The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  The stairs changed to cement-jacketed brick with small buttresses cut into the rock. There was a pile of stems and cherry pits on one landing, and the railing above them was white with bird droppings. Piggy leaned over the rail and said, “Hey, I can see seagulls down there. Flying around.”

  “Where?” Russ leaned over the railing, then said scornfully, “Those are pigeons. The Ghazoddis used to release them for rifle practice.”

  As Piggy turned to follow Russ down again, Donna caught a glimpse into his eyes, liquid and trembling with helplessness and despair. She’d seen that fear in him only once before, months ago when she’d stopped by his house on the way to school, just after the Emir’s assassination.

  The living room windows were draped and the room seemed unnaturally gloomy after being out in the morning sun. Blue television light flickered over shelves of shadowy ceramic figurines: Dresden milkmaids, Chantilly Chinamen, Meissen pug-dogs connected by a gold chain held in their champed jaws, naked Delft nymphs dancing.

  Piggy’s mother sat in a limp dressing gown, hair unbrushed, watching the funeral. She held a cup of oily looking coffee in one hand. Donna was surprised to see her up so early. Everyone said that she had a bad problem with alcohol, that even by service wife standards she was out of control.

  “Look at them,” Piggy’s mother said. On the screen were solemn processions of camels and Cadillacs, sheikhs in jellaba, keffigeh and mirrorshades, European dignitaries with wives in tasteful grey Parisian fashions. “They’ve got their nerve.”

  “Where did you put my lunch?” Piggy said loudly from the kitchen.

  “Making fun of the Kennedys, like that!” The Emir’s youngest son, no more than four years old, salaamed his father’s casket as it passed before him. “That kid’s bad enough, but you should see the mother, crying as if her heart were broken. It’s enough to turn your stomach. If I were Jackie, I’d—”

  Donna and Piggy and Russ had gone bowling the night the Emir was shot. This was out in the ruck of cheap joints that surrounded the base, catering almost exclusively to servicemen. When the Muzak piped through overhead speakers was interrupted for the news bulletin, everyone had stood up and cheered. Up we go someone had begun singing, and the rest had joined in, into the wild blue yonder…Donna had felt so sick with fear and disgust she had thrown up in the parking lot. “ I don’t think they’re making fun of anyone,” Donna said. “They’re just—”

  “Don’t talk to her!” The refrigerator door slammed shut. A cupboard door slammed open.

  Piggy’s mother smiled bitterly. “This is exactly what you’d expect from these ragheads. Pretending they’re white people, deliberately mocking their betters. Filthy brown animals.”

  “Mother! Where is my fucking lunch?”

  She looked at him then, jaw tightening. “Don’t you use that kind of language on me, young man.”

  “All right!” Piggy shouted. “All right, I’m going to school without lunch! Shows how much you care!”

  He turned to Donna and in the instant before he grabbed her wrist and dragged her out of the house, Donna could no longer hear the words, could only see that universe of baffled futility haunting Piggy’s eyes. That same look she glimpsed today.

  ***

  The railings were wooden now, half the posts rotting at their bases, with an occasional plank missing, wrenched off and thrown over the side by previous visitors. Donna’s knees buckled and she stumbled, almost lurching into the rock. “I have to stop,” she said, hating herself for it. “I cannot go one more step.”

  Piggy immediately collapsed on the landing. Russ hesitated, then climbed up to join them. They three sat staring out into nothing, legs over the Edge, arms clutching the rail.

  Piggy found a Pepsi can, logo in flowing Arabic, among the rubble. He held it in his left hand and began sticking holes in it with his butterfly knife, again and again, cackling like a demented sex criminal. “Exterminate the brutes!” he said happily. Then, with absolutely no transition he asked, “How are we ever going to get back up?” so dolorously Donna had to bite back her laughter.

  “Look, I just want to go on down a little bit more,” Russ said.

  “Why?” Piggy sounded petulant.

  “So I can get down enough to get away from this garbage.” He gestured at the cigarette butts, the broken brown glass, sparser than above but still there. “Just a little further, okay guys?” There an edge to his voice, and under that the faintest hint of a plea. Donna felt helpless before those eyes. She wished they were alone, so she could ask him what was wrong.

  Donna doubted that Russ himself knew what he expected to find down below. Did he think that if he went down far enough, he’d never have to climb back? She remembered the time in Mr. Herriman’s algebra class when a sudden tension in the air had made her glance across the room at Russ, and he was, with great concentration, tearing the pages out of his math text and dropping them one by one on the floor. He’d taken a five-day suspension for that, and Donna had never found out what it was all about. But there was a kind of glorious arrogance to the act; Russ had been born out of time. He really should have been a medieval prince, a Medici or one of the Sabakan pretenders.

  “Okay,” Donna said, and Piggy of course had to go along.

  Seven flights farther down the modern stairs came to an end. The wooden railing of the last short, septambic flight had been torn off entire, and laid across the steps. They had to step carefully between the uprights and the rails. But when they stood at the absolute bottom, they saw that there were stairs beyond the final landing, steps that had been cut into the stone itself. They were curving swaybacked things that millenia of rain and foot traffic had worn so uneven they were almost unpassable.

  Piggy groaned. “Man, you can’t expect us to go down that thing.”

  “Nobody’s asking you,” Russ said.

  ***

  They descended the old stairway backwards and on all fours. The wind breezed up, hitting them with the force of an unexpected shove first to one side and then the other. There were times when Donna was so frightened she thought she was going to freeze up and never move again. But at last the stone broadened and became a wide, even ledge, with caves leading back into the rock.

  The cliff face here was green white with lichen, and had in ancient times been laboriously smoothed and carved. Between each cave (their mouths alone left in a natural state, unaltered) were heavy-thighed women—goddesses, perhaps, or demons or sacred dancers—their breasts and faces chipped away by the image-hating followers of the Prophet at a time when Mohammed yet lived. Their hands held loops of vines in which were entangled moons, cycling from new through waxing quarter and gibbous to full and then back through gibbous and waning quarter to dark. Piggy was gasping, his face bright with sweat, but he kept up his blustery front. “What the fuck is all this shit, man?”

  “It was a monastery,” Russ said. He walked along the ledge dazedly, a wondering half smile on his lips. “I read about this.” He stopped at a turquoise automobile door someone had flung over the Edge to be caught and tossed by fluke winds, the only piece of trash that had made it down this far. “Give me a hand.”

  He and Piggy lifted the door, swung it back and forth three times to build up momentum, then lofted it over the lip of the rock. They all three lay down on their stomachs to watch it fall away, turning end over end and seeming finally to flicker as it dwindled smaller and smaller, still falling. At last it shrank below the threshold of visibility and became one of a number of shifting motes in the downbelow, part of the slow, mazy movement of dead blood cells in the eyes’ vitreous humors. Donna turned over on her back, drew her head back from the rim, stared upward. The cliff seemed to be slowly tumbling forward, all the world inexorably, dizzyingly leaning down to crush her.

  “Let’s go explore the caves,” Piggy suggested.

  They were empty. The interiors of the caves extended no more than thirty feet into the rock, but they had all been elaborately worked, arched ce
ilings carved with thousands of faux tesserae, walls adorned with bas-relief pillars. Between the pillars the walls were taken up with long shelves carved into the stone. No artifacts remained, not so much as a potsherd or a splinter of bone. Piggy shone his pocket flash into every shadowy niche. “Somebody’s been here before us and taken everything,” he said.

  “The Historic Registry people, probably.” Russ ran a hand over one shelf. It was the perfect depth and height for a line of three-pound coffee cans. “This is where they stowed the skulls. When a monk grew so spiritually developed he no longer needed the crutch of physical existence, his fellows would render the flesh from his bones and enshrine his skull. They poured wax in the sockets, then pushed in opals while it was still warm. They slept beneath the faintly gleaming eyes of their superiors.”

  When they emerged it was twilight, the first stars appearing from behind a sky fading from blue to purple. Donna looked down on the moon. It was as big as a plate, full and bright. The rilles, dry seas and mountain chains were preternaturally distinct. Somewhere in the middle was Tranquility Base, where Neil Armstrong had planted the American flag.

  “Jeez, it’s late,” Donna said. “If we don’t start home soon, my mom is going to have a cow.”

  “We still haven’t figured a way to get back up,” Piggy reminded her. Then, “We’ll probably have to stay here. Learn to eat owls and grow crops sideways on the cliff face. Start our own civilization. Our only serious problem is the imbalance of sexes, but even that’s not insurmountable.” He put an arm around Donna’s shoulders, grabbed at her breast. “You’d pull the train for us, wouldn’t you, Donna?”

  Angrily she pushed him away and said, “You keep a clean mouth! I’m so tired of your juvenile talk and behavior.”

  “Hey, calm down, it’s cool.” That panicky look was back in his eyes, the forced knowledge that he was not in control, could never be in control, that there was no such thing as control. He smiled weakly, placatingly.

  “No, it is not. It is most emphatically not ‘cool.’” Suddenly she was white and shaking with fury. Piggy was a spoiler. His simple presence ruined any chance she might have had to talk with Russ, find out just what was bugging him, get him to finally, really notice her. “I am sick of having to deal with your immaturity, your filthy language and your crude behavior.”

  Piggy turned pink and began stuttering.

  Russ reached a hand into his pocket, pulled out a chunk of foil-wrapped hash, and a native tin pipe with a carved coral bowl. The kind of thing the local beggar kids sold for twenty-nine cents. “Anybody want to get stoned?” he asked suavely.

  “You bastard!” Piggy laughed. “You told me you were out!”

  Russ shrugged. “I lied.” He lit the pipe carefully, drew in, passed it to Donna. She took it from his fingers, felt how cold they were to her touch, looked up over the pipe and saw his face, thin and ascetic, eyelids closed, pale and Christlike through the blue smoke. She loved him intensely in that instant and wished she could sacrifice herself for his happiness. The pipe’s stem was overwarm, almost hot, between her lips. She drew in deep.

  The smoke was raspy in her throat, then tight and swirling in her lungs. It shot up into her head, filled it with buzzing harmonics: the air, the sky, the rock behind her back all buzzing, ballooning her skull outward in a visionary rush that forced wide open first her eyes and then her mouth. She choked and spasmodically coughed. More smoke than she could imagine possibly holding in her lungs gushed out into the universe.

  “Hey, watch that pipe!” Piggy snatched it from her distant fingers. They tingled with pinpricks of pain like tiny stars in the darkness of her flesh. “You were spilling the hash!” The evening light was abuzz with energy, the sky swarming up into her eyes. Staring out into the darkening air, the moon rising below her and the stars as close and friendly as those in a children’s book illustration, she felt at peace, detached from worldly cares. “Tell us about the monastery, Russ,” she said, in the same voice she might have used a decade before to ask her father for a story.

  “Yeah, tell us about the monastery, Unca Russ,” Piggy said, but with jeering undertones. Piggy was always sucking up to Russ, but there was tension there too, and his sarcastic little challenges were far from rare. It was classic beta male jealousy, straight out of Primate Psychology 101.

  “It’s very old,” Russ said. “Before the sufis, before Mohammed, even before the Zoroastrians crossed the gulf, the native mystics would renounce the world and go to live in cliffs on the Edge of the World. They cut the steps down, and once down, they never went back up again.”

  “How did they eat then?” Piggy asked skeptically.

  “They wished their food into existence. No, really! It was all in their creation myth: In the beginning all was Chaos and Desire. The world was brought out of Chaos—by which they meant unformed matter—by Desire, or Will. It gets a little inconsistent after that, because it wasn’t really a religion, but more like a system of magic. They believed that the world wasn’t complete yet, that for some complicated reason it could never be complete. So there’s still traces of the old Chaos lingering just beyond the Edge, and it can be tapped by those who desire it strongly enough, if they have distanced themselves from the things of the world. These mystics used to come down here to meditate against the moon and work miracles.

  “This wasn’t sophisticated stuff like the Tantric monks in Tibet or anything, remember. It was like a primitive form of animism, a way to force the universe to give you what you wanted. So the holy men would come down here and they’d wish for…like riches, you know? Filigreed silver goblets with rubies, mounds of moonstones, elfinbone daggers sharper than Damascene steel. Only once they got them they weren’t supposed to want them. They’d just throw them over the Edge. There were these monasteries all along the cliffs. The farther from the world they were, the more spiritually advanced.”

  “So what happened to the monks?”

  “There was a king—Althazar? I forget his name. He was this real greedhead, started sending his tax collectors down to gather up everything the monks brought into existence. Must’ve figured, hey, the monks weren’t using them. Which as it turned out was like a real major blasphemy, and the monks got pissed. The boss mystics, all the real spiritual heavies, got together for this big confab. Nobody knows how. There’s one of the classics claims they could run sideways on the cliff just like it was the ground, but I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. So one night they all of them, every monk in the world, meditated at the same time. They chanted together, they said, It is not enough that Althazar should die, for he has blasphemed. He must suffer a doom such as has been visited on no man before. He must be unmade, uncreated, reduced to less than has ever been. And they prayed that there be no such king as Althazar, that his life and history be unmade, so that there never had been such king as Althazar.

  “And he was no more.

  “But so great was their yearning for oblivion that when Althazar ceased to be, his history and family as well, they were left feeling embittered and did not know why. And not knowing why, their hatred turned upon themselves, and their wish for destruction, and they too all of a single night, ceased to be.” He fell silent.

  At last Piggy said, “You believe that crap?” Then, when there was no answer, “It’s none of it true, man! Got that? There’s no magic, and there never was.” Donna could see that he was really angry, threatened on some primal level by the possibility that someone he respected could even begin to believe in magic. His face got pink, the way it always did when he lost control.

  “No, it’s all bullshit,” Russ said bitterly. “Like everything else.”

  They passed the pipe around again. Then Donna leaned back, stared straight out, and said, “If I could wish for anything, you know what I’d wish for?”

  “Bigger tits?”

  She was so weary now, so pleasantly washed out, that it was easy to ignore Piggy. “I’d wish I knew what the situation was.”

  “
What situation?” Piggy asked. Donna was feeling langorous, not at all eager to explain herself, and she waved away the question. But he persisted. “What situation?”

  “Any situation. I mean, all the time, I find myself talking with people and I don’t know what’s really going on. What games they’re playing. Why they’re acting the way they are. I wish I knew what the situation was.”

  The moon floated before her, big and fat and round as a griffin’s egg, shining with power. She could feel that power washing through her, the background radiation of decayed chaos spread across the sky at a uniform three degrees Kelvin. Even now, spent and respent, a coin fingered and thinned to the worn edge of nonexistence, there was power out there, enough to flatten planets.

  Staring out at that great fat boojum snark of a moon, she felt theflow of potential worlds, and within the cold silver disk of that jester’s skull, rank with magic, sensed the invisible presence of Russ’s primitive monks, men whose minds were nowhere near comprehensible to her, yet vibrated with power, existing as matrices of patterned stress, no more actual than Donald Duck, but no less powerful either. She was caught in a waking fantasy, in which the sky was full of power and all of it accessible to her. Monks sat empty handed over their wishing bowls, separated from her by the least fictions of time and reality. For an eternal instant all possibilities fanned out to either side, equally valid, no one more real than any other. Then the world turned under her, and her brain shifted back to realtime.

  “Me,” Piggy said, “I just wish I knew how to get back up the stairs.”

  They were silent for a moment. Then it occurred to Donna that here was the perfect opportunity to find out what was bugging Russ. If she asked cautiously enough, if the question hit him just right, if she were just plain lucky, he might tell her everything. She cleared her throat. “Russ? What do you wish?”

  In the bleakest voice imaginable, Russ said, “I wish I’d never been born.”