by Linda Nagata
“—please! You don’t understand—”
“Listen to her!” Jack croaked, surprised at how the sound grew in the space between him and them, amplified by the stones.
Some of them stopped speaking; all of them turned, and a whispering chorus of “What now?”s and “Is that . . . ?”s slithered back to him under the clacking and huffing and pouncing of the more anxious and blustery bears.
Another wave. Jack braced himself and wondered what the bears must think, what Greta must think, but then it had passed and he said again, “Listen to her.”
One of the bears stepped toward Jack and rose up on its hind legs to study him; he thought it might be one of the ones that had turned him into a scarecrow, but it had been a long time and his brain was addled enough that he couldn’t be sure. He met its gaze as best he could, though, and waited for it to speak.
“You broke in,” it said at last.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Another wave, mostly memories of Nancy, but it only slowed him for a second and then he said, “Because she loves him. Because maybe she can do what you can’t. Besides, I don’t think this castle is quite the same anymore; I think it’s just a stone building like any other, now, so you’d better let her do what she can before Bernadette finds you.”
The bears started muttering and huffing among themselves, and Jack heard Bernadette’s name and his own more than once, but behind them he could see Greta slipping away toward the hallway. Jack’s heart jumped into his throat, and he let himself fall to the ground. More of the bears came toward him, curious or concerned, and that was good—it gave Greta a head start. More importantly, though, it put his palms against the floor, and this time he went straight to the castle’s heart, opening doors along the way.
Greta almost missed the first door, Jack saw through the castle, and he cried out in spite of himself. He didn’t think he said anything articulate, but it was difficult to be sure, and anyway it hardly mattered: the bears had already realized she’d gone. Greta stopped, though, and doubled back, and Jack did his best to close doors behind her. But of course, the bears knew exactly where they were going and she didn’t.
They caught up to her at last just as she ran into the last room. Greta saw the young man on the bed and stopped short; she tried to say something, but the words caught in her throat. What little sound she made seemed to wake the young man on the bed, though, and as he stirred, the bears hung back as if to wait and see what he would do.
Greta stepped forward slowly, waiting after each step, but Jack thought the young man looked too weak to raise himself even enough to sit up, so Greta just kept step, step, stepping until she stood at the side of the bed and the young man could see her. “Oh, love . . . ” she breathed, face tight with pain, as she reached one hand toward the waxy shell that covered half his chest now.
The young man clacked his jaw and swatted at her; Greta flinched, but after a second she moved her hand closer again. This time the young man bellowed—an angry, pulsing sound Jack wouldn’t have thought a human throat could produce—and threw himself at her. He might be weak, but he still weighed more than Greta, and he surprised her enough to knock them both to the ground.
“Sweetheart,” Greta cried as he struggled with her, “please—I’m sorry, but it’s killing you, you have to— let me—” Greta tried to get at his chest, but the closer she got the harder he fought her, until finally she found an opening and pulled at the waxy growth.
The young man screamed in pain and shoved her so hard that she fell away from him. The bears started forward, but Greta shouted, “Look, it’s coming off!” and they paused. “You have to let me finish,” she added, though whether she was talking to the young man or the bears Jack could not guess; for a few seconds the only movement was the rise and fall of Greta’s chest and of the young man’s, both of them breathing heavily.
Then one bear stepped forward. “I will help you,” it said. Greta nodded warily, but the bear circled around until it could hold down the young man’s hands. It leaned down to lick his face; the young man clacked and blew at him and struggled to get free, until another bear came and held down his feet, moaning something that might have been “Auberon.”
Greta crawled back over to the young man, who glared hate at her, but she just reached around and pulled at the wax she’d already loosened from his skin. He screamed, and Greta winced, but the bears held him still and Greta kept on pulling. The wax clung to his skin and it took a few long minutes to remove it. “Hush, you big baby,” Greta whispered fiercely at one point; the bears looked up—startled, perhaps, though Jack didn’t know enough about bear society to tell if they’d been surprised by human eccentricity or bear-like behavior—but Greta didn’t seem to notice. All her attention was focused on pulling at the wax and making sure it didn’t just reattach somewhere else.
At long last Greta gave one final tug and fell backwards onto the floor with a thud. The young man’s scream cut off abruptly and he sagged between the two bears. The one who held his hands bent down and crooned something to him; the other let go, and the young man rolled over, and then suddenly he too was a bear.
Greta blinked, but she didn’t seem surprised. She did, however, sit very, very still, eyes fixed on the bear she had just saved.
The bear spoke first. “What did you do to me?” he grunted.
“I can’t—” Greta gestured to her throat; one of the other bears, the first one to help her, leaned over and breathed on her neck. “Oh . . . ” she said, eyes wide. “Auberon, I—” She frowned and sat up straighter.
“Master Builder?” Someone was speaking to Jack—to his body—and he lost his hold on the castle. “Master Builder?” the bear repeated, but it was difficult to hear over the sudden pounding in his ears, and his vision was strangely blurry, and he thought he heard someone ask if he was all right before he fell into endless nothing.
Jack woke once, long enough to swallow some broth, and then fell back into nothingness; when he woke again he found himself in bed and the early winter sun stretching, pale and thin, from a narrow window to the edge of his blankets. He tried slowly to sit up and found that, aside from being a bit stiff, he could move perfectly well; even his bandaged hands didn’t complain when he put weight on them.
A sudden movement by the wall caught his attention; Greta rose to her feet and put a book down on her chair. “You’re awake,” she said, smiling. “I was starting to worry.”
“Oh, you know,” he said, “it’s been, what, the better part of a year since I’ve slept? Figure I was due for a good nap.”
Greta laughed, and it sounded like music to him, but even as he smiled he felt a hollow space in the middle of his ribcage.
“Were you two able to . . . sort things out?” he asked as he got slowly out of bed and found himself shivering at the sudden chill of the air.
“We’re working on it.” Greta pointed to a massive wooden wardrobe in one corner of the room. “There should be plenty of warm clothes in there.”
“Inter-species relationships frowned upon in bear society?” Jack asked as he looked through the wardrobe’s contents and recognized his own clothes.
“That, plus a lot of magic and politics nobody had explained to me before. I knew Auberon could become human, but nobody told me I needed to watch out for rival magicians masquerading as servants offering candles. Or that promising not to speak of something could be magically binding.”
Jack’s hand went automatically to his favorite shirt, favorite trousers. Arms full, he turned around again—and saw Greta frowning slightly in his direction. “What is it?” he asked.
Greta hesitated a moment, but then she asked, “Your wife was the storyteller, wasn’t she? The one who came for the spring celebration?”
“Yes,” Jack said quietly.
“And that’s how you know Auberon and the other bears. It was one of her stories you told me in the woods, that’s why it sounded so familiar.”
Jack
nodded. “She never could bring herself to believe you’d hurt him on purpose.”
Greta blinked back a sudden brightness in her eyes and said, “You’re welcome to stay here, of course, or to come with us, but Auberon needs to get back, deal with—what was her name? Bernadette.” Jack put the clothes down on the bed. “We can stay another day or two, maybe, but he’s already been gone so long . . . ”
Jack nodded. “I need some time to think.”
“Of course.”
“Maybe a few hours. You’ll know by tonight, though, and you can tell Auberon he doesn’t need to wait any longer than tomorrow morning, at least not on my account.”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded, running fingertips lightly across familiar fabrics.
“Thank you. I’ll go tell him and give you some privacy. You have the run of the castle, of course, and the grounds outside.”
Jack nodded again. “Thank you.” He waited until the door clicked shut behind her and then started to change, dumping his traveling clothes piece by piece in a pile on the cold stone floor.
Jack sat on a tree stump on the hill where he last remembered seeing Nancy. He’d thought she might be here, that he’d find her gravestone at least, but he’d looked everywhere it might be. He’d even tried to talk to the castle again, but it was . . . sleeping. So he sat, staring at the sky and seeing her eyes, wondering how the hole in his heart wasn’t killing him.
“She’s not here,” said a bear’s voice, and Jack turned, startled, to see Auberon and Greta. It was only the second time he’d ever seen the bear prince in person, and Jack realized with surprise that Auberon was actually smaller than many of the other bears. There was something noble about him, though, and Jack bowed his head; Auberon lowered his own briefly in response, and continued, “Your wife didn’t die here, Jack. She left.”
“I don’t remember,” Jack whispered, throat and chest suddenly tight.
Auberon bobbed his head. “Neither do I. But my advisors do; they say she grew sickly and left, to regain her health, but that you were so busy you seemed barely to notice.”
Jack’s whole body felt suddenly weightless, more like a bird than a man or even a scarecrow, though he hung his head and ran a hand absently through his hair. Of course, he thought. Castles don’t have wives. But if she’s still alive, somewhere . . .
Auberon must have let him sit like that for a few seconds, but then he grunted “Master Builder” in such a tone that Jack had to straighten and look at him. “You have saved my life twice over, now, and I cannot offer you sufficient thanks for that.”
Jack took a shaky breath and stood. “I was glad to help. Am glad to help. And I hope I can visit both of you, someday, but right now I think I need to go pack.”
“You’re leaving,” Greta said, smiling slightly, and it wasn’t a question.
Jack nodded. “I need to find Nancy. I owe her an apology, and if she’ll tell me, I’d like to know how that story ends. I’m sure the knight doesn’t make it home, but I think the little girl might, and if she does . . . well, I’d like to hear it from her.”
Greta nodded; Auberon sat up on his hind legs and met Jack’s gaze for several seconds. “What do you want done with the castle?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Jack answered, forcing himself to focus on this, his last responsibility. “It’s its own person, if that makes any sense, and it’s calmer now. Though it would probably be nice for it if someone lived in it, and nicer still if the someone were you. It was built to take care of you, after all, and I always feel like buildings get as sad as anyone else about being abandoned or losing their purposes.”
Auberon bobbed his head once more, and Greta reached out and shook his hand, and then Jack smiled quickly at both of them before walking past, down the hill, back toward the castle to get ready for his journey. He was ready—more than ready—to go home.
In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns
Elizabeth Bear
Police Sub-Inspector Ferron crouched over the object she assumed was the decedent, her hands sheathed in areactin, her elbows resting on uniformed knees. The body (presumed) lay in the middle of a jewel-toned rug like a flabby pink Klein bottle, its once-moist surfaces crusting in air. The rug was still fresh beneath it, fronds only a little dented by the weight and no sign of the browning that could indicate an improperly pheromone-treated object had been in contact with them for over twenty-four hours. Meandering brownish trails led out around the bodylike object; a good deal of the blood had already been assimilated by the rug, but enough remained that Ferron could pick out the outline of delicate paw-pads and the brush-marks of long hair.
Ferron was going to be late visiting her mother after work tonight.
She looked up at Senior Constable Indrapramit and said tiredly, “So these are the mortal remains of Dexter Coffin?”
Indrapramit put his chin on his thumbs, fingers interlaced thoughtfully before lips that had dried and cracked in the summer heat. “We won’t know for sure until the DNA comes back.” One knee-tall spit-shined boot wrapped in a sterile bootie prodded forward, failing to come within fifteen centimeters of the corpse. Was he jumpy? Or just being careful about contamination?
He said, “What do you make of that, boss?”
“Well.” Ferron stood, straightening a kinked spine. “If that is Dexter Coffin, he picked an apt handle, didn’t he?”
Coffin’s luxurious private one-room flat had been sealed when patrol officers arrived, summoned on a welfare check after he did not respond to the flat’s minder. When police had broken down the door—the emergency overrides had been locked out—they had found this. This pink tube. This enormous sausage. This meaty object like a child’s toy “eel,” a long squashed torus full of fluid.
If you had a hand big enough to pick it up, Ferron imagined it would squirt right out of your grasp again.
Ferron was confident it represented sufficient mass for a full-grown adult. But how, exactly, did you manage to just . . . invert someone?
The Sub-Inspector stepped back from the corpse to turn a slow, considering circle.
The flat was set for entertaining. The bed, the appliances were folded away. The western-style table was elevated and extended for dining, a shelf disassembled for chairs. There was a workspace in one corner, not folded away—Ferron presumed—because of the sheer inconvenience of putting away that much mysterious, technical-looking equipment. Depth projections in spare, modernist frames adorned the wall behind: enhanced-color images of a gorgeous cacophony of stars. Something from one of the orbital telescopes, probably, because there were too many thousands of them populating the sky for Ferron to recognize the navagraha—the signs of the Hindu Zodiac—despite her education.
In the opposite corner of the apt, where you would see it whenever you raised your eyes from the workstation, stood a brass Ganesha. The small offering tray before him held packets of kumkum and turmeric, fragrant blossoms, an antique American dime, a crumbling, unburned stick of agarbathi thrust into a banana. A silk shawl, as indigo as the midnight heavens, lay draped across the god’s brass thighs.
“Cute,” said Indrapramit dryly, following her gaze. “The Yank is going native.”
At the dinner table, two western-style place settings anticipated what Ferron guessed would have been a romantic evening. If one of the principals had not gotten himself turned inside out.
“Where’s the cat?” Indrapramit said, gesturing to the fading paw-print trails. He seemed calm, Ferron decided.
And she needed to stop hovering over him like she expected the cracks to show any second. Because she was only going to make him worse by worrying. He’d been back on the job for a month and a half now: it was time for her to relax. To trust the seven years they had been partners and friends, and to trust him to know what he needed as he made his transition back to active duty—and how to ask for it.
Except that would mean laying aside her displacement behavior, and dealing with her own proble
ms.
“I was wondering the same thing,” Ferron admitted. “Hiding from the farang, I imagine. Here, puss puss. Here puss—”
She crossed to the cabinets and rummaged inside. There was a bowl of water, almost dry, and an empty food bowl in a corner by the sink. The food would be close by.
It took her less than thirty seconds to locate a tin decorated with fish skeletons and paw prints. Inside, gray-brown pellets smelled oily. She set the bowl on the counter and rattled a handful of kibble into it.
“Miaow?” something said from a dark corner beneath the lounge that probably converted into Coffin’s bed.
“Puss puss puss?” She picked up the water bowl, washed it out, filled it up again from the potable tap. Something lofted from the floor to the countertop and headbutted her arm, purring madly. It was a last-year’s-generation parrot-cat, a hyacinth-blue puffball on sun-yellow paws rimmed round the edges with brownish stains. It had a matching tuxedo ruff and goatee and piercing golden eyes that caught and concentrated the filtered sunlight.
“Now, are you supposed to be on the counter?”
“Miaow,” the cat said, cocking its head inquisitively. It didn’t budge.
Indrapramit was at Ferron’s elbow. “Doesn’t it talk?”
“Hey, Puss,” Ferron said. “What’s your name?”
It sat down, balanced neatly on the rail between sink and counter-edge, and flipped its blue fluffy tail over its feet. Its purr vibrated its whiskers and the long hairs of its ruff. Ferron offered it a bit of kibble, and it accepted ceremoniously.
“Must be new,” Indrapramit said. “Though you’d expect an adult to have learned to talk in the cattery.”
“Not new.” Ferron offered a fingertip to the engineered animal. It squeezed its eyes at her and deliberately wiped first one side of its muzzle against her areactin glove, and then the other. “Did you see the cat hair on the lounge?”
Indrapramit paused, considering. “Wiped.”
“Our only witness. And she has amnesia.” She turned to Indrapramit. “We need to find out who Coffin was expecting. Pull transit records. And I want a five-hour phone track log of every individual who came within fifty meters of this flat between twenty hundred yesterday and when Patrol broke down the doors. Let’s get some technical people in to figure out what that pile of gear in the corner is. And who called in the welfare check?”