Robots vs. Fairies(100)
There was a concert here, in the snowy dead of the night. After it was finished, the children who came to it walked out across the country, and as they walked, they sang the melody beneath their breath, shifting water into ice and smog into air, a song that called to the ghosts of bees and the bones of birds, a song that brought back summer and winter to the world, a song that sang the seasons back into balance.
You know, and I know, if there’s rock, there’s gotta be roll. If there’s a place beneath, this must be the place above, where we stand in an audience listening together, where we sing along to the songs we know.
And then we go to the hotel together, trundle bed and a queen-size, coffee and champagne, me and my family. Our son goes to sleep with his lullaby. I hold my wife in my arms, and she holds me back, as tightly as she holds the world.
. . . we see
The seasons alter. Hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
—William Shakespeare,
Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act II, Scene I
TEAM FAIRY
* * *
BY MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
I’m a Gemini, born on June twenty-first. Solstice, midsummer, cusp, that particularly notorious fairy moment? All of it. This means I want things mutable. Robots are not as mutable as fairies, by nature (or, I guess, by tech-nurture), which is why many robot stories are about robots gaining mutability. Fairies, on the other hand, are inherently made of wildness, unpredictability, and dazzle. In the case of this story, since my theater geek high school days, I’ve had a fondness for the section of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that deals with how a custody battle between Oberon and Titania changes the climate of Earth. It seemed ripe for a contemporary version. It’s always fun to put magic into our real world, and even more fun when the magical people are as complex and inept as we are, when their inability to speak to one another creates the same sort of love disasters we’ve all experienced here. I like the flaws and raging egos of Fairy, the epic injured hearts, the glittering talents. I like it wild.
TO A CLOVEN PINE
by Max Gladstone
Close the jaws. Close them now. Close them before it’s too late.
You want to know why? You want the full story, O Self? I’ll spin you a tale in the seconds we have left, I’ll parse my computation to narrative, I’ll filter you the numinous and then you’ll understand.
When it starts, I hear no screams.
I hope you won’t mistake me, O Self—that’s good. Sort of.
Why? Dearest Self, we’re on the run: Callie, Miri, the old man, and me. The Witch chases us, her million million mites spread across space like an enormous clutching hand. She casts spells through those wicked sharp-edged metal bugs, and seeds snares for us on every channel. She pleads, wheedles, commands in assembly code. Stop, the Witch says. Stop, for a second, and let me slide my claws into your guts.
Self, we know how her claws feel inside us, and none among us is eager to accept her invitation.
So we block our ears with wax—or the scientifical equivalent. We furl antennas, shut receivers down. We run silent and dark as a prehistoric submarine. Ears closed, we can’t hear the Witch’s spells, or her wet cackle, or the screams of her other victims, our fellow ships she’s caught and burned. Back there our friends are dying, back there Our Lady Herself breathes Her last, Her miles-long hull shattered and leaking coolant, Her beautiful great guns silent. We’re safe while we flee—a silver dart on the crest of a bloodthirsty tidal wave. We run through silent space. Witches don’t tire, but neither do we. Thank Newton and his laws.
If we could hear the screams outside our hall, the Witch would have us already.
But we can hear one another—and I ought to hear Callie’s wails right now. I don’t.
That may be a problem.
You see, Caliban had a chance to kill the old man tonight, during our slingshot around the black hole. (We needed speed—we always do. The Witch does not slow.) Motives, Callie has them: she’s a prisoner, she’s suffered the old man’s torture. Method, she has that too: claws and teeth. Opportunity: his back was turned. But she didn’t, which worries me, and now she’s gone, which worries worse.
Outcome matrix: each time Callie tries to kill the old man and fails, he locks her in the cave again. The old man won’t kill her and end it, because Miri won’t let him. She begs each time, on bended knees if needed, till he relents. Callie wants to escape into the black, but he, all mission and purity and fear, won’t let her; if Callie doesn’t kill him, she’ll writhe and hiss beneath his thumb forever. She’s not killed him yet, but failing doesn’t bother her, though she screams when the pain starts.
But the whole world’s quiet tonight—as quiet inside our hull as without. Callie did not die. Neither did the old man. She had the opening, and she didn’t take it. Why?