“Sebastian Morgan seems in extreme good health,” I informed my mother, thinking she would be glad for the news.
But “Mmn,” was all she said. Was she talkative as a child? To me she seems more laconic every time I wake. To be truthful, I do not wake often enough to take accurate measurements.
For this conversation, she was sitting on her rocker in one corner of my room. Creak, creak, moooooaaaaan. That is the sound the rocker makes. I find it soothing, really. Like a heartbeat. A mortar sat in her lap. Every time she came to a forward stop, she ground down at its contents. From the powdery sting in the air, I surmised the bowl was full of whole peppercorns. I sneezed. (Sneezing, Grandmother Elspeth, in my state, gives me accidents, but from the number of towels beneath me, I conceive that mother has more than prepared for this. Besides, I find the suddenly pungent quality of the air invigorating.)
“Sebastian Morgan,” I repeated to her. “There is a name I can almost be proud of.”
My mother rocked back. The ready tension in her shoulders and all the lines of her face relaxed for one infinitesimal moment. I wish she would not work so hard.
“You were nearly coherent at his birth,” she recollected.
“Was I? I recall nothing of it now.”
I consulted your letter again, Grandmother.
“She writes that Sophia Candy—ugh! I was not coherent for long, was I?—Sophia Candy wants to take orders. Listen to this: ‘A very pious toddler, young Candy has aspirations to the Abbacy.’ ”
I laughed, but mother did not.
“Isn’t it marvelous? One changeling in the army, another in the church. And did not Auntie Hortensia write just last week—was it only last week? No, don’t answer! It was three months ago or something of that lapse; I can read it in your eyes—to tell us that Darren bodes well to be a politician, with his gravity and knack for diplomacy. It is almost as if, as if . . . ”
As if it were all on purpose, I almost said, Grandmother. But what do I know of these matters? I am not eighteen, and have spent most of the last four years in bed!
“We need a strong Abbess,” grunted my mother, rocking forward again, grinding. “Our current Abbot meddles with . . . ”
For a moment her gaze met mine. All the women in our family have dark eyes.
“Unholy spirits,” she finished.
“Well,” I told her, “Sophia Candy does not come by her devoutness from me.”
“No,” my mother agreed.
“Mother, is there no legal way to change her name? Some fee we might pay and have done with it? We cannot have an Abbess Candy!”
“You are not religious,” she reminded me. “Besides, one takes a Saint’s name with one’s orders. She might be an Abbess Sira or an Abbess Rahzad.”
“Either! Both! Anything but Candy.” I lapsed back into my pillows. “Have I given birth yet?”
“No.” My mother’s voice was so gentle I presumed I was going under again. She came close to me, bringing her wooden mortar with her. The smell was so strong I started sobbing.
“Soon,” she said. “Not yet but soon. Close your eyes.”
I did, I do, I think I’ll put this letter down now. My pencil grows heavy. . . .—E.A.
There is a rhyme about pepper.
Black Piper whistles to rupture what’s tight
White Piper softens and moistens and serves
Green Piper sings out the young and the bright
Red Piper seals, Pink Piper preserves.
It is possible I just made up that rhyme, or heard my mother singing it when I was asleep. Regardless, I wake up covered in a crust of pepper. My mother has basted my body in honey, has crusted that honey thickly with black, pink, red, green and white pepper only partially ground.
I ask you what it is for, but it is mother who answers. My voice seems a meager thing in my throat.
“You lost a lot of blood. The pepper will give you back some heat.”
She speaks so low I do not think you can hear her through the windowpane, and I am glad, I am glad, because she is mine and you shall not have her too! She is the best hetch never caught and tried by the Inquisition at Winterbane. I have told you that, I think, have I told you that? What did she have to trade them to make them leave her and me be?
Her craft is solid. I had been cold and now am growing warmer.
“I had another baby?”
“Yes.”
“And the placenta? Did I deliver the placenta?”
If I fear anything in this world, it is the idea of carrying around a rotting placenta inside me. I am always more concerned about the afterbirth than the birth. Have you noticed this? You, who are always with me. Sometimes I do not think you care a jot if I live or die so long as I perform my duty.
“It is drying on the windowsill now.”
She shows me the placenta when I prove too weak to turn my head. You will eat it before dawn, I know, and grow strong, strong enough, perhaps, to leave my windowsill and go torment some other girl. But I do not mean that. How could I? I desire no other maid to suffer from your winks and taps and smiles. Also, I would be a little jealous, I think.
“Is it a boy or a . . . ”
“Girl.”
“What did I name her?”
“Sophia.”
Is my mother laughing at me? She is smiling, but in a way that harrows the edges of her eyes. I grope for fitness of thought. Clouds, nothing but clouds. All I can do is wail.
“No, no, I named my other daughter Sophia! Sophia Candy! We were just talking . . . ”
“Well,” my mother interrupts briskly, “this one is also named Sophia. Just Sophia. Not Sophia Candy—who will likely change her name when she takes orders.”
“Saint Sira,” I recall, “Saint Rahzad.”
“Both!” My mother smiles again, with more warmth.
“That won’t be for almost two decades!” Barely are the words out but I wonder if my two daughters will ever meet. If it matters that they share a name. Or a mother. “Have they taken her away yet?”
“Your Auntie Mews is arriving soon.”
Some names taste exactly like medicine. The vile kind that never does much good anyway. But mother ignores my scrunched face and piteous moan and is calm.
“After thirteen children and six grandchildren, Mewsie knows how to raise a child. Sophia will have guardians in the older children and playmates in the younger.”
You do not need to mutter so, and scowl at me, and carry on. Do you think I cannot read in my own beloved mother’s careful tone and shift of eyes that Sophia will be tyrannized over by the teenagers, loathed by the youngsters, and ostracized by all? I am not a fool. Our world does not suckle Gentry babes with the milk of human kindness.
I stir on my couch. I tug my mother’s bloodstained skirt.
“I want to see this one. It is likely this time I will remember her, now that I have been put off all my elixirs . . . ”
No loosed breath or cry betrays her surprise, but I see the shock; it whitens the corners of her mouth. But also—notice! She is smiling as she turns, smiling still as she leaves the room. Proud, maybe, that I am asserting myself. You are smiling too. I sense a conspiracy afoot. My mother and the ivy at my window, heads together, plotting. For me or against? If I were not covered in honey and peppercorn, I should demand an account!
I will see what of this mess I can scrub clean. A new nightshirt has been laid out for me. I do not suppose you will turn your back?
Do you not find it somewhat uncanny—if not out and out bizarre—that this last Sophia is my fourth child, and I have not so much as held a one of them in my own arms? When I had my garden (since Darren’s conception I am not allowed to enter it), I would weed and water the soil, I would turn the earth and fret if it rained too much or too little. In the end, I harvested my own roots and fruits and vegetables, shelled the peas and scooped the gourds myself. There is some satisfaction in holding the thing I have nurtured before it is goes to be consumed.
; Our world eats Gentry children. Or my relatives raise them. It amounts to the same thing, does it not? Ah, we are in accord. At last.
The knob turns. My mother enters with the last Sophia. The infant is craning her head almost all the way to stare at me. At us. Like an owl. I do not remember if her father was an owl. There may have been feathers. Sometimes, on those nights when the moon smiles most thinly, you will wear feathers and a mask made of small bones. You think I do not remember everything?
I observe aloud, or think I do, “She sits up very straight for a newborn!”
My mother sets the last Sophia in my arms. “Careful. She was born with teeth.”
So tiny. Five pounds or less in gown, blanket and diaper together. Her hair is a silk of black over a skull soft as petals. She smells like lavender and fresh cream. Gentry babes will only eat cream, and only from cows. Human milk gives them colic and turns them pasty and mean. My mother leaves us. Mutual examination follows. Thus we occupy ourselves a good ten minutes.
“Who is your father?”
“He is right outside your window,” replies the last Sophia. “But I do not think you should let him in.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because you are weak and not ready for another babe. And because,” she pauses, “having dwelled inside you for some time, I am grown interested in your person. I do not believe your best use is as host to husk.”
I compliment her on her prodigious command of the language, but she merely shrugs.
“You spoke out loud often enough during my gestation. I garnered what I could. At first I wondered if you might be mad, as some humans become who have too prolonged a contact with the Gentry, but soon realized it was more complicated than that.” Sophia’s milky lip curled. Not humorously. “You have performed remarkably under circumstances that were—are—hardly under your control. Although, if you will leave your window open . . . ”
“It grows so stuffy in here! I am not permitted to leave. Indeed, most days I have not the strength to rise from bed.”
Again, that shrug, but more subtly, as if the movement wearies her. Her head bobbles on the slender stem of her neck. I support her more firmly on my lap, seeing that the last Sophia is not so strong as she initially wished me to perceive.
“Perhaps I would have done the same,” she concedes. “There is nothing I hate more than being cooped up. Saving your presence.” She makes me the most curious little boneless bow. “I do not know your name.”
It is almost an apology.
“Esther Aidan.” A strange delight to recollect those two little words, lost to me until I reach for them, at my daughter’s own request.
“Esther Aidan, then. Are you going to give me away?”
As if her words herald the event, I hear the cataclysmic boom of Auntie Mews’s arrival downstairs. She always travels with at least three dogs and twice that in children. They never stay with us; our cottage is too poor and not clean enough and we do not keep servants, which Auntie Mews cannot do without.
“Mewsie!” my mother greets her, with all evidence of enthusiasm. Well, they are sisters. I never had one—I do not know about them.
“I have a sister,” the last Sophia says softly.
“You do,” I confirm, surprised. Had I spoken? Or is she like you, with an ear pressed to my very thoughts? “And two brothers.”
Whatever response she may have made to this is swamped by Auntie Mews.
“Milla, my dear babe! Where is the newest changeling? I’ll scrub the malice out of her! And when she gets a little older, I’ll spank it out. Wash her unnatural mouth with soap. Won’t be a tarnish of magic left by the time she comes of age.”
“She’s with Esther at present, but . . . ”
“With Esther?” Mews’s horror—or is it humor?—grates like a grizzly bear clawing at a tree. In my arms, the last Sophia bares her barracuda pearls. “Esther’s not bonding, is she?”
“No. She is simply curious.”
“Precious good that’ll do her. Next good storm blows in, she’ll catch the preggers again. Has she been taking her medicine? I brought more from the Holy See. And a letter from mother.”
“Have some tea, Mewsie. Would your kiddies like some biscuits?”
I stop listening, the better to study the thing I dandle.
The last Sophia, I will say, does not appeal to my maternal instincts. I do not think I have any—no more than you have an instinct for charity. But she is interesting. What’s more, when she talks, I understand everything. To the chronically confusticated, clarity has a deep allure. Her eyes are sharp enough to cut me. All the women in my family have dark eyes.
What do you want, child? What can I give you? Words surge. New thoughts. A wave. I do not know what will be left of me when it recedes.
“Will I give you away, you ask, to live with my Aunt Mews and her large pink family? What will they do with you? I will tell you. They will raise you right, dress you in pink, take you to church, punish you for fancy’s flight or any slight poetical leaning, for tears, tantrums, for keeping quiet, for talking. Auntie Mews will certainly not let a baby speak until she feels a baby should speak, and then only in that spit bubble patois fit for mortal babes. But I think—and whence comes this notion, my last Sophia? Is it mine own or applied from without?—I think you might be happier in scarlet and gold than in pink, might prefer a wooden sword to a doll. You might even like to learn about the magical properties of peppercorn at my own outcast mother’s knee. I confess I have not known you long, but I see that in you which would shrivel under Mewsie’s iron rule. It would be iron, my last Sophia, make no mistake. She will gird you in iron if that be what it takes. But I, if I kept you, would not. Fragile alien that you are, I might still do you some good. If I can but keep my wits! It is unlikely. They wander. They scatter like raindrops on a windowpane. You thought me mad even from the womb, and perhaps you were correct. Your mother is a broken thing. . . . ”
“I can help you,” the last Sophia whispers. “Esther Aidan, I can help you. Only—keep me by your side. Bring my brothers and my sister home. Perhaps not to stay, but from time to time, that I might know them, and they us. We will need each other in the days to come. There is a war, but we will do what we can to protect you.”
She is so tiny. She is too new to help anyone. Even now her proud head droops to her breast. She yawns. Her fist flails near her eye. She is still marked from her passage. Likely her continued presence under my mother’s cottage, far from enhancing our security, will draw to our thatched roof the flaming arrows of Abbacy and Gentry both.
But even if she is of no use to me whatever, even if I must die for it . . .
“You are the last Sophia,” I tell her. “I will not give you away.”
Her eyes are closed now. She does not hear me. But I hear her soft sigh, and when she shivers, I draw my blanket up around her. And you, who pretend you are ivy overgrowing my window, you sigh too, and your green and gold smile is—for once—not unkind. That is some kind of triumph, I am certain. And this: the child sleeps. But I am awake.
Some of Them Closer
Marissa Lingen
Coming back to Earth was not the immediate shock they expected it to be for me. It was something, certainly, but I’d been catching up on the highlights of the news as it cascaded back to the ship on our relativistic return trip, and I never knew the island where we landed, when we left home twenty of our years ago and a hundred of theirs, so I expected it to look foreign to me, and it did. The Sun was a little more yellow than on New Landing, the plants friendlier.
But I never thought of myself as an Earther. Even with the new system, hardly any of us do. I thought of myself as from Montreal. Quebecoise. Canadian, even. But Earther? No. I am far more provincial than the colonists whose home I built will ever be.
I flew into the new place instead of Dorval. It looked like Dorval used to. It looked nearly exactly like Dorval used to, and I had a twinge of discomfort. The floors were curiously springy, t
hough, which made me feel like something was different, and that was reassuring. There isn’t an Old Spacers’ Legion or anything like that to meet people like me coming in from off-planet—they did that on the little Brazilian island where we landed—but there was a department for Cultural Integration, meant for people traveling from elsewhere on Earth. They assigned me to a representative of the government, who greeted me in a French whose accent was nearly my own. To my ear it sounded more English, with the round vowels, but even with the new system I thought it might be rude to say that to a Quebecoise.
The English-sounding French-speaker gave me a key to the four-room apartment they’d gotten me, not far from the Guy-Concordia Metro station. I told her I could take the Metro to it, but she smiled and said no, they’d have to get my things out of storage for me anyway. So we did that. There were only three boxes. Once you do the math on what will keep for a hundred years, it’s a lot easier to give away the things you can’t take with you. I gave them to my sister, who died, and whatever was left, she probably gave to her son, who had also died, or her daughter, who was retired and living comfortably in Senegal last I heard. So what I had left myself fit in three small plastic boxes, all labeled “Mireille Ayotte NL000014.”
We terraformers all got two-digit numbers for our colonies, NL for New Landing, 14 because there were thirteen team members signed up before they took me.
There was never any doubt they were going to take me. It was just a matter of where I wanted to go, and I wanted New Landing because the survey probes made the plants look promising, which I think they were. When I wasn’t catching up on Earth culture for the last hundred years, I was looking at reports from the other colonies, and I thought ours did the best with plant adaptation so far.
I had to start thinking of New Landing as “theirs,” not “ours.” I could go back, of course, but by the time I got there they’d have gone on without me as well, and I’d just have the same thing as Montreal all over again: a city full of things that seem like they should look familiar, but they don’t.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 61