The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (38 page)

The daisy-chain could knot her up into it and continue on. Or she could end it here.

Before she knew what she was doing, the knife was in her fist. She crossed
the tiny room to where the ghost sat slumped. Kicked the salt clear from its feet. Held out her hand.

It trusted neither her grin nor the glint in her eyes, but got up all the same.

The Archivist
Area: 65.002 sq. deg. (appx. 0.16%)
from the Ragtree Chart: plant-based pigment, human skin Winter

Four stars, all minor: hardly enough to reasonably discern the image of what this tiny grouping is
meant to represent; namely, a woman with a knife in one hand and a sort of scroll in the other, frozen in the act of stepping forward.

This trickster’s status as culture-hero is provisional – her motives are dubious, her intentions suspect, the queues to her shrines no longer than the trails of corpses that rattle along in her wake through a half-dozen tales – but persistently widespread.

What
makes it particularly strange is that she seems to have played culture-hero
to the very spirits of the deceased.

If this woman truly was, as a fairly large body of conjecture suggests, one of the Archivists, the historian-priestesses of the bitch-god Catchkeep (see above), she would have been an extremely capable fighter, trained since early childhood to single combat and little else; and it
is true her skybound avatar does hold her knife point-out, in brawling stance, against the vacuum of space.

But why the scroll? These priestesses are well known to us for
their striking methodology, half clever, half quaint: while the quantities of information they gleaned from their informant ghosts was massive, nothing was committed to paper, for paper had they none. It is a reasonable supposition
that to a one they were in fact illiterate. So this constellation, gazing blankly out at us from a face it does not have, begs the question – why should the ghosts have borne this woman any loyalty at all? Had she gone turncoat? Shirked her bound and holy duty to enslave them? Flouted Catchkeep’s law?

The only clue we have can be found in a strange fragmented text discovered with the Ragtree
Chart, interred beneath that tree itself. (The tree in question is a crab apple, and a curious one. Thrice the size it ought to be, at one point it appears to have grown up through a sort of hut, its footprint approximately four paces by four, constructed of automobile parts and leather and stones: most of the leather is long gone, but the framework that once supported it, in minor part, remains.)

The text itself is in grievous disrepair, scrawled on a few palmsized fragments of scorched paper crushed into a glass bottle of palest green. Interestingly, it appears to have been penned by two different hands: first in a dire penmanship, blocky and childish, which peters out as though in great exhaustion midway through; the writing that continues after, while legible and even flowing, gives
the observer the unmistakable impression that its scribe was able to maintain only through great concentration only the most tenuous grasp on his writing implement (which appears to have been a pin or needle dipped in blood) – as though he, or it, were made mostly of air.

If we are reading the text in its proper order, it tells us how an Archivist of Catchkeep, name of Wasp, in a total upheaval
of all of the ritual structures of Catchkeep’s worship, challenged her keeper/overseer in single combat and bested him. Gravely wounded, she used the last of her strength to free all of the dead man’s captive ghosts and destroy every last one of the Archivist tools (see fig. 7 for a replica of a typical field kit) by which those ghosts and others had been hunted and enslaved.

It is not known
what became of her – whether she died in her blood on the dirt floor of the priest of Catchkeep’s house or else somehow healed her wounds and went on to become the sort of patron saint for ghosts the evidence suggests.

In the end, every wildly disparate theory sinks its roots in the same pot: the proto-tale rather uninspiredly entitled “Archivist Wasp Frees the Ghosts.” Wherein, after destroying
Catchkeep’s priest and all his tools, our mortally wounded heroine conjures Catchkeep herself down out of the sky and tricks the dog-god into suffering the newly-released ghosts to climb up upon Her back. From there they are borne, clinging on like barnacles, aloft into the night. Meantime, our retired Archivist and a single anonymous ghost (though some sources insist that there were two) remain
to see that none are left behind, vowing to rejoin the others when their work on earth is done.

And if they’re not there yet
, as every version of the story always ends,
they are here still
.

VALENTINES

Shira Lipkin

1.

The waiter’s name is Valentine. He has long, slim fingers, and he writes down my order instead of pretending to commit it to memory. I like that, his pen on the paper bringing forth one simple thing about me. My lunch. Just a tiny fragment of information. I honor him by doing the same. “The waiter’s name is Valentine,” I write in my battered notebook, “and he has
long, slim fingers.”

Information is sacred. I don’t remember why, or who told me. But I know that information is sacred, so I write it down, scraps of knowledge and observations. I used to write in leatherbound journals with elegant heavy pens, but the fetish for elegance has fallen by the wayside in my rush to commit everything to paper. Now I use cheap marbled composition books, purchased by
the dozen. The pen is still important, though. It must write in smooth lines of black, not catch on the page. There is too much to capture.

I order chai tea and butternut squash soup. I write that down as well, just after Valentine does. I watch him walk to the kitchen, slender and graceful, and I wonder what Valentine does when he is not refilling coffee mugs. I wonder if he dances. I write
that down: “Perhaps Valentine dances.” I watch him flirt with the barista, their movements around each other a careful ballet of hot espresso and soup and witty banter, and I curl up in my armchair and wrap my hands around the mug of tea when Valentine brings it to me with his usual smile and nod. I observe. I record.

I write on the bus, on my way home. I write about the bus driver, and about
the woman sitting across from me, wearing a too-heavy jacket (“perhaps she is sick”). I write about the barista
and the patterns of her movement around the large copper espresso machine, the way she admires her reflection. When I get home, I carefully tear the pages from my notebook, and I tear fact from fact, isolating each bit of information, and I file them accordingly in the rows of small
boxes nailed to my walls. Miniature pigeon coops filled with paper instead of birds. Facts. Ways to build the world. I copy things over when necessary, when I must file “perhaps Valentine dances” under both Valentine and Speculation. I must separate speculation, after all. My shreds and fragments of information comprise my image of Valentine (for example). I cannot allow speculation to color that.
I can allow his grace, but not the possibility of his dancing.

With enough data, maybe I can figure out the world.

2.

The waiter’s name is Val. His hands are stained a burnished yellow from nicotine, and are guitar-callused. He is bored and impatient, waiting for his shift to end. He does not write down my order – which is fair because it’s just coffee and blackberry pie, and the pie is right
at hand. He slices it and slaps it on the plate; it falls over just a bit, slides, and blackberry oozes out onto the plain white plate, the color almost shocking. I write that down, and the way the steam dances over the coffee mug. The mug is smooth and unadorned, the same bone-white, and the coffee is rich and dark and bitter. The diner is a diner, no more and no less, retro-50s tube with aproned
waitresses and meat loaf and pie and Val, leaning forward by the register, staring at the door. Waiting for something else.

He talks to me. I think out of sheer boredom – I’m the only customer at the bar, the only person here alone. His dark hair is frosted blond at the ends, and his eyes are seaglass-blue. He is in a band, but he worries that now that the guys have day jobs, they’ll stop playing
music. He doesn’t think he’s good enough to go solo. He shrugs a lot – he has developed his own fake-casual rolling shrug, a silent “whatever”. He asks why I care, and I tell him that these are the things that make him *him*. That we are collections of information. We are what we are because our dog died or our dad left or we won the lottery or whatever. And I like to figure out what people are
by examining what they’re made of.

When I close my eyes, I imagine Val made of paper, all the little strips of paper I’ll file later under “music” and “loss” and “resentment,” cross-reference him with others, see if I can figure out “loss.”

See if I can figure out data loss.

When I open my eyes, Val has gone on to the next customer. I eat my pie and write.

3.

The waiter’s name is V. It’s
a new restaurant, sci-fi themed; all of the waiters have names like Klaatu or Ripley. I point out that
V
is a series, not a character, and he laughs. “No one remembers character names from
V
. But everyone remembers the show. Everyone remembers the lizards.”

He writes down my order, and I write down that everyone remembers
V
. I will file it under “television” and “things everyone remembers”. “Things
everyone remembers” is one of my bigger boxes; it is not nearly full. Not nearly as full as it needs to be.

Data loss. I do not remember the things everyone remembers. And I need to. In order to build a self, I need a foundation. So I write everything down, and I am always hoping that someone will let slip one of the things “everyone knows” or “everyone remembers.”
V
and the Challenger explosion
and 9/11 and the Smurfs. Sometimes when I get home, after I file the day’s newly gathered information, I take the slips out of that box and spread them out on the floor to subcategorize them. Everybody knows this about politics. Everyone remembers that song.

My food arrives, a faux-Klingon dish I’ve already forgotten the name of. I must look it up later and record it. The drink V brings is not
what I ordered – it’s a neon-blue thing in a Klein bottle with dry ice fuming out of it. V grins and drapes himself over the chair beside me. “You looked like you could use it.”

“What is it?”

“Dunno. Try some.”

“I have … trouble. With things I don’t know.”

V looks around; seeing no manager, he takes a quick sip from my glass. “Perfectly safe.”

I sip. It’s sweet. V grins as I lower the glass.
His hair is frosted
silver, and I wonder if he’s dyed it, or if he sprays it on every night. His hands seem to have a mind of their own; he gestures incessantly when he talks. Italian, he says, with a shrug very unlike Val’s. I write that down: “Italians talk with their hands,” and also, “V is Italian.”

He has to get up eventually, as the restaurant gets busy. He brings me a spoon for dessert,
with a wink like Valentine’s.

1.

Valentine writes my order down with a flourish and gives me a wink like V’s. I study him – none of his other mannerisms remind me of V. He does not talk with his hands. He is not flashy or flamboyant. His hands, unlike Val’s, do not have guitar calluses; if Valentine plays anything it’s a wind instrument, or maybe a violin.

This is speculation. I cannot allow
speculation.

I study my own hands. They shake slightly, and I wonder if I ever played anything; if so, that data is lost. I should search my apartment. It has been too long since I’ve done anything there but file and sleep.

Valentine presents my chai with a smile. “Valentine,” I ask, halting him in his graceful spin kitchenwards, “do I always order the same thing?”

“In the fall, yeah.” He sits
down beside me in a way not entirely unlike V’s draping or Val’s slouch. “Other soups, the rest of the year. But always chai and soup.”

“Then why do you write it down?”

“Because you like it.” I must look as puzzled as I feel, because he shrugs (unlike Val, like V) and continues. “You told me once that you don’t see how anyone can hold that in their heads, not really. Things fade. I might forget
what kind of tea, what kind of soup.”

I stretch my hand, aching from holding the pen. “I think I forget.”

2.

Val pours the coffee, thick plume of steam from the stream of dark liquid, the battered pot. “Do I always get the same thing?”

Val gives his rolling shrug. “Coffee, keep it comin’. Pie. Yeah, you do.”

I write that down: “I always order the same thing.”

I don’t know how to file that.
“My brain.” That box is overflowing. I need to find a way to subcategorize it. I can’t figure it out.

I ask Val if he’s Italian. He’s not. Mostly Norwegian, he says. I study him all shift for things that correlate with Valentine and with V. He notices, but ignores it.

I write. Everything. The clumping of the salt in its shaker. The reflection of sunlight on the silver edge of the clock. Val
and the waitress, Thalia – she looks like the barista.

Everyone looks like everyone else these days. It feels like my world is compressing. I have to write more, write faster. I have to make sense of things.

3.

I don’t remember entering the restaurant, but V is already sprawled across from me. He asks if I’m okay, and I tell him honestly that I don’t know. I ask if he’s in love with a waitress,
and he laughs, says no, gestures at a waiter in Jedi robes. I tell him what I’m slowly, falteringly, worrying about: that all of them are the same person. He tells me all the ways he’s different, but I find some things the same.

(A)

They all have a younger brother. They all had a dog, growing up. They are all waiters.

1.

I am so tired. Valentine brings me a chai without my asking, and he asks
if I’m okay, and I tell him honestly that I don’t know. He asks me when I last saw my doctor.