Asimov's SF, April-May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I'm taking this.” I showed him the harpoon gun, the only weapon I had. “Just in case the hunters are still around."

  He gave a grave nod. “Good idea. I don't have anything with me—I had a small weapon, but it's still in the rigger; I couldn't get at it."

  When I saw his craft, I knew why. Looking down from the top of the cliff, the prow of the rigger had been stoved in and it was sinking. The back half was already submerged.

  “You were really lucky to have made it up the cliff,” I said. “There's no way we're going to be able to drag that up."

  Lailoken cursed. “It'll be gone by the time we can get a rescue copter out here and anyway, I'd have to pay. Oh well. It's insured, at least."

  “Will you get the full amount back?"

  He snorted. “I pay a high enough premium."

  When we got back to the lighthouse Lailoken, with an air of resignation, asked if I had a spare fishing rod. I watched him walk across the ice, a graceful prowl, and chop a hole in the ice with a borrowed prong.

  A fish supper, in pleasant company. Maybe I'd been lonelier than I'd thought.

  I had a number of tasks to do around the light: basic maintenance. I went down into the base area to fetch some equipment; the skin of the selk was still there, folded as neatly as I could manage it, and so was Lailoken's pack. We'd made up a bed for him on the couch.

  As I crossed the room, I heard a whisper.

  Iskir. Iskir.

  It was surprisingly loud and it startled me. I looked around, but nothing was there. My head rang with it. Iskir.

  “Who's there?” I said aloud.

  The whisper came again and it was coming from the pack. I was an idiot, I told myself. Lailoken must have a radio in there. Not much use, however, if the battery went flat. I didn't like rummaging about in his bag, but I opened it a little way anyway.

  There was no radio. A handful of clothing, a spare slickskin, a long, flat parcel in a waterproof wrapping, that whispered, Iskir, Iskir.

  I flicked the parcel open and snatched my hand back. There was blood on it, from a thin, shallow cut. I put my hand to my mouth and, carefully, drew the wrapping aside. Inside, was a long black knife: black blade, black shaft. It looked almost of a piece, the metal and bone blending into one another so seamlessly that I had to look hard for a join. My mouth flooded with the taste of iron.

  I had a small weapon, but it's still in the rigger.

  The door hummed and I hastily shoved the bag shut. Lailoken stood in the entrance with a brace of limmerel, his face wind-reddened and smiling.

  “They're shoaling. You could almost pull them out of the water."

  “Oh, well done.” My voice sounded almost normal, I found to my surprise. I kept my injured hand out of sight, behind my back. “That's dinner settled, then."

  Perhaps this was what marriage was like, all cheer and plans for supper, with the hiss of secrets underneath. I got through the next few hours with difficulty, and excused myself shortly after dinner. I told Lailoken I'd cut myself on a weathered sheet of metal. He seemed hardly to hear me.

  My mother might have lived alone, apart from me, but that didn't mean that she didn't communicate. She had friends all over the Reach: on the message boards and the genealogy lists. One of them was a sea marshal named Kari Shoar. I sent her a message, then went to bed and tried to sleep.

  I could still hear it, in my restless dreams. Iskir, Iskir.

  Around three AM, I found myself wide awake. The message-in section of the console was blinking. I went to look at what Shoar had written.

  I've not met Edri Lailoken myself. Some of the older guys here know him, though he hasn't been out with the boats for years, since his accident. They say he's a miserable old bugger, keeps himself to himself. What's he doing all the way out at the Baille Atha light?

  I hadn't voiced my suspicions yet, but I did so then. I did not feel able to handle this on my own. I needed help and I asked Shoar to send a sea marshal out, or come herself. Why would you take on someone else's identity, unless you had something to hide? And besides, identity theft in the Reach is not an easy matter. Not easy, or cheap.

  I did not sleep for the remainder of that night. There was no further reply from Shoar; her part of the Reach was several hours ahead of Baille Atha, and she had probably gone on shift. I watched the moon drift down over the ocean, sliding into its own silver track, and still the whispering went on.

  Towards dawn, there was a flicker of green in the corner of my eye. Message-in, I thought, and ran to the console. But it was on another array to the communications console—a small emerald light, telling me that the main door of the lighthouse had been opened.

  I should have waited. I should have locked myself into the lighthouse, a princess in my tower, and made sure that the override switches were on lock. Because I knew what Lailoken was, now, and where that black blade had come from: a land of dark glass cliffs, of echoing forests, of experiments and spells.

  Should have waited, but did not. I thought of that sad piled pelt in the base of the lighthouse, of the selk singing at the ocean's edge, and I could not stay. I picked up the harpoon gun on my way out; he had not taken it with him. I suppose he did not need to. I also checked his bag. The knife was gone.

  In the cold glow just before the dawn, the spires and pinnacles of ice gleamed green with their own faint phosphorescence. Lailoken had left no tracks in the snow, and that nearly made me turn back to the reassuring column of the lighthouse. But I went on, following the whisper of the knife in my mind, and at last I came to that same cliff, that my mother had called the edge of the world.

  Lailoken was nowhere to be seen. Cautiously, I made my way to the lip of the cliff and looked over. The ice field extended some distance out from the shore, a thin spring sheet, and he was already halfway across it. Ahead, shadowy shapes marked the rocks. The selk were there. I raised the harpoon and measured a shot but he was out of range. I could see how he'd made his way down the cliff, the handholds. It was still dark enough that he might not see me even if he looked back, or so I prayed. I shouldered the gun and went after him.

  When I was almost at the bottom of the cliff, and Lailoken's figure was approaching the rocks on which the selk lay, something changed. The world around me became colder and seemed to darken, but at the same time, I could see more clearly. I caught a glimpse of Lailoken's face, as if I was kneeling before him. It was white and rapt against the pre-dawn sky and I knew that I was seeing through the knife itself, through Iskir. My blood hammered and pounded in my head and I came close to falling. I snatched at a handhold of ice, half caught it, and slid the rest of the way, luckily only a few feet, to the base of the cliff.

  Down here, the rocks were slippery, like wet glass. I did not know how Lailoken had made such quick progress and my fear of him grew. I saw his face again and he was speaking, whispering to the knife as someone might whisper to a lover. Something pushed against the world; I had the sense of force—and then the song began.

  This time, it was not wordless. The selk, sentient now, was singing in its own tongue of Shelta. I did not understand it, but I could grasp repeats, refrains—and Iskir did understand, I somehow knew, and was spinning the song out of the selk like a long skein of blood.

  Lailoken gave a single shout, a cry of triumph. He raised Iskir, brought it down through the air. I had a dizzying rush, cleaving the air with the knife, as it cut the song. Lailoken's other hand held a bag; the song fell into it. From across the icefield, there was a heavy, echoing splash as the selk rolled and fell. And I dragged the harpoon from my shoulder, aimed and fired.

  The world slowed down. Lailoken turned as the bolt glided towards him and I saw his face, clearly at last. He looked nothing like the blue-eyed, black-haired young man from whom I'd sat across a table, eating limmerel. I don't know what he looked like, except that I wouldn't have described it as human. The bolt crept on and Lailoken smiled and stepped unhurriedly out of the way.

  “Iskir!�
� I cried. “Iskir!” My voice sounded thick in my mouth. Lailoken's smile widened, but out on the rocks, something stirred. A selk was singing.

  It wasn't the plaintive, desolate song of a few minutes before. Lailoken's spell had been broken just long enough, the knife's concentration shifting. This was a war song.

  My hands hammered at my ears. I dropped to my knees. Time came back in a rush and the harpoon bolt sailed past Lailoken and struck a spire of ice, which shattered. But the ice was shattering, too, thin splintering cracks stemming out from where Lailoken, suddenly, was flailing for balance.

  It happened quickly after that: the ice breaking, Iskir flying from Lailoken's hand like a black arrow, the vitki going down, down, into the killing sea. The selk's song stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I was crouching, my forehead nearly touching the ice. A few yards from me, where the ice was unbroken, Iskir skittered to a halt and lay waiting.

  After a moment, I became aware that the pounding sound in my head wasn't my own blood, after all, but the rotor blades of a sea marshal's copter, landing above me on the cliff. Slowly, I got to my feet. I stepped out onto the ice, picked up Iskir, and put it in a fold of my slickskin. It felt slippery, as if coated with blood. Then I climbed back up the cliff to where Marshal Shoar was waiting.

  * * * *

  An hour later, she and I went back up to the northwest quadrant of the icefield. It was not long past dawn, with a strong morning wind blowing offshore. Together, Shoar and I looked over the cliff to where the wrecked rigger lay. It was not wrecked now. It hovered slightly above the surface of the water, quite safe, with the flicker of a dying holo-form shuddering over it. In the moments where the holo-form was failing, I saw that it was nothing like a fishing rigger, but a thin craft. I'd never seen anything similar before, but Shoar nodded when she saw it.

  “Vitki,” was all that she said.

  “He wanted me to file the report about the skin,” I said. “He was prepared for someone to come."

  “Arrogance,” she said. But she did not sound sure. Then she added, “Perhaps he wanted a copter."

  Her team took the rigger back with them to Uist, proof of enemy incursions into the Reach. The Baille Atha lighthouse was put on the nearest marshal's sea patrol and now a wing comes over perhaps every three days or so, undergoing routine checks. But Lailoken still walks the ice, head down in its vitki hood, stumbling along as if looking for something. I can see the ice spires through his body; I have seen no need to alert the sea patrol to his presence.

  I keep Iskir in a metal box, up in the light near the storms and the sky. Sometimes, I take the knife out and look at it; it seems to grow harder, more solid, year by year. I have not told the sea patrol about Iskir, either. For if another wolf of the spirit should come, searching for a knife that can cut a song from the air, I think I would like to see just how far Iskir can pare, spiraling flesh and blood and bone away, all the way down to the cold hollow of an enemy soul.

  Copyright © 2007 Liz Williams

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  * * *

  THE EATER OF DREAMS

  by Robert Silverberg

  "This is the shortest, by a good many thousands of words, of the two dozen or so stories I've had in Asimov's over the years. But that doesn't mean it's insignificant, at least not to me, because writing it qualified me for a place in this very special issue. It's an honor to be here, no matter what the length of the story."—Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg's new story collection, To Be Continued, was published by Subterranean Press late last year. It's the first volume in what is intended as a nine-volume set of Bob's collected (not complete!) science fiction stories. This first volume covers stories written between 1953 and 1958. Obviously, it will take a while before we see the volume that includes this latest tale by our resident Grand Master.

  The Queen-Goddess feels another dream coming to her tonight, and she knows it will be a dark one. So I am summoned to her, masked in the mask of my profession, and I crouch by her pallet, awaiting the night. The Queen-Goddess sleeps, lying asprawl like a child's discarded doll. At the foot of the bed lurks the Vizier in his horned mask: our chaperone. No man, not even the royal Eater of Dreams, may enter the Queen-Goddess’ bedchamber unescorted.

  Her spirit flutters and trembles. Her eyes move quickly beneath their lids. She is reaching the dream-world now. Her dreams are always true visions. Therefore she suffers when a dark one comes, for such dreams acquaint her with pain and grief, and we suffer when she suffers, since all things flow to us through the spirit of the Queen-Goddess. What she will bring us after such a dream is pain and grief. We cannot abide pain or grief; and so I must take her dark dreams from her as swiftly as I can.

  Last night she dreamed—she could not communicate it well to me—of ashes and ruin, of ugliness and shame, of strife and sadness. From her vague description, I knew that she has been ranging through ancient times again. She often makes contact with some epoch of the distant pre-Imperial past, that era of apocalyptic nightmare out of which our own shining civilization emerged. Last night's dream, for which, alas, I was not summoned in time, has cast its shadow over today's flow of beneficial energy. If another like it comes tonight, I will be here to guard her majesty against it.

  And, yes, yes, the dream is coming, and it is the same.

  Surely her majesty has slipped once more into the black abyss of time past. I say the words that unlock the portals of her spirit, link my mind with hers, and see a fearful strangeness. The stars, of which she gives me just the most fleeting of glimpses before her gaze turns away from them, seem to have an unfamiliar look: the constellations I so quickly see do not appear to be the constellations we know today. They must be those of some long-ago epoch. The stars in their courses travel great distances over time.

  And what I behold under these strange skies is bleakness and horror. We are in a hideous city. It is an era I have never seen in her dreams before, an awful one. The buildings are brutal towers, looming inexorably. On myriad interlacing roadways, vehicles move like swarming beetles. I see an ashen sky; I see stunted trees with blackened leaves; I see hordes of people with faces twisted in anguish. The air itself has a poisonous-looking pall. It is the past, yes; it is one of those dark predecessor civilizations, ridden with pain and error, out of which we have emerged into sunlight and joy. What can this terrible ancient era be, if not the dreadful world of eight, ten, twelve thousand years ago, that grim time so proud of the frenzied, furious industriousness that its builders mistook for wealth, from which the benevolence of her majesty's dynasty has emancipated us all forever?

  “Majesty,” I say softly. “Give me this dream."

  I utter the words of transfer and the dream enters me in all its fury. For a moment I recoil; but I am skilled in my art, and quickly I engulf the images, neutralize them, dissipate them, and then it is over and I am rising, trembling, drenched in sweat, fighting nausea. It will take me a while to recover. But I am used to that. Her majesty's face is tranquil. She sleeps like a happy child. The Vizier comes to me and we embrace, mask against mask. “Well done,” he says. “But I fear this is not the last of them."

  The day that follows is a happy one. Strength and joy flow from her majesty from dawn to dusk. It is a day of golden sunlight, of cloudless skies, of unfolding blossoms and rising fragrance. The great lawns sweeping down to the river have never looked greener; the river's pure flow is a celestial blue. We are a blessed people. We will not make the mistakes of yesteryear. Our civilization will endure eternally.

  But at midnight the Vizier summons me again.

  “Another,” he says. “The third night. This one will be the worst."

  Smiling, I tell him, “Whatever it is, I am ready."

  Indeed I am. For sixty years now I have guarded her majesty against the terrors of the night, and we have moved together from triumph to triumph. In the privacy of my soul I flatter myself with the thought that I am essential to the realm—that, without my
diligence and skill, the Queen-Goddess would be ridden nightly by horror and torment and all the world would be the worse for that.

  I don my mask. The Vizier dons his. The Queen, ever youthful, ever beautiful, is asleep. Signs of tension are visible on her brow. The dream is coming. I say the words. The link is formed.

  It comes now, the dream.

  Her wandering mind has entered that same ancient era, but this night there are significant differences. The brutal towers now are shattered: charred stumps are everywhere. Those interlacing roads are twisted and broken. Vehicles lie piled in rusting heaps along their margins. The air is black and oily. The citizens—there are just a few in the ruined streets—have a dazed, stunned look. Some dreadful thing has happened. The dreaming mind of the Queen-Goddess must have found the very end of the former era, the disastrous climactic time of the Great Collapse, when all assumptions were overthrown and the corrosive prosperity of the day tumbled overnight into that dreary poverty out of which, after so many centuries, our Imperial government created the serene, lovely epoch in which we live today.

  It is a much more powerful vision than last night's, and I know that afterward I will reverberate with it for hours, but so be it. I will take it from her and all will be well. “Majesty,” I say, as ever. “Give me—"

  But then her head shifts, and she murmurs in her sleep, and the perspective changes and she shows me the sky, not the brief glimpse of last night but a long, slow, clear view, and everything is wrong. The moon, our familiar pockmarked moon, is a chipped and broken thing, and the stars whose patterns I have studied so well are not the stars of some vanished yesterday nor the stars of today but stars strung across the sky in some utterly unknown configuration. And in that moment all my strength leaves me, for I know this dream to be too huge to swallow. It is the future, not the past, through which the Queen-Goddess walks tonight, and what it shows is that the cycle of destruction will come round again, that our green and golden era that we thought to be invulnerable will not last eternally after all, that we too will be swept away as all earlier civilizations of Earth have been swept away. I can protect her against the past, but there is no way I can stave off the onrushing future, and I fling my mask aside and crouch and weep while the Vizier, maskless and stunned as well, comes hurrying to my side.