by Ken MacLeod
What could be said to be Golubash’s liver was a vast flock of shaggy horses—not truly horses, but something four-legged and hoofed and tailed that was reasonably like a horse—that ran and snorted on the open prairie beyond the town of Nanut. They were essentially hollow, no organs to speak of, constantly taking in grass and air and soil and fruit and fish and water and purifying it before passing it industriously back into the ecology of Golubash.
Uncle Grel was probably closer to Golubash than any of us. He spent days talking with the tall, three-faced creature the APV still thought of as independent from the river. He even began to hyphenate his sentences, a source of great amusement. We know now that he was learning. About horses, about spores and diffusion, about the life-cycle of a Hyphen, but then we just thought Grel was in love. Grel first thought of it, and secured permission from Golubash, who bent his ponderous head and gave his assent-blessing-encouragement-trepidation-confidence. He began to bring the horses within the walls of Saleeng-Carolz, and let them drink the wine deep, instructing them to hold it close for years on end.
In this way, the rest of the barrels were left free for weapons.
This is the first wine closed up inside the horses of Golubash: 60% Cabernet, 20% Syrah, 15% Tempranillo, 5% Petit Verdot. It is specifically banned by every planet under APV control, and possession is punishable by death. The excuse? Intolerable biological contamination.
This is a wine that swallows light. Its color is deep and opaque, mysterious, almost black, the shadows of closed space. Revel in the dance of plum, almond skin, currant, pomegranate. The musty spike of nutmeg, the rich, buttery brightness of equine blood and the warm, obscene swell of leather. The last of the pre-war wines—your execution in a glass.
2795 Domaine Zhaba, White Tara, Bas-Lequat
Our only white of the evening, the Bas-Lequat is an unusual blend, predominately Chardonnay with sprinklings of Tsuki-bella and Riesling, pale as the moon where it ripened.
White Tara is the second moon of Avalokitesvara, fully within the orbit of enormous Green Tara. Marubouzu-Debrouillard chose it carefully for their first attack. My mother died there, defending the alder barrels. My sister lost her legs.
Domaine Zhaba had committed the cardinal sin of becoming popular, and that could not be allowed. We were not poor monks on an isolated moon, orbiting planet-bound plebeians. Avalokitesvara has four healthy moons and dwells comfortably in a system of three habitable planets, huge new worlds thirsty for rich things, and nowhere else could wine grapes grow. For a while Barnarders had been eager to have wine from home, but as generations passed and home became Barnard’s System, the wines of Domaine Zhaba were in demand at every table, and we needed no glittering Yuuhi gates to supply them. The APV could and did tax exports, and so we skirted the law as best we could. For ten years before the war began, Domaine Zhaba wines were given out freely, as “personal” gifts, untaxable, untouchable. Then the inspectors descended, and stamped all products with their little Prohibido seal, and, well, one cannot give biohazards as birthday presents.
The whole thing is preposterous. If anything, Earth-origin foodstuffs are the hazards in Barnard’s System. The Hyphens have always been hostile to them; offworld crops give them a kind of indigestion that manifests in earthquakes and thunderstorms. The Marubouzu corporals told us we could not eat or drink the things that grew on our own land, because of possible alien contagion! We could only order approved substances from the benevolent, carbonated bosom of Coquil-Grollë, which is Chatêau Marubouzu-Debrouillard, which is the Asociación de la Pureza del Vino, and anything we liked would be delivered to us all the way from home, with a bow on it.
The lunar winery on White Tara exploded into the night sky at 3:17 am on the first of Julka, 2795. My mother was testing the barrels—no wild ponies on White Tara. Her bones vaporized before she even understood the magnitude of what had happened. The aerial bombing, both lunar and terrestrial, continued past dawn. I huddled in the Bas-Lequat cellar, and even there I could hear the screaming of Golubash, and Julka, and Heeminspr, and poor, gentle Niflamen, as the APV incinerated our world.
Two weeks later, Uncle Grel’s rumblers ignited our first Yuuhi gate.
The color is almost like water, isn’t it? Like tears. A ripple of red pear and butterscotch slides over green herbs and honey-wax. In the low-range you can detect the delicate dust of blueberry pollen, and beneath that, the smallest suggestion of crisp lunar snow, sweet, cold, and vanished.
2807 Domaine Zhaba, Grelport, Hul-Nairob
Did you know, almost a thousand years ago, the wineries in Old France were nearly wiped out? A secret war of soil came close to annihilating the entire apparatus of wine-making in the grand, venerable valleys of the old world. But no blanketing fire was at fault, no shipping dispute. Only a tiny insect: Daktulosphaira Vitifoliae Phylloxera. My namesake. I was named to be the tiny thing that ate at the roots of the broken, ugly, ancient machinery of Marubouzu. I have done my best.
For a while, the French believed that burying a live toad beneath the vines would cure the blight. This was tragically silly, but hence Simone Nanut drew her title: zhaba, old Slovak for toad. We are the mites that brought down gods, and we are the cure, warty and bruised though we may be.
When my uncle Grel was a boy, he went fishing in Golubash. Like a child in a fairy tale, he caught a great green fish, with golden scales, and when he pulled it into his little boat, it spoke to him.
Well, nothing so unusual about that. Golubash can speak as easily from his fish-bodies as from his tall-body. The fish said: “I am lonely-worried-afraid-expectant-in-need-of-comfort-lost-searching-hungry. Help-hold-carry me.”
After the Bas-Lequat attack, Golubash boiled, the vines burned, even Golubash’s tall-body was scorched and blistered—but not broken, not wholly. Vineyards take lifetimes to replace, but Golubash is gentle, and they will return, slowly, surely. So Julka, so Heeminspr, so kind Niflamen. The burnt world will flare gold again. Grel knew this, and he sorrowed that he would never see it. My uncle took one of the great creature’s many hands. He made a promise—we could not hear him then, but you must all now know what he did, the vengeance of Domaine Zhaba.
The Yuuhi gates went one after another. We became terribly inventive—I could still, with my one arm, assemble a rumbler from the junk of this very platform. We tried to avoid Barnard’s Gate; we did not want to cut ourselves off in our need to defend those worlds against marauding vintners with soda-labels on their jump-suits. But in the end, that, too, went blazing into the sky, gold filaments sizzling. We were alone. We didn’t win; we could never win. But we ended interstellar travel for fifty years, until the new ships with internal Yuuhi-drives circumvented the need for the lost gates. And much passes in fifty years, on a dozen worlds, when the mail can’t be delivered. They are not defeated, but they are . . . humbled.
An M-D cruiser trailed me here. I lost her when I used the last gate-pair, but now my cousins will have to blow that gate, or else those soda-sipping bastards will know our methods. No matter. It was worth it, to bring our wines to you, in this place, in this time, finally, to open our stores as a real winery, free of them, free of all.
This is a port-wine, the last of our tastings tonight. The vineyards that bore the Syrah and Grenache in your cups are wonderful, long streaks of soil on the edges of a bridge that spans the Golubash, a thousand kilometers long. There is a city on that bridge, and below it, where a chain of linked docks cross the water. The maps call it Longbridge; we call it Grelport.
Uncle Grel will never come home. He went through Barnard’s Gate just before we detonated—a puff of sparkling red and he was gone. Home, to Earth, to deliver-safeguard-disseminate-help-hold-carry his cargo. A little spore, not much more than a few cells scraped off a blade of clarygrass on Golubash’s back. But it was enough.
Note the luscious ruby-caramel color, the nose of walnut and roasted peach. This is pure Avalokitesvara, unregulated, stored in Golubash’s horses, grown in the port
s floating on his-her-its spinal fluid, rich with the flavors of home. They used to say wine was a living thing—but it was only a figure of speech, a way of describing liquid with changeable qualities. This wine is truly alive, every drop, it has a name, a history, brothers and sisters, blood and lymph. Do not draw away—this should not repulse you. Life, after all, is sweet; lift your glasses, taste the roving currents of sunshine and custard, salt skin and pecan, truffle and carmelized onion. Imagine, with your fingers grazing these fragile stems, Simone Nanut, standing at the threshold of her colonial ship, the Finnish desert stretching out behind her, white and flat, strewn with debris. In her ample arms is that gnarled vine, its roots wrapped with such love. Imagine Sebastién Perdue, tasting a Tsuki-Bella for the first time, on the tongue of his Hipparchan lady. Imagine my Uncle Grel, speeding alone in the dark towards his ancestral home, with a few brief green cells in his hand. Wine is a story, every glass. A history, an elegy. To drink is to hear the story, to spit is to consider it, to hold the bottle close to your chest is to accept it, to let yourself become part of it. Thank you for becoming part of my family’s story.
I will leave you now. My assistant will complete any transactions you wish to initiate. Even in these late days it is vital to stay ahead of them, despite all. They will always have more money, more ships, more bile. Perhaps a day will come when we can toast you in the light, in a grand palace, with the flares of Barnard’s Star glittering in cut crystal goblets. For now, there is the light of the exit hatch, dusty glass tankards, and my wrinkled old hand to my heart.
A price list is posted in the med lab.
And should any of you turn Earthwards in your lovely new ships, take a bottle to the extremely tall young lady-chap-entity living-growing-invading-devouring-putting down roots in the Loire Valley. I think he-she-it would enjoy a family visit.
Leave
Robert Reed
Politics doesn’t make friendships. I have forgotten the names and faces of almost every other protester, and that’s after two years of enduring the elements with those very good people, berating distant politicians as well as the occasional drivers who showed us their middle fingers.
No, what makes the friendship is when two adult men discover a common, powerful love for skiing and for chess.
I met Don in front of the old Federal Building. We had found ourselves defending the same street corner, holding high a pair of hand-painted signs demanding that our troops come home. That was seventeen years ago. Our cause was just, and I never doubted the wisdom or glorious nobility of our methods. But every memory is tinged with guilty nostalgia. Of course the war was wrong—a blatant, foolish mistake perpetrated by stupid and criminally arrogant leaders—and hasn’t history proved us right? If only more people had stood on enough corners, and then our not-so-good nation would have emerged sooner from that disaster with our reputation only slightly mangled and thousands of our precious young people saved.
Don was the most ordinary member of our tofu-loving group. With his conservative clothes, the constant shave, and his closely cropped, prematurely gray hair, he was our respectable citizen in a platoon composed of cranks and ideologues. There was some half-serious speculation that poor Don was an agent for the State Patrol or FBI. But beneath that respectable, boring exterior lurked a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party. Chat with the man for five minutes, and you knew he was genuine. Listen to a thirty-minute lecture, and you’d take away everything you’d ever need to know about personal responsibility and stripping the government from our private lives.
The fact that our spouses hit it off instantly didn’t hurt either. Our wives ended up being as good friends as we were. So it seems that war gave me one good gift: Don and Amanda, and their two children, Morgan and sweet Little Donnie.
Cheryl and I couldn’t have kids—a constant sadness in an otherwise untroubled marriage. So when I mention being close to Don’s children, picture a fond uncle.
Morgan was ten when we met the family—a bright, almost pretty girl who would make any parent proud. She had inherited her father’s fastidious attitude and a sharp, organized mind. Being seven years older than her brother, she helped raise the wild youngster. Yet the girl never complained, even if that meant babysitting a weepy, feverish imp while her folks stood in the sleet and wind, holding high signs begging the world for a single rational act.
I can’t remember Morgan ever acting jealous toward her sibling. Which was a considerable feat, if you knew Little Donnie and his special relationship to the world.
As a toddler, LD (as his family called him) was an effervescent presence already speaking in long, lucid sentences. Cheryl explained to me that some three-year-old girls managed that early verbal capacity, but never little boys. Then she pointed out—and not for the last time—that Little Donnie wasn’t merely smart, he was absolutely beautiful: a delicious sweet prince of a lad destined to grow up into a gorgeous young man.
Don was openly proud of both kids, but LD stories outnumbered Morgan stories at least three-to-one.
Every time I saw my friend, he had to share at least one LD anecdote. Preschool and then elementary school brought a string of thunderous successes, including perfect report cards and glowing praise from every teacher. And middle school—that realm of social carnivores and petty hatreds—proved to be a tiny challenge for the golden boy. Of course LD earned his place in the finest gifted programs in the state. And it didn’t hurt that he was a major force in the local t-ball circuit, and that he dominated the seventh-grade basketball court, and nobody in eighth grade could hang with that stallion when he decided to run the four hundred meter sprint.
But eighth grade was when our world abruptly and unexpectedly changed.
As the boy entered high school, the glowing reports fell off. Don was still genuinely thrilled with his son. I have no doubts. But suddenly he was less likely to share his news about LD’s continuing rise to still-undefined greatness.
What if somebody was listening to his boasts?
Distant but horrible forces were at work in the universe, and Don sensed that silence might be the wiser course.
In an earlier age, Don and I had done what we could to battle an awful war. Success meant that our troops eventually came home, and his children could grow up safe, and nothing else seemed to matter.
But LD turned fourteen, and a new war began.
Or rather, an unimaginably old and bizarre and utterly unexpected conflict had found its way into our lives and tidy homes.
I was still kept abreast about the most important LD news. And I’d cross paths with the boy, or my wife would. As she had predicted, he grew up gorgeous and brilliant. And Little Donnie remained charming, though in that cool, detached way that every generation invents for the first time. He was always polite to us, even at the end. His lies were small affairs, and on the surface, harmless. It actually made me jealous to hear my middle-aged bride praising the Apollo-like figure who had chatted with her at the supermarket. But she was right. “The only thing I worry about,” she said with a confidential tone, “is that LD has too many choices. Know what I mean, John?”
I suppose I did, but not from my own life experience.
“There’s so many careers he could conquer,” Cheryl added. “And with any girl he wants, of course.”
Including my wife, if she could have just shrugged off twenty years and forty pounds.
“Is he doing all right at school?” she would ask.
As far as I knew, yes.
“Because Amanda’s mentioned that his grades are down,” she reported. “And his folks are getting worried about his friends.”
Big Don had never quite mentioned those concerns, I noted.
Then a few months later, my best friend dropped his king on its side and told me, “I resign.” That very poor performance on the chessboard preceded a long, painful silence. Then with a distracted air, he added, “LD’s been suspended.”
Did I hear that right? “Suspended from what?�
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“School,” Don allowed.
I didn’t know what to say, except, “Sorry.”
Don looked tired. He nodded, and after hard consideration decided to smile. “But he’s in a twelve-step program. For the drug use.”
I was astonished. “What drug use?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. With a wince, he reported, “The counselors are telling us that when a kid is high-functioning, being bored is the greatest danger.”
We were talking about drugs, and we weren’t.
“What drugs?” I had to ask.
“It doesn’t matter.” Don paused, then nodded, as though he’d convinced himself it really didn’t matter.
I slumped back in my chair, staring at the remaining black and blond chessmen.
“LD is in rehab,” the worried father continued, “and he’s promised to get clean and well. And he’ll graduate on time, too.”
A string of promises that were met, it turned out.
That next year, the young prince went to our local college—perhaps to keep him within reach of his worried parents. What news I heard was cautiously favorable. But after the first semester, even those mild boasts stopped coming. The only glowing news was about Morgan and her burgeoning career as a dermatologist.
I made a few tactful inquiries.
Don would say, “Oh, the boy’s doing fine too.”
Cheryl’s queries to Amanda ended with the same evasive non-answers.
Then one morning, while strolling downtown on some errand, I happened to stumble across the famous LD.
To my eye, he looked fit and sober.
But when he told me, “I’m going to buy a new bike today,” he was lying. And when he said, “I’m riding across the country this summer,” he was feeding me a fairy tale.
The boy had already made up his mind.
I didn’t even suspect it.
“Enjoy your ride,” I advised, feeling proud of this tall, strong kid with whom I had shared nothing except seventeen years and an emotional stake that was never defined, but nonetheless felt huge.