A coyote watched them from up on the hillside. The jackalope wife looked up at him, recoiled, and Grandma laid a hand on her arm.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I ain’t got the patience for coyotes. They’d maybe fix you up but we’d both be stuck in a tale past telling, and I’m too old for that. Come on.”
They went a little further on, past a wash and a watering hole. There were palo verde trees spreading thin green shade over the water. A javelina looked up at them from the edge and stamped her hooved feet. Her children scraped their tusks together and grunted.
Grandma slid and slithered down the slope to the far side of the water and refilled the water bottles. “Not them either,” she said to the jackalope wife. “They’ll talk the legs off a wooden sheep. We’d both be dead of old age before they’d figured out what time to start.”
The javelina dropped their heads and ignored them as they left the wash behind.
The sun was overhead and the sky turned turquoise, a color so hard you could bash your knuckles on it. A raven croaked overhead and another one snickered somewhere off to the east.
The jackalope wife paused, leaning on her crutch, and looked up at the wings with longing.
“Oh no,” said Grandma. “I’ve got no patience for riddle games, and in the end they always eat someone’s eyes. Relax, child. We’re nearly there.”
The last stretch was cruelly hard, up the side of a bluff. The sand was soft underfoot and miserably hard for a girl walking with a crutch. Grandma had to half-carry the jackalope wife at the end. She weighed no more than a child, but children are heavy and it took them both a long time.
At the top was a high fractured stone that cast a finger of shadow like the wedge of a sundial. Sand and sky and shadow and stone. Grandma Harken nodded, content.
“It’ll do,” she said. “It’ll do.” She laid the jackalope wife down in the shadow and laid her tools out on the stone. Cigarettes and dead mouse and a scrap of burnt fur from the jackalope’s breast. “It’ll do.”
Then she sat down in the shadow herself and arranged her skirts.
She waited.
The sun went overhead and the level in the water bottle went down. The sun started to sink and the wind hissed and the jackalope wife was asleep or dead.
The ravens croaked a conversation to each other, from the branches of a palo verde tree, and whatever one said made the other one laugh.
“Well,” said a voice behind Grandma’s right ear, “lookee what we have here.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
“Don’t see them out here often,” he said. “Not the right sort of place.” He considered. “Your Saint Anthony, now . . . him I think I’ve seen. He understood about deserts.”
Grandma’s lips twisted. “Father of Rabbits,” she said sourly. “Wasn’t trying to call you up.”
“Oh, I know. ” The Father of Rabbits grinned. “But you know I’ve always had a soft spot for you, Maggie Harken.”
He sat down beside her on his heels. He looked like an old Mexican man, wearing a button-down shirt without any buttons. His hair was silver gray as a rabbit’s fur. Grandma wasn’t fooled for a minute.
“Get lonely down there in your town, Maggie?” he asked. “Did you come out here for a little wild company?”
Grandma Harken leaned over to the jackalope wife and smoothed one long ear back from her face. She looked up at them both with wide, uncomprehending eyes.
“Shit,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Never seen that before.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. “What did you do to her, Maggie?”
“I didn’t do a damn thing, except not let her die when I should have.”
“There’s those would say that was more than enough.” He exhaled another lungful of smoke.
“She put on a half-burnt skin. Don’t suppose you can fix her up?” It cost Grandma a lot of pride to say that, and the Father of Rabbits tipped his chin in acknowledgment.
“Ha! No. If it was loose I could fix it up, maybe, but I couldn’t get it off her now with a knife.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “Now I see why you wanted one of the Patterned People.”
Grandma nodded stiffly.
The Father of Rabbits shook his head. “He might want a life, you know. Piddly little dead mouse might not be enough.”
“Then he can have mine.”
“Ah, Maggie, Maggie. . . . You’d have made a fine rabbit, once. Too many stones in your belly now.” He shook his head regretfully. “Besides, it’s not your life he’s owed.”
“It’s my life he’d be getting. My kin did it, it’s up to me to put it right.” It occurred to her that she should have left Eva a note, telling her to send the fool boy back East, away from the desert.
Well. Too late now. Either she’d raised a fool for a daughter or not, and likely she wouldn’t be around to tell.
“Suppose we’ll find out,” said the Father of Rabbits, and nodded.
A man came around the edge of the standing stone. He moved quick then slow and his eyes didn’t blink. He was naked and his skin was covered in painted diamonds.
Grandma Harken bowed to him, because the Patterned People can’t hear speech.
He looked at her and the Father of Rabbits and the jackalope wife. He looked down at the stone in front of him.
The cigarettes he ignored. The mouse he scooped up in two fingers and dropped into his mouth.
Then he crouched there, for a long time. He was so still that it made Grandma’s eyes water, and she had to look away.
“Suppose he does it,” said the Father of Rabbits. “Suppose he sheds that skin right off her. Then what? You’ve got a human left over, not a jackalope wife.”
Grandma stared down at her bony hands. “It’s not so bad, being a human,” she said. “You make do. And it’s got to be better than that.”
She jerked her chin in the direction of the jackalope wife.
“Still meddling, Maggie?” said the Father of Rabbits.
“And what do you call what you’re doing?”
He grinned.
The Patterned Man stood up and nodded to the jackalope wife.
She looked at Grandma, who met her too-wide eyes. “He’ll kill you,” the old woman said. “Or cure you. Or maybe both. You don’t have to do it. This is the bit where you get a choice. But when it’s over, you’ll be all the way something, even if it’s just all the way dead.”
The jackalope wife nodded.
She left the crutch lying on the stones and stood up. Rabbit legs weren’t meant for it, but she walked three steps and the Patterned Man opened his arms and caught her.
He bit her on the forearm, where the thick veins run, and sank his teeth in up to the gums. Grandma cursed.
“Easy now,” said the Father of Rabbits, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s one of the Patterned People, and they only know the one way.”
The jackalope wife’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she sagged down onto the stone.
He set her down gently and picked up one of the cigarettes.
Grandma Harken stepped forward. She rolled both her sleeves up to the elbow and offered him her wrists.
The Patterned Man stared at her, unblinking. The ravens laughed to themselves at the bottom of the wash. Then he dipped his head and bowed to Grandma Harken and a rattlesnake as long as a man slithered away into the evening.
She let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “He didn’t ask for a life.”
The Father of Rabbits grinned. “Ah, you know. Maybe he wasn’t hungry. Maybe it was enough you made the offer.”
“Maybe I’m too old and stringy,” she said.
“Could be that, too.”
The jackalope wife was breathing. Her pulse went fast then slow. Grandma sat down beside her and held her wrist between her own callused palms.
“How long you going to wait?” asked the Father of Rabbits.
“As long as it takes,” she snapped back.
>
The sun went down while they were waiting. The coyotes sang up the moon. It was half-full, half-new, halfway between one thing and the other.
“She doesn’t have to stay human, you know,” said the Father of Rabbits. He picked up the cigarettes that the Patterned Man had left behind and offered one to Grandma.
“She doesn’t have a jackalope skin anymore.”
He grinned. She could just see his teeth flash white in the dark. “Give her yours.”
“I burned it,” said Grandma Harken, sitting up ramrod straight. “I found where he hid it after he died and I burned it myself. Because I had a new husband and a little bitty baby girl and all I could think about was leaving them both behind and go dance.”
The Father of Rabbits exhaled slowly in the dark.
“It was easier that way,” she said. “You get over what you can’t have faster that you get over what you could. And we shouldn’t always get what we think we want.”
They sat in silence at the top of the bluff. Between Grandma’s hands, the pulse beat steady and strong.
“I never did like your first husband much,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Well,” she said. She lit her cigarette off his. “He taught me how to swear. And the second one was better.”
The jackalope wife stirred and stretched. Something flaked off her in long strands, like burnt scraps of paper, like a snake’s skin shedding away. The wind tugged at them and sent them spinning off the side of the bluff.
From down in the desert, they heard the first notes of a sudden wild music.
“It happens I might have a spare skin,” said the Father of Rabbits. He reached into his pack and pulled out a long gray roll of rabbit skin. The jackalope wife’s eyes went wide and her body shook with longing, but it was human longing and a human body shaking.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Grandma Harken, suspicious.
“Oh, well, you know.” He waved a hand. “Pulled it out of a fire once—must have been forty years ago now. Took some doing to fix it up again, but some people owed me favors. Suppose she might as well have it . . . Unless you want it?”
He held it out to Grandma Harken.
She took it in her hands and stroked it. It was as soft as it had been fifty years ago. The small sickle horns were hard weights in her hands.
“You were a hell of a dancer,” said the Father of Rabbits.
“Still am,” said Grandma Harken, and she flung the jackalope skin over the shoulders of the human jackalope wife.
It went on like it had been made for her, like it was her own. There was a jagged scar down one foreleg where the rattlesnake had bit her. She leapt up and darted away, circled back once and bumped Grandma’s hand with her nose—and then she was bounding down the path from the top of the bluff.
The Father of Rabbits let out a long sigh. “Still are,” he agreed.
“It’s different when you got a choice,” said Grandma Harken.
They shared another cigarette under the standing stone.
Down in the desert, the music played and the jackalope wives danced. And one scarred jackalope went leaping into the circle of firelight and danced like a demon, while the moon laid down across the saguaro’s thorns.
THE CARTOGRAPHER WASPS AND THE ANARCHIST BEES
E. Lily Yu
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” draws from E. Lily Yu’s experience with beekeeping in college, Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee, and several papers on the phenomenon of anarchism in honeybees, including Oldroyd and Osborne, 1999. The story was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, and WSFA Small Press awards, and Yu won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. She lives near Seattle, Washington.
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” is a deceptively complex story, combining insects and politics in the tradition of Bernard Mandeville and James Gould.
For longer than anyone could remember, the village of Yiwei had worn, in its orchards and under its eaves, clay-colored globes of paper that hissed and fizzed with wasps. The villagers maintained an uneasy peace with their neighbors for many years, exercising inimitable tact and circumspection. But it all ended the day a boy, digging in the riverbed, found a stone whose balance and weight pleased him. With this, he thought, he could hit a sparrow in flight. There were no sparrows to be seen, but a paper ball hung low and inviting nearby. He considered it for a moment, head cocked, then aimed and threw.
Much later, after he had been plastered and soothed, his mother scalded the fallen nest until the wasps seething in the paper were dead. In this way it was discovered that the wasp nests of Yiwei, dipped in hot water, unfurled into beautifully accurate maps of provinces near and far, inked in vegetable pigments and labeled in careful Mandarin that could be distinguished beneath a microscope.
The villagers’ subsequent incursions with bee veils and kettles of boiling water soon diminished the prosperous population to a handful. Commanded by a single stubborn foundress, the survivors folded a new nest in the shape of a paper boat, provisioned it with fallen apricots and squash blossoms, and launched themselves onto the river. Browsing cows and children fled the riverbanks as they drifted downstream, piping sea chanteys.
At last, forty miles south from where they had begun, their craft snagged on an upthrust stick and sank. Only one drowned in the evacuation, weighed down with the remains of an apricot. They reconvened upon a stump and looked about themselves.
“It’s a good place to land,” the foundress said in her sweet soprano, examining the first rough maps that the scouts brought back. There were plenty of caterpillars, oaks for ink galls, fruiting brambles, and no signs of other wasps. A colony of bees had hived in a split oak two miles away. “Once we are established we will, of course, send a delegation to collect tribute.
“We will not make the same mistakes as before. Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”
It took two weeks to complete the nurseries with their paper mobiles, and then another month to reconstruct the Great Library and fill the pigeonholes with what the oldest cartographers could remember of their lost maps. Their comings and goings did not go unnoticed. An ambassador from the beehive arrived with an ultimatum and was promptly executed; her wings were made into stained-glass windows for the council chamber, and her stinger was returned to the hive in a paper envelope. The second ambassador came with altered attitude and a proposal to divide the bees’ kingdom evenly between the two governments, retaining pollen and water rights for the bees—“as an acknowledgment of the preexisting claims of a free people to the natural resources of a common territory,” she hummed.
The wasps of the council were gracious and only divested the envoy of her sting. She survived just long enough to deliver her account to the hive.
The third ambassador arrived with a ball of wax on the tip of her stinger and was better received.
“You understand, we are not refugees applying for recognition of a token territorial sovereignty,” the foundress said, as attendants served them nectars in paper horns, “nor are we negotiating with you as equal states. Those were the assumptions of your late predecessors. They were mistaken.”
“I trust I will do better,” the diplomat said stiffly. She was older than the others, and the hairs of her thorax were sparse and faded.
“I do hope so.”
“Unlike them, I have complete authority to speak for the hive. You have propositions for us; that is clear enough. We are prepared to listen.”
“Oh, good.” The foundress drained her horn and took another. “Yours is an old and highly cultured society, despite the indolence of your ruler, which we understand to be a racial rather than personal proclivity. You have laws, and traditional dances, and mathematicians, and principles, which of course we do respect.”
“Your terms, please.”
She s
miled. “Since there is a local population of tussah moths, which we prefer for incubation, there is no need for anything so unrepublican as slavery. If you refrain from insurrection, you may keep your self-rule. But we will take a fifth of your stores in an ordinary year, and a tenth in drought years, and one of every hundred larvae.”
“To eat?” Her antennae trembled with revulsion.
“Only if food is scarce. No, they will be raised among us and learn our ways and our arts, and then they will serve as officials and bureaucrats among you. It will be to your advantage, you see.”
The diplomat paused for a moment, looking at nothing at all. Finally she said, “A tenth, in a good year—”
“Our terms,” the foundress said, “are not negotiable.”
The guards shifted among themselves, clinking the plates of their armor and shifting the gleaming points of their stings.
“I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“The choice is enslavement or cooperation,” the foundress said. “For your hive, I mean. You might choose something else, certainly, but they have tens of thousands to replace you with.”
The diplomat bent her head. “I am old,” she said. “I have served the hive all my life, in every fashion. My loyalty is to my hive and I will do what is best for it.”
“I am so very glad.”
“I ask you—I beg you—to wait three or four days to impose your terms. I will be dead by then, and will not see my sisters become a servile people.”
The foundress clicked her claws together. “Is the delaying of business a custom of yours? We have no such practice. You will have the honor of watching us elevate your sisters to moral and technological heights you could never imagine.”
The diplomat shivered.
“Go back to your queen, my dear. Tell them the good news.”
It was a crisis for the constitutional monarchy. A riot broke out in District 6, destroying the royal waxworks and toppling the mouse-bone monuments before it was brutally suppressed. The queen had to be calmed with large doses of jelly after she burst into tears on her ministers’ shoulders.
The New Voices of Fantasy Page 10