Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (27 page)

Ahead, atop a rise, something moved in the gloom. Figures, all of different sizes and shapes, some huge and lumbering, some ethereal and others winged and crouched over. The ones he was looking for. He smiled and using the intercom, directed the attack. The war machines closed on their targets, weapons loaded and ready. Quince had decided to see how the enemy reacted before opening fire on them. He wanted to scare them off first, hopefully back to wherever they had the woman’s son and granddaughter. In case that failed, he would use the nets to trap one or two and make his prisoners take him to their lair. It wouldn’t be hard once he used the drugs and prods on them.

Once he had Mrs. Cullen and the son and granddaughter safely in hand, he would decide whether to eradicate these troublesome creatures or simply frighten them badly enough that they would flee the country and all this Old Folk nonsense would be ended.

As the war machines crested the rise, the creatures they pursued already fled into the trees, Quince saw the yawning black chasm directly ahead of them, only yards away, invisible until you were right on top of it. He shouted into the intercom in warning, screaming, “Stop, stop!” But it was too late. The momentum of the vehicles carried both over the edge and into the void.

The war machines tumbled away and the occupants were consumed by their own dark fears.

Barbro turned from Jimmy and the baby when she heard the screams, wondering at their source. When she turned back again, they were gone. She looked around wildly, frantic to find them, a tall ethereal figure emerged from the trees. The Queen of Air and Darkness was luminous in her robes of northlights and garlands of snowy kiss-me-never, and a wondrous glow that mimicked the aurora and the rainbows after storms and the dreams of men unrealized and lost shown about her head.

“Welcome home, Wanderfoot,” she greeted, her voice as soft as kitten fur and a child’s wishes on a star.

Without knowing why, Barbro inclined her head slightly in recognition that she was in the presence of royalty. “I had forgotten you called me that.”

“Once I did, when you were asked to stay and fled.”

She shook her head in despair. “I was frightened. I wanted my child back.”

The Queen looked off into the distance. “So you took him. But now he is here again.”

“With Barraboo. My grandchild. I have come for them.”

“With war machines and weapons and the men who use them. Very like another time.”

Barbro was crying. “A terrible mistake. I am sorry.”

Ayoch appeared, knelt and bowed to the Queen. “All finished, Lady Moon. Gone into the void, men and machines and their dark intent.” He glanced at Barbro. “We were not ready for such wickedness last time. But we can learn and we can adapt and we can be what we need to be. Cockatoo!”

His crowing rattled her further. “I want to see my son and granddaughter. Please let me.”

“So you can take them away again? So you can return them to lives you believe will be so much better than ours? To drugs that will numb their minds and steal their wits away? To drinks and potions and pills that will give them no relief? To soul-stealing machines that will offer alternative realities both sterile and empty? To links to millions of words spoken by faceless voices in meaningless interactions that will never allow for the touch of flesh and offer only the pretense of true caring? Why, Wanderfoot? So they can be lost in your cities and your teeming numbers and never know loving and never live unfettered or experience the bliss of wildflowers and close companionships or escape the futility in everything they do? You would give them air filled with ashes and dust and tar and poison to breathe? You would give them concrete roads and stone block walls that rise up and crush their spirit and steal their hopes? You would see them rot from within and without; you would witness them suffer crushing defeats of rejection and indifference? All that, would you give them, even knowing they would never be made happy and fulfilled in the way they would if they remained here with me!”

The Queen’s words floated on the air, spoken in a voice absent of disdain and filled only with sadness. “Come hither with me, Wanderfoot,” she whispered. “Come see what you ask your child and grandchild to forgo.”

She stepped away and Barbro followed obediently, even though aware that what she would be shown was false trickery of the sort that Sherrinford had warned so strongly against.

Ayoch bounded along beside her, his half-human face wreathed in a smile. “You are so sure in your wrongness. Listen to her!”

In an emerald glade washed with the glow of firethorn and starlight she found Jimmy and Barraboo. Jimmy had the baby lying on a blanket spread wide, her chubby legs kicking and her curious arms reaching for the kiss-me-never vine he dangled over her. There seemed no pretenses about what she was seeing, no false coloring of the landscape or dressing up of father and daughter, no attempt at recreating fiction to approximate truth. Barbro understood. What she was seeing was real and present. The Queen had learned a few things since last they met.

“This is what you would take from them,” the Queen declared. “This is what you would steal away.”

“No,” Barbro whispered. “This is what I would give them back again. This is what I would help them find. You would let them see this, but I would let them live it. You would give them this only in their minds, and I would give them this for real. Or at least I would try. Not all would be good and kind, but much of it would. Better they see life for what it is than for what pretense would make it seem. Here, there is only the latter.”

She was astonished she had spoken so boldly, but the Queen simply gave a small wave of her hand. “You cannot give them what they need, Wanderfoot. You cannot even help them find it. Not in your world of decay and disintegration. Your failure is already written in the books of your history. Your race is doomed. The Fey are the future as they have been the past.”

Barbro straightened and faced her squarely. “Please let me have them,” she said. “They belong with me.”

The Queen regarded her, tall and regal and distant, her eyes depthless pools of far-seeing and secrets untold. “You will sleep with us tonight and on the morrow I will decide.”

Then she was gone, faded back into the night. Ayoch was beside her at once. “Your bed is here, mother love,” he said, gesturing vaguely.

She glanced back to where she had seen Jimmy and Barraboo, but they were gone. She felt a sudden, intense weariness steal over her. She could not seem to help herself; she had to sleep.

“Lead me,” she told the pooka, and so he did.

When she woke again, Jimmy was sitting next to her. He had a worn and world-weary look, but there was intensity in his blue eyes that suggested the strength of his resolve. She could tell at once that he had decided on his course of action. She sat up quickly. “Will you come away with me?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I will remain here. I came to find a new life. I need to leave behind the old one. It stole so much away from me I cannot go back to it. Here, I have a chance to find peace and contentment of the sort I knew as a child.”

“It is not real,” she insisted.

“It is real enough for me, and more real than the life I was living. I do not believe in that world anymore. I hope I can come to believe in this one.”

“And Barraboo? Will you keep here with you or give her to me?”

She had missed seeing the bundle lying by his side. He reached down and picked up the baby and handed it to her. “Give her what you think she needs and if that fails, bring her back to me. I will be waiting.”

She was in tears as she took the baby and held it to her. Its dark little face peeked out at her with eyes that at once seemed both young and innocent and old and wise. “Oh, Jimmy,” she whispered.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Think of me now and then, Mother. Remember how happy I am.”

He led her down to where a wagon hitched to a reindeer and driven by an old man barely taller than her waist and wrinkled with age waited. Jimmy helped her climb aboard, taking care to wrap her and Barraboo in a blanket. He smiled a knowing smile at the driver, who gave back a small nod, and then the little man clucked at the reindeer and lightly touched one flank with the switch and the wagon and its occupants rumbled off into the haze.

Morgarel the wraith waited until they were gone too far for the woman to look back and see him changing back and then walked over to Ayoch. The pooka was staring off into the distant, watching after Wanderfoot and her new baby with sharp, far-seeing eyes.

“Hoah,” the pooka said softly. “How long do you give her?”

“Before she comes again? I have no sense of that. Years, I hope. The changeling needs time to adapt and learn.”

“Which she will do. She is clever, that one. And how clever our Mistress, too.” He looked behind the wraith. “And what of them?”

Jimmy Cullen sat rocking Barraboo as he fed her milk from a goatskin and sang softly to her. Other creatures hovered at the edges of shadows that didn’t quite reach to where father and daughter shared a life and watched intently.

“He will live awhile longer and then pass. She will become one of us. The Queen ordains.”

“Mother Sky sees our future thusly. We will be them and so make them us, and in the end ours shall be the way.” Ayoch cocked his head and hopped once in a sort of minor celebration. “Cockatoo!” he crowed.

The cry echoed over Cloudmoor and into the future.

AFTERWORD:

I began reading
science fiction and fantasy in middle school—right about 1956—although there was little enough of the latter being written at that time and most of the kids I knew were reading the former. It was the beginning of the age of space travel and Sputnik and travels to the moon, and that was what every kid I knew was reading about. I shouldn’t say “kids” but rather “boys” because very few girls I knew had found their way to that sort of fiction yet.

Anyway, among those writers whose works I read and admired—while still in my burgeoning wannabe-professiona-writer mode—was Poul Anderson. In those days, I wasn’t reading or particularly interested in fantasy. I was strictly a science fiction kid, with peripheral leanings towards adventure stories (
Boy’s Life
and the like), so my favorite stories by Poul tended to fall along those lines.

But I remember one that didn’t. I read “The Queen of Air and Darkness” right after it came out in one of the science fiction magazines, and I was captivated by it. When I was asked to contribute to this anthology, it was the first story I thought of. It always felt to me as if there were more to the story, as if the telling of it wasn’t finished. What happened afterwards to the Queen and the Old Folks of Cloudmoor and Carheddin? Was that really the end of them when Sherrinford took back Jimmy Cullen? Could they really have been so easily dispatched?

I felt a certain trepidation in trying to make those determinations for Poul. “The Queen of Air and Darkness” had won both the Hugo and Nebula and has enthralled Poul Anderson readers for decades. Who was I to mess with an icon and his art? But my marching orders were clear—I was to take something from Poul’s astounding body of work and build on it. I have tried to do that here.

I met Poul Anderson once, years ago now, at a family gathering at Astrid and Greg’s home. I can no longer remember the occasion. He was quiet and unassuming and had about him the grandfatherly look I see in myself these days when I look in the mirror. I said hello and told him how much I admired his work. I have no idea if he knew who I was or what I did. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. What mattered was how it made me feel. Writers form links in an endless chain, one influencing another in a crucial, necessary rite of interaction and succession, ultimately so we may be inspired and our craft may evolve.

Poul Anderson was one who did that for me.

In spades.

—Terry Brooks