A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1988)1 opens with a far-future soldier, who is trying to seduce a woman, tell her a tale about his childhood:
That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my sea-changing memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that Neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future. p. 24
There are other exotic details:
Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye, I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire. p. 25
The central episode of the story occurs when Flip, the narrator, gets bored with a procession outside and returns to the Stone House; while he is at the fireside a larl, a large predatory beast indigenous to the planet, comes out of the shadows and, to Flip’s surprise, starts speaking to him.
The larl begins by telling Flip how his kind pass on their memories by eating the brains of their dead, and how “he” was eating his grandfather’s when humans first came to this planet (presumably this is one of those inherited memories). The larl goes on to tell him that, after a period of peace between his people and the new arrivals, one of the larls killed a human. The man’s wife, Magda, pursued the larl on her snowstrider, even though she had her young baby with her, and chased the larl to his people’s sacrifice rock (the larl realised he could not outrun the woman and her machine, so decided to pass on the information he had gathered about how to evade her—temporarily at least—to his people).
Magda catches up with the larl at the rock, and watches from a distance while other larls kill and eat her quarry. She notes (spoiler) how they react when they absorb the creature’s flesh and knowledge—and then sees them turn towards her. They hunt her down, a long process that eventually forces her, after she loses the snowstrider, to circle back to the sacrifice rock. There she lays her baby down and offers herself up: when the larls kill and consume her, they become more than animals:
Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.
“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe. p. 37-38
The larl goes tells Flip that his people took the baby back to the humans’ Captain, and how the two groups lived in peace thereafter. The larl adds that they didn’t tell the Captain about the woman, and that they take a human every now and then to maintain their closeness to humanity. He then tells Flip that, if he is good, then maybe it will be him they eat.
The last section returns to the soldier at the beginning of the story (indentifiable now as the older Flip), where we see him try to complete his seduction. This part artfully makes the older Flip’s world more real while making his childhood world more doubtful: was it something he imagined, something that was real, or was the larl telling him a story?
Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cavebears by playing the oldest winter games there are.
You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?
Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives.
That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.
All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.2
This is very well told story, rich in detail, and even the possible ludicrousness of the memories-from-brains gimmick didn’t register for a couple of days. A deserving winner of that year’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll.
**** (Very good). 5,950 words.
1. The 1989 Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll Winners at ISFDB. It is worth comparing this list with the Hugo nominees and the Nebula nominees. They are all quite different that year.
2. I note that this section (I haven’t checked the rest of it) is rewritten for the Spirits of Christmas, 1989 anthology version. Original in normal font, revision in italics:
Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed.
[No change]
“Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant.
“Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension.
Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.
I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.
A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.
[“all” deleted]
“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it.
“As the woman had hoped I would be. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind.
She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.”
[No change]
The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.
[“smooth” changed to “velvety”, “hooded” changed to “sheathed”]
NB The first two quoted sections are from the reprinted version I read (but have the Asimov’s page reference); the third quoted section is from the Asimov’s version.