Angels and Exiles
Authors: Yves Meynard
YVES MEYNARD
ChiZine Publications
JO WALTON
I first came across Yves Meynard around the turn of the millennium with the short story “Tobacco Words” (which you will find in this collection) in a Year’s Best anthology. It blew me away. I immediately went to see what else Meynard had written and found the novel
The Book of Knights
(1998), which I acquired and enjoyed. By the time I moved to Montreal in 2002 and actually met Yves, I was a big fan of his work.
Yves is a big guy with a square head and close-cropped hair. He says himself he looks as if he’s drawn by Picasso. He’s funny and witty and considerate and kind, all of which you might guess from reading his work.
When I first met him, I was both thrilled and horrified to discover that most of his writing was in French, and that he’s just as much of a stylist in French as he is in English, and also that (like my other favourite Francophone writer, Elisabeth Vonarburg) I was going to have to either wait for translations of his work or improve my French a lot.
Yves, like many Montrealers, speaks both official Canadian languages with equal facility. Even so, most writers only work in one or the other. I asked him once about writing in both languages, and he told me that he has ideas in one language or the other. This makes perfect sense to me, because ideas come to me with their mode. Still, it seems more impressive to create across languages, and to have the skill with words Yves has to make either language do what he wants.
In French, he has long been recognized as a major writer. In English, recognition has been slower, I suspect simply because he hasn’t published as much. In 2012, Tor brought out a second novel by Yves in English,
Chrysanthe,
a high fantasy reminiscent of Dunsany, Zelazny, Eddison, and Wolfe.
Now we have this collection, with its fascinating title:
Angels & Exiles
. It contains all of Yves’ best short work in English from the last quarter century. Some of these stories are easy to find. Some were entirely new to me. I think some will be new to even his most devoted fans. This is the point where I should single out some of the stories for your attention, but I’m finding it hard to do. I don’t want to spoil them at all. I could say there’s an android, and a train, but the process of discovering what these things mean is something you should come to yourself.
These stories cover a vast range, were written over a long time, and there’s a whole lot of variety. Some are fantasy, some are science fiction, and many of them cover an interesting middle ground between the two—a form I think of as myths of the future, and of which Meynard has a special mastery. I do like some of them best; that’s inevitable. But taken as a whole, it’s a terrific collection. It’s always interesting to see a body of work brought together, to see it as one thing, to notice recurring themes and motifs. Here, the theme that resonates most strongly across the stories is the power of hope. Hope is sometimes denied or deferred, but it is never scorned. Sometimes when you read a collection in one piece it reveals flaws that you wouldn’t notice in stories read alone, and other times, as here, seeing it together highlights how very good it all is.
But it isn’t just good. It’s exciting.
Yves Meynard is an exciting writer.
It’s not just that he’s a stylist, with every word chosen so perfectly for its purpose that his prose is a joy to read. It’s not just that he writes characters who you can care about as if they’re your friends, even if they are sparingly evoked in just a few lines. Nor is it his strangely angled and baroque worlds, fascinating as they are. Any one of these things would make his stories worth reading, and they’re all present throughout his work. What makes him an exciting writer, what makes me catch my breath time and again when reading his work, is the confluence of these things with the twists he throws on his ideas. I find myself reading along admiring the prose, loving the characters, delighting in the charm of the details, and then suddenly the story comes around an unexpected corner and forces me to reassess everything I was thinking. And that’s exciting. It’s part of what I want and, I believe, what every genre reader wants from a story—not just the breath of strangeness, but finding a new way of confronting the universe.
You’ll find that here. I feel confident that you’ll enjoy these stories, and that they’ll move you. But better than that, there will be moments, and they might be different moments for you than for me, when these stories make you realize that the world isn’t the way you thought it was. And when I say that, I don’t necessarily mean the world of the story.
Rails have been set to cincture the world, east to west to east, along the equatorial lowlands. There are many other lines, in all directions. Only this one runs forever, looping back upon itself.
On the rails, in the middle of the region the toponymists have named New Caucasus, a train is running in the direction of Sternstadt, the hub of the network. The train is several hundred cars long: from one end of it, you can barely see the other.
Its locomotive is a screaming woman. Steel hair sweeps back from her steel eyes; steel arms piston at her sides; her gaping steel mouth howls as it devours the thick air
She roars over the rails at a terrific pace. It is as if she wanted to outrace the setting sun; indeed, she nearly does. The already sluggish passage of the World’s furnace through the heavens is slowed fourfold: sunsets last more than a full workshift.
Apart from the steel woman, who may or may not count, there is only one living being aboard the train: a man, who spends the voyages in the control cabin built at the back of the locomotive, where the organic lines of her body flow into rectangular contours. For long Hours, the man works, checking and rechecking the status of the energy systems, feeding the furnace the fuel it demands, wiping the glass dials clean with a moistened cloth. One Hour in every four he may rest. At those times, he usually sits quietly and drinks vodka, which is allowed so long as it is not done to excess. The man needs very little sleep. Also, he has no name. The former is essentially a consequence of the latter.
Wasps and vipers, fangs and stings, the bite of alcohol after a long Day’s work. For this Hour, the man without a name sits atop the metacoal tender and watches the angels fly alongside the train.
Why they do it he does not know. Every voyage, as soon as he has left Sternstadt behind the horizon, they appear. Where they come from he cannot tell. It is almost as though they were escorting him. Their stiff wings beat rapidly, but they fail to keep pace with the train’s progress.
The man enjoys watching them. He knows they do no harm. He feels a touch of pity for them, of embarrassment for the gruelling pace he sets. Sometimes he toys with the idea of slowing down the train, if only for a brief while, so that they will be able to keep up with it. Perhaps they would appreciate his kindness, he tells himself. But he never entertains this thought for long: after a short time, he begins to feel pain in his head and busies himself with the locomotive to make the ache stop.
He has, after all, a schedule to maintain; how could he think of running late?
The man chases away that idea and returns to his contemplation of the angels. One of them is close, indeed, closer than he has ever seen one come. It is a large male, full of the strength and temerity of all young men. It is actually flying faster than the train is running. It advances (for all its speed, it seems almost to crawl), flying low above the wagons. It is so very close. . . . It has reached the edge of the tender! The man stares in disbelief as the angel grasps the rail with its hands and feet, and climbs aboard.
The man without a name is stunned. He eases down from the pile of golden-red metacoal, approaches the angel. He is careful and slow, not wanting to scare it away. But the angel does not seem timid; it remains immobile, only its thin chest heaving with breath, as it watches the man (its eyes are almost entirely black, with a smoky gleam in them from the sun).
The man is close to the angel now. He marvels silently at its face, whose incredibly falcate nose and deep wrinkles belong to a fairy-tale crone; at the mating-hooks protruding from its haunches; at the design on its chest, a set of whitish lines on the blue scales, like a ritual scar: a tilted lemniscate struck by a broken diagonal.
The angel still watches the man, without a quiver or a sign of fear; it runs the long fingers of one hand through its mop of feathery hair (all six of its digits have four joints). And then it speaks.
—Are you a man of words?
The man’s jaw goes slack. He had never thought that angels could talk—although perhaps, once, someone he only dimly recalls might have told him something about it. But certainly he never believed.
—I look for a man of words, says the angel. I will hear a story. Tell me a story, Other (its voice is like the wind whistling through the branches of the hag-pines that line the railway).
A story? The request is even more surprising than the fact of the angel speaking.
—What . . . which story do you mean? the man says stupidly.
As he speaks, the man without a name feels a slight ache in his brain. Then he stands quite still, and tells himself—clearly, in words that echo loudly through his head—that this is the end of his shift, that he has a full Hour to himself, that nothing he does hurts the Company in any way. And after a moment the pain goes away, like water drunk by a patch of dry sand—diffused, but wholly there, under the surface.
—A story, any story, the angel has been saying with apparent urgency. Tell me a story, Other.
The man hesitates; but the request is not for something forbidden, and he does not mean to refuse it if it means the angel will go away. So he nods slowly, sits down amidst the nuggets of metacoal. The angel smiles as if with relief (its teeth are thin, numerous, and pointed) and sits likewise. It folds its stiff butterfly wings so that they offer as little surface to the wind as possible. Were it to deploy them fully, thinks the nameless man, the wind of their passage would propel the angel backward and away in an instant.
Now the man thinks of asking a price for the storytelling. But what could the angel give him—and what does he need that the Company does not provide? He cannot even ask for an exchange of names, lacking one of his own. So, somewhat gracelessly, he begins:
—This is a story from long ago. I heard it from someone on the railway, I think. I don’t remember when.
The angel hunches its head forward on its long neck and clutches a nugget of metacoal in its spidery hands. The man without a name begins his tale.
Not long after the Company came to the World, there was a young man who lived in one of the cities of the plain.
In those Days, the mantle of the World still had holes in it: there were many places in the World which would poison you if you went there unprotected. The young man’s father was a monitor: his duty was to check the poisoned places, to gather data for the life-weavers, those who planned the mantle’s growth, its slow conquest by assimilation. The young man’s mother had been of the life-weavers. She had died many years back, from a native illness that had escaped from the glass tubes where she had been studying it.
The young man went to school at a lyceum of high repute in Sternstadt, thousands of kilometres away from his residence, so that he could rarely return home. Before his mother’s death, the young man had looked forward to those infrequent visits; too much so, he felt. When he became an adult, he might be called on to leave his home for a new one, halfway across the World; and so strong ties were discouraged by the Company.
But now he feared his return home, for after his mother’s death, his father had grown slowly but thoroughly insane. In all ways now he acted as if his wife had never died, and this terrified the young man, who began to find excuses not to come. After a while, he realized that his father did not need any justification from him for his absences, and he ceased to bother. And in some way, that was worse than all of his father’s madness.
Now when the young man was twenty, a year away from the Employment Examinations, he fell in love. It isn’t very surprising that his love was the exact opposite of his father’s. His mother had been a quiet and dependable woman, and his father’s love for her a quiet and dependable thing. The young man fell in love with a vain young woman whose future as an Employee was doubtful; he quarrelled with her all the time, only to make up in tears before the Day was half done.
In his own painful way, he was probably happy.
Not long after he met the young woman, the young man began to neglect his studies. The Day of the Examination approached, and he failed to prepare properly: he scored less than ever before. His mentors warned him as sternly as they could; but he did not listen. In desperation the mentors tried to call the young man’s father to make him talk sense into his son; but he was away on a mission.
He never came back.
His body was found in one of the poisonous areas, not far from his lifter. A spine from a needlegaunt had struck through a fault in his xenosuit’s fabric: the venom had killed him in an instant.
Everyone was sad at the news: the young man’s father had been a good Employee, even after his wife’s death. Everyone thought there would be a full funeral, as always for those Employees who die in the line of duty. But the investigation revealed that the damage to the fabric had been deliberate. The death was ruled to be a suicide. The young man’s father was cremated, and all his wealth reverted to the Company, as its laws said it must. It was also decreed that his name would not be written on the Pioneer’s Monument.
Something happened to the young man then, like the phase-shift that announces a fusion engine has gone into self-generating mode. All of a sudden, he returned to his studies. He did not seem to be making any special efforts, but at the Examination, his marks were the highest the lyceum had seen in a generation.
He was admitted into the ranks of the Employees, but this was not the end of his rise. One of his few friends said his intelligence had “bloomed like a flame” and now he would have said it wanted to devour the whole world of knowledge. The young man took the most demanding courses and passed them easily; he made several brilliant suggestions on the research problems where he was put as an assistant; in his spare time, he designed improved life-weaving machines.
They called him a genius. The Company put him on the Planetology program, with the master planners for the development of the World. No one else had ever achieved those ranks so young; his reputation was made, his wealth was assured. The stigma of his father’s madness and death had been washed from him.
The one thing that reflected poorly upon him was his continuing relationship with the frivolous young woman: as anyone would have foretold, she had failed to become an Employee. She was immensely below his status, yet he remained with her, despite their incessant quarrels. His money supported her. And after all, it was a minor thing: geniuses are allowed to be eccentric, and some people said it reflected well on him to be supporting a young woman who otherwise would have been drafted into the Reproduction Corps.
So the young man was set for the future, and his name was certain to be carved deep on the Monument. No one could have foretold what was to happen.
The young man was right at the peak of his career; he was involved in nearly every project at the highest level, which meant he knew many secrets of the Company. That was when he rebelled. He had never forgiven the Company for its ruling on his father’s death; and now he intended to make war on it.
With his wealth, he had built a hidden castle in the mountains, where no one could find him; he fled to it in a stolen flier, along with tons of equipment. The young woman went along with him.
From the castle, he waged war with the Company. In all the places he had worked, he had left software-bombs to irretrievably destroy data, or mechanical traps that would wreck priceless experiments, if not entire laboratories. But he didn’t stop there. He blew up the rail network that linked the cities. He introduced chaos into the computers that controlled the automated outposts. He had even brought genetic equipment with him, and with it he tried to undo the efforts of the life-weavers by adapting the local life to compete with Man-life; by creating diseases to attack the plants, and microorganisms that changed the atmosphere back to what it had been.
For years he fought his war; he did terrible damage to the Company, and they could not stop him. But then something else happened that hadn’t been foretold. The young woman fell sick. It was a sickness the young man couldn’t cure. Only the Company could heal her.
And so he communicated with the Company. He made a deal with it: if it saved his love, he would stop his war and give himself up.
The Company agreed; and its word was binding. It saved the young man’s love in the way that only it could have saved her; so the young man surrendered.
He thought the Company would punish him by killing him, but the Company could not take his life. Instead, it forgave him: it took him back as an Employee, and the young woman as well.
And they lived happily ever after.
The man falls silent. The angel watches him fixedly, the lump of metacoal still held tightly in its hands. Feeling a sudden spasm of unreasoned fear—water moistening the surface of the sand—the man rises to his feet, goes forward to check on the locomotive.
But all is well. In the depths of the furnace, the metacoal nuggets catalyze the cool fusion of light nuclei; as they become exhausted, they disaggregate and fall to a fine powder that is evacuated and dispersed beneath the engine, coating the rails as with gold dust. The hopper is full, the reaction temperature squarely within the green portion of the alarm spectrum; the cybersystem murmurs softly “all is well.” The nameless man is not needed; he is still on his Hour-long break. The sun will not set for a long time yet.