The Best of Michael Swanwick (17 page)

They held up the child, bloody on a platter.

***

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension. I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor. I was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.

“As the woman had intended. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us
language
. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, velvety paw, the ivory claws sheathed but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.

I hardly dared breathe.

“That morning I entered Landfall, carrying the baby’s sling in my mouth. It slept through most of the journey. At dawn I passed through the empty street as silently as I knew how. I came to the First Captain’s house. I heard the murmur of voices within, the entire village assembled for worship. I tapped the door with one paw. There was sudden, astonished silence. Then slowly, fearfully, the door opened.”

***

The larl was silent for a moment. “That was the beginning of the association of People with humans. We were welcomed into your homes, and we helped with the hunting. It was a fair trade. Our food saved many lives that first winter. No one needed know how the woman had perished, or how well we understood your kind.

“That child, Flip, was your ancestor. Every few generations we take one of your family out hunting, and taste his brains, to maintain our closeness with your line. If you are a good boy and grow up to be as bold and honest, as intelligent and noble a man as your father, then perhaps it will be you we eat.”

The larl presented his blunt muzzle to me in what might have been meant as a friendly smile. Perhaps not; the expression hangs unreadable, ambiguous in my mind even now. Then he stood and padded away into the friendly dark shadows of the Stone House.

I was sitting staring into the coals a few minutes later when my second-eldest sister—her face a featureless blaze of light, like an angel’s—came into the room and saw me. She held out a hand, saying, “Come on, Flip, you’re missing everything.” And I went with her.

***

Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cave-bears by playing the oldest winter games there are.

You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young, and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?

Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives. That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.

All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.

The Edge of the World

The day that Donna and Piggy and Russ went to see the Edge of the World was a hot one. They were sitting on the curb by the gas station that noontime, sharing a Coke and watching the big Starlifters lumber up into the air, one by one, out of Toldenarba AFB. The sky rumbled with their passing. There’d been an incident in the Persian Gulf, and half the American forces in the Twilight Emirates were on alert.

“My old man says when the Big One goes up, the base will be the first to go,” Piggy said speculatively. “Treaties won’t allow us to defend it. One bomber comes in high and whaboom—” he made soft nuclear explosion noises—”it’s all gone.” He was wearing camouflage pants and a khaki teeshirt with an iron-on reading KILL ’EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ’EM OUT. Donna watched as he took off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. His face went slack and vacant, then livened as he put them back on again, as if he were playing with a mask.

“You should be so lucky,” Donna said. “Mrs. Khashoggi is still going want that paper done on Monday morning, Armageddon or not.”

“Yeah, can you believe her?” Piggy said. “That weird accent! And all that memorization! Cut me some slack. I mean, who cares whether Ackronnion was part of the Mezentian Dynasty?”

“You ought to care, dipshit,” Russ said. “Local history’s the only decent class the school’s got.” Russ was the smartest boy Donna had ever met, never mind the fact that he was flunking out. He had soulful eyes and a radical haircut, short on the sides with a dyed-blond punklock down the back of his neck. “Man, I opened the Excerpts from Epics text that first night, thinking it was going to be the same old bullshit, and I stayed up ’til dawn. Got to school without a wink of sleep, but I’d managed to read every last word. This is one weird part of the world; its history is full of dragons and magic and all kinds of weird monsters. Do you realize that in the eighteenth century three members of the British legation were eaten by demons? That’s in the historical record!”

Russ was an enigma to Donna. The first time they’d met, hanging with the misfits at an American School dance, he’d tried to put a hand down her pants, and she’d slugged him good, almost breaking his nose. She could still hear his surprised laughter as blood ran down his chin. They’d been friends ever since. Only there were limits to friendship, and now she was waiting for him to make his move and hoping he’d get down to it before her father was rotated out.

In Japan she’d known a girl who had taken a razor blade and carved her boyfriend’s name in the palm of her hand. How could she do that, Donna had wanted to know? Her friend had shrugged, said, “As long as it gets me noticed.” It wasn’t until Russ that Donna understood.

“Strange country,” Russ said dreamily. “The sky beyond the Edge is supposed to be full of demons and serpents and shit. They say that if you stare into it long enough, you’ll go mad.”

They all three looked at one another.

“Well, hell,” Piggy said. “What are we waiting for?”

***

The Edge of the World lay beyond the railroad tracks. They bicycled through the American enclave into the old native quarter. The streets were narrow here, the sideyards crammed with broken trucks, rusted out buses, even yachts up in cradles with stoven-in sides. Garage doors were black mouths hissing and spitting welding sparks, throbbing to the hammered sound of worked metal. They hid their bikes in a patch of scrub apricot trees where the railroad crossed the industrial canal and hiked across.

Time had altered the character of the city where it bordered the Edge. Gone were the archers in their towers, vigilant against a threat that never came. Gone were the rose quartz palaces with their thousand windows, not a one of which overlooked the Edge. The battlements where blind musicians once piped up the dawn now survived only in Mrs. Khashoggi’s texts. Where they had been was now a drear line of weary factory buildings, their lower windows cinderblocked or bricked up and those beyond reach of vandals’ stones painted over in patchwork squares of grey and faded blue.

A steam whistle sounded and lines of factory workers shambled back inside, brown men in chinos and white shirts, Syrian and Lebanese laborers imported to do work no native Toldenarban would touch. A shredded net waved forlornly from a basketball hoop set up by the loading dock.

There was a section of hurricane fence down. They scrambled through.

As they cut across the grounds, a loud whine arose from within the factory building. Down the way another plant lifted its voice in a solid wham-wham-wham as rhythmic and unrelenting as a headache. One by one the factories shook themselves from their midday drowse and went back to work. “Why do they locate these things along the Edge?” Donna asked.

“It’s so they can dump their chemical waste over the Edge,” Russ explained. “These were all erected before the Emir nationalized the culverts that the Russian Protectorate built.”

Behind the factory was a chest-high concrete wall, rough-edged and pebbly with the slow erosion of cement. Weeds grew in clumps at its foot. Beyond was nothing but sky.

Piggy ran ahead and spat over the Edge. “Hey, remember what Nixon said when he came here?
It is indeed a long way down.
What a guy!”

Donna leaned against the wall. A film of haze tinted the sky grey, intensifying at the focal point to dirty brown, as if a dead spot were burned into the center of her vision. When she looked down, her eyes kept grabbing for ground and finding more sky. There were a few wispy clouds in the distance and nothing more. No serpents coiled in the air. She should have felt disappointed but, really, she hadn’t expected better. This was of a piece with all the natural wonders she had ever seen, the waterfalls, geysers and scenic vistas that inevitably included power lines, railings and parking lots absent from the postcards. Russ was staring intently ahead, hawklike, frowning. His jaw worked slightly, and she wondered what he saw.

“Hey, look what I found!” Piggy whooped. “It’s a stairway!”

They joined him at the top of an institutional-looking concrete and iron stairway. It zigzagged down the cliff toward an infinitely distant and nonexistent Below, dwindling into hazy blue. Quietly, as if he’d impressed himself, Piggy said, “What do you suppose is down there?”

“Only one way to find out, isn’t there?” Russ said.

***

Russ went first, then Piggy, then Donna, the steps ringing dully under their feet. Graffiti covered the rocks, worn spraypaint letters in yellow and black and red scrawled one over the other and faded by time and weather into mutual unreadability, and on the iron railings, words and arrows and triangles had been markered onto or dug into the paint with knife or nail: JURGEN BIN SCHEISSKOPF. MOTLEY CRUE. DEATH TO SATAN AMERICA IMPERIALIST. Seventeen steps down, the first landing was filthy with broken brown glass, bits of crumbled concrete, cigarette butts, soggy, half-melted cardboard. The stairway folded back on itself and they followed it down.

“You ever had
fugu
?” Piggy asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “It’s Japanese poisonous blowfish. It has to be prepared very carefully—they license the chefs—and even so, several people die every year. It’s considered a great delicacy.”

“Nothing tastes that good,” Russ said.

“It’s not the flavor,” Piggy said enthusiastically. “It’s the poison. Properly prepared, see, there’s a very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers turn cold. Numb. That’s how you know you’re having the real thing. That’s how you know you’re living right on the edge.”

“I’m already living on the edge,” Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.

A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water. It bounced after them as they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a scattering of carbonized sparkplugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. “Sure is a lot of crap here,” he observed. The landing smelled faintly of urine.

“It’ll get better farther down,” Russ said. “We’re still near the top, where people can come to get drunk after work.” He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rainbowed mist, distance glamoring it beauty.

“How far are we planning to go?” Donna asked apprehensively.

“Don’t be a weak sister,” Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.

The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock were walnut-sized lumps of rust.

Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.

Hours passed. Donna’s feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky, and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap grab tug on the rail. She felt sweaty and miserable.

Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge into nothingness. They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history’s first great failure in weather control. This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if—no, especially if—it meant playacting something she was not. Last year in Germany when she’d gone out with that local boy with the Alfa Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything’s going to be different now. But no.

Nothing ever changed.

“Heads up!” Russ said. “There’s some steps missing here!” He leaped, and the landing gonged hollowly under his sneakers. Then again as Piggy jumped after.

Donna hesitated. There were five steps gone and a drop of twenty feet before the stairway cut back beneath itself. The cliff bulged outward here, and if she slipped she’d probably miss the stairs altogether.

She felt the rock draw away from her to either side, and was suddenly aware that she was connected to the world by the merest speck of matter, barely enough to anchor her feet. The sky wrapped itself about her, extending to infinity, depthless and absolute. She could extend her arms and fall into it forever. What would happen to her then, she wondered. Would she die of thirst and starvation, or would the speed of her fall grow so great that the oxygen would be sucked from her lungs, leaving her to strangle in a sea of air? “Come on, Donna!” Piggy shouted up at her. “Don’t be a pussy!”

“Russ—” she said quaveringly.

But Russ wasn’t looking her way. He was frowning downward, anxious to be going. “Don’t push the lady,” he said. “We can go on by ourselves.”

Donna choked with anger and hurt and desperation all at once. She took a deep breath and, heart scudding, leaped. Sky and rock wheeled over her head. For an instant she was floating, falling, totally lost and filled with a panicky awareness that she was about to die. Then she crashed onto the landing. It hurt like hell, and at first she feared she’d pulled an ankle. Piggy grabbed her shoulders and rubbed the side of her head with his knuckles. “I knew you could do it, you wimp.”

Donna knocked away his arm. “Okay, wiseass. How are you expecting to get us back up?”

The smile disappeared from Piggy’s face. His mouth opened, closed. His head jerked fearfully upward. An acrobat could leap across, grab the step and flip up without any trouble at all. “I—I mean, I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Russ said impatiently. “We’ll think of something.” He started down again.

It wasn’t natural, Donna realized, his attitude. There was something obsessive about his desire to descend the stairway. It was like the time he’d brought his father’s revolver to school along with a story about playing Russian roulette that morning before breakfast. “Three times!” he’d said proudly.

He’d had that same crazy look on him, and she hadn’t the slightest notion then or now how she could help him.

***

Russ walked like an automaton, wordlessly, tirelessly, never hurrying up or slowing down. Donna followed in concerned silence, while Piggy scurried between them, chattering like somebody’s pet Pekinese. This struck Donna as so apt as to be almost allegorical: the two of them together yet alone, the distance between filled with noise. She thought of this distance, this silence, as the sun passed behind the cliff and the afternoon heat lost its edge.

The stairs changed to cement-jacketed brick with small buttresses cut into the rock. There was a pile of stems and cherry pits on one landing, and the railing above them was white with bird droppings. Piggy leaned over the rail and said, “Hey, I can see seagulls down there. Flying around.”

“Where?” Russ leaned over the railing, then said scornfully, “Those are pigeons. The Ghazoddis used to release them for rifle practice.”

As Piggy turned to follow Russ down again, Donna caught a glimpse into his eyes, liquid and trembling with helplessness and despair. She’d seen that fear in him only once before, months ago when she’d stopped by his house on the way to school, just after the Emir’s assassination.

The living room windows were draped and the room seemed unnaturally gloomy after being out in the morning sun. Blue television light flickered over shelves of shadowy ceramic figurines: Dresden milkmaids, Chantilly Chinamen, Meissen pug-dogs connected by a gold chain held in their champed jaws, naked Delft nymphs dancing.

Piggy’s mother sat in a limp dressing gown, hair unbrushed, watching the funeral. She held a cup of oily looking coffee in one hand. Donna was surprised to see her up so early. Everyone said that she had a bad problem with alcohol, that even by service wife standards she was out of control.