Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (26 page)

dies off altogether, to be supplanted by a new, more useful, more

appropriate
weltanschauung.
So it was with the colonist’s children’s children’s children and with the generations that followed after.

Worlds turned—one hundred years for earth, hence two hundred for

Mars—and the old ways were duly supplanted. Meanwhile, across

the void, the cradle of mankind rotted away under the weight of

half-recollected calamities, and the supply freighters ceased their comings and goings. No one was left to remind the colonists, who

were now Martians, of the world their ancestors had forsaken hoping for better lives so far away. The elaborate terraforming schemes of

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corporations and governments were only ever half-implemented, at

best, and outside the sanctuary of the domes, the planet stayed more or less as it had been for three and a half billion years.

Beáta is thinking none of these thoughts as she sits at her gourd

stall halfway down the dusty boulevard. She is thinking only that it has been a good year for the farms and the foundries, and that the people of Balboa have coin to spend on the march, which means

they have money to spend on her gourds and candles and wards. It

will be a proper Phantom March, which is never a guarantee. Beáta

is always prepared for the lean times.

The boulevard smells of incense, sweeting cooling in candy

molds, the leafy hydroponic wares of the greens merchants, modest

cauldrons of precious, bubbling sugar. And the starchy meat of her gourds, two of which she’s split long ways so that customers may see for themselves she is offering the best on the row.

“Buy’em dry, buy’em raw,” she calls out over the clamor. “Fresh

for stew or holl’er for the light. Buy’em dry, or buy’em raw.”

If all goes well in the scant hours remaining before the march,

she’ll have sufficient roll to cover both rent on her stall and on her one-room coop five blocks over in the genny district, where the

hundred plus wind turbines raised above the dome’s roof run day

and night, night and day, twenty-four months a year. She’ll still owe some back rent, but who in the genny district doesn’t? The landlords know well enough to tolerate a modicum of tardiness or watch the

empty coops pile up, empty and even less profitable than tenants

who only pay when they can.

“Buy’em dry, buy’em raw . . . ”

The customers come and go, glittering and painted in their march

finery, and Beáta happily watches as her stock of gourds diminish. At this rate, the lot will be gone an hour
before
the march. Which means she’ll be able to close shop and climb onto one of the balconies, or squeeze into the press filling up the bleachers. As a gourd seller, she has a certain status among the citizens of Balboa, and respectful folks wouldn’t begrudge her that much.

Two women stop and carefully survey her wares, then she sells

them a pair of yellow-brown gourds, dried, hollowed, already fitted CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN [201]

by beeswax tcandles, already fitted at their tops with jute loops. The two women immediately attach the gourds to their rosaries of olivine and hematite beads strung on strands of transgen hagfish silk. The women have likely inherited the rosaries from their mothers, who

inherited them from their mothers before them, and so on. New

strings can be purchased at stalls along the boulevard, but the oldest are the most prized, and Beáta can tell by the cut of their clothes that these are women of tradition. They do not even haggle over her asking price, and they tip. For Beáta, tips are rare as blue turnips are to sugar-beet farmers, as they say. The women thank her, offer well wishes from the Seven Ladies of the Poles and the Seven of the Wells, and then vanish once more into the crowd. Beáta grins, which she

rarely does, because she’s ashamed of the teeth she’s missing right up front and all the rest going lickity split. But even a gourd merchant hasn’t the cachet to land a health patron, not in times like these, so she makes do with teeth she has left, and only smiles when she can’t help herself.

“Fresh for stew or holl’er for the light. Buy’em dry, or buy’em raw.”

Beáta Copper’s first Phantom March—well, the first she can

recall—she was five years old, and her mothers took turns holding her up on their shoulders so she could watch the mummers over the heads and hats of the other celebrants. To her eyes, the boulevard seemed to have caught fire, all those lanterns swinging side to side, twirling roundabout, the gourd lanterns in the march and those scattered in amongst the crowd. It was not so simple to put her at ease when the rods came along, but then they were
meant
to frighten the children.

The worst of the four was Famine, three stories tall, it’s many-jointed limbs and its toothsome jaws worked by twenty puppeteers. Famine, its hungry gaze blacker and colder than a winter’s night on the Niliacus.

Not even Old Man Thirst could trump Madam Famine. Beáta wanted

to look away, but her mothers wouldn’t permit it. Yes, the march is celebration and reverence, but it is also a grim reminder of the gifts and of the frailty of day-to-day existence in this and any dome.

“Buy’em dry, or buy’em raw.”

At her Phantom Eve tuition in the week before, she’d been
taught
of the famines that had gripped Mars in the long seasons after contact

[202] WHILST THE NIGHT REJOICES PROFOUND AND STILL

with Earth was lost. How half the planet’s population had died before the ’culturists and water miners had managed to establish the United Provision Syndicate as a functional and effective body. She watched tapes of the complete ruin of Paros and Sagan, of the refugee camps, little terror shows of light and shadow flickering across the temple screen. The pictures from Sagan were the worst, because that dome

had been so big and had needed so much to survive. The albino

priestess had talked about the seven sol war, when Sagan had raided nearby Barsukov is a desperate attempt to save itself by stealing

from another failing dome. In the end, the skins of both craters had been breached, and almost everyone had died one sort of death or

another, most quickly from suffocation and decompression. She had

been taught that honoring the Seven and the Seven was the only way to insure that those dark seasons never, ever came again.

“The goddesses smile on us, and they hold the Four at bay,” said

the white-haired priestess, “but
only
through our worship and only through our conservation of their bounty, which we wring from soil, earth, and sky.

“Waste is the one evil in the world. All wrongdoing is waste, in

one way or in another. We remember this against our undoing.”

Thirty-two years on, Beáta still believes that, sure as she believes fertilizer stinks. But she pays as much respect to the scientists and laborers of the UPS, and never fails to pay her dues, even if it means the rent goes wanting.

“ . . . or holl’er for the light.”

A produce inspector makes his last obligatory rounds before the

hymns that signal the march’s commencement, and when he stops at

Beáta’s stall, she gives him a fat, uncarved gourd on the cuff, the pick of what she has left.

“Now, Beá, you wouldn’t be trying to grease me, would you?” he

asks, admiring her gift, turning it over and over in his thin hands.

“Ain’t no need in that, sir, not seein’ as mine’s the cleanest on the street,” she assures him, spreading her arms wide to indicate every vegetable remaining at her stall. “Not a yea big speck of the phako or scourge anywhere to be seen.”

“Then you’re as kindly and as responsible as ever,” he says, tossing CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN [203]

the gourd up and catching it twice for luck, one for each of the Seven.

“Clean bill, Beá, as usual. And all the blessings upon you.”

“As on you, inspector.”

He tips his cap and moves along to the next stall over, a fellow she knows from her own neighborhood. He sells neatly bound bouquets

of collards and kale.

Outside the dome, the sun sets, twilight spreading out and filling up the canyons of the Corprates to the west, washing over the plains and channels surrounding Balboa. Drowning the craters. Beáta is

visited by and sells to a handful of stragglers, and all but five of her smallest gourds are purchased. She makes an offering, tossing them into the boulevard to be trampled beneath the feet of the mummers, then draws the awning, ties it down, and goes to find her place among the devout.

Before he switches off the electric, Jack carefully snaps the antique clip into the even more antique crank box and then presses the ON

switch. The sound that leaks from the speakers isn’t
exactly
music.

There might be music hidden somewhere in it, but it was recorded—

decades ago—to mimic the wild voices of the goddesses, the wail of the global perihelion dust storms, the shudder of the dome against the gales. Once the lights are out, there’s only the flickering, dim glow from the peanut oil lantern. The darkness is heavy and warm and musty.

Of course, he’s not alone in the attic. There must always be three and ideally no more than three. Miranda and Dope already sit crosslegged on the plastic floor, waiting for him. In their way, these three twelve-year-olds are enacting a ceremony as sacred and crucial to

the community’s safe passage through Phantom Eve as the coming

procession. Here, on the night before the March, all the children

below the dome must gather in thrices to do their part, a duty that must be performed precisely and in all seriousness. Each of the three has already sliced the tip ends of their index fingers and squeezed blood into the lantern.

Jack takes his place with Miranda on his left, Dope on his right,

and he’s wishing two things: that he hadn’t drawn short this year,

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and that there was another boy in the attic with him. Isn’t having to assume the role of teller bad enough without also being the only XY?

Miranda takes a deep breath and begins reciting the invocation

to the Seven and the Seven, and when she’s finished, Dope murmurs

the ward against the Four. Dope hardly ever raises her voice above a whisper, because she stutters sometimes. Jack waits patiently, his eyes on the lamp’s wick, his mind running over all the details of the tale he’s chosen.

“Your turn,” Dope murmurs when she does, and Jack glares at

her.

“Don’t you think I know? Think I’m simple?”

“Nuh-nuh-no,” she whispers.

“Shit. Think I don’t
know
my part?”

“I’m suh-suh-suh-”

“Stop it, Jack,” Miranda scowls. “She didn’t mean nothing by it.

She’s just nervous is all. Tell me you ain’t.”

Jack shakes his head. “Might be nervous, but I know my part.”

In the lantern light, Dope’s face is still pale as cheese, and

Miranda’s is nearly the same red-brown as the desert. He wants to

get up and shut off the crank. Not because he’s scared, but who wants to hear those noises? Who in his right mind? They’ve already worked their way beneath his skin and are coiling, cold and dense, down in his gut.

“Sorry, Dope,” he says, even if he isn’t, and then he begins the

tale.

The crank sings its wordless, disharmonious song.

“Was back at the start of the Seven Sol War, see, and it isn’t a

coincidence that the Seven and the Seven took offense when Sagan

turned on its sister. The Seven knew to the final hour how long the fighting would go on, see. They knew, and that pissed them off just about as bad as they ever get pissed off, because they saw how it

would make the Four even stronger than they were already.”

He pauses, watching the lantern, wondering if there’s anything he

can leave out without breaking the rule. There isn’t, but that doesn’t stop him from wondering, or from wishing there were.

“But they waited,” he continues. “They waited until the cannons

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN [205]

had done their worst, and the Saganites had breach the containment gates to loot what was left of Barsukov, even if that wasn’t much. That was the irony. Most of what they came to steal they destroyed in the war, by their own hands.

“And there were the Four, slitherin’ about the skin of Barsukov

and getting in the souls of the invaders. Waste, you see, that’s the only evil in all the world, just like they say at temple mass. And the militia from Sagan, what had they done but waste pretty much all of a larder that was meager before they showed up?”

“Even if that wasn’t their intent,” chimes in Miranda, because

her family is descended from Saganite refugees, and she can get

defensive. “It was desper—”

“Did
you
draw,” sighs Jack. “I sure don’t
remember
you drawing, but maybe I’m mistaken.”

The crank box roars and titters from across the attic, and Jack

wishes he’d turned the volume down a bit.

Miranda apologizes.

“So,” Jack says, “regardless of their
intent,
the militia did the worst thing possible when, as it was, there was so little to go around. Before they got inside, they scorched the ground. They burst cisterns, fouled reservoirs, even burned crops and grain silos. Hell, by the time the looting started, hardly a rat’s squat left in there
to
loot. This made them angry, those men and women from the north, and so they

killed even more, so it wasn’t only the battles that killed.”

“I don’t like this puh-part,” murmurs Dope, but Jack ignores her.

“And that’s when the Seven and the Seven swept down from their

towers at the poles, and up from the wells, too. They’d foreseen it all along, how the invaders would do themselves more harm than

good—though, even if they hadn’t, the Seven would have come upon