It’d been rumored for years that the mainland would bomb us someday and send South Padres’ towers finally crashing into the sea. Looking at the gull-picked corpses the pirates had chained to the balconies of the Hilton across from us, I wondered if they’d ever bother. If the hurricanes didn’t finish us soon, the pirates would, and then they’d just eat themselves.
“You thinking about going out again?” Sophie said, her eyes following mine.
“No.” My cut from that sugar run would pay our squat rights for two more months. By then, Monkey said I wouldn’t need to risk my ass out on the ocean any more. Touching the tablet beside me, thinking of all I’d learned in the past few weeks from him and this little window into such a strange, wider world, I believed him.
“Good,” Sophie said. Then, “Mom worried.”
“Mom noticed?”
Sophie’s fingers traced Monkey’s back. “She cried.”
“She wouldn’t have had to, if she’d sobered up long enough to do her job and paid our rights. Then I wouldn’t have had to go.”
Sophie blinked back tears, and my throat went tight. “Christ,” I sighed, staring at Monkey. He stared back at me, big eyes innocent.
“What are you looking at, furball? You keep saying it’s almost time, well, I say it’s past time. Start talking. Teach her. She needs this.” Monkey stayed silent for a second, and I added, “You make me look crazy, and I’ll throw you out for the gulls.”
Monkey stuck his tongue out at me, but then he turned and faced my sister.
“Sophie,” he said, his voice too deep for his tiny body. “Would you like to be a doctor, like your mother?”
Sophie’s tough. She didn’t throw Monkey off her, though she snatched her hand away.
“What?”
“I can teach you. The way I’m teaching Cesar to work his computer,” Monkey said. “I can teach you to help people, the way your mom used to. You want to learn?”
Sophie looked at the little animal in her lap, eyes wide, lips starting to move, then the balcony door scraped open. Mom, red eyed and bleary, grimaced out into the bright daylight.
“Who the hell you talking to out here?”
“Cesar’s monkey,” Sophie said.
Mom stared at Monkey. “Rats with thumbs. Carry disease y’know. Should. . .” Her voice trailed away and she stumbled away from the light, back inside. The sound of plastic bottles rattled through the door, her searching for another swallow.
Sophie shoved the door shut. “What is he, Cesar?”
“Magic,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t know. Little bastard won’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you what you need, Cesar.” Monkey’s tail curled loose around Sophie’s wrist. “So you and yours can leave this place.”
“So we can be safe?” Sophie asked.
Monkey stared at me with his dark eyes, not answering, so I did.
“Not safe, Sophie. Strong.”
Excerpted from Constellation Prize:
Bogie 1’s leaving the system today. (Don’t start with the quibbles. She’s in the Kuiper belt, and that’s my finish line. Going as fast as she is, it’s not like she’s going to turn around.)
She came, popped her baby, slung around the sun, and now she’s off to boldly go wherever the hell she’s going next.
Which just leaves us with Bogie 2. Which is definitely headed straight at us, after those course corrections we saw it fire off last week.
So what the hell is it?
An instrument package? An ambassador? A bomb?
Maybe it’s a fucking fruit basket.
The answer is, we don’t know. And since both ships refuse to return our calls, we won’t know until it gets here. Frustrating, init?
Gosh, if only we could do something, like meet it half way, wouldn’t that’d be great? Oh, but to do that we would need a space program that wasn’t a complete fucking joke.
I know, we couldn’t afford it. Billionaires needed tax breaks and artists needed grants to paint their asses blue. I get that.
I’m just saying it might’ve been nice to have the opportunity to be proactive here, instead of just watching as Bogie 2 cruises in.
Because while it’s probably not a bomb, it’s not like we could do shit about it if it was.
I guess we’ll have to be content in knowing we spent our money on more important shit. Like winning the war on drugs, amiright?
Christ, we are such dumbasses. If it is a bomb, we deserve it.
The girl slammed the man down in our living room, scattering vodka bottles, screaming for the doctor.
I don’t know how she hauled him up all those stairs, big as he was. She had though, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to me tell her the doctor was too hung over to help.
She yelled, I yelled, the man bled and groaned, then my sister shoved in.
“Shut up, Cesar, and hold him,” Sophie snapped at me, wiping blood away from the knife handle that protruded from the man’s belly.
Too confused to argue, I did what she said. The girl shut up too, staring at Sophie. I wondered why she didn’t protest about a kid taking charge, but shit, Sophie was doing something.
Her hands danced across the man, pressing and poking into his neck, armpits, and groin. He groaned once, then passed out. Sophie jumped up, ducked into her room, and bounced back before I could yell at her with a suture kit and drug vials.
“Thought Mom sold all her shit.”
“Not what I hid,” Sophie said. “Grab the knife.”
“Why?”
“Cause when I tell you, you’re going to pull it out.”
“What?”
“Do it, Cesar,” Sophie said, her voice taking that crisp tone our Mom’s used to get before she whupped us. “Do it just how I say, or he’ll bleed out. And if I lose my first patient cause of you, you’ll be my second.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Sophie gathered her supplies, paused to look at Monkey, who nodded at her. Then she started telling me what to do.
“Rest, clean water, and meat if you can get it. He lost a lot of blood.” Sophie sounded exhausted, but she stood straight as she explained to the girl what her father would need. I listened and spun the knife in my hand, wondering what the hell to make of my little sister.
“Thank you.” Lisa, the girl, she was about my age. “We owe you.”
I stilled the knife, looked at the anchor branded into the skin of the girl’s arm. “You’re fisherfolk?”
“Yes. We’ll get you fish, whatever you want.” For the first time I noticed her long braids, her rich red-brown skin and my tongue went all sideways.
“Fish. Well — ”
“What the hell’s this?”
Mom stepped into the room, ragged with involuntary sobriety. She looked at the man stretched across our floor, a row of stitches marking his belly. “Who the hell did that?”
“I did,” Sophie said, almost a whisper.
“When’d you decide to play doctor?”
“When you got too drunk to be one.”
Mom stared at her, red-rimmed eyes almost focusing for once, then she turned away, stumbling back into her room.
“Who was — ”
“Nobody,” I told the girl, my tongue free again. “You got a boat?”
“Course we do.”
“Good,” I said, “We’re going to need a ride, sometime soon.”
“That we can trade you, easy.” She smiled at me, and I smiled back, a little dizzy again. I looked away from her to catch my breath and caught sight of Monkey’s tail disappearing into Mom’s room.
Excerpted from Constellation Prize:
A year’s passed since Bogie 2 blazed across the sky, broke up and dropped its pieces into the deepest parts of the ocean, and what’s happened?
Nothing.
So is that all the show our visitors planned for us?
Doubtful.
They’re down there, doing something. Spying? Colonizing?
Poki
ng Cthulhu with a stick?
I have no fucking clue. None of us do. Us curious Georges gotta wonder, though. We stare at the waves and try to imagine what’s going on down there. What are they doing, what are the planning?
When are they coming out?
Because they will. They didn’t come all this way for nothing. Someday they’re going to surface, and then what?
In the comments, in my inbox, everyday, that’s the question, over and over. What are they going to do to us?
Christ, how the hell should I know?
All we can do is watch the sea and wait, and hope that maybe, if we’re lucky, they won’t fuck us over anymore than we’ve already fucked ourselves.
“Where you folk going?”
Samuel had a rough voice to go with his big body, but he treated me nice. He treated Sophie like a saint.
“New Orleans,” I said.
“Orleans? Why in hell would you want to go somewhere more messed up than South Padre, boy?”
Because a man waited there with three new US national ID cards, each of them tied to grey market credit lines flush with the money I’d drained from some private accounts last week. A certain ceegee officer and her boys were going to be wondering where all their money had gone, soon.
I just smiled. “No worries, Samuel. You get us there, we’ll be fine.”
The big man grumbled, but went back to his rigging, rubbing his hand over the raw pink scar on his belly. His daughter helped him, and when Lisa caught me staring at her she smiled.
“We should bring them along.”
Monkey’s whisper made me jump, but he clung to my shoulder easy enough, lips brushing my ear as he spoke. “We’ll need more people on the mainland.”
“What for?” I asked, turning to the rail, away from the fisherfolk.
“Getting stronger. Look.”
Following his arm, I could see something floating in the water. An old door, and on it —
“Jesus,” I swore. “One for each of us, right?”
“You’ll each need one. To learn, to grow.”
I stared at the little monkeys clustered on the makeshift raft, staring back at me. “Grow into what?”
“Something better.” Monkey shifted on my shoulder, and I realized how much I’d missed him being there these last few weeks. He’d helped me crack the ceegee’s accounts and arrange our documents, but he spent most of his time now with my mother, whispering in her ear. “We’re going to help you. All of you. There will be those, though, who won’t like that.”
“The people who make me and mine weak,” I whispered.
“It’ll change, Cesar. Your family will grow, and there are other families, all around the world, growing and learning like you. You’ll come together, someday, and it’ll all change.” Monkey dropped from my shoulder, starting towards the prow where my mother stood, staring out at the waves. Standing straight, clean, sober.
“What are you teaching her?” I called after him, not caring who heard, knowing it didn’t matter.
Monkey stopped and looked back at me, eyes shining with sunlight. “I’m teaching her about hope, Cesar. Hope, and God.”
Something thumped against the hull, and over the rail the new monkeys bounded, eager to teach.
About the Author
Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial arts instructor, and stay-at-home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Baen’s Universe and Writers of the Future 25.
The Romance of Ruins
E. C. Ambrose
Little excites our sense of adventure more than an attractive ruin: a castle on a hill, a vine-clutched pyramid, a masonry wall sheltered in a natural cave. Ruins appear in a variety of roles in the fantasy tale — and it’s rare indeed to find a fantasy without them. Some are indelible settings for pivotal scenes, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Weathertop. Others are destinations in themselves — fabled cities that hide secrets the protagonist must discover. Still others suggest a deeper truth to the story, a layer beneath the obvious reality: a ruined rocket at the center of an apparently medieval city.
What purposes do ruins serve in the fantasy story, short or long? What resonance do they create? How does this sense of history enhance the tale at hand? Looking at the history of European interactions with ruins provides interesting insight into how and why they appear in the realms of fantasy, and how characters respond to them.
[Heidelberg Castle, Germany, one of the most striking of European ruins.]
The origin for our fascination with ruins is likely found in the work of the medieval humanists associated with the Italian poet Petrarch, famed as an author and speaker even in his own time. Like many of his intellectual contemporaries, Petrarch disdained his own time as decadent, a dark period when men and morality had fallen from grace. Rather than look to the future for improvement, these early humanists instead took their inspiration from the works they translated and disseminated: the writings of ancient Rome.
Clearly, the Romans possessed wisdom and skills lost to their weak descendants, but it might be possible to reclaim that Golden Age. Especially in Italy, but also across much of Europe, the physical remains of the Roman Empire still loomed over their medieval counterparts. In some cases contemporaries incorporated the broken architecture of the ancients into their own structures, creating hybrid buildings with elements constructed a thousand years apart.
[A later period house built into part of the ruined abbey at Bury St. Edmund's, England.]
In places like Trier, Germany, this consumption was a deliberate act, with the former Imperial Palace transformed into a church, its awe-inspiring proportions and ingenious forced perspective harnessed to serve religion rather than state. Petrarch urged the popes, then residing at Avignon, to return to Rome, wresting it back from anarchy and using that rich landscape as the center of a new Golden Age. He even supported the military coup of the peasant Cola di Rienzo, an uprising that briefly succeeded at ruling Rome, only to degenerate into a Roman-inspired madness and collapse.
The landscape of Europe — the origin of many influential fantasy authors and the inspiration for many great fantasy works — grows thick with ruins. To the Italian humanists, Rome dominated the local imagination. Meanwhile, in the Celtic regions from France and Spain to Ireland, pagan tumuli, standing stones, and earthworks rise up as well, creating a palimpsest of history, tangible and mysterious. Ruins of all ages dot the maps of European cities, serving as literal playgrounds, open-air museums, and secret hideouts for the seminal authors who established the fantasy genre. Ruins formed the backdrop of their lives, creating a sense of the richness of history beneath every footstep, around every corner.
[Ruins in the garden at Bury St. Edmund's, England.]
It’s not uncommon in a fantasy novel to find ruins embedded in the landscape and essentially treated as part of the scenery. In the work of many lesser fantasists, scenes may take place in a picturesque ruin, but the ruin itself remains in the background, not drawing the characters’ or the reader’s attention — just as those ruins that spot the landscapes of Europe must become mundane for many who live there and pass them on a daily basis. And for authors like Tolkien and Lewis, whose works inspired not only generations of readers, but American writers as well, this deep history would be fragmented and layered yet again by the ruin of World War II.
In this way, the ruin can speak to the very heart of its world. David Farland echoes the sense of tradition being destroyed in the first volume of the Runelords series, when his characters are led by mysterious compulsion to the Seven Stones rumored to be the foundations of the world itself. They find most of the standing stones already toppled, and the last one breaks while they watch, foretelling great change, perhaps the destruction of all that they know.
The Victorians explored, exploited, and domesticated the ruins around them. Victorian gardens often feature mysterious pathways or broad vistas del
iberately constructed to call attention to elaborate and artificial follies made after the fashion of medieval and ancient structures. Monasteries broken by Henry VIII became pleasure gardens and walking paths, and artwork featured delicate human figures dwarfed by the remnants of the past, even as the inhabitants devour the fruits of the present. Ironically, the Victorians turned for their own Golden Age to the very height of the medieval period that Petrarch despised.
[c. 1800 engraving from Trier, Germany shows the medieval church built into the Imperial Baths (artist unknown).]
Pre-Raphaelite painters created images of King Arthur and his knights in a process of both recovering and creating of the myths of chivalry that underlie so much fantasy fiction. The Arthurian tales beloved of the courts of 12th-century Europe were embellished with heroic values even then, and more so in England and America of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Little wonder that the generation of authors we now think of as fantasy’s founding fathers looked to the Middle Ages amidst the horror of their own time — a degraded and decadent age if ever there had been one. And they packed their fantasy realms with ruins, both inspiration and reminder of that brighter time.
The most obvious use of ruins in fantasy, then, is the evidence of that Golden Age when humans were greater and more worthy, often possessing nobility, wisdom, strength of arms, and semi-magical talents their descendants no longer have. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is rife with ruins of this kind, the symbols of the prior age. They serve not only as reminders of the fall, but also as hope for the future — that the True King, Aragorn, could return the land to its richness and glory. Indeed, the city of Osgiliath, introduced as a ruin, and the hills of Emyn Arnen, the traditional homeland of Gondor’s stewards, are given to Aragorn’s designated prince, Faramir, to be restored to prosperity.
C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend, offered an interesting example of this conception of the Golden Age in the course of his Narnia series. The children crowned as kings and queens in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, reside in the fabulous palace of Cair Paravel, ruling over a prosperous, peaceful land. But when they return in Prince Caspian they find their beloved home now a ruin, their own age regarded as legendary. The structure of Lewis’s series allows the residents of the Golden Age to return and witness how the very adventure they participated in is elevated by time in the memory of those who are good and true — and despised by their conquerors. Lewis offers the same characters a rare chance to inhabit both the Golden Age and its fallen successor.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 19