Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

newly minted air filling Isotainer Four, and she cannot help

but note the irony at work. This luxury born of mishap. Certainly, no one on earth has breathed air even half this clean in more than two millennia. The Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Chinese, they all set in motion a fouling of the skies that an Industrial Revolution and the two centuries thereafter would hone into a science of indifference. An art of neglect and denial. Not even the meticulously manufactured atmo of Mars is so pure as each mouthful of the air Nix now breathes. The nitrogen, oxygen—four fingers N , a thumb 2

of 0 —and the so on and so on traces, etcetera, all of it transforming 2

the rise and fall of her chest into a celebration. Oh, happy day for the pulmonary epithelia bathed in this pristine blend. She shuts her eyes and tries to think. But the air has made her giddy. Not drunk, but certainly giddy. It would be easy to drift down to sleep, leaning against the bole of a Dicksonia antarctica, sheltered from the misting rainfall by the umbrella of the tree fern’s fronds, of this tree and all the others that have sprouted and filled the isotainer in the space of less than seventeen hours. She could be a proper Rip Van Winkle, as the Blackbird drifts farther and farther off the lunar-Martian rail line. She could do that fabled narcoleptic one better, pop a few of the phenothiazine capsules in the left hip pouch of her red jumpsuit and ? 161 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

never wake up again. The forest would close in around her, and she would feed it. The fungi, insects, the snails and algae, bacteria and tiny vertebrates, all of them would make a banquet of her sleep and then, soon, her death.

. . . and even all our ancient mother lost was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed with dew, from darkening again with tears.

Even the thought of standing makes her tired.

No, she reminds herself—that part of her brain that isn’t yet ready to surrender. It’s not the thought of getting to my feet. It’s the thought of the five containers remaining between me and the bridge. The thought of the five behind me. That I’ve only come halfway, and there’s the other halfway to go.

Something soft, weighing hardly anything at all, lands on her cheek.

Startled, she opens her eyes and brushes it away. It falls into a nearby clump of moss and gazes up with golden eyes. Its body is a harlequin motley of brilliant yellow and a blue so deep as to be almost black.

A frog.

She’s seen images of frogs archived in the lattice, and in reader files, but images cannot compare to contact with one alive and breathing.

It touched her cheek, and now it’s watching her. If Oma were online, Nix would ask for a more specific identification.

But, of course, if Oma were online, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

She wipes the rain from her eyes. The droplets are cool against her skin. On her lips, on her tongue, they’re nectar. It’s easy to romanticize Paradise when you’ve only ever known Hell and (on a good day) Purgatory. It’s hard not to get sentimental; the mind, giddy from clean air, waxes. Nix blinks up at all the shades of green; she squints into the simulated sunlight shining down between the branches.

The sky flickers, dimming for a moment, then quickly returns to its full 600-watt brilliance. The back-up fuel cells are draining faster than they ought. She ticks off possible explanations: there might be a catalyst leak, dinged up cathodes or anodes, a membrane breach impairing ion-exchange. Or maybe she’s just lost track of time. She ? 162 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

checks the counter in her left retina, but maybe it’s on the fritz again and can’t be trusted. She rubs at her eye, because sometimes that helps. The readout remains the same. The cells have fallen to forty-eight percent maximum capacity.

I haven’t lost track of time. The train’s burning through the reserves too fast. It doesn’t matter why.