Songs of Love & Death

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…”

The trouble was, of course, that she’d been right. Martin was fond of Barry—if he thought about it, he’d have to say that Barry had been his closest friend since childhood, given a very limited experience with close friends. But he had few illusions about his cousin’s probity or loyalty: even in the first flush of his infatuation with the new computer, he’d known that nothing Barry told him about it was likely to be true. The brand was completely unfamiliar, the keyboard had too many function keys beyond the usual twelve, and there were other keys and markings with strange symbols that Barry never even tried to explain to him. “It’s one of a kind, absolutely unique, same as you. I feel like I’m in Shakespeare, bringing two great lovers together.”

Directions had not been included, but Jaroslav, the amiable graduate student two doors down the hall, who actually did know quite a lot about computers, came over to set up Martin’s laptop for him. It took considerably longer than expected, due in part to Jaroslav’s unfamiliarity with the operating system, and in equal measure to his fascination with the computer’s programs and connections. “No, that cannot be it, that makes no sense. Well, I suppose that would work, it seems to work, but I cannot understand… yes, that works, but why… ?” He made no more sense out of the keyboard than Barry had, and was clearly only half-joking when he muttered, “With this thing, I am lucky to know to set the clock, where to plug in the mouse.” By the time he was done his Iron Man T-shirt was sweated through, and he was talking to himself in Serb. Afterward, Martin noticed—on the occasional times they passed in the lobby or hall, or outside the building’s laundry room—that Jaroslav avoided meeting his eyes.

Despite Martin’s vast ignorance of the workings of his new computer, however, it functioned better than any machine he had ever owned since a beloved bathtub motorboat that ran up a flag and fired pellets at his rubber ducks. Lorraine had once commented that electronic devices seemed to commit suicide in Martin’s presence, and it was a hard point to argue. Yet the strange laptop never misbehaved: never froze, never crashed, never devoured work he had forgotten to back up—never, in short, treated him with the kind of spitefulness that had always been his lot from anything involving electrons and wires. He realized that he was actually grateful, and from time to time found himself thinking of it not as a machine, but as a quiet and singular friend.

Often now, when he came home in the evening from the large chain grocery where he was the produce manager, he would sit at his worktable (dinner having long since evolved into a solitary pursuit for both Lorraine and himself), and let the computer talk to him, either on-screen or through the excellent earphones that Barry had grandly thrown into the deal. The computer had a sound system, with built-in speakers, but Lorraine complained about the noise, and Martin liked the earphones better anyway. They gave him a curious private peacefulness that made him feel as though he were at the bottom of the ocean in an old-fashioned diving suit, talking with a companion he could not see. Not that he had ever worn any sort of diving suit, or actually been in water deeper than his high school swimming pool. Martin had not been to very many places in his life.

He did no store work on the new computer; there was an intimidating, unforgiving desktop model in his backroom cubicle for that. The laptop was for telling him stories at the swirl of a mouse: it was for bringing him news, delivering such e-mail as he ever received—while most considerately eliminating all junk and spam—and for showing him not only the old films noir and television episodes of his youth, but a wider, richer world, a world he had resigned himself early in life to seeing in snippets at best, but never to know in all its sprawling, vulgar magnificence. The laptop seemed genuinely to care for him: him, Martin Gelber, forty-one years old, balding and lonely, spending his days with fruits and vegetables, and his nights with a wife long since a stranger. Absurdly—and he knew bitterly well just how absurd it was—Martin began to feel cherished.

He was also aware that he had no more than scratched the surface of the laptop’s talents and capacities. There were keys he carefully avoided touching, software settings he never once changed from how Jaroslav had left them, areas of the screen where he never let the mouse wander. Now and then he was tempted to click on some mysterious button—just to see—but Martin had the sad virtue of understanding his own capacity for disaster, and the allure of adventure always faded quickly. He was more than happy with the computer the way it was, and the way they were together.

Except for the One Key.

Martin called it that, having seen The Lord of the Rings, and read Tolkien’s books as well. The One Key lived alone on the upper right corner of the keyboard, well past Print Screen and Scroll Lock