Welcome to Bordertown Page 13

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  That’s the number that was worked into the twisting vines that twined around the frame of the painting of Caer Ceile that Synack sent back. I knew that it must be a beautiful painting, because it went through the Border. But I thought it was kind of flat and uninspiring. It looked like the pink castle at Disneyland, complete with the pennants and the shrubbery around it, and the mythical beasts that gamboled around its walls only completed the feeling that we were looking at something that came out of Fantasyland, not the Realm of Faerie. Maybe it was the composition. I don’t know much about painting, but I know that good paintings have good composition and that this one didn’t have something, so maybe it was the composition.

  “That’s the family place, huh?” I said after I’d examined it. It hung in a dining room in which you could have fed fifty people. Jetfuel’s father’s dining room, which was paneled in somber woods that turned into seeking branches at waist height, living branches that grew straight up to the ceiling, supporting a network of leaves that absorbed the sound, giving the room the acoustic properties of a library or a forest glade.

  A servant—a human servant, a middle-aged lady—padded into the room carrying a silver tray, which she set down on the long, lustrous table. The woman gave Jetfuel a warm hug and gave me a suspicious look before offering me a cup of tea. She fussed with small biscuits and cakes but didn’t bother us as we moved around the painting, which dominated one wall, using a spell-light to cast a bright spot on each leaf, each of us writing down each number in turn, checking each other’s work. My network operators did this all the time, but it had been years since I’d had to do it, and I’d lost track of how tedious it was. My people earned their pay.

  We sat down to eat our biscuits just before her father’s keys rattled in the front door lock. Even before the knob had turned, Jetfuel’s back had stiffened, all the fun going out of her face. She set down her cookie and pursed her lips; then she stood and crossed to the doorway, looking down the hall as the front door swung wide. I trailed after her.

  Her father looked like your basic Business District suit: conservative hair, a Worldly suit cut to emphasize his long, slender torso and limbs and neck. But for the silver eyes and pointed ears, he might have been a skinny banker on his way to Wall Street. He stepped into the cool dark of his hallway, already unbuttoning his jacket, and was just turning to hang it on a burnished brass coat hook when he caught sight of Jetfuel.

  The war of emotions on his face was unmistakable: first delight, then sadness, then irritation. “Sweetheart,” he said. “What a nice surprise.” He made it sound real enough. Maybe it was.

  Jetfuel jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Dad, this is Shannon. I’ve told you about him. Shannon, this is Baron Fenrirr.”

  He snorted. “You can call me Tom,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “Heard so much about you, Shannon. Good things! What you’ve done for our city—”

  I shook his hand. It was cool and dry, and the fingers felt as long as patch cables. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  And then we all stood, a triangle of awkwardness, until the baron said, “Right, well, plenty to do. Will you stay for dinner?”

  I thought he must be asking Jetfuel, but he was looking at me. I looked at Jetfuel. She shook her head. “Plenty to do,” she said. “Got to get back to BINGO.”

  That look of sadness again on his face, and then he nodded. He took one step toward the staircase that led to the upper rooms, where, I suppose, he kept his study. Then he turned again and shook my hand goodbye. “Nice to meet you. Don’t be a stranger.” After he let go, he turned and grabbed Jetfuel in a hug that was so sudden she didn’t have time to back away. She stiffened again, as she had at the table, but he kept squeezing, his face lowered to the top of her head, where it smelled, I knew, of bread. He kept on holding her, long beyond what a normal parental hug might have demanded. She slumped into his arms and then, tentatively, hugged him back.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, enough.”

  He let go and she slugged him in his skinny shoulder, and they smiled an identical smile at each other. He went upstairs. We grabbed our notebooks and our cookies, and Jetfuel called out a goodbye to the maid, and we stepped out into the day and started the walk to BINGO, where we would send back the third part of the protocol.

  * * *

  I thought Jetfuel’s poem was funny:

  Five is a respectable digit,

  But seven makes it look like a midget.

  Nine puts them both to shame,

  Weird old zero’s at both ends of the game.

  Four’s quite square and not at all prime,

  And you might say the same of our old friend the nine.

  Two is prime and even as well,

  Five is quite right to think that’s weird as hell.

  Four’s for foreplay,

  Which comes before six.

  This poem’s full of numbers,

  A rather good trick.

  Jetfuel squinted at the sheet of paper and scowled at it and made ready to ball it up and toss it to the bedroom floor along with the previous fifty attempts. I stopped her hand, grabbing it in mine and bringing it up to my lips. “Stop already. Enough. It’s a funny poem. I think it’s beautiful. As beautiful as a financial report, anyway, and tons of those get across the Border.”

  She shook her hand away from my lips and glared at me, then flopped against the pillows and nuzzled her head into my chest. “Financial reports aren’t contraband. This needs to be beautiful enough to pass on its own merits.”

  I shook my head. “It’s beautiful. Enough. You’ve written a hundred poems. This one’s got everything—sex, midgets, and math jokes! That’s what I call beauty.”

  “ ‘Six’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘trick.’ ”

  “Sure it does. Six trick, six trick, six trick, six trick. Rhyme.”

  She looked out the window at the twinkling Faerie dust streets of B-town. “I’ll take another crack at it in the morning,” she said.

  “Put it in an envelope, affix postage, and give it to a runner downstairs to bring to the couriers on Ho Street.”

  “You are the world’s worst boyfriend,” she said.

  “And yet here we are,” I said, and kissed her.

  * * *

  How beautiful was the poem? I don’t know. Maybe it was beautiful enough to traverse the Border, and maybe Synack received it at Caer Ceile and stitched a beautiful embroidered frame for it and hung it on the wall, or maybe she burned it by moonlight or fed it to the unicorns or something.

  Maybe Synack never received it and will spend the rest of her days as the mistress of Caer Ceile, attending Elf Parliament in gossamer dresses and tabling motions to increase the Faerie dust allotment to Narnia.

  Maybe Synack received it and clutched it in her hand tightly and set off for the Border to hand it back to us, to prove that a single bit could traverse the invisible barrier that separates two worlds—two universes—but as she approached the Border from the Faerie side, she pricked her finger on a spinning wheel and fell into a thousand-year sleep. Or perhaps no time has passed for her as she crossed the Border, but the years have stretched by here.

  In case you’re wondering, we still haven’t heard back from her.

  Jetfuel’s dad installed a peecee in his study, and he sends Jetfuel email thre
e times a day, which she almost never answers.

  Some kid from the World just showed up with his own Wikipedia server that he’s running out of a Net café on Hell Street, and he’s maintaining the canonical B-town pages. Farrel Din is pissed.

  I still think Jetfuel’s poem was beautiful. She gets up earlier than I do, and her pillow smells of warm bread, so I get to bury my face in it until the smell of the coffee and Tikigod’s shouting rouses me every morning.

  With thanks to Seth David Schoen for technical assistance.

  CRUEL SISTER

  BY PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP

  Two daughters had the butcher’s wife,

  Alike as day and night,

  Alike as dross and gold, the two,

  As moon shadow and light.

  As tots one pinched and bit and tore,

  Laughed at the other’s cries.

  She smacked her sister with her dolls,

  Pulled off their staring eyes.

  One sister fled her mother’s arms,

  Chortled at her chiding,

  Would not sit still for song or tale,

  And mocked her mother’s guiding.

  The other learned to sew and weed,

  To count and read a book,

  She weighed chops in the butcher’s shop,

  And helped her mother cook.

  The one grew willow-tall and pale,

  Green eyes like leaves in frost,

  Hair of milk and moonlight mixed,

  Bright smile freely tossed.

  The other was of earth and mold,

  Fox teeth and foxfire hair,

  Eyes shy and wide like wild things

  Warned early to beware.

  The one loved night and air that smelled

  Of wine and sweat and smoke.

  She danced and drank the night away,

  Crept to bed as others woke.

  The other craved the sun and earth,

  Dug and hoed and planted,

  Buried with each seed the thought

  Her sister was enchanted.

  One said yes to all the men

  And no to all their hope.

  She let them love, then laughed at them,

  Let them curse and mope.

  The other loved but one kind man,

  True in word and kiss.

  Her sister teased and laughed and flaunted

  The beauty he would miss.

  He did not see the one for love

  Ablaze in the other’s heart.

  She took his hand, he sang with her,

  They knew they’d never part.

  Her father smiled at their news,

  Invited all the town,

  Her mother cried and stitched her tears

  Like pearls in the wedding gown.

  But on their day she found her veil

  Torn from hem to crown,

  Her shoes dirt-filled, her flowers tossed,

  Her cake thrown upside down.

  “Beautiful sister, cruel sister,

  Why must you torment me?

  You have all I have and more.

  Why can’t you let me be?”

  From her sister’s eye there came a tear,

  The first that ever fell,

  Hard and cold as diamond

  Forged in a special hell.

  “No sister of mine are you,” she said.

  “No mother did we share.

  Mine brought me here and took my heart,

  Then left without a care.

  “You are human, these paths are yours

  That map the human heart.

  The stony streets I walk lead back

  To the hollow where they start.”

  “Then, sister mine,” the other said,

  “My elfin rose and thorn,

  You must leave and follow moonlight’s path

  To find where you were born.”

  The one touched her and held her fast

  For a breath, another tear,

  The other still as a wild thing

  Encircled by her fear.

  Then she was out the door and gone,

  The other with love and rue

  Smiling in the wreck of her wedding day,

  Tipping the earth from her shoe.

  A VOICE LIKE A HOLE

  BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  The trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you’re sixteen. That’s the proper age. At sixteen, a long golden road opens up before you, and at the end of it is this amazing life. A sixteen-year-old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them. She smells like peaches or strawberries or something. She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout in the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off, just to be the thing she runs away to. Everyone knows: you run away at sixteen, and it all works itself out. But I couldn’t even get that right, which is more or less why I’m sitting here telling you all this, and more thanks to you for the ear.

  My name is Fig. Not short for anything, just Fig. See, in eighth grade my school did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty overstimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be nonspeaking fairies. I’m not actually talent-free. I could do Hermia for you right now. But I was so shy back then. The idea of auditioning, even for Cobweb, who barely gets to say “Hail!” felt like volunteering to be shot. Auditioning meant you might get chosen or you might not, and some kids were always chosen and some weren’t, and I knew which one I was, so why bother?

  I asked the drama teacher: “What can I be without trying out?”

  She said: “You can be a fairy.”

  So to pass the time while Oberon and Titania practiced their pentameters, the lot of us extraneous pixies made up fairy names for each other like the ones in the play: Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Moth. I got Fig. It stuck. By the time I ran away, nobody called me by my real name anymore.

  Talking to a runaway is a little like talking to a murderer. There was a time before you did it and a time after and between them there’s just this space, this monstrous thing, and it’s so heavy. It all could have gone so differently, if only. And there’s always the question haunting your talk, the rhinoceros in the room: Why did you do it?

  Because having a wicked stepmother isn’t such a great gig, outside of fairy tales. She doesn’t lay elaborate traps involving apples or spindles. She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up in the margins. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes the girl to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did. The instinctive way a kid knows she doesn’t really love you because she’s not really your mother—that’s how the kid knows she’ll never stop until you’re gone.

  So I went. I hopped a ride with a friend across the causeway into the city. The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore, but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.

  My remaining belongings sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one Lord of the Rings; the Complete Keats; a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton; a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin; two shirts, also black; $10.16; and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on planet Earth.

  I forgot my toothbrush.

  * * *

  So h
ere’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, sleep in libraries. If questioned, pretend to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through Les Misérables, Madame Bovary, and Simulacra and Simulation before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something. And when it comes to filling your head, those dead French guys usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.

  It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates: poof. Like dandelion seeds. I could say: Don’t do drugs; don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away. But the truth is, drugs are expensive, and you kind of have to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.