He thought of the unknown aliens who made the ray-gun. Could they be influencing events? If the ray-gun was intelligent, could it be responsible for the coincidence?
Kirsten had often spent time near the gun. On their first visit to the pond, she and Jack had lain half-naked with the gun in Jack’s backpack beside them.
He thought of Kirsten that day. So open. So vulnerable. The gun had been within inches. Had it nurtured Kirsten’s interest in yachting . . . her decision to get a job in Oregon . . . even her grandparents’ offer of their boat? Had it molded Kirsten’s life so she was ready when Jack needed her? And if the gun could do that, what had it done to Jack himself ?
This is ridiculous, Jack thought. The gun is just a gun. It doesn’t control people. It just kills them.
Yet Jack couldn’t shake off his sense of eeriness—about Kirsten as well as the ray-gun. All these years, while Jack had been preparing himself to be a hero, Kirsten had somehow done the same. Her self-improvement program had worked better than Jack’s. She had a boat; he didn’t.
Coincidence or not, Jack couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He told Kirsten he’d be delighted to go sailing with her. Only later did he realize that their time on the yacht would have a sexual subtext. He broke out laughing. “I’m such an idiot. We’ve done it again.” Like that day at the pond, Jack had only been thinking about the gun. Kirsten had been thinking about Jack. Her invitation wasn’t a carte-blanche come-on but it had a strong hint of, “Let’s get together and see what develops.”
Where Kirsten was concerned, Jack had always been slow to catch the signals. He thought, Obviously, the ray-gun keeps dulling my senses. This time, Jack meant it as a joke.
Summer came. Jack drove west with the ray-gun in the trunk of his car. The gun’s safety was on, but Jack still drove as if he were carrying nuclear waste. He’d taken the gun back and forth between his hometown and university many times, but this trip was longer, on unfamiliar roads. It was also the last trip Jack ever intended to make with the gun; if the gun didn’t want to be thrown into the sea, perhaps it would cause trouble. But it didn’t.
For much of the drive, Jack debated how to tell Kirsten about the gun. He’d considered smuggling it onto the boat and throwing the weapon overboard when she wasn’t looking, but Jack felt that he owed her the truth. It was overdue. Besides, this cruise could be the beginning of a new relationship. Jack didn’t want to start by sneaking behind Kirsten’s back.
So he had to reveal his deepest secret. Every other secret would follow: what happened to Deana; what had really been on Jack’s mind that day at the pond; what made First Love go sour. Jack would expose his guilt to the woman who’d suffered from the fallout.
He thought, She’ll probably throw me overboard with the gun. But he would open up anyway, even if it made Kirsten hate him. When he tossed the ray-gun into the sea, he wanted to unburden himself of everything.
The first day on the boat, Jack said nothing about the ray-gun. Instead, he talked compulsively about trivia. So did Kirsten. It was strange being together, looking so much the way they did in high school but being entirely different people.
Fortunately, they had practical matters to fill their time. Jack needed a crash course in seamanship. He learned quickly. Kirsten was a good teacher. Besides, Jack’s longstanding program of hero-dom had prepared his mind and muscles. Kirsten was impressed that he knew Morse code and had extensive knowledge of knots. She asked, “Were you a Boy Scout?”
“No. When I was a kid, I wanted to be able to untie myself if I ever got captured by spies.”
Kirsten laughed. She thought he was joking.
That first day, they stayed close to shore. They never had to deal with being alone; there were always other yachts in sight, and sailboats, and people on shore. When night came, they put in to harbor. They ate in an ocean-view restaurant. Jack asked, “So where will we go tomorrow?”
“Where would you like? Up the coast, down the coast, or straight out to sea?”
“Why not straight out?” said Jack.
Back on the yacht, he and Kirsten talked long past midnight. There was only one cabin, but two separate fold-away beds. Without discussion, they each chose a bed. Both usually slept in the nude, but for this trip they’d both brought makeshift “pajamas” consisting of a T-shirt and track pants. They laughed at the clothes, the coincidence, and themselves.
They didn’t kiss good night. Jack silently wished they had. He hoped Kirsten was wishing the same thing. They talked for an hour after they’d turned out the lights, becoming nothing but voices in the dark.
The next day they sailed due west. Both waited to see if the other would suggest turning back before dark. Neither did. The farther they got from shore, the fewer other boats remained in sight. By sunset, Jack and Kirsten knew they were once more alone with each other. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do.
Jack asked Kirsten to stay on deck. He went below and got the ray-gun from his luggage. He brought it up into the twilight. Before he could speak, Kirsten said, “I’ve seen that before.”
Jack stared at her in shock. “What? Where?”
“I saw it years ago, in the woods back home. I was out for a walk. I noticed it lying in a little crater, as if it had fallen from the sky.”
“Really? You found it too?”
“But I didn’t touch it,” Kirsten said. “I don’t know why. Then I heard someone coming and I ran away. But the memory stayed vivid in my head. A mysterious object in a crater in the woods. I can’t tell you how often I’ve tried to write poems about it, but they never work out.” She looked at the gun in Jack’s hands. “What is it?”
“A ray-gun,” he said. In the fading light, he could see a clump of seaweed floating a short distance from the boat. He raised the gun and fired. The seaweed exploded in a blaze of fire, burning brightly against the dark waves.
“A ray-gun,” said Kirsten. “Can I try it?”
Some time later, holding hands, they let the gun fall into the water. It sank without protest.
Long after that, they talked in each other’s arms. Jack said the gun had made him who he was. Kirsten said she was the same. “Until I saw the gun, I just wrote poems about myself—overwritten self-absorbed pap, like every teenage girl. But the gun gave me something else to write about. I’d only seen it for a minute, but it was one of those burned-into-your-memory moments. I felt driven to find words to express what I’d seen. I kept refining my poems, trying to make them better. That’s what made the difference.”
“I felt driven too,” Jack said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if the gun can affect human minds. Maybe it brainwashed us into becoming who we are.”
“Or maybe it’s just Stone Soup,” Kirsten said. “You know the story? Someone claims he can make soup from a stone, but what he really does is trick people into adding their own food to the pot. Maybe the ray-gun is like that. It did nothing but sit there like a stone. You and I did every-thing—made ourselves who we are—and the ray-gun is only an excuse.”
“Maybe,” Jack said. “But so many coincidences brought us here. . . . ”
“You think the gun manipulated us because it wanted to be thrown into the Pacific? Why?”
“Maybe even a ray-gun gets tired of killing.” Jack shivered, thinking of Deana. “Maybe the gun feels guilty for the deaths it’s caused; it wanted to go someplace where it would never have to kill again.”
“Deana’s death wasn’t your fault,” Kirsten said. “Really, Jack. It was awful, but it wasn’t your fault.” She shivered too, then made her voice brighter. “Maybe the ray-gun orchestrated all this because it’s an incurable romantic. It wanted to bring us together: our own personal matchmaker from the stars.”
Jack kissed Kirsten on the nose. “If that’s true, I don’t object.”
“Neither do I.” She kissed him back.
Not on the nose.
Far below, the ray-gun drifted through the cold black depths
. Beneath it, on the bottom of the sea, lay wreckage from the starship that had exploded centuries before. The wreckage had traveled all the way from Jupiter. Because of tiny differences in trajectory, the wreckage had splashed down thousands of miles from where the ray-gun landed.
The ray-gun sank straight toward the wreckage . . . but what the wreckage held or why the ray-gun wanted to rejoin it, we will never know.
We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood.
But we wouldn’t.
THE GOD OF AU
ANN LECKIE
The Fleet of the Godless came to the waters around Au by chance. It was an odd assortment of the refugees of the world; some had deliberately renounced all gods, some had offended one god in particular. A few were some god’s favorites that another, rival god had cursed. But most were merely the descendants of the original unfortunates and had never lived any other way.
There were six double-hulled boats, named, in various languages, Bird of the Waves, Water Knife, O Gods Take Pity, Breath of Starlight, Righteous Vengeance, and Neither Land Nor Water. (This last was the home of a man whose divine enemy had pronounced that henceforth he should live on neither land nor water. Its two shallow hulls and the deck between them were carefully lined with soil, so that as it floated on the waves it would be precisely what its name declared.) For long years they had wandered the world, pursued by their enemies, allies of no one. Who would shelter them and risk the anger of gods? Who, even had they wished to, could protect them?
More than any other people in the world, they were attuned to the presence and moods of gods—they would hardly have survived so long had they not been—and even before they came in sight of the line of small islands that stretched southward from the larger island of Au they had felt a curious lifelessness in the atmosphere. It was unlike anything they had ever met before. They sailed ahead, cautiously, watched and waited, and after a few days their leader, a man named Steq, captain of Righteous Vengeance, ordered the most neutral of prayers and a small sacrifice to whoever the local gods of the waters might be.
Shortly afterwards, twelve people disappeared in the night and were never seen again. The remaining Godless knew a sign when they saw one, and their six captains met together on Neither Land Nor Water to consult.
The six ships rode near a small island, sheer-sided black stone, white seabirds nesting in the crags, and a crown of green grass at the top. The breeze was cold, and the sun, though bright in a cloudless, intensely blue sky, seemed warmthless, and so they huddled around the firebox on the deck between the two hulls.
“What shall we do?” Steq asked the other five when they had all settled. He was, like the other Godless, all wiry muscle and no fat. Years of exposure had bleached his dark hair reddish, and whatever color his skin had been at his birth, it had been darkened yet further by the sun. His eyes were brown, and seemed somehow vague until he spoke, when all hints of diffusion or dreaminess disappeared. “I have some thoughts on the matter myself, but it would be best to consider all our options.”
“We should leave here,” said the captain of O Gods Take Pity, a broad-shouldered man with one eye and one hand, and skin like leather. He was older than any of the other captains. “The god in question is clearly capricious.”
“What god isn’t?” asked another captain. “Let’s make up a sacrifice. A good one, with plenty of food, a feast on all six boats. Let us invoke the god who punished us for our recent offense. In this way perhaps we can at least mollify it.”
“Your thought is a good one,” said Steq. “It has crossed my mind as well. Though I am undecided which I think better—a feast, or some ascetic act of penitence.”
“Why not both?” suggested another. “First the penitence, and then a feast.”
“This would seem to cover all eventualities,” said Steq. The others were agreed, except for the captain of O Gods Take Pity.
“This god is tricky and greedy. Moreso than others. Best we should take our chances elsewhere.” And he would not participate in the debate over the safest wording and form of the rites, but closed his one eye and leaned closer to the firebox.
When the meeting was done and the captains were departing for their own boats, Steq took him aside. “Why do you say this god is greedier and trickier than most?”
“Why do you ask me this when the meeting is finished?” asked the other captain, narrowing his one eye. Steq only looked at him. “Very well. Ask yourself this question—where are the other gods? There is not an infant in the fleet that does not feel the difference between these waters and the ones we’ve left. This is a god that has driven out or destroyed all others, a god who resents sacrifices meant for any other. And that being the case, why wait for us to make the mistake? Why not send warning first, and thus be assured of our obedience? It pleased the god that we should lose those twelve people, make no mistake. You would be a fool not to see it, and I never took you for a fool.”
“I see it,” said Steq. He had not risen to a position of authority without an even temper, and considerable intelligence. “I also see that we could do worse than win favor with a god powerful enough to drive any other out of its territory.”
“At what cost, Steq?”
“There has never been a time we have not paid for dealing with gods,” said Steq. “And there has never been a time that we have not been compelled to deal with them. We are all sick at heart over this loss, but we cannot afford to pass by any advantage that may offer itself.”
“I left my own son to drown because I could not go back without endangering my boat and everyone in it. Do not think I speak out of sentiment.” Both men were silent a moment. “I will not challenge your authority, but I tell you, this is a mistake that may well cost us our lives.”
“I value your counsel,” Steq told him, and he put his hand on the other captain’s shoulder. “Do not be silent, I beg you, but tell me all your misgivings, now and in the future.” And with that they parted, each to their own boat.
A thousand years before, in the village of Ilu on the island of Au, there were two brothers, Etoje and Ekuba. They had been born on the same day and when their father died it was unclear how his possessions should be divided.
The brothers took their dispute to the god of a cave near Ilu. This cave was a hollow in the mountainside that led down to a steaming, sulfur-smelling well, and the god there had often given good advice in the past.
Let Ekuba divide according to his satisfaction, was the god’s answer. And let Etoje choose his portion. Let the brothers be bound by their choices, or death and disaster will be the result.
But instead of dividing fairly, Ekuba hid the most desirable part of his father’s belongings in a hole under the pile he was certain Etoje would not choose. It was not long before Etoje discovered his brother’s deception, and in anger he drew his knife and struck Ekuba so that he fell bleeding to the ground. Thinking he had killed his brother, Etoje took a small boat and fled.
The island furthest to the south of Au had reared its head and shoulders above the water, with much steam and ash and fire, in the time of Etoje’s great-grandfather. Birds were still wary of it, and it was not considered a good place to hunt. Its sides were black and steep, and there was no place for a boat to land, but Etoje found a spur of rock to tie his boat to, and he climbed up the cliff to the top, where a few plants and mosses had taken tentative root in the ashes, and a pool of warm water steamed. There was nothing else of interest.
But darkness was falling and he had nowhere else to go, so he sat down next to the spring to consider his situation. “Oh, Etoje,” he said to himself, “your anger will be the death of you. But what else were you to do?”
As he sat, a seabird flew overhead, carrying a large fish. Etoje thought that if he could make the bird drop the fish, he might at least have some food for the evening. So he took up a stone as quickly as he might and threw it at the bird.
The ston
e hit its target, and the bird dropped the fish. But the fish fell not on the ashy land, but into the spring. Etoje could not see it to pull it out, and he was wary of wading into a spring he knew nothing of, so he settled himself once again.
When he had sat this way for some time, he heard a voice. “Etoje,” it whispered. Etoje looked around, but saw nothing. “Etoje!” This time Etoje looked at the spring, and saw the fish lying half in and half out of the water.
“Did you speak to me, fish?” Etoje asked. It looked like any other fish, silver-scaled and finned and glassy-eyed.
“I spoke,” said the fish, “but I am not a fish.”
“You look like a fish to me,” remarked Etoje.
“I am the god of this island,” said the fish in its weird whisper. “I must have a mouth to speak, and perforce I have used this fish, there being nothing else available.”
“Then I thank you, god of this island, whatever your proper name, whether you be male or female, or both, or neither, for your hospitality. Though I have little besides thanks to offer in exchange.”
“It was of exchange I wished to speak. Shall we trade favors and become allies?”
“On what terms?” asked Etoje, for though he was in desperate straits, he knew that one should be cautious when dealing with gods.
“I was born with the island,” said the fish. “And I am lonely. The cliff-girt isles around me subsist on the occasional prayers of hunters. They are silent and all but godless. No one hunts my birdless cliffs, and my island, like those others, will likely never be settled. Take me to Au, and I will reward you.”
“That, I’m afraid, is impossible.” And Etoje told the fish of his father’s death, and his brother’s deception, and his own anger and flight.
“Take me to Au,” the fish insisted. And it told Etoje that if he would do so, and make the sacrifices and perform the rites the god required, Etoje would be pre-eminent in Au. “I will make you and yours rulers over the whole land of Au. I will promise that you and yours will be mine, and your fates my special concern, so long as Au stands above the waves.”
The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Page 27