Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 106

"Soon," Esau said easily, manhandling me down the last of the slope. He held up the hand that wasn't knotted around my wrist. I blinked twice before I realized the veined, translucent yellow webs between his fingers were a part of him. He grabbed my arm again, handling me like a bag of groceries.

Pinky hitched himself forward to meet us, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit Esau across the face with his crutch. I imagined the sound the aluminum would make when it shattered Esau's cheekbone. Litters of them. Broods. Easy to give in and let it happen, yes. But litters of what?

"You didn't have to bring Maria into it."

"We can give her what she wants, can't we? With your help or without it. How'd you get the money for school?"

Pinky smiled past me, a grin like a wolf. "There was platinum in those chains. Opals. Pearls big as a dead man's eyeball. Plenty. There's still plenty left."

"So there was. How did you survive?"

"I was guided," he said, and the blue lights flickered around him. Blue lights that were kin to the silver lights swarming over the river. I could imagine them buzzing. Angry, invaded. I turned my head to see Esau's expression, but he only had eyes for Pinky.

Esau couldn't see the lights. He looked at Pinky, and Pinky met the stare with a lifted chin. "Come home, Isaac."

"And let Jacob try to kill me again?"

"He only hurt you because you tried to leave us."

"He left me for the father of frogs in the salt marsh, Esau. And you were there with him when he did-"

"We couldn't just let you walk away." Esau let go of my arm with a command to be still, and stepped toward Pinky with his hands spread wide. There was still light down here, where the canyon was wider and the shadow of the walls didn't yet block the sun. It shone on Esau's balding scalp, on the yolky, veined webs between his fingers, on the aluminum of Pinky's crutches.

"I didn't walk," Pinky said. He turned away, hitching himself around, the beige rubber feet of the crutches braced wide on the rocky soil. He swung himself forward, headed for the river, for the swarming lights. "I crawled."

Esau fell into step beside him. "I don't understand how you haven't ... changed."

"It's the desert." Pinky paused on a little ledge over the water. Tamed by the dam, the river ran smooth here and still. I could feel its power anyway, old magic that made this land live. "The desert doesn't like change. It keeps me in between."

"That hurts you." Almost in sympathy, as Esau reached out and laid a webbed hand on Pinky's shoulder. Pinky flinched but didn't pull away. I opened my mouth to shout at him, feeling as if my tongue were my own again, and stopped. Litters.

Whatever they were, they'd be Pinky's children "It does." Pinky fidgeted with the crutches, leaning forward over the river, working his forearms free of the cuffs. His shoulders rippled under the white cloth of his shirt. I wanted to run my palms over them.

"Your legs will heal if you accept the change," Esau offered, softly, his voice carried away over the water. "You'll be strong. You'll regenerate. You'll have the ocean, and you won't hurt anymore, and there's your woman-we'll take her too."

I heard the warning in the tone. The anger. Esau did not. He glanced at me. "Speak, woman. Tell Isaac what you want."

I felt my tongue come unstuck in my mouth, although I still couldn't move my hands. I bit my tongue to keep it still.

Esau sighed, and looked away. "Blood is thicker than water, Isaac. Don't you want a family of your own?"

Yes, I thought. Pinky didn't speak, but I saw the set of his shoulders, and the answer they carried was no. Esau must have seen it too, because he raised one hand, the webs translucent and spoiled-looking, and sunlight glittered on the barbed ivory claws that curved from his fingertips, unsheathed like a cat's.

With your help or without it.

But litters of what?

I shouted so hard it bent me over. "Pinky, duck!"

He didn't. Instead, he threw his crutches backward, turned with the momentum of the motion, and grabbed Esau around the waist. Esau squeaked-shrieked-and threw his hands up, clawing at Pinky's shoulders and face as the silver and blue and coppery lights flickered and swarmed and swirled around them, but he couldn't match Pinky's ma.s.sive strength. The lights covered them both, and Esau screamed again, and I strained, lunged, leaned at the invisible chains that held me as still as a posed mannequin.

Pinky just held on and leaned back.

They barely splashed when the Colorado closed over them.

Five minutes after they went under, I managed to wiggle my fingers. Up and down the bank, there was no trace of either of them. I couldn't stand to touch Pinky's crutches.

I left them where they'd fallen.

Esau had left the keys in the car, but when I got there I was shaking too hard to drive. I locked the door and got back out, tightened the laces on my sneakers, and toiled up the ridge until I got to the top. I almost turned my ankle twice when rocks rolled under my foot, but it didn't take long. Red rock and dusty canyons stretched west, a long, gullied slope behind me, the river down there somewhere, close enough to smell but out of sight. I settled myself on a rock, elbows on knees, and looked out over the scarred, raw desert at the horizon and the setting sun.

There's a green flash that's supposed to happen just when the sun slips under the edge of the world. I'd never seen it. I wasn't even sure it existed. But if I watched long enough, I figured I might find out.

There was still a hand span between the sun and the ground, up here. I sat and watched, the hot wind lifting my hair, until the tawny disk of the sun was halfway gone and I heard the rhythmic crunch of someone coming up the path.

I didn't turn. There was no point. He leaned over my shoulder, braced his crutches on either side of me, a presence solid and cool as a moss-covered rock. I tilted my head back against Pinky's chest, his wet shirt dripping on my forehead, eyes, and mouth. Electric blue lights flickered around him, and I couldn't quite make out his features, shadowed as they were against a twilight sky. He released one crutch and laid his hand on my shoulder. His breath brushed my ear like the susurrus of the sea. "Esau said blood is thicker than water," I said, when I didn't mean to say anything.

"Fish blood isn't," Pinky answered, and his hand tightened. I looked away from the reaching shadows of the canyons below and saw his fingers against my skin, pale silhouettes on olive, unwebbed. He slid one under the black strap of my tank top. I didn't protest, despite the dark red, flaking threads that knotted the green smoke around his hands.

"Where is he?"

"Esau? He drowned."

"But-" I craned my neck. "You said Gilmans never drown."

He shrugged against my back. "I guess the river just took a dislike to him. Happens that way sometimes."

A lingering silence, while I framed my next question. "How did you find me?"

"I'll always find you, if you want," he said, his patched beard rough against my neck. "What are you watching?"

"I'm watching the sun go down."

"Come in under this red rock," he misquoted, as the shadow of the ridge opposite slipped across the valley toward us.

"The handful of dust thing seems appropriate-"

Soft laugh, and he kissed my cheek, hesitantly, as if he wasn't sure I would permit it. "I would have thought it'd be 'Fear death by water.'"

The sun went down. I missed the flash again. I turned to him in a twilight indistinguishable from the gloom that hung around his shoulders and brushed the flickering lights away from his face with the back of my hand. "Not that," I answered. "I have no fear of that, my love."

The Dying of the Light When John Keats was my age, he had been dead for seven years.

The necrophilia makes it seem dirtier than it really is.

Cold comfort, muttered over the phone by 3 a.m.

friends with obviously something better to do.

But it's not the love, not really. It's more my distraction, a ringing bell calling my name. When she calls I salivate. Her voice sounds like static, like electricity. Sparks fly when we're motionless, in stasis. When she's cold.

Like sleeping or whatever else happens under covers on shiny frostbitten autumn nights. John Keats, dead and so tragically young.

Like each of them, it's what he did before dead that matters.

Now ice forms on her skin, and I remember her fingers were slim, slender, like knitting needles or pins. With her arms out wide like that she was easy to keep still. But when she said my name, it had too many syllables. So I leave her hanging, she's left me, and I walk, and all the doors are open.

I'm not here for him-or Sh.e.l.ley either, another one, sucking great agonizing gasps of cold seawater into faltering lungs. All the palely loitering I need hangs in Boston Goth bars.

They're all the places I used to know. Between drinks, I'd call her Tink, as a joke, and she'd mutter under her breath, but when I laughed even she'd smile and with the moon streaming in like that, careful silver, she might have been dead.

Dead as the old poets, covered in old lace, and I remember.

Both men buried in Rome, close as husband and wife-too far away and too, too long ago.

Either way, how I held them up? It was all a matter of display. Like how I see myself in storefront windows, reflected in the damp, the condensation.

Sugar maple leaf plasters my boot wetly, caution orange. I pluck it away.

d.i.c.kinson? Closer, but somebody would have gotten her by now. Rosetti, too: if "The Goblin Market" isn't a dead giveaway.... Dylan Thomas a better candidate, but I hadn't been the first at his grave.

Laden, I trudge uphill, past serried headstones.

Everything is wet, but still there are marks left to make. I unfurl rolls of paper, dig charcoal from the bottom of a ratty bag; I used to sign all of my pieces, my etchings.

But my name means less than it used to.

Some aren't born with it.

Cursed with the will, the skill, fire in the belly but no fire on the soul... we beg. Tin cup to hand, rags bound about the brow.

Now I wait for the pennies to fall from heaven, commuter cash, and I spend them quickly. I buy sandwiches on stale bread, coffee without cream because it's cheaper. And I walk, because here everything is free.

I come to the grave of the hanged man, the rabble-rouser, the forgotten bard. No more songs, he sang, but a power's laid here with him, p.r.i.c.kle and chafe.

Maybe here there are methods to my madness, maybe here she'll come to me.

The sacrifices: chapbooks, a sad few shred-eared literary journals. Self-published, unpaid, unread. Unremembered. Whatever it is, I never had it.

I used to type out everything, but my hands don't shake, not anymore. Now I have records, memoirs, everything.

Paper doesn't burn all that well: thus the brazier. Hibachi. Whatever. Crickets resounding: sky first flame, then mauve, ash.

Finally it's cool enough: I dip fingers, ash- trace his deep cut marble name.

I show her, my piece, my strung up, she has wings, or maybe that's all I can see, b.u.t.terfly girl on blue velvet. My words were for her.

Poetry dies unvoiced. Soon, soon. Use me up, cinder-crumble.

Maybe she flies away, or maybe she doesn't.

Green fairy, mauve fairy. She's in there with him, singer no more under crumbled earth, sod, concrete vault and cheap coffin.

Shovel. Pry bar.

Maybe when I sign my name, the charcoal will look like dirt. Maybe turn itself silver, become the key, the lock, and we'll be trapped, the two of us.

Thick walls and roof: oven, and she'll consume me, licking her fingers, sucking up the juices.

White-hot art. Sh.e.l.ley. Keats. Me.

I can maybe get ten years out of her if I'm careful.

Maybe she'll be dead then, blanket of earth, memory, art. Alabaster, smooth as ice, cold as marble.

(The necrophilia makes it seem dirtier than it really is.) Lucifugous Guten Abend, meinen Damen under Herren! You are this chilly March evening aboard the zeppelin Hans Glucker, departing old Calais for the city of New Amsterdam, jewel of British North America. Among you is a celebrity: the famed Don Sebastien de Ulloa, known to the Continent as the Great Detective, along with his a.s.sistant Jack Priest.

Ah! I see your concern. Clearly you know of Don de Ulloa's reputation. Allow me to a.s.sure you, they are only pa.s.sengers on this voyage, just part of our small and cozy coterie as we sail across the Atlantic. So, relax, ladies and gentlemen.

After all, this is 1899, and this is a zeppelin.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter I.

The zeppelin Hans Glucker left Calais at 9:15 in the evening on a cold night in March, 1899, bound for New Amsterdam, the jewel of British North America. Don Sebastien de Ulloa, known to the Continent as the great detective, pa.s.sed his departure on the promenade, watching the city lights recede through blurring isingla.s.s. He amused himself by taking inventory of his fellow pa.s.sengers while enjoying the aroma of a fairly good cognac.

The Hans Glucker was nearly empty, aside from cargo. So empty, in fact, that Sebastien wondered if she would not have delayed her Atlantic voyage for want of pa.s.sengers if she were not also a mail dispatch and carrying diplomatic papers. Her capacity was over sixty, but this trip she bore only fourteen.

The longest-term travelers were a couple who had been with the airship since Shanghai, Mr. Cui Jioahua and his wife, Zhang Xiaoming. They had pa.s.sage as far as the Spanish settlement of San Diego, on the west coast of North America, where they intended to join familyif the intersection of their limited Arabic and German and Sebastien's equally flawed Cantonese could be trusted.

It seemed a tremendous journey, but the trans-Siberian and then trans-Atlantic route by airship was actually faster and more secure than the month one might expect to spend on a steamer east across the Pacific. Mr. Cui was willing to risk his household furnishings to the pirates infesting the Windward Isles, but, being of a practical bent, he was not willing to risk his own life or that of his lovely wife.

Another six comprised a touring group of five Colonials and one European that had been with the Hans Glucker since Ukraine. The touring group, which had boarded in Kyiv after traveling by rail from Moscow, were all plainly well-acquainted already, and what with one casually overheard conversation and another, Sebastien had pieced together a good deal about them. The eldest pa.s.senger, though by a few years only, was Madame Pontchartrain, a stout, gray-eyed matron enroute to her family's estate in French Mississippi by way of New Amsterdam. She accompanied a young Colonial relative of apparently impeccable breeding and small estate, a Mademoiselle LeClere, who said she was travelling home to Nouvelle Orleans. The resemblance between them was strong enough that Sebastien thought Madame Pontchartrain must have been a very great beauty in her youth. He also thought them lucky that the Hans Glucker's routenew the previous Septemberspared them a trip by rail across the interior of the North American continent. Various treaties with the Native nations would have made it possible, but far more rigorous and perilous than a modern journey by air.

Next was Oczkar Korvin, an aristocratic Hungarian with hair as dark as Sebastien's and an equally patrician bearing. A platinum chain leashed his pocket watch, and though he had the sallow Habsburg coloring, he was undisfigured by the famous deformed jaw. A collateral branch, no doubt.

The loveliest of the group was also the most famous. She traveled with an entourage and claimed three cabins. Dressed outrageously in a man's suit and cravat, Lillian Meadows, the American moving picture star, crossed her ankle over her knee and smoked Virginia cigarettes in a long tortoisesh.e.l.l-and-jet holder, gesturing extravagantly with fingers studded with sapphires and diamonds. She was returning to Atlantawhere the studios werefrom a European junket. Her white-blonde hair had been arranged in delicate waves around jeweled pins, and the English couplewho like Sebastien had boarded at Calaisavoided her.

One of her traveling companions was a man nearly as beautiful as she was, and also blond. He wore his darker gold hair slicked back against his skull, a handlebar moustache accentuating planed cheekbones and a defined jaw. His name was Virgil Allen, and he was a wealthy farmer's son from South Carolina, and a playboy by reputation.

The other was a woman, the Boston auth.o.r.ess Phoebe Smith. She a fair-haired, bespectacled, sensible small woman with a stubborn tilt to her head, straight-spined in widow's black that did not suit her, her hands usually folded before her. She carried a little bag with a black paper-bound note-pad and fountain-pen, and every so often she would take them up and scribble a line.