenced to the machine and subsequent suffocation. I had in contract been given privileges of the cell block and occasional periods in default during which Lame Hans had been subject to interrogation, and I had been permitted to sleep or otherwise amuse myself. Of course, there were limits to my own freedom, and my life contained no more possibility than that of Lame Hans.

  The good aspect of totalitarianism is that it grinds all of its subjects into a monotony of feeling and circumstance. Everything feels pretty much like everything else after a while. There is a glittering similarity and a fascinating restriction of emotional range that, once accepted, tends to pass rather quickly.

  “There was never any intention to enlist me in place of the machine,” I point out. “I was never meant to be a participant.”

  “Au contraire,” Lame Hans said. Sometimes he lurches into terrible French, a language he comprehends as poorly as I do chess. “Provisions were clear. You would enter at the conclusion of the one hundred and sixtieth victory for either side. You are white and therefore on move. I suggest an aggressive game. King’s Gambit? Of course it will be King’s Gambit declined.”

  All of this rather tense and barely comprehensible exchange is taking place between a man in a musty corridor, barely pervaded by light, and another locked in a cell. The question of who is the prisoner, who the guardian, seems quite abstract at this moment.

  “Gretchen suffocated,” I observed pointlessly.

  “So she did. Life itself is a dismal affliction, an imposition upon us. We breathe, we do not breathe; it is all the same. Like totalitarianism. Life itself is a species of suffocation. We are now on the clock. An imaginary clock of course, but no less determinant for all of this. I await your move.”

  I understood, finally, that the situation was somewhat more complex than I had previously thought. Bavaria is more than Bavarian: It is the world itself. This is a species of contemplation with which I had never been previously engaged.

  In consequence and somewhat reluctantly, I moved the King’s Pawn two spaces. I know this much at least, and of the necessity to bring out the Queen’s Pawn on the subsequent move and the King’s Knight shortly thereafter. In the wake of this rather daring accommodation, I survey the board gluml
y, awaiting Lame Hans’s subsequent move. His eyes appear to glitter with purpose.

  He moved his own King’s Pawn, folded his arms, stared at me. “Mate in ten moves,” he said. “By the way,” he added, “all of this is in your imagination.”

  As if from a great distance, gasps and throttles come from somewhere behind him, deep in his cell.

  Gretchen is suffocating again.

  Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all- time leading award winner for short fiction. He has won five Hugos (from a record thirty-six nominations), a Nebula, and other major awards in the United States, France, Japan, Croatia, Poland, and Spain. He is the author of seventy-one novels, more than two hundred and fifty short stories, three screenplays, and is the editor of forty-one anthologies. His work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and he was the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

  Barry Malzberg is the author of more than ninety books and three hundred short stories, and is a former editor of both Amazing and Fantastic. A multiple Nebula and Hugo nominee, he won the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel.

  Epistoleros

  AARON ALLSTON

  On Gene Wolfe: I first met Gene at the New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival (NOSF3) in the early 1990s. I was a program participant at the convention and had a total of two or three novels in print at the time.

  I sat on a panel with several other writers with similarly short pedigrees, and just before the panel was to begin, a middle-aged man in the audience asked a question. “Do you mind if I come up there and join you? If I speak on a panel, I can write this trip off on my taxes.” Seeing the blank expressions on all the panelists’ faces, he added, “I’m Gene Wolfe.”

  Well, yes. If we could have levitated him up to the panel table, we would have. I have no recollection of what the panel was about, but I do remember that Gene was gracious, humorous, very well spoken . . . and tremendously nice to a collection of newbie writers who hadn’t recognized him.