Fantasy: The Best of 2001 Read online

  Fantasy The Best of 2001

  Copyright © 2002 by ibooks, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2001, 2002 by Agberg, Ltd.

  “The Bones of Earth” copyright © 2001 by the Inter Vivos Trust for the Le Guin children; “Legerdemain” copyright © 2001 by Jack O’ Connell; “Diving the Coolidge” copyright © 2001 by Brian A. Hopkins; “The Mould of Form” copyright © 2001 by Lucius Shepard; “Wolves Till the World Goes Down” copyright © 2001 by Greg van Eekhout; “The Lady of the Winds” copyright © 2001 Poul Anderson; “Ave de Paso” copyright © 2001 by Catherine Asaro; “Grass” copyright © 2001 by Lawrence Miles; “Slipshod, at the Edge of the Universe” copyright © 2001 by Robert Thurston; “Hell Is the Absence of God” copyright © 2001 by Ted Chiang.

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  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  and KAREN HABER

  Fantasy The Best of 2001

  ROBERT SILVERBERG’s many novels include The Alien Years; the most recent volume in the Majipoor Cycle, The King of Dreams; the bestselling Lord Valentine trilogy; and the classics Dying Inside and A Time of Changes. He has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards more times than any other writer; he is a five-time winner of the Nebula and a five-time winner of the Hugo.

  KAREN HABER is the bestselling co-author (with Link Yaco) of The Science of the X-Men, a scientific examination of the popular superhuman characters published by Marvel Comics. She also created the bestselling The Mutant Season series of novels, of which she co-authored the first volume with her husband, Robert Silverberg. She is a respected journalist and an accomplished fiction writer. Her short fic­tion has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Full Spectrum 2, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fic­tion Magazine, and Science Fiction Age.

  FANTASY

  THE BEST OF 2001

  AN INTRODUCTION

  by Robert Silverberg

  and Karen Haber

  Fantasy is the oldest branch of imaginative literature—as old as the human imagination itself. It is not at all hard to believe that the same artistic impulse that produced the extraordinary cave paintings of Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet, fifteen and twenty and even thirty thousand years ago, also produced astounding tales of gods and demons, of talismans and spells, of dragons and werewolves, of wondrous lands beyond the horizon—tales that fur-clad shamans recited to fascinated audiences around the campfires of Ice Age Europe. So, too, in torrid Africa, in the China of prehistory, in ancient India, in the Ameri­cas; everywhere in the world, in fact, on and on back through time for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. Surely there have been storytellers as long as there have been beings in this world that could be spoken of as “human”—and those storytellers have in particular devoted their skills and energies and talents, throughout our long evolutionary path, to the creation of extraordi­nary marvels and wonders.

  The tales the Cro-Magnon storytellers told their spell-bound audiences on those frosty nights in ancient France are lost forever. But surely there were strong components of the fantastic in them. The evidence of the oldest stories that have survived argue in favor of that. If fantasy can be defined as literature that depicts the world beyond that of mundane reality, and mankind’s struggle to assert domi­nance over that world, then the most ancient story that has come down to us—the Sumerian tale of the hero Gil­gamesh, which dates from about 2500 B.C.—is fantasy, for its theme is Gilgamesh’s quest for eternal life.

  Homer’s Odyssey, with its shapeshifters and sorcer­esses, its Cyclopses and many-headed monsters, is fan­tasy. The savage creature Grendel of Beowulf, the Midgard Serpent and the dragon Fafnir of the Norse Eddas, the immortality-craving Dr. Faustus of medieval German lit­erature, the myriad enchanters of The Thousand and One Nights, and many more strange and wonderful beings all testify to the endless fertility of humankind’s fantasizing imagination.

  In modern times fantasy has moved from being a component of the human mythmaking process to a signif­icant form of popular entertainment. The wry tales of Lord Dunsany, the grand epics of E.R. Eddison and H. Rider Haggard, the archaizing sagas of J.R.R. Tolkien, the sophisticated novels of James Branch Cabell and the furious adventure stories of Robert E. Howard demonstrate the reach and range of fantasy in the past century and a quarter. And in today’s publishing world it has established itself in a vastly successful commercial form that mani­fests itself as immense multi-volume series that carefully follow expected narrative formulas.

  The present anthology is intended to show that reach and range as it is demonstrated nowadays in the shorter forms of fiction. You will find very little that is formulaic here, although we have not ignored any of fantasy’s great traditions. There are stories set in the familiar quasi-medieval worlds to which modern readers are accustomed, and others rooted in the authentic myth-constructs of high antiquity, and several that depend for their power on the juxtaposition of fantastic situations and terribly contemporary aspects of modern life on Earth. There are philosophical and theological speculations. There is even one science-fiction story—although one that carries scien­tific thinking to a fantastic extreme—by way of showing that science-fiction, rather than being a genre apart, is simply one of the many branches of fantasy literature.

  These eleven stories—which we think are the best short fantasies published in 2001—are reassuring proof of fan­tasy’s eternal power even in this technological age.

  —Robert Silverberg

  Karen Haber

  THE BONES OF THE

  EARTH

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  IT WAS RAINING AGAIN, and the wizard of Re Albi was sorely tempted to make a weather spell, just a little, small spell, to send the rain on round the mountain. His bones ached. They ached for the sun to come out and shine through his flesh and dry them out. Of course he could say a pain spell, but all that would do was hide the ache for a while. There was no cure for what ailed him. Old bones need the sun. The wizard stood still in the doorway of his house, between the dark room and the rain-streaked open air, preventing himself from making a spell, and angry at himself for preventing himself and for having to be prevented.

  He never swore—men of power do not swear, it is not safe—but he cleared his throat with a coughing growl, like a bear. A moment later a thunderclap rolled off the hidden upper slopes of Gont Mountain, echoing round from north to south, dying away in the cloud-filled forests.

  A good sign, thunder, Dulse thought. It would stop raining soon. He pulled up his hood and went out into the rain to feed the chickens.

  He checked the henhouse, finding three eggs. Red Bucca was setting. Her eggs were about due to hatch. The mites were bothering her, and she looked scruffy and jaded. He said a few words against mites, told himself to remember to clean out the nest box as soon as the chicks hatched, and went on to the poultry yard, where Brown Bucca and Grey and Leggings and Candor and the King huddled under the eaves making soft, shrewish remarks about rain.

  “It’ll stop by midday,” the wizard told the chickens. He fed them and squelched back to the house with three warm eggs. When he was a child he had liked to walk in mud. He remembered enjoying the cool of it rising between his toes. He still liked to go barefoot, but no longer enjoyed mud; it was sticky stuff, and he disliked stooping to clean his feet before going into the house. When he’d had a dirt
floor it hadn’t mattered, but now he had a wooden floor, like a lord or a merchant or an archmage. To keep the cold and damp out of his bones. Not his own notion. Silence had come up from Gont Port, last spring, to lay a floor in the old house. They had had one of their arguments about it. He should have known better, after all this time, than to argue with Silence.

  “I’ve walked on dirt for seventy-five years,” Dulse had said. “A few more won’t kill me!”

  To which Silence of course made no reply, letting him hear what he had said and feel its foolishness thor­oughly.

  “Dirt’s easier to keep clean,” he said, knowing the struggle already lost. It was true that all you had to do with a good hard-packed clay floor was sweep it and now and then sprinkle it to keep the dust down. But it sounded silly all the same.

  “Who’s to lay this floor?” he said, now merely quer­ulous.

  Silence nodded, meaning himself.

  The boy was in fact a workman of the first order, carpenter, cabinetmaker, stonelayer, roofer; he had proved that when he lived up here as Dulse’s student, and his life with the rich folk of Gont Port had not soft­ened his hands. He brought the boards from Sixth’s mill in Re Albi, driving Gammer’s ox team; he laid the floor and polished it the next day, while the old wizard was up at Bog Lake gathering simples. When Dulse came home there it was, shining like a dark lake itself. “Have to wash my feet every time I come in,” he grumbled. He walked in gingerly. The wood was so smooth it seemed soft to the bare sole. “Satin,” he said. “You didn’t do all that in one day without a spell or two. A village hut with a palace floor. Well, it’ll be a sight, come winter, to see the fire shine in that! Or do I have to get me a carpet now? A fleecefell, on a golden warp?”

  Silence smiled. He was pleased with himself.

  He had turned up on Dulse’s doorstep a few years ago. Well, no, twenty years ago it must be, or twenty-five. A while ago now. He had been truly a boy then, long-legged, rough-haired, soft-faced. A set mouth, clear eyes. “What do you want?” the wizard had asked, know­ing what he wanted, what they all wanted, and keeping his eyes from those clear eyes. He was a good teacher, the best on Gont, he knew that. But he was tired of teaching, didn’t want another prentice underfoot. And he sensed danger.

  “To learn,” the boy whispered.

  “Go to Roke,” the wizard said. The boy wore shoes and a good leather vest. He could afford or earn ship’s passage to the school.

  “I’ve been there.”

  At that Dulse looked him over again. No cloak, no staff.

  “Failed? Sent away? Ran away?”

  The boy shook his head at each question. He shut his eyes; his mouth was already shut. He stood there, intensely gathered, suffering: drew breath: looked straight into the wizard’s eyes.

  “My mastery is here, on Gont,” he said, still speaking hardly above a whisper. “My master is Heleth.”

  At that the wizard whose true name was Heleth stood as still as he did, looking back at him, till the boy’s gaze dropped.

  In silence Dulse sought the boy’s name, and saw two things: a fir cone, and the rune of the Closed Mouth. Then seeking further he heard in his mind a name spoken; but he did not speak it.

  “I’m tired of teaching and talking,” he said. “I need silence. Is that enough for you?”

  The boy nodded once.

  “Then to me you are Silence,” the wizard said. “You can sleep in the nook under the west window. There’s an old pallet in the woodhouse. Air it. Don’t bring mice in with it.” And he stalked off towards the Overfell, angry with the boy for coming and with himself for giving in; but it was not anger that made his heart pound. Striding along—he could stride, then—with the sea wind pushing at him always from the left and the early sunlight on the sea out past the vast shadow of the moun­tain, he thought of the Mages of Roke, the masters of the art magic, the professors of mystery and power. “He was too much for ’em, was he? And he’ll be too much for me,” he thought, and smiled. He was a peaceful man, but he did not mind a bit of danger.

  He stopped then and felt the dirt under his feet. He was barefoot, as usual. When he was a student on Roke, he had worn shoes. But he had come back home to Gont, to Re Albi, with his wizard’s staff, and kicked his shoes off. He stood still and felt the dust and rock of the clifftop path under his feet, and the cliffs under that, and the roots of the island in the dark under that. In the dark under the waters all islands touched and were one. So his teacher Ard had said, and so his teachers on Roke had said. But this was his island, his rock, his dirt. His wizardry grew out of it. “My mastery is here,” the boy had said, but it went deeper than mastery. That, perhaps, was something Dulse could teach him: what went deeper than mastery. What he had learned here, on Gont, before he ever went to Roke.

  And the boy must have a staff. Why had Nemmerle let him leave Roke without one, empty-handed as a prentice or a witch? Power like that shouldn’t go wandering about unchanneled and unsignaled.

  My teacher had no staff, Dulse thought, and at the same moment thought, The boy wants his staff from me. Gontish oak, from the hands of a Gontish wizard. Well, if he earns it I’ll make him one. If he can keep his mouth closed. And I’ll leave him my lore-books. If he can clean out a henhouse, and understand the Glosses of Danemer, and keep his mouth closed.

  The new student cleaned out the henhouse and hoed the bean patch, learned the meaning of the Glosses of Danemer and the Arcana of the Enlades, and kept his mouth closed. He listened. He heard what Dulse said: sometimes he heard what Dulse thought. He did what Dulse wanted and what Dulse did not know he wanted. His gift was far beyond Dulse’s guidance, yet he had been right to come to Re Albi, and they both knew it.

  Dulse thought sometimes in those years about sons and fathers. He had quarreled with his own father, a sorcerer-prospector, over his choice of Ard as his teacher. His father had shouted that a student of Ard’s was no son of his, had nursed his rage, died unforgiving.

  Dulse had seen young men weep for joy at the birth of a first son. He had seen poor men pay witches a year’s earnings for the promise of a healthy boy, and a rich man touch his gold-bedizened baby’s face and whisper, adoring, “My immortality!” He had seen men beat their sons, bully and humiliate them, spite and thwart them, hating the death they saw in them. He had seen the answering hatred in the sons’ eyes, the threat, the pitiless contempt. And seeing it, Dulse knew why he had never sought reconciliation with his father.

  He had seen a father and son work together from daybreak to sundown, the old man guiding a blind ox, the middle-aged man driving the iron-bladed plough, never a word spoken. As they started home the old man laid his hand a moment on the son’s shoulder.

  He had always remembered that. He remembered it now, when he looked across the hearth, winter evenings, at the dark face bent above a lore-book or a shirt that needed mending. The eyes cast down, the mouth closed, the spirit listening.

  “Once in his lifetime, if he’s lucky, a wizard finds somebody he can talk to.” Nemmerle had said that to Dulse a night or two before Dulse left Roke, a year or two before Nemmerle was chosen Archmage. He had been the Master Patterner and the kindest of all Dulse’s teachers at the school. “I think, if you stayed, Heleth, we could talk.”

  Dulse had been unable to answer at all for a while. Then, stammering, guilty at his ingratitude and incredulous at his obstinacy—“Master, I would stay, but my work is on Gont. I wish it was here, with you—”

  “It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be. Well, send me a student now and then. Roke needs Gontish wizardry. I think we’re leaving things out, here, things worth knowing. . .”

  Dulse had sent students on to the school, three or four of them, nice lads with a gift for this or that; but the one Nemmerle waited for had come and gone of his own will, and what they had thought of him on Roke Dulse did not know. And Silence, of course, did not say. It was evident that he had learned ther
e in two or three years what some boys learned in six or seven and many never learned at all. To him it had been mere ground-work.

  “Why didn’t you come to me first?” Dulse had demanded. “And then go to Roke, to put a polish on it?”

  “I didn’t want to waste your time.”

  “Did Nemmerle know you were coming to work with me?”

  Silence shook his head.

  “If you’d deigned to tell him your intentions, he might have sent a message to me.”

  Silence looked stricken. “Was he your friend?”

  Dulse paused. “He was my master. Would have been my friend, perhaps, if I’d stayed on Roke. Have wizards friends? No more than they have wives, or sons, I suppose. . . Once he said to me that in our trade it’s a lucky man who finds someone to talk to. . . Keep that in mind. If you’re lucky, one day you’ll have to open your mouth.”

  Silence bowed his rough, thoughtful head.

  “If it hasn’t rusted shut,” Dulse added.

  “If you ask me to, I’ll talk,” the young man said, so earnest, so willing to deny his whole nature at Dulse’s request that the wizard had to laugh.

  “I asked you not to,” he said. “And it’s not my need I spoke of. I talk enough for two. Never mind. You’ll know what to say when the time comes. That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.”

  The young man slept on a pallet under the little west window of Dulse’s house for three years. He learned wizardry, fed the chickens, milked the cow. He suggested, once, that Dulse keep goats. He had not said anything for a week or so, a cold, wet week of autumn. He said, “You might keep some goats.”

  Dulse had the big lore-book open on the table. He had been trying to reweave one of the Acastan Spells, much broken and made powerless by the Emanations of Fundaur centuries ago. He had just begun to get a sense of the missing word that might fill one of the gaps, he almost had it, and—“You might keep some goats,” Silence said.