Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (97 page)

The message comes back a week later, over official channels.

It’s patchy, as if the machinery is going, or her voice is.

He sits more forward in his chair with every word.

“
Dr. Hammond died. Sometime early morning, maybe 0430, actual time unknown—I didn’t sleep for very long, but when I woke up she had gone. It’s just me.
“

The horror fades. Panic edges in.

Where are the others, he almost yells into the mic, who would leave you alone like this, but the question would take an hour to reach her, and that isn’t the thing he wants her to hear from him last.

(It would be the last; her voice is going, he realizes now what it means.

This will be the last.

His hands are shaking.)

So instead he says, “Roger that, Preetha. Please update us with any message for the Manu, and continue to report.”

He says, trying to be steady, “Everyone from home wishes you well.”

They send an ethicist and a psychologist to the comm center a few hours later, to talk to Henry and Wen about whether the ship should know.

“This puts them under a lot of unnecessary stress,” one of the ethicists argues.

“Good,” Henry says. “They have a lot to live up to.”

The other one says, “Informing them of a change like this could be more stressful than useful. They already know the importance of a clean landing on this.”

He says, “After this they fucking well better.”

Eventually, Wen snaps.

“This entire operation hinges on the crucial importance of full information,” she says, cutting off the psychologist halfway through a sentence about perception of failure. “It’s been that way since my forebears set foot here. Earth trusted them enough to send them. If we can’t trust them with information, we should tell them to turn around. Do you want to tell them that? Because I’m not going to.”

And before they can object, she hits the button to bounce it to the transport, so the skeleton crew that’s still awake will know what’s happened.

When they’re gone, muttering about calling her before the Ethics Board, Henry says, “There might be a record of something else on the Manu.”

She looks over at him, parsing what he’s done.

“Sometimes records are faulty,” she says. “Sometimes Jupiter interferes.”

They sit side by side, looking out at the cloud and the ice and the red day rising, channels open for messages that don’t come.

(The message Wen sent is a duplicate.

Henry hit Send before they ever showed; he hit Send before he ever paged Wen and told her there was something she needed to see.

He hit Send as soon as it came over the transom, and his hand stopped shaking.)

“To the Europa Base, and the crew and passengers of the Manu: We on Earth who have dreamed of exploration honor your mission, and have faith that what you work to build will come back to you a hundredfold.

For those who will go on to Gliese 581, that hidden world that holds our future in it; you are the children of Galileo, and we send our hopes with you.

The citizens of Earth wish you good journey, and good homecoming.”

He takes a crawler out to the dark side.

Ahead of him is a blue marble (behind him is a bead of jasper).

The blue marble isn’t winking—looking from here, there’s no marked difference from what it used to be. It will take some generations yet. When the water swallows up the last of it, the Evrard Telescope will show a surface of near-unbroken blue.

The grandchildren of Europa will be taken out to the dark side (no helmets, by then), and they’ll hold up binoculars and be instructed to look carefully for the bluest thing they can see.

(It won’t be Rigel, the teacher will have to remind them. Keep your eye out for something steady—you’re looking for a moon, not a star.)

Through his binoculars, he can see India passing out of sight; somewhere on what’s left of the land is the place where Kai died, fifty-three minutes before he got her last transmission.

It’s the first time he’s looked at something, and really known.

(Preetha means, The palm of the hand; it means happiness; it means beloved; one on top of the other.)

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine
is the author of
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.
Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed,
and
Apex,
and in the anthologies
Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth,
and more. She is a co-author of the forthcoming pop-culture book
Geek Wisdom,
and her film and TV writing has appeared in
Fantasy Magazine
and
Strange Horizons.
Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

England under the White Witch

Theodora Goss

It is always winter now.

When she came, I was only a child—in ankle socks, my hair tied back with a silk ribbon. My mother was a seamstress working for the House of Alexandre. She spent the days on her knees, saying Yes, madame has lost weight, what has madame been doing? When madame had been doing nothing of the sort. My father was a photograph of a man I had never seen in a naval uniform. A medal was pinned to the velvet frame.

My mother used to take me to Kensington Gardens, where I looked for fairies under the lilac bushes or in the tulip cups.

In school, we studied the kings and queens of England, its principle imports and exports, and home economics. Even so young, we knew that we were living in the waning days of our empire. That after the war, which had taken my father and toppled parts of London, the sun was finally setting. We were a diminished version of ourselves.

At home, my mother told me fairy tales about Red Riding Hood (never talk to wolves), Sleeping Beauty (your prince will come), Cinderella (choose the right shoes). We had tea with bread and potted meat, and on my birthday there was cake made with butter and sugar that our landlady, Mrs. Stokes, had bought as a present with her ration card.

Harold doesn’t hold with this new Empress, as she calls herself, Mrs. Stokes would tell my mother. Coming out of the north, saying she will restore us to greatness. She’s established herself in Edinburgh, and they do say she will march on London. He says the King got us through the war, and that’s good enough for us. And who believes a woman’s promises anyway?

But what I say is, England has always done best under a queen. Remember Elizabeth and Victoria. Here we are, half the young men dead in the war, no one for the young women to marry so they work as typists instead of having homes of their own. And trouble every day in India, it seems. Why not give an Empress a try?

One day Monsieur Alexandre told my mother that Lady Whorlesham had called her impertinent and therefore she had to go. That night, she sat for a long time at the kitchen table in our bedsit, with her face in her hands. When I asked her the date of the signing of the Magna Carta, she hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and said, As though I could remember such a thing! Then she said, Can you take care of yourself for a moment, Ann of my heart? I need to go talk to Mrs. Stokes.

The next day, when I ran home from school for dinner, she was there, talking to Mrs. Stokes and wearing a new dress, white tricotine with silver braid trim. She looked like a princess from a fairy tale.

It’s easy as pie, she was saying. I found the office just where you said it was, and they signed me right up. At first I’m going to help with recruitment, but the girl I talked to said she thought I should be in the rifle corps. They have women doing all sorts of things, there. I start training in two days.

You’re braver than I am, said Mrs. Stokes. Aren’t you afraid of being arrested?

If they do arrest me, will you take care of Ann? she asked. I know it’s dangerous, but they’re paying twice what I was making at the shop, and I have to do something. This world we’re living in is no good, you and I both know that. Nothing’s been right since the war. Just read this pamphlet they gave me. It makes sense, it does. I’m doing important work, now. Not stitching some Lady Whortlesham into her dress. I’m with the Empress.

In the end, the Empress took London more easily than anyone could have imagined. She had already taken Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford. We had heard how effective her magic could be against the remnants of our Home Forces. First, she sent clouds that covered the sky, from horizon to horizon. It snowed for days, until the city was shrouded in white. And then the sun came out just long enough to melt the top layer of snow, which froze during the night. The trees were encased in ice. They sparkled as though made of glass, and when they moved I heard a tinkling sound.

Then, she sent wolves. Out of the mist they came, white and gray, with teeth as sharp as knives. They spoke in low, gutteral voices, telling the Royal Guards to surrender or have their throats ripped out. Most of the guards stayed loyal. In the end, there was blood on the snow in front of Buckingham Palace. Wolves gnawed the partly-frozen bodies.

Third and finally came her personal army, the shop girls and nursemaids and typists who had been recruited, my mother among them. They looked magnificent in their white and silver, which made them difficult to see against the snow. They had endured toast and tea for supper, daily indignity, the unwanted attention of employers. Their faces were implacable. They shot with deadly accuracy and watched men die with the same polite attention as they had shown demonstrating a new shade of lipstick.

Buckingham Palace fell within a day. On the wireless, we heard that the King and his family had fled to France, all but one of his sisters, who it turned out was a sympathizer. By the time the professional military could mobilize its troops, scattered throughout our empire, England was already hers to command.

I stood by Mrs. Stokes, watching the barge of the Empress as it was rowed down the Thames. She stood on the barge, surrounded by wolves, with her white arms bare, black hair down to her feet, waving at her subjects.

No good will come of this, you mark my words, said Mr. Stokes.

Hush! Isn’t she lovely? said Mrs. Stokes.

You have seen her face in every schoolroom, every shop. Perhaps in your dreams. It is as familiar to you as your own. But I will never forget that first glimpse of her loveliness. She looked toward us, and I believed that she had seen me, had waved particularly to me.

The next day, our home economics teacher said, From now on, we are not going to learn about cooking and sewing. Instead, we are going to learn magic. There was already a picture of our beloved Empress over her desk, where the picture of the King used to be.

At first, there were resistance movements. There were some who fought for warmth, for light. Who said that as long as she reigned, spring would never come again. We would never see violets scattered among the grass, never hear a river run. Never watch young lovers hold each other on the embankment, kiss each other not caring who was watching. There was the Wordsworth Society, which tried to effect change politically. And there were more radical groups: the Children of Albion, the Primrose Brigade.

But we soon learned that our Empress was as ruthless as she was beautiful. Those who opposed her were torn apart by wolves, or by her girl soldiers, who could tear men apart with their bare hands and were more frightening than any wolves. Sympathizers were rounded up and imprisoned, encased in ice. Or worse, they were left free but all the joy was taken from them, so that they remained in a prison of their own perpetual despair.

Her spies were everywhere. Even the trees could not be trusted. The hollies were the most dangerous, the most liable to inform. But resistance groups would not meet under pines, firs, or hemlocks. In many households, the cats were on her side. Whispers of disloyalty would bring swift retribution.

And many said, such traitors deserved punishment. That winter was good for England, that we needed cold, needed toughening. We had grown soft after the war, allowed our dominions to rebel against us, allowed the world to change. But she would set things right. And so the resistance movements were put down, and our soldiers marched into countries under a white flag that did not mean surrender. Those who had tried to be free of us were confronted with winter, and sorceresses, and wolves. Their chiefs and rajahs and presidents came to London, bringing jewels and costly fabrics to lay before her feet, and pledged their loyalty.

Our empire spread, as indeed it must. A winter country must import its food, and as winter spreads, the empire must expand to supply the lands under snow, their waters locked in ice. That is the terrible, inescapable logic of empire.

I was a Snowflake, in a white kerchief with silver stars.  Then, I was an Ice Maiden. The other girls in school nodded to me as I walked by. If they did not wear the white uniform, I asked them why they had not joined up yet, and if they said their parents would not let them, I told them it was their responsibility to be persuasive. I won a scholarship to university, where I was inducted into the Sisterhood of the Wolf.

My den mother encouraged me to go into the sciences. Scientists will be useful to the Empress in the coming war, she said. Science and magic together are more powerful, are greater weapons, than they are apart. And there is a war coming, Ann. We hear more and more from our spies in Germany. A power is rising in that part of the world, a power that seeks to oppose the reign of the Empress. Surely not, I said. Who would oppose her? A power that believes in fire, she said. A fire that will burn away the snow, that will scorch the earth. That does not care about what we have already achieved—the security, the equality, the peace we will achieve when her empire spreads over the earth.