Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback (19 page)

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.

Something soft, weighing hardly anything at all, lands on her cheek.

Startled, she opens her eyes and brushes it away. It falls into a nearby clump of moss and gazes up with golden eyes. Its body is a harlequin motley of brilliant yellow and a blue so deep as to be almost black.

A frog.

She’s seen images of frogs archived in the lattice, and in reader files, but images cannot compare to contact with one alive and breathing.

It touched her cheek, and now
it’s
watching
her.
If Oma were online, Nix would ask for a more specific identification.

But, of course, if Oma were online, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

She wipes the rain from her eyes. The droplets are cool against her

skin. On her lips, on her tongue, they’re nectar. It’s easy to romanticize Paradise when you’ve only ever known Hell and (on a good day)

Purgatory. It’s hard not to get sentimental; the mind, giddy from

clean air, waxes. Nix blinks up at all the shades of green; she squints into the simulated sunlight shining down between the branches.

The sky flickers, dimming for a moment, then quickly returns to

its full 600-watt brilliance. The back-up fuel cells are draining faster than they ought. She ticks off possible explanations: there might be a catalyst leak, dinged up cathodes or anodes, a membrane breach

impairing ion-exchange. Or maybe she’s just lost track of time. She

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checks the counter in her left retina, but maybe it’s on the fritz again and can’t be trusted. She rubs at her eye, because sometimes that

helps. The readout remains the same. The cells have fallen to forty-

eight percent maximum capacity.

I haven’t lost track of time. The train’s burning through the reserves
too fast. It doesn’t matter why.

All that matters is that she has less time to reach Oma and try to

fix this fuck-up.

Nix Severn stands, but it seems to take her almost forever to do so.

She leans against the rough bark of the tree fern and tries to make out the straight line of the catwalk leading to the port ’tainers and the decks beyond. Moving over and through the uneven, ever-shifting terrain

of the forest is slowing her down, and soon, she knows, soon she’ll be forced to abandon it for the cramped maintenance crawls suspended

far overhead. She curses herself for not having used them in the first place. But better late than fucking never. They’re a straight line to the main AI shaft, and wriggling her way through the empty tubes will

help her focus, removing her senses from the Edenic seduction of the terraforming engines’ grand wrack-up. If she can just reach the front of this compartment, there will be an access ladder, and cramped

or not, the going will surely be easier. She’ll quick it double time or better. Nix wipes the rain from her face again, and clambers over the roots of a strangler fig. Once on the slippery, overgrown walkway, she lowers the jumpsuit’s visor and quilted silicon hood; the faceplate will efficiently evaporate both the rain and any condensation. She does

her best to ignore the forest. She thinks, instead, of making dockside, waiting out quarantine until she’s cleared for tumble, earthfall, and of her lover and daughter waiting for her, back in the slums at the edge of the Phoenix shipyards. She keeps walking.

S
kycaps launch alone.

Nix closes the antique storybook she found in a curio stall at

the Firestone Night Market, and she sets it on the table next to her

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• The Road of Needles •

daughter’s bed. The pages are brown and brittle, and minute bits of

the paper flake away if she does not handle it with the utmost care

(and sometimes when she does). Only twice in Maia’s life has she

heard a fairy tale read directly from the book. On the first occasion, she was two. And on the second, she was six. It’s a long time between lifts and drops, and when you’re a mother whose also a runner, your

child seems to grow up in jittery stills from a time-lapse. Even with her monthly broadcast allotment, that’s how it seems. A moment

here, fifteen minutes there, a three-week shore leave, a precious to-and-fro while sailing orbit, the faces and voices trickling through in 22.29 or 3.03 light-minute packages.

“Why did she talk to the wolf?” asks Maia. “Why didn’t she ignore

him?”

Nix looks up to find Shiloh watching from the doorway, backlit

by the glow from the hall. She smiles for the silhouette, then looks back to their daughter. The girl’s hair is as fine and pale as corn silk.

She’s fragile, born too early and born sickly, half crippled, half blind.

Maia’s eyes are the milky green color of jade.

“Yeah,” says Shiloh. “Why is that?”

“I imagine
this
wolf was a very charming wolf,” replies Nix, brushing her fingers through the child’s bangs.

Skycaps launch alone.

Sending out more than one warm body, with everything it’ll need

to stay alive? Why squander the budget? Not when all you need is
someone on hand in case of a catastrophic, systems-wide failure.

So, skycaps launch alone
.

“Well, I would never talk to a wolf. If there were still wolves,” says Maia.

“Makes me feel better hearing that,” says Nix. A couple of strands

of Maia’s hair come away in her fingers.

“If there were still wolves,” Maia says again.

“Of course,” Nix says. “That’s a given.”

Her lips move. She reads from the old, old book: “Good day, Little
Red Riding Hood,” said he. “Thank you kindly, wolf,” answered she.

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“Where are you going so early, Little Red Riding Hood?” “To my

grandmother’s.”

Nix Severn’s eyelids flutter, and her lips move. The home-away

chamber whispers and hums, manipulating hippocampal and

cortical theta rhythms, mining long- and short-term memory,

spinning dreams into perceptions far more real than dreams or déjà

vu. No outbound leaves the docks without at least one home-away to

insure the mental stability of skycaps while they ride the rails.

“You should go to sleep now,” Nix tells Maia, but the girl shakes

her head.

“I want to hear it again.”

“Kiddo, you know it by heart. You could probably recite it word

for word.”

“She wants to hear you read it, fella” says Shiloh. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it again myself, for that matter.”

Nix pretends to frown. “Hardly fair, two on one like this.” But then she gently turns the pages back to the story’s start and begins it over.

The home-away mediates between limbic and the cerebral hemi-

spheres, directing neurotransmitters and receptors, electrochemical

activity and cortisol levels.

There was once a sweet little maid . . .

Shiloh kisses her brow. “Still, hell, I don’t know how you do it, love.

All alone and relying on make-believe.”

“It keeps me grounded. You learn the trick, or you washout fast.”

The skycap’s best friend! Even better than the real thing! Experience
the dream and you might never have to come home.

The merch co-ops count on it.

“You could look for other work than babysitting EOTs,” whispers

Shiloh. “You’ve got the training. There’s
good
work you could do in the yards, in assembly or rollout.”

“I don’t want to have this conversation again.”

“But with your experience, Nixie, you could make foreman on the

quick.”

“And get maybe a quarter the grade, grinding day and night.”

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• The Road of Needles •

“We’d see you so much more. That’s all. And it scares me more

than you’ll ever know, you hurtling out there alone with nothing but make-believe and plug and pray for waking company.”

Make haste and start before it gets hot, and walk properly and nicely,
and don’t run, or you might fall.

“The accidents—”

“—the casts hype them, Shiloh. Half what you hear never

happened. You know that. I’ve told you that, how many times now?”

“Going under and never coming up again.”

“The odds of psychosis or a flatline are astronomical.”

Shiloh rolls over, turning her back on Nix. Who sighs and shuts her

eyes, because she has prep at six for next week’s launch, and she’s not going to spend the day sleepwalking because of a fight with Shiloh.

. . . and don’t run, or you might fall.

The emergency alarm screams bloody goddamn murder, and an

adrenaline injection jerks her back aboard the
Blackbird,
back to here and now so violently that she gasps and then screams right back at the alarms. But her eyes are trained to see, even through so sudden a disengage, and Nix is already processing the diagnostics and crisis report streaming past her face before the raggedy hitch releases her.

It’s bad this time. It doesn’t get much worse.

Oma isn’t talking.

“Good day, Little Red Riding Hood . . . ”

Of course, it
isn’t
true that there are no wolves left in the world. Not strictly speaking. Only that, so far as zoologists can tell, they are extinct in the wild. They were declared so more than forty years ago, all across the globe, all thirty-nine or so subspecies. But Maia has a terrible phobia of wolves, despite the fact “Little Red Riding Hood”

is her favorite bedtime story. Perhaps it’s her favorite
because
she’s afraid of wolves. Anyway, Shiloh and I told her that there were no

more wolves when she became convinced a wolf was living under

her bed, and she refused to sleep without the light on. We suspect

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she knows, perfectly well, that we’re lying. We suspect she’s humoring us, playing along with our lie. She’s smart, curious, and has access to every bit of information on the lattice, which includes, I’d think, everything about wolves that’s ever been written down.

I have seen wolves. Living wolves.

There are a handful remaining in captivity. I saw a pair when

I was younger, still in my twenties. My mother was still alive, and

we visited the bio in Chicago. We spent almost an entire day inside

the arboretum, strolling the meticulously manicured, tree-lined

pathways. Here and there, we’d come upon an animal or two, even a

couple of small herds—a few varieties of antelope, deer, and so forth—

kept inside invisible enclosures by the shock chips implanted in their spines. Late in the afternoon, we came upon the wolves, at the end

of a cul-de-sac located in a portion of the bio designed to replicate the aspen and conifer forests that once grew along the Yellowstone

River out west. I recall that from a plaque placed somewhere on the

trail. There was an owl, an eagle, rabbits, a stuffed bison, and at the very end of the cul-de-sac, the pair of wolves. Of course, they weren’t purebloods, but hybrids. Both were watered-down with German

shepherd genes, or husky genes, or whatever.

There was a bench there beneath the aspen and pine and spruce

cultivars, and my mother and I sat a while watching the wolves.

Though I know that the staff of the park was surely taking the best

possible care of those precious specimens, both were somewhat thin.

Not emaciated, but thin. “Ribsy,” my mother said, which I thought

was a strange word. One I’d never before heard. Maybe it had been

popular when she was young.

“They look like ordinary dogs to me,” she said.

They didn’t, though. Despite the fact that these animals had never

lived outside pens of one sort or another, there was about them an

unmistakable wildness. I can’t fully explain what I mean by that. But it was there. I recognized it most in their amber eyes. A certain feral desperation. They restlessly paced their enclosure; it was exhausting, just watching them. Watching them set my nerves on edge, though

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• The Road of Needles •

my mother hardly seemed to notice. After her remark, how the

wolves seemed to her no different than regular dogs, she lost interest and winked on her Soft-See. She had an eyeball conversation with

someone from her office, and I watched the wolves. And the wolves

watched me.

I imagined there was hatred in their amber eyes.

I imagined that they stared out at me, instinctual y comprehending

the role that my race had played in the destruction of theirs.

We were here first,
they said without speaking, without uttering a sound.

It wasn’t only desperation in their eyes; it was anger, spite, and a promise of stillborn retribution that the wolves knew would never

come.

Ten times a mil ion years before you, we feasted on your foremothers.

And, in that moment, I was as frightened as any small and

defenseless beast, cowering in shadows, as still as still can be in hope it would go unnoticed as amber eyes and hungry jaws prowled the