by Ian McDonald
“Just sign the waybill and she’s on her way.”
The girl stood in a circle of drips beneath the fractal fronds of the Ningyo Drifting. She dabbed at herself with the offered towel.
“You should really have a shower, get that salt off you. It’s not good for you.”
“I seem to have missed most of it. But it’s nice to be out of it.” The towel was dry. “Can I ask a question?”
“You can ask anything you like.”
“At the beach, the things I saw you bring out of the sea, what have you done with them?”
Reith did not show works in progress to people. Sharing broke the unity. People put ideas onto things that were not theirs. Opinions demanded recognition. And some were too big, too long, too diffuse in their evolution, to make any sense before the moment when he decided that to add one thing more would start to subtract. When he videoed them for his YouTube channel, he never showed the build, the Drifting, the explanation; just long, swooping orbits of the details.
So he said, “oh, yeah. Here.” He rested a finger on the Puchie deer. He had picked apart its rear end, flayed and splayed it and grafted it on to the chest of a Barbie doll. “Come up pretty good once I got the salt off. That vinyl finish can crack if you don’t treat it like skin. There’s stuff you get for shining up auto interiors, works good on it. Nice piece.”
The hat was in the former best bedroom with all the headgear. He had not developed an idea for the Drifting that pleased him. But the conceit was faces, a few simple lines in black marker pen, loosely connected to his imagining of the hat’s purpose, drawn on the inside of the hat. This yellow hard hat, Reith had decided, belonged to a longshoreman, who had worked ocean-going barges. In a few strokes the inverted face showed hard-weather, resignation, peace and toughness.
The child’s trunki had made it to the plastic-well in the kitchen, to the top of that heap, to the work-top for assimilation into the Kanagawa Drifting. It had faltered there.
“I’m not sure about this one. I think this one is complete. I can’t see how it would fit. It may be the start of something else. I’m thinking about children.”
The girl ran long fingers over the sand-scratched plastic.
“What did you do with things inside?”
“I didn’t throw them away. Nothing gets thrown away. That’s the idea. Nothing is ever lost.”
A fleece-fiber scarf, a bucket of plastic zoo-animals, a drinks cup with spout, a sea-rotted cardboard picture book sat in a clear plastic box. The animals had been spilled from their bucket. Reith saw the girl inhale very slowly as she bent over the box to closer examine the little castaway menagerie. Her long fingers walked through the lost things.
“Here’s a story. There once was a little girl but she’s dead now. She drowned. She was in the car with her parents and her big brother. They all brought one thing; that was all they had time for before the sea came. So she brought a thing with things in it. They drove fast but no matter how fast you drive you can only go where the road leads you and the water didn’t need roads. I think we forget how fast water can be. Water has weight and water has mass. The road wouldn’t take them away from the water and it just swept them off the road and tumbled them over and over and spilled everything out and they drowned. I know this story.” She trailed her fingers across the still-sodden pulp of the children’s book. “It’s called Mouse Heart Robot. It’s about a robot who was last to be built before the factory closed, and so they forgot to give him a heart. He just stood there, looking, thinking. Then a family of field mice moved in to the place where his heart should be, and he came to life and looked after them, but when they grew up and moved away, he went dead again. Mice have such short lives. I used to get read that story. The poor robot. I felt so sad for him. There, that’s a story inside a story. Something with a story and a hurt. Give it back.”
Reith gave a small start. “What?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’ve had so much. Like you said, nothing is ever lost. Things have memories. Maybe give some of them back.”
The door bell rang. A second startle.
“Just as well I looked,” the courier said. He presented the waybill. “You forgot to sign it.”
“I’m sure . . . ” Reith took the pen. The space for the signature was blank. Over the courier’s shoulder, he could the see the girl, walking away, already a distance down the road, very straight and upright, in the salt rain.
The plants were dying. The floral borders outside Driftwood Crafts, Gifts and Pots; the flower tubs and baskets at the McLaren Realty; the raised beds outside the Westwood Lodge were shriveled. The lawns of 3rd Street were scabbed with brown patches. The tougher shrubs were browning at leaf tip and blossom. The trees shed needles, drift upon drift.
For five days the salt rain had fallen. Salt water rushed in the gutters, sheeted across roads, clogged drains with rafts of brown needles.
“Half the dogs in town are sick,” Lauren said pouring coffee for Reith. “And things are coming out of the forest looking for water. Axel chased deer away from the back door. Dead birds all over the place. And he says the propane tank is rusting bad. Why haven’t we made the television news yet?”
The mail boxes, the barbecues, the garden seats, the swings and chain fences, the kids’ bikes, the garden tools, were turning to rust. The gas station canopy, the elementary school climbing frame, the cell phone relay, the electrical step-down transformer, the oil and gas tanks, the cars, scabbed with creeping rust.
“And the stink. I just can’t get it out of my hair, my clothes. Off my skin. I smell like a harbor. Like a dead seal.”
Reith splashed out across the streaming salt-water to the pickup. The air was thick with salt, weed, ozones and ions and briny, iodinic sourness. He gagged. He drove up to the house as around him the town crumbled to ochre rust. Endless parade of low, curdled clouds marched in from the ocean; endless, endless salt rain.
He thought he glimpsed the girl in the rear-view mirror, standing on the roadside at the edge of the dying forest, arms long at her side, her hair so straight and glossy. When he looked over his shoulder she was not there. Of course.
He could feel the salt caking on his skin, itching, desiccating in the few steps from the car to the porch. A shower. Fresh water on his body. Cleaning, cleansing, sanctifying. He strewed salt-sodden clothes along the path between the Driftings. The stench was in the house; rotting weed, brine, deep water. He was naked by the time he reached the bathroom door. He closed his eyes and waited for the anointing gush of warm and pure.
Sea-rot gusted in his face, so strong Reith retched. Salt water blasted in his face, hot salt water filled up his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his open mouth. He gagged, spat, dived to the water-cooler. He drained a plastic cupful. Reith choked, sprayed water across the room, heaved and heaved; dry, retching, wracking heaves.
Sea water.
Reith plunged into the surf line; knee-deep, the water heavy around his thighs; waist-deep, pushing against the resistance of an entire ocean; wading out chest-deep, slow now, every step ponderous and buoyed at the same time. The rain fell steadily, pocking the glassy surface of the slow swell. He held the trunki over his head. Towed behind him on a surf-board line, it would have filled with water and become unmanageable. Held high, it was an offering to the things of salt-water.
Give it back. Each time he had spoken with the girl, she seemed startled by her own words, as if she were not in control of them, as if other voices formed them.
Give it back.
It had to be the beach where he had found it. He drove through grey rain half blind, half-crazed, the wipers throwing handfuls of salty, gritty water from the windshield, the pickup squeaking and creaking as the brine wore into its struts and bones. He slipped-slid down the path between the stark, rain-grey trees to the shore. The driftwood like looked like the bones of the ocean, heaved on to the solid world to see the sun and die. He was sick, so sick of the reek of rot and weed and sea in his sinuses. Int
o the ocean.
Reith stood a moment, the plastic child’s trunk held high. He had packed it with the painstaking care of a Drifting maker. The fleece scarf washed and freshened with fabric conditioner and folded. The zoo animals returned to their plastic bucket-Ark, battened down beneath the lid. The drinks cup cleaned and sterilized and filled with Minute-maid. A libation. One thing he had omitted; the book. It was unsalvageable, the story all but erased to patches of Kanji and bright color on grey board: a robot’s head, a mouse paw, a heart-shaped hole. Mouse Heart Robot. It touched him, it made him remember and feel things long washed out. She had loved that story, she used to have it read to her. She felt so sorry for the poor robot. A hole for a heart. The image excited him. Filling holes. Secret chambers, hidden hearts. He could feel the nature of the Driftings changing, from huge assemblages, whip-stitched frankensteins; to small juxtapositions.
Give it back. It had given to him. The ocean closed around him; grey before and grey behind, above and below, the circle of the waters. Easy to become disoriented, to strike out into open ocean believing horizon line was shore line; drawn out by those tows and currents to join the gyre. Human flotsam.
“It’s yours!” he shouted. The words were thin and pointless. But he still said, “Thank you!” Then he hurled the trunki as far as he could out into the ocean. It splashed, bobbed, each bob taking it lower in the water as the sea jetted in through the imperfect seal. Reith watched until all that could be seen was a single plastic tiger ear, stealing out to sea, drawn back into the great gyre of tsunami-things.
Reith drove back slick as a seal in his wet-suit. As he stepped out of the car the air caught him, breath to sigh to near-sob. Clean. Fresh. He turned his face to the clouds and let pure, sweet water fill up its hollows and stream from its angles.
Mouse Heart Robot: he had a pure, sweet idea for it.
Reith opened the door.
The living room was filled with hair. Long, sleek, black hair, hanging from ceiling to floor, sleek black hair, dripping with sea water. The door closed behind Reith. The wet hair rippled, as if someone were moving through it.
About the Author
Ian McDonald is the author of many science fiction novels, including The Dervish House, Ares Express, Brasyl, River of Gods, Cyberabad Days, Desolation Road, King of Morning, Queen of Day, Out on Blue Six, Chaga, and Kirinya. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the BSFA Award, and a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for the Nebula Award and a Quill Book Award, and has several nominations for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Variations on Bluebeard and Dalton’s Law Along the Event Horizon
Helena Bell
The First Wife
When I am told well, the shade of my husband’s beard is a word for longing. A robin’s egg, deep water below the coral reef, the night sky against the glow of a dying flashlight. A fooling color so I will not know his plans for me until the first door is opened and my neck is sliced: the thin edge like fresh cut paper.
In these stories I have a courtship, a wedding, a ring of flowers whose speed of wilting is an inside jest. In some tellings there is a disagreement, an escalation, a sense that all those who follow will be an attempt at reconciliation. In others there is no tenderness. In others there are no questions. In others there are only answers: many doors and each one I pass is the curve of desire. It builds until I will open nothing without proscription. I open his drawers, his pockets, the last box of cereal. I keep my fists closed when he passes the salt. On our wedding night, and each thereafter I tell him nothing. No endearments, no cries, not even my own name. Slowly my legs close too, a fusion of flesh and scaled distaste. A mermaid’s tail, and he with his skinning knife.
When I am told less well, I am not mentioned at all. I am merely one of a row of bodies. Perhaps I am described like fruit or hanging clothes. Perhaps I am so far in the distance you cannot even see me, do not know that I am there. I am neither naked nor clothed: a mountain bathed in blue light. Atmospheric perspective, they call it. One of three, one of six, one of ten thousand brides lined like British soldiers whose red coats have fallen to the ground to stain the next girl’s silken shoes and the indiscreet brass key. Is it brass? I do not know. When I am told by Frenchmen, I am given neither explanation nor warning for the guillotine. Rhyming morals concerning curiosity and prenuptial agreements, the efficacy of protective brothers are left for others. I have no family; no one ever looks for me; I am nothing and no one; forgotten.
The Second Wife
He wished I was like his first wife: queen, domestic goddess with the small hands and curling eyelashes. Neck like a willow branch. His beard turned blue with lamentation: I cannot talk, nor cook, nor breathe like she.
I purged her slowly. The drapes were shredded and resown in patterns of crass aesthetic then sold at auction. How poor her taste must have been, I told the others. It’s no wonder he remarried. I gave away the silver she touched, a parting gift to her former servants. Her kin in town were moved. Any tastes we shared, I changed. She liked dogs? I stuffed the menagerie with cheetahs, plucked fathers off her squawking parrot and shoved it naked into my cats’ teeth.
He resisted at first: all men do. Shifted her belongings to the fourth hall closet, barred the entrance. Doubted my will. But I would not rest until there were no rooms left.
The Third Wife
Sometimes I am a painting on the wall, admired from a distance and ordered by post, like a political match or salad spinner. It largely depends on the century in which I am dressed: leather, feathers, silk brocade. A suit of white fabric with hard joint bearings, a glass hat. Whether I have white gloves or bare wrists, a tattoo of iron gates from knuckles to clavicle. I am zoftig or slight, depending on the fashion, but always the moment’s desire in the dark.
I am also: first loser to the first loser. Pinned to a horse I am the color of piss, the quick hump before four.
Here is a secret only I can tell you: I sat quietly in the hall with the key in hand. I did not open it; I was pushed.
The Fourth Wife
The morning after my husband first tries to kill me, his former wives join me for breakfast. Always they tie scarves around their wounds, dip their fingers in rouge so each touch to the furniture, the linens, my cheek, leaves russet stains which smelled faintly of spice. Sometimes they do not wear clothing—only the wisp of silk below their chins—and in these versions I fear I must be imagining their touch: the explanation for the dark red blooming upon my flesh.
My husband never interests me. The only reason we marry is so that I may come here, to this moment, though it always goes in ways I do not wish it to.
In each version, I think they like me at first. The one with black and gold in a windsor knot, she smiles and ducks her head when I reach out to grasp her hand. We are like fresh burns or blisters, bubbling over and longing to touch ourselves, each other.
“There are enough of us now,” I say and the one with white rabbits clucks her tongue and shakes her head.
The others look less sure. “Do you know how to fight?
“Can you shoot? Can you poison? Do you know how to evade the constable, the copper, the polygraph? Have you a swamp in which to hide the body, a furnace which heats to a thousand degrees? What is our means of escape? The horses? The car? The black hole looming outside the starboard window?”
The conversation never changes, only the number of mornings like this one. The consumption of bread and tea, the women’s bodies pressing in like so many eager accomplices.
Later, in the closet, I remember the clink of metal on metal as their fingers tapped in feigned boredom. I would ask what it means but we have no mouths here, and it is time for the next.
Five through Sixteen: Optional
These girls have been added over time. Some say they are to pad the body count, others to establish the subtle patterns of a psychological profile. There are rumors that Wife Fourteen staved the moment of her execution for three years b
y slowly revealing a complex quadratic equation for the attainment of eternal youth. She began with a history of decompression: the white goats of Haldane falling to their knees with each expansion of depth and time ratios. She draws parallels between fractal theory and time travel. Some say this is an example of distraction like Scheharazade. Her cleverness should be lauded, held as an example to all women who must deal with difficult men. Others are less sure.
The Seventeenth Wife
I do not appear until the thousandth telling, but I am there for every one thereafter. I am dropped in without warning, an elision of motivation and necessity. I am the first wife with metal skin and wiring but am given incontrovertible rules of behavior such that they are of little use.
There are other versions of me too who come later, but though we are all called the Seventeenth, we do not think of ourselves as the same. One of us has yellow buttons for eyes, an analog radio mouth. We suppose we could deconstruct ourselves, interchange our organs of rocket thrusters and screens of pulsing data. Or perhaps lay our skins out, our alveoli and cortexes, hard limbs (do we have these things? we must have these things if we are to breathe and to think and calculate the integral of our breasts) to blanket the entire galaxy.
It occurs to us occasionally that we could stop our husband from killing us, we could raise our arms and the blade would find no purchase in the deep paunch of our necks. But at least it is a quick death. Clean, uncompromising. Sometimes we think we prefer it.
Nineteen
Eventually it comes to pass that those who tell the story insert themselves into its fabric. There is the green-skinned housekeeper who hands me a tangled knot of thread when I first enter the house and warns me of a monster at the center of the maze. I believe she is confused with other constructions, other stories which are being told and retold in other places, at other times and I (and we all who come after) are too embarrassed to tell her so.
I am the first who can see outside: the black hills and black sun, the blue limbed trees which sway in winds too warm for brittle skin. I take the thread and tie it to the door anyway, shed my shoes and run as fast as I can in any direction. The air fills with a fine silt and it is hours before I realize I am not breathing it in.