Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 3) Page 15
* * * *
His voice woke her from the quiescence in which she waited the sun.
“Chalcedony?”
Something cried as she came awake. Infant, she identified, but the warm shape in his arms was not an infant. It was a dog, a young dog, a German shepherd like the ones teamed with the handlers that had sometimes worked with Company L.
The dogs had never minded her, but some of the handlers had been frightened, though they would not admit it. Sergeant Patterson had said to one of them, Oh, Chase is just pretty much a big attack dog herself, and had made a big show of rubbing Chalcedony behind her telescopic sights, to the sound of much laughter.
The young dog was wounded. Its injuries bled warmth across its hind leg.
“Hello, Belvedere,” Chalcedony said.
“Found a puppy.” He kicked his ragged blanket flat so he could lay the dog down.
“Are you going to eat it?”
“Chalcedony!” he snapped, and covered the animal protectively with his arms.
“S’hurt.”
She contemplated. “You wish me to tend to it?”
He nodded, and she considered. She would need her lights, energy, irreplaceable stores. Antibiotics and coagulants and surgical supplies, and the animal might die anyway. But dogs were valuable; she knew the handlers held them in great esteem, even greater than Sergeant Patterson’s esteem for Chalcedony. And in her library, she had files on veterinary medicine.
She flipped on her floods and accessed the files.
* * * *
She finished before morning, and before her cells ran dry. Just barely.
When the sun was up and the young dog was breathing comfortably, the gash along its haunch sewn closed and its bloodstream saturated with antibiotics, she turned back to the last necklace. She would have to work quickly, and Sergeant Patterson’s necklace contained the most fragile and beautiful beads, the ones Chalcedony had been most concerned with breaking and so had saved for last, when she would be most experienced.
Her motions grew slower as the day wore on, more laborious. The sun could not feed her enough to replace the expenditures of the night before. But bead linked into bead, and the necklace grew—bits of pewter, of pottery, of glass and mother of pearl. And the chalcedony Buddha, because Sergeant Patterson had been Chalcedony’s operator.
When the sun approached its zenith, Chalcedony worked faster, benefiting from a burst of energy. The young dog slept on in her shade, having wolfed the scraps of bird Belvedere gave it, but Belvedere climbed the rock and crouched beside her pile of finished necklaces.
“Who’s this for?” he asked, touching the slack length draped across her manipulator.
“Kay Patterson,” Chalcedony answered, adding a greenish-brown pottery bead mottled like a combat uniform.
“Sir Kay,” Belvedere said. His voice was changing, and sometimes it abandoned him completely in the middle of words, but he got that phrase out entire.
“She was King Arthur’s horse-master, and his adopted brother, and she kept his combat robots in the stable,” he said, proud of his recall.
“They were different Kays,” she reminded. “You will have to leave soon.”
She looped another bead onto the chain, closed the link, and work-hardened the metal with her fine manipulator.
“You can’t leave the beach. You can’t climb.”
Idly, he picked up a necklace, Rodale’s, and stretched it between his hands so the beads caught the light. The links clinked softly.
Belvedere sat with her as the sun descended and her motions slowed. She worked almost entirely on solar power now. With night, she would become quiescent again. When the storms came, the waves would roll over her, and then even the sun would not awaken her again. “You must go,” she said, as her grabs stilled on the almost-finished chain. And then she lied and said, “I do not want you here.”
“Who’s this’n for?” he asked. Down on the beach, the young dog lifted its head and whined. “Garner,” she answered, and then she told him about Garner, and Antony, and Javez, and Rodriguez, and Patterson, and White, and Wosczyna, until it was dark enough that her voice and her vision failed.
* * * *
In the morning, he put Patterson’s completed chain into Chalcedony’s grabs.
He must have worked on it by firelight through the darkness. “Couldn’t harden the links,” he said, as he smoothed them over her claws.
Silently, she did that, one by one. The young dog was on its feet, limping, nosing around the base of the rock and barking at the waves, the birds, a scuttling crab. When Chalcedony had finished, she reached out and draped the necklace around Belvedere’s shoulders while he held very still. Soft fur downed his cheeks.
The male Marines had always scraped theirs smooth, and the women didn’t grow facial hair.
“You said that was for Sir Kay.” He lifted the chain in his hands and studied the way the glass and stones caught the light.
“It’s for somebody to remember her,” Chalcedony said. She didn’t correct him this time. She picked up the other forty necklaces. They were heavy, all together.
She wondered if Belvedere could carry them. “So remember her. Can you remember which one is whose?”
One at a time, he named them, and one at a time she handed them to him.
Rogers, and Rodale, and van Metier, and Percy. He spread a second blanket out—and where had he gotten a second blanket? Maybe the same place he’d gotten the dog—and laid them side by side on the navy blue wool.
They sparkled.
“Tell me the story about Rodale,” she said, brushing her grab across the necklace. He did, sort of, with half of Roland-and-Oliver mixed in. It was a pretty good story anyway, the way he told it. Inasmuch as she was a fit judge.
“Take the necklaces,” she said. “Take them. They’re mourning jewelry. Give them to people and tell them the stories. They should go to people who will remember and honor the dead.”
“Where will I find alla these people?” he asked, sullenly, crossing his arms.
“Ain’t on the beach.”
“No,” she said, “they are not. You’ll have to go look for them.”
* * * *
But he wouldn’t leave her. He and the dog ranged up and down the beach as the weather chilled. Her sleeps grew longer, deeper, the low angle of the sun not enough to awaken her except at noon. The storms came, and because the table rock broke the spray, the salt water stiffened her joints but did not—yet—corrode her processor. She no longer moved and rarely spoke even in daylight, and Belvedere and the young dog used her carapace and the rock for shelter, the smoke of his fires blackening her belly.
She was hoarding energy.
By mid-November, she had enough, and she waited and spoke to Belvedere when he returned with the young dog from his rambling. “You must go,” she said, and when he opened his mouth to protest, she added, “It is time you went on errantry.”
His hand went to Patterson’s necklace, which he wore looped twice around his neck, under his ragged coat. He had given her back the others, but that one she had made a gift of. “Errantry?”
Creaking, powdered corrosion grating from her joints, she lifted the necklaces off her head. “You must find the people to whom these belong.”
He deflected her words with a jerk of his hand. “They’s all dead.”
“The warriors are dead,” she said. “But the stories aren’t. Why did you save the young dog?”
He licked his lips, and touched Patterson’s necklace again. “‘Cause you saved me. And you told me the stories. About good fighters and bad fighters. And so, see, Percy woulda saved the dog, right? And so would Hazel-rah.”
Emma Percy, Chalcedony was reasonably sure, would have saved the dog if she could have. And Kevin Michaels would have saved the kid. She held the remaining necklaces out.
He stared, hands twisting before him. “You can’t climb.”
“I can’t. You must do this for me. Find p
eople to remember the stories. Find people to tell about my platoon. I won’t survive the winter.” Inspiration struck. “I give you this quest, Sir Belvedere.”
The chains hung flashing in the wintry light, the sea combed gray and tired behind them. “What kinda people?”
“People who would help a child,” she said. “Or a wounded dog. People like a platoon should be.”
He paused. He reached out, stroked the chains, let the beads rattle. He crooked both hands, and slid them into the necklaces up to the elbows, taking up her burden.
26 MONKEYS, ALSO THE ABYSS
Kij Johnson
1.
Aimee’s big trick is that she makes twenty-six monkeys vanish onstage.
* * * *
2.
She pushes out a claw-foot bathtub and asks audience members to come up and inspect it. The people climb in and look underneath, touch the white enamel, run their hands along the little lions’ feet. When they’re done, four chains are lowered from the stage’s fly space. Aimee secures them to holes drilled along the tub’s lip and gives a signal, and the bathtub is hoisted ten feet into the air.
She sets a stepladder next to it. She claps her hands and the twenty-six monkeys onstage run up the ladder one after the other and jump into the bathtub. The bathtub shakes as each monkey thuds in among the others. The audience can see heads, legs, tails; but eventually every monkey settles and the bathtub is still again. Zeb is always the last monkey up the ladder. As he climbs into the bathtub, he makes a humming boom deep in his chest. It fills the stage.
And then there’s a flash of light, two of the chains fall off, and the bathtub swings down to expose its interior.
Empty.
* * * *
3.
They turn up later, back at the tour bus. There’s a smallish dog door, and in the hours before morning the monkeys let themselves in, alone or in small groups, and get themselves glasses of water from the tap. If more than one returns at the same time, they murmur a bit among themselves, like college students meeting in the dorm halls after bar time. A few sleep on the sofa and at least one likes to be on the bed, but most of them wander back to their cages. There’s a little grunting as they rearrange their blankets and soft toys, and then sighs and snoring. Aimee doesn’t really sleep until she hears them all come in.
Aimee has no idea what happens to them in the bathtub, or where they go, or what they do before the soft click of the dog door opening. This bothers her a lot.
* * * *
4.
Aimee has had the act for three years now. She was living in a month-by-month furnished apartment under a flight path for the Salt Lake City airport. She was hollow, as if something had chewed a hole in her body and the hole had grown infected.
There was a monkey act at the Utah State Fair. She felt a sudden and totally out-of-character urge to see it. Afterward, with no idea why, she walked up to the owner and said, “I have to buy this.”
He nodded. He sold it to her for a dollar, which he told her was the price he had paid four years before.
Later, when the paperwork was filled out, she asked him, “How can you leave them? Won’t they miss you?”
“You’ll see, they’re pretty autonomous,” he said. “Yeah, they’ll miss me and I’ll miss them. But it’s time, they know that.”
He smiled at his new wife, a small woman with laugh lines and a vervet hanging from one hand. “We’re ready to have a garden,” she said.
He was right. The monkeys missed him. But they also welcomed her, each monkey politely shaking her hand as she walked into what was now her bus.
* * * *
5.
Aimee has: a nineteen-year-old tour bus packed with cages that range in size from parrot-sized (for the vervets) to something about the size of a pickup bed (for all the macaques); a stack of books on monkeys ranging from All About Monkeys to Evolution and Ecology of Baboon Societies; some sequined show costumes, a sewing machine, and a bunch of Carhartts and tees; a stack of show posters from a few years back that say 24 Monkeys! Face The Abyss; a battered sofa in a virulent green plaid; and a boyfriend who helps with the monkeys.
She cannot tell you why she has any of these, not even the boyfriend, whose name is Geof, whom she met in Billings seven months ago. Aimee has no idea where anything comes from any more: she no longer believes that anything makes sense, even though she can’t stop hoping.
The bus smells about as you’d expect a bus full of monkeys to smell; though after a show, after the bathtub trick but before the monkeys all return, it also smells of cinnamon, which is the tea Aimee sometimes drinks.
* * * *
6.
For the act, the monkeys do tricks, or dress up in outfits and act out hit movies—The Matrix is very popular, as is anything where the monkeys dress up like little orcs. The maned monkeys, the lion-tails and the colobuses, have a lion-tamer act, with the old capuchin female, Pango, dressed in a red jacket and carrying a whip and a small chair. The chimpanzee (whose name is Mimi, and no, she is not a monkey) can do actual sleight of hand; she’s not very good, but she’s the best Chimp Pulling A Coin From Someone’s Ear in the world.
The monkeys also can build a suspension bridge out of wooden chairs and rope, make a four-tier champagne fountain, and write their names on a whiteboard.
The monkey show is very popular, with a schedule of 127 shows this year at fairs and festivals across the Midwest and Great Plains. Aimee could do more, but she likes to let everyone have a couple of months off at Christmas.
* * * *
7.
This is the bathtub act:
Aimee wears a glittering purple-black dress designed to look like a scanty magician’s robe. She stands in front of a scrim lit deep blue and scattered with stars. The monkeys are ranged in front of her. As she speaks they undress and fold their clothes into neat piles. Zeb sits on his stool to one side, a white spotlight shining straight down to give him a shadowed look.
She raises her hands.
“These monkeys have made you laugh, and made you gasp. They have created wonders for you and performed mysteries. But there is a final mystery they offer you—the strangest, the greatest of all.”
She parts her hands suddenly, and the scrim goes transparent and is lifted away, revealing the bathtub on a raised dais. She walks around it, running her hand along the tub’s curves.
“It’s a simple thing, this bathtub. Ordinary in every way, mundane as breakfast. In a moment I will invite members of the audience up to let you prove this for yourselves.
“But for the monkeys it is also a magical object. It allows them to travel—no one can say where. Not even I—” she pauses “—can tell you this. Only the monkeys know, and they share no secrets.
“Where do they go? Into heaven, foreign lands, other worlds—or some dark abyss? We cannot follow. They will vanish before our eyes, vanish from this most ordinary of things.”
And after the bathtub is inspected and she has told the audience that there will be no final spectacle in the show—”It will be hours before they return from their secret travels”—and called for applause for them, she gives the cue.
* * * *
8.
Aimee’s monkeys:
+ 2 siamangs, a mated couple
+ 2 squirrel monkeys, though they’re so active they might as well be twice as many
+ 2 vervets
+ a guenon, who is probably pregnant, though it’s still too early to tell for sure. Aimee has no idea how this happened
+ 3 rhesus monkeys. They juggle a little
+ a capuchin female named Pango
+ a crested macaque, 3 snow monkeys (one quite young), and a Java macaque. Despite the differences, they have formed a small troop and like to sleep together
+ a chimpanzee, who is not actually a monkey
+ a surly gibbon
+ 2 marmosets
+ a golden tamarin; a cotton-top tamarin
+ a proboscis monkey
>
+ red and black colubuses
+ Zeb
* * * *
9.
Aimee thinks Zeb might be a de Brazza’s guenon, except that he’s so old that he has lost almost all his hair. She worries about his health, but he insists on staying in the act. By now all he’s really up for is the final rush to the bathtub, and for him it is more of a stroll. The rest of the time, he sits on a stool that is painted orange and silver and watches the other monkeys, looking like an aging impresario watching his Swan Lake from the wings. Sometimes she gives him things to hold, such as a silver hoop through which the squirrel monkeys jump.
* * * *
10.
No one knows how the monkeys vanish or where they go. Sometimes they return holding foreign coins or durian fruit, or wearing pointed Moroccan slippers. Every so often one returns pregnant or accompanied by a new monkey. The number of monkeys is not constant.
“I just don’t get it,” Aimee keeps asking Geof, as if he has any idea. Aimee never knows anything any more. She’s been living without any certainties, and this one thing—well, the whole thing, the fact the monkeys get along so well and know how to do card tricks and just turned up in her life and vanish from the bathtub; everything—she coasts with that most of the time, but every so often, when she feels her life is wheeling without brakes down a long hill, she starts poking at this again.
Geof trusts the universe a lot more than Aimee does, trusts that things make sense and that people can love, and therefore he doesn’t need the same proofs. “You could ask them,” he says.
* * * *