Laughter at the Academy

by Seanan McGuire

  Two Raven cheerleaders turn to each other, using the sound of screaming to cover their voices. “Remember when women never made it onto the field?”

  “Times change, Alisa, jeez.” The other cheerleader snaps her gum, eyes glinting red in the gleam from the floodlights. “We’re co-ed now.”

  “Chill, Kerry,” says Alisa, and thrusts her pom-pom into the air, whooping encouragement for their team.

  The players keep running. The cheerleaders keep cheering. The sweet October night goes on.

  Halftime finds six players in blue and gold, seven in red and rust, with nine as yet undecided. Not that the decision is a conscious thing; not that the teams will necessarily be equal when the night is done. Some games end with all twenty-two players on the same team. It all depends on their circumstances, on what they want all the way down to the bottoms of their souls.

  As the cheerleaders group like strange, colorful birds around the edges of the field, watching the marching band go through its paces, a figure in glittering silver and green runs out of the locker room, pulling one of the remaining white uniformed players from the huddle. The man looks confused as he is led away, passing his substitute. The new player is led by a silver-and-green figure of her own.

  “Are substitutions at this stage legal?” asks Rona.

  “Technically,” says Elle. The team captains are standing together, with no signs of animosity between them. It would be a waste of energy, and they have little to spare at this point in the evening. The teams are so close to evenly divided; it’s still anybody’s game. “I wonder who made the error by sending him here.”

  “Medical technology keeps improving. It may not have been an error at all.”

  “Even so,” says Elle. She picks up her pom-poms, shaking them experimentally. A single black feather falls out. “I wonder if he’ll get another chance.” Unspoken are the rules of this field, of this game, of this endless October where every night is played a thousand times over again: only warriors come here, earning their place on the team by dying a warrior’s death. A substitution at this stage in the game may mean the player who was removed (Albert Li, United States Marine Corp) may not be coming back for another chance at the trophy.

  The marching band is finishing their final song, and the cheerleaders flock forward while the crowd is still applauding, taking up their places for the halftime show. Oh, this is part of the ritual, and oh, they almost seem to soar as they throw themselves into the leaps and backflips, and oh, they have been here before so many times, and oh. October never ends if the game is never truly finished.

  Elle and Rona stand atop their respective pyramids and clap their hands, and the cheerleaders shout defiance into the blackness of the night, and the game—the game that never ends—goes wildly on.

  The score is tied, 21-21, and the players are falling into more fixed roles on more fixed teams, blue with blue, red with red. They don’t seem to notice doing it, even when a uniform blooms in the middle of a play and a player switches sides without warning. Falcons fly with Falcons, Ravens with Ravens. It is the simple logic of the game. The cheerleaders shout their names and wave their pom-poms in the air, and if a name is never called before the player’s uniform changes colors, no one really cares. Each of them is lost in his or her private battle, each of them playing on a different green field, somewhere in the recesses of their hearts.

  Clarice McNally, bus driver and local hero, who saved six schoolchildren at the expense of her own life, joins the Ravens.

  Michael Jones, SPCA, who was stabbed in the back six times while investigating an illegal dog fighting ring, joins the Falcons.

  Neither team is marked as “home” or “away” on the scoreboard: it’s just numbers, 21-21, and then the Ravens score a touchdown, and the numbers change. “Gimme an ‘R’!” shouts Rona, and the Ravens scream delight into the evening air. The moon hasn’t moved since the start of play. It’s still early evening, the scent of popcorn and bonfires and fresh green grass filling the air. The players move across the field, falling back into position, counting down to the next play.

  “Go Falcons, go Falcons! Go, go, go Falcons!”

  The ball is snapped, and Clarice McNally—the substitution, whose bus hit the water as the game was starting, whose lungs gave up as halftime rolled around—snatches it from the air, turning to run toward the distant, welcoming shape of the goal. She runs for the joy of running as much as anything else; her lungs pull in each breath like a benediction, so glad to be breathing unencumbered, so glad to be alive.

  —but she’s not alive, she’s not, she remembers the water reaching up to wrap its arms around her, and it’s not October, it’s nowhere near October; it’s June, the school year is racing to a close, and if the bridge had been maintained like it should have been, she would never have been forced to drown—

  Clarice stumbles to a stop. The safeties are five yards behind her and closing when the ball tumbles from her nerveless fingers and hits the turf, dead in play as soon as it touches the ground. Clarice is a heartbeat behind it, dropping to her knees as confusion and contradiction swarm around her. She can’t be here. She died, she died in the river, and half the children in her charge died with her. Some parents will remember her as a hero, but what about the parents of the dead? What about the ones she couldn’t save, who drowned reaching for the only adult who might have been able to help them?

  “No,” she mumbles, starting to rock. “No, no, no.”

  Someone blows the whistle for a time out. Not the coach for the Ravens. Not the coach for the opposing team, either; neither coach has been seen since the start of play. Play freezes all the same, and the cheerleaders come flocking onto the field, strangely colored birds descending on the fallen player.

  “Clarice? Are you all right?”

  She raises her head and finds herself looking at Rona, squad leader for the Ravens’ team cheerleaders. She is pretty, in a stark way, the sort of girl who always seems to stand on the outside of groups and skirt along the leading edge of trends. Her hair is the color of red velvet cupcakes or dried blood, and her eyes are almost amber. She should be terrifying, this autumn-girl under the October moon. Instead, somehow, she looks like coming home.

  “I couldn’t save them,” Clarice tells her, and tears run down her cheeks. “I tried, but I couldn’t save them. Why couldn’t I save them?” The grass—no longer pristine, not now, not in the middle of the battle—is cold beneath her hands. The smell of bonfires is stronger now, like the field itself is on fire.

  “Fighting doesn’t always mean winning,” says Rona, still crouching in front of the fallen warrior. “Sometimes it just means doing the best that you can do, and hoping that when the scores are tallied, that’s enough to put you on the winning side.”

  “Winning? Losing? Children died, and now somehow we’re…how am I here? How are we playing football? I haven’t played football since high school.”

  “But you did,” says another girl—Elle, with her white-blonde hair streaked in Falcon blue, and she’s lovely, she’s an angel, but her eyes are cold as she looks down on Clarice. “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be playing water polo, maybe, or chess, or competitive Pictionary.”

  “There are as many battlefields as there are fallen warriors to fight on them,” says Rona. She straightens, offering Clarice her hands. “You earned your place here, I swear you did, and now all you have to do is see the game through to its end in order to get your reward.”

  Clarice looks at her, this teenage girl with her hair tied up in ribbons, and nothing has ever been more wrong, and nothing has ever been more right. This is Homecoming, this is the October that never ends, and she has earned her place here, on this field, on this team. She slides her hands into Rona’s without deciding that she’s going to do so, and Rona tugs her back to her feet, stronger than she should be for a girl so slight.

  “Fight on, warrior,” she says, letting go of Clarice’s hands. She smiles, and for a moment, sh
e is something else; not a cheerleader, exactly, but something older, and wilder, and serving the very same role. She cheers at the edges of the battlefield. “Fight on, and win.”

  Then the cheerleaders are running from the field, and the whistle blows again, and this night—this beautiful, perfect, endless night—resumes.

  A touchdown for the Ravens; a penalty for the Falcons; two more players on each team, and only three are still running the field in white uniforms that show no dirt or grass stains, unlike the colored uniforms of their team mates. The Ravens and Falcons show the wear of the game, but the players in white uniforms are unmarred. If any of them find this strange, they do not say it. They never say it.

  “BE AGGRESSIVE! B-E AGGRESSIVE!” shriek the Falcon cheerleaders, and their voices are the cries of hunting birds who remember, always, the safety of the hand and the glove.

  “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” answer the Raven cheerleaders, and their voices are the call of carrion birds on the battlefield, no less revered because their duty is to the dead.

  The players surge back and forth across the green, and the cheerleaders fly in their carefully-practiced formations, pom-poms shaking, voices lashing hard across the night. In the stands, the crowds cheer and whistle and stomp their feet, and if none of them ever comes fully into the lights, fully into view, well, that’s not what this night is about, is it? This night is about the boys and girls of fall, their feet digging divots into the turf, the smell of sweat and blood and battle in their nostrils. This night, this good October night with the moon like a single all-seeing eye, this night is theirs.

  The Falcons’ quarterback catches the ball and hooks it hard to a receiver in blue and gold, who plucks it from the air like a farmer plucks an apple. He starts to run, but a player in white puts her shoulder into his numbers, and—

  —the plane is going down hard, and there’s nothing that can be done for it now; they’re going to crash into the mountains, and if they’re lucky, they’ll live long enough for the rescue choppers to arrive. They’re not going to be lucky, Emily Kwan knows that in her bones. She opens her email client, breathing in through her nose, out through her mouth, and starts sending her research to her partner back at the lab. She may die, but her work will live on, and maybe a few lives will be saved as hers is ending. She presses send, and the oxygen masks deploy, and the world goes black on impact—

  Emily’s uniform blooms red and rust as she goes down with her opponent, a whistle shrilling the end of the play. The Falcons will have to punt now, their forward momentum diminished.

  On the sidelines, Elle shakes her head.

  “I thought for sure she was ours.”

  Rona laughs, and just claps her hands as the cheer for Emily begins.

  The final two players both bloom blue and gold, Falcons on the field. When the final scrimmage lines up, it is ten in red and rust and twelve in blue and gold, an illegal formation that doesn’t draw a flag. Everyone’s focus is on the ball, on the moon, on the last game of the season before the season fades away forever. Emily Kwan snaps the ball to Tony Woodrow, and he’s running, he’s running so fast that it seems like he can almost fly. The other players follow, some defending him, some trying to claim the prize for their own, and it’s a beautiful snapshot of a life well-lived, this moment, this field. In this moment, winning and losing don’t matter. There’s only the play itself, the old, familiar pattern of hands and hearts working in perfect concert.

  The crowds scream. The cheerleaders cheer. The players run like there is nothing left to them but running, block like there is nothing that can ever tear them down.

  The Ravens score the final touchdown, and the stands go wild for a beautiful, heart-stopping second. Everything is right as Tony’s fellow players hoist him onto their shoulders, shouting their joy into the night, and the cheerleaders…

  …the cheerleaders are silent and still, save for the last fading notes of Birdie’s whistle.

  The players falter, looking confused, and in that moment, the shouting from the stands stops. For the first time, the glare from the stadium lights is dim enough to let them see the bleachers, and there is no one there. There is no one there at all.

  “What’s going on?” Daniel Ryan, Specialist, removes his helmet. Around him, the other players are doing the same, revealing the faces of bewildered men and women.

  “The game is over,” says Elle. She stands on the sidelines, but her voice is clear; her voice is always clear.

  “You fought bravely,” says Rona.

  “But the fight is finished.”

  “The sides are drawn.”

  The two step onto the field, and maybe it’s a trick of the light, but the colors of their uniforms seem to shift as they walk, blue becoming red, rust becoming gold, the small differences of cut and style fading, until the two girls are dressed identically. They stop in front of the players, and even the names written across their chests are different now—not Falcons, not Ravens, but Valkyries.

  “What…?” asks Clarice.

  Rona smiles. “Your coaches are here.”

  The girls turn, looking toward the locker room doors; the players, unsure, do the same. A man emerges from one door; a woman from the other. Together yet apart, they walk across the field toward the two teams.

  The man has only one eye, and the logo of the Ravens is printed on his sweatshirt.

  The woman has red gold hair, like wheat in the sunset, and wears a cap with the logo of the Falcons.

  They wave their teams to them, and they begin their postgame talks. What they say to their players is private; it has always been private, and always will be, on those sweet harvest nights when the field is filled with laughter, triumph, tears, and regret. But the word Valhalla is spoken, as is the word Fólkvangr, which is less remembered in this day and age, yet has always been there, for as long as there have been Valkyries to choose, and warriors to be chosen. Some warriors yearn for the fight to go on forever. Others seek rest and recuperation. Half the chosen slain are bound for each hall at the end of any battle—and look: the Ravens follow the one-eyed man, and the Falcons follow the woman with the golden hair.

  Only Clarice McNally hesitates, looks back at the assembled girls in the red and gold cheerleading uniforms. Birdie is whistling again, a piece by Wagner. She never gets the low notes right.

  Rona waves. After a moment’s hesitation, Clarice waves back. Then she exits, and the field is empty, waiting for the next game to begin.

  It’s always October for this game, the big game, the game everyone who has ever loved high school football dreams of for their entire lives. The air smells like bonfires and promises. In the locker room, twenty girls in cheerleader’s uniforms are preparing for the field ahead of them. The choosers of the slain have always loved their rituals. Elle, wearing Raven red and rust, smiles across the benches at Rona in her Falcon blue and gold.

  “We’ll have a good game tonight,” she says.

  Rona smiles back at her sister. “We always do,” she replies.

  Frontier ABCs:

  The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher

  This story was originally written for the anthology Raygun Chronicles, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. He said he wanted stories with a big, boisterous space opera feel, and I did my best to deliver. For me, the best part of being involved with the project was getting to appear in an anthology with A.C. Crispin before she passed away. She has been one of my literary heroes since I was a child, and seeing my name on a cover with hers was…

  Well, it was the world.

  Charity is a character who’s been kicking around my head looking for a home for a very long time, and I was pleased to finally be able to give her one. “Frontier ABCs” isn’t connected to any specific space opera setting, or maybe it’s connected to all of them: after all, it’s a big universe. There’s a lot of sky out there to fly in.

  A IS FOR AMMUNITION

  There are no banks to rob in this painted doll of a dustbowl fanta
sy town; the money is all bits and bytes stored in a computer vault no human hands can open, whether they belong to banker or bandit. But there are other forms of thievery to be practiced by the quick and the clever, and Cherry is both, when she sees call to be. So when word goes out on the down-low that the Mulrian gang is planning a heist and needs bullets to get them to the finish line, Cherry’s first to the cattle call, her guns low and easy on her hips, her hair braided like an admonition against untidiness. They’re surprised to see her—aren’t they always, when she shows up in places like this?—but they’re willing enough to let her on the crew once they’ve seen what she can do.

  She doesn’t brag much. Doesn’t talk much either, outside of a classroom or a courtroom. But oh, that little lady in the worn-out britches and the red flannel shirt can shoot like she made a bargain with the God of All Guns. Some folks say as she was a sniper in the last war. There have been wars upon wars since she showed up on the scene, and it’s always “the last war.” No one knows how old she is, no one knows the name of her home world, and no one’s sure when she’s finally going to snap and take out her allies along with her enemies. But they keep taking her on, because she makes the bullets dance to her tune. Could shoot the wings off a fly, the flame off a candle, and the fat off of a hog.

  The raid begins at local midnight. Four techslingers, four gunslingers, a pilot, and Cherry, all walking into town from different directions, all heading for the places they’re supposed to be. The first shot is fired at two past the hour, an old-fashioned gunpowder bullet smashing through the window of city hall. That’s the signal. The gunslingers commence to shooting the things they’ve been approved to shoot—mostly foliage and buildings and the police bots that come swinging down the sidewalks like they stand a chance against flesh and lead and practice—and the techslingers slide their clever wires into the datastream, bleeding off billions in less time than it takes for Cherry to reload.