The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009
Page 69
My waterfall hair reached to its thick heels when I stood beside it. I didn’t want to be stuck riding a waterweed thing all my life, or what passed for it. I liked Frigga’s tuft-eared cat, or Holda’s black mare with her glittering starlit eyes. But most of all, I wanted to ride Spiderhorse.
It was just a wish, nothing more than that. But wishes are like thistledown seeds when the Hunt rides: they get blown on the wind of horses’ hooves, and take root in odd places.
I certainly didn’t mean to steal Wotan’s horse. It just worked out that way.
It was my tenth hunt, or thereabouts. Easy enough to count: the warriors gave me a silver bracelet every time I rode. They asked for a different kind of ride in exchange, but I didn’t mind that. It was as much fun as the waterweed steed, and the feather whispered to me all night long while the warriors snored.
On that tenth Hunt, we rode out over Heimfell. It was winter again, not long after Yule, and even in a land which rang with church bells there was still enough room for us: still holly and ivy round the lintel, still the midnight crossroads’ gifts. The long back of Heimfell glittered with snow and my waterweed pony plodded on the sparkling air as if we were trotting across mud. When I dug my heels in, so did it. I looked all the way up the curve of the Hunt and saw Spiderhorse prance and dance as the ravens’ wings blotted out the moon and I thought: that’s what I want.
I didn’t mean to say it out loud. No one heard me except Waterweed—and the feather, which caught on a sudden gust of icy air and fluttered down. I grabbed at it and almost fell. I watched it spiral down, down, through the hooves of the Hunt to the summit of Heimfell, where it arrowed into the snow and quivered into stillness. I saw the feather vanish and a shadowy stain spread out across the snow. I didn’t know what it meant at the time. I should have remembered about wishes.
Wotan started to take more of an interest in me after that, and this should have worried me more than it did, too. But I was a girl, and popular, and wanting to be so, and of course it turned my head.
And Wotan was—well, Wotan. It’s hard to describe his kind, because it’s hard to look at them closely, or for long. Think of someone dark and sparkling, with an amber eye and wolf’s pelt hair. Think of someone who can blot out the moon.
It didn’t take long and I knew it would only be the once. He was gentle, at first. He gave me mead in a glass cup and a comb made of human bone to clasp my hair. But lying with him was not like lying with a warrior, or with a human man (what? I’d had an experimental phase). He was ice cold and when he entered me it burned and hurt. I was too proud to cry out and I think he liked that, though eventually I did so, but with the pleasure behind the pain.
I thought he’d probably got me pregnant. He usually did, with his girls, and quite often they lived through the birth. He did not go to sleep like a warrior, did not sprawl snoring. He lay on his back, still as stone, and I saw the reflection of his amber eye upon the ceiling, like a little coal. Gradually the reflection faded, and when I dared to look I saw that the eye had faded from amber to shadow, although it was still open. I reached down between my legs and found that I was mistletoe-sticky, but there was no blood. That, Holda had told me before I went to Wotan’s chamber, was a very good sign.
I thought: I want this child. But I want to ride Spiderhorse, too.
Well, no time like the present.
I slid from the whispering sheets. Wotan’s ravens were sitting on the bedposts: I hadn’t seen them when I came in. But when I sought a closer look, fearing immediate betrayal, I saw that they were nothing more than rough carvings of black wood. So I kept silent and slipped on. One of the advantages of being born dead is that you still need to breathe, but not often. I barely stirred the shadows as I went through the door and down the hall, and through the mead-hall where the dogs and the warriors muttered in meat-soaked sleep, and out into the night to where the horses were stabled.
My pony was kept at the end nearest to the mead-hall. Water that smelled of pond-weed leaked from under the door. I went on, along the row of doors to the far end, the end closest to the edge of things. The stars seemed very close, here, and the moonlight fell hard on my skin. I looked down at my fingers, still sticky with mistletoe, and they gleamed silver. I could feel Spiderhorse inside his stall. I heard him stamp one of his eight feet, that are said to be shod with human bone to enable his master to ride the sky-roads, and it rang on the floor of the stable like church bells. I shivered to hear it, but I still walked on to the furthest stable, where everything stopped. I looked out onto a black sea, star-speckled. Very far away, out across the edge of things, I thought I could see the trunk of the Tree, a column of dark against dark, but I wasn’t sure. I’d ride there, I thought to myself, and take a look. Maybe I’d even drop in on the Hall, and I smiled at the little, rooty thing I had once been as I looked down at my milky hands. Strong enough to hold Sleipnir’s bridle? I hoped so. Time to find out. I could almost hear the beat of ravens’ wings at my back, catch the gleam of a wolf’s eye, wakening.
I opened the stable door. Spiderhorse seemed a lot bigger, close to. It was hard to see how the eight legs joined his body; the muscles seemed to be in constant movement, sliding beneath the shining skin. Impossible to tell what colour he was, too: sometimes he looked as black as the night sea, or as grey as the winter dusk, and then a clear glistening white like wet bone. I blinked, and there was only an eight-legged moving shadow, brown as ash-wood. Spiderhorse arched a long neck and looked at me and his eyes were like a man’s eyes, filled with a wicked knowing.
I didn’t give myself time to think, or I would have turned and fled. I snatched the saddle from the wall—made of warriors’ skins, or so they said, and heavy enough to make my knees buckle. I threw it over Spiderhorse’s back and drew the girth tight. The horse did nothing, but he watched me all the while. Then the bridle—made of women’s braids, or so they said, and it snaked in my hands like lightning. Over the horse’s head, and then it was time to put my foot in the stirrup and leap, a jump that felt sun-high. Spiderhorse stamped his foot, once, and I turned him and rode him through the door and out over the edge. He gave a long shrieking cry as we went and his eight hooves rang out across the star road –I could see it now a little way below, many packed points of light, grain scattered across the heavens’ floor. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw that far behind us, the lights were indeed going on. Wotan’s hall had woken up. I took a deep breath, and rode on.
What was it like, riding Spiderhorse? It was more pleasure than any I’ve known, speed and power running through me like water, stronger than the pleasure of the warrior’s ride, stronger than the pleasure of killing. I would have ridden Sleipnir to the end of time, to Ragnarok, forever, if I’d had the chance.
But the chance wasn’t to come. Something brushed my face and I looked up to see the first leaves of the Tree. Then there was the sharpness of pain and when I put my hand to my cheek, it came away bloody. Spiderhorse charged through the leaves, and I ducked, leaning low over the horse’s steaming neck as we went on, past the vast column of the Trunk and through the other side. If my old Hall was there, I did not see it. But I did see Mid-Earth below, a tapestry of silver and black with the hard ball of the moon hanging over it, and then a burst of blinding light as the sun rolled up over the world’s edge. The light blinded me so that I cast my arm in front of my face, just in time to see Wotan’s Hunt ride up behind me, with a yellow eye gleaming from under the hood of someone standing at the prow of Freya’s cat chariot.
I shouldn’t have let go of the reins.
Of course, Spiderhorse reared.
Of course, I fell.
I saw the whole length of the Tree as I went, crown to trunk to root, with the sun’s light striking off the leaves as the morning world roared to meet me. A winter world still, with the waterfalls frozen, and the land bitter under the frost. And as I fell, I felt myself grow small, dwindling down, my hair streaming behind me like a comet’s tail and then evaporating
into fire as my flesh burned painlessly away and I grew yet smaller, soft as a frog.
I went straight through a roof, sending the snow that covered it hissing into steam, and landed somewhere dark and hot and wet. I didn’t realise what had happened at first, until I couldn’t get out, and then I tried to scream, with my frog mouth, and could not.
I did get out eventually. It took nine months, of chafing and regrets and pleading and cursing, until nature took its course and took pity on me. No one else was listening, after all. My new hostess squeezed me out into a midwife’s hands, into a hovel’s smoky air.
I’d already planned what to do. I’d done it before. But as I came into Mid-world for the second time, I opened my eyes and there was Wotan, standing on the other side of the fire. The yellow eye flared in the firelight with a bitter burn and it frightened me so much that I opened my mouth and shrieked.
That was that. The Hunt only ever take the dead.
And that was seventeen years ago, now. I still dream of my root-life in the Hall, and of my time spent riding on the waterweed steed in the wake of the Hunt. But most of all, as I trudge the slopes of Heimfell after the pigs, I dream of riding Spiderhorse, especially in the spring when the black hooves of the ash-trees start springing new leaves.
I have never been touched by a man. I’m just as beautiful as I used to be in Wotan’s mead hall, so there’s been no lack of offers. But I’ve had to ask my father to turn them all down. He’s indulged me so far, but the pregnancy—still concealed—is growing on. It’s taken seventeen years, so far, to get to this point. I don’t know how long it has to go, or what I will give birth to. Wotan’s child, deep within, is silent, and tells me nothing. But when it is born, I know exactly what I will do. I’ll take it to the midnight crossroads, in winter when the moon is dark, and together we’ll wait for the beat of eight hooves, and the breath of cold on the wind.
THE TEAR
IAN MCDONALD
Ptey, sailing
On the night that Ptey voyaged out to have his soul shattered, eight hundred stars set sail across the sky. It was an evening at Great Winter’s ending. The sunlit hours raced toward High Summer, each day lavishly more full of light than the one before. In this latitude, the sun hardly set at all after the spring equinox, rolling along the horizon, fat and idle and pleased with itself. Summer-born Ptey turned his face to the sun as it dipped briefly beneath the horizon, closed his eyes, enjoyed its lingering warmth on his eyelids, in the angle of his cheekbones, on his lips. To the summer-born, any loss of the light was a reminder of the terrible, sad months of winter and the unbroken, encircling dark.
But we have the stars, his father said, a Winter-born. We are born looking out into the universe.
Ptey’s father commanded the little machines that ran the catamaran, trimming sail, winding sheets, setting course by the tumble of satellites; but the tiller he held himself. The equinoctial gales had spun away to the west two weeks before and the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water. Twins hulls cut through the ripple-reflections of gas-flares from the Temejveri oil platforms. As the sun slipped beneath the huge dark horizon and the warmth fell from the hollows of Ptey’s face, so his father turned his face to the sky. Tonight, he wore his Steris Aspect. The ritual selves scared Ptey, so rarely were they unfurled in Ctarisphay: births, namings, betrothals and marriages, divorces and deaths. And of course, the Manifoldings. Familiar faces became distant and formal. Their language changed, their bodies seemed slower, heavier. They became possessed by strange, special knowledges. Only Steris possessed the language for the robots to sail the catamaran and, despite the wheel of positioning satellites around tilted Tay, the latitude and longitude of the Manifold House. The catamaran itself was only run out from its boathouse, to strong songs heavy with clashing harmonies, when a child from Ctarisphay on the edge of adulthood sailed out beyond the outer mole and the fleet of oil platforms to have his or her personality unfolded into eight.
Only two months since, Cjatay had sailed out into the oily black of a late winter afternoon. Ptey was Summer-born, a Solstice boy; Cjatay a late Autumn. It was considered remarkable that they shared enough in common to be able to speak to each other, let alone become the howling boys of the neighborhood, the source of every broken window and borrowed boat. The best part of three seasons between them, but here was only two moons later, leaving behind the pulsing gas flares and maze of pipe work of the sheltering oil-fields, heading into the great, gentle oceanic glow of the plankton blooms, steering by the stars, the occupied, haunted stars. The Manifolding was never a thing of moons and calendars, but of mothers’ watchings and grandmothers’ knowings and teachers’ notings and fathers’ murmurings, of subtly shifted razors and untimely lethargies, of deep-swinging voices and stained bedsheets.
On Etjay Quay, where the porcelain houses leaned over the landing, Ptey had thrown his friend’s bag down into the boat. Cjatay’s father had caught it and frowned. There were observances. Ways. Forms.
“See you,” Ptey had said.
“See you.” Then the wind caught in the catamaran’s tall, curved sails and carried it away from the rain-wet, shiny faces of the houses of Ctarisphay. Ptey had watched the boat until it was lost in the light dapple of the city’s lamps on the winter-dark water. See Cjatay he would, after his six months on the Manifold House. But only partially. There would be Cjatays he had never known, never even met. Eight of them, and the Cjatay with whom he had stayed out all the brief Low Summer nights of the prith run on the fishing staithes, skinny as the piers’ wooden legs silhouetted against the huge sun kissing the edge of the world, would be but a part, a dream of one of the new names and new personalities. Would he know him when he met him on the great floating university that was the Manifold House?
Would he know himself?
“Are they moving yet?” Steris called from the tiller. Ptey shielded his dark-accustomed eyes against the pervasive glow of the carbon-absorbing plankton blooms and peered into the sky. Sail of Bright Anticipation cut two lines of liquid black through the gently undulating sheet of biolight, fraying at the edges into fractal curls of luminescence as the sheets of microorganisms sought each other.
“Nothing yet.”
But it would be soon, and it would be tremendous. Eight hundred stars setting out across the night. Through the changes and domestic rituals of his sudden Manifolding, Ptey had been aware of sky-watch parties being arranged, star-gazing groups setting up telescopes along the quays and in the campaniles, while day on day the story moved closer to the head of the news. Half the world—that half of the world not blinded by its extravagant axial tilt—would be looking to the sky. Watching Steris rig Sail of Bright Anticipation, Ptey had felt cheated, like a sick child confined to bed while festival raged across the boats lashed beneath his window. Now, as the swell of the deep dark of his world’s girdling ocean lifted the twin prows of Sail of Bright Anticipation, on his web of shock-plastic mesh ahead of the mast, Ptey felt his excitement lift with it. A carpet of lights below, a sky of stars above: all his alone.
They were not stars. They were the eight hundred and twenty six space habitats of the Anpreen Commonweal, spheres of nano-carbon ice and water five hundred kilometers in diameter that for twice Ptey’s lifetime had adorned Bephis, the ringed gas giant, like a necklace of pearls hidden in a velvet bag, far from eye and mind. The negotiations fell into eras. The Panic; when the world of Tay became aware that the gravity waves pulsing through the huge ripple tank that was their ocean-bound planet were the bow-shocks of massive artifacts decelerating from near light-speed. The Denial, when Tay’s governments decided it was Best Really to try and hide the fact that their solar system had been immigrated into by eight hundred-and-some space vehicles, each larger than Tay’s petty moons, falling into neat and proper order around Bephis. The Soliciting, when it became obvious that Denial was futile—but on our terms, our terms. A fleet of space probes was dispatched to survey and attempt radio contact with
the arrivals—as yet silent as ice. And, when they were not blasted from space or vaporized or collapsed into quantum black holes or any of the plethora of fanciful destructions imagined in the popular media, the Overture. The Sobering, when it was realized that these star-visitors existed primarily as swarms of free-swimming nano-assemblers in the free-fall spherical oceans of their eight hundred and some habitats, one mind with many forms; and, for the Anpreen, the surprise that these archaic hominiforms on this backwater planet were many selves within one body. One thing they shared and understood well. Water. It ran through their histories, it flowed around their ecologies, it mediated their molecules. After one hundred and twelve years of near-light speed flight, the Anpreen Commonweal was desperately short of water; their spherical oceans shriveled almost into zero gravity teardrops within the immense, nano-tech-reinforced ice shells. Then began the era of Negotiation, the most prolonged of the phases of contact, and the most complex. It had taken three years to establish the philosophical foundations: the Anpreen, an ancient species of the great Clade, had long been a colonial mind, arranged in subtle hierarchies of self-knowledge and ability, and did not know who to talk to, whom to ask for a decision, in a political system with as many governments and nations as there were islands and archipelagos scattered across the world ocean of the fourth planet from the sun.
Now the era of Negotiation had become the era of Open Trade. The Anpreen habitats spent their last drops of reaction mass to break orbit around Bephis and move the Commonweal in-system. Their destination was not Tay, but Tejaphay, Tay’s sunward neighbor, a huge waterworld of unbroken ocean one hundred kilometers deep, crushing gravity, and endless storms. A billion years before the seed-ships probed the remote star system, the gravitational interplay of giant worlds had sent the least of their number spiraling sunwards. Solar wind had stripped away its huge atmosphere and melted its mantle of water ice into a planetary ocean, deep and dark as nightmares. It was that wink of water in the system-scale interferometers of the Can-Bet-Merey people, half a million years before, that had inspired them to fill their night sky with solar sails as one hundred thousand slow seed-ships rode out on flickering launch lasers toward the new system. An evangelically pro-life people were the Can-Bet-Merey, zealous for the Clade’s implicit dogma that intelligence was the only force in the universe capable of defeating the physical death of space-time.