“Oh, I’m all right. A bit of reading will do me good.” She opened the book. It was one from his office. Sometime during the night she must have gotten out of bed.
Carson braced himself against the hallway wall as he walked to the front door, hunched over the illness. His head throbbed and the sunlight through the front window was too bright.
“Carson, are you in there?” a voice yelled. “Birnam wood has come to Elsinore,” it shouted.
Through the pain and fever, Carson squinted. He opened the door. “Isn’t it Dunsinane that Birnam comes to?”
The warehouse manager balanced a box on his hip. “I saw the damnedest thing on the way here.” He started. “Jeeze, man! You look terrible.”
Carson nodded, trying to put the scene together. The manager’s truck was parked next to his own in the driveway. The sun lingered high in the sky.
How long had he been sleeping? Carson forced the words out in little gasps. “What are you doing?”
Grabbing Carson’s arm, the manager helped him into the living room onto the couch. “I found the antibiotics I told you about,” he said. “It wasn’t in the pharmacy. The place burned to the ground.” The manager ripped open the box lid. Inside were rows of small, white boxes. Inside the first box were hundreds of pills. He plucked two out. “But in the delivery area behind the store, there was a UPS truck chock full of medicine.”
Carson blinked, and the manager offered him a glass of water for the pills. When did he get up to fetch the water?
“Your chest is heavy, right, and you’re feverish and tired?”
“Yes,” croaked Carson.
“I can hear your lungs from here. Pneumonia, for sure, I’ll bet. If we’re lucky, this’ll knock it right out.”
Carson swallowed the pills. Sitting, he felt better. It took the pressure off his breathing. Tillie had looked healthier. Maybe the penicillin helped her, and if it helped her, it could help him.
The manager walked around the room, stopping at the photoelectric panel’s gauges. “You have a sweet set up here. Did you do the wiring yourself?”
Carson nodded. He croaked, “Why aren’t you at the warehouse?” The light in the room flickered. Ponderously, Carson turned his head. Through the picture window, it seemed for a moment as if shadows raced over the houses, but when he checked again, the sun shone steadily.
Without looking at him, the manager said, “Time to move on. That warehouse paralyzed me. I’ve been waiting, I think. Olivier’s Hamlet said last night, ‘If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come it will be now.’ ”
“What was he talking about?” asked Carson.
“Fear of death. Grief,” said the manager. “The readiness is all, he said. Ah, who is this?”
Tillie stood at the entrance to the hallway. She’d changed into jeans and a work shirt. Her face was still feverish and she swayed a little. “Oh, good, the pool man,” she said. Without pausing for a reply, she waved a handful of packets at them. “I’m tired of waiting for flowers, Carson. I’m going to plant something.”
Confused, he said, “It’s nearly winter,” but she’d already disappeared. He rubbed his brow, and his hand came away wet with sweat. “Did she call me Carson?”
Shadows hurried across the street again, and this time the manager looked too.
“What is that?” asked Carson.
“I was going to ask you.” The manager stepped out the door and glanced up. “I saw them on the way over. They’re funny birds.”
Carson heaved himself out of the couch. His head swam so violently that he nearly fell, but he caught himself and made it to the door. He held the manager’s arm to stay steady.
Overhead, the flock streamed across the sky, barely above the rooftops. Making no sound. Hundreds of them. Narrow wings. Red breasts.
“What are they?” asked the manager.
Carson straightened. Even sickness couldn’t knock him down for this. The birds zoomed like feathered jets. Where had they been all these years? Had there just been a few hidden in the remotest forests, avoiding human eyes? Had they teetered on the edge of extinction for a century without actually disappearing despite all evidence to the contrary? Was it conceivable to return to their glory?
Carson said, “They’re passenger pigeons.”
The manager said, “What’s a passenger pigeon?”
It’s an addition to my life list, thought Carson. Audubon said they’d darkened the skies for days. Carson remembered the New York City Marathon. The people kept running and running and running. They filled the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
“I guess sometimes things can come back,” said Carson.
The impossible birds wheeled to the east.
The Potter of Bones - ELEANOR ARNASON
Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To The Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tipree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel is Ring of Swords. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. Her stories have appeared in our Seventeenth and Nineteenth Annual Collections.
Here she takes us to a strange planet sunk in its own version of a medieval past for a fascinating study of the birth of the Scientific Method… and also for an intricate, moving, and quietly lyrical portrait of a rebellious and sharp-minded woman born into a time she’s out of synch with and a world that refuses to see what she sees all around her.
The northeast coast of the Great Southern Continent is hilly and full of inlets. These make good harbors, their waters deep and protected from the wind by steep slopes and grey stone cliffs. Dark forests top the hills. Pebble beaches edge the harbors. There are many little towns.
The climate would be tropical, except for a polar current that runs along the coast, bringing fish and rain. The local families prosper through fishing and the rich, semi-tropical forests that grow inland. Blackwood grows there, and iridescent greywood, as well as lovely ornamentals: night-blooming starflower, day-blooming skyflower and the matriarch of trees, crown-of-fire. The first two species are cut for lumber. The last three are gathered as saplings, ported and shipped to distant ports, where affluent families buy them for their courtyards.
Nowadays, of course, it’s possible to raise the saplings in glass houses anywhere on the planet. But most folk still prefer trees gathered in their native forests. A plant grows better, if it’s been pollinated naturally by the fabulous flying bugs of the south, watered by the misty coastal rains and dug up by a forester who’s the heir to generations of diggers and potters. The most successful brands have names like “Coastal Rain” and emblems suggesting their authenticity: a forester holding a trowel, a night bug with broad furry wings floating over blossoms.
This story is about a girl born in one of these coastal towns. Her mother was a well-regarded fisherwoman, her father a sailor who’d washed up after a bad storm. Normally, a man such as this-a stranger, far from his kin-would not have been asked to impregnate any woman. But the man was clever, mannerly, and had the most wonderful fur: not grey, as was usual in that part of the world, but tawny red-gold. His eyes were pale clear yellow; his ears, large and set well out from his head, gave him an entrancing appearance of alertness and intelligence. Hard to pass up looks like these! The matrons of Tulwar coveted them for their children and grandchildren.
He-a long hard journey ahead of him, with no certainty that he’d ever reach home-agreed to their proposal. A man should be obedient to the senior women in his family. If they aren’t available, he should obey the matrons and
