She was the holy woman of the tribe, the keeper of its secrets, and her name was Atsula, the fox. Atsula walked before the two tribesmen who carried their god on long poles, draped with bearskins, that it should not be seen by profane eyes, nor at times when it was not holy.
They roamed the tundra, with their tents. The finest of the tents was made of caribou hide, and it was the holy tent, and there were four of them inside it: Atsula, the priestess, Gugwei, the tribal elder, Yanu, the war leader, and Kalanu, the scout. She called them there, the day after she had her vision.
Atsula scraped some lichen into the fire, then she threw in dried leaves with her withered left hand: they smoked, with an eye-stinging grey smoke, and gave off an odour that was sharp and strange. Then she took a wooden cup from the wooden platform, and she passed it to Gugwei. The cup was half-filled with a dark yellow liquid.
Atsula had found the pungh mushrooms—each with seven spots, only a true holy woman could find a seven-spotted mushroom—and had picked them at the dark of the moon, and dried them on a string of deer-cartilage.
Yesterday, before she slept, she had eaten the three dried mushroom caps. Her dreams had been confused and fearful things, of bright lights moving fast, of rock mountains filled with lights spearing upward like icicles. In the night she had woken, sweating, and needing to make water. She squatted over the wooden cup and filled it with her urine. Then she placed the cup outside the tent, in the snow, and returned to sleep.
When she woke, she picked the lumps of ice out from the wooden cup, as her mother had taught her, leaving a darker, more concentrated liquid behind.
It was this liquid she passed around, first to Gugwei, then to Yanu and to Kalanu. Each of them took a large gulp of the liquid, then Atsula took the final draft. She swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a libation to Nunyunnini.
They sat in the smoky tent, waiting for their god to speak. Outside, in the darkness, the wind wailed and breathed.
Kalanu, the scout, was a woman who dressed and walked as a man: she had even taken Dalani, a fourteen-year-old maiden, to be her wife. Kalanu blinked her eyes tightly, then she got up and walked over to the mammoth skull. She pulled the mammoth-hide cloak over herself, and stood so her head was inside the mammoth skull.
“There is evil in the land,” said Nunyunnini in Kalanu’s voice. “Evil, such that if you stay here, in the land of your mothers and your mother’s mothers, you shall all perish.”
The three listeners grunted.
“Is it the slavers? Or the great wolves?” asked Gugwei, whose hair was long and white, and whose face was as wrinkled as the gray skin of a thorn tree.
“It is not the slavers,” said Nunyunnini, old stone-hide. “It is not the great wolves.”
“Is it a famine? Is a famine coming?” asked Gugwei.
Nunyunnini was silent. Kalanu came out of the skull and waited with the rest of them.
Gugwei put on the mammoth-hide cloak and put his head inside the skull.
“It is not a famine as you know it,” said Nunyunnini, through Gugwei’s mouth, “although a famine will follow.”
“Then what is it?” asked Yanu. “I am not afraid. I will stand against it. We have spears, and we have throwing rocks. Let a hundred mighty warriors come against us, still we shall prevail. We shall lead them into the marshes, and split their skulls with our flints.”
“It is not a man thing,” said Nunyunnini, in Gugwei’s old voice. “It will come from the skies, and none of your spears or your rocks will protect you.”
“How can we protect ourselves?” asked Atsula. “I have seen flames in the skies. I have heard a noise louder than ten thunderbolts. I have seen forests flattened and rivers boil.”
“Ai . . .” said Nunyunnini, but he said no more. Gugwei came out of the skull, bending stiffly, for he was an old man, and his knuckles were swollen and knotted.
There was silence. Atsula threw more leaves on the fire, and the smoke made their eyes tear.
Then Yanu strode to the mammoth head, put the cloak about his broad shoulders, put his head inside the skull. His voice boomed. “You must journey,” said Nunyunnini. “You must travel to sunward. Where the sun rises, there you will find a new land, where you will be safe. It will be a long journey: the moon will swell and empty, die and live, twice, and there will be slavers and beasts, but I shall guide you and keep you safe, if you travel toward the sunrise.”
Atsula spat on the mud of the floor, and said, “No.” She could feel the god staring at her. “No,” she said. “You are a bad god to tell us this. We will die. We will all die, and then who will be left to carry you from high place to high place, to raise your tent, to oil your great tusks with fat?”
The god said nothing. Atsula and Yanu exchanged places. Atsula’s face stared out through the yellowed mammoth bone.
“Atsula has no faith,” said Nunyunnini in Atsula’s voice. “Atsula shall die before the rest of you enter the new land, but the rest of you shall live. Trust me: there is a land to the east that is manless. This land shall be your land and the land of your children and your children’s children, for seven generations, and seven sevens. But for Atsula’s faithlessness, you would have kept it forever. In the morning, pack your tents and your possessions, and walk toward the sunrise.”
And Gugwei and Yanu and Kalanu bowed their heads and exclaimed at the power and wisdom of Nunyunnini.
The moon swelled and waned and swelled and waned once more. The people of the tribe walked east, toward the sunrise, struggling through the icy winds, which numbed their exposed skin. Nunyunnini had promised them truly: they lost no one from the tribe on the journey, save for a woman in childbirth, and women in childbirth belong to the moon, not to Nunyunnini.
They crossed the land bridge.
Kalanu had left them at first light to scout the way. Now the sky was dark, and Kalanu had not returned, but the night sky was alive with lights, knotting and flickering and winding, flux and pulse, white and green and violet and red. Atsula and her people had seen the northern lights before, but they were still frightened by them, and this was a display like they had never seen before.
Kalanu returned to them, as the lights in the sky formed and flowed.
“Sometimes,” she said to Atsula, “I feel that I could simply spread my arms and fall into the sky.”
“That is because you are a scout,” said Atsula, the priestess. “When you die, you shall fall into the sky and become a star, to guide us as you guide us in life.”
“There are cliffs of ice to the east, high cliffs,” said Kalanu, her raven-black hair worn long, as a man would wear it. “We can climb them, but it will take many days.”
“You shall lead us safely,” said Atsula. “I shall die at the foot of the cliff, and that will be the sacrifice that takes you into the new lands.”
To the west of them, where the sun had set hours before, there was a flash of sickly yellow light, brighter than lightning, brighter than daylight. It was a burst of pure brilliance that forced the folk on the land bridge to cover their eyes and spit and exclaim. Children began to wail.
“That is the doom that Nunyunnini warned us of,” said Gugwei the old. “Surely he is a wise god and a mighty one.”
“He is the best of all gods,” said Kalanu. “In our new land we shall raise him up on high, and we shall polish his tusks and skull with fish oil and animal fat, and we shall tell our children, and our children’s children, and our seventh children’s children, that Nunyunnini is the mightiest of all gods, and shall never be forgotten.”
“Gods are great,” said Atsula, slowly, as if she were comprehending a great secret. “But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return . . .”
And there is no telling how long she might have continued in this blasphemy, had it not been interrupted in a manner that brooked no argument.
The roar that erupted from the west was so loud that ear
s bled, that they could hear nothing for some time, temporarily blinded and deafened but alive, knowing that they were luckier than the tribes to the west of them.
“It is good,” said Atsula, but she could not hear the words inside her head.
Atsula died at the foot of the cliffs when the spring sun was at its zenith. She did not live to see the New World, and the tribe walked into those lands with no holy woman.
They scaled the cliffs, and they went south and west, until they found a valley with fresh water, and rivers that teemed with silver fish, and deer that had never seen man before, and were so tame it was necessary to spit and to apologize to their spirits before killing them.
Dalani gave birth to three boys, and some said that Kalanu had performed the final magic and could do the man-thing with her bride; while others said that old Gugwei was not too old to keep a young bride company when her husband was away; and certainly once Gugwei died, Dalani had no more children.
And the ice times came and the ice times went, and the people spread out across the land, and formed new tribes and chose new totems for themselves: ravens and foxes and ground sloths and great cats and buffalo, each a taboo beast that marked a tribe’s identity, each beast a god.
The mammoths of the new lands were bigger, and slower, and more foolish than the mammoth of the Siberian plains, and the pungh mushrooms, with their seven spots, were not to be found in the new lands, and Nunyunnini did not speak to the tribe any longer.
And in the days of the grandchildren of Dalani and Kalanu’s grandchildren, a band of warriors, members of a big and prosperous tribe, returning from a slaving expedition in the north to their home in the south, found the valley of the first people: they killed most of the men, and they took the women and many of the children captive.
One of the children, hoping for clemency, took them to a cave in the hills, in which they found a mammoth skull, the tattered remnants of a mammoth-skin cloak, a wooden cup, and the preserved head of Atsula the oracle.
While some of the warriors of the new tribe were for taking the sacred objects away with them, stealing the gods of the first people and owning their power, others counseled against it, saying that they would bring nothing but ill luck, and the malice of their own god (for these were the people of a raven tribe, and ravens are jealous gods).
So they threw the objects down the side of the hill, into a deep ravine, and took the survivors of the first people with them on their long journey south. And the raven tribes, and the fox tribes, grew more powerful in the land, and soon Nunyunnini was entirely forgot.
ADAM-TROY CASTRO SAYS . . .
I live in Miami with my wife, Judi, and two constantly warring cats, the volatile Maggie and the remarkably restrained Jones. I have published more than seventy short stories, ranging from extreme horror to light humor with every stop in between. They include the Stoker nominee “Baby Girl Diamond” and the previous Hugo/Nebula nominees “The Funeral March of the Marionettes” and (with Jerry Oltion) “The Astronaut from Wyoming.” My ten books include a quartet of SpiderMan novels and the short story collections Lost In Booth Nine, An Alien Darkness, A Desperate Decaying Darkness, Vossoff and Nimmitz, and Tangled Strings. I appear most regularly in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Analog.
Regarding “Sunday Night Yams”: It’s about a lot of things, really, but its main concern is getting the wonder back.
Adam-Troy’s Web site is at http://www.sff.net/people/adam-troy/.
SUNDAY NIGHT YAMS AT MINNIE AND EARL’S
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Frontiers never die. They just become theme parks.
I spent most of my shuttle ride to Nearside mulling sour thoughts about that. It’s the kind of thing that only bothers lonely and nostalgic old men, especially when we’re old enough to remember the days when a trip to Luna was not a routine commuter run, but instead a never-ending series of course corrections, systems checks, best-and-worst case simulations, and random unexpected crises ranging from ominous burning smells to the surreal balls of floating upchuck that got into everywhere if we didn’t get over our nausea fast enough to clean them up. Folks of my vintage remember what it was to spend half their lives in passionate competition with dozens of other frighteningly qualified people, just to earn themselves seats on cramped rigs outfitted by the lowest corporate bidders—and then to look down at the ragged landscape of Sister Moon and know that the sight itself was a privilege well worth the effort. But that’s old news now: before the first development crews gave way to the first settlements; before the first settlements became large enough to be called the first cities; before the first city held a parade in honor of its first confirmed mugging; before Independence and the Corporate Communities and the opening of Lunar Disney on the Sea of Tranquility. These days, the Moon itself is no big deal except for rubes and old-timers. Nobody looks out the windows; they’re far too interested in their sims, or their virts, or their newspads or (for a vanishingly literate few) their paperback novels, to care about the sight of the airless world waxing large in the darkness outside.
I wanted to shout at them. I wanted to make a great big eloquent speech about what they were missing by taking it all for granted, and about their total failure to appreciate what others had gone through to pave the way. But that wouldn’t have moved anybody. It just would have established me as just another boring old fart.
So I stayed quiet until we landed, and then I rolled my overnighter down the aisle, and I made my way through the vast carpeted terminal at Armstrong Interplanetary (thinking all the while carpet, carpet, why is there carpet, dammit, there shouldn’t be carpeting on the Moon). Then I hopped a tram to my hotel, and I confirmed that the front desk had followed instructions and provided me one of their few (hideously expensive) rooms with an outside view. Then I went upstairs and thought it all again when I saw that the view was just an alien distortion of the Moon I had known. Though it was night, and the landscape was as dark as the constellations of manmade illumination peppered across its cratered surface would now ever allow it to be, I still saw marquee-sized advertisements for soy houses, strip clubs, rotating restaurants, golden arches, miniature golf courses, and the one-sixth-g Biggest Rollercoaster In the Solar System. The Earth, with Europe and Africa centered, hung silently above the blight.
I tried to imagine two gentle old people, and a golden retriever dog, wandering around somewhere in the garish paradise framed by that window.
I failed.
I wondered whether it felt good or bad to be here. I wasn’t tired, which I supposed I could attribute to the sensation of renewed strength and vigor that older people are supposed to feel after making the transition to lower gravities. Certainly, my knees, which had been bothering me for more than a decade now, weren’t giving me a single twinge here. But I was also here alone, a decade after burying my dear wife—and though I’d traveled around a little, in the last few years, I had never really grown used to the way the silence of a strange room, experienced alone, tastes like the death that waited for me too.
After about half an hour of feeling sorry for myself, I dressed in one of my best blue suits—an old one Claire had picked out in better days, with a cut now two styles out of date—and went to the lobby to see the concierge. I found him in the center of a lobby occupied not by adventurers or pioneers but by businessmen and tourists. He was a sallow-faced young man seated behind a flat slab of a desk, constructed from some material made to resemble polished black marble. It might have been intended to represent a Kubrick monolith lying on its side, a touch that would have been appropriate enough for the Moon but might have given the decorator too much credit for classical allusions. I found more Kubrick material in the man himself, in that he was a typical hotel functionary: courteous, professional, friendly, and as cold as a plain white wall. Beaming, he said: “Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m looking for Minnie and Earl,” I told him.
His smile was an unfaltering, professional thing, that migh
t have been scissored out of a magazine ad and Scotch-taped to the bottom half of his face. “Do you have their full names, sir?”
“Those are their full names.” I confess I smiled with reminiscence. “They’re both one of a kind.”
“I see. And they’re registered at the hotel?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “They’re lunar residents. I just don’t have their address.”
“Did you try the directory?”
“I tried that before I left Earth,” I said. “They’re not listed. Didn’t expect them to be, either.”
He hesitated a fraction of a second before continuing: “I’m not sure I know what to suggest, then—”
“I’m sure you don’t,” I said, unwillingly raising my voice just enough to give him a little taste of the anger and frustration and dire need that had fueled this entire trip. Being a true professional, used to dealing with obnoxious and arrogant tourists, the concierge didn’t react at all: just politely waited for me to get on with it. I, on the other hand, winced before continuing: “They’re before your time. Probably way before your time. But there have to be people around—old people, mostly—who know who I’m talking about. Maybe you can ask around for me? Just a little? And pass around the word that I need to talk?”
The professional smile did not change a whit, but it still acquired a distinctively dubious flavor. “Minnie and Earl, sir?”
“Minnie and Earl.” I then showed him the size of the tip he’d earn if he accomplished it—big enough to make certain that he’d take the request seriously, but not so large that he’d be tempted to concoct false leads. It impressed him exactly as much as I needed it to. Too bad there was almost no chance of it accomplishing anything; I’d been making inquiries about the old folks for years. But the chances of me giving up were even smaller: not when I now knew I only had a few months left before the heart stopped beating in my chest.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 Page 14