Somewhere Beneath
Those Waves
Sarah Monette
Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Monette.
Introduction © 2011 by Elizabeth Bear.
Cover art by Elena Dudina.
Cover design by Telegraphy Harness.
Ebook design by Neil Clarke.
ISBN: 978-1-60701-332-7 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-305-1 (trade paperback)
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For Elise, who carries the Moon.
Contents
Introduction by Elizabeth Bear
Draco Campestris
Queen of Swords
Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day
Under the Beansidhe’s Pillow
The Watcher in the Corners
The Half-Sister
Ashes, Ashes
Sidhe Tigers
A Light in Troy
Amante Dorée
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home
Darkness, as a Bride
Katabasis: Seraphic Trains
Fiddleback Ferns
Three Letters from the Queen of Elflands
Night Train: Heading West
The Séance at Chisholm End
No Man’s Land
National Geographic On Assignment: Mermaids of the Old West
A Night in Electric Squidland
Impostors
Straw
Absent from Felicity
The World Without Sleep
After the Dragon
Story Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Introduction
Elizabeth Bear
I am hardly without bias where Sarah Monette is concerned.
She is my co-author on (so far) three novels, a number of short stories, and the occasional bit of tomfoolery. She is my confidante in matters personal and my co-traveler in matters professional. She is my writing partner: a person I turn to for critiques, perspectives, and that all-important voice that tells me I’m being impenetrable again.
But most importantly, she is my friend, and one of the best friends I’ve had in my life.
Honesty compels me to acknowledge that friendship, even when I am not here to celebrate it. What I am here to celebrate, rather, is her work—or, as I find myself thinking of it, her early work. Because as I write this Sarah is brilliant, and imaginative, and not yet forty—and surely she has many more stories to tell.
I could tell you that her prose is lapidary—but you hold this book in your hands. In a moment, you will see that yourself. I could tell you that her ideas are fantastical and chilling, but . . . the same applies. I could tell you that she has studied the craft of horror and fantastic fiction from the pens of masters and mistresses of the genre. But you can see the results for yourself.
So instead, I will talk briefly about a few of the stories, and what they mean to me.
This collection opens with my favorite of Sarah’s stories to date, “Draco campestris,” which is named for a necklace created by Elise Mattheson and which inspired me to write a dragon story in response, to which Sarah penned another, and so on. (I believe it’s currently my turn.)
I may be too in love with this story to speak sensibly about it—its non-traditional structure, the way its themes emerge from the narrative like the patterns of a fugue. I find myself speaking in musical metaphors a lot when discussing Sarah’s work, possibly because the words so clearly evoke melodies to me. If “Draco campestris” is a melody, then, it is a grating and discordant one, full of the cries of strange birds and the rasp of scale on stone.
This is a story of details, told in details, and it must be reconstructed as the taxonomist reconstructs legendary creatures from their bones.
And what we learn from those dry bones of narrative is that this is also a love story. A great and tragic love story about two awkward, inarticulate people, the sort that inspires operas and ballads and tear-jerking stage productions for generations to come.
Only Sarah would build a love story that way, like a paleontologist assembling a fossil skeleton—half by guesswork and half by a profound understanding of how the living animal might have worked, had to have worked. If you’re reading it for the first time, I envy you.
“Under the Bean Sidhe’s Pillow” is a love story too, an even more unlikely one. It is a story of how immigrants bring their stories with them, and how stories need to be told. It’s brief, a page or two, and it echoes with perfect loneliness and perfect devotion—from the point of view of a banshee who has started to be a bit affected by the stresses of her job.
Not all love is the romantic sort. There’s the love that washes the dead, as well.
“The Watcher in the Corners” is a ghost story, and it’s sort of a running joke between Sarah and me that I do not like ghost stories, do not understand them, have very little sympathy for their aims. But “The Watcher in the Corners” isn’t just any ghost story. It’s a story about brave young woman in a bad, real world where men, bad and good, had the power to treat their families as possessions—a world that is still very real, for some of us.
What I’m getting at is that Sarah’s stories are often—usually—the stories of awkward outsiders, people who in some way do not fit the expectations of their societies. They are people who are too strong, too introverted, too queer, too transgendered, too haunted, too political, too feral. Her heroes and heroines are aliens in their own worlds, bemused and lonely, and still trying to find connection to other people—some way, some how.
So, what you hold in your hands is the first non-themed collection of the short fiction of one Sarah Monette, poet of the awkward and the uncertain, exalter of the outcast, the outré, and the downright weird. There is nothing else quite like it. And no matter how strange and alienated you may feel, there is room in her world for you.
Draco Campestris
i.
The Museum owns eighty-nine specimens of the genus Draco. It is unlikely that there will be any additions to the collection, for the adit to that array of Arcs has become increasingly unstable in the last two centuries. For that same reason, very little work has been done with the specimens since the last of the great dragon hunters willed his collection to the Museum one hundred thirty-two years ago. They were once a prized exhibit, but since the great taxonomic scandal under the previous Director, they have been an embarrassment rather than a glory. There is a cavernous hall in the sublevels of the Museum where the dragons stand shrouded in layers of yellowing plastic, unvisited, unwept, unremembered.
Their great eye-sockets are full of darkness deeper than shadows.
ii.
The Lady Archangel was no longer in favor with the Empress.
That much was certain, and the Museum buzzed and rustled with the rumors that strove to create the story around that fact. The visitors chattered of it while the tour guides looked remote and superior and squirreled away every tidbit to be shared later over tea. The curators speculated, in slow, disjointed conversations; the visiting scholars asked nervously if there was any danger of an uprising, for the Lady Archangel was popular, and the papers reported unrest in those parts of the Centre where her charity had been most needed and most freely given.
No, said the curators, the tour guides, even the custodians. There had been no uprising in the Centre since the short and bloody reign of the long-ago Emperor Carolus, and there would not be one now. But when the scholars inquired
as to the probable fate of the lady herself, they were met with grim headshakes and the sad, gentle advice to concentrate on their research. Whether it was sin or treason the Lady Archangel stood accused of, if she could not prove her innocence, she would be beheaded at the culmination of Aquarius. Such was the penalty for falling when one climbed as high as the Lady Archangel had climbed, and though the Empress was just, she was not merciful. She could not be, and hope to maintain her rule.
It was not for mere poetry that her throne was called the Seat of Dragons.
iii.
The Director has a dream. So she says, and no one in the Museum would dare to say otherwise, no matter how much they may doubt her ability to dream. Everyone knows she does not sleep.
Perhaps it is only a metaphorical dream, but even so, her shining coils are restless with it, her great yellow eyes (which only blink when she remembers that they ought to) hypnotizing. There are rumors that they were the eyes of a basilisk, and somehow that seems more likely than the idea that the Director can dream. Her metal claws score gouges in the vat-grown teak of her desk, and when she leaves her office, the tithe-children come creeping to sand and polish, as they have been doing for years, so that no unwary visitor may catch a splinter in the soft pads of his or her fingers.
When the Director speaks, there is only the faintest harshness in her voice to tell you that she is not a flesh-and-blood woman, nor—if the stories whispered in the Museum halls are true—ever was. When she speaks of her dream, that metallic rasp is louder, more strident; the matter is not merely important to her, but in some queer way, vital.
iv.
Visitors come to the Museum from all Arcs of the Circumference. It is the second-most popular tourist attraction of the Centre, after the Empress’s palace (and that only in the summer months, for in the winter the Gardens of the Moon is closed to the public), and far ahead of such delights as the Tunguska Robotics Works and the People’s Memorial of War. Visitors come on two legs, on four, on the sweeping sinuosity of scaled, legless bodies. There are perches in front of every exhibit for those who come by wing, whether feathered or membranous, and the Museum does its best to accommodate those whose habitual method of locomotion is aquatic. Parties of schoolchildren are allowed, although they are expected to be clean and quiet and capable of obeying the Museum’s rules.
The most popular exhibit in the Museum is the mechanical orchestra of the Emperor Horatio XVI, bequeathed by him to the Museum on his death-bed. His death-bed is also an exhibit, though few visitors penetrate far enough into the Domestic Arts wing to find it.
Horatio XVI’s mechanical orchestra is kept in perfect working condition by the curators, although it has not been played in over a hundred years. The sixteen rolls of its repertoire—imported, like the orchestra itself, from Arc ρ29—stand in a glass cabinet along one side of the orchestra’s specially built hall. Each is five feet long and, mounted on its steel spindle, heavy enough to kill a man.
Nearly as popular as the mechanical orchestra is the Salle des Joyaux, where the Museum keeps—along with a number of stunning examples of the jeweller’s art—the Skystone, sacred to the aborigines of Arc ν12; the black Blood of Tortuga from Arc κ23; the cursed Hope Diamond from Arc σ16; and the great Fireball Opal, donated to the Museum by the Mikado of Hekaiji in Arc φ05.
Many visitors spend hours enthralled by the illuminated manuscripts of the Pradine Cenobites, brought out of Arc τ19 mere days before the eruption of Mount Ephramis closed that arc permanently. Others marvel over the treasures of the Arms and Armor Wing: the armor of the spacefarers from Arc θ07; the porpentine gloves characteristic of the corsairs of Wraith (ξ22) the claymore of Glamis (σ03); the set of beautifully inlaid courtesan’s stilettos from the Palace of Flowers (α08).
It is considered advisable to purchase a map at the ticket window. Assuredly, the stories of visitors becoming lost in the Museum, their dessicated corpses found years—or decades—later, are merely that: stories. But all the same . . . it is considered advisable to purchase a map at the ticket window.
v.
He was the greatest taxonomist of twenty Arcs. His enemies said bitterly that formaldehyde ran in his veins instead of blood. Unlike the stories whispered about the Director, this was a mere calumny, not the truth.
He was pleased and proud to be part of the Director’s dream (he said at the Welcome Dinner organized by the Curators’ Union), and if there was any irony in him, the curators did not hear it.
All that season, the taxonomist, impeccable in suit and crisply knotted tie, assisted by a series of tithe-children, none of whom he could distinguish from any of the others, clambered among the bones of the eighty-nine dragons, scrutinizing skulls and teeth and vertebrae, recovering from the mists of misidentified obscurity Draco vulcanis, D. campestris, D. sylvius, D. nubis; separating a creative tangle of bones into two distinct specimens, one D. maris, the other D. pelagus; cleaning and rewiring and clarifying; entirely discrediting the identification of one specimen as the extinct D. minimis. It was merely a species of large liazard, said the taxonomist—any fool could see that from its teeth—and should be removed from the collection forthwith.
Meanwhile, the Director ordered the Salle des Dragons opened and cleaned. The tithe-children worked industriously, washing and polishing, commenting excitedly among themselves in the sign-language that no outsider has ever learned. They found the armatures where they had been carefully stored away, found the informational placards, beautifully written but entirely wrong. They found the tapestries, artists’ reconstructions worked in jewel-colored yarns by the ladies-in-waiting of the current Empress’s great-grandmother. These, they cleaned and re-hung, and the Director gave them words of praise that made their pale eyes shine with happiness.
Swept and garnished, the Salle was ready for its brides, and as the summer waxed and ripened, the taxonomist and the tithe-children brought them in, one by one, bearing them as tenderly across the threshold as if they came virgin to this marriage.
vi.
The dragon lies piled like treasure on the stairs, cold and pale and transparent as moonlight, its milky eyes watchful, unblinking. It is visible only on rainy days, but even in full sunlight, the staff prefer the East Staircase.
The tithe-children, though, sit around the ghost dragon during thunderstorms, reaching out as if they could touch it, if only they dared.
vii.
Once, as the taxonomist was making comparative measurements of two D. anthropophagi skulls, a tithe-child asked, “Are there any dragons still alive, mynheer?”
He was surprised, for it was not customary for the tithe-children to speak; he had not even been certain that they could. “Perhaps, although I have never seen one.”
“I would like to see a living dragon.”
The taxonomist looked at the tithe-child, its twisted body, its pale, blinking eyes. He said nothing, and the tithe-child turned away from his cold pity. It would never see a living dragon, would never see anything that was not catalogued, labeled, given a taxonomy and a number and a place in the Museum’s long halls. But it had dreamed, as every living creature must.
The taxonomist returned to his measurements; the tithe-children, watching, wondered what he dreamed.
viii.
One does not wander in the Museum after dark. Even the tithe-children stay in their rookeries; the security guards keep to their strait and narrow paths, traveling in pairs, never any further from each other than the length of a flashlight’s beam. And of all the Museum’s staff, it is the security guards who are hardest to keep. For they, who see the Museum’s night-veiled face, know more clearly than any of the daytime staff the Museum’s truth, its cold, entrapping, sterile darkness. They know what its tall, warped, and shining doors shut in, as well as what they shut out.
In the reign of the Empress Heliodora, a security guard committed suicide by slitting his wrists in the main floor men’s bathroom. No one ever knew why; the only suicide note he left, written i
n his own blood across the mirrors, was: All things are dead here.
Later, the mirrors had to be replaced, for although the tithe-children cleaned and polished them conscientiously, the reflection of those smeared letters never entirely came out.
ix.
It was a sultry afternoon in mid-August when the taxonomist descended the ladder propped against D. campestris’s horned skull, turned, and found the lady watching him.
She was a tall lady, fair and haggard, dressed with elegant simplicity in gray. The taxonomist stared at her; for a moment, recognition and memory and pain were clear on his face, and it seemed as if he would speak, but the lady tilted her head infinitesimally, and he looked over her shoulder, seeing the two broad-shouldered men in nondescript suits who stood at the door of the Salle, as if waiting for someone or something.
His gaze met hers again, and in that glance was exchanged much that could not be spoken, then or ever, and he bowed, a formal, fussy gesture, and said stiffly, stiltedly, the pedantic mantle of his profession settling over him, “May I help you, mevrouw?”
The lady smiled at him. Even though she was haggard and no longer young, her smile was enchanting, as much rueful as charming, and heart-breakingly tired. “We loved this room as children,” she said, lifting her eyes to gaze at the long, narrow wedge of D. campestris’s skull. “I remember coming here with my brother. We believed they were alive, you know.” She waved a hand at the surrounding skeletons.
“Indeed.”
“We thought they watched us—remembered us. We imagined them, after the Museum had closed, gathering in a circle to whisper about the people they’d seen that day and make up stories about us, the same way we made up stories about them.” Her face had lost some of its haggardness in remembering, and he watched her, almost unbreathing.
“Indeed.”
“Tell me about them. Tell me about this one.” She pointed at D. campestris.
“What do you wish to know?” he said, his gaze not following the graceful sweep of her arm, but remaining, anxiously, on her face.