by Ian McDonald
“Is that what you want?”
“No. But I don’t want to go back. Don’t make me go back. I won’t go back. You can’t make me. This is my place. My place. Why did you have to come here to ruin it, spoil my fun, make everything horrible? Why did you have to come and change things? Why do you want to take me away when I don’t want to go?”
Enye looks long at the thing she had always thought of as her Adversary: this girl, this child in a woman’s dress. She had been wrong. The Rooke archive had been wrong. The Midnight Children had been wrong. Her enemies had spoken the truth. There was nothing here that could possibly have opposed her. The Adversary, as ever, had been within.
Enye opens her arms to the little girl. The child accepts the invitation into her embrace, reaches out its arms to return the affection. Enye hugs the girl to her chest, arms wrapped tightly, protectingly, imprisoning the child within her embrace.
“This is no place for you.” Enye whispers. “In my world there is a place for you. A time for you.”
The child screams and heaves and thrashes: No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no…
But Enye will not let go. She crushes the child to her breast. The child beats its head against her, again and again and again and again, tries to free its arms to strike and scratch, turn its head to bite. But Enye will not let go.
And she feels it changing within her grip, feels its human contours soften and run, feels it reform itself. She cries aloud; within her embrace is a snake. But she does not let go. The snake writhes, swells. She is clutching to her soft breasts some impossibly huge, impossibly vile insect. But she does not let go. The insect transforms itself into a chimera of spines and fangs and quills that crucify her flesh. She cries out as the blood leaks from a thousand punctures.
But she does not let go. The child transmutes itself: a white-hot glowing ingot of iron; a pillar of dry ice; a blaze of solid lightning. But Enye will not let go. Claws rend her, acid burns her, vile and poisonous vapours corrode her nostrils, sear her lungs into blisters of pus; leprosy gnaws her fingers and breasts and face to rotted abscesses; maggots and weevils hatch within her belly and eat their way to light and air; she embraces fang and sting and poison and pestilence, but Enye will not let go; through the fiftieth transformation, and the five hundredth and the five thousandth, Enye will not let go.
And in the end, all the changes are run and within the circle of her arms lies something silver and shimmering, like a foetus, and a newborn baby, and a child, and a handsome woman, and an aged, aged crone all at once, flickering from state to state, transient and insubstantial. Enye picks up the silver, dazzling thing. It is slippery to the touch, smoother than glass. It flows over her fingers like quicksilver.
She presses it to her belly.
“Yes!” she cries as the quicksilver thing passes through the flesh of her belly to rest within. “Yes…”
A tremor shakes the mountain of phaguses. A crack appears in the slate throne, from top to bottom, runs down through the fused, ossified phaguses. The Mygmus quakes again; the mountain cracks and fissures. Fragments of phagus tumble away down the sheer slopes. The whole unsteady pile groans and settles. The imaginary structure of the Mygmus is coming apart. A third volley of tremors sends Enye clutching for the slate throne. Behind her, the flesh and bone vaulting unravels; spans and cables shear and snap; the flesh-stuff from which they are woven breaks into streamers and corpuscles. Whole geographies of bodyscape spin into the unsubstance of the Mygmus, wheeling, shedding ropes and spirals of dream flesh. The mountain of phaguses faults catastrophically across the centre. With inexorable, ponderous slowness the summit, throne, and Enye slide off into the void. Chunks of phagus-stuff fall past her. The bone piers and buttresses that supported the world unwind into their component fibres; those fibres disintegrate into clouds of free-flying ceils. Pulsing air sacs tumble through nothingness. Bereft of its shaping and sustaining imagination, the Mygmus is returning to its original unstructured state. In a very few minutes the entire edifice of Emily Desmond’s fantasy is reduced to a cloud of corpuscles expanding outward into great and boundless darkness.
Clinging to the wreckage of her father’s throne, Enye tumbles through the Mygmus. Beneath her she spies a tear in the unsubstance: a pale dawn light spills through, light in the darkness. The light of a new morning breaks across Enye.
Go there! she screams silently at the stone slab, willing stability and trajectory into its tumbling flight. How did it work in The Wizard of Oz? There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home… Don’t you need a pair of ruby slippers for that to work? The body-verse is almost entirely absorbed back into the primal state: she alone is the sole remaining quantum of definition and order.
She focuses her desires on that dawn light, that gateway back to her life. She remembers all the things she has ever loved about her life and world, calls them to mind, dwells upon them, touches, tastes, feels them; and while she savours them again, she rejects all that the Mygmus has to offer.
This no place for life.
The vagina-mouth opens; the light of morning shines into the Mygmus, and swallows her.
Light. Primal light.
Cold. Primal cold.
She cannot believe she can be this cold and still be alive.
Because she is cold, she must be alive.
Sometime in the night her body must have fused with the stone against which she is sitting; she is now a frost-glazed outcrop of herself, stone legs stone arms stone hands stone eyes.
She thinks for a moment her eyes have frozen shut.
But she opens them on a still-dark land lying in the darkness beneath the mountain; a giant shadow cast over forest and field and sea. At the zenith the vapour trail of a westbound jet catches the rays of the sun and kindles into burning gold. Light touches the summits of the mountains across the bay, steals with giant, silent strides across the land.
The blankets are stiff with frost. Her attempts to move her frozen limbs makes them crackle and snap. People have died in less severe conditions than this. How then has she…
… unless her voyage to the Mygmus and back had not been the wholly imaginary journey she had assumed.
Immaterial. For now, praise God for light and morning and gifts of moving and stretching and feeling, even if it feels like a rock coming to life after a million years of stillness. The dawning light sends probing fingers over the hilltop, down the mountainsides, calling life and warmth into Enye’s body. She bends, stretches, limbers up with the aching slowness of aged aged practitioners of t’ai chi. When she feels at least half human she repacks the hold-all. Imagination? Then where is the katana? She shoulders the bag, limps away from the Bridestone. She turns back for one look at her adversary and ally. The stone slab, taller than herself, has cracked through from top left to bottom right. No imagination. She turns back onto the way-marked paths of men. The light is touching the tops of the trees, but an inner light is breaking over whole landscapes of her spirit that had lain long in darkness. Down among the trees, where she can hear the sound of early traffic from the main road, she stops. Of course, it is far too early, it is a biological impossibility for her to feel what she thought she felt, but it had seemed to her that she could feel the baby move and quicken inside her.
Back at the car, she finds that in the night, someone has broken in through the open roof and stolen her new stereo and case of tapes.
She leans back against the car door and laughs and laughs and laughs.
They just won’t let you live.
As usual when the phone rings she has to scream at Elliot for five minutes to shut up that damn racket there’s someone on the phone. What? Someone on the phone. What? Can’t hear. Someone on the phone. Hang on a minute, I’ll switch off the music, what? Someone on the phone. Oh. For me?
No. For me.
Jaypee.
She almost can’t believe it. Like getting phone calls from a ghost, or a South American desaparecido. He’s been me
aning to call her for some time but, well, you know, dear heart, this and that and the other, especially the other. How is she?
She is seven months’ pregnant, feels the size of a major Jovian satellite, condemned to back pains fallen arches tacky maternity fashions with little bunny rabbits on the breast pocket and Elliot insisting she practice practice practice the breathing techniques they’re learning at antenatal class. But it’s good.
Finding the courage to tell Elliot she was pregnant had been no trivial quest. She had been tempted to leave it to the incontrovertible evidence of his eyes and time, but then he might have been misled into believing the child was his. Early into the new year they had started sleeping with each other. Sleeping partners do not deserve such shabby deceptions. She wanted him to be in no doubt that the child was not his, even though the price of his knowledge might have been his feet under her duvet and pots of China tea first thing in the morning. Though she bled from the heart at the thought of losing him, she said, “I’m pregnant.” For three days he had locked himself away in his attic with the music-making machines he had managed to salvage from the warehouse fire while Enye felt like a sinner condemned by God. He would, he said, Think About It.
And the third day a van drew up outside twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street and out of the back came keyboards QWERTY boards rhythm generators synthesizers reel-2-reels, CD cassette and record decks mixing desks amps mikes posters prints paintings eighteen-gear Shinamo system ATB, and Elliot.
“Every child needs a father,” he said. “Seeing as how the real one has finked out on his duty, I would like to apply for the post.”
And with the whole of L’Esperanza Street aghast behind their nets at the brazenness of it all, Enye, grinning like a synchronised swimmer, opened the doors and let Elliot with his keyboards QWERTY boards rhythm generators synthesizers reel-2-teel CD cassette and record decks mixing desks amps mikes posters prints paintings and eighteen-gear Shinamo system ATB into her home.
The system is cosy and practical. Another communication from yet another set of solicitors left Enye the recipient of yet another bequest—the property and ground of number twenty-seven L’Esperanza Street courtesy the estate of Mr. Antrobus deceased. Elliot has use of the downstairs rooms to make his music. Enye smiles. She sees it as the completion of Antrobus’s revenge against the twitch-curtain brigade, a revenge begun when the Drugs Squad raided Enye’s apartment and found themselves in possession of two Zip-Loc bags of assorted toenail clippings and bleached pubic hair which did not appear to be listed on any of the catalogues of Bustable Substances Euphoriant Stimulant Depressant Hallucinogenic The folk in forensic had been unable to ascertain an active principle despite the fact that it left odd peaks on the chemical analysis charts. The one cocksure enough of his science to try some of the stuff reported only that it tasted like light bulbs.
Case dismissed.
But it was still the Biggest Event of the Decade behind the lace curtains and vertical blinds of L’Esperanza Street. Until Elliot and his keyboards QWERTY boards rhythm generators synthesizers reel-2-reels CD cassette and record decks mixing desks amps mikes posters prints paintings and eighteen-gear Shinamo system ATB.
Elliot is good. Good enough to be able to do the bikes just three days a week. Good enough to be getting airplay on the FM stations; good enough for the nationwide network to have asked him to cut a session. Good enough to be the uncrowned King of Klubland, Master of the Warehouses, King of the Remixes; Doctor Jive. Even if sometimes Enye cannot hear the telephone.
She tells Jaypee she feels good.
That’s good to Jaypee. To hear his voice is like rolling up the years as if they were an old carpet to dance on the floorboards. He has News. Capital N news. Word is up, the skids are under the Blessèd Phaedra. Crossed Oscar the Bastard on policy decisions once too often. No one knows the exact nature of her transgressions, but Word is Up, So: QHPSL Advertising has a couple of jobs that it’s had to put on the metaphorical back burner because right now, dear heart, they’re up to metaphorical here and rather than lose accounts, they’re considering subcontracting. Interested, honey child?
She wishes science-fictiony things like videophones existed so Jaypee could see her smile when she says that Actually, she’s moving into another area of creative work entirely. Publishing.
Of course, Jaypee asks just what does she mean, but Enye does not want to tell him, not yet, that she posted the revised and edited and corrected manuscript of The Secret Language of Flowers, by Enye and Jessica MacColl, to a national publishing house two days ago. She tells Jaypee thanks, but she’s really not interested.
Keep in touch, says Jaypee.
She says she will try to, yes, more than try to, she will, and in her voice is a tone of sincerity that says that if they do not meet again it will not be for want of her trying.
Elliot comes bounding up the stairs, shaggy mane flying. He looks so good and fresh and spontaneous that she cannot resist pulling him into the bedroom with tiny squeaks and cries, throwing him down onto the bed and herself on top of him.
“That your mother again?”
“No. An old friend. From advertising days.”
He harrumphs. He likes to pretend he is jealous of her advertising friends.
“Oh, by the way, post.” It is a postcard, rather, a colour print, somewhat crumpled, with an address scrawled on the back. The message reads, Love from and the signatures are illegible. The photograph is of a blocky, thickset man of twenty-wise and a very pretty girl, age approximately ditto, wearing a denim jacket and a T-shirt with the legend “SunMed Capo Blanco.” They have a dog with them, a scruffy mongrel. It is jumping up and the man is holding its front paws off the ground, as folk will, with dogs.
“Who’s it from?”
“Oh, some folk I haven’t seen in a long time.” Then she lifts his hands and presses them to her belly. “Feel. Life. Elliot. Strong life. Feel it kick.”
Elliot loves to feel the baby move and stir within Enye’s womb.
“Feels like it’s going to be a pole vaulter, that one. A little street fighter. Feet that kick!”
“Oh, no,” Enye says. “A ballet dancer. She’s going to be a girl.”
“How can you so sure?”
“Oh, I’m sure.”
She rises from the bed, goes to the midi system, clicks on whatever tape is in the deck. Sibelius Five. She crosses to the window, looks out at the garden where late spring is uncoiling from the earth like a slow, silent explosion. It seemed to take a long time to come this year, but it came. It always does.
“What do you think of Emily as a name?” she says.
AFTERWORDS
“IN FANTASY… ALL STORIES must run to three volumes and include a mention of the Wild Hunt.”
—David Langford: Mexicon III Program Book
THANKS
IT’S A CHURLISH HUSBAND who doesn’t dedicate his novel to his wife, so first and foremost, here’s to you, Patricia, for encouragement, and when encouragement didn’t work, stubbornness, and when stubbornness didn’t work, reminding me that I could actually do this thing called writing. A great debt of thanks goes to David Rhodes, for permission to plunder mercilessly our mutual childhoods (Percy Perinov lives!), and as inventor of the word phagus. Thanks also, and apologies, to the many people who without knowledge or consent may find themselves between these covers. Finally, to the Arts Council for Northern Ireland for awarding me a bursary during work on this novel, and all you nice people at Bantam, hope it was worth the wait: thanks.
About the Author
Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in t
he short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Ian McDonald
Cover design by Gabriel Guma
978-1-4804-3215-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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