Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe (6 page)

“This is also an island, of a kind,” the man with the mustache said. “There are islands of time as well as space. I think that all of you live or die according to whether I need you.”

He closed his eyes again and we were floating over a surreal futuristic city, an Art Deco fantasy of pastel buildings with streamlined aircars flitting around. He closed his eyes again and we were back on the island.

He looked at me. “Shall I need you, Christopher? Which would you like to be?”

“Do you mean would I rather be a character in a story, or, as a real person, cease to exist?”

“Not ‘cease,’ ” he said gently. “If you are just a character in a story, you never have been real.”

“It’s not a story, though. It’s your story.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “What do you think?”

I heard the sea, then voices. Not too close. Smelled the sea to the left, and then wood smoke, from another direction. Blinked away crust, and rubbed my eyes, and the green dapple became dense overhead foliage, restless in the breeze. I didn’t hurt, but my legs and arms were like heavy wood, and sunburned the color of mahogany. I couldn’t recall my name.

Have I have been here before?

The youngest writer to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Joe Haldeman has earned steady awards over his forty- three-year career: His novels The Forever War and Forever Peace both made clean sweeps of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he has won three more Hugos and Nebulas for other novels and shorter works. Three times he’s won the Rhysling Award for best science fiction poem of the year. In 2012 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. The final novel in a trilogy, Earthbound, is just out (after Marsbound in 2008 and Starbound in 2009). Ridley Scott has bought the movie rights to The Forever War. Joe’s next novel is Work Done for Hire. When he’s not writing or teaching—a professor at MIT, he has taught every fall semester since 1983—he paints and bicycles and spends as much time as he can out under the stars as an amateur astronomer. He’s been married for forty-seven years to Mary Gay Potter Haldeman.

TIMOTHY ZAHN

On Gene Wolfe:
Many years ago, I was at a convention where Linda, the wife of the chairman, handled registration. She was something of a “mundane,” but loved meeting people.

Gene had sent in his preregistration for him and his son. Linda, not recognizing his name, pro cessed the memberships like everyone else’s. She was working the registration table when a gentleman walked up to her and said, “I’m Gene Wolfe, and I’m preregistered.”

Linda calmly pointed to a table to her right and said, “Please pick up your registration over there.” Gene dutifully went over to the table and picked up the registration. Then he asked about a friend of his, Walt, and Linda said that she thought he was in the consuite and pointed him in that direction.

About ten minutes later Walt came out, slightly aghast, and asked Linda, “Do you know who Gene Wolfe is?”

Linda looked up and said, “Yes, he registered just a short while ago.”

When Linda’s husband found out about it, he hurriedly tracked down Gene, apologized profusely, and promised to get him his registration money back. Gene refused, saying he hadn’t had such a good laugh at a convention in years.

T
he tavern didn’t have a name. It didn’t need one. The village was small, and it was the only tavern inside the long log walls that guarded against the dangers of the outside world.

Most of the villagers, even the poorest, ate at the tavern at least once a month. A few, the wealthier ones who could afford it, sometimes came in as often as once a week.

The wizard ate there every day.

There were fewer patrons than usual today, he noted as he sat at his table by the window. Normally the midday hour was bustling with activity, with only the farmers and hunters who labored beyond the walls unable to take the necessary time for a good meal.

But today only one other table was occupied. The four men seated there were leaning forward, their heads close to each other, talking together in low, nervous tones.

The server hurried to the wizard’s table. “Good midday, master,” the boy said. He seemed nervous, too. “How may we serve?”

“One portion,” the wizard said, drawing a small pouch from inside his threadbare tunic. He’d seen more of the outside world than anyone else in the village, and knew that most taverns had several food items to choose from each day. But not here. Here, the cook chose each morning what she would prepare, and that was what was served.

“Yes, master.” The boy hesitated. “You’re certain you wouldn’t prefer one and a half?”

“One will do,” the wizard said. The weaving of spells required extra sustenance, but he had no such activities planned for today. “Here’s my payment,” he added, opening the pouch.

The boy flicked the contents a distracted glance. “Tarragon?”

“Rosemary,” the wizard said, frowning. The boy knew his spices better than that. “From my window box. Is something wrong?”

The boy’s eyes shifted to the occupied table. The wizard followed his gaze, to find that the quiet conversation had ceased and all four men were staring at him.

“Is something wrong?” he repeated, raising his voice to include them as well as the boy.

One of the men, the village tanner, cleared his throat. “If the elders haven’t yet chosen to speak with you—”

“The elders move at their own pace,” the wizard said. “I move at mine. Tell me the problem.”

The tanner glanced at the others. “It’s the witch king,” he said grimly. “The wizard whose army has been sweeping through the lowlands—”

“I know who he is,” the wizard said. “What does this have to do with us?”

“He’s decided he wants to conquer the Tarnholm across the mountains.” The tanner’s throat worked. “And he’s just made the decision to bypass the main road and bring his army instead through our valley.”

The wizard looked out the window at the log wall. Beyond it, the dark forest that pressed up against the village seemed itself to be listening. “When?”

“He’ll be here in two days.”

Two days. The wizard looked at the server, still standing nervously beside the table. Closing the pouch, he handed it to the boy. “Here,” he said. “You’d best make it two portions.”

The first task was to reinforce the wall.

The wizard had woven this same spell many times over the thirty years since he’d first erected the barrier. But for most of those years the spell had been geared toward defense against moss, rot, or damage from scratching deer horns and wolf claws. Now, the spell would be called upon to strengthen the wood against spears, swords, axes, and the witch king’s own spells.

The elders thanked him when he was done. But he could tell by their pinched expressions that they weren’t expecting the spell to stop anyone for long. On that count, he knew they were right.

Beyond that, there was little he could do. Diverting a portion of the river to encircle the village would take too long, and would accomplish nothing except announce to the approaching invaders that the village had something its inhabitants thought especially worth protecting. Spells used for removing brambles and tangleweed from the farmers’ fields could be reversed to seed the army’s path with obstacles, but such ploys were childish and would only irritate the soldiers instead of turning them away onto a different route. A thorn hedge was possible, but having such convenient kindling pressed up against a log wall would be an invitation for the witch king to reduce the village to smoldering ash and continue on his way.

In the end, the wizard knew there was only one way the village could be saved.

The rest of the two days was spent gathering the people together and sending them into the forest. Not the dark forest directly behind the village, the one no one ever entered, but the cleaner forest on the far side of the valley.

“You don’t need to stay,” the wizard told the tanner as they stood together, watching the distant line of people cross the bridge and make their way through the trees into the foothills of the snowy mountains that towered over the valley.

“You may need me,” the tanner said. “I know a few spells myself, you know. I may be able to help out a little.”

“You realize he probably won’t bother with us himself,” the wizard warned. “Not at first. He has his own phalanx of mages to throw against his enemies.”

“So much the better,” the tanner said with grim humor. “I’ll last longer against lesser minds.”

“You may die.”

“I may,” the tanner acknowledged. “But I may surprise you. Who can tell?” He gave the wizard a sideways look. “Besides, you’ll need someone to serve.”

The wizard sighed deep within his soul. So the tanner knew what he had planned. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I will.”

The witch king’s usual pattern, the wizard had heard, was to approach his objectives at dawn, when the defenders were weary from a night of staring fearfully into the darkness.

But the various small towns and villages along the army’s path weren’t objectives. They were little more than diversions, not even for the witch king himself, but for whichever group of soldiers had the time and inclination for an hour or so of looting and casual destruction.

It was nearly midday, and the army’s vanguard had already passed, when the would-be looters the wizard was expecting finally broke ranks and strode across the half-plowed fields toward the village. There were thirty of them, their laughing voices and the bell- like clanking of their armor in stark contrast to the cruel anticipation on their faces.

Some townspeople, the wizard knew, would welcome such invaders through their gates in the forlorn hope that cooperation would lead to mercy. Others would take the riskier path of pretending cooperation and then try to deal with the soldiers quietly, out of sight and hearing of their comrades passing by outside the walls.

The wizard knew better than to try either. There would be no mercy from these men; and while the witch king’s army was vast, his officers made a point of keeping track of even the lowliest soldiers, if only to make sure that the families of deserters paid for the runaway’s crime. Someone in the ranks would have made careful note of where these particular soldiers were going, and even the wizard couldn’t simply make them disappear without inviting terrible consequences.

There was no way that the wizard and the village could avoid attracting attention. The question thus became whose attention they would attract.

The approaching soldiers were halfway across the field when they spotted the two men waiting on either side of the village gate. The crossbowman in the lead said something to the others and shrugged his weapon off his shoulder. He loaded a bolt, aimed at the wizard, and let fly.

Fifty yards from the village wall, the bolt burst into flame.

It was probably the last thing the soldiers expected, and all thirty stopped dead in their tracks. But the shock didn’t last long. They had fought armies, sorcerers, wild animals, and probably a whole range of woodland sprites, and they weren’t about to let a simple country mage stand in their way. Even as the burning bolt disintegrated into a cloud of ash, the soldiers were moving into combat formation, the ten crossbowmen forming up into standing and kneeling lines as they loaded their weapons, the spearmen and swordsmen spread into flank-guard positions on either side. At a sharp command from one of the swordsmen, all ten crossbow bolts fired together.

All ten exploded into smoking shards at the same distance as the first bolt.

The swordsman snarled another order, and the crossbowmen recocked their weapons. Behind them, the marching army began to come to a somewhat haphazard halt as individual soldiers and squads paused to watch the drama taking place at the edge of the forest. As the crossbowmen loaded their bolts, the spearmen spread out to both sides, their spearheads gleaming too brightly to be simply reflecting the sunlight. One of the witch king’s mages had probably encircled them with hardness or penetration spells.

Unfortunately for them, those spells required a certain minimum amount of metal to work with, which was the same amount necessary for other, more subtle spells.

At the swordsman’s command, the spearmen strode forward in a curved line, lowering their spears toward the wizard and the tanner like the jagged teeth of a half-invisible woodland sprite. At the same time, the crossbowmen lifted their weapons to their shoulders. The wizard smiled tightly and continued weaving his spell. . . .

Abruptly, the spearmen leaped ahead into a charge. The swordsman barked an order and the crossbowmen let fly their bolts.

But this time, instead of bursting into flame, the bolts curved sharply to the sides, each bearing down on one of the spearheads like a hawk pursuing a rabbit.

The spearmen saw the bolts coming and tried their best to dodge them. But it was no use. The bolts slammed unerringly into their chosen spearheads, and as each hit there was a burst of fire and blueedged lightning as the encircling hardness spells were broken. Eight of the ten spear shafts splintered, while the other two exploded violently enough to send their owners pitching backward, stunned, onto the ground. Without waiting for orders, the freshly disarmed men scrambled back to the rest of the group, dragging their two twitching comrades with them.