Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (38 page)

I breathed my excitement. It was not merely what he had written in the extra pages, though it was his own handwriting. I could feel what he knew. He could never forget anything that he learned, and that certainty was imbued throughout the tiny volume.

“Let me see it,” Ulundra said. She reached for the book. I held it out to her.

In the water between us, the tiny, aged relic came to pieces in her hands. Ulundra flailed for it, her white hands becoming huge. She succeeded only in scattering the shreds of soggy paper and strands of linen stiffened with glue to the far ends of the archives. My heart sank. It could never be whole again.

I was devastated. My mission was a failure. I had nothing to bring back to my sister witches.

Yet while I watched the ruin of my hope, I had a curious sensation. I felt the presence of the disappeared Autarch. I felt as if I was sharing intelligence with him, feeling his feelings, knowing his knowledge, but not only him—them.

I had no artifact to bring home. I was the artifact, and I carried the wisdom of ages. He did not forget, and neither would I.

“Can you guide me back to my ship?” I asked Ulundra.

The excitement I felt must have been shining from my eyes. She regarded me sadly. Her warm voice was muted in color.

“You will never return to us, will you?”

I took her hands in mine and patted them. For once, they seemed smaller, almost as small as my daughters’ hands.

“When I can. When I have given all that I have to Ushas, I will come back to Ocean. It is not what I feared. I have much to learn, here.”

Ulundra leaned over and kissed me.

“Then, come,” she said. “It is not far.”

“What of us, then?” Iria asked, after I had clambered aboard, and been furnished with dry clothes, food, and drink, and told my tale. “Will this be enough to guide Ushas toward the future?”

“There are no guarantees,” I said. “But, I think so. We have all been deprived of that which we once had, and must seek other comforts and knowledge. We do not know what lies ahead, but we could guide with the light of that collective wisdom that had lived within the Autarch’s mind. Strength tempered with mercy, the honesty of humility, and never to forget where one has been. Such lessons are not only for the humble.”

“Huh,” Iria said, planting her chin on one bony palm. “To think that we found such tidings in the sea.”

“Tidings in the tides,” said Chettor. He looked shy as we laughed.

“Oh, and I forgot to tell you,” I said, as Iria and I leaned on the rail, watching the lip of Ushas rise above the face of the New Sun. “I am getting married.”

Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” When not engaged upon this worthy occupation, she writes fantasy and science fiction books and short stories.

Before breaking away from gainful employment to write full-time, Jody worked as a file clerk, bookkeeper at a small publishing house, freelance journalist and photographer, accounting assistant, and costume maker. For four years, she was on the technical operations staff of a local Chicago television station, ending as technical operations manager.

Since 1987 she has published forty- three books and well more than one hundred short stories. Although she is best known as a collaborator with other notable authors such as Anne McCaffrey (the Ship Who series, the Dinosaur Planet series), Robert Asprin (Dragons and Myth Adventures), John Ringo (Clan of the Claw), and Piers Anthony, Jody has numerous solo books to her credit, mostly fantasy and science fiction with a humorous bent. Her latest book is View from the Imperium (Baen Books), which she describes as “Jeeves and Wooster in space.” During the past last twenty- five years or so, Jody has taught numerous writing workshops. She also speaks at schools and libraries. When not writing, she enjoys baking, calligraphy, travel, photography, and, of course, reading.

Jody lives in the northwest suburbs of Illinois with her husband, Bill Fawcett, and Jeremy, their cat.

DAVID BRIN

On Gene Wolfe:
He is known as one of the great literary stylists of our genre, one I admire with a sense of genuine awe. But unbeknownst to him, Gene also helps me teach writing to others. One aspect of fiction narrative that students often find daunting is “point of view”—establishing a reader’s perspective riding on the shoulder of the central character, perhaps only seeing what she sees but not sharing thoughts, or sharing surface thoughts but remaining ignorant of dark, inner knowledge. Or else immersed in the protagonist’s roiling, deeper conflicts. Or possibly watching from an aloof detached distance. I’ve seldom seen a stylist illustrate the power of these many-leveled techniques as well as Gene does, with apparent ease and grace. Any student who wants to master this core element of narrative should— I strongly recommend—learn how it is done by retyping great passages by Gene Wolfe.

A
t first, during the early months of exile, I seethed with resentment. Our mother had no business yanking us from Moscow, no matter how painful the city had become. Wasn’t it bad enough, with our father declared an Enemy of the Czar? Denounced by People, Coss, and State? How could she thereupon haul her daughters along, like huddled gypsies, following the slender rails to a stark and snowy place? To a community of self- banished outcasts, encamped within distant sight of the prison- gulag where father (according to bribed hints) was held.

My sister, Yelena, and I learned from the oldest schoolmaster— suffering—how to endure the way that only Russians can. The bare and diminished winter sun had little strength to warm our adolescent flesh. But cold possessed power to penetrate, sinking razor teeth through every bundled layer that we wore.

There we joined work crews of the semi-free, who trimmed giant-boled trees and harnessed them behind grunting beasts who puffed, snorted, and vented steam as they dug into icy dust, hauling treasure toward the rails.

Each evening, when our shifts came to an end, mother made sure that Yelena and I smoked our weed and opened books, consuming lessons, as if our futures still held promise of reward. Study was hard, as we struggled to concentrate past a fog of fatigue, and despite nearby wails of mourning. For it was a rare day that passed without at least one casualty, one frozen corpse—or several, carried away from our bivouac of the nominally “free.”

What kind of mother—I mused angrily while rubbing Yelena’s feet and inhaling fumes while she read aloud—what kind of mother would voluntarily drag her offspring to a place like this? When the czar had made a standing offer to the blood relatives of political prisoners—to work off guilt-by- association in greater comfort, close to home?

“Comfort, but also time,” she told me, on one of the rare occasions when mother explained anything at all. “The czar and Cossacks live by a code. If we survive, and pay our fines, then you and your sister can never again be charged for being related to traitors. Other crimes, perhaps. But not that.”

I thought about it while spending my free hour as I normally did—earning a couple of added kopeks by working in the stables. Mucking out the stalls of draft animals and grooming their thick fur. Yelena liked to hang around the elepents, but they seemed too dour and moody for me. I much preferred the mammuts—so phlegmatic and accepting. So I worked on that side of the dank, musty barn, polishing their gleaming tusks and brushing their immense grinding teeth.

“Yesh . . . yesh, Sasha . . . ve-vehind dat one . . . yesh . . .” crooned the one called Big Bennie, who wrapped his trunk around my left arm and drew me so close that I felt enveloped by his breath, a sweetly foul blend of alfalfa and stomach juices. Reaching in to scrape a back molar, I knew at any moment he could nip off my head with a single crunch, and the overseers would let it go with nary a shrug. But I wasn’t afraid. Bennie took his meals in liquid form. And those diamond-hard teeth were not for eating.

I wiped the airtight seals and nictitating membranes covering his beady eyes and finished by rubbing floppy ears, which would expand and swivel during long stretches on the snow, as he sensed the heft and momentum of great tree-hauling sleds, or detected the speedy passage of pebbles, a thousand meters away. At last, Bennie’s trunk reached into a pouch and pulled out a five-kopek coin that glittered next to the freshly waxed sheen of his tusk. I made my appreciation known. At this rate, I might earn liberty in mere years.

A low groaning arose from the opposite end of the vast chamber, beginning deep, at or below the hearing range of mere humans. I grimaced as the mammuts let out trumpetings of desultory complaint. Perfunctory, because nothing would prevent that basso rumble from growing, coalescing as a dozen bull elepents joined in, finding their interlaced rhythms, reiterating reflections off the walls and climbing toward crescendo.

Their evening dirge of longing did not bother me—at least not as much as it did some humans—hence the reason why this plum job was available to a mere kid. And the mammuts’ complaints soon tapered away, muffled in grudging respect, leaving the soundscape for elepents to occupy, alone.

Yelena, my sweet sister, barely fourteen, did not have to endure. Rather, she grinned in delight, dancing lightly on her toe-tips, like the ballerina she once dreamt of becoming, turning with arms stretched, as if luxuriating in the sonic waves. Around her, bull elepents wafted their long, armored trunks, waggling the fingerlike tips, modulating what soon became a brass ensemble of trombones, coronets, and growling tubas.

Lingering effects of Learning Weed still wafted in my nostrils, sinuses, and brain, reinforcing knowledge-engrams that had come through conscious reading and unconscious pulsations, just an hour before. I now pictured the barn as a resonant cavity, within which reinforcing waves added and multiplied, like the photons in a laser beam. A queerly obvious insight, now that I could picture what—only yesterday—had been a bizarre mystery.

Not for the first time I wondered: What was I beforehand . . . before to night’s lesson? Too stupid to see or hear?

And what will be stupidly opaque to me, tomorrow, that I’ll understand the day after?

Long, prehensile tails whipped the air while each pachyderm flexed his four squat legs, ending in hands that shoved against the straw-covered floor, raising the heavy beasts upon stubby but powerful grip-fingers, rising and falling as they sang. Well, that wasn’t much of a feat, given where, in the universe, they stood. Still, the push- ups looked impressive. The nearest male weighed several tons, most of it packed within a massive globe of grayish flesh. Hairless, unlike the mammuts. And the elepents’ radar ears were fully erect, all turned in unison, facing the same direction.

Toward the gleaming opal of Earth’s moon. Sensed, if not seen. The paradise of their desirings, where crystal forests gleamed and matriarchal herds roamed, ready to welcome home a few—just a few—of those bulls who proved themselves worthy.

No wonder Yelena liked elepents.

“You should too, Sasha!” she once said. “They are much like us. Like you and me. Sad exiles, dreaming of home.”

Only, that was the problem. Elepents were too much like us. All considered, I preferred the simple, cheerful mammuts.

Mother always fussed, when we dressed to go outside, checking our layers and gloves and mufflers, our boots and ushanka head coverings, taking special care over Yelena’s buttons. As teenagers do, we hissed and complained, even—especially—when she found something amiss.

“I’m almost a grown-up!” Yelena griped. “If we had stayed home I’d be getting ready for quinceañera!”

The czar and his royal cossins had taken a liking to that Spanish custom, encouraging it to be shared all over Earth. A rite of budding womanhood while still innocent. The Coss had a soft spot for traditions like that.

Except that, for the crime of having been sired by a traitor, Yelena’s party would have been a sadly truncated affair, in some local resettlement work town close to Moscow, say in Siberia. Near the bright lights, but tormentingly so. Might it be better to delay? To return home strong, no longer innocent, but free?

Was I starting to understand Mother’s reasons?

No! I shook my head, taking my sister’s hand and heading for our adolescent work team, accepting a silent duty from our mother to watch over her. I would do as I was bid. But I refused to accept. This was wrong. The reasons—though growing plainer to me— weren’t good enough.

It would take more than this to forgive her.

I checked Yelena’s scarf, gloves, boots, coverall, and headgear once again.

“But we already—”

“Stop fidgeting, Yelena Nikolaevna Bushyeva!” I hissed, using formality to emphasize my seriousness.

She grumbled.

“Mammut-loving nerdoon.”

“Oh, so? What a blessing, if only I farted powerfully and often, like a nerdoon! I would need no propulsion.”

My response made her giggle, and Yelena settled down till I finished the inspection.

“Come my little friend-of-elepents. If we are late, we’ll be demoted to zolotor duty.” To cleaning outhouses.