Songs of Love and Death

think that they had lost their minds.

....

THE SHOW, AS some of the visitors later referred to it, lasted about twenty minutes by the clocks of the hotels. About thirteen by any accurate and consulted wristwatch.

When finally the light went away, which it did very quickly, merely fluttering and going out like an ordinary candle, or—as someone said—as if an electric connection had fused, there was only absolute blackness briefly muddled with afterimages. And then the east began to kindle legitimately for morning.

By the breakfast hour, almost everybody, apart from the specific watchers, had become or been convinced that the glow in the lake was all a clever trick, put on by the area sponsors. They joked about it all day, and for days and months and years after. They told people back home that they too really should go to see the lake below Sirrimir, the lake with the legend, and look out for this fantastic performance that was laid on for your last night.

But the guides, they professed to have slept all through the event. They always did. They always would.

Meanwhile, the body of the young, red-haired woman was not discovered until it washed up on the noon tide. It seemed that she had gone for a swim, and though so young, her heart had stopped. She had not drowned.

10

“PERHAPS YOU MIGHT care for some kvah, madame, sir?”

“Oh yes, thank you,” he replied, before he knew quite what he said, or where he was. “For both of us, please.”

The attentive voice that had called through the door acquiesced and went away.

Then he turned and looked at her, his new wife, just waking from slumbering beside him in the overland sleeper, as the pullcar rattled gruntingly southward.

Outside, the woods were thinning to wide blue fields, while overhead, the blue-pink sky was prettily decorated by birds.

He knew now where he was, just as he knew the language. For a moment he studied her, too, making certain that she, as he, was not entirely bemused.

But she only kneeled up by the window and said, “The sky is always that color. Am I right, Zeh?”

“Yes, Zaeli.”

“How do we know?” she inquired, but then she looked at him, and they moved into each other’s arms, and were, to each other, the flawless completion of all known havens, lands, and states. One exquisite constant in an ever-dismantling chaos.

Over there, some clothes of an inventive cut awaited them. And some luggage lay in its cubby that he, and she too, instinctively recognized. Just as they did the quaint trees and the blue-blossoming fields and the sky like a painting on china. But only as if they had been briefed on such things a few minutes before arrival.

None of this would matter anyway. They knew each other.

“We speak this language now, it seems,” he said, smiling.

“I suppose it will seem less odd quite soon,” she sagely assured him.

“Or more so?”

“Zeh, is kvah coffee? I think it is.”

“Or milk. Or beer…”

They ceased to talk about the kvah.

They had met only recently, and were soon married, in some city to the north.

The train rattled on the hard rails, real as all reality.

It was carrying them home, to her tall old house by the blue and ever-tidal lake. With every second, they remembered more—and forgot more, too. Already they had almost forgotten their former lives, those other things they had lost, since both heart and mind had been refilled to the brim. They were changing smoothly into those people that now they were. This now was the reality, and everything else, any other lives, quite likely some sort of dream. This was real: two lovers going homeward to a lakeshore, while behind the painted china sky, the stars crossed unseen.

Peter S. Beagle

Learning to operate a computer can be difficult for the uninitiated. Some computers, however, may be trickier to run than others…

Peter S. Beagle was born in New York City in 1939. Although not prolific by genre standards, he has published a number of well-received fantasy novels, at least two of which, A Fine and Private Place and The Last Unicorn, were widely influential and are now considered to be classics of the genre. In fact, Beagle may be the most successful writer of lyrical and evocative modern fantasy since Bradbury, and is the winner of two Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards and the Locus Award, as well as having often been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

Beagle’s other books include the novels The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. His short fiction has appeared in places as varied as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Seventeen, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and has been collected in The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, Giant Bones, The Line Between, and We Never Talk About My Brother. He won the Hugo Award in 2006 and the Nebula Award in 2007 for his story, “Two Hearts.” He has written the screenplays for several movies, including the animated adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn; the libretto of an opera, The Midnight Angel; the fan-favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Sarek”; and a popular autobiographical travel book, I See By My Outfit. His most recent book is the new collection, Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle.

Kaskia

Even afterward, Martin never could bring himself to blame the laptop. Rather, he blamed his foolishness in buying a computer at once so far beyond his means, his needs, and his abilities. “Goddamn bells and whistles,” Lorraine told him scornfully at the time. “LEDs, apps, plug-ins, backup gadgets—you’ve always been a fool for unnecessary extras. You think people will look at that thing and think you’re a real computer geek, an expert.” She gave that little sneeze-laugh he’d once found endearing, and went off to call her buddy Roz and relate his latest idiocy in detail. Sucking a forefinger, cut while he was struggling to open the box, he heard Lorraine saying on the phone, “And on top of that, he bought the thing from his cousin Barry! That asshole. You remember—right, right, anything that falls off a truck is legally Barry’s. I am telling you, Roz…”