Summer 2007 (32 page)

The mason gave the skinchanger’s egg another mighty blow
of his hammer. The egg rocked a little but did not so much as dent.

“How to hatch it? How to hatch it?” Marm pondered.
“Shouldn’t have struck my little Jackie down, now should I? He knows all about
them hill creatures like he knows his alphabet. Always a bright boy, my baby
bantam, my daffy little bullybum.” She shrugged philosophically and regarded
the egg.

“Never mind the hammer, lovey,” she told the mason.
“Thought of gold has my thighs so tingled, I’ll need a roll or I won’t catch
three winks tonight. Put that great bowling ball beneath the bed. Perhaps our
bouncing’ll give it a crack, eh?”

The mason grunted in his usual way and tossed the egg
aside. Marm chucked her dress and the mason grabbed her breasts and they set to
a nice rough tumble on the hay tick.

Marm and the mason were just getting on in the usual way
(the usual way going something like this: “Oh, no! Oh, yes! Oh, God! Oh, gold!
It’s gold! It’s gold we’ll get, it’s aaaaauuuggghhh!!!”) when Jack Yap climbed
through the mason’s low square-cut window. He quietly went to the door of the
cottage and unlatched it for Pudding, who stooped inside as though velvet shod,
for all his boots were stone.

The brothers stood over the wheezing mattress, looking
down at the sweat-soaked clowns upon it: one brother so tall his head near
brushed the roof, the other so small he had to crane to get perspective on the
heaving things. Pudding had his boots. Jack Yap had an iron poker he had
pillaged from the ruins of their cottage.

“Me first,” Jack Yap breathed, and he brought the poker
down. The sound it made was something like “THWACK!” but with a bit more juice
and crack in it.

After a moment or two, Pudding joined in the fun.

#

The hay tick was a blood-sodden mess when the brothers
were through, and Jack Yap was feeling just the slightest smidge of tired. His
head still ached something fierce from the coalscuttle, and the red fire that
had fueled his eyes and the killing machine of his skinny, poker-bearing arm
had all but banked its devil flames. He fished the egg out from under all the
mess and cradled it close to his thin chest.

“Hush now,” he crooned to it. “Jack Yap’s come back to
fetch you, Tam my child. And Uncle Pudding too.”

The skinchanger’s egg pulsed and flashed in Jack Yap’s
arms. Though it was warm and sticky, positively writhing in blood, the egg was
brighter than ever and seemed almost to be chiming.

Pudding began humming the egg song, perhaps supposing a
soothing sound was in order. He was eating parts of what used to be the mason’s
muscular arm, for stomping things always made him marvelous hungry.

And then the egg began to rock.

The skinchanger’s egg began to rock.

It rocked and chimed and rang like faerie bells, and
then it began to flame and flare and flicker. It grew warm in Jack Yap’s hands,
then scalding hot, then cold as ice, and then the shell began to splinter. It
splintered, shivered, and exploded, and where each shard of burst shell fell,
it turned into diamond and pearl and silver. Pudding, who liked shiny bits,
murred
excitedly and bent to pick up the pieces. In this way, he missed the birth
entirely, and missed the precise moment Jack Yap met his changeling child. It
was probably better for all three of them that he did, for Pudding had been
Jack’s only darling for so long that it might have been a blow to find himself
supplanted in a heartbeat. Or–and this was more likely, as brains are
brains and Pudding’s weren’t much–the portentous event might have meant
the merest nothing to Pudding. Few things did.

The skinchanger, in human shape, was a full-formed
woman, but so small she curled in Jack’s arms like a cat. Her hair was longer
than her body, which was so supple and slippery Jack had to use all his wiles
to keep hold of her. She was the color of pitch and of flame, and sometimes of
lightning, and then she would shiver and chime and change. That night Jack Yap
held in his arms a baby lynx, an ostrich chick, an elephant calf and a fawn, a
pink weasel baby, a black colt, and a white lamb. He sang lullabies to all of
them, with his Marm’s corpse and the mason’s looking dully on.

Pudding fell asleep to the sound of lullabies and
skinchanging, his sweet, lax, flower mouth brown-stained all around with blood.

“Sleep, my Tam,” Jack Yap
soothed the changeling. She was now a chimpanzee, clinging to his neck, now a
python wrapped about him playfully. “Sleep and Jack Yap will guard you. And
tomorrow, me and you and Uncle Pudding too, why, we have some traveling to do.”

Fiction:
Unrequited Love by Gene Wolfe

“Two loves I have, of comfort and despair.”

—Shakespeare

You have no reason to listen to me, but may sigh and
turn the page and be none the worse for it. Yet I have every reason to speak
out. If this public confession of my innocent guilt lifts my spirits to the
slightest degree, it will be well worth the loss of your esteem. You see, I am
one who had done wrong while seeking to do good. There are millions like me in
that, and most acknowledge no smallest trace of guilt.

“My intentions were good!”

Soon, one hopes, a great, blood-colored hand whose
fingers are tipped with claws will close about them and drag them down to Hell.

So it may drag me; and mine
were
good, though I
scorn to offer that in my defense. It is results that matter in this world and
in every other. My good intentions brought innocent hearts pain that will not
end. Each night, once, twice, sometimes three times in a night, I rise and
dress and go out to see if they are there.

They are not, but would be if they could—poor
simple little beings whose torment I began. Do you understand?

Of course not.

How could you? I will explain everything in order,
starting with Roberta.

#

Roberta belonged to the Robinsons, the couple who have
the house one door west of mine. I first saw her one May morning walking to
school, with her own little laptop in a shiny new bag, the picture of beauty,
innocence (there is that word again) and blooming health. She was a ‘bot, of
course. Either the Robinsons could not have a child of their own, or were
unwilling to undertake the travail and expense of a real child. I could
not—I do not—blame them in the least. But I wondered, because I
have never had much to do with such ‘bots, about her schooling.

So it was that I struck up a conversation with her one
day when I happened to be walking in the same direction. I asked the
inevitable, utterly banal question: “Do you like school?”

And Roberta answered, “Oh, yes! It’s fun.”

“Really? What’s your class studying?”

“Oh, you know. The names of the letters and how each one
sounds. The color wheel and watercolors. Arithmetic. Stranger danger.”

“I’m no stranger,” I told her.

“Of course you aren’t. You live next door.”

“Exactly. And I’m not about to ask you to go anywhere
with me or do anything, though I do enjoy talking to you.”

“That’s good!” She smiled.

“For me, at least. What do you get if you mix black and
white?”

“Grey if you mean paint. Brown if you mean people.”

“I meant paint. Blue and yellow?”

“Green.”

“What’s the square root of two hundred and fifty-six?”

“Sixteen.” She looked around at me with a charming
little grin. “Only that’s not fair. It’s not first-grade work.”

“Exactly. You must know everything the rest of your
class—“

“No, there are three of us.”

“Is there to learn. So how can it be fun for you?”

“Oh, it’s lots of fun!”

“Is it really? What part do you like best.”

“Tutoring. That’s where one of us takes a boy or girl
who isn’t doing very well and tries to help him. Or her.” For a moment she
looked serious and a little sad. “It’s nearly always a boy, because there are
five boys and two girls besides us. Only what I like best is when it’s a girl like
me. Sometimes I know I’ve really, truly helped. Helped her and helped Mrs.
Morse, too. I like that a lot.”

We had nearly reached the elementary school, so I said,
“Well, I hope you get a girl today.”

She said, “So do I! I hope I get Julianne!” and ran into
the school.

Not too long after that I met Julianne, and here I
intruded. If I bore no guilt until now (though I think I did) I certainly bore
it in that.

I saw her shuffle sadly past our house on her way the
Robinson’s, a small girl with a pinched face and long black braids. I saw her,
too, on her way back home, and could not resist. I went out and walked more or
less with her, trying to look as though I were enjoying the sunshine, and
contrived to strike up a conversation. “Do you play with Roberta?”

“Sure.” It was mumbled; I shall not mention the mumbling
in the future. Everything Julianne said was mumbled.

“It must be fun.”

A sad nod. “She’s my best friend.”

“Do you have many friends?”

She shook her head.

“I’m know I can’t play with you the way another girl
would, but I’m Roberta’s neighbor and I’d like to be your friend, too.” I
introduced myself.

“I’m Julianne.”

I had been fairly certain of that already.

She sighed. “My father’s a cook. We’re supposed to say
chef. But he is. That’s why I’m Julianne. He fixes salads, mostly.”

I said, “A good chef is a treasure among men.”

“Mom says the money’s pretty good.”

“No doubt the salads are, too.”

“So I’m going to get another friend.” The small, pinched
face seemed to brighten somewhat. “I’m going to get a puppy. Roberta’s going to
have a puppy and I told Mom and Dad, so I’m getting one, too.”

“’Beauty without vanity, strength without insolence,
courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of Man, without his vices.’ Lord
Byron said that. I believe his dog was a Newfoundland. Do you know what breed
you’ll be getting, Julianne?”

“A robot. Roberta’s going to get a border terrier,
though.” For a moment it almost seemed that Julianne smiled. “They can play
with each other while we do.”

It left me speechless. Or if I spoke, I do not recall
what it was I said or why I said it.

Perhaps I turned at some corner or other, or perhaps
Julianne reached her home and went inside. I do not recall that either. I only
know that I walked on, alone, filled with a tragic anger. Our gently curving
streets offended me. Our neatly finished green lawns, more than half of them of
artificial grass, offended me still more. I hated every house I saw; their
fresh paint and absurd mixture of styles were more than sufficient to account
for any amount of hatred.

Yet I had another, better, reason. I hated then because
there was scarcely one that housed two children, and that most housed none.

Like my own.

My kind had built a paradise, of which I was a part. A
paradise for machines, in which the human race, though welcome, could not and
did not thrive. In and around the filthy huts of the medieval peasants,
children ran and shouted, laughed and wept, and no doubt received sturdy
buffets when they made too much noise. There the family sang around a table we
would scorn. There grandmothers recounted wild tales before the fire, tales
full of bold boys who made good and honest country maidens who tricked evil
dwarves like me.

Tales that were full of life because the children were,
and full of death, too, because each child had to learn that death is life’s
shadow.

Here—But I have gone on too long already.

#

A week passed before I spoke to either girl again. As
often as I could I watched them out my windows or from my deck. Sometimes they
waved to me, and when they did I took care to smile and wave in return.

For the most part they did not.

Roberta remained the perfection of childhood beauty.
Julianne seemed always her sad, pinched self. This though once I heard her
laugh, a sound every bit as unnatural as her playmate.

The promised puppies appeared, Roberta’s first. It was
small and wigglesome, brownish, reddish, and blackish. Both girls embraced and
kissed it, Julianne shyly and Roberta often.

Julianne received hers a week or two later. It was
larger and seemed to be a caricature of a Dalmatian, white with over-regular
black spots and too-large eyes. Perhaps I can best characterize it as
resistibly cute, though both girls appeared to adore it. Roberta’s puppy played
with it as he might have played with a ball or any other inanimate object. I
doubt that he knew it was a counterfeit of his own species.

Watching them, I meditated upon a plan. It is because of
that plan and its result that I am writing this.

First I seized an opportunity to speak to the girls
together. Roberta’s puppy had penetrated the hedge that separates the
Robinson’s back yard from our own. Both girls screamed, jumped up and down, and
did little else. I quieted them, assured them that I would capture their small
fugitive, and did so by tempting him with scraps of meat.