Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 103

Brahe laid back on his pillow, and did not seem to hear.

"Heaven is an observatory, Johannes." Eyes that had surveyed the geometry of the Heavens with unheralded precision were blind now, feverbright. "Listen to Mars."

"Mars, master. I know. You must trust me."

"Mars will tell you everything."

Yes, Kepler thought. Eventually, he will.

"G.o.d will give you a star as well," Brahe muttered. "And I have given you Mars."

Johannes Kepler nodded tolerantly-but he would think of those words again, three years later, when Brunowski's excited midnight pounding on Kepler's door drew his attention to his own Stella nova, lodged like a thorn in the belly of Ophiucus.

Brahe's impeccable Mars data-unheralded in its precision-stretched decades. In 1609, Kepler would find those meticulous data indispensable in proving that Mars traveled in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. In the process, he would establish that his mentor-and his own earlier theories, and those of Copernicus-had been totally, irrevocably wrong.

Brahe had shattered the universe once. Kepler would be among the first to build a new one from the shards.

Non videri sed est.

The answer lies with Mars. It has always lain with Mars. Mars and his odd, looping motion across the sky. And we will know his answer when Kepler finishes the maths. He estimates it will take some thousand pages of equations.

There is a simple answer, under G.o.d, and the simple answer is the best. If the Earth moved under our feet, how could we not feel it? If Copernicus were correct about the perfect solids of the heavens, then neither Mars nor my comet could move in such loops and ellipses as they do.

Previous data have been flawed, but mine are better, and they will show the truth of G.o.d's design.

Kepler must carry on. Sophie and I have proven it. The course of the Heavens is a changing thing.

I call for Kepler, and I hear his voice, shuffling footsteps across the dense hand-knotted carpets, but I do not understand what he says. The young German. Not G.o.dless, but outcast by Lutheran and Catholic alike. And brilliant, and if he will only see the truth of G.o.d's will, an astronomer.

A scientist.

Does he come? I know it not. The pain is very great. Some edge of my soul knows I am fevered, knows that I lie under linen, that sweet faithful Kirstine cools my brow and drips water down my throat. I know what they are giving me for the raging fever, then: salts of mercury, and other things. My own prescription for fever and vomiting, devised with clever Sophie so many years ago.

I am Tycho Brahe. I taste my own poison. The savor of metal locks my tongue. My commoner wife, whom I have never been forgiven for loving, holds my hand in slick fingers. My argumentative student sits by my bed. I am dying.

The rest of me soars. Build on my mistakes, Johannes. Non videri sed est.

"To be rather than to seem." The voice is a darkness in me. There is something I know.

I am dying. Dying, like a star, and revelation comes to a dying man in a flare of inspiration, like the clarity when the fever at last breaks. Die Stella nova, my Sophie's bright discovery, was a star indeed. But not a new star.

It was a dead star.

A funeral pyre. I was right: the spheres in heaven are not immutable; I was wrong: this was not a birth.

It was an explosion.

Darkness swaddles me, cold as a Knudstrup balcony in November. Like the salmon that kills itself to breed, out of the old thing comes the next thing.

It is the advancement of the world: as Brahe gives birth to Kepler, the dead star hangs s.h.i.+ning in unfathomable darkness. I am dying, but my light will illumine my student, and the next, and the one after that.

The brightest star is a dying star.

Stella mortis. Stella nova.

Non videri sed est.

Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit.

Stella mortis. Stella nova.

Nefrustra vixisse videar.

Long Cold Day Remarkably, Christian Whittaker went to bed sober one cold Wednesday night, the last day of February, in 1976. Whittaker was a big, blunt man, broken-veined, with a habitual drunk's coa.r.s.eness of skin and voice. He wasn't astoundingly fat, but he had an astounding ring of fat around his neck: jowls and a double chin that fell over his throat and collar and two thick cus.h.i.+ons on either side of his spine below his ears, like the hams on a hog. He wore a wedding ring because his hands were spongy with retained fluid; he could never take it off.

Whittaker shuffled along Maple Street, careless of melt.w.a.ter rivulets frozen across the sidewalk. Clouds snagged like handfuls of cotton wool on the mountains bounding a vast, torn, oceanic sky. White on white on gray, snowcapped peaks sweeping down to snow-frosted foothills that cupped a low, cold valley.

His gloves were old; his hands were shoved into his pockets against the cold. There was a hole in the thumb of the right-hand one. He idly rasped the hair on his leg against the skin with his thumb as he walked. His legs burned with wind through the cloth of his jeans.

He was drunk. Not very drunk, not by Whittaker's standards, but enough that the cold didn't hurt as much as it should have. He saw a woman walk past, though, headed in the other direction, her child walking in front of her. The little boy's coat was threadbare corduroy, not warm enough for the iron of the day, and his mother had cupped her blue naked fingers over his ears.

Whittaker turned his head inside its ox-collar of flesh to watch them pa.s.s. The woman ducked her chin and wouldn't meet his eyes, her shoulders hunched toward her ears with cold or fear.

Whittaker thought of his own boy, Tony. He thought of Tony s.h.i.+vering in an apartment that went unheated half the time, and he stopped on the sidewalk, his hands knotting in his pockets. Cold. It was always cold; he couldn't remember when he'd last seen a b.u.t.tercup edging between sidewalk slabs or flicked the head off a dandelion with his thumbnail. He half-thought those things were fantasies, childhood fancies carried through to adulthood-the Easter bunny, Santa Claus.

But the warmth had to come and go, didn't it? Warmth enough to melt the snow where it lay against the earth, so it slumped in curves and hollows and sent trickles of melt.w.a.ter across the sidewalks to freeze in treacherous ridges. Warmth enough to drip icicles from eaves like accelerated stop-motion stalact.i.tes.

Whittaker wished he could remember the last time he'd seen the sun. He turned around his left foot, not a smooth pivot but a stumping spiral, and stared up at the mountains, the clouds bunched and tangled around their peaks. He s.h.i.+vered in his too-small coat.

Tony would be cold. Even colder. Whittaker ducked his head as he faced into the wind; it sheared into his sinuses like gla.s.s. His boots were scuffed, almost scoured across the toes. Fractal salt stains spidered up the leather like frost-flowers, grasping at his cuffs.

A white coupe sat by the curb, engine running. Long piratical plumes of exhaust curled from the tailpipe, whipped forward by the same wind that was suffocating Whittaker. He contemplated stealing the car, driving it home, piling Jessica into the pa.s.senger seat and Tony in back, and driving until they reached someplace warm.

He could hear her voice, almost, if he listened for it. Go ahead, Chris. Do what you have to do.

He heard things sometimes. He was used to it.

He waded through plowed snow to the car and pulled his gloved hand from his pocket. It took concentration to uncurl the fist. His entire body wanted to clench, tendon by tendon, bone by bone. He reached for the handle of the pa.s.senger-side door, the door against the curb. Chrome shocked through his gloves; when he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back his fingers caught, ice cracked off the handle, and the door swung open. The plow had scruffed snow into ice, big yellow-black chunks, and the door thumped solidly when it struck the s.m.u.t-marked bank.

It was warm in the car. Cigarette-scented air puffed past him, easing the ache in his sinuses, a breeze from a summer day. Whittaker bent forward, grunting, hands on his knees and then on the seat as he shoved his bulk inside, reaching out to brush the keys with a fingertip. He crawled across the pa.s.senger seat, a yellow patchwork quilt bunching under his knee, his pants riding up his calf and allowing an arctic gust to caress gooseflesh.

He didn't fit. The dashboard shoved against his hip. The stick s.h.i.+ft jabbed his thigh. He should have gone to the driver's side. He shouldn't be here at all.

"Hey!" The first cry tattered, but the second one strong. "Hey, you son of a b.i.t.c.h.

Hey"

Whittaker flinched, shoved backward, boot slipping on rilled ice. He bruised hip and elbow, shoulder and a.s.s, on the doorframe while wriggling loose. He didn't fall, but he slipped, twisted, wrenching his knee. Something tangled his legs; his hands clenched in fear as he clawed at it. He didn't turn, didn't glance over his shoulder to see who had shouted.

Heaving, arms pumping, whatever was in his hand flapping behind him like Batman's cape, Whittaker ran. His knees stabbed and his ankles tw.a.n.ged, every step resonating through his body like a beating. He ducked down an alley, air scalding his throat as he gasped in huge, painful breaths. He fetched up inside an empty bus shelter three blocks away, slumped against splintered wood, snot and phlegm gliding from his nose to crackle on the sidewalk. Crimson flashes haunted the black tunnel closing over his vision; his heart pounded so hard it shook his hands in time. He heard the bus coming and couldn't look up.

With his free hand he fumbled in his pocket for change, fingers numb through worn leather. The driver knelt the city bus with a sizzle of hydraulics. Whittaker hauled himself up the steps, panting, the sweat freezing on his neck. He paid and started coughing before he even managed to drop into one of the handicapped benches at the front. He doubled over until his belly pressed his thighs, coughing until it felt like his lungs were rasped pink.

His fingers clenched on cloth, warmth, softness through his glove. He looked down. There was a yellow quilt-a quarter-sized quilt, a child's quilt-clenched in his left hand.

Whittaker was nearly at the end of the bus route when he realized that the home he was going to didn't exist anymore and when he remembered that Jessica was dying-on the sharp verge of dying, nothing left of her but an unconscious sh.e.l.l on a plastic hospital pillow-and Tony hadn't spoken to him in seven years.

The bus was going the wrong way, anyway.

Gretchen and Tamara were shooting pool and drinking tequila mockingbirds in a bar called the Golden Eagle when Tony Whittaker blew in out of the dark. Every time the wooden door opened, its watered-gla.s.s panel shook in the wind and the swampish interior of the tavern cooled enough to offer some relief. A mediocre blues quartet was ruining "h.e.l.lhound on my Trail" and Miller High Life was the most upscale beer the tavern served.

Tony sidled through the door into warmth, packed bodies, and noise. His bell-bottoms flapped around his boots and bubbled paint flaked onto his fingers. He unzipped his coat, let it swing open so the music and moist warmth could slip inside, then pulled steamed gla.s.ses off his nose and polished them on his pullover.

Gretchen had the keener sense of smell. Tamara saw the lean line of her sister's body tighten when Tony's scent curled past her. She followed the lift of Gretchen's chin, the sideways angle of her green-hazel eyes. Prey, the look said.

Tamara lifted her pool cue to make a right angle with the floor and straightened her spine. him, Gretchen said. he has moved what was not meant to be moved. he has intersected the angles with the curve. he is here, as it was said he would be.

well, he's ugly enough, Tamara answered. is he full of juice?

mmm, yes. Gretchen laughed silently, a nodding grin that showed her canines. She squared her shoulders-the shoulders of her sickly, curvaceous alien body-and tilted her beer against her lips. They left a red print on the rim as she drained it. and a good thing, because i am thirsty and the gate-keeper awaits the gate and the key the cold and the snow take him, Tamara said. take him and make us strong. open the way for the master, for the sisters that all may feast. Gretchen set her empty bottle aside. i'll go and see if he shoots pool. Her lips pursed into a smile as she watched Tony Whittaker belly up to the bar and order a Bud Lite and a bourbon, a boilermaker. Gretchen followed his scent through the press of bodies, s.h.i.+vering away from the curved human flesh that brushed the envelope she wore. Their presence was p.r.i.c.kly-uncomfortable, squelchy-soft, even more unpleasant to brush her fringes than to be tangled in. She gritted her palps and kept going, yearning back to the comfortable precise angles of the pool table, her sister, her home. And of her master, the terrible voluptuous form, the unholy curves and arcs of his presence.

She would serve.

And then she would be permitted to feed, and go home.

When Tony Whittaker turned to face the young woman who jostled his elbow, he drew a single sharp nervous breath. She seemed oblivious to his presence until then, as if the gasp caught her attention, and she looked up and smiled.

The woman's golden brown hair was streaked pale and curled in little feathers around her cheekbones and jaw. She was small, slight to boniness, her little t.i.tties poking sharp triangles through her sweater and her jeans slung off hip bones you could cut yourself on. Her elbows and knees and shoulder blades were all angles, and her eyes-green and amber in the light over the bar-were luminescent, huge. Some trick of the dimness made her pupils look weird, lens-shaped like an alligator's.

"Can I buy you a drink?" he said, before he consciously formed the words in his head. He fumbled the antique watch in his pocket, the texture of its faceted etchings warm under the pad of his thumb. He flicked the stem with his nail, just to be sure-a bad habit. It wasn't ticking. He pulled his hand away.

She laid a fine-boned hand on the suede of his jacket sleeve, blurring the nap. "Sure," she said. Her voice seemed to come from a great distance. She smiled. "Do you shoot pool?"

The crowd on the bus thinned by ones and twos, oppressive flesh-scented warmth giving way to a drafty chill, until Whittaker was the last pa.s.senger. The driver made him get off at the end of the line. "Sorry, man. I'm going back to the depot. Rules. There's a 10:45 inbound if you wait at the bus shelter."

Whittaker paused at the top of the steps, the yellow quilt wadded up in his hand. The floor was angled by the bus's hydraulics to bring the bottom step close to the curb. "What time is it now?"

The bus driver touched the brim of her hat. She had a kind cast of feature; Whittaker thought it was a little like Jessica's, although he couldn't really remember what Jessica looked like. "About 9:30. There's a bar over there you can wait at." She gestured, a poke of her nibbled finger, and Whittaker followed the arc of it to a neon sign advertising the Golden Eagle Tavern. A barnlike structure loomed on the far side of the parking lot, motorcycles and pickup trucks huddled around its feet. Whittaker glanced over his shoulder, caught the bus driver's eye. A disturbing suggestion of feathered motion rippled the shadows behind her, but Whittaker shrugged it off. He was used to seeing things that weren't quite there.

"10:45?"

"Cross my heart." The bus driver made the gesture with her gnawed-on thumbnail, and Whittaker shrugged and started down the steps, ducking his chin behind his collar. He leaned on the wind to get across the parking lot. He didn't hear the bus pull away, but when he glanced over his shoulder, it was gone.

Inside, he met raucous noise and close-packed bodies. He paused inside the door, steaming in his black coat, the quilt wadded incongruously in his hand. The atmosphere felt thick and airless all at once. He gasped in the sudden heat.

Tony didn't see Whittaker come in and wouldn't have recognized him unless he got a good look at his face. It had been that long-and anyway Tony was bent over the red felt of the pool table, the cue slipping between his knuckles like a dog's wet tongue. Tamara leaned a hip against the table beside him, distracting him with glimpses of a soft oval belly b.u.t.ton when the edge of her s.h.i.+rt rode up.

Tony broke. b.a.l.l.s scattered, ringing off each other with crisp staccato thumps. The two-ball, the four-ball, sank. He grinned and settled back on his heels. "Solids," he said.

"Good luck," Gretchen said and b.u.mped him with her shoulder as she stepped up. "I'd rather play you than Tamara." He swatted her playfully; she ducked away, but he didn't miss Tamara's grin.

He did miss the third shot. And stood by, amazed, as Tamara sank eight b.a.l.l.s in a row, almost without hesitation. The economy of her motion struck him most, the elegant way her bony body angled and unleashed. Snakes, he thought, but snakes wasn't quite right-snakes were all curves, and she was all points.

"d.a.m.n," he said. "I'm glad we weren't playing for stakes."

"We weren't?" she said. "Anyway, it's only geometry."

Gretchen dropped quarters in the slot to retrieve the billiard b.a.l.l.s. She racked them with a decisive rattle and lifted the rack with a flourish.

"Tamara?"

"Oh," Tamara said, "let Tony play. I'm going to powder my nose." She gave Tony a squeeze and slipped away.

Gretchen smiled at him, showing teeth. "So," she said. "You want to break?" he's hooked, sister.

i'm hungry, sister. can we hurry this? yes. i want to go home.

home, Tamara agreed, with longing. She shuffled through the crowd, trying not to brush up against too many of the slimy-soft, grub-squirmy humans. The restroom was crowded with females fixing their makeup and inhaling narcotics. She didn't blame them for wanting to distance themselves from their flesh. Raw, greasy flesh. Meat for worms.

She waited impatiently and took her turn in the stall, the cold hardness comforting. Straight hard stall, right angles and parallel lines. Sloppy, of course, but the closest a creature of meat could manage.

At least they tried.

She washed her hands under cold water and dried them under hot air, eavesdropping throughout on Gretchen's conversation with the boring human. The boring dangerous human, she reminded herself. The boring dangerous human with the power of ice and winter and frozen timelessness at his command. If she wanted to go home, she should be careful to remember that, that this sharp-scented, bulbous, curvilinear creature was capable of stopping time in its tracks, of offending the master enough that he had sent her and her sister to make redress.

They would need to not only destroy the prey but also discover how he had done what he had done and reverse it.

i want to go home, she whined, or maybe it was Gretchen. They weren't all that different, one Hound from another.

She decided to pa.s.s by the bar on the way back to the pool table. She was thirsty, and she knew Gretchen would be too. They were always thirsty, these bodies. Always hungry. Always craving, needing, desiring. And not simple desires, simple needs-home, the den, the orderly confluence and linear evolution of timestreams. No, strange, needy hungers.

Such hungry meat.

She pushed up to the bar next to a fat man in a damp black coat who clutched a magic blanket in his hand and ordered beer for both herself and Gretchen and another boilermaker for the prey. She pushed a crumpled ten dollar bill across the counter and was waiting for change when the scent underlying the filth and alcohol saturating the man next to her caught her attention.

gretchen, she said. i think someone has come for our prey. we should be leaving soon.

Whittaker had decided not to wait for the bus. He had enough money in his pocket for a couple of drinks, and he thought he could call somebody-get a ride-something. He'd figure out who to call when he'd had a drink. Or two.

He didn't want to go back out into the cold.

He collected his scotch and water and turned around to look for a place to sit. He wanted to be at the bar, but all the stools were taken, and the press of bodies against his bulk made it hard to breathe. He noticed the skinny girl who brushed past him with three bottles of beer in her right hand and a bourbon balanced in the left; he watched her path through the crowd. And he almost dropped his drink when he saw where she was heading and who was waiting for her there.

Gretchen, Tony thought, was even more dangerous than Tamara. It seemed almost as if she only had to look at the b.a.l.l.s to sink them. She'd beaten him three games running by the time Tamara returned with the drinks, and he was glad enough to give up his place at the table.

"Look," Tamara said as she dropped a beer and a bourbon he hadn't asked for into his hands. Cold sweat wicked between his fingers. The bottle was slick. He held it tight. "It's crowded here, and the band sucks. Why don't you come back to our place, Tony? We've got beer and weed. We can play cards or whatever."

He blinked and looked from one of them to the other. Gretchen, head thrown back, was draining her beer. Her tongue darted inside the neck to capture the last few droplets. Tony tasted his beer to hide his shaking hands. He wondered how she stayed so skinny when she drank like that. "Your place?"