The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (72 page)

This time the South played no part. The South remained tranquil and disposed to sneer, half amused, half hopeful, at their northern brothers tearing themselves to pieces. And their northern brothers as if to please them put on a great show, violent,
tumultuous, filling earth and sky with battle-cries and screams of pain. Yes – I’m talking about the Six Thousand Day War. Which didn’t last 6,000 days, nowhere near it, and nobody seems to know why it got called that, except some obsessive collector of historical curiosities who might explain that it took about 6,000 days for the Empire to recover from the war of the three dynasties and to re-establish
order, peace, and its borders. Or so say the academic historians. Maybe the true truth is something else, but I only say maybe. Maybe the true truth is that it took 6,000 days, more or less, for Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty to seek, locate, and exterminate the members of the other two dynasties and all their followers. What we do know is that the whole North was one great battlefield,
and that since fighting was the sole occupation of the time, the northern seaport was paralyzed, and no freight-caravans passed by the mountain city. The war itself was far away; the city continued to be draped in moss and ivy, with flowers in the water tanks and on the cornices, bright-colored beetles hiding in the stone eyes of the statues and the fountains, and so it went on almost until the end,
and all might have remained the same, maybe right on up to now, if Bloodthirsty, who fully deserved his appellation, hadn’t been betrayed by an ambitious general.

Oddembar’Seil had to flee, but had nowhere to flee to. The South was still neutral, but not safe; the South was never safe for power-seekers. And Oddembar’Seil sought power. He fled northward. Not alone, to be sure. He divided his men
into groups which blended in with the various groups fighting each other in every region they had to cross through, and pushed them on northward, far north, in a desperate and not very rational effort to reach the sea, to find ships in which they could sail down the coast on the old shipping route and disembark and attack from the east. It looked as if he might succeed. Most of his troops caught
up to him in the foothills, and on a summer morning they marched off again and came to the gates of the city. I don’t know, nobody
knows, whether Bloodthirsty cursed or grinned; I don’t know whether he looked at the unknown city with greed, or scratched his head in puzzlement. I do know he entered it peacefully, his men carrying their weapons handy but not brandishing them, and that the inhabitants
of the mountain city watched him with curiosity. I know that they even approached him and offered food and shelter. He needed both, but did not accept them. I know that the enemy army caught up to him there, striking at the rear guard while it was half in the city streets, half still on the plains. Goodbye ships, good-bye shipping route and hopes of a surprise attack from the east. Everything
was lost, but when you have to fight, you fight.

There have been hideous battles in the long history of the Empire. It’s even possible there have been some, a few, crueler than the one that was later called the Battle of the North, as if there was only one north, one battle. But it’s hard for anyone to imagine what happened, and I don’t know if I can give you any idea of it. I’ll try, that’s
all I can do. Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty gave a great shout when he heard that the enemy was advancing and his men were in a vulnerable position, unready, some of them crowded into the narrow city streets and others scattered out through the fields around it. Concerning these men of his, you can say anything that’s usually said about soldiers and warriors, but not that they were cowardly or undisciplined.
They heard him shout and they regrouped, took arms, fell in as best they could, and tried to repel the attack. Bloodthirsty leapt across the fallen and ran to fight in the front rank, shoulder to shoulder with his men. He was no coward either.

The Battle of the North lasted exactly fifty hours. The men attacked, broke, scattered, retreated, had a bite to eat, and returned to the attack. Telling
such things one is sickened by what men are. They were not men; nor were they wolves, nor hyenas, nor vultures, nor eagles. They were blind organisms, mindless, nerveless, without feeling or thought, with only the power to wound, and blood to shed. They didn’t think, believe, feel, see, or hope; all they did was kill and kill again; all they did was retreat and retreat again, and attack again,
and kill again. They had been born, they had worked, loved, played, grown to manhood for nothing but this, to kill in the fields of the North under the walls of a mossy,
flowery city. Fifty hours after the first attack not more than a hundred men were still afoot, naked, dirty, bloody, maimed, mad. They didn’t know or care who the enemy was: they went on killing, attacking, shouting with their
lacerated mouths, weeping from their wounded eyes, breathing through their split nostrils, holding their weapons with what fingers they had left, returning to attack, to kill. It was then that Oddembar’Seil cut off a head that rolled on the blood-soaked ground, and on the headless body, on the filthy, hacked breastplate, flashed a collar of gold and amethysts. The future emperor shouted again, and
so ended the Battle of the North: he had killed Reggnevon son of Reggnevavaun, pretender to the imperial throne.

You know how the inhabitants of the northern city and his few surviving soldiers crowned the Emperor Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty on the site of his victory as he stood erect over the body of his enemy, dirty, wounded, feverish, naked, with a marble crown hacked with hammer and chisel
from the head of a statue that adorned an old aristocratic garden now used for playing-fields, and how then and there he signed his first decree, declaring the city that had witnessed his triumph the capital of the Empire.

Six thousand days hadn’t passed, not yet. But the war was over, and when that time really had gone by, the northern city was still capital of the Empire; and the courtiers,
the functionaries, the ladies, the admirals, the judges, went to and fro by the Fountain of the Five Rivers, under the arch on which stand the mourning figures from the first mayor’s tomb, through the winding, narrow streets, and sometimes stopped to drink or to wet their fingers and forehead in the alabaster basins that still ran with healing water. For the emperor had ordered that they be preserved:
he never forgot that the citizens had offered him food and shelter, and he believed that this had brought him luck. He commanded that his palace be built using the walls of the Empress Sesdimillia’s palace, keeping its style and plan, antiquated as they were, and he prohibited any change in the streets and buildings, the parks and fountains. The outside of houses could be repaired and painted,
but not changed; the incredible staircases could not be moved; the inopportune walls could not be taken down. Building could take place outside the city limits, and did, and interiors could be remodeled, and many were, so that houses could return
to what they’d been in the reign of the Listener and his heirs. And nothing more.

The 6,000 days of the Emperor Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty were
fulfilled, and another 6,000 days passed, and a bit more. His rule was harsh and violent; he was implacable with his enemies and soft with his friends. But it must be said for him that he reorganized the Empire and brought it peace, territory, and unity. He did so brutally, with more blood, more deaths, with woe and mourning, but Reggnevaun would have been no more merciful, nor can we know what might
have happened if the Six Thousand Day War hadn’t been fought. A stroke finished him in the midst of a banquet, and the tears shed for him were few and false.

Many years have passed and many emperors have lived and reigned, but the mountain city is still the capital of the Empire. Toadies and social climbers invent poetical names and illustrious origins for it, and Drauwdo the Brawny is a mere
character in bedtime tales for children who don’t want to go to sleep yet, but the Bloodthirsty was perhaps the first who understood it, and made his understanding clear when he ordered that it not be touched or changed. And those who came after him must have guessed the profound wisdom in this order, which seemed so little in accord with the spirit of the times, since they too enforced it. Here
it stands, as in the years of the healing waters, of the gods, of the musicians, of the battles. It looked like a dense mesh of gold, with tiny, irregular openings, pulled tight, stretched across the mountains. It’s grown on the farther side, of course, and seven more roads have been added to the one that ran to it; all eight are wide and well-paved as royal roads should be, and swarm with travelers
and traffic. It turned its back on the plain that was a desert, a garden, a battlefield; the new mansions, the rich houses, the palaces of the nobility, are to the north, on the road that leads to the distant port. It shines at night, and the light on the peaks never goes out, only dimming in the dawn, as when the painters and poets used to talk and drink in the cafes. It prospers and thrives as
it did when the healing water welled up out of the ground. It’s a splendid capital, beautiful, mysterious, charming, old as the capital of an old Empire should be, solid, wealthy, built to last thousands and thousands of years. And yet I wonder…

THE RADIANT CAR THY SPARROWS DREW

Catherynne M. Valente

Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants
will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk: a soulless phantasm and nothing more. “Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!”

—Wordsworth Donisthorpe,
inventor of the Kinesigraph Camer

View the Famous Callowhale Divers of Venus from the Safety of a Silk Balloon! Two Bits a Flight!

—Advertisement Visible
in the Launch Sequence of
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

EXT. The cannon pad at the Vancouver World’s Fair in 1986, late afternoon, festooned with crepe and banners wishing luck and safe travel
.

The Documentarian Bysshe and her crew wave jerkily as confetti sticks to their sleek skullcaps and glistening breathing apparati. Her smile is immaculate, practiced, the smile of the honest young
woman of the hopeful future; her copper-finned helmet gleams at her feet. Bysshe wears women’s clothing but reluctantly and only for this shot, and the curl of her lip betrays
disdain of the bizarre, flare-waisted swimming costume that so titillates the crowds. Later, she would write of the severe windburns she suffered in cannon-flight due to the totally inadequate protection of that flutter
of black silk. She tucks a mahogany case smartly under one arm, which surely must contain George, her favorite cinematographe. Each of her crewmen strap canisters of film – and the occasional bit of food or oxygen or other minor accoutrements – to their broad backs. The cannon sparkles, a late-model Algernon design, filigreed and etched with motifs that curl and leaf like patterns in spring ice breaking.
The brilliant nose of the Venusian capsule Clamshell rests snugly in the cannon’s silvery mouth
.

They are a small circus – the strongmen, the clowns, the trapeze artist poised on her platform, arm crooked in an evocative half-moon, toes pointed into the void
.

I find it so difficult to watch her now, her narrow, monkish face, not a pore wasted, her eyes huge and sepia-toned, her smile enormous,
full of the peculiar, feral excitement which in those days seemed to infect everyone who looked up into the evening sky to see Venus there, seducing behind veils of light, as she has always done. Those who looked and had eyes only for red Mars, all baleful and bright, were rough, raucous, ready and hale. Those who saw Venus were lost.

She was such a figure then: Bysshe, no surname, or simply
the Documentarian. Her revolving lovers made the newsreels spin, her films packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times ’round. Weeks before a Bysshe opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theater, selling genuine cells she touched with her
own hand
and replica spangled cages from
To Thee, Bright Queen!
sized just right to hold a male of Saturnine
extraction. Her father, Percival Unck, was a brooding and notorious director in his time, his gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths perpetually agape with horror or orgiastic transcendence. Her mother was, naturally, one of those ever-transported actresses, though which one it is hard to remember, since each Unck leading lady became, by association
and binding contract, little black-bobbed Bysshe’s mother-of-the-moment. Thus it is
possible to see, in her flickering, dust-scratched face, the echoes of a dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, easily forgotten but for the legacy of their adoptive daughter’s famous, lean features, her scornful, knowing grin.

Bysshe rejected her father’s idiom utterly. Her film debut in Unck’s
The Spectres of Mare
Nubium
is charming, to say the least. During the famous ballroom sequence wherein the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, little Bysshe can be seen crouching unhappily near the rice-wine fountain, picking at the pearls on her traditional lunar
kokoshnik
and rubbing at her make-up. The legend goes that when Percival Unck tried to smudge his daughter’s eyes with
black shadows and convince her to pretend herself a poor Schirm relation while an airy phantasm – years later to become her seventh mother – swooped down upon the innocent child, Bysshe looked up exasperatedly and said: “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”

And so she would be, forever, only and always Bysshe. As soon as she could work the crank on a cinematographe herself, she set
about recording “the really real and actual world” (age seven) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale,” (age twentyone) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double exposure drivel.” Her first documentary,
The Famine Queen of Phobos
, brought the colony’s food riots to harsh light, and earned her a Lumiere medal, a prize Percival Unck would never receive.
When asked if his daughter’s polemics against fictive cinema had embittered him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said: “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”