The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05

by Bill Congreve (ed) (v1. 0) (epub)

  In my travels I have seen many wrongnesses done, and heard many others told of with laughter or with awe around a fire. I have come upon horrors of all kinds, for these are horrible times. But never has a thing been laid out so obvious and ongoing in its evil before my eyes and under my nose and with the flies feasting even as it happens. And never has the means to end it hung as clearly in front of me as it hangs now, on the wall, in the smile of the mudwife’s axe-edge, fine as the finest nail-paring, bright as the dawn sky, the only clean thing in this foul cottage.

  ~ * ~

  I reach my father’s house late in the afternoon. How I knew the way, when years ago you could put me twenty paces into the trees and I’d wander lost all day, I don’t know; it just came to me. All the loops I took, all the mistakes I made, all laid themselves down in their places on the world, and I took the right way past them and came here straight, one sack on my back, the other in my arms.

  When I dreamed of this house it was big and full of comforts; it hummed with safety; the spirit of my mother lit it from inside like a sacred candle. Kirtle was always here, running out to greet me all delight.

  Now I can see the poor place for what it is, a plague-ruin like so many that Grinnan and I have found and plundered. And tiny - not even as big as the witch’s cottage. It sits in its weedy quiet and the forest chirps around it. The only thing remarkable about it is that I am the first here; no one has touched the place. I note it on my star map - there is safety here, the safety of a distance greater than most robbers will venture.

  A blackened boy-child sits on the step, his head against the doorpost as if only very tired. Inside, a second child lies in a cradle. My father and second-mother are in their bed, side by side just like that lord and lady on the stone tomb in Ardblarthen, only not so neatly carved or richly dressed. Everything else is exactly the same as Kirtle and I left it. So sparse and spare! There is nothing of value here. Grinnan would be angry. Burn these bodies and beds, boy! he’d say. We’ll take their rotten roof if that’s all they have.

  “But Grinnan is not here, is he?” I say to the boy on the step, carrying the mattock out past him. “Grinnan is in the ground with his lady-love, under the pumpkins. And with a great big pumpkin inside him, too. And Mrs Pumpkin-Head in his arms, so that they can sex there underground forever.”

  I take a stick and mark out the graves: Father, Second-Mother, Brother, Sister - and a last big one for the two sacks of Kirtle-bones. There’s plenty of time before sundown, and the moon is bright these nights, don’t I know it. I can work all night if I have to; I am strong enough, and full enough still of disgust. I will dig and dig until this is done.

  I tear off my shirt.

  I spit in my hands and rub them together.

  The mattock bites into the earth.

  * * * *

  Margo Lanagan is the author of four short story collections: White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes and the forthcoming Yellowcake. Her dark fantasy novel Tender Morsels was an Honor Book in the Printz, Shirley Jackson and Tiptree awards, and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her next novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island, will be published in late 2011. Margo lives in Sydney.

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  * * * *

  * * *

  The Empire

  SIMON BROWN

  ‘You know, little brother,’ Isaac said, looking out the window of their tiny room, ‘you can see the stars. When we first came to London there was so much fog that you could not even see the tops of buildings. I can even see Mars.’

  ‘Is it really red?’ Leonard asked, joining Isaac and leaning out on the sill.

  ‘Yes. Small and red.’ Isaac pointed it out.

  ‘I can’t see it.’

  ‘There, next to the really bright white one. That’s Jupiter.’

  Leonard’s face fell.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘Mama told me the brightest star was pop, all the way up in heaven, looking down on us.’

  Isaac nodded. ‘Well, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is poppa.’

  Leonard shook his head. ‘No. You are always right, Isaac. It is Jupiter if you say so. And I can see Mars, too.’

  ‘I am always right, eh? Even about Machines?’

  Leonard snorted. ‘You are never right about Machines.’

  Isaac checked the song sheet in his hand, trying to memorise all the lyrics, and started singing. Leonard joined him for the last few lines, and they knew how sweet they sounded. Some things in their lives were right, at least some of the time. When they stopped they looked at each other with something like pride, and almost with one mind turned to look out the window again, to see the stars and planets. And eventually they looked down to see spread out before them the yellow lights of reborn London, and beyond the city the high wall that kept them in, and beyond that the red landscape that was the domain of the Martians, their hunting grounds and their nursery.

  ~ * ~

  History made Erin Kay go to Happy Rest, an antiseptic flat-roofed hospice in the middle of irrigated gardens near Phoenix.

  She rolled up not expecting anything, but hoping Howard Finkel’s signature would have some influence. The registrar umm-ed and ah-ed when Erin gave her the authority. She spoke softly into the intercom and the day manager appeared; he phoned the contact number beneath Howard Finkel’s almost illegible scribble. He spoke a few words, nodded silently to himself and put down the phone.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he told the registrar, and walked away without having said a word to Erin.

  The registrar pointed down a corridor. ‘Third door on the left. Room 12. Poor dear’s not long for this world. He used to be a singer or something, did you know?’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Erin said, and made sure she retrieved the authority, figuring she might need it again.

  She knocked on the door to Room 12. She heard a reply but could not make out the words. She risked opening the door wide enough for her to peek inside.

  ‘Zac Feelgood?’

  He was looking straight at her. Brown eyes that seemed too young for the pale dying face they peered from. He was sitting in a wheelchair, wrapped in an old checkered bathrobe. Thin grey hair was combed back over his head, ending in uneven tips above a silver cravat. His hands tightly gripped the chair’s wheels as if he was afraid they would suddenly fall off.

  ‘I said I was busy,’ he said in a wheeze. Spittle flecked his lips and Erin felt queasy.

  ‘My name’s Erin Kay, Mr Feelgood.’ She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. ‘Your son Howard said I could visit you.’

  ‘That was good of him, considering he never visits himself. The little spiv. I should have given Dot my name. My real name. Her kids visit all the time. Good kids. But he was the only legitimate one left, so he gets everything.’ Feelgood’s mouth curled, showing a full set of yellowing teeth. ‘You one of his lawyers? What the fuck do you want? More papers to sign?’

  ‘I’m an historian, Mr Feelgood, not a lawyer.’

  ‘Don’t call me Feelgood,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Pardon?’ For a second Erin had the horrible thought that she had knocked on the wrong door.

  ‘It’s Finkel. Get that right if you’re gonna write a book.’ He growled at her. ‘I read all those books about me and my brother. All they talk about is the booze and drugs and dames. It’s like our act meant nothing at all. But we put smiles on the faces of millions.’

  ‘I know, Mr Fe ... Mr Finkel. Look, can I call you Zac?’

  She held her breath while he stared noncommittally at her for a long moment.

  ‘Isaac,’ he said distantly, as if he was remembering the name of a friend long dead. Then he came back to the present. ‘Talk to me? About what particularly?’

  Erin knelt down next to him. ‘About what came before,’ she said, almost in a whisper, because that was how everyone talked about what came before.

  ‘Why me?’ he said suspiciously. ‘There are hundreds of us left from those da
ys.’

  ‘They didn’t go through what you and Leonard went through.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘A long time ago I met Dot. We were friends. She told me things.’

  ‘And Howard still let you come and see me?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him about Dot. I told him I was interested in music hall and vaudeville. I told him I was writing a book about Zac and Lenny Feelgood. But I’m more interested in Isaac and Leonard Finkel.’

  He leaned towards her and said, ‘You know, almost no one knows the secret history of Isaac and Leonard Finkel, and how we saved the world from a fate worse than ... well, worse than death.’

  ‘I know some of it. Dot told me a lot before she died. She said forget about everything I’d read, about the movies, and about how you changed your name from Finkel to Feelgood —’

  ‘And how we married too young, how we got hooked on hash and hooch, how we deserted Benny our first manager, poor dumb bastard, and how we ignored our kids, like poor dumb Dot, and how Lenny died from cirrhosis in 1953, and how I’m here forgotten in an old peoples home in 1965 and telling the nurses stories they don’t believe.’

  Erin said in a subdued voice, ‘Something like that.’

  Isaac’s face went flat and hard. He stared at Erin like he didn’t care about anything in the world. ‘Why the fuck should I?’

  ‘Because you’re dying, Isaac, and this is your last chance.’

  Isaac’s breath rattled somewhere in his chest. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Because it really happened,’ Erin said.

  There was another long pause, and then Isaac looked away from her and outside his room’s only window. Hard Arizona light slanted across his face. Erin thought she had lost her chance. She sighed heavily and stood up. But before she could move to the door, Isaac started talking, the words coming out slow as treacle, and Erin retrieved her tape recorder from her purse and turned it on.

  ‘This is the only story that matters, and the only reason most people haven’t heard it before is that it was too good for stage or screen let alone real life, even if the Committee for Conciliation had felt like letting it through the censor. It starts a long time ago, long before common memory, and long, long before history.

  ‘The first date to remember is May 1894…’

  ~ * ~

  ... when all the way from Danzig, as hopeful as birds in spring, the Finkels arrive in London. Jacob, a cobbler, his wife Magdalena and their two children, Isaac and Leonard. But as Magdalena always said, ‘An unlucky person is — kaput! — a dead person’, and Jacob was as unlucky as they come. The Martians arrived three months after the Finkels set foot in England, and as the world soon learned the Martians had no respect at all for people with good hearts and modest ambition and a determination to work hard.

  Jacob Finkel did not live out the first onslaught, and Magdalena, with her two small boys, was taken prisoner and put in a camp in London with thousands of other survivors, all homeless and bewildered and watched over by monstrous machines with heat rays and no mercy at all.

  ~ * ~

  ‘They were terrible and beautiful, the Machines. I remember their long silvery legs moving in the morning mist from the Thames like the fingers of some giant Jehovah.’ Isaac walked three fingers on the arm of his wheelchair to show Erin how they moved. ‘And when the sun was low in the afternoon the metal on the Machines looked like molten gold.’

  Isaac paused again while he remembered the Machines, the great striding of them.

  ‘Now listen, Erin Kay, because the second date I’m going to give you is the one to remember, because that’s when it all really starts. It is 1897 ...’

  ~ * ~

  ... and in the refurbished rooms of Mr George Cochrane, manager of the Empire Theatre, the aforesaid Mr Cochrane is on the defensive.

  ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.’ Cochrane said the name as if it was the start of a sigh.

  ‘I prefer Magdalena. From you, in fact, Mrs Finkel is even better.’

  ‘After all we’ve been through.’

  ‘Which is less than you imagine and more than I can bear to think about,’ Magdalena said stiffly, and gathered her boys around her to prevent any unwanted advances. Mr Cochrane may have been a cad, but Isaac and Leonard sometimes played with his own children and he was sensible about rumours.

  ‘Take my advice, my good lady. Change the name of the act.’

  ‘It is very English. I have heard English say it.’

  ‘Froth and Bubbles.’ Cochrane shook his head. ‘No. It sounds like the name of a female revue, you know, with the fan and ti ... feathers.’

  Magdalena looked blankly at him.

  Cochrane cocked one heel and lifted invisible breasts. ‘Bristen ... boosten?’ He wiggled his backside. ‘Toches?’

  Magdalena was horrified and tried to cover her children’s ears, but they were already tittering.

  Blushing, Cochrane cleared his throat. ‘Much better if it was something like ...’ He waved a hand in the air. ‘What are they doing again?’

  ‘Some jokes, some song, some jokes, some dance, some jokes ...’ Magdalena started, but her voice was drowned out by the cranking, stomping sound of a passing Machine. The walls of Cochrane’s office shook a little, and dust sprinkled from the ceiling. The boys ran to a window before their mother could stop them and caught a glimpse of a huge metal leg.

  ‘Land dreadnought,’ Isaac said with certainty.

  ‘No. Cruiser. Four heat rays —’ Leonard said.

  Isaac interrupted his younger brother. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  They were jerked away from the window, Isaac by Magdalena and Leonard by Cochrane.

  ‘Fool boys!’ the manager said shortly, handing Leonard to his mother, then craning his head out the window to make sure the Machine had gone on.

  Magdalena shook her sons by their stiff white collars. ‘Idiots! What are you? Meshugeh? Don’t you know better, as if I haven’t taught you myself? You want to disappear? You want to feed the monsters?’

  ‘Sorry, mamma,’ Leonard squeaked.

  ‘It didn’t see us,’ Isaac said.

  ‘And how does Isaac Finkel, twelve years old, know what a Martian can or cannot see?’ Magdalena demanded. ‘Are you an expert on Martians, all of a sudden?’

  ‘He thinks he knows all about them,’ Leonard piped enthusiastically.

  ‘More than you, anyway,’ Isaac said under his breath.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Both Lenny and me collected cards,’ Isaac said. He pointed to a set of drawers next to his bed. ‘In there, Erin Kay. In the top drawer.’

  She opened it. There was a wallet, toothbrush and toothpaste. And what looked like a pack of miniature cards held together with a rubber band; the back of the top card had on it a picture of a packet of cigarettes and the word ‘Players’.

  ‘Bring the cards to me,’ he said.

  Erin gave him the cards. He slipped off the rubber band, turned them face up and spread them in his two hands. Each card had a vivid three-colour illustration of a Martian Machine. Erin could not believe her eyes. She had heard descriptions of the machines from other old folk, but had never imagined they could look so lethal and so utterly alien. And yes, beautiful, too.

  ‘Zac and I collected them. Had every one, except the sea cruiser, which was rarer than ...’ He frowned in concentration. ‘Rarer than an acorn.’

  ‘Acorn?’

  ‘From an oak tree. The red weed killed most of ‘em. After the defeat of the Martians, Players started making cigarettes again and put cricketers and racing cars and battleships on their cards. The Committee for Conciliation didn’t want any reminder of the Martians, and the world soon forgot how close it came to having no history at all.’

  ~ * ~

  A cat leaped onto the windowsill and looked into Cochrane’s office just long enough for everyone to notice it, including Leonard who sneezed violently.

  ‘Cats,’ Mrs Finkel explained to C
ochrane. ‘His allergy. Also geraniums and coff —’

  ‘Bubble and Squeak,’ Mr Cochrane said.

  The three Finkels looked at the chairman with puzzled expressions.

  ‘Bubble and Squeak,’ he went on. ‘A name for the act. That’s as English as breakfast. And your boys are good with the jokes, I know, so the name fits. Like a suit, Maggie.’ Magdalena glared at him and he forced a laugh. ‘I mean Mrs Finkel.’