Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(49)

And who knows when the Sleeping Beauty will wake? (There has

to be an after, so we know that she will.) There are signs now—she ? 155 ?

? Sleeping Beauty of Elista ?

is stirring in her sleep and mumbling occasionally, in the soft gurgle of infants because she never learned another language. So it must be close, the citizens whisper, and disagree about what will happen then. Will she rise and walk across the land, growing gigantic, traveling from Elista to Moscow to Novosibirsk in three steps? Will she multiply herself like a true Buddha, with twin streams of water and fire shooting out of her eyes? Will she teach at the temple?

Or will the mere act of her waking shake the curse away, and the world itself, asleep since 1989, will sit up abruptly, wondering at what had become of it?

The signs are clear now, and the Sleeping Beauty’s eyes are opening, and there is a terrible light behind them; the witch walks into the temple and stands, waiting, her knotted hand resting lightly on the edge of the cot, as if gently shaking the crib to wake a sleeping infant.

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Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety.

Her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming, was released in December 2012. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

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Fairy tales have informed a great deal of my fiction, both my

novels and my short fiction. They’re a wellspring I return to again and again, and sometimes my exploration of them is very overt—as with “The Road of Needles”—and sometimes it’s only subtext. All the various incarnations of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale, those are the ones that have most fascinated me, and so they’re the ones I’ve gone to again and again. But I’d never done the story as science fiction, and, offhand, I couldn’t recall anyone else who had, either. So, when it occurred to me, “The Road of Needles” was born.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

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The Road of Needles


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Caitlín R. Kiernan





1.


Nix Severn shuts her eyes and takes a very deep breath of the

newly minted air filling Isotainer Four, and she cannot help

but note the irony at work. This luxury born of mishap. Certainly, no one on earth has breathed air even half this clean in more than two millennia. The Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Chinese, they all set in motion a fouling of the skies that an Industrial Revolution and the two centuries thereafter would hone into a science of indifference. An art of neglect and denial. Not even the meticulously manufactured atmo of Mars is so pure as each mouthful of the air Nix now breathes. The nitrogen, oxygen—four fingers N , a thumb 2

of 0 —and the so on and so on traces, etcetera, all of it transforming 2

the rise and fall of her chest into a celebration. Oh, happy day for the pulmonary epithelia bathed in this pristine blend. She shuts her eyes and tries to think. But the air has made her giddy. Not drunk, but certainly giddy. It would be easy to drift down to sleep, leaning against the bole of a Dicksonia antarctica, sheltered from the misting rainfall by the umbrella of the tree fern’s fronds, of this tree and all the others that have sprouted and filled the isotainer in the space of less than seventeen hours. She could be a proper Rip Van Winkle, as the Blackbird drifts farther and farther off the lunar-Martian rail line. She could do that fabled narcoleptic one better, pop a few of the phenothiazine capsules in the left hip pouch of her red jumpsuit and ? 161 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

never wake up again. The forest would close in around her, and she would feed it. The fungi, insects, the snails and algae, bacteria and tiny vertebrates, all of them would make a banquet of her sleep and then, soon, her death.

. . . and even all our ancient mother lost was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed with dew, from darkening again with tears.

Even the thought of standing makes her tired.

No, she reminds herself—that part of her brain that isn’t yet ready to surrender. It’s not the thought of getting to my feet. It’s the thought of the five containers remaining between me and the bridge. The thought of the five behind me. That I’ve only come halfway, and there’s the other halfway to go.