Megan’s mouth fell open and she stared at the distant beach disbelievingly. “So they were just there waiting for you to take them? Did you eat them?”
“We steamed them and then we ate them with just a squeeze of lemon juice. Lemons grow on trees, but we bought our fruit from the market.”
“How does steaming work?” It was hard for her to imagine the world I took for granted. Megan never had raw food so she didn’t understand about cooking. The closest she came to seafood was the tinned salmon they served on New Year’s Day.
“You have to steam them to force the shells open so you can get to the meat inside.” Megan looked disappointed. She relished the idea of a movable feast, food simply there for the taking. Our dependence within the colony was so constant; the concept of fending for yourself was a favourite source of wonder for her.
I liked to indulge her. “Sometimes you could catch them with the shells open. I caught buckets of razor clams at the estuary. Find a hole in the sand, that’s where they’ve dug themselves into. You just drop a bit of salt into the hole and then reach in and drag the clams straight out of their shells. They’re plump and meaty. If you were hungry enough, I guess you could simply eat them on the spot. In the old days, they had special knives to pry the shells open and eat them alive.”
“How would you know they weren’t poisonous?”
“There’s not much from the sea that will kill you, not if it’s fresh.”
Not in the Celtic Sea, anyway. I stare out at the poisonous waves of G851.5.32, a mystery to me. Who knows what beasts lurk within its softly glowing swells. The scent is sharp and chemical rather than the briny breeze of Swansea Bay. Everything here is toxic.
“What does it taste like? Food you find on your own, I mean.” By the time Megan was thirteen, I’d given up all hope of returning home. We were “self-sufficient” and a perfect test bed for the colonies of the future, with sterilised capsules transferring data back to Earth. All wonderful research, except that I’d never signed up for this, never wanted to spend a lifetime in space, never would have started a family if I’d known the antiseptic life in the colony was all she’d ever see. Megan’s curiosity became insatiable as she begged for details of a “normal” life, of what she’d missed. I told her about wine and thunderstorms and aeroplanes and guitars. I taught her church hymns and Bonnie Tyler songs and rugby chants. Megan continued to sneak out of the dome, “taking liberties with her safety” it said on the reports. Colony security wasn’t designed to hold in rebellious teenagers; she didn’t find it difficult. I never said anything. How could she grow up in this barren collection of plastic buildings? She needed to explore.
Owen grew distressed. “You are making her homesick for a world she’s never known,” he told me. I didn’t care. I wanted her to know, to understand where she had come from. So I kept telling her the stories, answering her questions. I never noticed how often we returned to the subject of food.
“Shellfish tastes better than anything else in the universe,” I told her. “Especially if you caught it yourself. The fresh air seasons it, we say. But it’s because you put the effort in, you made the food happen.”
“But specifically, what is it like? What do cockles and mussels taste of?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. She had never eaten anything that wasn’t full of preservatives and salt. “They taste like the sea. They taste slick and primordial. They taste of brine and dark blue depths. It’s an Earth flavour. I can’t explain.” She glared at me and stomped out of the room. She wanted facts, not metaphors. She wanted to know and I wasn’t helping. She wanted to go home and taste them for herself.
The silt of the shore is soft and powdery, nothing like the golden sand of Swansea Bay. When I press my fingers into it, the edges of my gloves begin to singe against the damp soil underneath. Everything about this planet is poison. It was never meant for families.
The day Megan told me she had a stomachache, I didn’t think too much about it. “Have you finished your school work?” I asked her. She had daily one-on-one tutorials, taught by some the best scientists of our time, not that an education was any use up here. Still, we stuck to the routines, pretended there was a future.
“I don’t feel well at all,” she said. Those were her last coherent words. She collapsed before I made it across the room to feel her forehead. I carried her to the med station myself, her long legs dragging along the polished hallways. Megan’s eyes opened as I screamed for the nurse to help me. She twisted and began to vomit blood as they pulled her onto the bed and wheeled her into the back rooms. Within a few hours, she was dead.
Owen found refuge in process. He told me they thought she might have the same bacteria that stopped us returning to Earth, that she might be the key to finding the cure. I turned away as he stuttered platitudes, that maybe they would solve the quarantine, that maybe her death wouldn’t be in vain. I couldn’t stand to hear him try to make sense of the tragedy. He stayed at the medical station, signing consent forms, overseeing the process as they cut her open and examined her insides.
I went home and sat in her room, touching her things. I bunched her favourite dress in my fists, hoping to banish the last sight of her, flesh pale as marble, splattered with blood, blue eyes colder than any ice. I collapsed onto her bunk. Once the tears slowed, I ran my fingers over her stuffed octopus like a blind woman, touching the ragged cloth and glassy eyes as if it might hold some of her essence.
The sharp edges of something under her pillow stopped me. I opened my eyes and moved the pillow to see a pair of stolen protective gloves, singed away at the tips, and half a dozen blood-red shells. Two of them were cracked and pried open; the insides sparkled like mother of pearl, wiped clean. Licked clean.
Owen told me that Megan’s death was not preventable. It was an unknown illness, he said, there was nothing that we could have done. He cried as he told me that she’d ingested some sort of parasites. They had rampaged through her flesh, feasting on her organs. He promised me that it was quick, as if I didn’t already know that, as if that was a consolation. I took the shells she’d hidden under her pillow and said nothing.
I press my bare toes into the powdery silt of the barren shore of G851.5.32. It stings, a million pins and needles pricking my flesh. When I was a girl, we would dare each other to dash into the frigid waves of the sea, the water so cold that it burned.
I wonder if it will feel the same, in this alien sea so far from home. I clench the broken shells in my fists and run forward into the breaking waves.
I think it will feel just the same.
© 2013 by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley.
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley was born in Germany and spent her childhood in Los Angeles. She now splits her time between southeast Wales and Andalucia, two coastal regions with almost nothing in common. Her short stories have been published in the UK, the US, France, and Argentina. You can find out more about her at www.intrigue.co.uk.
Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon
Theodora Goss
When the Queen learned that she could not have a child, she cried for three days. She cried in the clinic in Switzerland, on the shoulder of the doctor, an expert on women’s complaints, leaving tear stains on his white coat. She cried on the train through Austria, while the Alps slipped past the window of her compartment, their white peaks covered with snow. She cried when the children from the Primary School met her at the station, bringing her bouquets of snowdrops, the first of the season. And after the French teacher presented her with the bouquets, and the children sang the Sylvanian national anthem, their breaths forming a mist on the cold air—she cried especially then.
“It doesn’t matter, Margarethe,” said King Karel. “My nephew Radomir will make a fine king. Look at how well he’s doing at the Primary School. Look at how much he likes building bridges, and if any country needs bridges, it’s Sylvania.” For the Danube and its tributaries ran through the country, so that wherever you went in Sylvania was over a
river, or perhaps two.
And then Queen Margarethe stopped crying, because it was time to greet the French ambassador, and she was after all the youngest daughter of the King of Greece. She had been trained to restrain her emotions, at least at state functions. And the blue satin of her dress would stain.
But that night, when the French ambassador was discussing business with the bankers of Sylvania, and her other guests were discussing French innovations in art (for although Sylvania was a small country, it had a fashionable court) or losing at cards in a cloud of cigarette smoke, the Queen walked out to the terrace.
It was a cold night, and she pulled the blue satin wrap more closely about her shoulders. The full moon above her was wearing a wrap of gray clouds. In its light, she walked down the steps of the terrace, between the topiaries designed by Radomir IV, boxwood swans swimming in a pool of grass, a boxwood stag running from overgrown boxwood hounds. She shivered because her wrap was not particularly warm, but walked on through the rose garden, which was a tangle of canes. She did not want to go back to the castle, or face her guests.
She reached the croquet lawn, beyond which began the forest that surrounded Karelstad, where croquet balls were routinely lost during tournaments between the ministers and the ladies-in-waiting. Suddenly, she heard laughter. She looked around, frightened, and said, “Is anyone there?”
No one answered. But under a chestnut tree that would be covered with white flowers in spring, she saw a basket. She knelt beside it, although the frost on the grass would stain her dress more certainly than tears, and saw a child. It was so young that the laugh she had heard might have been its first, and it waved its fist, either at the moon above or at the Queen, whose face looked like a second moon in the darkness.
She lifted the child from its basket. Surely it must be cold, left out on a night like this, when winter still covered Sylvania. Surely whoever had left it here did not deserve a child. She picked it up, with the blanket it was wrapped in, and carried it over the croquet lawn, through the rose garden, between the boxwood swans and the boxwood stag, up the terrace steps, to the castle.
“Surely she has a mother,” said the King. “I know this has been difficult for you, Margarethe, but we can’t just keep her.”
“If you could send the Chamberlain out for diapers,” said the Queen. “And tell Countess Agata to warm a bottle.”
“We’ll have to advertise in the Karelstad Gazette. And when her mother replies, we’ll have to return her.”
“Look,” said the Queen, holding the child up to the window, for the cook had scattered cake crumbs on the terrace, and pigeons were battling over them. “Look, embroidered on the corner of her blanket. It must be her name: Lucinda.”
No one answered the advertisement, although it ran for four weeks, with a description of the child and where she had been found. And when the King himself went to look beneath the chestnut tree, even the basket was gone.
Princess Lucinda was an ordinary child. She liked to read books, not the sort that princesses were supposed to like, but books about airplanes, and mountain climbing, and birds. She liked to play with her dolls, so long as she could make parachutes for them and toss them down from the branches of the chestnut tree. The Queen was afraid that someday Lucinda would fall, but she could not stop her from climbing trees, or putting breadcrumbs on her windowsill for the pigeons, or dropping various objects, including the King’s scepter, out of the palace window, to see if they would fly.
Lucinda also liked the gardener’s daughter, Bertila, who could climb trees, although not so well as the Princess. She did not like receptions, or formal dresses, or narrow shoes, and she particularly disliked Jaromila, her lady-in-waiting and Countess Agata’s daughter.
But there were two unusual things about Princess Lucinda. Although her hair was brown, it had a silver sheen, and in summer it became so pale that it seemed purely silver. And the Princess walked in her sleep. When the doctor noticed that it happened only on moonlit nights, the Queen ordered shutters to be placed on Lucinda’s windows, and moonlight was never allowed into her room.
For the Princess’ sixteenth birthday, the Queen planned a party. Of course she did not know when the Princess had been born, so she chose a day in summer, when the roses would be at their best and her guests could smoke on the terrace.
Everyone of importance in Sylvania was invited, from the Prime Minister to the French teacher at the Primary School. (Education was considered important in Sylvania, and King Karel had said on several occasions that education would determine Sylvania’s success in the new century.) The Queen hired an orchestra that had been the fashion that winter in Prague, although she confessed to the Chamberlain that she could not understand modern music. And Prince Radomir came home from Oxford.
“They ought to be engaged,” said the Queen at breakfast. “Look at what an attractive couple they make, and what good friends they are already.” Princess Lucinda and Prince Radomir were walking below the morning room windows, along the terrace. The Queen might have been less optimistic if she had known that they were discussing airplane engines. “And then she would be Queen.”
She looked steadily at the King, and raised her eyebrows.
“But I can’t help it, Margarethe,” said King Karel, moving his scrambled eggs nervously around on his plate with a fork. “When the first King Karel was crowned by the Pope himself, he decreed that the throne must always pass to a male heir.”
“Then it’s about time that women got the vote,” said the Queen, and drank her coffee. Which was usually how she left it. King Karel imagined suffragettes crashing through the castle windows and writing “Votes for Women” on the portraits of Radomir IV and his queen, Olga.
“How can you not like him?” asked Bertila later, as she and Lucinda sat on the grass, beneath the chestnut tree.
“Oh, I like him well enough,” said Lucinda. “But I don’t want to marry him. And I’d make a terrible queen. You should have seen me yesterday, during all those speeches. My shoes were hurting so badly that I kept shifting from foot to foot, and Mother kept raising her eyebrows at me. You don’t know how frightening it is, when she raises her eyebrows. It makes me feel like going to live in the dungeon. But I don’t want to stand for hours shaking hands with ambassadors, or listen to speeches, even if they are in my honor. I want—”
What did she want? That was the problem, really. She did not know.
“But he’s so handsome, with those long eyelashes, and you know he’s smart.” Bertila lay back on the grass and stared at the chestnut leaves.
“Then you should marry him yourself. Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. You used to be so sensible, and now you’re worse than Jaromila.”
“Beast. As though a prince could marry a gardener’s daughter.” Bertila threw a chestnut, rejected by a squirrel the previous autumn because a worm had eaten through its center, at the Princess.
“Ouch. Stop it, or I’ll start throwing them back at you. And not only do I have more chestnuts, I have much better aim. But seriously, Bertie, you’d make a better queen than I would. You’re so beautifully patient and polite. And since you’re already in love with his eyelashes … ”
“There you are,” said Jaromila. “Lying in the dirt as usual, and talking with servants.” She tapped one shoe, as pointed and uncomfortable as fashion demanded, on the grass.
“You’re not wanted here,” said Lucinda.
“But you’re wanted at the reception, half an hour ago.”
“You see?” said Lucinda to Bertila, in dismay. “You’d make a much better queen than I would!”
“And she’d be just as entitled to it,” said Jaromila. She had also seen Lucinda walking with Radomir on the terrace, but she had reacted quite differently than the Queen. She could not tell you the length of Radomir’s eyelashes, but she knew that one day he would be king.
“What do you mean?” asked Lucinda.
“Yes, what do you mean?” asked Bertila.
She was usually patient, just as Lucinda had said, but today she would have liked to pull Jaromila’s hair.
“Well, it’s time someone told you,” said Jaromila, shifting her feet, because it was difficult to stand on the grass, and because she was nervous. “But you can’t tell anyone it was me.” From the day the Princess had been found, Queen Margarethe had implied that Lucinda was her own child, born in Switzerland. No one at court had dared to question the Queen, and the Chamberlain and Countess Agata liked their positions too well to contradict her. But Jaromila had heard them discussing it one night, over glasses of sherry. If anyone found out that Jaromila had told the Princess, she would be sent to her grandmother’s house in Dobromir, which had no electric lights or telephone, not even a phonograph.
“Told what?” asked Lucinda. “You’d better tell me quickly. I have a whole pile of chestnuts, and you can’t run in those shoes.”
“That you’re not a princess at all. You were found in a basket under this chestnut tree, like a peasant’s child.”
That afternoon, the Queen had to tell Lucinda three times not to fidget in front of the French ambassador.
As soon as the reception was over, Lucinda ran up to her room and lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Who was she, if she was not the Princess Lucinda? After a while, she got up and took off the dress she had worn to the reception, which had been itching all afternoon. She put on her pajamas. But she could not sleep. For the first time in her life, she opened the shutters on her bedroom windows and looked out. There was the moon, as full as a silver Kroner, casting the shadows of boxwood swans and hounds on the lawn.
In her slippers, she crept down the stairs and out the French doors to the terrace. She walked between the topiaries and the rose bushes, over the croquet lawn, to edge of the forest. There, she lay on the grass and stared up at the moon, through the branches of the chestnut tree. “Who am I?” she asked. It seemed to smile at her, but gave no answer.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37 Page 16