Кэтрин Валенте - The Future Is Blue

“LET US BEGIN by practicing the chromatic scale, beginning with E Major.”

That is what the voice coming out of the eye socket of a giant operatic squirrel said and it was Orchid’s voice and it had a laugh hidden inside it like it always did. I pulled myself up and over the lip of the socket and curled up next to Orchid Harm and his seven books, of which he’d already read four. I curled up next to him like nothing bad had ever happened. I fit into the line of his body and he fit into mine. I didn’t say anything for a long, long time. He stroked my hair and read to me about basic strumming technique but after awhile he stopped talking too and we just sat there quietly and he smelled like sunlight and booze and everything purple in the world.

“I killed the Ordinary Emperor with a story’s tail,” I confessed at last.

“I missed you, too.”

“Are you dead?”

“The squirrels won’t tell me. Something about collapsing a waveform. But I’m not the one wearing a red dress.”

I looked down. Deep red silky satin death flowed out over the bone floor. A lot of my skin showed in the slits of that dress. It felt nice.

“The squirrels ate you, though.”

“You never know with squirrels. I think I ate some of them, too. It’s kind of the same thing, with time travel, whether you eat the squirrel or the squirrel eats you. I remember it hurt. I remember you kissed me till it was over. I remember Early-to-Tea and Stopwatch screaming. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. Anyway, the squirrels felt bad about it. Because we’d taken care of them so well and they had to do it anyway. They apologized for ages. I fell asleep once in the middle of them going on and on about how timelines taste.”

“Am I dead?”

“I don’t know, did you die?”

“Maybe the bubbles got me. The Emperor said I’d get sick if I traveled without a clarinet. And parts of me aren’t my own parts anymore.” I stretched out my legs. They were the color of rooster feathers. “But I don’t think so. What do you mean the squirrels had to do it?”

“Self-defense, is what they said about a million times.”

“What? We never so much as kicked one!”

“You have to think like a six-legged mauve squirrel of infinite time. The Ordinary Emperor was going to hunt them all down one by one and set the chronology of everything possible and impossible on fire. They set a contraption in motion so that he couldn’t touch them, a contraption involving you and me and a blue story and a Red Country where nobody dies, they just change clothes. They’re very tidy creatures. Don’t worry, we’re safe in the Red Country. There’ll probably be another war. The squirrels can’t fix that. They’re only little. But everyone always wants to conquer the Red Country and nobody ever has. We have a wall and it’s a really good one.”

I twisted my head up to look at him, his plum-colored hair, his amethyst eyes, his stubborn chin. “You have to say what you mean here.”

“I mean I love you. And I mean the infinite squirrels of space and time devoured me to save themselves from annihilation at the hands of a pepper grinder. I can mean both. It’s allowed.”

I kissed Orchid Harm inside the skull of a giant rodent and we knew that we were both thinking about ice cream. The ruby bassoons hooted up from the piazza and scarlet tanagers scattered from the rooftops and a watercolor unicorn told a joke about the way tubas are way down the road but the echoes carried her voice up and up and everywhere. Orchid stopped the kiss first. He pointed to the smooth crimson roof of the eye socket.

A long stripe of gold paint gleamed there.

ONCE UPON A time, three rather large and unusual creatures grew very tired indeed of fighting, day and night and day again, fighting the same overwhelming and unyielding enemies, fighting with all their large and scaly might, as well as their claws, teeth, flaming breath, and occasionally, walloping rune-carved giant’s hammers they found lying about where others had fallen. Because the sun was setting rosy in the sky, and because they could hardly bear to put one foot in front of the other, and because, at long last, their fates had been tucked firmly into bed and told to stay there or else, these three rather large and unusual beasts sat down upon a rather large and filthy hill in a country called Fairyland. The hill was filthy because a great battle had been fought there. Bronze and wicker and glass armor lay everywhere strewn about. Swords and axes and scissors and needles and a million thousand arrows turned that hill into a pincushion. Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea. The three creatures sat carefully on their haunches inside a prickly prison of blades and bows and bucklers.

One was a tall man all in green, armored in a battered green breastplate and a battered green helmet and a green carriage-driver’s cloak and hardy green boots. One was an enormous Leopard with a curling green saddle on her back. The man smoked a long green pipe, and wherever he went a fresh green wind followed. This was not surprising, for he was the Green Wind, and his cat was the Leopard of Little Breezes. Together they brought storms and sighs to all the six corners of the world. The third creature looked something like a dragon. But he could not be a dragon, surely not, for he had no forepaws. His body curved back against his powerful hind legs like a capital S. He was the color of the very last embers of the fire, and his belly was the color of old peaches. He was graceful and gallant and gregarious and grim. His huge claws were very black, his eyes were very orange, his horns were fierce and sharp, he had long whiskers hanging from long snouts, and enormous wings like bats, if bats were far bigger than houses, extremely bony, and not in the least blind.

If you have not guessed it already, this dear and daring beast was a Wyvern. A Wyverary, if we are to be taxonomically accurate, for though his mother was a proper Wyvern, his father was a library. That only sounds strange if both of your parents were precisely the same sort of animal, which hardly ever happens, when you really think about it. He had been named for the family business, for a library has ever so many encylcopedias, and the beast was called A-Through-L. He knew just everything about everything, so long as it began with the letters A through L.

They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. They had only just met today, having fought on the same side, and after today, they would not meet again for a very, very long time. But they had become fast friends, for that is what three people who have survived something dreadful together always do.

The Wyvern looked down from their pincushion hill of swords and arrows into a long, deep valley. It had been very pretty down there once. Lots of blue stones and violet flowers and rabbits and foxes and minks who realized long ago that they all had soft ears and moist noses and hated hunters, and so, rather than fight each other, formed a collective for the Betterment of Us Who Gets Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Our Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy, and lived in reasonable happiness. None of that was down there any longer. No flowers, no stones, no softness. A great battle had been fought in the Valley of Soft Ears. The last battle of the war, in fact. A stranger had come, an outsider, a mysterious girl with untold riches and untold fury. She had sent her armies screaming through the meadows and forests to seize Fairyland for herself.