Winter Fire

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Asimov's - Winter Fire

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Geoffrey A. Landis: Winter Fire

First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1997.

Nominated for Best Short Story.

I am nothing and nobody; atoms that have learned to look at

themselves; dirt that has learned to see the awe and the

majesty of the universe.

The day the hover-transports arrived in the refugee camps,

huge windowless shells of titanium floating on electrostatic

cushions, the day faceless men took the ragged little girl that

was me away from the narrow, blasted valley that had once

been Salzburg to begin a new life on another continent: that is

the true beginning of my life. What came before then is almost

irrelevant, a sequence of memories etched as with acid into

my brain, but with no meaning to real life.

Sometimes I almost think that I can remember my parents. I

remember them not by what was, but by the shape of the

absence they left behind. I remember yearning for my

mother’s voice, singing to me softly in Japanese. I cannot

remember her voice, or what songs she might have sung, but I

remember so vividly the missing of it, the hole that she left

behind.

My father I remember as the loss of something large and

warm and infinitely strong, smelling of–of what? I don’t

remember. Again, it is the loss that remains in my memory, not

Read these

Nebula-

nominated

stories

From Asimov's

Echea, by

Kristine

Kathryn Rusch

Fortune and

Misfortune, by

Lisa Goldstein

Izzy and the

Father of

Terror, by

Eliot Fintushel

Lethe, by

Walter Jon

Williams

Standing

Room Only,

by Karen Joy

Fowler

Winter Fire,

by Geoffrey A.

Landis

From Analog

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Asimov's - Winter Fire

the man. I remember remembering him as more solid than

mountains, something eternal; but in the end he was not

eternal, he was not even as strong as a very small war.

I lived in the city of music, in Salzburg, but I remember little

from before the siege. I do remember cafés (seen from below,

with huge tables and the legs of waiters and faces looming

down to ask me if I would like a sweet). I’m sure my parents

must have been there, but that I do not remember.

And I remember music. I had my little violin (although it

seemed so large to me then), and music was not my second

language but my first. I thought in music before ever I learned

words. Even now, decades later, when I forget myself in

mathematics I cease to think in words, but think directly in

concepts clear and perfectly harmonic, so that a mathematical

proof is no more than the inevitable majesty of a crescendo

leading to a final, resolving chord.

I have long since forgotten anything I knew about the violin. I

have not played since the day, when I was nine, I took from

the rubble of our apartment the shattered cherry-wood scroll. I

kept that meaningless piece of polished wood for years, slept

with it clutched in my hand every night until, much later, it was

taken away by a soldier intent on rape. Probably I would have

let him, had he not been so ignorant as to think my one

meager possession might be a weapon. Coitus is nothing

more than the natural act of the animal. From songbirds to

porpoises, any male animal will rape an available female when

given a chance. The action is of no significance except,

perhaps, as a chance to contemplate the impersonal majesty

of the chain of life and the meaninglessness of any individual’s

will within it.

When I was finally taken away from the city of music, three

years later and a century older, I owned nothing and wanted

nothing. There was nothing of the city left. As the hoverjet took

me away, just one more in a seemingly endless line of ragged

survivors, only the mountains remained, hardly scarred by the

bomb craters and the detritus that marked where the castle

had stood, mountains looking down on humanity with the gaze

of eternity.

My real parents, I have been told, were rousted out of our

apartment with a tossed stick of dynamite, and shot as infidels

as they ran through the door, on the very first night of the war.

Aurora in Four

Voices, by

Catherine

Asaro

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"Winter Fire" by

Geoffrey A.

Landis,

1997 by

Geoffrey A.

Landis, used

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Winter Fire

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