Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Page 20

  As did the body parts of all of his companions, oozing out of the travois. The technical phrase is advanced and enhanced decomposition produced by infernal conditions. Colloquially known as Quick Rot.

  Too bad for Boatright and his crew, of course, but from the cold-blooded standpoint of Realpolitik the outcome was just as good as if we’d brought them back alive. Not even the harshest Scandinavian or Slavic deity would fault us for the demise of the Boatright party. Such beings took violent death as a matter of course. What mattered was whether honor, just retribution and clan vengeance was satisfied. Bringing back all the corpses and putting paid to the Lords of Xibalba did that just fine.

  Sophia told me a few weeks later that human embassies touring the so-called “morally neutral” portions of the nether regions universe were being feted everywhere they went. Especially in those mythos which placed a premium on sneakiness, treachery, and guile. Which was just about all of them.

  Our first date went well, I thought. Extremely well, in fact. But I was clearly in for a protracted period of emotional exercise and probable exhaustion. The new lady in my life is never at a loss for words.

  Fortunately, I have a theropod’s stamina.

  AFTERWORD:

  I’ve always enjoyed Poul Anderson’s stories, which I started reading as a teenager. And in his case, I enjoyed just about everything he wrote.

  That’s unusual. With most authors I enjoy, I really only like a portion of their work. One story or novel but not another; one series or setting, but not another. With Anderson, I can’t think of one that I didn’t enjoy.

  So, when Gardner Dozois asked me to contribute to this anthology, I had to think about it. Not whether I’d contribute something—that would be a pleasure—but in which of Poul Anderson’s many universes.

  It finally came down to a choice between the world Anderson created in Operation Chaos and the one he created in The High Crusade. (Three Hearts and Three Lions was a close third.)

  In the end, I opted for Operation Chaos. I enjoy The High Crusade every bit as much, as a story, but I’d find it somewhat awkward to write my own story in that setting. More precisely, I’d find it difficult to write a story in that setting that stayed true to Anderson’s own vision of it. And doing so, I think, is important for this kind of anthology.

  I never met Poul Anderson, and never corresponded with him. But it’s obvious just from reading his work that he had a different view of the political history of the human race than I do. He had a soft spot in his heart for feudalism. It might be better to say, was attuned to what he saw as its advantages. You could see that not only in The High Crusade but in such stories as “No Truce With Kings.” That went along with an elegiac attitude toward the grandeur of dying regimes, which of course runs all through his massive Dominic Flandry series.

  Me? I think the best thing about the medieval period is that it’s gone. And as much as I enjoyed each and every one of the Flandry stories, the truth is, deep down inside I was always rooting for the Merseians. The fading glories of the Terran Empire, so far as I was concerned, were just the trappings of another rotting, decadent empire. Pfui. History is littered with the cruddy things. Good riddance.

  I’m sure Anderson and I would have spent a number of pleasant hours wrangling over the issues involved, if we’d ever met. Unfortunately, that can’t happen now. And I wasn’t comfortable at the idea of writing a story for an anthology commemorating an author that, no matter how subtly or indirectly, constituted a tacit critique of his work.

  It’s too bad, in a way. I would have had fun writing a story about the stalwart and quick-thinking alien peasantry rising up in rebellion against tyrannical and dirt-stupid human barons . . .

  But, what the hell. I knew I’d have just as much fun writing about shapechangers and witches in the world of Operation Chaos—and that story was one I could write completely and fully in Poul Anderson’s own spirit.

  Such was my intent, at any rate. You’ve now just read the story, so you can decide for yourself if I succeeded or not.

  —Eric Flint

  TALES TOLD

  by Astrid Anderson Bear

  When I was little, having Poul Anderson as my father meant that I had really good bedtime stories. Really, really good bedtime stories. Sometimes he’d read to me from Grimm’s Eventyr, a book he probably had been read to as a child himself by his parents. It was a turn-of-the-nineth/twentieth-century-volume of Grimm’s fairy tales written in Danish, lavishly illustrated with fine engravings. He would translate the stories on the fly, and the wonderfully, well, grim tales were a delight to me.

  He’d also tell me made-up stories about a little girl named Astrid, and her adventures with her animal friends, based on my favorite stuffed animals. They traveled together in a purple submarine, on both land and water, and often outwitted a particularly dim highway patrolman. Decades later, he wrote a story for my son, Erik, in which a young boy named Erik encounters the same animals after he’s been carried off by a mechanical alligator while the family is on a camping trip, and it ends with him promising to journey with them.

  Eventually I outgrew bedtime stories, but I did discover the printed Anderson oeuvre. One summer when I was about eleven, we repainted my bedroom. The jumble of furniture and piles of possessions forced me to sleep on the spare bed in my father’s study for a few days. Needing something to read in bed—I always read before sleep—I turned to the handy shelf of author’s copies and picked out Agent of the Terran Empire. I was a big Man from U.N.C.L.E. fan at the time, so likely the idea of “agent of . . .” caught my eye. Now, I had been reading SF for some years at this time, starting with Space Cat by Ruthven Todd and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, and I do recall reading Dune as it came out in Analog, but somehow I hadn’t gotten around to reading any of my father’s work.

  So I found myself plunged into the world of the dashing, clever, love-them-and-leave-them Dominic Flandry, determined warrior fighting against the forces of the Long Night. “Wow!” I remember thinking. “This stuff is pretty good!” And so I read all the Flandry there was, that summer, and moved on to such delights as the Hoka stories, the Time Patrol stories, The High Crusade, and so on.

  As I became an adult, the books kept coming: Tau Zero, Dancer from Atlantis, The Avatar, The Merman’s Children, The Boat of a Million Years . . . it went on and on. And then, in 2001, there was no more.

  Characters don’t die when an author does. They are still there in the books and stories, treading the well-worn paths of their adventures. But it is bitter-sweet to contemplate my dad’s characters hoisting a mug together in the Old Phoenix Tavern, wishing they could have another outing in their home worlds.

  This anthology, ably put together by Gardner Dozois, does just that. Here are tales of Dominic Flandry, Alianora, Manse Everard, Steven and Virginia Matuchek, and many others, told by inheritors to the story-telling mantle of Poul Anderson. It’s been wonderful to read these stories as they’ve come in, and I think my dad would have enjoyed them, too. Thank you to Gardner for the idea, to Subterranean Press, and later Baen Books for publishing it, and to all the authors for coming out to play in Poul Anderson’s Worlds.

  THE FEY OF CLOUDMOOR

  by Terry Brooks

  Terry Brooks published his famous fantasy novel The Sword of Shannara in 1977, when it became the first work of fiction ever to appear on the New York Times Trade Paperback Bestseller List, where it remained for five months. He has published thirteen consecutive bestselling novels since. Brooks has subsequently explored the complex history of the Shannara universe, spanning hundreds of years, in more than a dozen novels—including The Elfstones of Shannara, The Wishstones of Shannara, The First King of Shannara, The Druid of Shannara, The Elf Queen of Shannara, Isle Witch, and Jarka Rules—as well as the three-volume Genesis of Shannara series, prequels to the original novel, and the tangentially related three-volume Word and the Void series. In addition, he’s the author of the light-he
arted six-volume Magic Kingdom of Landover series. His most recent books are the start of a new Shannara series, Bearer of the Black Staff and The Measure of the Magic, and a Shannara story published as a novella chapbook, Indomitable. Brooks lives with his wife in the Pacific Northwest and in Hawaii.

  Here he gives us another take, a most compelling one, on what happens after the end of one of Poul Anderson’s most famous stories, “The Queen of Air and Darkness.”

  He came out of the world of Men and their cities of steel and concrete in tatters, all scratched up and dirtied on the surface and broken and ripped apart inside. He carried what was left of his life in a blanket clutched to his breast, carefully shielding its contents from the sights and sounds and smells of the civilization that had ruined him and destroyed her. He thought of her all the time, but he couldn’t make himself remember what she looked like anymore. He only knew how hard they had tried to find a way through the morass of their lives, choosing to share their misery but always searching to break free of their bonds.

  Hard to do when nothing in your life is real and every day is a slog through dark and painful places that strip the skin from your soul.

  When she died, they had been huddled in an alleyway in the darkest part of Christmas Landing, sheltered poorly in cardboard from a steady downpour that formed a small river only four feet away. They had scored early and resold what they had to get money for food and milk for Barraboo. They made a good choice for once, but came to regret it with night’s hard descent and no means to soften the blow. She had been coughing badly for days and her breathing had worsened and all he knew to do was to stay with her. There were medical centers you could go to, but once they entered one of those places they might as well say goodbye to their baby. She might have gone alone, of course, but she was afraid to do that, as if making that choice would cost her the baby anyway.

  As if in his desperation, he might choose to sell it.

  As if in hers she might approve.

  He stole some medicine off the shelves of a pharmacy, but it didn’t seem to help her. Nothing did. She just kept coughing and wheezing, everything getting worse. He found her an old blanket in a garbage bin and wrapped her in that and then held her close against him to share his body heat. She was so cold, and she didn’t look right. But she still held Barraboo and wouldn’t let her go, and so he ended up holding them both.

  But finally he fell asleep, even though he had told himself he wouldn’t do so, and when he woke she was dead.

  He never knew her real name. She never gave it to him. He called her Pearl because she was precious to him, and she seemed content enough with that. He told her his own name, though. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. “Once upon a time, I was kidnapped by the Old Folk.”

  He told that to only a very few before her and then quit doing so because no one believed him. She probably didn’t believe him either, but she came closer to looking as if she did than anyone else. She was like that. Even at her worst, when she was so strung out she could barely put a sentence together and started seeing things that weren’t there, she could find a way to listen to him. She was tough, but she was vulnerable, too. She trusted people when she shouldn’t have. She had faith in people who didn’t deserve it. He was one of those people, he supposed. Mostly, he was good to her and took care of her and the baby and did little things to make her life more bearable when really it was Hell-on-Earth.

  He thought all this and more as he rode the hovercraft out of Christmas Landing to Portolondon and his future. His and Barraboo’s. For he was determined his daughter would have a future, even if Pearl didn’t. He had fought against himself and his habit and his wasteful, reckless existence for too long. He had denied what he had known was true for too many years, persuaded by his mother and the rescuer she had hired to find him, made to believe when in his heart he knew he shouldn’t.

  Memories surfaced like half-remembered dreams of his time among the Old Folk, the Outlings. He had been only a boy, little more than a baby and so young he barely realized what was happening to him. Taken from his mother’s camp by a pooka, carried to the realm of the Old Folk beyond Troll Scarp, seduced and made happy beyond anything he could have imagined possible, his mother all but forgotten, his world made over—there he had remained until his mother had come for him, finding him with a mother’s persistence in the face of formidable odds, taking him back to his old life, telling him he would forget all this one day, it would seem a dream to him, he would become the man he was meant to be and not a pawn in the hands of creatures who could not know and would never care what it was he needed.

  “The choices you make in this world should be your own and never another’s,” she had told him. “You should never be another’s pawn.”

  He disembarked with his precious cargo still asleep and stood looking from the loading platform at the dingy buildings of the town. There was nothing here for him and never would be—not in this hardscrabble collection of housings and shelters, not in this scooped up mélange of humanity and waste. He wrinkled his nose at it, a measure of its ugliness given his own sad state. All of Roland was a backwater, light years away from the civilized universe—the back of beyond. It allowed for habitation—breathable air, drinkable water, sustainable crops—but not for much in the way of sunlight. He shivered in the cold, empty light of the season’s perpetual night. Winterbirth, the pooka had called it. It gave him pause that he should remember this, but memory chose to keep what it wanted and discarded the rest. What mattered was how much attention you paid to memory and what you did with it as a consequence. For example, if you knew it was dangerous to go somewhere, you tried hard to remember not to go there again.

  Conversely, if you remembered a place where you were happy—even if you were told you weren’t and tried very hard to forget it and pretend that what you believed then to be happiness was in fact nothing of the sort—maybe you needed to make sure.

  Especially when all other options had been exhausted and nothing of your life was good. Especially when you had more than yourself to worry about, and even in your drug-addicted rootless life you knew babies were pure and innocent and deserved better than what you could give them.

  Especially when hope was all you had left to give.

  He looked out across the buildings to the far north of Arctica, to the shimmer of the aurora and the green of mountains and valleys and mysteries that everyone knew were waiting there and no one wanted to discover.

  No one except him.

  “Hoah,” a voice greeted. He looked down. A dwarf was standing right beside him, looking up from waist-high, bearded and twinkly-eyed, browned by weather and sun, wrinkled by age. “Need transport?”

  He shook his head. “Got no money.”

  “You don’t say? But there’s other means to get to where you want to go, youngling. Have you a destination?”

  He shrugged. “Out there, somewhere. A place I lived once a long time ago, when I was a boy. Beyond Troll Scarp.”

  “Scallywags! Flywinds! Danceabouts!” The old one shook his head. “Don’t no one wants to go there. They who is not to be named in places like this one live in places like that one, and they keep to themselves. Everyone knows. No one says.”

  “Old Folk. Outlings. The Fey. The Faerie Kind. There, I’ve said it for all those who won’t. I don’t fear them. I lived with them.”

  The old man cocked his head. “Yet came back to live among the humans who birthed you? That right? But from the look of you it didn’t work out so well.”

  “Not so well.”

  “A baby and no mother?”

  He looked at the old man sharply. The baby hadn’t moved or cried out. He might have been carrying old clothes for all anyone could tell. But this old man knew better.

  “The mother died. Pearl. She was like me, an addict. But not strong enough to survive it. The baby is all I have left.”

  “Ayah. Would you take her with you, then?” Jimmy didn’t miss that he hadn’t told the old man it was a
girl. “Would you give her over to them for a drug that only they could give you?” the old man persisted. “Would you make a trade if it were offered.”

  He shook his head. “Not for anything. Not though I were the most desperate of men, and I am very much that. I am the lowest and saddest of all humans, and I would sell anything I could get my hands on to satisfy my need for even five minutes. But not Barraboo. Not my Pearl’s child. I have not yet come to that.”

  The old man studied him as if to ascertain the truth of such a statement. Then he shrugged. “What then?”

  Jimmy Cullen, he that was taken by a pooka once upon a time, smiled crookedly. “I have come to take her home.”

  The old man regarded him quizzically, all knitted brow and scrunched up mouth, before saying, “Well, then perhaps I can help you.”

  The old man led him through the city, down its teeming streets and byways, along its alleys and footpaths, past shops and offices, homes and apartments, flowers and filth way out to the ends of the northside and there to a stable. Inside the stable was a wagon and what appeared to be a reindeer and soon enough, on closer inspection, proved to be. The old man hauled the wagon out of the stable by himself, grunting with the effort but refusing Jimmy’s help, harnessed the reindeer and got them aboard and settled.

  “Bit of a ride ahead. If you need to sleep, put the small one in the necessaries box behind you—there, you see it, don’t you? There’s blankets to make her snug. What’s your name again?”

  “Jimmy Cullen,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. But it will do until we reach Cloudmoor.”

  “What’s yours?” Jimmy asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Oh, I have all sorts of names. Widdershanks and Skitterfoot and Trundlestump, among others. But you can call me Ben.”