Angel
On the bed a lusterless black flank is heaving feverishly. Wild cat digestion. I dash to the fridge and poke about frantically. Orange marmalade, kalamata olives, fresh but already somewhat wilted chili, Bavarian Blue cheese. A cat. A cat. What do cats eat? Cat food. And in a flash I recollect something: what’s the guy’s name downstairs?
Kaikkonen? Korhonen? Koistinen? The man with the young foreign wife. They’ve got some sort of a pet. Once I saw the man opening the front door, about to go in, and he was carrying a red leather harness.
So they’ve got a cat, for I’ve seen neither of them walking a dog.
Palomita
Sleep’s a well—I float up from it like a bubble. The water’s black honey. My arms and legs are trying to stir in the syrupy night. I drag my lids open, so my eyes smart.
I’m damp with sweat and my heart’s starting to race. For a moment I think the sound I hear is the bell on the bar counter back at Ermita. The bell that orders me out of the back room. But luckily my hand touches something, my eyes open, and I’m surrounded by the grey-blue of the room’s make-believe night.
I’ve been in a very deep sleep, as I always am when Pentti’s away. When I’m alone, as soon as I drop off I feel I’m spinning downwards. I don’t need to tense every bit of my body, like when Pentti’s beside me. No need to wake up at every sound. Pentti, when he’s asleep, sounds like someone suffocating.
The ringing isn’t at all like the horrible silvery bar-bell at Ermita. It’s tinnier and rougher and makes you jump. Ring-ring-ring it goes in the empty hall that Pentti’s removed all the coats from and locked them up in the closet for the time he’s off on his trip. I slip my slippers on and get my bathrobe off the chair. The bell rings again and again, as if someone’s in a terrible state. I get the footstool out of the cupboard and climb on it to peep through the peephole.
It’s the man from upstairs who’s ringing the bell. He’s fair and tall and curly-haired. I’ve seen him once before on the staircase outside.
I’ve learned always to look through the peephole. Pentti doesn’t want me to open the door to anyone except those he’s told me to. The peephole’s a well, where little crooked people live. Many times a day I get on to the stool and look out at the staircase. There aren’t often people there, but whenever I see one it’s a reward. The man rings the bell once more, and then he tosses his head. He’s giving up.
I’ve no idea why I’m doing it. But cautiously I open the door.
He’s speaking Finnish fast, and I can only pick up a word here and there. The words are twisty and misty, and they’ve long bits that ought to be said with your mouth open right to the back. Lucky for me I don’t have to depend much on Finnish, as Pentti hardly says anything and I don’t go anywhere.
The man says, “Excuse me.” He says his name, which I can’t hear properly, but it sounds like Miguel. He says he’s from the floor above, and he keeps on asking for some sort of food and repeating some word I simply don’t know.
It seems to be dawning on him that I don’t understand. Up to now he’s only been able to see his own problem, but now he’s beginning to see me. He begins speaking English, which I understand better, though not very well anyway, because at home we spoke Chabacano and Tagalog in the village, and they had to cut school short for me.
“Cat food?” he asks. “Have you any cat food you could lend me?”
In spite of myself, a smile crosses my face. We haven’t got a cat. Pentti wouldn’t put up with anything like that. Once, when he was drunk again, he took a lucky doll I’d been given by Conchita at the bar and flushed it down the lavatory. He’d noticed I used to nurse it in my arms sometimes, before going to bed. The doll blocked the drain, and Pentti had to pump away with a plunger for ages before it flushed clear again.
I shake my head and say no, no cat food. I ask if he speaks Spanish, but he signals no, with troubled eyes. I grope for some English words, trying to help. Just around the corner there’s a big kiosk that sells almost everything. One evening Pentti sent me to get some beer there, gave me some money and a piece of paper with the order scribbled on. I handed them over to the kiosk-keeper, and he handed me back six cold brown bottles. I didn’t know I was supposed to get a receipt, and when I got back Pentti said I’d kept some of the change. Myself, I did think they were a bit dear. I haven’t been back to the kiosk since, but I do remember it was stocked with almost as much stuff as the market.
Miguel wrinkles his forehead. I feel sorry for him. I can’t understand why he can’t run those two blocks to this kiosk, which is almost a little department store, but I’m eager to think of some way to help him. I think about cats, I think about what they eat. Cats swarm in the harbor. They love fish.
I leave the door open and rush into the kitchen. I open the freezer and take out a packet from a big bag of packed coley Pentti bought on special offer. The packets rattle like firewood. I go back to the door and push a frosty packet into Miguel’s hand.
“The microwave. Put it in the microwave,” I say, clearly. Those are words I’ve often heard, and I know them well. Miguel stares at the packet of fish and shifts it from hand to hand because it’s so cold.
He squeezes the packet. Thanks flow from his lips in a mixture of English and Finnish. And then he’s off, hopping up the stairs, a man with an angelically beautiful face and hair like a wheat field in sunshine. I hear the door slam shut on the floor above.
Elegy for a Young Elk
Hannu Rajaniemi
Hannu Rajaniemi is the author of the novels The Quantum Thief(2010) and The Fractal Prince(2012), with a third novel forthcoming in 2014. His widely acclaimed debut, The Quantum Thief, won the annual Tähtivaeltaja Award for the best science fiction novel published in Finnish. Originally from Finland, Rajaniemi now lives in Scotland; he holds a Ph.D. in string theory from the University of Edinburgh. His story "Elegy for a Young Elk," originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine, is concerned with the mind-bending consequences of highly advanced tech, along with the human desire to make meaning through words . . .
The night after Kosonen shot the young elk, he tried to write a poem by the campfire.
It was late April and there was still snow on the ground. He had already taken to sitting outside in the evening, on a log by the fire, in the small clearing where his cabin stood. Otso was more comfortable outside, and he preferred the bear’s company to being alone. It snored loudly atop its pile of fir branches.
A wet smell that had traces of elk shit drifted from its drying fur.
He dug a softcover notebook and a pencil stub from his pocket. He leafed through it: most of the pages were empty. Words had become slippery, harder to catch than elk. Although not this one: careless and young. An old elk would never have let a man and a bear so close.
He scattered words on the first empty page, gripping the pencil hard.
Antlers. Sapphire antlers. No good. Frozen flames. Tree roots. Forked destinies. There had to be words that captured the moment when the crossbow kicked against his shoulder, the meaty sound of the arrow’s impact. But it was like trying to catch snowflakes in his palm. He could barely glimpse the crystal structures, and then they melted.
He closed the notebook and almost threw it into the fire, but thought better of it and put it back into his pocket. No point in wasting good paper. Besides, his last toilet roll in the outhouse would run out soon.
“Kosonen is thinking about words again,” Otso growled. “Kosonen should drink more booze. Don’t need words then. Just sleep.”
Kosonen looked at the bear. “You think you are smart, huh?” He tapped his crossbow. “Maybe it’s you who should be shooting elk.”
“Otso good at smelling. Kosonen at shooting. Both good at drinking.” Otso yawned luxuriously, revealing rows of yellow teeth. Then it rolled to its side and let out a satisfied heavy sigh. “Otso will have more booze soon.”
Maybe the bear was right. Maybe a drink was all he needed. No point in being a
poet: They had already written all the poems in the world, up there, in the sky. They probably had poetry gardens. Or places where you could become words.
But that was not the point. The words needed to come from him, a dirty bearded man in the woods whose toilet was a hole in the ground. Bright words from dark matter, that’s what poetry was about.
When it worked.
There were things to do. The squirrels had almost picked the lock the previous night, bloody things. The cellar door needed reinforcing. But that could wait until tomorrow.
He was about to open a vodka bottle from Otso’s secret stash in the snow when Marja came down from the sky as rain.
The rain was sudden and cold like a bucket of water poured over your head in the sauna. But the droplets did not touch the ground, they floated around Kosonen. As he watched, they changed shape, joined together and made a woman, spindle-thin bones, mist-flesh and muscle. She looked like a glass sculpture. The small breasts were perfect hemispheres, her sex an equilateral silver triangle. But the face was familiar—small nose and high cheekbones, a sharp-tongued mouth.
Marja.
Otso was up in an instant, by Kosonen’s side. “Bad smell, god-smell,” it growled. “Otso bites.” The rain-woman looked at it curiously.
“Otso,” Kosonen said sternly. He gripped the fur in the bear’s rough neck tightly, feeling its huge muscles tense. “Otso is Kosonen’s friend. Listen to Kosonen. Not time for biting. Time for sleeping. Kosonen will speak to god.” Then he set the vodka bottle in the snow right under its nose.
Otso sniffed the bottle and scraped the half-melted snow with its forepaw.
“Otso goes,” it finally said. “Kosonen shouts if the god bites. Then Otso comes.” It picked up the bottle in its mouth deftly and loped into the woods with a bear’s loose, shuffling gait.
“Hi,” the rain-woman said.
“Hello,” Kosonen said carefully. He wondered if she was real. The plague gods were crafty. One of them could have taken Marja’s image from his mind. He looked at the unstrung crossbow and tried to judge the odds: a diamond goddess versus an out-of-shape woodland poet. Not good.
“Your dog does not like me very much,” the Marja-thing said. She sat down on Kosonen’s log and swung her shimmering legs in the air, back and forth, just like Marja always did in the sauna. It had to be her, Kosonen decided, feeling something jagged in his throat.
He coughed. “Bear, not a dog. A dog would have barked. Otso just bites. Nothing personal, that’s just its nature. Paranoid and grumpy.”
“Sounds like someone I used to know.”
“I’m not paranoid.” Kosonen hunched down and tried to get the fire going again. “You learn to be careful, in the woods.”
Marja looked around. “I thought we gave you stayers more equipment. It looks a little . . . primitive here.”
“Yeah. We had plenty of gadgets,” Kosonen said. “But they weren’t plague-proof. I had a smartgun before I had this”—he tapped his crossbow—“but it got infected. I killed it with a big rock and threw it into the swamp. I’ve got my skis and some tools, and these.” Kosonen tapped his temple. “Has been enough so far. So cheers.”
He piled up some kindling under a triangle of small logs, and in a moment the flames sprung up again. Three years had been enough to learn about woodcraft at least. Marja’s skin looked almost human in the soft light of the fire, and he sat back on Otso’s fir branches, watching her. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“So how are you, these days?” he asked. “Keeping busy?”
Marja smiled. “Your wife grew up. She’s a big girl now. You don’t want to know how big.”
“So . . . you are not her, then? Who am I talking to?”
“I am her, and I am not her. I’m a partial, but a faithful one. A translation. You wouldn’t understand.”
Kosonen put some snow in the coffee pot to melt. “All right, so I’m a caveman. Fair enough. But I understand you are here because you want something. So let’s get down to business, perkele,” he swore.
Marja took a deep breath. “We lost something. Something important. Something new. The spark, we called it. It fell into the city.”
“I thought you lot kept copies of everything.”
“Quantum information. That was a part of the new bit. You can’t copy it.”
“Tough shit.”
A wrinkle appeared between Marja’s eyebrows. Kosonen remembered it from a thousand fights they had had, and swallowed.
“If that’s the tone you want to take, fine,” she said. “I thought you’d be glad to see me. I didn’t have to come: They could have sent Mickey Mouse. But I wanted to see you. The big Marja wanted to see you. So you have decided to live your life like this, as the tragic figure haunting the woods. That’s fine. But you could at least listen. You owe me that much.”
Kosonen said nothing.
“I see,” Marja said. “You still blame me for Esa.”
She was right. It had been her who got the first Santa Claus machine. The boy needs the best we can offer, she said. The world is changing. Can’t have him being left behind. Let’s make him into a little god, like the neighbor’s kid.
“I guess I shouldn’t be blaming you,” Kosonen said. “You’re just a . . . partial. You weren’t there.”
“I was there,” Marja said quietly. “I remember. Better than you, now. I also forget better, and forgive. You never could. You just . . . wrote poems. The rest of us moved on, and saved the world.”
“Great job,” Kosonen said. He poked the fire with a stick, and a cloud of sparks flew up into the air with the smoke.
Marja got up. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m leaving. See you in a hundred years.” The air grew cold. A halo appeared around her, shimmering in the firelight.
Kosonen closed his eyes and squeezed his jaw shut tight. He waited for ten seconds. Then he opened his eyes. Marja was still there, staring at him, helpless. He could not help smiling. She could never leave without having the last word.
“I’m sorry,” Kosonen said. “It’s been a long time. I’ve been living in the woods with a bear. Doesn’t improve one’s temper much.”
“I didn’t really notice any difference.”
“All right,” Kosonen said. He tapped the fir branches next to him. “Sit down. Let’s start over. I’ll make some coffee.”
Marja sat down, bare shoulder touching his. She felt strangely warm, warmer than the fire almost.
“The firewall won’t let us into the city,” she said. “We don’t have anyone . . . human enough, not anymore. There was some talk about making one, but . . . the argument would last a century.” She sighed. “We like to argue, in the sky.”
Kosonen grinned. “I bet you fit right in.” He checked for the wrinkle before continuing. “So you need an errand boy.”
“We need help.”
Kosonen looked at the fire. The flames were dying now, licking at the blackened wood. There were always new colors in the embers. Or maybe he just always forgot.
He touched Marja’s hand. It felt like a soap bubble, barely solid. But she did not pull it away.
“All right,” he said. “But just so you know, it’s not just for old times’ sake.”
“Anything we can give you.”
“I’m cheap,” Kosonen said. “I just want words.”
The sun sparkled on the kantohanki: snow with a frozen surface, strong enough to carry a man on skis, and a bear. Kosonen breathed hard. Even going downhill, keeping pace with Otso was not easy. But in weather like this, there was something glorious about skiing, sliding over blue shadows of trees almost without friction, the snow hissing underneath.
I’ve sat still too long, he thought. Should have gone somewhere just to go, not because someone asks.
In the afternoon, when the sun was already going down, they reached the railroad, a bare gash through the forest, two metal tracks on a bed of gravel. Kosonen removed his skis and stuck them in the snow.
; “I’m sorry you can’t come along,” he told Otso. “But the city won’t let you in.”
“Otso not a city bear,” the bear said. “Otso waits for Kosonen. Kosonen gets sky-bug, comes back. Then we drink booze.”
He scratched the rough fur of its neck clumsily. The bear poked Kosonen in the stomach with its nose, so hard that he almost fell. Then it snorted, turned around and shuffled into the woods. Kosonen watched until it vanished among the snow-covered trees.
It took three painful attempts of sticking his fingers down his throat to get the nanoseed Marja gave him to come out. The gagging left a bitter taste in his mouth. Swallowing it had been the only way to protect the delicate thing from the plague. He wiped it in the snow: a transparent bauble the size of a walnut, slippery and warm. It reminded him of the toys you could get from vending machines in supermarkets when he was a child, plastic spheres with something secret inside.
He placed it on the rails carefully, wiped the remains of the vomit from his lips and rinsed his mouth with water. Then he looked at it. Marja knew he would never read instruction manuals, so she had not given him one.
It Came from the North Page 8