Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

It was worse in the Great Night... Everything’s worse in the Great Night. The snow would come swirling down the staircase and he saw things in it – faces – heard voices. The faces and voices of the people who had died, up there on the altiplano. He had to follow them, go up, into the Valley of the Kilns, where he would ask the people to forgive him – or kill him.

And he went. I couldn’t stop him – I didn’t want to stop him. Can you understand that? I watched him from this very belvedere. The pelerines are not our warders, any of us is free to leave at any time, though I’ve never seen anyone leave, but Arthur. He left in the evening, with the lilac light catching Gloaming Peak. He never looked back. Not a glance to me. I watched him climb the steps to that bend there. That’s where I lost sight of him. I never saw or heard of him again. But stories come down the stairs with the stickmen and they make their way even to this little eyrie; stories of a seer – a visionary. I look and I imagine I see smoke rising, up there on the altiplano.

It’s a pity you won’t be here to see the clouds break around the Gloaming, or look at the stars.

PLATE 10 V genetric nives : Mother-of-snows (direct translation from Thent). Ground-cover hi-alpine of the Exx Palisades. The plant forms extensive carpets of thousands of minute white blossoms.

The most intricate papercut in the Botanica Veneris. Each floret is three millimetres in diameter. Paper, ink, gouache.

A HIGH-STEPPING SPIDER-CAR took me up the Ten Thousand Steps, past caravans of stickmen, spines bent, shoulders warped beneath brutal loads of finest porcelain.

The twelve cuts of the Botanica Veneris I have given to the Princess, along with descriptions and botanical notes. She would not let me leave, clung to me, wracked with great sobs of loss and fear. It was dangerous; a sullen land with Great Night coming. I could not convince her of my reason for heading up the stairs alone, for they did not convince me. The one, true reason I could not tell her. Oh, I have been despicable to her! My dearest friend. But worse even than that, false.

She stood watching my spider-car climb the steps until a curve in the staircase took me out of her sight. Must the currency of truth always be falsehood?

Now I think of her spreading her long hair out, and brushing it, firmly, directly, beautifully, and the pen falls from my fingers...

EGAYHAZY IS A closed city; hunched, hiding, tight. Its streets are narrow, its buildings leans towards each other; their gables so festooned with starflower that it looks like perpetual festival. Nothing could be further from the truth: Egayhazy is an angry city; aggressive and cowed: sullen. I keep my LedekhTeltai in my bag. But the anger is not directed at me, though from the story I heard at the Camahoo hoondahvi; my fellow humans on this world have not graced our species. It is the anger of a country under occupation. On walls and doors the proclamations of the Duke of Yoo are plastered layer upon layer: her pennant, emblazoned with the four white hands of House Yoo, flies from publics buildings, the radio station mast, tower tops and the gallows. Her javrosts patrol streets so narrow their graapa barely squeeze through them. In their passage, the citizens of Egayhazy flash jagged glares, mutter altiplano oaths. And there is another sigil: an eight-petalled flower; a blue so deep it seems almost to shine. I see it stencilled hastily on walls and doors and the occupation-force posters. I see it in little badges sewn to the quilted jackets of the Egayhazians; and in tiny glass jars in low-set windows. In the market of Yent I witnessed javrosts upturn and smash a vegetable stall that dared to offer a few posies of this blue bloom.

THE STAFF AT my hotel were suspicious when they saw me working up some sketches from memory of this blue flower of dissent. I explained my work and showed some photographs and asked what was this flower? A common plant of the high altiplano; they said. It grows up under the breath of the high snow; small and tough and stubborn. Its most remarkable feature is that it blooms when no other flower does – in the dead of the Great Night. The Midnight Glory was one name, though it had another, newer, which entered common use since the occupation: The Blue Empress.

I knew there and then I had found Arthur.

A PALL OF sulfurous smoke hangs permanently over the Valley of Kilns, lit with hellish tints from the glow of the kilns below. A major ceramics centre on a high, treeless plateau? How are the kilns fuelled? Volcanic vents do the firing, but they turn this long defile in the flank of Mount Tooloowera into a little hell of clay, bones, smashed porcelain, sand, slag and throat-searing sulphur. Glehenta is the last of the Porcelain Towns, wedged into the head of the valley, where the river Iddis still carries a memory of freshness and cleanliness. The pottery houses, like upturned vases, lean towards each other like companionable women.

And there is the house to which my questions guided me: as my informants described; not the greatest but perhaps the meanest; not the foremost but perhaps the most prominent, tucked away in an alley. From its roof flies a flag, and my breath caught: not the Four White Hands of Yoo – never that, but neither the Blue Empress. The smoggy wind tugged at the hand-and-dagger of the Hydes of Grangegorman.

Swift action: to hesitate would be to falter and fail, to turn and walk away, back down the Valley of the Kilns and the Ten Thousand Steps. I rattle the ceramic chimes. From inside, a huff and sigh. Then a voice: worn ragged, stretched and tired, but unmistakable.

“Come on in. I’ve been expecting you.”

PLATE 11: V crepitant movebitvolutans. Wescott’s Wandering Star. A windmobile vine, native of the Exx Palisades, that grows into a tight spherical web of vines which, in the Venerian Great Day, becomes detached from an atrophied root stock and rolls cross-country, carried on the wind. A central calx contains woody nuts that produce a pleasant rattling sound as the Wandering Star is in motion.

Cut paper, painted, layered and gummed. This papercut contains over thirty layers.

TEA?

I have it sent up from Camahoo when the stickmen make the return trip. Proper tea. Irish breakfast. It’s very hard to get the water hot enough at this altitude but it’s my little ritual. I should have asked you to bring some. I’ve known you were looking for me from the moment you set out from Loogaza. You think anyone can wander blithely into Glehenta?

Tea.

You look well. The years have been kind to you. I look like shit. Don’t deny it. I know it. I have an excuse. I’m dying you know. The liquor of the vine – it takes as much as it gives. And this world is hard on humans. The Great Days – you never completely adjust – and the climate: if it’s not the thin air up here it’s the moulds and fungi and spores down there. And the ultraviolet. It dries you out, withers you up. The town healer must have frozen twenty melanomas off me. No I’m dying. Rotten inside. A leather bag of mush and bones. But you look very well Ida. So Patrick shot himself. Fifteen years too late, says I. He could have spared all of us... enough of that. But I’m glad you’re happy. I’m glad you have someone who cares, to treat you the way you should be.

I am the Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, and I am dying.

I walked down that same street you walked down. I didn’t ride, I walked, right through the centre of town. I didn’t know what to expect. Silence. A mob. Stones. Bullets. To walk right through and out the other side without a door opening to me. At the very last house, the door opened and an old man came out and stood in front of me so that I could not pass. “I know you.” He pointed at me. “You came the night of the Javrosts.” I was certain then I would die, and that seemed not so bad a thing to me. “You were the merciful one, the one who spared our young.” And he went into the house and brought me a porcelain cup of water and I drank it down and here I remain. The Merciful One.