Gifted
by Michelle Sagara
Rosdan Press, 2011
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
SMASHWORDS EDITION: 978-1-927094-16-7
Copyright 2011 by Michelle Sagara
All rights reserved
Cover design by Anneli West, Four Corners Communication
Lace: photoshop brush by http://nadinepau.deviantart.com
Gifted, Copyright 1992 by Michelle Sagara. First appeared in Aladdin, Master of the Lamp ed. Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.
Introduction Copyright 2003 by Michelle Sagara. First appeared in Speaking With Angels.
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Novels by Michelle Sagara
The Book of the Sundered
Into the Dark Lands
Children of the Blood
Lady of Mercy
Chains of Darkness, Chains of Light
Chronicles of Elantra
Cast in Shadow
Cast in Courtlight
Cast in Secret
Cast in Fury
Cast in Silence
Cast in Chaos
Cast in Ruin
Cast in Peril
The Dead
Silence*
Touch**
Grave**
*Forthcoming in 2012
**Forthcoming
Table of Contents
Introduction
Gifted
Other Stories by the Author
Introduction
This was the first short story that Mike Resnick ever bought from me. It was pretty much the first short story that I ever attempted, although between its beginning and its completion, I wrote another which was published first (Birthnight.)
There is something utterly appropriate about the subject matter; I was writing about a Genie, and I was spending much of my free time on the then on-line GEnie service. (This was at a time when being on-line at all cost serious money, but the SFRT chat rooms were free for members of SFWA, which was one of the biggest advantages to being in SFWA, at the time.) It was on GEnie that I met Mike Resnick, and Mike Resnick was to teach me much of what I know about the publishing business. (Much of this has now changed in the past almost two decades, but it was invaluable at the time, if only to avoid the occasional unexpected surprise.) He was funny when I needed humour, and serious in that older statesman way (he’d deny this loudly if asked). It was also Mike Resnick who made me call Sheila Gilbert at DAW when I had a novel I wanted to submit to her, and he even gave me her phone number when I did the electronic version of stammer. He really wasn’t keen on excuses. (In his defense, I had spoken to Sheila Gilbert several times by that point, at Worldcons and on the phone when she called the bookstore to speak to Tanya Huff. Had I not already known her in person I would never have scraped up the courage to cold-call her.)
I was incredibly nervous, writing this for him. (The good news: you become less nervous with time. You flail less, or tear out your hair less, or doubt yourself less. Unless you’re writing novels, in which case, in my experience, it’s worse. I live in a short story while I’m writing it, but it’s only for a few days. I live in a novel for a lot longer, and have a clearer idea, now, of what can go wrong.)
I started it several times, and finally finished the story that’s included here. I can see a lot of things that I would do differently now. But this was the best I could do then, and in some ways, it reflects the writer I was. (Oddly enough, I like it more now than I did eight years ago, possibly because I’m far enough removed from it now that I have no memory at all of actually writing it.)
When I was on the verge of telling him I wasn’t certain I could write a story he’d like, I showed it to Teresa Edgerton, and she offered me encouragement enough that I sent it.
Toronto, 2003
Toronto, 2011
Gifted
He was the last of the Genies.
The others had served their purpose in a brilliant flash of three sharp bursts, and had been dust or less for many centuries.
When he was born, if indeed a Genie can be said to know birth, he was taught. He could not remember the teacher at all, but the teacher’s words were as sharp and clear now as they had been at the beginning of his awareness.
“You are part of the magic of the world,” the teacher had said. “All things that live must have purpose, and that is yours. You will not be strong, as camels are, and you will not be cunning or wily in the manner of men; you will not be mortal, but you cannot live forever.”
“What will we be?” One of the Genies had asked.
“What you are: Wishgivers. And when you have found the one, you will make your choice—and three times, you will know the power of the Maker. You might be as Gods, if you choose your dreamer wisely.”
“What happens when the wishes are given?”
The teacher did not answer.
Time did. Time, and the first of the Genie’s brothers. He was an impatient wisp of air and color, with no thought to the future and only the desire of power to guide him. He found a poor man—who better than the poorest of the poor to make a great wish?—and gave his gift first to gold and jewels, second to beautiful flesh, and last to a kingdom that spanned the deserts. The wishgiver, the first of the wishbringers, knew the glory of power and the song of fulfilment, just as he had desired.
But the gold and jewels were scattered now, melted and changed over the passage of time. The beautiful women were dust and less than dust, and the kingdom was lost scant years after its founding. The first of the wishgivers had not lingered to see this: The last of his power, and the whole of his life, broke and burst in the instant the kingdom had been created. He was gone to wind and sand and the burning sun above.
The Genies had no time to bid their brother farewell. Sobered, they hid in the shadows and the little, secret places that magic makes. They made vows of abstinence, and swore to each other that they would not squander their lives or their gift on insubstantial longing.
But the teacher had been right. What lives must have purpose. One by one, over the passage of millennia, the Genies succumbed to the silent call of their magical vocation. Yes, they grew crafty, and yes, they struggled to make their wishes immortal and fixed in the stream of time. Some created works of genius, and some bestowed genius upon the merely mortal; some created immortals, too soon lost to violent death when time would not take them. Some created war, and some won them; some let their seekers touch and know magic’s glory.
But the price was always the same: The Genies grew beautiful in their work—incandescent to the eyes of their brothers, sublimely terrible—and when that work was done, they were gone.
The last of the Genies had once been privileged to watch one of his brother’s giftings: The third and last. And he remembered, no matter how hard he had tried to forget, the pained look of surprise and loss, the sudden struggle and scramble for life, that had loomed for an instant upon a visage that was already disintegrating.
He had been afraid, then.
He made his vow and made it strong by seeing, always, the face of his long dead brother. When the last of his kin finally succumbed to a call and temptation that had grown too ripe, he said a prayer to the maker, to no avail. He was the last of his kind, and he had lived without purpose for a very long time.
* * *
As time pass
ed, he learned how to avoid the call of human longing. He adorned himself in the guise of humanity, rather than the guise of the magical, and wandered human streets, watching time change them with distant fascination. He travelled the ocean, and listened to the whales mourn the coming of the great, noisy ships that cut them off, forever, from the voices of brothers they would never see.
He came to the new world—it was called a new world for reasons that he did not understand—because the people who came were few, and their dreams were linked to reality and their own actions. The young, he did not trust; it was always the young that had drawn his kin in and ground them up in the saying of three simple sentences in any of a number of languages. Not even all of the languages had survived their wishers.
He hid in the wild, listening to the hungry dreams of winter wolves and sleeping rabbits. But the towns and the cities always called him back; he could hear the dreams and the fervently uttered prayers that he had been born to answer. There was no sweeter sound, and none more terrible; he could not live with it, but the emptiness of its absence hurt in a different way.
He learned that the easiest way to avoid people was to stand beneath their gazes. He made the street his home, and conjured the clothing—with its peculiar smell—of the curb dwellers. He held out his hand, and murmured a sing-song little plea for coin, and men and women, with their dreams buried deep in darkened hearts, would scurry past in all their finery, never dreaming of what they might take from him, if they could see beyond his illusion. They would not even meet his eyes or raise their heads while they sped past, and that was for the best.
* * *
It was winter in the city—which meant that snow and cold had driven the people from their places in the street by the turning of the night. Even the curb-dwellers were gone, huddled over steaming vents or sleeping in the vestibules of instant-money-machines when they could sneak past people who were not willing to gainsay their entrance.
The Genie was not troubled by weather, and in fact welcomed the ice and the frost—it cleared the air of its summer haze, and made the streets more properly quiet. He leaned against the dirty bricks of an old storefront on the Queen’s street and tried to catch a glimpse of starlight through the spotty cloud cover.
He felt them before he saw them, and watched with remote curiosity as they walked past. They wore black leather with silvered bits around their wrists and collars; they had hair of various hues and shapes, and one carried a music-maker over his shoulder, although at the moment it was thankfully silent. They wore heavy boots, heavy coats, and grim expressions that were meant, he thought, to be smiles; it was hard to tell.
They were the angry youth, with stunted dreams of power that drove them to pettiness instead of greatness. Every life must have a purpose—so the teacher had said—but these man-boys were allowed none, and had grown wild in their frustration. In a bygone age, they would have been the best of soldiers, the best of followers. Here, in the now that the people of this world had chosen, they were wasted.
He did not fear them, and they did not fear him; but they, like their older counterparts, passed him by quickly, although he did not ask them for coin. He smelled their desires in the air; they hung like a cloud in a deadened sky. But they asked nothing of him, and as they drifted past, the shadows of their mutual companionship drawn tight about them, they were forgotten. Minutes drifted; snow, too cold to be pretty, fell wayward on the breeze.
A lone figure struggled along the icy cement, heavily coated and somewhat bent. He watched her as she walked, and knew her age by her awkward gait. He held out his hand in supplication; she met his eyes, and the lines of her face drew into a tight mask. She walked on, stopped and fumbled with her purse, and walked back. It was obvious, from the state of her worn grey coat and the rubber boots that she wore over swollen calves, that she was not among the city’s wealthy, but she gave him the money that he’d asked for before turning west again without a word.
He looked at the coins in his palm; one was brass colored, three copper and two silver. They jangled as he put them in his pockets, and vanished to the keeping place that only the Genies know. He settled back against the red-brick and waited, feeling the cold only because it was a curious thing.
When he heard the shout, he turned. The streets were empty, or almost empty, and the noise carried easily. Curious, he drifted westward, following the wind and the old woman’s tracks.
She was there, and indeed it had been her voice that raised the shout; her words came again, less strong and less distinct. Surrounding her, like a pack of feral dogs, were the angry young men. Their voices were muted but darkly cheerful; violence was the taste of their dream.
He stopped when they became clear and distinct from their background, and watched. The young men chose not to see him, or chose not to care. But the old woman, struggling on all fours like a child learning to crawl, looked up. Blood, from a triangular cut in her forehead, dripped and fell into the folds of her skin; her glasses were shards and wire on the sidewalk, and it was obvious that she could not see clearly.
But her eyes found his nonetheless, widening and narrowing in turn. “Please,” she whispered, as a foot caught her ribs. “Help me.”
The young men turned and saw him. They looked back at the youth who was obviously the pack leader; he shrugged and spit to the side.
“Get lost.”
The Genie tried to take a step backward, but found himself transfixed. Before he could even speak, his arms were in motion—a motion that was completely foreign and more natural than breath to a human. Smoke and light billowed up from the ground in shades of graduated red; a plume of fire touched the suddenly slack faces of the boys, responding in kind to their anger and their choice.
They screamed; he felt, distantly, their sudden pain and their desire to be free of it. But their wish had no power over him now, and they fled his fire and his magic.
The old woman lay against the thin ice, bleeding into the snow. She was no longer conscious. In horror, he drifted to her side and touched her; she was warm and solid. He lifted her gently, keeping the cold at bay, and stared in angry fascination at her broken face.
Years he had watched and kept his distance—and in one night, in a way that he did not understand, with no more control than the youngest of his kin had ever showed, he had made his choice; had found his one.
The pettiness of the wish that had cost a third of his life caused him to weep in the silence.
* * *
He knew where she lived, of course; she was his chosen and the knowledge could not be stopped from coming. Although age had made her heavy, the magic was now upon him—with a simple gesture and a bit of concentration, he, she and her forlorn purse were suddenly transported into the darkness of a small room. He could see, with perfect clarity, the outline of her bed; with a lift of two fingers, the sheets rose and dangled a moment in the air, waiting until he had removed her coat and boots. He laid her down, snapped his fingers, and caught the soft cloth rag that appeared, in mid-air, before him.
Gently and slowly he began to wipe the drying blood from her face. She stirred, but did not wake, and when at last he’d finished his ministrations, he stood back, in a darkened corner, to wait.
But the moon was out. Curious, he pulled back the shades and let light reveal—and shadow—the lines of the old woman’s face. History marked her and aged her, and he viewed each wrinkle as if it were a chapter of a novel in a foreign, unknowable tongue.
He had known all his life that the chosen one would be special—but he had never dreamed, as he hid and avoided the making of the choice, that he would find an old, impoverished woman beautiful. What he felt he did not know, could not name—but this new and peculiar warmth he attributed to the beginning of his brief reign as an almost-god.
He was afraid, but thought that he finally understood why fear was not the only thing his brothers-in-thrall had shown.
* * *
She woke just after dawn—started beneath t
he sheets life a frightened animal and sat up with a cry. Then, as sunlight made the safety of her bed clear, she relaxed and fumbled at the small table to her side. Her fingers scrambled against the hard wood for a moment before he realized what she was searching for.
“They were destroyed,” he said softly.
She froze. Very slowly she turned herself in the direction of his voice, her hands white now where they clutched at linen.
“You wanted help,” he continued, in a steady voice. “I answered your call.”
“W-what are you doing here?”
“Don’t you remember?” He took a step towards her, and she shied back against the headboard, which creaked unsteadily in response. “You wished for help. I answered.”
“How did you get in here?”
“By magic.”
Her eyes were wide, troubled and undecided. He stayed in the corner, but thought to bring both of his hands, palm up, to show her. She squinted, and it became clear that she couldn’t see them. Minutes passed.
“You were attacked by young men,” he began again, his own voice betraying confusion. “Last night. You gave me coins. Here.” He called and they came, jangling in mid-air.
“You—you’re the bum!” The lines on her face contorted and then relaxed into a frown of suspicion. “So—did you go through my purse to find out where I lived?”
“No.” He shrugged. “I know where you live.”
“How?” She was frightened again.
“I told you: Magic. You wished for help, and I answered that wish. You were unconscious; I returned you to your place of residence. You are my chosen mistress, and I must grant two more of your wishes.”
“Magic, is it?” She snorted, and tossed the bedclothing aside. “Did you take any money out of my wallet?” Without waiting for an answer, she stalked over to a large dresser and pulled open the slim, upper drawer.