Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  Waking, dreaming. She felt as if a woman torn between two lovers—one of them calm, and sweet, and still and good, and the other magnificent, stone-muscled and taciturn and bold enough to seize her and pull her close to him in the darkness of night.

  She set the notebook down, ruminating. There was a choice coming. She would have to choose a name. Said she, in that world, “Melei,” then her dark lover would listen, and hear, and understand what her heart said. The delicious torture would end, and he would send her home . . . never to return. Yet said she that other name, that strange name that even now squirmed beneath her tongue, prickling her mouth and fighting to be pronounced in the sunny morning calm of Ulthar, then her dark lover would seize her, all at once, and carry her off into the delightful terror of the world of her dreams, leaving the streets of Ulthar forever empty of her.

  She could feel the city’s ache, at the very thought of her leaving. The city’s ache, or perhaps it was her own.

  No harm could come of writing the name, she decided. She had written it upon her own palm, in different scripts, one by one, and not a thing had happened save that she had dreamt of the other world sooner, and more fiercely, each time. She could write it upon a page, she was sure. It was not the same as saying it. She could still decide. Melei, or . . .

  She took a quill, unlidded a jar of sepia ink, and touched the quill’s tip into the inky darkness. Without speaking—with her jaw locked firmly, to guard against accidental pronouncement—she touched the tip of the quill against the gently yellowed page. The dawn sunlight cast a shadow from the feather quill, throwing a line of gentle shading across the page and into her lap. She shut her eyes, and opened them, and shut them again, and once more opened them, so as to let the shadow find a place in her heart’s memory.

  She realized, then, she was building up a storehouse of memories already. The faces of the swarthy guards. The troupes of cats mewing happily all around her. She had stopped hating Ulthar, wincing at the summery stink of the cat turds and grumbling at the foreign power that ruled the place. She had found the kind of love that wells up one when she abandons her lover for another, her world for another’s; that sort of love that is rooted in impossibility that cannot be prevented even by sorrow, even by fear, even by the movement of the shadow across a page as the sun slips up into the sky.

  She did not write the name, but instead rose, scribbling-book still in hand, and went back to her window. The sweetest cottages of Ulthar lay just there, empty of terror but touching in their way, stirring memories of the games she had played in these dusty streets during what felt like another life. Laughter and the voices of children who had somehow become half-forgotten friends, folk whose faces that she had seen not once in ages and ages.

  And Melei knew, then, that she would say the name. Perhaps not that night. Not so soon as that, she told herself. But she would say it, and go, and old Ulthar would continue on without her, as it had done before her birth, with its cats and gentle sunny days and whispering old women and men.

  She filled a basin with warm water, and carried it to a high table in her room, her feet padding upon the wooden planks of the floor. Outside, a bird sang a snatch of birdsong she had heard dozens of times before, though she could not name what type of bird it was. She splashed the water on her face, delighting in its gentle warmth, steeling herself.

  For there would be precious little warmth like this in the other world, in the arms of her dark dream lover.

  And then she donned a bright and comfortable silk, light in shade to suit the warm day, and crossed the threshold of her home, going out into a street that smelled of blooming cherry flowers and apple orchards that had been planted by the Southerners. There, in the street, a trio of cats gazed up at her, curiously eyeing her approach with heads tilted one way or another. They seemed, like all cats in Ulthar, almost as if they wished to ask her something, or to dispense some holy secret to her, but if indeed this was so, they said nothing, their own jaws as firmly locked as hers had been minutes before.

  An old man made his way down the street, comfortable and calm though his back was a little bent. He smiled at her, and a cock crowed in the distance, and Melei closed her eyes. And opened them again.

  And closed them.

  And opened them again, committing every breath of it, every shade and tiny noise and scent, to the strongest urn in the storehouse of her memory. The voices of children long gone echoed, now, within that storehouse, and the image of her mother baking sour bread, and the laughter of cats—for in Ulthar, by nights, cats do laugh, though only the most blessed ever hear it more than once—and the sunrises, the sunrises that had saddened her so often.

  Perplexed, she went through the streets, dazed, eyes and heart drinking Ulthar in deeply and constantly until she was drunk with the place. It was her farewell kiss to the world of her birth, a kiss of the eyes upon the forehead. It was her last embrace of the little city, day-long as she wandered and rambled from shop to temple to the current doorsteps of present friends and the abandoned doorways of friends long-lost. She met those she had once loved, and said nothing of leave-taking, though she wondered if they could see it in her eyes. Yet she asked not a soul as she spoke to them of nothings, of needle work and gossip and of the latest news from other cities and lands. As she walked those quiet, calm streets, her footsteps tapping gently the beat of her last ballad to Ulthar, she realized she loved this city, loved it unceasingly and would do so evermore though she would not live here any longer.

  For as the sun began slowly to draw itself down unto the horizon, and the shadows lengthened across the streets as another shadow had done upon her page that morning, the name beneath Melei’s tongue stirred once more, this final time irresistibly . . .

  About the Author

  Gord Sellar is a Canadian who was born in Malawi and lived in South Korea from 2002 until early 2013. A 2006 graduate of Clarion West and a 2009 finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, his work has appeared in many major SF magazines and numerous anthologies and collections, and his first screenplay (“The Music of Jo Hyeja”, a Korean adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story) was made into an award-winning short film in 2012. For recent news, visit his website at gordsellar.com.

  Night, in Dark Perfection

  Richard Parks

  In the domain of the Faerie Queen it was always night, and the sky as seen from her Palace was always cold, black and full of stars, and she was always heartbreakingly beautiful. She would have it no other way.

  On this particular never-changing, never-ending night, she had decreed a ball, and as she stood before the window in her Palace, she looked at the stars while her maids got her ready.

  “Has everyone answered?” she asked.

  “All but the Marquessa of Shadows, Majesty,” they told her. Perhaps one of them said it. Perhaps all of them said it. To the Faerie Queen, it made little difference. The all looked at her with the same fixed expressions.

  “This won’t do. See that she is summoned,” the Faerie Queen said, and the maids said “Yes, Your Majesty.” One or all of them sent the summons with the methods available to them, and as one they hoped, in their way, that the Faerie Queen would forget. She did not forget. They finished dressing the Faerie Queen, and she studied the result in her mirror.

  The dress looked like woven copper trimmed in gold, and perhaps it was. The queen did not bother herself with such details. What mattered was how well it set off her porcelain skin and fiery red hair, and the dress did so very well indeed. She was pleased with the dress. She was not pleased with her maids and, most especially, the Marquessa of Shadows, whom she had not forgotten for an instant.

  “Have you received an answer?”

  “Answer, Your Majesty?”

  The Queen sighed. “Where is she?”

  At first she received no response except a feigned innocent silence, until she reached for her scepter. “I will ask this only one more time: where is she?”

  “In her b
oudoir, Your Majesty . . .shall . . .shall we send a messenger?”

  “We’ve sent enough messages already. We will deliver one more. In person.”

  “Your Majesty, perhaps it would be best—”

  “We decide what’s best.”

  The Faerie Queen left her maids and walked alone through the echoing corridors of her palace. Once she would have been escorted by handsome elfin knights wherever she went, but they were away, she had forgotten where. Besides, she didn’t need them. She was the beautiful and terrible Faerie Queen. She had her scepter. She did not need to fear. She dispensed fear, she did not receive it.

  She came to a place where most of the windows were covered with tapestries, except, here and there, a tapestry had fallen. She didn’t mind. There was a certain fashion in decay that suggested time, and she was not afraid of time. She paused for a moment and looked out the window there, but all she saw were stars, going on to forever. Just for that one instant in time, the Faerie Queen felt a sense of something missing.

  “Where’s the damned moon?”

  The window blinked off for a moment, then a series of symbols drew themselves across it. The Faerie Queen understood that what she was seeing was a map, and it showed her exactly where the moon was. Or had been. Or perhaps might still be. She closed her eyes and looked away, and in that instant, and only for that instant, she remembered what fear was. When she looked back, the map was gone and all she saw were the stars in another endless, moonless night. Words had power, she remembered, and questions were worse still when all words were words of command and the Palace was there to serve her. Her voice was binding magic, best to avoid careless uttering when all the walls had ears. That was the true danger of the faerie realm. The Queen hurried past the window.

  The Marquessa’s rooms were on the same level of the Palace as her own. There was no one else around. The Faerie Queen didn’t have the Palace announce her. She just opened the door. The Marquessa lay on her bed. In contrast to the Faerie Queen’s shining raiment, the Marquessa wore something long and lacy and dark, more like a robe than a dress.

  “Why did you not answer Our summons?”

  Silence. The Marquessa’s cold, dark eyes stared at the ceiling, and the Faerie Queen’s anger and irritation grew by the moment.

  “Answer me!” she shouted, but too late she realized what she had done, and it was not the Marquessa who answered her.

  Cascade failure in all systems. Photonic links degraded 63%. Reboot—

  “Stop! Stop it!”

  Silence.

  “I’m not like her,” she said. “Not like them.”

  They are shadows. You are the Faerie Queen, said the Palace.

  “The ball is cancelled.”

  Such a pity, Your Majesty.

  The Faerie Queen dreamed of the last great ball. She watched all the dancers from the throne on her dais but especially Duke Sunstone dancing, partnered with the Marquessa of Shadows. It was all so elegant and grand, and then it wasn’t. The Faerie Queen noticed to her horror that the Duke’s foot was broken. It turned ninety degrees at the ankle and flopped awkwardly whenever he tried to gavotte. As for the Marquessa, her long legs barely moved as he dragged her through the steps. There were others. Several had fallen. One was crawling. She thought it was Count Moonbeam. Some did not move at all, and the music echoed futilely through the ballroom as the stars above shone like cold diamonds against the blackness.

  “This is how the dead dance.”

  She banished the thought as she would a disgraced courtier. No one was dead. She was the Faerie Queen. She lived forever, and thus so did her subjects. That was her command. But there was one in the palace who did not obey the Queen’s writ. On the bad nights, the Faerie Queen could see the creature. It had skin as white as her own but not the white of porcelain. This was a ghastly white. The white on the belly of something you turned up under a stone. Its eyes were open and staring, its hair was nothing more than gray, straggling wisps. It was dead. It was alive. It was there, in the Kingdom of Faerie, and it did not belong.

  This was a bad night. The Faerie Queen saw the monster again. She could not touch it, though she forced herself to reach out. The thing was like smoke, there and then gone again. It did not speak, and it first appeared when her subjects began to fail.

  “This is the thing that has brought Death among us,” she said. “Whatever it is, I must destroy it.”

  You cannot, said the Palace.

  “Not as I am,” said the Faerie Queen.

  No. Not as you are.

  “Cryptic. I understand cryptic,” the Faerie Queen said. “I can no longer be the Faerie Queen. I must be something else. So must you. We will hunt this thing together.”

  In the world of the Captive Princess, it was always night, and the sky as seen from her Prison was always black and full of stars, and she was always heartbreakingly beautiful. She really had no choice. When she awoke, the strange, expressionless creature that served as her Captor dressed her in clothes fit for a princess, but she managed to conceal her scepter. It was the one thing they had not been able to take from her.

  The one link to her father’s kingdom, now usurped by her wicked stepmother, was the Magician. He spoke to her sometimes. Now he spoke through the scepter.

  What is your true wish?

  “I wish to be free. Who is coming to rescue me?”

  No one will rescue you, Princess.

  “Well, then, I must do it myself,” she said grimly. “Who is imprisoning me?”

  You already know who guards you.

  The Magician was right—it was a silly question. Her cruel stepmother, of course, imprisoned her, and it was her stepmother’s creature, the Beast, that held her there. No one else had a reason. No one else stood to gain. “Has she imprisoned you, too?”

  The Magician didn’t answer her. Then, There are people coming.

  She frowned. “What do you mean? I thought you said I wouldn’t be rescued.”

  Rescue is not their intent, Princess.

  “I see.”

  The Captive Princess took her scepter and went looking for the intruders. It was some time before she first heard the strange voices speaking a language she understood, but the accent was funny, and it crackled and popped in her ears as if it was carried on lightning.

  “—size of this place? Have you seen anything like it?”

  “Not outside of a history book. And keep your helmet on, Jek. You don’t know what’s been growing in this old soup. I’m amazed life-support is still working.”

  “Core’s still online and the ship’s stable, though no output from the drive engines . . .what’s your guess on those? Magneto-plasma?”

  “Probably. This place is a fucking museum.”

  Captive Princess entered the long corridor that led to her chambers, and there they were. Two men–or at least two man-shaped things wearing some kind of strange armor with rounded helmet and glass visors. As she saw them, they saw her.

  “Impossible,” the one named Jek said. “No one could still be alive here.”

  “They’re not,” said the other. “She’s not real.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Don’t be stupid. I mean, look at that outfit. She’s one of the former owner’s toys. I’d guess a construct covered in some sort of bio-reactive polymer matrix. Whoever owned this ship could afford the best.”

  The man called Jek peered at the Captive Princess. “Could be an avatar of some sort. Telepresence?”

  The other looked thoughtful. “Only if it’s under the ship’s control. There’s no one else here to operate it.”

  “What gibberish! I am the Captive Princess!” Captive Princess said. “Who are you and what is your intent?”

  The two stood in the corridor facing her. One gave an exaggerated bow. “My name is Kenson, Highness,” he said. “My partner is Jek. We’re here to claim right of salvage on this old hulk. How long have you been drifting, anyway?”

  She frowned. “What are you ta
lking about?”

  Kenson sighed. “You’re not a real person, Highness. You’re either an independent AI or a glorified telepresence avatar . . .and since no one could still be alive on this wreck to pull your strings, I’d guess in that case I’m talking to the ship’s computer. If you are the ship’s computer, then understand that your vessel is derelict, and has been that way for a long, long time.”

  “I didn’t think they could make a self-contained AI on this scale back then,” Jek said.

  Kenson shrugged. “Most likely not a true AI if it’s a sexbot. A very limited scope of programming would be required for that kind of toy.”

  “I am no toy! This is my Palace! You can’t just come here and take it!”

  Captive Princess felt dizzy. She hadn’t spoken. The Faerie Queen had spoken. And she was not the Faerie Queen. She was the Captive Princess. Nothing here belonged to her. There was nothing she wanted, except to kill the Beast and escape.

  To go home.

  “You have a ship? We can leave this island?”

  “Island? What island? This is a derelict starship, and there’s more high-grade titanium in your hull alone than either of us has seen in a lifetime, not even counting the rarer metals. We can retire as rich men, though we’re shutting the power core down before we take you in tow. It’s too dangerous otherwise.”

  She heard the Magician’s voice again. They’re simple thieves, Highness. That’s all.

  Jek prodded the other. “I thought you said she wasn’t real. That looks real.”

  Captive Princess held her scepter pointed straight at the two men. “I’m taking your ship,” she said. “I have to get away.”

  “I think she’s serious,” Jek said.

  The man named Kensen just sighed. “Look, I don’t know if you can understand this, but I’d rather not burn you and waste a valuable museum piece, so I’ll try again: Whatever pre-packaged or custom bedroom scenario you’re playing out, the fact remains that you’re not real. This ship is derelict, and under right of salvage it is ours by law. You and this hulk belong to us.”