by Geoff Ryman
Cara stood up too, and did a phantom dance towards her, uncertain she was wanted, wanting to hold and comfort.
Stefile suddenly shouted. “Stay there!” and waved Cara back with her hand. “Just . . . stay there!” She turned her back to Cara, and tore open the top of her dress, and mopped herself with a rag from the table, and suddenly flung it across the room, and covered her face. She made a creaking noise, that was wrenched from a clenched, constricted body. It was not the sound of weeping. Stefile was stopping herself weeping.
Cara stood where she was, watching helplessly. Stefile gathered breath, and quickly wiped her cheeks.
“Stef?” Cara asked.
Stefile’s hands played nervously with each other, clasped in front of her belly. “I didn’t tell you,” Stefile said, her voice thick with struggle. “She was pulled apart . . .”
“You told me.”
“No I didn’t.” Stefile shook her head. “Not this. She was pulled apart, but it was like when you clean your pens, the ink spreads out on the water and it was just like that. She spread out, like that, into a kind of mist, in the air. It started to move. And I tried to hold it, keep her to me. Just like that, always, always, always. And I felt it tug. I felt it tug away. It was still alive. She was still alive.” She turned towards Cara, her hand over her mouth.
“I don’t need to know this,” said Cara.
“But you do. You do. It started to move, out of the window, out under the door, and I followed it, into the yard, down the steps, into the garden. And it filled the garden. It filled the whole valley, getting thinner and thinner. It went up into the sky, like red clouds, and filled that too. It spread everywhere, very faintly. I can still see it. Very faintly. Everywhere I look I can still see it.”
Something terrible was happening in Stefile’s face. It seemed to be pushed to one side, and the teeth were bared like a snarl. Then, she tried to look happy. Her eyes tried to sparkle, and the snarl tried to twist into a smile.
“So I tell you what I think, I think she has become a kind of spirit in the world. I think the animals will breathe her in, and the fish will swallow her. She’ll go into the soil, and into the plants, and into the clouds, and the rain and the birds. Just like we all do, only she will know it. She’ll be everywhere, in all things. She’ll know everything. And that’s what she wanted, isn’t it? So I can’t be unhappy, can I? Not for her. So it’s all right, Cara. All of it. You see, it really is all right.”
The eyes were wide, and the head was shaking back and forth very quickly, to show, really, how right it was.
Then simply Stefile fell. She dropped on to her knees, and curled up into a tight knot on the floor, her forehead pressed against the polished stones. Her hands were cupped around her eyes.
“Stef,” said Cara, truly alarmed. “Stef. Get up.” She took hold of Stefile’s arms and tried to hoist her to her feet, but Cara was not as strong as she had been. Silently, Stefile knocked her hands away, drew in tighter.
“Come on. Up on your feet. Up.” Cara pulled again, and Stefile whimpered, and then suddenly, with a howl, rose up.
The face seemed plumper, swollen and red, and it quaked, and its mouth was open, howling, lines of spittle between the lips, and the eyes were open, and full of water that was shaken out of them. “I can leaf yall oh!” it wailed, words dissolved.
Cara grabbed her, and pulled her to her, and hugged her. “Oh Stef. Oh Stef,” she said and began to weep herself.
“Aiee nont stan!”
“You cry Stef. You cry as you can.” She felt the little body jerk and shiver, as the weeping escaped in yelps. “You haven’t slept,” said Cara, stroking her hair. “You haven’t slept in months.” They knelt together on the hard floor, rocking silently, Stefile’s face pressed against Cara’s.
Finally, after some time, Stefile was able to say. “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“Yes. She was.”
“And strange. Oh, Cara, I feel like I’ve left the world and I don’t know where I am.”
“Me too.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
“I don’t know. We’ll just have to see.”
But the question had to be faced. Stefile patted Cara’s arm. “I’m getting you wet.”
“Doesn’t matter,” murmured Cara, and held her.
Stefile still pulled free. “My knees hurt,” she said, and managed to smile. She stood up, and Cara followed, clumsily, somehow abashed. “I want to think for a bit, eh?” said Stefile. “Just for a bit. I want to go to the river.”
Cara nodded. She no longer looked at Stefile. She saw, on the table, face-down and crumpled, the doll called Hawwah. She saw Stefile’s hands pick it up. Cara was running her hand along the groove in the chair again, and suddenly she remembered: she had always done that as a child. Patterns. She heard Stefile walk across the kitchen floor. She heard the door close behind her.
“Duhdo duhdo genzu,” Cara murmured.
She wandered through the rooms of her life like a ghost. She sat in the room where she had been a little girl, and felt the bed that was still warm, from Stefile, or perhaps only the sun. She went into Tikki’s room, where there was a cradle, as empty now as a womb. She remembered that once she had made Tikki draw a picture on the stone floor, and he refused because that was not what boys did. She kept pushing the stick of charcoal and wax at him, until in a kind of rage, he had drawn a horse on the smooth limestone. It was a miraculous drawing, ready to move, better than anything Cara had drawn. The bondwoman had scrubbed it away. Now Cara knelt, and tried and tried to see any trace of it. She heard a sudden noise, birds at the boxes, and turned. She was still expecting to see Syki come back once again. If she did, bright and brittle and sometimes slightly heartless Magic, it would be no surprise. If Tikki, handsome and smiling, should step through the doorway, it would be no surprise. Death was the surprise.
She stood in the garden at the foot of the cliff. “Ata? Ama?” she called, because it seemed that they were with her. The words alone had the power to make her feel small and tender, to call up from the core of her being, the child from which she had grown. “I hope you can hear this . . .” she began and did not finish. The tears came then, aching out of her eyes, as though her eyes were her heart. Was it enough that love had once existed? Could that be comfort enough? It suddenly seemed to Cara that everyone in the world was still partly a child. That was why they followed a God. Or the Galu. Wave on wave of them.
I am Cal Cara Kerig, Dear Daughter of the Important House, so named because my parents loved me, and they were important people. That is who I am, and that cannot be changed or taken away from me, not by anything, not even death. That can never be destroyed.
She sat in the soil of her parent’s garden, and looked out over her valley, that had not changed. Mist and moonlight and rock would not change either. She plunged her hands into the soil. It was warm from rotting.
This is what it is like to be old, she realised. You lose beauty and strength and friends, and you are left with only the memory of love. But you still have yourself, and that must suffice. She suddenly felt cantankerous and old. This was what everyone else had to put up with. What did it matter that her face had not healed? It was healed, as much as it needed to be. What did it matter that the magic was gone? She had done without magic before. All she had to do was live, and that was guaranteed to her. Come on, Cara, up, she told herself.
But the house was dark inside and empty and silent and still, and she did not have the heart to cook any food, not for herself alone. There was something terrible in that silence. It was as though the house was going to be that empty forever. And the young would grow old and die, and the young after them would die, until everyone she had ever known was gone, until the world she had known was gone. Without Stefile there would be no one to remember with, or understand.
Dear God of the world, she didn’t want to be alone.
She heard the latch of the door behind her, and turned, startled
. “Oh, hullo,” she said, too brightly, embarrassed at standing alone.
Stefile kicked the front door shut behind her. “I caught a fish.” She announced, with a quick, nervous smile. She marched across the kitchen, holding it out in front of her. She knelt, and pulled out the baking brick, with a great clatter. “We can eat fish for free,” she murmured, half to herself. It was what she had said the first day, on the riverbank. She stood up, back to Cara, and began, without success, to look for the knife. “I tried your spell,” she said. “The one that changes.”
“Why . . . why did you do that?”
“To make myself a man. I thought it would be a way. It didn’t work. As you can see. Then I understood why. It didn’t need to.”
Cara found herself running her hand along the back of that cursed chair again, and felt tears spill, unbidden, out of her eyes.Why am I crying, she thought, I don’t feel that badly. “Are you going to stay?” she asked. She had meant it to be a hard and direct question, but it came out a thin, almost wheedling plea.
Stefile’s back went still. “Yes,” she said.
Stefile glanced over her shoulder, and saw Cara, small with a ruined face, picking at the chair, and what struck her about the figure was its bravery. “Yes,” Stefile said again, and went to her. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
That night Cara dreamt that they were all reunited at the end of the world. They all sat together on the hill by the wells of vision, her father and brothers, even the warrior in his shell of armour, who Cara had come to love too, in a way. Sykantata sat on his lap, with the doll. The head of Galo gro Galu looked out over the valley, held by the Baked Man. Cara saw herself and Stefile, and almost didn’t recognise them, they were so changed. They looked wise and powerful and ancient, rugged companions, victresses of a thousand lives. They wore strange clothes that were not made out of thread. Cara knew somehow that together they had seen mountains worn down to rubble, and cities built of that rubble rise higher than mountains. They had seen other worlds.
There were two other women there, and they danced together. Cara could not think who they were at first. One was plump, with very fine skin and red cheeks, and something about her made Cara’s breath catch with recognition. It was Liri, Aunt Liri, when she was young. Liri had been beautiful. Cara hadn’t realised that, beautiful and round and bobbing and full of chuckles. What else had been lost?
The other woman was not beautiful. She was tall and gangling, too gangling to dance well, all long veined arms and elbows. She wobbled and tottered in a red dress, and a crown that Cara somehow knew was deliberately tipped low over her forehead, to add to the absurdity.
The woman looked up, and saw Cara, and stopped, and smiled, as if there was nothing wrong in the world, or if there was, there was no point in spoiling fun. She was pop-eyed, and thin, and she gave a quick, delicious grin, wreathed in stringy muscle, white buck teeth resting on her lower lip. Then she raised a finger to her lips. Ssh, Cara, ssh, this is our secret.
“Ama!” Cara wanted to cry out, her chest seemed to swell to bursting, but it was a dream, and she couldn’t move. She had finally, finally, remembered her mother’s face.
In her dream, Cara heard hoarse, deep-drawn breath, and all the clouds in the sky stirred, and were pulled one way, towards the mountains of the Dragon’s Back, and were pushed out again, with the breath. The clouds were torn into shreds, tangled wispy strands, and the mountains stood clearly in the distance, farther than Cara had ever seen before, as if to the end of the Earth, layers of mountains, in blue distance. Then they shifted. There was a crumbling and slow falling away of rock. The ground shook underfoot, and Cara’s mother fell backwards laughing. The sound of thunder came, delayed, and from somewhere in the sky, a high, delighted keening.
The mountains stood up. Snow avalanched from them, the rock beneath it buckling, splitting, yawning. The mountains slid away from something underneath them, as dust and debris burgeoned up in giant billows. Through the haze of dust, sunlight caught something round and burnished, glinting. Obscured, surrounded by cracklings of lightning, a hind leg, scaly, bronze-coloured, broke out from under the ruins of the nearest range. It stretched out, like a cat just awakening, out across the horizon, delicately extending claws. Forested crags tipped from it in a ghostly tumble of stone. Then everything was lost in a haze of dust. Something uncoiled, loosened, and out of the heart of the earth, something the size of a continent stood up. It filled the sky, above the clouds, sunlight glaring harshly on it, as if it were a moon. Shadows moved across it.
“For I am the World,” the Dragon said, “and I am Life as it lived, brother to him who talks to God, and you, you are the Beast that Chooses.”
Overjoyed, Cara awoke. Stefile was beside her in the darkness.
At the end of the world, together on a hill, they danced.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEOFF RYMAN is the author of several successful, award-winning novels, mostly science fiction. The Unconquered Country (1984) won both the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award and the World Fantasy Award; The Child Garden (1989) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (first place); the hypertext novel 253 won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1999; and his novel Air won the Arthur C. Clarke and James Tiptree, Jr. Awards in 2006. Most recently, his novelette “What We Found” won the 2012 Nebula Award.
An early web design professional, Ryman led the teams that designed the first web sites for the British monarchy and the Prime Minister’s office. He also has a lifelong interest in drama and film; his 1992 novel Was looks at America through the lens of The Wizard of Oz and has been adapted for the stage, and Ryman himself wrote and directed a stage adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
ABOUT WENDY GAY PEARSON
WENDY GAY PEARSON (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at the University of Western Ontario and has also taught in the Department of Film Studies. She is the co-editor (with Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon) of Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008) and a past winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for the best published article of the year for “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer.” She mainly writes about sexuality in science fiction and won the Science Fiction Foundation’s graduate essay prize for an article on Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden. With Susan Knabe she also co-edited a special issue of Extrapolation on Ryman’s work.
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AVAILABLE JUNE 2O13
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