Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  She came into the room and sat down beside a window. Beyond the glassy material, the tall topiary waved like seaweed, in the sea of sky. She looked at this and did not look at him.

  Yet she saw only him.

  The water-sky dazzled as the pool had done, and he stepped out of the sky, the pool, and stood before her as in all her dreams, unmasked, naked, open-eyed. The nature of the pool was such, he was not even wet.

  The hirsute pelt which covered his kind was a reality misinterpreted, misexplained. It was most nearly like the fur of a short-haired cat, yet in actuality resembled nothing so much as the nap of velvet. He was black, like her sister Joya, yet the close black nap of fur must be tipped, each single hair, with amber; his color had changed second to second, as the light or dark found him, even as he breathed, from deepest black to sheerest gold. His well-made body was modeled from these two extremes of color, his fine musculature, like that of a statue, inked with ebony shadows, and highlighted by gilding. Where the velvet sheathing faded into pure skin, at the lips; nostrils, eyelids, genitals, the soles of the feet, palms of the hands, the flesh itself was a mingling of the two shades; a somber cinnamon, couth and subtle, sensual in its difference, but not shocking in any visual or aesthetic sense. The inside of his mouth, which he had also contrived to let her see, was a dark golden cave, in which conversely the humanness of the white teeth was in fact itself a shock. While at his loins the velvet flowed into a bearded blackness, long hair like unraveled silk; the same process occurred on the skull, a raying mane of hair; very black, very silken, its edges burning out through amber, ochre, into blandness—the sunburst of a black sun. The nails on his six long fingers, the six toes of his long and arched feet, were the tint of new dark bronze, translucent, bright as flames. His facial features were large and of a contrasting fineness, their sculptured quality at first obscured, save in profile, by the sequential ebb and flare of gold and black, and the domination of the extraordinary eyes. The long cinnamon lids, the thick lashes that were not black but startlingly flaxen—the color of the edges of the occipital hair—these might be mistaken for human. But the eyes themselves could have been made from two highly polished citrines, clear saffron, darkening around the outer lens, almost to the cinnamon shade of the lids, and at the center by curiously blended charcoal stages to the ultimate black of the pupil. Analogously, they were like the eyes of a lion, and perhaps all of him lionlike, maybe, the powerful body, its skin unlike a man’s, flawless as a beast’s skin so often was, the pale, fire-edged mane. Yet he was neither like a man nor an animal. He was like himself, his kind, and his eyes were their eyes, compelling, radiant of intellect and intelligence even in their strangeness, and even in their beauty. For he was beautiful. Utterly and dreadfully beautiful. Coming to the Earth in the eras of its savagery, he would have been worshipped in terror as a god. He and his would have been forced to hide what they were for fear the true sight of it would burn out the vision of those who looked at them. And possibly this was the reason, still, why they had hidden themselves, and the reason too for the misunderstanding and the falsehoods. To fear to gaze at their ugliness, that was a safe and sensible premise. To fear their grandeur and their marvel—that smacked of other emotions less wise or good.

  And she herself, of course, had run from this very thing. Not his alien hideousness—his beauty, which had withered her. To condescend to give herself to one physically her inferior, that might be acceptable. But not to offer herself to the lightning bolt, the solar flame. She had seen and she had been scorched, humiliated and made nothing, and she had run away, ashamed to love him. And now, ashamed, she had come back, determined to put away all she had felt for him or begun to feel or thought to feel. Determined to be no more than the companion of his mind, which itself was like a star, but, being an invisible, intangible thing, she might persuade herself to approach.

  But now he was here in a room with her, undisguised, in the gracious garments of his own world and the searing glory of his world’s race, and she did not know how she could bear to be here with him.

  And she wondered if he were pleased by her suffering and her confusion. She wondered why, if he were not, he would not let her go forever. And she pictured such an event and wondered then if, having found him, she could live anywhere but here, where she could not live at all.

  The sky went slowly out, and they had not spoken any more.

  In the densening of the darkness, those distant suns, which for eons had given their light to the Earth, grew large and shining and sure.

  When he said her name, she did not start, nor did she turn to him.

  “There is something which I must tell you now,” he said to her. “Are you prepared to listen?”

  “Very well.”

  “You think that whatever I may say to you must be irrelevant to you, at this moment. That isn’t the case.”

  She was too tired to weep, or to protest, or even to go away.

  “I know,” he said quietly. “And there’s no need for you to do any of these things. Listen, and I shall tell you why not.”

  As it turned out, they had, after all, a purpose in coming to the Earth, and to that other handful of occupied planets they had visited, the bright ships drifting down, the jewels of their technology and culture given as a gift, the few of their species left behind, males and females, dwellers in isolated mansions, who demanded nothing of their hosts until the first flowering of alien roses, the first tender kidnappings of those worlds’ indigenous sons and daughters.

  The purpose of it all was never generally revealed. But power, particularly benign power, is easily amalgamated and countenanced. They had got away with everything, always. And Earth was no exception.

  They were, by the time their vessels had lifted from the other system, a perfect people, both of the body and the brain; and spiritually they were more nearly perfect than any other they encountered. The compassion of omnipotence was intrinsic to them now, and the generosity of wholeness. Yet that wholeness, that perfection had had a bizarre, unlooked-for side effect. For they had discovered that totality can, by its very nature, cancel out itself.

  They had come to this awareness in the very decades they had come also to know that endless vistas of development lay before them, if not on the physical plane, then certainly on the cerebral and the psychic. They possessed the understanding, as all informed creatures do, that their knowledge was simply at its dawn. There was more for their race to accomplish than was thinkable, and they rejoiced in the genius of their infancy, and looked forward to the limitless horizons—and found that their own road was ended, that they were not to be allowed to proceed. Blessed by unassailable health, longevity, strength, and beauty, their genes had rebelled within them, taking this peak as an absolute and therefore as a terminus.

  Within a decade of their planetary years, they became less fertile, and then sterile. Their bodies could not form children, either within a female womb or externally, in an artificial one. Cells met, embraced, and died in that embrace. Those scarcity of embryos that were successfully grown in the crystalline generative placentae lived, in some cases, into the Third Phase, approximate to the fifth month of a human pregnancy—and then they also died, their little translucent corpses floating like broken silver flowers. To save them, a cryogenic program was instituted. Those that lived, on their entry to the Third Phase, were frozen into stasis. The dream persisted that at last there would be found some way to realize their life. But the dream did not come true. And soon even the greatest and most populous cities of that vast and blue-skied planet must report that, in a year twice the length of a year of the Earth, only eight or nine children had been saved to enter even that cold limbo, which now was their only medium of survival.

  The injustice of fate was terrible. It was not that they had become effete, or that they were weakened. It was their actual peerlessness which would kill the race. But being what they were, rather than curse God and die, they evolved another dream, and before long pursued it a
cross the galaxies. Their natural faculties had remained vital as their procreative cells had not. They had conceived the notion that some other race might be discovered, sufficiently similar to their own that—while it was unlikely the two types could mingle physically to produce life—in the controlled environment of a breeding tube such a thing might be managed. The first world that offered them scope, in a system far beyond the star of Earth, was receptive and like enough that the first experiments were inaugurated. They failed.

  And then, in one long night, somewhere in that planet’s eastern hemisphere, a female of that race miscarrying and weeping bitterly at her loss, provided the lamp to lead them to their dream’s solution.

  With the sound and astounding anatomical science of the mother world, the aliens were able to transfer one of their own children, one of those embryos frozen in cryogenesis for fifty of their colossal years, into the vacated womb.

  And, by their science too, this womb, filled and then despoiled, was repaired and sealed, brought in a matter of hours to the prime readiness it had already achieved and thought to abandon.

  The mother was monitored and cared for, for at no point was she to be endangered or allowed to suffer. But she thrived, and the transplanted child grew. In term, the approximate ten-month term normal to that planet, it was born, alive and whole. It had come to resemble the host race almost exactly; this was perhaps the first surprise. As it attained adulthood, there was a second surprise. Its essence resembled only the essence of its parental race. It was alien, and it pined away among the people of its womb-mother. Brought back to its true kind, then, and only then, it prospered and was happy and became great. It seemed, against all odds, their own were truly their own. Heredity had told, not in the physical, but in the ego. It appeared the soul of their kind would continue, unstoppable. And the limitless horizons opened again before them, away and away.

  By the date in their travels when they reached Earth, their methods were faultless and their means secret and certain. Details had been added, refining details typical of that which the aliens were. The roses were one aspect of such refinements.

  Like themselves, the plants of the mother world were incredibly long-lived. Nourished by treated soil and held in a vacuum—as the embryos were held in their vacuum of coldness—such flowers could thrive for half an Earth century, even when uprooted.

  Earth had striven with her own bellicosity and won that last battle long before the aliens came. Yet some aggression, and some xenophobic self-protective pride remained. Earth was a planet where the truth of what the aliens intended was to be guarded more stringently than on any other world. A woman miscarrying her child in the fourth or fifth month, admitted to a medical center, and evincing psychological evidence of trauma—even now it happened. This planet was full of living beings, a teeming globe prone still to accident and misjudgment. As the woman lay sedated, the process was accomplished. In the wake of the dead and banished earthly child, the extra-terrestrial embryo was inserted, and anchored like a star. Women woke, and burst into tears and tirades of relief—not knowing they had been duped. Some not even remembering, for the drugs of the aliens were excellent, that they had ever been close to miscarrying. A balance was maintained. Some recalled, some did not. A sinister link would never be established. Only the eager and willing were ever employed.

  There was one other qualification. It was possible to predict logistically the child’s eventual habitat, once born. Since the child would have to be removed from that habitat in later years, the adoptive family was chosen with skill. The rich—who indeed tended more often to bear their children bodily—the liberated, the open-minded, the unlonely. That there might be tribulation at the ultimate wrenching away was unavoidable, but it was avoided or lessened wherever and however feasible. Nor was a child ever recalled until it had reached a level of prolonged yearning, blindly and intuitively begging to be rescued from its unfitted human situation.

  Here the roses served.

  They in their crystal boxes, the embryos frozen in their crystal wombs. With every potential child a flower had been partnered. The aura of a life imbued each rose. It was the aura, then, which relayed the emanations of the child and the adult the child became. The aura which told, at last, this telepathically sensitive race, when the summons must be sent, the exile rescued.

  The green rose now flourishing in her garden here was Estár’s own rose, brought home.

  The woman who had carried Estár inside her, due to her carelessness, had lost Levin’s child, and received the alien unaware. The woman had needed to bear a child, but not to keep the child. Levin had gladly claimed what he took to be his own.

  Estár, the daughter of her people, not Levin’s daughter, not Lyra’s sister or Joya’s either, Estár had grown up and grown away, and the green rose which broadcast her aura began to cry soundlessly, a wild beacon. So they had released her from her unreal persona, or let her release herself.

  And here she was now, turning from the window of stars to the invisible darkness of the room, and to his invisible darkness.

  For a long while she said nothing, although she guessed—or telepathically she knew—he waited for her questions. At last one came to her.

  “Marsha,” she said. “They disqualified me from going there.”

  “A lie,” he said. “It was arranged. In order that your transposition should be easier when it occurred.”

  “And I—” she said, and hesitated

  “And you are of my kind, although you resemble the genera which was your host. This is always the case. I know your true bloodline, your true father and mother, and one day you may meet them. We are related, you and I. In the terminology of this world, distant cousins. There is one other thing.”

  She could not see him. She did not require to see him with her eyes. She now waited, for the beauty of his voice.

  “The individual to whom you are summoned—this isn’t a random process. You came to me, as all our kind return, to one with whom you would be entirely compatible. Not only as a companion, but as a lover, a bonded lover—a husband, a wife. You see, Estár, we’ve learned another marvel. The changes that alter our race in the womb of an alien species, enable us thereafter to make living children together, either bodily or matrically, whichever is the most desired.”

  Estár touched her finger to the topaz in her left ear.

  “And so I love you spontaneously, but without any choice. Because we were chosen to be lovers?”

  “Does it offend you?”

  “If I were human,” she said, “it might offend me. But then.”

  “And I, of course,” he said, “also love you.”

  “And the way I am—my appearance . . . do you find me ugly?”

  “I find you beautiful. Strangely, alienly lovely. That’s quite usual. Although for me, very curious, very exciting.”

  She shut her eyes then, and let him move to her across the dark. And she experienced in her own mind the glorious wonder he felt at the touch of her skin’s smoothness like a cool leaf, just as he would experience her delirious joy in the touch of his velvet skin, the note of his dark and golden mouth discovering her own.

  Seeing the devouring sadness in her face when she looked at them, unable to reveal her secret, Estár’s earthly guardians would fear for her. They would not realize her sadness was all for them. And when she no longer moved among them, they would regret her, and mourn for her as if she had died. Disbelieving or forgetting that in any form of death, the soul—Psyche, Estár, (well-named)—refinds a freedom and a beauty lost with birth.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Queen Who Could Not Walk” © 2013 The Avicenna Development Corporation. First publication: Weird Tales #361, Summer 2013.

  “Follow Me Light” © 2005 Elizabeth Bear. First publication: SciFiction, 12 January 2005.

  “The Coat of Stars” © 2007 Holly Black. First publication: So Fey, Queer Fairy Fiction, ed. Steve Berman (Lethe Press).

  “The Queen and the
Cambion” © 2012 Richard Bowes. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March-April 2012.

  “The Mussel Eater” © 2014 Octavia Cade. First publication: The Book Smugglers, 18 November 2014.

  “Fairy Tale” © 2003 Gardner Dozois. First publication: SciFiction, 15 January 2003.

  “Bears: A Fairy Tale of 1958” © 2013 Steve Duffy. First publication: Little Visible Light, eds. S. P. Miskowski & Kate Jonez (Omnium Gatherium).

  “Halfway People” © 2010 Karen Joy Foweler. First publication: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, eds. Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Giménez Smith (Penguin Books).

  “Diamonds and Pearls: A Fairy Story” © 2009 Neil Gaiman. First publication: Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A Collection of Photographic Evidence. Neil Gaiman, Kyle Cassidy & Beth Hommel (Eight Foot Books).

  “Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon” © 2007 Theodora Goss. First publication: Realms of Fantasy, June 2007.

  “The Glass Bottle Trick” © 2000 Nalo Hopkinson. First publication: Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, ed. Nalo Hopkinson (Invisible Cities Press).

  “The Road of Needles” © 2013 Caitlín R. Kiernan. First publication: Once Upon A Time: New Fairy Tales, ed. Paula Guran (Prime Books).

  “Catastrophic Disruption of the Head” © 2011 Margo Lanagan. First publication: The Wilful Eye, eds. Isobelle Carmody & Nan McNab (Allen & Unwin).

  “Beauty” © 1983 Tanith Lee. First publication: Red as Blood or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (DAW Books).

  “Red as Blood” © 1979 Tanith Lee. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1979.

  “The Coin of Heart’s Desire” © 2013 Yoon Ha Lee. First publication: Once Upon A Time: New Fairy Tales, ed. Paula Guran (Prime Books).

  “Travels with the Snow Queen” © 1996 Kelly Link. First publication: Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Vol 1, #1, Winter 1996–97) and reprinted in Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link (Small Beer Press).