I am telling the mousewife, yet again, the story of the toad and the terrapin. The “foolish” toad, she calls him, though to my mind he is more appalling, how he jumped aboard the terrapin and pinned me to its shell, leaking toad-water between us and crooning about the toadlets we would make together.
Delving deep to retrieve his exact words and all those horrid details that she likes, I don’t notice the moment when the cracking ceases from Mrs. Markmusen’s bed. Only when I reach the end of the tale does it strike me that I have been speaking to a silent room for some time.
“Mrs. Markmusen?”
Not even her breath wheezes from that corner of the night. I sit up, hold still, listen.
“Ma’am?”
Not a sound.
I leap from my bed and across the room and shake her. She does not resist or revive. “Mrs. Markmusen!”
I uncover the foxfire lamp and hold it up. Her staring eyes see nothing. Her face-fur is damp from her sympathetic exertions, but her warmth is already fading. No pulse beats in her; no breath comes or goes from her nostrils or mouth; not so much as a whisker of her trembles.
When I can move again, I drag my bedding into the passage—Edderkops may like to sleep among corpses, but I cannot.
I bundle myself tightly in blankets as the night opens—silent, spacious, terrifying—around me. The mousewife is dead. I owe nothing anymore to this house, to Muldvarp, to anyone. I could be that girl again, that running, swinging, monster-fleeing girl. I could throw off these wrappings, run along the passage, and there I’d be at the door. If only I had the strength—if only I had a bellyful of nectar instead of mouse-house stodge. If only I could direct my thoughts, instead of their trickling away like spring runnels from a snowpack. If only it were spring, with the promise of warmth outside, instead of chill autumn, when a person needs to shelter, needs to stay swaddled against the cold in blankets such as these, so soft, so familiar, so warm . . .
I wake to the tick and flicker of tiny Edderkop feet on the floor. The sisters’ eyes shine and bob at me in the faint light filtering through the glass of the eastern door. I sit up, and we shrink to our opposite walls.
“We waited,” says the eldest sister. “But the mistress did not come.”
“No.” I rise from the bedding, make a graceless gesture at the bedroom door. “And she won’t be coming.”
They shift like uneasy twig-brooms, all their eyes on the door, up and down. I push it wide for them, and they stare at me, then scuttle past. With ticks and taps and scrapes they take up positions around the mounded bed, and a silence falls, and extends.
And then they are in the doorway again, all four; two cling high on the doorposts. Recoiling, I am reflected eightfold in four sets of eyes as the first sunbeam strikes along the passage.
Spider-laughter vibrates them and sharpens their knees. “She’s dead, that mousewife,” says a sister. They jump into the passage, herd me against the wall. “And do you know how much we care about your wedding clothes, trollop?”
“Your tablecloths, on and on, the finest damask, the most elaborate—”
“Your evening gowns, your housedresses, your winter coats—”
“Your sheets. Your endless wedding sheets where you’ll disport yourself, with Mr. Mole under your spell—”
Tremendous thudding and scraping, and a muffled roar, shake the earth to the west of us, deep beyond the mousewife’s house. I know those sounds, but before I can pin down the memory, the tunnel door shatters, the doorknob bouncing from the shadows and careening off my ankle.
“Speak of the devil!” The sisters pile on one another against the far wall.
“Yes!” The curve of the passage brings Muldvarp’s whisper close, as if his mouth were right by my ear. “There is a change in the air! I’m a young man again, and my bride awaits!”
He barrels up the passage, shovel-claws and velvet with his pink nose leading.
“Come to my arms!” he cries out in joy, but I dive clear of his descending claw and roll to my feet, and run toward the light, and he is too big and clumsy to catch me.
I speed up the passage and across the vestibule, grasp the doorknob that will be too small and slippery for his claws, turn the heavy thing. His velvet weight is in the hall behind me. His claws scrape the floor. The sour insect-stink of his breath puffs over my shoulder.
I slip out the door and pull it closed against a blur of claw and velvet. He roars and throws his weight against it. It bows out, shaking in its frame, and its pretty glasswork cracks. It won’t hold long.
I spin round to face the wreckage of the summer grain, every stalk cut back to a stump, outlined in the sun’s first gold. There is nowhere for me to climb and hide.
And rain has washed the ground overnight. What is not puddles is soft, sticky-looking mud—
The door crashes again. Splinters fly from its glass panels. Muldvarp pushes his nose through the broken pane, bloodying himself. “Mine!” he bellows. “You are mine. You are promised to me!”
I pick up my skirts and spring to the nearest stump, to the next, and the next, and onward.
“Mine!” Muldvarp bursts out of the house behind me.
Terror fumbles my feet, and I’m in water to my knees, ice cold, mud clamping my ankles. The water soaks the hem of my nightshift, pulls me down. And here comes Muldvarp, sloshing and splashing across the field.
My fists are in the mud. My breath sobs in my throat. I will never rise from here, never go on, never save myself. Do I have time to drown before Muldvarp reaches me? My reflected face blazes up at me, steeling itself to plunge into cold, blessed unconsciousness.
Something strikes my back and pulls me up from the puddle, suckingly free of the mud. Some dark, thrumming thing lifts me by my nightshift into the sun. The desolate field falls away. Spiders spill from the ruined mouse-house door. The maddened Muldvarp flounders through the mud, toward nothing now. His bellowing fades on the wide air, taking my terror with it.
And then they are gone and done with—spiders, mole, and mouse-house all too small for me to see. I swing myself around, catch hold of Ms. Svale’s feathers, and scramble up to the warm, safe place between her steadily beating wings.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Margo Lanagan: Hans Christian Andersen’s “Thumbelina” is a tooth-dissolvingly sweet tale that speaks volumes about the gender divide of its time. Put this weeping, shivering moppet, always at the mercy of the giant creatures around her, up against the rambunctious adventurer Tom Thumb, and despair. But how to remake the story without simply giving the heroine a granite jaw, a weapon, and a big bag of agency? (I’ll confess, in my first attempt, I did just that.) In the end I took Andersen’s characterization of Thumbelina/Tommelise as a “spirit of a flower”—and a displaced flower at that, a tulip brought too far north—as my key. I gave her agency that she doesn’t know about, a pheromonal cloud around her that arouses everyone she meets. Because she’s exiled from her community, there’s no one to explain what’s happening to her, so the world becomes a bemusing place, and her journey one encounter after another with enormous, highly sexed creatures acting inappropriately. I guess I reached into the story and dragged out the elements that generally tend to set me off—the theme of tender young things being sent out into the world ignorant and powerless is one I’ve visited before and no doubt will again, it annoys me so. In the end it’s education, a last skerrick of self-respect, and a lucky friendship that saves my Tommelise. May every innocent have a Ms. Svale crash-land in her life and help make it all comprehensible.
PEARL
Aliette de Bodard
n Da Trang’s nightmares, Pearl is always leaving—darting away from him, toward the inexorable maw of the sun’s gravity, going into a tighter and tighter orbit until no trace of it remains—he’s always reaching out, sending a ship, a swarm of bots—calling upon the remoras to move, sleek and deadly and yet too agonizingly slow, to do anything, to save what they can.
Too late. Too late.
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It wasn’t always like this, of course.
In the beginning . . . in the beginning . . . his thoughts fray and scatter away, like cloth held too close to a flame. How long since he’s last slept? The Empress’s courtier was right—but no, no, that’s not it. She doesn’t understand. None of them understand.
In the beginning, when he was still a raw, naive teenager, there was a noise, in the hangar. He thought it was just one of the countless remoras, dipping in and out of the room—his constant companions as he studied for the imperial examination, hovering over his shoulder to stare at the words; nudging him when one of them needed repairs they couldn’t provide themselves. And once—just after Inner Grandmother’s death, when Mother had been reeling from the loss of her own mother, and when he’d come running to the hangar with a vise around his chest—he’d seen them weaving and dancing in a pattern beautiful beyond words as he stood transfixed, with tears running down his cheeks.
“Can you wait?” Da Trang asked, not looking away from the text in his field of vision. “I’m trying to work out the meaning of a line.” He was no scholar, no favored to be graced with a tutor or with mem-implants of his ancestors: everything he did was like moving through tar, every word a tangle of meanings and connotations he needed to unpack, every clever allusion something he needed to look up.
A nudge then; and, across his field of vision, lines—remoras didn’t have human names, but it was the one he thought of as Teacher, because it was one of the oldest ones, and because it was always accompanied by a swarm of other remoras with which it appeared to be in deep conversation.
>Architect. Need to see.<
Urgent, then, if Teacher was attempting to communicate—remoras could use a little human speech, but it was hard work, tying up their processes—they grew uncannily still as they spoke, and once he’d seen a speaking remora unable to dodge another, more eager one.
He raised his gaze, and saw . . .
Teacher and another remora, Slicer, both with that same look of intent sleekness, as if they couldn’t hold still for long without falling apart—and, between them, a third one, looking . . . somehow wrong. Patched up, like all remoras—leftovers from bots and ships that had gone all but feral, low-level intelligences used for menial tasks. And yet . . .
The hull of the third remora was painted—engraved with what looked like text at first, but turned out to be other characters, long, weaving lines in a strange, distorted alphabet Da Trang couldn’t make out.
>Is Pearl,< Teacher said, on the screen. >For you.<
“I don’t understand,” Da Trang said slowly. He dismissed the text, watched the third remora—something almost graceful in the way it floated, like a calligraphy from a master, suggesting in a few strokes the shape of a bird or of a snake. “Pearl?”
Pearl moved, came to stand close to him—nudging him, like a pet or favorite bot—he’d never felt that or done that, and he felt obscurely embarrassed, as if he’d given away some intimacy that should have been better saved for a parent, a sibling, or a spouse.
>Architect.< Pearl’s lines were the same characters as on its hull for a brief moment; and then they came into sharp focus as the remora lodged itself on his shoulder, against his neck—he could feel the heat of the ship, the endless vibrations of the motor through the hull, like a secret heartbeat. >Pleased. Will help.<
Da Trang was about to say he didn’t need help, and then Pearl burrowed close to him—a sharp, painful stab straight into his flesh; and before he had time to cry out, he saw—
The hangar, turned into flowing lines like a sketch of a Grand Master of Design Harmony; the remoras, Slicer and Teacher, already on the move, with little labels listing their speed, their banking angles; their age and the repairs they’d undergone—the view expanding, taking in the stars beyond the space station, all neatly labeled, every wavelength of their spectrum cataloged—he tried to move, to think beyond the confines of the vision the ship had him trapped in; to remember the poem he’d been reading—and abruptly the poem was there, too, the lines about mist over the water and clouds and rain; and the references to sexual foreplay, the playfulness of the writer trying to seduce her husband—the homage to the famed poetess Dong Huong through the reuse of her metaphor about frost on jade flowers, the reference to the bird from Viet on Old Earth, always looking southward. . . .
And then Pearl released him; and he was on his knees on the floor, struggling for breath. “What—what—” Even words seemed to have deserted him.
>Will help,< Pearl said.
Teacher, firmer and steadier, a rock amidst the turmoil in his mind. >Built Pearl for you, Architect. For . . . examinations?< A word the remora wasn’t sure of; a concept Da Trang wasn’t even sure Teacher understood.
>For understanding,< Slicer said. >Everything.< If it had been human, the remora would have sounded smug.
“I can’t—” Da Trang pulled himself upward, looked at Pearl again. “You made it?”
>Can build others,< Teacher said.
“Of course. I wasn’t doubting that. I just—” He looked at Pearl again and finally worked out what was different about it. The others looked cobbled together of disparate parts—grabbing what they could from space debris and scraps and roughly welding it into place—but Pearl was . . . not perfect, but what you would get if you saved the best of everything you found drifting in space, and put it together, not out of necessity, not out of a desire for immediate survival or return to full functionality—but with a carefully thought-out plan, a desire for . . . stability? “It’s beautiful,” he said at last.
>We built,< Teacher said. >As thanks. And because . . .< A pause, and then another word, blinking on the screen. >We can build better.<
Not beauty, then, but hope, and longing, and the best for the future. Da Trang found his lips twisting in a bitter smile, shaping words of comfort, or something equally foolish to give a remora—some human emotions to a being that had none.
Before he could speak up, though, there came the patter of feet. “Li’l brother, li’l brother!” It was his sister Cam, out of breath. Da Trang got up—Pearl hovering again at his shoulder, the warmth of metal against his neck.
“What—” Cam stopped, looked at him. “What in heaven is this?”
Pearl nudged closer; he felt it nip the surface of his skin—and some of that same trance rose in him again, the same sense that he was seeing the bones of the orbital, the breath of the dragon that was the earth and the void between the stars and the universe—except oddly muted, so that his thoughts merely seemed far away to him, running beneath a pane of glass. He could read Cam—see the blood beating in her veins, the tension in her hands and in her arms. Something was worrying her, beyond her usual disapproval of a brother who dreamt big and spent his days away from the family home. Pearl?
“This is Pearl,” Da Trang said awkwardly.
Cam looked at him—in Pearl’s trance, he saw her face contract; saw electrical impulses travel back and forth in her arms. “Fine,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You were weird enough without a remora pet. Whatever.”
So it wasn’t that which worried her. “What’s on your mind?” Da Trang asked.
Cam jerked. There was no other word for it—her movement would have been barely visible, but Pearl’s trance magnified everything, so that for a moment she seemed a puppet on strings, and the puppet master had just stopped her from falling. “How do you know?”
“It’s obvious,” Da Trang said, trying to keep his voice steady. If he could read her—if he could read people—if he could remember poems and allusions and speak like a learned scholar . . .
“The Empress is coming,” Cam said.
“And?” Da Trang was having a hard time seeing how that related to him. “We’re not scholars or magistrates, or rich merchants. We’re not going to see her unless we queue up for the procession.”
“You don’t understand.” Cam’s voice was plaintive. “The whole Belt is scraping resou
rces together to make an official banquet, and they asked Mother to contribute a dish.”
Da Trang was going to say something funny, or flippant, but that stopped him. “I had no idea.” Pearl was showing him things—signs of Cam’s stress, the panic she barely kept at bay, the desire to flee the orbital before things got any more overwhelming—but he didn’t need Pearl for that. Imperial favor could go a long way—could lift someone from the poorer, most outward orbitals of the Scattered Pearls Belt all the way to the First Planet and the Imperial Court—but it could also lead someone into permanent disgrace, into exile and death. It was more than a dish; it would be a statement made by Mother’s orbital, by the Belt itself, something they would expect to be both exquisite and redolent with clever allusions—to the Empress’s reign name, to her campaigns, to her closest advisers or her wives. . . .
“Why did they ask Mother?”
“I don’t know,” Cam said. Blood flowed to her face, and her hands were moments away from clenching. “Because there was no one else. Because they wanted us to fail. Take your pick. What matters is that we can’t say no, lest we become disgraced.”
“Can you help?” he asked, aloud, and saw Cam startled, and then her face readjusting itself into a complex mixture of—contempt, pity—as she realized he was talking to the remora.
“You really spend too much time here,” she said, shaking her head. “Come on.”
“Can you help?” Da Trang asked again, and felt Pearl huddle more closely against him, the trance rising to dizzying heights as the remora bit deeper.
>Of course, Architect.<
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