Jay Lake - Green

Tor Books by Jay Lake

Mainspring

Escapement

Green

Green

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

GREEN

Copyright 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lake, Jay.

Green / Jay Lake.1st ed.

p. cm.

A Tom Doherty Associates book.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2185-5

ISBN-10: 0-7653-2185-8

I. Title.

PS3612.A519G74 2009

813'.6dc22

2008050608

First Edition: June 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to my daughter, whose story it is.
Someday she may choose to reveal which parts are true and which parts
were made up by her dad .

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the wonderful assistance of people too numerous to fully list here. Nonetheless, I shall try, with apologies to whomever I manage to omit from my thank-yous. Much is owed to Karen Berry, Sarah Bryant, Kelly Buehler and Daniel Spector, Michael Curry, Miki Garrison, Anna Hawley, Dr. Daniel Herzig, Ambassador Joseph Lake, Adrienne Loska, Shannon Page, Tom Powers, Matthew S. Rotundo, Ken Scholes, Jeremy Tolbert, the Umberger family, the Omaha Beach Party, Amber Eyes, and, of course, my entire blogging community in all their bumptious glory. There are many others I have neglected to name: That omission is my own fault and does not reflect on you at all.

I also want to recognize the Brooklyn Post Office here in Portland, Oregon, as well as the Fireside Coffee Lodge and Lowells Print-Inn for all their help and support. Special thanks go to Jennifer Jackson, Beth Meacham, Jozelle Dyer, Melissa Frain, and Eliani Torres for making this book possible, and real. Also, I want to thank Irene Gallo and Dan Dos Santos for such a striking cover, which, oddly, very much resembles my child.

Special thanks go to Bridget and Marti McKenna, editors of on magazine, who first published Green in short story form in on Five . Without them, Green would never have seen the page.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the nameless ox that watched over my younger brother when he was a very small child many years ago in a faraway land of rice paddies and endless sunlight.

Errors and omissions are entirely my own responsibility.

Green

Memory

T HE FIRST thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. His back was before me as we walked along a dusty road. All things were dusty in the country of my birth, unless they were flooded. A ditch yawned at each side to beckon me toward play. The fields beyond were drained of water and filled with stubble, though I could not now say which of the harvest seasons it was.

Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world. I did not have many words. Even so, I knew that my grandmother was lashed astride the back of Papas patient beast. She was so very still and silent that day, except for her bells.

Every woman of our village is given a silk at birth, or at least the finest cloth a family can afford. The length of the bolt is said to foretell the length of her life, though Ive never known that a money-lenders sister wrapped in twelve yards of silk lived longer than a decently fed farmwife with a short measure hanging on her sewing frame. The first skill a girl-child learns is to sew a small bell to her silk each day so that when she marries, she will dance with the music of four thousand bells. Every day she sews so that when she dies, her soul will be carried out of this life on the music of twenty-five-thousand bells. The poorest use seed pods or shells, but still these stand as a marker of the moments in our lives.

My silk is long lost now, as are my several attempts since to replace it. Be patient: I will explain how this came to be. Before that, I wish to explain how I came to be. If you do not understand this day, earliest in my memory like the first bird that ever grew feathers and threw itself from the limb of a tree, then you will understand nothing of me and all that has graced and cursed my life in the years since.

The ox Endurance bore a burden of sound that day. His wooden bell clopped in time to his steps. The thousands of bells on my grandmothers silk rang like the first rainfall upon the roof of our hut after the long seasons of the sun. Later in my youth, before I returned to Selistan to see the truth of my beginnings for myself, I would revisit this memory and think that perhaps what I heard was her soul rising up from the scorching stones of this world to embrace the cool shadows of the next.

That day, the bells I heard seemed to be tears shed by the tulpas in celebration of her passage.

In my memory, the land rocked as we proceeded, in a way that meant I did not walk. I had eyes only for Endurance and my grandmother. My father drove the ox, so my mother must have carried me. She was alive then. Of her I can recall only the feel of arms as a pressure across the backs of my legs, and the sense of being held too close to the warmth of her skin as I wriggled away from her to look ahead. I hold no other recollection of my mother, none at all.

Her face is forever hidden from me. I have lost so much in this life by racing ahead without ever pausing to turn back and take stock of courses already run.

Still, my unremembered mother did as a parent should do for a child. She walked with a measured tread that followed the slow beat of Endurances wooden bell. She held me high enough that I could look into my grandmothers white-painted eyes.

Her I recall well in that moment. Whatever came before in my young life is lost now to my recollection, but my grandmother must have been important to my smallest self. I drank in the sight of her with a loving eagerness that foretold the starveling years to come.

The lines upon her face were a map of the ages of woman. Her skin seemed webbed, as if her glittering eyes were spiders waiting to entrap whatever little kisses and pudgy hands might stray too close. I do not suppose she had any teeth left, for her betel-stained lips were collapsed in a pucker that seems to me in memory to have been as familiar as the taste of water. Her nose was long, not so much in the fashion of most of Selistans people, and had retained a certain majestic force even in her age. She had no hair left but for some errant wisps, though as most of her scalp was covered by the arch of her belled silk, I suppose this knowledge is itself a memory of a memory.

There must have been a washing, a laying out, a painting of the white and the red. These things I know now from my experience of later years, learned upon the corpses of those I helped prepare for the next life, as well as the corpses of those I have slain with my own hands.

Did my father run his fingers across his mothers cooling body to do these things?

Did my mother perform that ultimate rite for him?

Did my mother and grandmother live well together in the presence of my father, or did they fight like harridans?