It takes a great event to differentiate one sunrise from the next. In this case it's a storm, fiercer and blacker than any Perth's encountered since the day her ship and her lungs first took on water. A black line of sediment on the horizon that sprouts a crop of thunderheads. Waves that pace and toss their heads with growing restlessness as the afternoon suddenly goes dim. The deep, stifling pause before the first bolt of lightning splits the sky from liver to lights. Wind and rain, buckets and buckets of it, turning the air to water and the water to darts and the whitecaps to jagged, monstrous jaws that could swallow a church steeple whole.
And then the whale. It never strays too far, her prey. Maybe there's something inside that won't let it, a hateful little voice hissing you've earned this.
It breaches close enough to her raft that she can see the bones of the flippers shining through rents in the flesh, like white faces behind ragged curtains. Up and up and up it climbs, an entire continent of rotten meat, a mountain range of carrion. Slimy things wriggle and squirm in eye sockets the size of hogsheads. Water sluices down from its mottled gray back, pocked and pitted as the moon. Through the storm's teeth Perth watches as it blots out the sky above her — it seems to go on forever, the shark-gnawed flukes, the belly riddled with streaming caverns — and, for the first time in who knows how long, something akin to an emotion stirs in her chest. A strange kind of happiness, maybe, out here in the maelstrom with the sea and the spume and the horrid awesomeness of the whale.
But it passes, as all distractions do. The whale completes its arc and vanishes into the green-black as quickly as it came. A wash of memories slams into her. She falls to her gristly knees and vomits seawater flecked with bits of stomach lining.
“Don't leave me,” she says. “Please. Come back.”
Recollection always comes, whether you want it or not.
Sheaves of letters on paper yellow as sun-rotted silk, scattered for the wind and the waves to rifle when Perth's hopes swam north and her ship sank south. She kept them in a hatbox beneath her bunk in the captain's quarters, because she was no stronger in life than she would be in death, and torturing herself with old hurts and wrongdoings had become an addiction more powerful than the opium pipe. The script (firm, no-nonsense, blue ink) had been traced by greasy fingertips so many times only the imprint of the words remained, carved into the pulpy surface like a sailor's initials whittled into a beam. And then the sea took those as well, and she was left with nothing but the memory of a goodbye, and she knew that this, too, was her doing. Take the medicine you've earned, dearie duck. Swallow every last blessed, bitter drop.
The whale beaches itself on a strip of pockmarked stone and black sand. Dead trees reach up to clutch at the gray sky's skirts. Bones lay scattered up and down the coast for as far as the eye can track, rolling like a cast die each time a wave rolls inland. They rasp against the underside of Perth's raft as she pulls ashore, the only bright and polished things in this faded daguerreotype of a landscape. She kicks them aside. Surf the color of driftwood foams around her ankles.
“No,” she says. The noise is less her rotted tongue and vocal cords making recognizable words and more the universe remembering what that might have once sounded like. “Never.”
She takes a swaying step. Another. Invisible strings pull her along the sandbar, staggering the final yards like an old dog finding her sealegs. The bulk of the whale crests before her, bone and barnacle and bare, slippery sinew. Baleen between the jaws like an antiquated harp with all the strings snapped and fraying. Hagfish wriggling slimy sailor's knots through what's left of the flesh. When she lays her finger bones against its ruined side she can feel the faint vibrations of their stirring, like the ghost of a long-dead pulse. “Get up, gods damn you. We're not done yet. We can't be done.”
A groan comes from somewhere deep inside the beast. It's the sound of an old ship threatening to break apart, finally strained beyond what oak and iron can endure. Let me die the final death, woman. The bottom aches for my bones. The crabs and the little nibbling fish call out to me. My ancestors sing songs of rest from the silt. Unclench your grip and let go, for both of our sakes. Mercy. Mercy for your soul and mine.
Perth ignores the plea and pushes. Her claws sink elbow-deep into the jellied mass. Twenty able-bodied living men could not move the mountain but beneath the straining gibbet's wreck of her it shifts, ever so slightly. Somewhere out of sight bone strikes bone and the resistance gives her more leverage. The heels of her boots dig furrows in the wet sand. Every bit of will and concentration she has left bends towards budging the whale from its resting place. And reluctantly, resignedly, with a noise like a sigh and a noise like a sob, it lets itself be shoved towards the water, shedding bits of gristle and blubber as it grates across pumice. The oily waves slowly choke the beast back down, fore to aft.
When the gulls are through cleaning up, there's nothing to show the beast was ever there, save a deep furrow in the gravel identical to a hundred others up and down the beach. And the bones, of course. It always sheds a few. Perth wonders how many more it has to lose. She wonders, not for the first time, how much longer they can go on like this.
She waits until the whale has a good head start. Then, harpoon in hand, she pushes her raft out into the surf and follows.
The Legend of RoboNinja
He had a name once, doled out by a loving mother in some antecedent time and place so distant it seems impossible the stars moved in their current polity. Gone now. Fallen and trampled to an obscure macule in the roadside mud, like his vanished arms and legs and viscera. Nothing would be changed in the knowing.
RoboNinja. A name for garbled tongues and garbled times. Interstate mudlarks peer at him from beneath grotty brows as he passes, eyes the size of headlamps reflecting the gelid glow of his visor. He once tried obscuring the light with handfuls of ash, smeared across LEDs and his shining silver carapace like the penitential marks of a sect long forgotten. It had worked for a time, until the monsoon came mocking once more.
What alloy is he, that does not rust or falter? What spirit turns the clockwork heart, the hydraulics hissing at each joint like chained and malignant demons? Why do his knees have running lights? None step forward to ask. He walks the highways alone. The blasted countryside sighs with relief to see the back of him, an unlucky silver coin passed on to some other gambler's hand.
The elasticity of muscle. Meat and bone sliding together in perfect alignment. Blood humming faintly in veins delicate as silkworm strand. Things he never knew he missed. Taken from him, piece by piece, until nothing was left but machinery. Two katanas and a sweet-ass rail gun. Metallic fingers to crush the windpipe of God, should he ever come across him on his meanderings.
A story common in the days before the cataclysm. A rival clan. Cybernetic legs, replacing those lost in rooftop shadow-games. The moon never judged his lack of skill. First one arm and then the other, tumble-turning in the osseous light like shot-stricken passenger pigeons.
Remove the limbs of a ninja. Take the head and lungs and ice-cold heart of him, the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the liver and lights and soul uncoiling beneath them like squid ink on the sea floor or a totally rad ninja smoke bomb. If one were to replace all the components and seal that third-rate warrior's spirit inside a suit of living robotic armor, would it remain the same shinobi? Or would something ineffable be lost in the changing?
In his perambulations he comes across a city. Charred skyscrapers turned to skeletal slag, grasping for the sky like the clawed and blackened hands of sinners reaching from Hell toward some unobtainable beatitude. Leadbellied clouds visible through the rebar. Wasted shadows scuttling from the light he carries, dazzled by refulgence. Also there is a Waffle House.
Rough men live here. He passes a knot of them, making sport of a tiny orange kitten. RoboNinja stops for little on the road. The world is a horror forgotten by God, completing its circumvolution over and over heedless as any tormented eidolon ever haunted the hal
ls past midnight. He has seen trees impaled with the skulls of infants and roadsides smeared with the gore of feasts unimaginable. But he likes cats. Moreover, he has a railgun and two katanas. It takes little effort to send the souls of the men back to the formless and unthinking void they issued out of.
The kitten blinks up at him. Owlet in feline form. Fluffy fur matted by oil and who knows what else. A mew so quiet as to be almost imperceptible.
The way will be hard, he says to the grimalkin. I can't promise you anything.
Purring. The flick of one small ear, indifferent.
All right then. Your choice.
He reaches down, plucks the kitten from the ground by its scruff and opens the secret robot ninja compartment in his chest. He can still feel it rumbling inside as they travel on down the road.
A family of ferals dwelt beneath the dojo when he was young. Lithe obscurations at the corners of his vision, here and then gone, like a name on the tip of your temporal lobe. Sunshine and shadow. The smell of fish stew cooking. Colors and textures and tastes leaching from his memory until at the last all cats are gray.
In a tenement building still mostly intact on the outskirts of the urbicolous RoboNinja sees a cluster of lights, yellow as torches held aloft by subterranean explorers in the wet wombs of the Earth. There are sentries at the door. Bedecked with strings of human teeth and ears like dried fungi wetted with the blood of previous owners and scraps of letters tattooed across their scarred faces in crude homebrewed inks, the scripture of damnation relentless.
He becomes shadow and fog, a penumbra across their awareness, clouding their minds so that he exists to them not at all.
y'know: ninja stuff.
Endless flights of stairs where stagnant water stands and piles of decaying plaster gather leaf-drift deep, slippery and stinking. Up and up, pneumatic joints untiring, toward the Babylonian vertex.
He can hear them. A revel in full swing. Feet stomping and voices shrieking glossalalic psalms of ravishment and drums thudding like the chambers of a vast human heart. Flesh slapping against flesh. The floor beneath him shudders, an old hound trying to rid itself of fleas. How many dwell above? Fifty? A hundred? How does the rotted hull of the thing contain them?
He gains the uppermost landing. Miasma thick enough to clot his visor. A glow like Hell's own furnaces leaking beneath the door. He pushes it and steps inside.
The revelers smoke papaverine pipes of jade and obsidian and tiger's eye rippling like the fur of some great beast gone extinct when men still hid in caves cowering obeisance to gods the shape of bears and lion, draped across the floor in various states of narcotic bliss and various states of undress and various states of coitus, languid or frantic or somewhere in-between. Bare flesh frescoed with painted handprints or rude symbols the meanings known only to the wearers. Musicians do violence to enormous drumskins with wooden sledgehammers roughly shaped into ram's heads or play flutes of bone in sooty corners.
In the midst of all of this, a desk, and at that desk a man-shape, cowled and brooding.
In this age of malnutrition and early death he is a giant, shoulders the width of a bull's. He unsteeples his fingers and makes a grand gesture with one splayed hand. RoboNinja's head could easily fit inside his palm.
Quiet, my friends, quiet. We have a guest. Don't be shy. Step right up, my robotic friend.
RoboNinja does, but not for any reasons but his own. Careful not to trod on fingers or toes or anything else left vulnerable by the human carpet. One or two hiss and snap at his ankles like dogs. He dodges them easily.
Well well, says the hooded man, regarding him. Well well. A robotic ninja, no less. Your legend precedes you, friend. Or should I say your ineptitude.
He doesn't respond. His pride died with the last human part of him. Robots have no need for such emotions.
I'm here, he says finally, shrugging. They're not.
Good answer. Which brings me to my first question. Why are you here?
Another long pause. The only sound the crackling of the fires and the soft susurrus of bodies rubbing against one another.
I need a job.
The giant barks laughter. You? What does a robot need a job for? You don't eat, do you?
No.
Don't screw, don't need clothes?
No.
Don't need bullets?
This is a railgun. It is too badass to need ammo.
Then what are you interrupting my brooding for?
Robot fingers punch a button sequence on his chest. A pneumatic hiss. Gently he removes the sleeping kitten from inside. Holds out the spark of orange fur for examination.
The hooded man and the robot ninja regard one another over the expanse of desk and cat. What imp of the perverse capers in the mind of the man? What strange stirrings in the petrified and corroded heart of the automaton, to make him act thusly? None may know, until the day of judgment when all graves give up their dead and the final great ninja battle is joined.
I suppose I can do something to keep you in sardines. How would you feel if I asked you to be a marketing shill for Lightspeed?
Dead inside, as always.
That's fair. But will you do it?
The kitten begins purring. The gears of the universe miniaturized and set to motion inside a body no bigger than a throwing star.
There is only one response.
Darlings
The fashion ten years ago was for Appleheads, can you believe it? They didn't raise the sleek, narrow-jawed little ladies we have today. Seemingly every girl coming out of the kits was ruddy-cheeked and round-faced, like a cherub or one of those Kewpie dolls you see in antique stores sometimes. The breeders just kept modifying them and tinkering and poking at their genetics, until some of the poor darlings could barely stand under the weight of their massive heads. Probably a mercy the club put a stop to it, really. It always hurt my heart to see them stumbling around up on those stages doing their routines; even the well-bred ones seemed a bit… well, pathetic, you know? You'd never catch me raising them, I'll tell you that right now. My Herschel always said people didn't have any sense about when to stop, and he knew what he was talking about, he really did.
Not that we don't get our own share of grousers. There's been some mean talk about the shape of their cheekbones (Axeheads, ha ha ha! Bottle-Openers! People can be so, so cruel), and this one woman – it was at a pageant in Santa Fe, I think – tried to lecture me about their legs, said that anything that long and spindly must break if you so much as looked at it funny. Which is a load of bull hooey, of course. The whole point was to get that pretty, elegant fawn look, and you don't see fawns getting tangled in their own legs. The Foxglove community is very tight-knit. If any Johnny-come-lately buys a permit and starts churning out girls taller than the standard six feet, we'll tumble down on them like a ton of bricks. Someone has to take some responsibility; we owe it to the girls. The last thing we want is for the breed to turn into something like the Stareyes, or, Heaven help us, Topsy-Turvies. Donna had one of those a few years back and she came home from a bridge game and Pinkie had fallen over in the sink and drowned in half an inch of water. Couldn't get herself back upright under the weight of all those curls, nearabout broke Donna's heart. It's all about the almighty dollar to some of these folks. All they think of is how many more they'll be able to sell if they make a popular combination.
Now, when I combine genetic traits, I do it for the good of the breed. Only girls that are champion Darlings with a total of twenty-five points get their genes passed on. The ones that don't have what it takes go to good homes, and I make the new Mommies sign a contract promising they won't use the child's DNA sequence for any kind of funny business. Like I said, it's just the responsible thing to do. It's like a pact between you, the little one, and the pageant judges, keeping the line safe for future generations. I've always admired the Rosycheek breeders for being so diligent, but I also suppose that's why there are only fifteen licensed geneticists in their registry. Al
ways a price, always a price.
There's a movement to go back to working lines. You know, tiny hands for electronics factories, narrow shoulders for going up chimneys, enhanced vocal chords and bright smiles and puberty at seven for commercials and television, all that stuff. I'm not so sure how I feel about it. Do they really need to do all that? Isn't that what the talent portions of the pageants are for? My Gladiola (she's a Foxglove/Ladyfinger cross) can put together a mobile phone and sing a cover of “Moon River” that would make a brick wall weep, I don't see why she needs to go to school just because unenhanced little girls a hundred years ago used to. Her quality of life is good; why rock the boat? She begs for books, I hand her a makeup kit. She wants classes, I send her to playdates with other Foxgloves. Learn what's going to be important to your life, sweetness, I tell her, and leave the addition and subtraction and See Spot Run to them that are cursed to live in this cruel old world far longer than yourself, poor mayfly.
We have them for such a short time. It's my only regret, you just can't seem to find a Foxglove that lives past eleven anymore. But that just makes them more precious, doesn't it? Little angel-babies from Heaven, each and every one.
Mechanical Animals
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The Synthetic Vertebrata Uplink Project
by Dr. Leslie Reyes
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Funded! This project was successfully funded on Jun 29.
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backers
$5,039,830
pledged of $5,000,000.00
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Using state-of-the-art advances in neural uplink technology and biologically-based cybernetic vessel structure, this project will try to place a human consciousness where it has truly never gone before — into the body of an animal.
The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters Page 5
