The Apex Book of World SF Part 13

Melchor Antevadez squinted at her. "Is any love worth all this effort? Looking for the impossible?"

Maria Isabella gave the tiniest of smiles. "What makes you think I'm in love?"

Melchor Antevadez raised an eyebrow at her denial.

"I'll get everything," she promised the kitemaker.

"But it may take a lifetime to gather everything," the artisan said wearily.

"A lifetime is all I have," Maria Isabella told him. She then shook the butcher's boy awake.

"I cannot go alone. You're younger than me but I will sponsor you as my companion. Will you come with me?"

"Of course," mumbled butcher's boy drowsily. "After all, this shouldn't take more time than I have to spare."

"It may be significantly longer than you think," the artisan said, shaking his head.

"Then please, Ser Antevadez, dream the design and I'll have everything you listed when we return." She stood to leave.

That very day, Maria Isabella told her parents and both sets of her padrinos that she was going off on a long trip. She invoked her right of Ver du Mundo: when women of at least sixteen years, and men of at least twenty years, could go forth into the wideness of Hinirang; sometimes to seek their fortune, sometimes to run from it. They all gave her their blessings, spoke fondly of how she used to dance and sing as a child, saluted her new right as a woman and full citizen of Ciudad Meiora, accompanied her all the way to the Portun du Transgresiones with more recalled memories of her youth, and sent her on her way. As for the butcher's boy, he waited until she was well away and then joined her on the well-worn path, the Sendero du'l Viajero, along with the supplies she had asked him to purchase.

"I'm ready to go." The butcher's boy grinned at her. He was clad in a warm tunic in the manner of city folk, and around his neck, for luck, he wore an Ajima'at, a wooden charm fas.h.i.+oned in the form of a wheel.

"What did you tell your kinfolk?" Maria Isabella asked him as he helped her mount a st.u.r.dy horse.

"That I would be back in a month or so."

It took almost sixty years for Maria Isabella and the butcher's boy to find all the items on Melchor Antevadez's impossible list.

They began at Pur'Anan, and then trekked to Katakios and Viri'Ato (where the sanctuary of the First Tree stood unmolested by time).

They travelled north to the lands of Bontoc and Cabarroquis (where the Povo Montaha dwelt in seclusion).

They sailed eastward to Palao'an and the Islas du'l Calami'an (where the traders from countries across the seas converged in a riot of tongues).

They ventured westward to the dark lands of Siqui'jor and Jomal'jig (where the Silent Ones kept court whenever both sun and moon occupied the same horizon).

They visited the fabled cities of the south: Diya al Tandag, Diya al Din, and Diya al Bajao (where fire-shrouded Djin and the Tiq'Barang waged an endless war of attrition).

They entered the marbled underworld of the Sea Lords of Rumblon and braved the Lair of the M'Arinduque (in whose house the dead surrendered their memories of light and laughter).

When they ran out of money after the third year of travel, Maria Isabella and the butcher's boy spent time looking for ways to finance their quest. She began knowing only how to ride, dance, sing, play the arpa, the violin, and the flauta, embroider, sew, and write poetry about love; the butcher's boy began knowing how to cut up a cow. By the time they had completed the list, they had more than quintupled the amount of money they began with, and they both knew how to manage a caravan; run a plantation; build and maintain fourteen kinds of seagoing and rivergoing vessels; raise horses big and small, and fowl, dogs, and seagulls; recite the entire annals of six cultures from memory; speak and write nineteen languages; prepare medicine for all sorts of ailments, worries, and anxieties; make flashpowder, lu fuego du ladron, and picaro de fuegos artificiales; make gla.s.s, ceramics, and lenses from almost any quality sand; and many many other means of making money.

In the seventh year of the quest, a dreadful storm destroyed their growing caravan of found things and they lost almost everything (she clutched vainly at things as they flew and spun in the downpour of wind and water, and the butcher's boy fought to keep the storm from taking her away as well). It was the last time that Maria Isabella allowed herself to cry. The butcher's boy took her hand, and they began all over again. They were beset by thieves and learnt to run (out of houses and caves and temples; on roads and on sea lanes and in gulleys; on horses, aguilas, and waves). They encountered scoundrels and sinverguenzza and learnt to bargain (at first with various coins, jewels, and metals, and later with promises, threats, and dreams). They were beleaguered by nameless things in nameless places and learnt to defend themselves (first with wooden pessoal, then later with kris, giavellotto, and lamina).

In their thirtieth year together, they took stock of what they had, referred to the thousands of items still left unmarked on their list, exchanged a long, silent look filled with immeasurable meaning, and went on searching for the components of the impossible kite--acquiring the dowel by planting a langka seed at the foot of the grove of a kindly diuata (and waiting the seven years it took to grow, unable to leave), winning the lower spreader in a drinking match against the three oldest brothers of Duma'Alon, a.s.sembling the pieces of the lower edge connector whilst fleeing a war party of the Sumaliq, solving the riddles of the toothless crone Ai'ai'sin to find what would be part of a wing tip, climbing Apo'amang to spend seventy sleepless nights to get the components of the ferrule, crafting an artificial wave to fool the cerena into surrendering their locks of hair that would form a portion of the tether, rearing miniature horses to trade to the Duende for parts of the bridle, and finally spending eighteen years painstakingly collecting the fifteen thousand different strands of thread that would make up the aquilone's surface fabric.

When at last they returned to Ciudad Meiora, both stooped and older, they paused briefly at the gates of the Portun du Transgresiones. The butcher's boy looked at Maria Isabella and said, "Well, here we are at last."

She nodded, raising a weary arm to her forehead and making the sign of homecoming.

"Do you feel like you've wasted your life?" she asked him as the caravan bearing everything they had ama.s.sed lumbered into the city.

"Nothing is ever wasted," the butcher's boy told her.

They made their way to the house of Melchor Antevadez and knocked on his door. A young man answered them and sadly informed them that the wizened artisan had died many many years ago, and that he, Reuel Antevadez, was the new Maestro du Cosas Ingravidas.

"Yes, yes. But do you still make kites?" Maria Isabella asked him.

"Kites? Of course. From time to time, someone wants an aquilone or--"

"Before Ser Antevadez, Melchor Antevadez, died, did he leave instructions for a very special kind of kite?" she interrupted.

"Well..." mumbled Reuel Antevadez, "my great-grandfather did leave a design for a woman named Maria Isabella du'l Cielo, but--"

"I am she." She ignored his shocked face. "Listen, young man. I have spent all my life gathering everything Melchor Antevadez said he needed to build my kite. Everything is outside. Build it."

And so Reuel Antevadez unearthed the yellowing parchment that contained the design of the impossible kite that Melchor Antevadez had dreamt into existence, referenced the parts from the list of things handed to him by the butcher's boy, and proceeded to build the aquilone.

When it was finished, it looked nothing at all like either Maria Isabella or the butcher's boy had imagined. The kite was huge and looked like a star, but those who saw it could not agree on how best to describe the marvellous conveyance.

After he helped strap her in, the butcher's boy stood back and looked at the woman he had grown old with.

"This is certainly no time for tears," Maria Isabella reprimanded him gently, as she gestured for him to release the kite.

"No, there is time for everything," the butcher's boy whispered to himself as he pushed and pulled at the ropes and strings, pulley and levers and gears of the impossible contrivance.

"Goodbye, goodbye!" she shouted down to him as the star kite began its rapid ascent to the speckled firmament above.

"Goodbye, goodbye," he whispered as his heart finally broke into a thousand mismatched pieces, each one small, hard, and sharp. The tears of the butcher's boy (who had long since ceased to be a boy) flowed freely down his face as he watched her rise--the extraordinary old woman he had always loved, strapped to the frame of an impossible kite.

As she rose, he sighed and reflected on the absurdity of life, the heaviness of loss, the cruelty of hope, the truth about quests, and the relentless nature of a love that knew only one direction. His hands swiftly played out the tether (that part of the marvellous rope they had bargained for with two riddles, a blind rooster, and a handful of cold and l.u.s.treless diamante in a bazaar held only once every seven years on an island in the Dag'at Palabras Tacitas), and he realised that all those years they were together, she had never known his name.

As she rose above the city of her birth, Maria Isabella took a moment to gasp at the immensity of the city that sprawled beneath her, recalled how everything had begun, fought the trembling of her withered hands, and with a fishbone knife (that sad and strange knife that had been pa.s.sed from hand to hand, from women consumed by unearthly pa.s.sion, the same knife that had been part of her reward for solving the mystery of the Rajah Sumibon's lost turtle sh.e.l.l in the southern lands of Diya al Din) cut the glimmering tether.

Up, up, up, higher and higher and higher she rose. She saw the winding silver ribbon of the Pasigla, the fluted roofs of Lu Ecolia du Arcana Menor ei Mayor, the trellises and gardens of the Plaza Emperyal, and the dimmed streets of the Mercado du Coristas. And Maria Isabella looked down and thought she saw everything, everything.

At one exquisite interval during her ascent, Maria Isabella thought she spied the precise tower where Lorenzo du Vicenzio ei Salvadore, the stargazer, must live and work. She felt the exuberant joy of her lost youth bubble up within her and mix with the fiery spark of love she had kept alive for sixty years, and in a glorious blaze of irrepressible happiness she waved her free hand with wild abandon, shouting the name that had been forever etched into her heart.

When a powerful wind took the kite to sudden new heights, when Ciudad Meiora and everything below her vanished in the dark, she stopped shouting and began to laugh and laugh and laugh.

And Maria Isabella du'l Cielo looked up at the beginning of forever and thought of nothing, nothing at all.

And in the city below, in one of the high rooms of the silent Torre du Astrunomos (where those who had served with distinction were housed and honoured), an old man, long-retired and plagued by cataracts, sighed in his sleep and dreamt a dream of unnamed stars.

"Cinderers"

Nir Yaniv.

Nir Yaniv is an Israeli writer, editor and musician. His first short story collection, Ktov Ke'shed Mi'shachat (Write Like a Devil), came out in 2006, and he is co-author (with the editor of this book) of a short novel, The Tel Aviv Dossier. He served as editor of the Israeli SF Society's website and later edited the magazine Chalomot Be'aspamia. He lives in Tel Aviv.

They say you should always start small. Burn a tree, perhaps: a parked car, road signs, a traffic light. Not us. We, for starters, burned Mr Kalmanson's flat--including two fine leather chairs, forks and knives (two dozen pairs), a life-sized (ugly) wooden horse, and Mr Kalmanson himself, of course.

"Oy," said Huey, "add a little six kilohertz, and I can't hear the bedroom."

I heard the bedroom just fine, and also the kitchen, the living room, and the toilets. Mics and earphones of the highest quality, and a stills camera--black and white, of course. Louie gave it some more six K, and exactly then Kalmanson's stupid wife chose to take her leave of this world with a deafening cry.

"s.h.i.+t!" roared Huey and tore away the earphones.

"I thought she'd scream higher," said Louie. "It sounded like, I don't know, B-flat?"

"Almost two K with annoying overtones. I hope we can take it out in the editing."

"We'll see," said Louie, and Huey put on the earphones again. In the flat the shuddering bodies fell still, as did one of the mics in the kitchen, burnt despite its thermal casing. Annoying, but what can you do? The fire began to die as the gas filling the house was consumed. One kilometre north, I saw the lights of the fire engine turning in desperation. Nails on the road. The firemen are our brothers, but the siren would ruin our recording.

Later, equipped with backpacks, sleeping bags, a grenade launcher, and much good will, we lay in wait under cover of a giant Sony billboard by the highway, announcing that "This Is No Television--It Is Reality." Drexler's tanker leaves Ashdod at one hundred kilometres per hour toward Haifa. Half an hour later, Schwartz's truck exits Chedera toward Tel Aviv at ninety kilometres per hour. Drexler carries cooking gas, and Schwartz, detergents. When and where will they meet? And how?

Boom.

Huey didn't let me film in 8mm. Noise. In my opinion there is nothing like the grainy look of real film, but sometimes you have to make allowances. I used high-resolution video, and Dewey had to take care of the rest of the sound equipment by himself. A clean recording, aside from the part where the burning Schwartz, flying out of the truck's window, landed on one of the mics and crashed it. Nu, n.o.body's perfect.

Louie disappeared in the middle of dinner. One moment he was there, absentmindedly playing with his broccoli whilst examining the flamethrower for tomorrow's job, and the next his plate was orphaned.

"Do you think he'd mind if I ate it?" asked Dewey.

"Eat," I said. "It's good for you." I never understood those vegetarians. I pa.s.sed him the plate.

"Say," said Dewey with his mouth full, "doesn't it strike you as odd..."

"What?"

"That he, like, disappeared?"

"Who?"

"What do you mean who? Where's your brain?"

"Listen," I said, "Let's not play games. If you want to ask me something, be specific."

Dewey knows me, and knows there is no point in arguing.

"Louie. Disappeared. Don't you think something here doesn't add up?"

I thought about it. "No," I said. "He probably took a break. He'll be back soon."

"Look," said Dewey. "I wouldn't be surprised if he disappeared any other time, but in the middle of dinner?"

You could say that for Dewey--occasionally there was something to his twisted logic.

"There is something to your twisted logic," I said, "but I don't think we can do anything about it."

"He's not right," said Dewey.

"Don't exaggerate," I said. "He did a nice job with the trucks today. Doing is everything, the rest is nothing."

"No--yes--that is, sure. That's not what I meant."

"Don't be a pain," I said. "Why don't you finish here instead?"

And I went.

When I came back I found Louie leaning over building plans and writing comments in a little notebook. Huey was looking over his shoulder. "What's that?" I asked.

"The lift shaft for tomorrow. I'm just working out how much of Eve we need.

"Eve?"

"Extreme Velocity Explosives," said Huey.

"That's right," said Louie. "EVE."

"Oh," I said, and looked around. Huey wasn't there. "You know," I said, "doesn't it strike you as odd..."

"What?"

"That he, like, disappeared?"

"Listen," said a voice.

"Who?" said Louie.

"What do you mean who? Where's your brain?"

"Listen," said Louie, "Let's not play games. If you want to ask me something, be specific."

I know him, and I know there is no point arguing.

"Huey. Disappeared. Don't you think something here doesn't add up?"