Hub - Issue 16 Read online

  Hub

  Issue 16

  July 20th 2007

  Editors: Lee Harris and Alasdair Stuart.

  Published by The Right Hand.

  Sponsored by Orbit.

  Issue 16 Contents

  Fiction: Every Odalisque Knows by Dominae Petrosini

  Reviews: Mammoth, Blaze

  British Fantasy Society Open Night in York – October 2007

  On Saturday October 13th, Hub is playing host to an Open Night for the British Fantasy Society. Held at York Brewery, the Open Night welcomes both members and non-members alike – if you’re interested in Fantasy or Horror, feel free to come along! We just need to know how many of you are coming so we can make appropriate arrangements with the brewery.

  As well as socialising with like-minded people, there is also the option to be part of a private tour of the brewery (a small charge will apply for this).

  Full details over at www.hub-mag.co.uk/bfs

  York’s a great place to visit. We hope to see you there!

  About Hub

  Every week we will be publishing a piece of short fiction, along with at least one review (book, DVD, film, audio, or TV series) and we’ll also have the occasional feature, too. We can afford to do this largely due to the generosity of the people over at Orbit, who have sponsored this electronic version of the magazine, and partly by the generosity displayed by your good selves. If you like what you read here, please consider making a donation over at www.hub-mag.co.uk.

  Every Odalisque Knows by Dominae Petrosini

  People saw that. People did? Alban saw it like it smoldered in a limelight, like it was dead and dyed in a scanning microscope, like it was the only thing on television. Remember television? The soldiers in the street rustled around something Alban couldn't quite see, but knew was a woman. A moment ago she had been standing, but she wasn't standing anymore. The soldiers were holding buckets. One of the soldiers looked back over his shoulder and Alban recognized Larker, the pilot. Even the strongest strands were snapping. Alban decided to go out there before things got scenic. Impose some lattice of discipline. The woman stood up on her own and Alban recognized her too. A local woman, the scientist named Vinca. And now somebody was calling on the telephone. Alban called it a telephone. He unhooked the device from his belt and handed its query to his communications officer, who let it ring twice more, gaping at the scene before him. Turn that off. The communications officer disappeared into the belly of the ship, out of the forest of instant rooms and tents that made up their camp. Alban walked to his office door, to call something out to the street. Because he had moved, after an afternoon of abeyance, the medals on his chest jingled like wind chimes. Alban remembered wind.

  It was a still world they were on. Maybe it was just a still season. The half-platoon had only been there for days. Two suns passed above, one near and nearly normal, the other far away, pensive, and dim. Their hosts had so far offered little hospitality and less information. They were not invited, but nevertheless, such rudeness confused. Space was large and lonesome. Protocols existed. His men were weary from the journey and eager to begin their mission, their big barter or smash and grab. But negotiations had never begun. The locals were all but conversationally inert and the landscape was strange. The soldiers were tired of waiting. And there had an accident, a soldier drowned. Alban didn't make it outside before Larker threw the contents of the bucket on the woman. He began to move faster.

  "Stand down," he said.

  Larker stood back but his shoulders didn't drop.

  "We don't have time for their games," Larker said, and narrowed his eyes at the drenched woman. Alban was shocked that Larker's face was capable of making that expression. He had known him for fifteen years.

  Larker said to her, "I think you'll tell us what's going on here. Or else we'll find some other way to make you useful."

  She did not expect that threat. She hoped she misunderstood.

  "I'm not a prostitute," she said.

  "Oh yeah? You sure?"

  She thought for a moment of unhinging for him, one way or another. Her mind was a collection of many dangerous things. Science and stories and distaff wonders and fears. Women had dissolved before, in their manners and in their minds. But time was short and there were larger concerns than this large man. She absorbed the coolness of his shadow covering her, mustered her sodden, piebald scraps of dignity and replied, "I hope I would have noticed."

  The woman seemed unharmed. The men had been there less than 100 hours and already one soldier had succumbed to the potent ocean. He meant to swim. He had stripped off his regulation boots and rolled up his regulation pants. He had gingerly removed the wooly, sturdy socks that his girlfriend hand-knitted for him and rolled them into a neat ball, careful not to stretch out their elastic necks. Then he took three balletic leaps into the unstirred sea, pitched forward, and silently died. The touch of the water brutally stung the soldiers' skin when they tried to pull him out. They were madly waiting for one of their numbers to return from the ship with a sturdy pole when a local man, hearing their shouts from a nearby building, roused himself from his pondering, waded into the sea, and retrieved the body. He looked them over, exasperatedly, and said only, "Don't go in the ocean." He wandered back to his building and disappeared from sight. He had not been injured at all. The soldiers were very angry. The locals said nothing more. The soldiers were getting nervous. They came from a planet at dire war. They had been drafted and assigned like a hand scooping up sand and carelessly tossing it. They wanted this woman Vinca to give them the Saffron Project. Now.

  The communications officer charged out of the ship.

  "Lieutenant!" he cried. Alban furrowed his brow at the man's loss of composure and guided him back into the darkness of the ship with a hand lightly pressing his shoulder. When he returned moments later, Alban looked ashy, as though he'd been closely present as a volcano erupted, transfixed on the narrowest edge of survivability.

  Vinca turned to Alban.

  "I think it is possibly time we spoke," she said.

  "Possibly?" scoffed Larker.

  Vinca met his gaze.

  She said, "Perhaps 'possibly' is not the right word," and she began walking in the direction of the rocky shore, where the main road ended in a half mile's distance. Alban followed. He still had a mission, sadly superfluous as it had just become. Maybe Vinca was about to offer hospitality or parlay. He would buy their mysterious technology from them, if they were willing. No need for violence. They were going to need to become compatriots, now. But there was no need to give that away. Try for gently diplomacy, judicious trade. He tried not to look up at the sky and think of home. Besides, Alban had no reason to believe that the circumstances of his group's desperate departure and abrupt arrival were known to the colony on Baux. He was, of course, wrong.

  *****

  Alban had a wife, and she was a soldier too. She had been ordered to stay behind to help organize the final defense. She was educated in tactics. They had an afternoon together before he left. That morning it had snowed and the pipes in their house had frozen and burst. A mean slush formed on the floor of their bedroom. The windows were already cracked from the mobs of people who rioted at night, throwing and burning, terrified at what was coming. The bedding was wet and the walls were slick and cold so they laid on the tiny balcony that overlooked their naked trees and felt the wind rattle through the sticks of their bones. Sylvia bit through her lip and it was hard to make the bleeding stop. When Alban finally walked away, she was still blotting it with a pinkening cloth. There had been disasters of every scale. Sometimes he missed his cat. Alban's group in their tiny ship looped three times around the planet and was gone.
r />   Things homeward were in chaos, but they'd been sent to Baux. Baux was a research colony bathed in a strange religion. They were regarded as a perplexing faith, antique and untraceable or newborn and sly. They separated the sexes, but did not seem to prize one over the other. They craved knowledge and traveled widely. They studied everything. After they discovered saffron on Baux, they had summoned their faithful home. After the exodus, they fell silent. They kept their new insight to themselves. They were called the Scri'ibe. What was saffron? Alban's leaders believed it was a weapon. The planet skeptics believed it was a dream. Believe what you like, but it was the last loose hope to win the Chaser War. Alban's men were a final arrow launched by a faltering bowman whose second-to-last breath was bubbling redly out. They pursued an obscure and owned colony, left alone to do science and to spin a solitary society and to practice their inscrutable faith until they discovered something essential. Perhaps essential. Perhaps discovered. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken with the colonists on Baux.

  They were supposed to retrieve them. They were supposed to hurry. The orders were given by a sharp leader whose voice teetered on the edge of hysteria. Bring back the women or the men, and bring back the technology. Use the technology. But here was Vinca, sitting on a rock, gazing out at a watery horizon watching the small sun set. Alban noticed that her clothes were worn and disheveled and he chalked it up to her cult's mendicant ways. She saw him looking and ran a hand over the front of her skirt. She gazed at the small thread pulls and tears and touched them thoughtfully, as though she were reading the world in Braille.

  "I'm sorry you're meeting us like this," she said. "Usually we are cheerier, and friendlier, and better kept. And of course, there are many more of us. You've even come at a bad cycle of the ocean."

  Alban had wondered at their dreariness and sparseness. When seen, the women blew around the town like skilled tumbleweed. The soldiers watched them going from building to building, moving items and bringing them to the parked escape shuttle where they all seemed to live. The men were firmly rooted and sharply tined. They sat together and didn't talk, and they glared at the soldiers with something like ire. But to business.

  "We've come to trade," Alban said. "Are you a good person for me to speak with about trading?"

  Vinca looked at him as though he were very, very young.

  "Would it be better to talk to one of the men?" he ventured.

  Vinca laughed through her nose and then stood up, drawing herself into a more official posture.

  "You are aware that I am the head of this expedition?" she asked.

  "That's what my paperwork said, but the situation on the ground seems otherwise. Nobody seems in charge. And I need to deal with the person in charge. So tell me, have you been replaced as the leader?"

  "I have not."

  "It seemed….well, maybe there was a conflict?" He decided to get to the heart of the matter. "Your women seem to be running around, doing all the manual labor, like slaves. I can understand how something like the Saffron Project could cause a conflict."

  Vinca didn't move, but Alban had a ghost of feeling that she had almost hit him. She swallowed hard.

  "We are not slaves. We are just very sad. And you, " she said, "have killed us all. So try to keep a civil tongue." She began walking down the beach. He followed her with an uneasy stride.

  He noticed that she was drying off from Larker's weird attack. Little scraps of moist but crumbling debris littered her hair, and she pulled them out, one by one.

  "It precipitates out of the ocean," she said. "The ocean undergoes complex chemical cycles, and during one of its stages, it produces these little…leaves. The water can hurt you badly if you haven't ingested enough of it to become habitualized. That's what happened to your man."

  Alban did not want a botany lesson. He interrupted.

  "My men are very serious. They're going to start killing."

  Vinca was unmoved. Alban thumped his fist against his thigh in frustration. Vinca remained unmoved.

  "I am sorry I cannot be more afraid of you. I am sure under other circumstances you are stern and terrifying." She continued walking.

  "It's funny…., " she began dreamily.

  "It's not funny."

  She sighed. "Maybe funny isn't the right word. It's….I'm sorry your friend died. And I'm sorry that nobody will ever know that he died before and not later."

  "Give us the Saffron Project. Please. The worlds of ours, where I'm from…where all of you were from, are at war and losing. The Chasers….well, you can't imagine. They're ending us. And your discovery is all that's left. So much….," he remembered the message given to him by the communications officer. It was a relaying of news from a neutral party, a trading convoy who seldom passed through the system. They had gone to Alban's world to sell their wares and had found it gone. Everything for a vast distance was a dust so fine that the traders checked and re-checked their maps before they issued a notifying communication to save other traders from making the wasted trip.

  "So much," he finished. "Has already been lost."

  Vinca put the pieces of leaves in a small pile in the palm of her hand. When she absently rubbed one between her fingers, a scent like jasmine filled the air.

  "Were you hoping it would smell of sulfur?"

  He gaped at her.

  "Our saffron won't help you win your war and it won't make you live forever. Did you read somewhere that it would? In fact..." They both looked up and noticed ships patrolling the skies, just at the threshold of visibility.

  Alban felt shredded, like he had thrust his hands into a nest of quickly spinning gears and they had taught him better. The equipment they used now had few moving parts. Solid state. But the people who ran them could still be flattened and torn.

  "Don't you wonder what it does?" She brushed her hands clean.

  Alban had hoped to find something lovely and wish-granting, like a mermaid. But what did mermaids turn out to be? Narwhals and giant squid. The type of obscure creatures that were not properly studied until people began to leave the planet. He had left his planet and his wife and a million mundane things that he was already forgetting. He was forgetting already. His soldiers began forgetting while they were still in the air. They forgot in the vacuum of space. What were we?

  Alban was shocked out of his miserable reverie by a crack that split the sky and knocked them both to the ground.

  Vinca made such a shocked face that Alban laughed idiotically.

  "That was a loud noise!" she shouted. "Your Chasers are fast!"

  Alban thumped on the sides of his head until his hearing came back and he realized what she'd said.

  "We were followed?"

  "Yes. You knew that was a possibility."

  "How did you know?"

  "It's no great wonder. We monitored your communications, as well as those of your enemies. Who you've made our enemies."

  "But you haven't communicated with the outside world in decades."

  "We may not send, but we receive. With," she said, "sublime sensitivity."

  "The ship! We have to get to the ship! We may be able to – "

  "Your ship was disabled almost the instant you landed. Your enemies are sophisticated and determined."

  Alban looked panicked and then very, very sad. He could see his ship off in the distance, and just make out the members of his half-platoon scurrying around it like jostled ants. Vinca put her hand on his arm. She took pity.

  "It seems wrong to come all this way, and to not even find out what it is. Saffron is not, for you, I think, entirely useless."

  She had some in her pocket. Eat it, steep it, toss it in the air and disappear in a cloud of it. Put it in a sauce. Make your eldritch wishes under its petaled influence and the strange skies that encourage it. Take it raw when there are only moments left. They had traveled ever so far and here were the flowers that greeted them.

  "It's a mild intoxicant." She held out a small envelope.

  "
Perhaps mild is the wrong word." Everything in her smile told him. He took a pinch of the powdery leaves and put them on his tongue and swallowed. Vinca was pleased and relieved to be able to do at least one last kind deed. The Scri'ibe believed in souls. Now he would recall and he would not be alone.

  For a moment Alban looked confused, and his hands made a motion as if they were leafing through a stack of papers. He kept looking down at the papers and then looking up quizzically at Vinca.

  "None of this matches the information I was given," he said.

  Vinca smiled wryly.

  "Welcome to outer space," she said.

  She told him the story of the beginning and the end.

  *****

  There is saffron in this story. That is what we call it. Saffron. It is dear, but it does not redeem. It only draws out of you the notes already present. Still, it is a gift. We have found it so.

  The first colonists came to mine bauxite. They leached it up and pounded it into stripes and shipped it off-world as trade. They discovered the strange floating organism that wasn't algae or animal. Some of the miners were Scri'ibe, and experimented, and took note of what they had found. They didn't tell the others of their discovery. When the others left to find new mines, they stayed behind, and soon other Scri'ibe came to join them. A mining company still technically owns this world, perhaps you knew that, but there is nothing else here they want and we live here freely and until today, far enough away to be safe.

  We are a scholar people and our inquiries often peer backwards. Discovering our origins was like skipping stones across the galaxy. From our studies and our ancestors, we knew back to one world. Someplace with water and trees and then neither. Probably our journey (Your journey too. We are the same species, of course.) had started farther back in time and space. Even with all our research, the archaeology and the anthropology, that was as far back as we were able to trace with our eager, dusty fingers.

  Saffron changed our focus, softened us, and gave our studies a new, more personal glow. It made us remember. It is a sylvan hand smoothing the wrinkled map of your memory. Perfect recall of all you have read and seen and felt and known. This was a humbling gift for a small colony of avid students. We were surprised we had forgotten so much, and we welcomed our lost thoughts like they were a herd of plump sheep come home just before winter fell.