The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  As the old, old realm perished in the moment of its victory, his doomed Seigneur placed him in my caïque, at the very edge of death, laden with immobilized molecular machines fought to a standstill even in his own flesh, and sent us aloft, fleeing through the slipstream in search of recovery that might never be found.

  When word of the second betrayal of Gloriana Avid spread across the skies, a rumor circulating outward in whispers, riding the coattails of the gossip that always attended her luminous mother, I seized and correlated the data. Those rumors had eddied for decades before they reached me. Decades rose and fell like fashion, like the hot sun of Harvest upon its lush world’s horizon, until word came of the third betrayal, and then decades more.

  Riding the slipstream is no easy task.

  To go from here to there, wherever here is or there, takes an instant too brief to measure. Calibrating the currents in the quantum tides, though…ah, a special gift is required, and good fortune. Once, tall ships of the Homeland ocean world set out in hopes of a favorable wind, but languished, often as not, in doldrums, paralyzed, crew starved and gaunt, perishing of thirst surrounded by endless water, deranged by heat and pointlessness. It is that way also, too often, in the slipstream.

  Finally I brought our vessel to the station above the equator of the fertile world, coupled us to the ladder, and brought down my charge to the surface.

  Where we found cats waiting. (All but one.)

  Fearsome mausers.

  And the mad lady Glory, with her ruined limb, her tattered heart, her crumpled, longing mind.

  Seventeen, she had been, with a perfect complexion eggplant-dark, teeth radiant in the white hot light, a dance quivering inside her, modesty-constrained arms eager to fling themselves wide, to embrace whichever prince destiny had deemed fit for her consort. Yet she was racked in the night, and during the heavy downpours that fecundated the crops, with an anxiety deep as her bones. No child abandoned so early, and so late, is ever free of dread. I am not worthy, she thought to herself, pulling the brocaded pillow over her head in the night. They will all leave me. I am not to be loved.

  But those were night terrors. In the daylight she trod out in the grace and beauty gifted from her mother’s genes, and with the authority learned from her father’s governing hand upon the tiller of the Harvest planet.

  Thrillingly, the biologist Bander Zonin came to her through the difficulties of the slipstream, with his suit and soon enough his proposal. William, Avid pere, looked well enough upon the match. He needed brains as rigorous, brilliant and dedicated as this man’s. A garden world is not just scattered into existence with a handful of unruly seed sown into loam. Everything is prepared for generations. So it had been with the Harvest world; so it was now. All things were propitious: the worm-turned soil, deep and dark and heavy with life, the air thrilling with the very breath of vegetable life, the star above with its vital spectrum, as if designed for that function by a supernal Hand. (None gave credence to such superstitions, except those few who fancied an elder race had passed, sowing the galaxy itself with life and the requisites of life. It is possible; it has never been disproved. Still, the conjecture led nowhere, except into sectarian wars of the most extreme uselessness and brutality, and the notion went into eclipse.) Meanwhile, the sun of Harvest poured out its rich light, and the crops flourished madly, gladly.

  There was one secret ingredient: the life-enhancing gift of Gloriana Avid, and of her mother Glory before her, and of thirty generations of glorious women shaped for that singular task.

  Something in her hidden recipe breathed forth hidden essences. The plants of the world bowed to her passing. She was gravid with vegetable life. The touch of her hand on a leaf made it flood with purple life. She walked in the cool of the morning in fields humming with bees and trailed her fingers in the sticky silks, touching lightly the tassels. Maize seemed to erupt from the erect stems, kernel-choked cobs golden amid the purple photo-optimized leaves.

  “What is it exactly that you do, my pretty?” asked Bander Zonin. His handsome, serious, sly face came close to hers, nuzzled with his rusty, wiry, itchy beard. “You are a goddess to this world, Gloriana. You are Ceres. You are Cyble, Arianrhod, Pi-Hsia-Yuan-Chun, Tlazolteotl. You are glorious! Darling, kiss me!”

  She knew those fertility goddess names, had learned them from childhood. With a certain lofty smugness she accepted their implications. There was no complacency at all in her response to Zonin’s declarations of love. Gloriana, the beautiful child, melted. Her heart opened like a flower. She sighed, she came near to fainting in his arms.

  Beneath a vast shading tree, hung with long deep green languid leaves, Bander Zonin led her to an ornamental pond bright with sparkles and small leaping fish.

  “We won’t need our shoes,” he said.

  Taking her hand, he led them wading through water lilies, then laved the mud from her toes at the grassy edge of the pond, and dried her delicate dark feet with his shirt. She sighed, and leaned against his hairy breast, allowed him to tuck her naked feet upon his lap. He shifted, and after a time, bent and kissed, and caressed them. A tremor passed through her loins, upward to her belly and her heart. For an instant the world shook and went away, and returned with a wild brightness she had never known.

  “Make love to me,” she told him urgently.

  Bander Zonin regarded her with amusement. “My dear, there is nothing I’d rather do. But we must wait. We must deny ourselves a little longer. Your father—”

  “Oh, bother my father,” cried Gloriana, and smothered his mouth with kisses, despite the bristles. After a moment she drew back. “You do not love me.”

  “How can you say such a thing? Darling, you are the soul of my soul, light of my life. I respond to your lightest touch as the gardens do when you walk among them, trailing your fingers in the silks.” He drew back, offered her a bland glance. “And how do you do that, my sweetest girl? What is the secret of your bond with this bounty, this cornucopia.”

  “That’s boring business.” Gloriana pouted, rose, slipped on her sandals, ran away into the sunlight. “Last one to the gazebo is a moldy peach!”

  He ran in pursuit, shirt folded in one hand, careful to lose, breathing hard in anticipation.

  You know the next part of the story, if you retain any knowledge at all of the Old Homeland world. Some call it truth, some say mere legend. I will tell it quickly, then, so we might move on:

  Her father, it is said, held a magnificent ball for her engagement to be wed.

  Human people came to his great house from all the reaches of Harvest, and many more rode down the sky ladder from the star worlds beyond in the deep blackness.

  They gathered, glittering with jewels, bright or sable their gowns and jackets, sweet-smelling. Three Lords and Ladies were in attendance, majestic, dour, and satisfied.

  Augmented creatures stood guard, or fetched and carried. Gray people scurried back and forth, taking cloaks, passing out crystal globes of fine vintage from the vineyards. Crisp bird flesh lay on plates, and incomparable corn or wheat breads smoking from the oven, and fruits, vegetables, fish charred in their scales, winking up with glazed eye, and their roe piled high on silver bowls.

  In they came, borne to the great house in cunning vegetable carriages shaped by the witchy DNA of the growers of Harvest, drawn by prancing giant mousers and attended by their gray augmented cousins.

  You know all this.

  How, tender, she came down the high, broad staircase in a soft glow fixed upon her, sharp-boned in her youth, midnight hair piled about her aubergine features, eyes alive with hope and expectation.

  How the great, vile biologist Bander Zonin met her at the foot of the staircase, bent over her hand, knelt, gestured once to a mouseman bearing a deep salver. He lifted her small right foot from the flagged floor, to the amazed gasps of the company, and, as music swelled from the orchestra, removed her pretty shoe, took a beautiful fur boot from the salver, and slipped it up her toes, beyond the swe
etly curved sole of her foot, pulled it past her ankles, let it fasten itself at her calf. Gloriana drew in her breath, and pressed her hands to her cheeks. The living booty was white as snow, and splashed in an eye-teasing pattern of blood-red markings.

  It was a fabulously expensive gift. She settled her weight into its ineffable comfort.

  Bander Zonin slipped away her left shoe, drew up the second Ioconian wolf-fur boot past her achingly lovely ankle. It closed upon her lower leg.

  Applause and cries of admiration. The orchestra burst up with the first waltz of the evening.

  The biologist bowed again to his betrothed, and took her hand.

  “May I have the honor?”

  They floated to the center of the ballroom. There they spun, weightless, she a bird with the borrowed feet of a hunting beast, he a beast, a male hunting, a wolf, a fox, a thief.

  The floor filled with men and women smiling, taking their measures. Music swooped, cantered.

  Nobody heard her shriek, her scream, her pitiful cry—not for a moment. And then everyone heard it.

  Nobody who heard her scream would ever forget it.

  She tumbled slowly, it seemed. He released her waist, her hand. Gloriana fell with a crash, clutching her left foot.

  The blood-splashed ivory fur burst scarlet with real blood.

  She screamed and screamed.

  And Bander Zonin tore off the boot, tearing away, it seemed to the aghast onlookers, the whole of her perfect heel, half the toes of her foot. He stared, apparently in horror, at his gift. He sagged. Mouse persons rushed to the aid of their mistress. Mausers roared in confusion. People rushed to Gloriana’s aid. In the crush, the rush, Zonin vanished.

  “Stop that foul son of a bitch!” roared anguished, incredulous, broken-hearted William Avid, Master of Harvest, taking up his traumatized daughter in his arms. “To the orbital ladder, mausers!”

  Within hours, as Glory Avid lay mute in a hospital shell, everyone knew that the brute had escaped. He had done the unthinkable, twice. First he had pillaged and raped the witchy flesh of the first daughter of Harvest planet. Then he had flung himself and his grisly, fabulously lucrative prize up and out and into the black, strapped down against gravity inside a spacecraft from the old imperium. Nobody knew such things existed still. Their ignorance was his salvation, his escape.

  Within a year, certain other worlds began to bear unwontedly lavish fruit and crops, under suns not quite as hard and hot as Harvest’s but fecundated by the old hidden secret of the flesh of the women who had ruled and enriched Harvest for thirty-two generations.

  When she recovered her senses, pain quenched, Gloriana Avid remained mute for fifteen bitter years, limping on her ruined foot, refusing regrowth and reshaping.

  Then she spoke. “I will die a virgin,” she said, finally. Her voice creaked with disuse. “I will never look at another man.”

  Nor did she—until the artist Kabaka Buganda came to the cheated world, the fated world, the place from whence one day would rise Daisy, the detestable cat, to spread that spoiled world’s fear and terror across the galaxy.

  Daisy went to the fastness of the four season ladies, his sisters, rapped upon the oak door. A mouse maid answered, looked at him with disapproval, tutted barely audibly, led him into a cool wood-paneled parlor. At her leisure, wearing a belled anklet that tinkled musically, Summery Justice strolled down the stairs, flirting her tail, flick, flick.

  He stood straight, slender, fierce-eyed. His vibrissae shone pale in the muted illumination of the parlor, testing and tasting the slightest vibration in the air.

  “And what can I do for you, Mr. Daisy?”

  “Our brother Boundless Courage is dead,” he said shortly. “Dead of his wound. I present myself as senior sibling.”

  She sank onto a narrow, straight-backed, armless, striped gold-cushioned chair, gestured him to do likewise. Once, a claim so bold, so absurd, would have earned a snigger. No longer. Was Summery Justice afraid of this outsider, this near-pariah, this overlooked rival for leadership of her clan? Would you be? Her voice, though, held no quaver as she asked:

  “Do you mean us harm, your sisters?”

  He tightened his lips. “I mean harm only to those who obstruct the path.”

  Now she did shiver, a little. “What path is that, Mr. Daisy?”

  “The path to the destiny of mausers. The glory road.”

  “I see. May I call my sisters together? I believe we should discuss this prospect.”

  A deep growl rose up within his breast. “Call them, yes. The hour is near. A Class Four superluminal personal carrier approaches our world, a man who might advance my plans or thwart me, if he can. Thwart us all, we mausers.”

  Bewildered, Summery cried, “A man? Oh, not another man! Is there to be no end to this?”

  Daisy, the detestable cat, moved his gloved hand through a short, dismissive arc.

  “He is frozen. He lives, attended by Death.”

  “Wonderful,” said Summery Justice, with asperity. “Just the kind of news we were hoping for, this season.” She rose and made to leave the room, her back turned rudely. Even fear can be trumped by indignation.

  “Come back here,” he commanded in a frightful tone.

  She paused. “Go to hell, monstrous girl-named cat.” In a fit of mad bravado, she thrust up one finger, two clenched up on either side, wiggled it, and gnawed on it with her sharp teeth.

  He pounced in one fast leap, seized her at the root of her tail, a most obscene hold, and spun her around. Summery Justice lost her cat balance, fell bruisingly to the floor, yowling.

  “You will respect me,” said the detestable cat. “Oh yes, I think you will.”

  They sprang at each other, aroused, snarling.

  A great curved frame had hung upon his back when he came down the ladder out of the slipstream. The artist Kabaka Buganda had been engaged to sing a lament for the passing of William Avid, Master of Harvest planet, who lay naked in his death, shrunken in his age, chilled for the moment against rot by circulating gelid vapors across his bier of state. In his own world Kabaka Buganda was regarded by some as a king, by many as a poet, a lover, a lovable scoundrel. Gloriana, in her grief and loss, saw a man mountain wrapped in the pelt of a wild animal (lion? tiger? cheetah?—she didn’t know, no wild cats roamed Harvest), masculine, powerful. He placed his hands, against tradition, familiarly upon her face, and cupped her cheeks.

  “We have never met, Missy Avid, and I grieve that this should be the occasion. He was a good man, your father. I will sing for him.”

  Corded muscle rippled under the dark, dark skin of his bare arms, his unencumbered legs, his four-square feet with their pale nails thick and curved and heavy as the horns of a bull. He was a bull, it seemed to her. He stood over her like a cloud filled with the rain waters of life. The crust of furious loathing and mistrust of all men that had locked her heart softened at his candid gaze, his admiration, his ownership.

  “Then you must sit for me,” he instructed her.

  “Sit?” She shook her head. “Sit?” Did this man from the big dark think he might command her like a dog, a cur? The endless aching in her wounded foot went away from her. Perhaps that was what she wished.

  “For your portrait.” He threw back his large shaven head and laughed a gusty roar of laughter. “I will surround you with the largesse of this garden world, Missy. I will catch the image of your soul within the embrace of a banana tree, lush and ripe with green leaves vast as the ears of the fabled elephant, with hands of bright yellow bananas to embrace you.” He stepped back. The funereal company stood shocked at his gusto, his half-nudity beside the deathly nakedness of William Avid, his penetrating presence. Dignitaries hesitated, crept forward, as if into a shadow, bowed to the dead prince of Harvest, and scuttled away.

  Kabaka Buganda never released Gloriana’s eyes. He took the great lyre from his back, found strings in the leather pouch at his waist, strung the lyre as if he were a warrior returned from voyages
weary past imagining, stringing a bow too large for mortal man to bend—but this was no weapon of battle. His thumb caressed the taut strings, finally, and a deep melodious note sprang out through the hall. His fingers tuned the notes, while he held her gaze, and she stood trapped and melting, the ache in her broken foot thrilling in a kind of agony of hope. He lifted his head and sang. These were the wer lyel, the funeral dirges of his own world. His bare feet struck the floor, set them booming like a drum.

  To her dizzy mind, days passed like minutes. He took her cantering on horseback across stubbled fields in fallow, attended by mounted mauser warriors. Rather, she invited him, but it did not seem so; he was masterly, charming, he took control without seeming to do so, he drew her up from the sour pit of despair in which she had been content to rest since her abandonment and mutilation.

  “Stand, now. I know it hurts. Good. Feel the pain in your stance, let it speak through your body. Remove your garment, child.” She was thirty years old and more. “Go on. We are alone. Yes, yes, aside from these delicious animal people of yours. Good girl, you are lovely. Ah, the light.” His machines struck at the marble slab brought him from a quarry halfway across the world. His hands moved, he sang, the machines bit into stone, broke it open, caressed it, smoothed it like silky flesh. Dust flooded the clear air, made her cough. He ignored the dust. “Now, bend forward. Let your breasts fall freely. Beautiful!” The shape he was carving did not look, to her grit-reddened eye, much like a portrait. He stood back. “It’s done,” he said. “Let us eat and drink.” And left the room.

  She found him outside under the radiant sun, washing himself in a rainbowed haze of spray. He was naked, and vast, a bull, an elephant, a trumpeting man. Laughing, she threw off the last of her garments and joined him recklessly, slapping at the runnels of bright water, stamping her good foot and her wounded foot in the mud they made.