Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  “Whatever, Rupert,” I mumbled, lips numb with cold. I didn’t have the energy to try and understand his words. I only knew I was freezing to death. “Listen, are you really going to blow up that train?”

  After a moment’s silence Rupert answered: “This place is full of dynamite. It’s by the rails, in the trees, under the snow. I’ve spent several nights making preparations. I have to do it. Even if you are going to be angry.”

  “Can’t I stop you in any way? Reason with you? Make you realize how senseless this all is?”

  “No.”

  “Well then you’ve obviously got to do what you’ve got to do,” I muttered, relieved—the responsibility was no longer mine. I couldn’t take any more responsibility.

  The train blew smoke in the air, and its steam pistons became tense and started to push the wheels where they were fixed; it was preparing to chase me again, to make its kill. To murder me.

  I felt somebody gripping my shoulders. Rupert started to walk me away from there, fast. My feet had lost their strength to the cold, but Rupert was strong. The valley reverberated with the train’s hollow panting and the metallic screech of the steam machinery that was pushing it off.

  We got as far as the junipers, and Rupert threw himself in the snow and dragged me down with himself. My face thumped against the snow. I was too benumbed to soften my landing.

  “Mother, I ignited all the fuses,” my son whispered. “Hands to your ears!”

  “We have to talk about this when we get home,” I sighed. “Let’s drink cocoa and really talk with each other for once.”

  I thought there was something that I ought to have noticed and understood. Something to do with causes and consequences. If only my head hadn’t been aching so terribly.

  With the growing pounding in my head I hardly even heard the explosions that suddenly started to tear apart the valley, the trees and the train that had left its timetable.

  * * *

  We stood there an hour, hand in hand, and waited, Alice and I. Then we sat on the rails and waited yet another hour. The train didn’t come, the track stayed empty. I felt more and more miserable. My stomach was hurting and my head ached. “It’s not coming,” I said. “Let’s leave now.”

  Alice angrily plucked a golden lock off her head and pouted. “It’s not showing up, indeed. We have to come back tomorrow.”

  We went home, Alice disappointed and I feeling ill but relieved.

  In the night I woke up feeling that I could hardly breathe. Twinges of pain were stabbing my temples. My first thought was that Alice was dead. I fancied I remembered how the train had come and swerved off the rails and crushed Alice in front of my horrified eyes. The image was so vivid I started crying in my bed. And yet I also remembered that the train had never come and we had returned home in peace.

  In the morning I ran to see Alice; I had to make sure that she really was alive. She set about at once to get us going to the railway tracks, but I refused, even when she pressed me hard and called me a traitor and even a bad friend. She looked at me somehow strangely, and I knew something had changed between us.

  We were still friends, of course, and went around together, but day by day our friendship got thinner and we met more and more infrequently—the magic was gone. It was pretty much my fault—I couldn’t relate to Alice naturally anymore, for I remembered her dying that afternoon on the railway, even while I also remembered we’d come back home together. I remembered her funeral, I even remembered the place she was buried, and her gravestone and the golden letters on it, and yet she was sitting next to me in school.”

  —From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.

  * * *

  That is the night I think I lost my son; I remember the night and the explosions, but after that—nothing. I don’t remember coming home. A few times I’ve tried to return by myself to look for that strange blind track in the forest, but every time I’ve been driven aside from the way and ended somewhere quite different.

  I remember Rupert’s birth. I remember him growing and his overactive imagination and the day he graduated from law school. I remember his love and the skull fracture that removed it from his head. I remember our night trip to the place where the trains turn, and that’s where I lost him in the worst way. All that I remember, but I also remember that I never had the child I wished for. My youth was spent in studying, and then I had to further my career. We often talked about children, I and my husband, but we put off the realization of the idea, and when we finally woke up to try, it was already too late.

  A few months ago I saw Gunnar on the television. He’d put on a lot of weight. I was startled; somehow I’d imagined he was dead. He spoke dryly about the big export sales his company had made, and I wondered whether he ever thought about the girl he had seduced by the railway tracks three decades since. So often had I wondered what would have happened if at the critical moment I’d prevented him from withdrawing and taken his seed and made him the father of my child. The thought had entered my mind at the time, however irrational and irresponsible it was. If I’d really done that, would the other line of my memories now be objective reality, not only subjective? Would Rupert now be objective reality?

  Remembering makes me feel ill, but I can’t help thinking of Rupert. He feels so real, often more real than this real life of mine. I remember how my figure got rounder and I took a taxi to the hospital and gave birth to my son, I remember the pain and the tears and the joy, when I received the little wrinkled human being in my arms. I remember the sour midwife and the hospital ward. And yet I know nothing like that happened to me—on the day Rupert was born I was on a business trip to Moscow, it’s documented. I remember that quite well, too, the small hotel room and the chambermaid I surprised as she was rummaging in my bag.

  Perhaps I’m crazy. How many sane persons have two sets of superimposed memories from 40 years’ time? Perhaps all those empty recollections that torment me are only the product of a brain that’s gone completely round the bend? That would be the easiest and also the most believable explanation—without one small problem: I could have invented Rupert, yes. He could very well be just a delusion, flung by an ageing woman suffering from childlessness into her past to soothe her pain. But what about the place where the trains turn? I do not have enough imagination to invent anything like that. I’m a very rational person, who keeps her feet closely and safely in the dust of the earth in all situations. Unlike some others, who used to let their imagination fly irresponsibly like a kite on a stormy Sunday afternoon; such was my lost son Rupert. The place where the trains turn could only have been invented by Rupert himself, and he couldn’t have done that if he himself were nothing more than my invention.

  I hunt my memories and study them from all angles, the way a scientist may collect and study extremely important samples. I draw charts of the two different lines of my life, they are sometimes hard to distinguish. And there is a pile of evidence on my desk:

  There is a phone number: there’s a lawyer called Birgitta Donner in Helsinki, but she has never heard of Rupert Nightingale.

  There is a Christmas card from Alice Holmsten, nowadays Frogge; she tells she’s married and works as a music teacher in a school in Turku. I hadn’t thought of her for years, but sometimes one receives cards from persons already forgotten even when there’s been no particular reason to remember them.

  There is a collection of short stories by Miriam Catterton that I bought yesterday from Houndbury Books. I’m not acquainted with Miriam, although I also have other kinds of recollections of her. Most people know her since she’s a teacher, but I don’t have children, and we’ve never even talked with each other. She seemed surprised when I phoned her this morning and introduced myself. I told her I’d read her book and been especially fascinated by one of the stories, the one that tells about a little boy called Robert who loves railways and whose imagination his overly rational mother Anna tries to repress.

  This is now quite silly, I explained, but I sim
ply had to call and ask where you got the idea for Robert’s story.

  Well, where do ideas come from, generally, Miriam said, sort of embarrassed.

  They just are in the air. I often have dreams and I use them. For a couple of nights I dreamed about a little boy who loved railways, and it developed out of that, gradually.

  I’ve read the story through several times already, trying to decide which truth its existence proves.

  There’s also on my desk an article I clipped out from the newspaper 40 years ago and kept unto this day between the encyclopaedia pages. It tells about a whole goods train that vanished without a trace with its freight and engine driver somewhere in the Houndbury region. The authorities investigating the case were puzzled, but according to them it appeared probable that there was an extensive conspiracy of railway personnel behind the train theft—no way otherwise could such a crime be explained. The press clipping also seems to want to tell me something, but I’m not able to figure out how that event could be connected with Rupert’s disappearance, not yet.

  I cannot let him pass away out of my reach into final oblivion. I cannot give him back to Nothingness. That is why I continue with my investigations. I have to finally understand, to find him on the eternal circle of cause and consequence. For the sake of my son I go on with this, for his sake I write these thoughts of mine on paper.

  Copyright © 2014 by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

  Art copyright © 2014 by Greg Ruth

  This story is about the eschatology of shadow puppets.

  * * *

  You’ve been a long time away from home with its vast, pale stage of textured silk and the queen’s everywhere garden. There is only a binary of colors in your existence, just as you are supposed to narrow everything into the binary of target and not-target. Nevertheless, your language has words for colors. They are not red or ochre or azure. They are not even white or black, the logical defaults. But there is a word for the color of a string just as it is slit. Another for the color of the queen’s favorite flowers, which coil so promisingly from each doorway. One for the color of fire. That last is rarely spoken, especially in the queen’s presence.

  Your uniform is the same color as the queen’s gloves; it is defined that way. The queen’s hands, they say of her knights. And now you’ve come back to the court with its thorn-collared tigers, its hawk-headed courtiers, its endlessly thwarted geodesics. The summons didn’t give a reason why your return was so urgent, but you can guess.

  The world-tapestry’s weave is replete with imperfections: stains scrubbed out, clots of thread, small tears subtly mended. Like the queen’s court entire, you glide frictionlessly across the tapestry’s surface. But you are always aware that there is a world beyond the tapestry, in three dimensions of space rather than two, and, perhaps, the pitiless audience; you are always aware of the faraway lanterns.

  The queen’s court measures time by her smiles. Lately she has smiled less and less frequently. For the distinction between light and dark has been diminishing little by little, a phenomenon your soldiers observed even in the Knotted Reaches. And that means that the lanterns, little by little, are going out.

  People quiet as you pass by them, lengthening and shortening in accordance to the laws of geometry, your position relative to the light sources. They have a name for you: the Knight of Pyres. It is not, despite the rumors, a reference to the nations you’ve torched, or even to the smoke like Cantor dust that drifts endlessly from your gun. You have never seen any point in telling them where the name comes from. After all, the queen would disapprove. Even in an airless world, a shadow-queen’s disapproval can suffocate.

  You approach the throne. The queen is flanked by her guards, and her poets, and her bearers-of-flowers. The last scatter petals of grave’s-breath at your approach. They have a fragrance like sickle nights and slivered moons. You lay your gun before the queen, kneel, and wait.

  It’s not a long wait, just enough to make the point that she commands your loyalty still. You have never liked the queen, but you concede her efficiency. Besides, you don’t have to like her to do her will. She made that clear to you a long time ago.

  “I did not wish to recall you from a campaign where you were enjoying such success,” the queen says. Her voice is low, and sharp the way that ice is sharp. At least there is no rebuke in it. “I have another mission for you.”

  Your lieutenant is competent enough. You have no doubt that she can finish the current war of subjugation to the queen’s satisfaction. There’s little left to do in any case. You could recite the figures readily enough. The houses slashed to tessellated debris, the number of knives, the dimensionless weight of ashes. But the queen has not asked about any of this, so you hold your silence.

  “The lanterns are becoming exhausted,” the queen says. The courtiers stir like a tremor in the tapestry: she has spoken the unspeakable after all. “You know what happens when all the lights go out.” One of the tame tigers yawns; a poet mutters half a verse-of-warding in hexameter flattened to a scrap of desperation. The queen’s head turns slightly. The poet shivers and subsides.

  The lights have gone out before, but they have always come back on. On those occasions she made use of you and your gun, too. You remember the last such nightplunge. In the darkness your face had no boundaries. You were unable to discern the scars in your history or the contours of your future. When the lights came back on, you had to rebuild yourself from ligatures of shadow and shapes whose names you had to mine out of convolute dreams. You started with your gun. The queen, it is said, started with her scepter. You remind yourself of this every so often, because it’s important to understand your adversaries, especially when you have something in common.

  “You have only to command me,” you say, which is not quite the case. She’s not incapable of giving an unwise order.

  The lanterns are an outside phenomenon, but it’s not entirely true that your people have no influence over the world beyond. You are the proof of that.

  The queen’s smile in her oval face is a gash of light. “Then my command is this,” she says. “Travel to the eastern border and bring back the Jewel of Mirrors. You will have to fight the eastern philosopher-king for it. But if the lanterns are failing us, if the world beyond is starved of mornings, then we will have to feed the lanterns ourselves. A foreign jewel is a small enough sacrifice.”

  It’s not the solution you had expected. In times past you have gone hunting in the world beyond. But the supply of prey is finite, and you are not surprised that she knows what to do after it is exhausted.

  East, right, away from the gates-ever-gaping; it’s a matter of cartographic convention, but the dawn-voyaging symbolism counts for something. What the queen isn’t saying is that the philosopher-king will have his armies, and his citizens, and his libraries of tomes inscribed in shadow-script as tiny and perfect as insects. What she isn’t saying is that she wants you to reduce his land to a rubble of pixels.

  “Your will is mine,” you say, the old bitter formula. At least nothing more is expected of you.

  The flower-bearers scatter petals of birds-ascending, so called because the flowers in full bloom resemble firebirds caught in the incandescent act of transporting themselves off the tapestry and into the impossible z-axis sky. You hide your cynicism; long practice.

  The queen nods, and you take up your gun. “You will leave tomorrow,” she says, and you wish she had given you permission to quit her presence straightaway. But instead you bow, and linger in the court for appearance’s sake, never comfortable amid the shadow-edges of spear and vine and people who know better than to come too close to the queen’s unchancy favorite.

  * * *

  At this point, it may be fruitful to review facts of stellar evolution. Stars like our sun effloresce into red giants, then shrink into white dwarfs, and eventually cool; in an older universe, the resulting black dwarfs would lurk in the vast reaches like carrion husks. More massive stars singe the darkness with heavy e
lements as they crumple into neutron stars. More massive still, and stars swallow themselves, leaving only black holes.

  What’s notable is not just the coruscating variety of colors, but the fact that each of these trajectories, while dependent on mass, eventually ends in darkness.

  * * *

  You know a lot of stories about the Jewel of Mirrors. None of them help you.

  The Jewel of Mirrors is a necklace guarded by a bird that has been bricked up in a tower since the hour of its birth, and whose song can reduce shadow to the transparency of dew. To slay the bird, you must reflect its voice upon itself so that it boils away into formlessness. It is not known whether the bird would welcome this release.

  The Jewel of Mirrors is a lock of twisting logic upon a starship’s carcass. If you remove the lock, the starship will rouse, and with it all its nine-and-twenty cannons, one for each bitter star in your world’s home constellation. The difficulty is not the lock, it’s preserving the astrology of oppression.

  The Jewel of Mirrors is a painting upon glass by the only artist to retrieve colors from outside the world-tapestry. Colors like crimson and bronze and viridian. Its virtue is that you can look into the painting and find a portrait of yourself. Its curse is that you can never unsee what you have seen there.

  You would much rather be studying intelligence on the philosopher-king than some gaudy gem wrapped up in folklore. But all you know is that he has given tribute dutifully year by year to keep the queen’s rapacious eye from turning in his direction. Indeed, some of those treasures decorate the queen’s throne room. Frogs composed of gears imperfectly meshed, who sing dolorous songs of ruination. Banners upon which eddies and curves of light depict thunderstorms, cyclones, the occasional stray dragon. Once, a lily with eyes blinking stutteringly in its petals. This one was not entirely successful: the queen liked the idea, but suspected the eyes of belonging to the philosopher-king’s sages or spymasters. Even now no one is certain how she disposed of the thing.