The Blue-Spangled Blue (The Path Book 1)

by David Bowles

  “Go on, Samanei.”

  The Oracle had turned sideways and was looking back and forth between Meji below her and Brando above. She smiled when he said her name.

  “I like the way that sounds. Just Samanei. There was Santo, suckling at his mother’s wrinkled old breast, and she was stroking his hair and telling him stuff: ‘You’re the best. You’ll lead them all to gnosis. Do whatever you must. Morality is irrelevant. Just enlightenment matters.’ More stuff, too. About how he was born to this mission, some kind of reincarnation of the prophet. And him just sucking away, eyes squeezed tight. Then something weird happened. I was looking at them, and of a sudden I could see through them, at the pieces of their selves, all black and full of holes, and the whole world opened up and I could see it all at once, all the small and big things, every detail people most times overlook, it all came streaming in like blue rain and I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t understand it all and in the middle of it came the voices, all the voices, above all His—Dresch spoke to me. He spoke and I fell away from the window and curled up inside of my own being and He told me I didn’t need Santo anymore, not as a teacher. I didn’t need anyone because He was gonna teach me all the things I needed to know.”

  Meji had fallen to his knees. Brando stood, dumbstruck and fascinated at the change that was coming over Samanei. She hunkered down on herself, making herself smaller, and her voice got quieter and more child-like.

  “Then the neighbors, they came, and they found me all dirty in a little ball, and, and they knocked on the door, and uncle, he comes out of the house with my bibi, and they pick me up and carry me back inside and Bibi, she takes my clothes off and gives me a bath and checks my little part and asks me if I bleed yet and I say no not yet, Umma says maybe next year. Then uncle, he comes in and gives me some clothes to wear and asks me what was I doing on the ground in the back yard, and I feel Him take over my mouth and He says with my voice that I was just playing in the dirt and the hot sun made me faint. But He tells me in my mind to look close at uncle and I see uncle don’t believe me, though he gots doubts. Bibi takes him aside and I can hear her tell him to keep an eye on me because I could help or hurt.”

  She straightened up and looked Brando straight in the eye.

  “And you know what happened next. When I was thirteen, he found me with the stigmata, he took me from my family, none of them trying to stop him, and he sealed me up in this horrible place. He made me play the role of Bibi, Brando. He suckled at my breast like a baby. And I stroked his hair the way he wanted me too. He’s a bad man, Brando. He’s hurt people long enough. He had Tenshi killed. And Tana, too, so young and innocent. He made them slaughter her like a pig. Remember her poor little broken body. Kill him, Brando. Kill him now.”

  Anguish and rage descended like night, and before he knew what he was doing, Brando released Santo’s arm, put his own around the old man’s neck, and twisted sharply.

  With a sickening pop Santo’s spine was severed, and he collapsed dead on the steps, sliding a bit before twisting sideways and stopping.

  “Good. Now, let’s go. We can’t stop here. There are many deputies and government officials whose inertia and complicity allowed this evil to happen. You’re still in the midst of the Killing Dance, your nascent soul caught up in that grime wende. In no time at all we’ll eliminate them, slay the jagen once and for all. Then you can help me rule this world for real.”

  Brando shook his head. He looked at Santo’s lifeless body, then at Meji, who was weeping.

  Samanei’s presence altered. Her hands hung loosely at her side, and she tossed her head with a carefree motion. Then she spoke with Tenshi’s voice. “Come, Brando, umpenzi, it’s not too late for us. We got used badly by everybody, but it’s our time now. We can remake a family. That’s what you really want, no? Another family? Well, this body’s back to normal. Look at me! The same as when that bastard killed me. Come closer, love. Put your arms around me. You waited so long. Me too. Why should we suffer anymore?”

  His heart was hammering in his chest.

  How can she do this? I don’t understand. But no, it isn’t Tenshi. I can’t let this thirst be slaked by her lies.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m not going to kill anyone for you. I won’t be your pawn. As for family, you’re not Tenshi. And I don’t just want another family, damn you. I want my own back!”

  Samanei clicked her tongue.

  “Look at Santo, Brando, dead there at your feet. Don’t feel any better, eh? Thought you would, but it’s not enough, never enough. They die, your enemies, but you go on. Maybe when you pull everything they ever did down in piles of rubble and gore, maybe then you’ll find peace. But you’ll never get your family back. They’re dead and gone and sapped into the black of nothingness, never to return.”

  Brando surged toward her in fury, and Meji finally found his voice.

  “NO! Brando, don’t kill Her! Stop the killing now!”

  “Oh, he’s not going to kill me, child. I remind him of his wife. Besides,” she muttered, patting her abdomen, “he needs me.”

  Regaining their feet, the arojin asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, of course you couldn’t know.” Her voice was a chuckle. “He’s going to clone them.”

  Brando’s head snapped about. He glared at Samanei uneasily.

  How could she know? His stomach twisted nauseously. What the fuck is she?

  “Clone who?”

  “Tenshi and Tana. He’s gotten his revenge, now he’s going to remake his family. Kind of sick, no? He’d be better off with me.”

  Meji stepped closer to where Brando and Samanei stood only feet apart. Their eyes were bleary with disillusionment. Behind them, the chirurgic began ticking one of its limbs against the floor, as if nervous.

  “Tell me this isn’t true.”

  Head whirling, Brando swallowed heavily. “No. She is insane. That wouldn’t bring them back. Why I would do it?”

  Samanei eyed him with amusement.

  “So dei campioni di sangue. So che hai comprato l'apparecchi.”

  Taken aback by her use of Italian, Brando reflected in panic. It was possible that someone might know he’d swiped the blood samples from the evidence room, or at least guess it had been him. Perhaps she could have learned of the purchase of so much illegal medical equipment, too.

  On the net for more than a decade. Every minute of every day.

  Unexpectedly, the chirurgic whirred its way forward and spoke.

  “Brando D’Angelo. I have a message for you. Playing in three, two, one.”

  As if awaiting apocalypse, the three humans stood frozen and dumb, the silence looming like some dark beast. A weak but compelling voice, old and full of gravel, began to speak from the robot’s innards.

  “D’Angelo, this is Archon Rawe. I’m recording this message on Santo Koroma’s docbot. I’m pretty sure what it’s meant for, the complicated operations that the Oracle will require to be made a regular woman again. I have no idea how all this will play out, and I fear the worst, but I know her, and she will try to get you here, somehow. I hope this chirurgic can get a message to you in time.

  “Don’t trust her. Whatever you do. She isn’t what it is she seems to be. When she first came to the jinja, I was full of selfish hope. I’ll admit that openly. She knew in an instant where I was weak. When I wasn’t expecting it, when my eyes were closed in meditation in the White Room, she—oh, by the Ogdoad, she lifted my robes and pleasured me. Then she spoke to me with my dead husband’s voice and I was so eager to believe I could be with sweet Aroha again that—”

  The message broke off into a sob for a second. When Rawe continued, he was more subdued.

  “The details aren’t important, but she began to play Santo and me off each other. She encouraged me to embrace reform while, I discovered later, berating me in front of Santo and urging him to oppose me. She insisted I cooperate more and more with the CPCC, and she got Santo invo
lved with the Brotherhood.

  “Though I had suspected this for years, some events made me relax. Samanei putting her in permanent hypostasis was one, Santo’s apparent rejection of the hard line was another. My doubts came back when Santo started his move to quarantine off-worlders, and she told me to play along. Didn’t seem right, so I got an off-world tech to bug her connection. Everything was heavily coded and impossible to read, but we traced destinations: she was communicating with every major demimundo organization in and around CPCC space, as well as religious and mercantile organizations on every major human settlement. Her motives and goals are inscrutable. But she manufactured this situation, D’Angelo. Jitsu would already be part of the CPCC now if she hadn’t interfered. Several hundred inhabitants of this world would still be alive, including your wife and daughter.

  “Now we come to what is truly dangerous. In a fit of anger as a teen, Samanei once revealed to me her hate of her twin. In the Oracle—in Samanei’s mind, Tenshi did nothing to help her because she wanted Santo to take her twin away, lock her up and remove her womanhood. She swore she’d see Tenshi and all she loved destroyed.

  “You see? All this—mess we’re in the middle of, it’s just a sick little girl striking out at the sister who was powerless to protect her. That seed of hate, I suspect, opened her up to Sakra’s voice. I don’t think she’s connected to the Ogdoad at all: it’s the Demiurge she communes with.

  “She discovered my tap on her line, I’m sure. I think she’s capable of anything to cover her tracks. I don’t have much time, and no one will believe me if I tell them what I fear. But I can warn you, yes. Don’t trust her. Don’t pity her. And for the sake of us all, don’t let her leave in this place. Disconnect her and lock her away. She’s evil and twisted inside, capable of destroying us all.”

  The chirurgic’s message ended. The silence felt even heavier than before. Black, inky silence smothering them slowly.

  Then Samanei laughed.

  It was a horrid, cackling, maniac laugh, the sort of stereotypical laughter of a villain on some infotainment drama.

  Brando heard an undercurrent of sarcastic commentary in that laugh, but beneath that a deeper level of true madness and evil that made him tremble involuntarily.

  “Ah, yes, horrible evil sick sick sick Samanei. I know yall, the ‘normal’ ones, quote quote, think I’m sick. Yall imagine that the way that yall see the world, the way yall think inside yall’s limited brains, that that’s the right way. What if yall’re wrong, eh? I pity yall; never hearing all the voices burbling blue there in yall’s subconscious,” she looked at Brando pointedly, “or just hearing them a bit, thinking it’s yall came up with those ideas. Heh. I hear them all, I see it all in crashing waves of blue, all the things that would make yall quiver in fear like the animals yall truly are. And I can let yall hear those voices, let yall peer into the majestic blue light of absolute wisdom, complete and panoramic seeing.”

  Stretching her limbs and cocking her head to the side, Samanei underwent a mesmerizing transformation. She walked up toward the dais, brushing brusquely past Brando, striding the way a man would, her shoulders and arms held in a completely new way. Turning to face the two men and the robot, she eased into Santo’s old chair and began to speak in a man’s voice using a very old dialect of Standard:

  “Imagine, if you will, a young girl, barely thirteen, whose life is shattered not only by her mental illness, but by the machinations of her wily if Oedipus-complex-driven uncle. He steals her away while her family stands idly by, even her twin sister, whose much-vaunted aggressive nature and non-conformity completely and quite conveniently fail her in this instance. The young girl is thrust into a situation in which she is compelled to make important religious and political decisions by a group of older men who, despite having sworn off the pleasures of the flesh, are sexually attracted to the teen, to such a degree that they have her surgically altered so as to prevent themselves from giving in and molesting her. Of course, they justify this to themselves by arguing that she will not be bothered with either the temptations or the excretions of the flesh, but deep within them they know, as men throughout the ages have known, that her sex is a weapon that they will impale themselves upon if permitted.

  “What is this girl to do? Meekly give in to the oppression? Or turn it against the men, against their culture, against the government that permits such a culture, against the species that permits such a government? Why should she pay a price and not they? In the end, all she wants is to be set free. Returned to womanhood and released from her prison.”

  Samanei leaned toward them, a look of exhaustion pulling at her features. “I just want to get out of here, do you understand me? Let me go. Please.”

  Brando felt his carefully welded heart break within his chest.

  “You,” he rasped, “foolish girl. Don’t you understand? She was trying to set you free! Every reform she pushed through, every step she took along the Path—oh, Samanei, it was because she loved you enough to risk everything else! Reform would lead to an Archon from Ona ra-Shamanga, who would have torn down the jinja and let you be the leader you were meant to be. But you didn’t trust her. You had the means to reach out to her. But you preferred to marinade in your pain, letting it rot you to your core. Oracle? You’re no oracle. You haven’t even had the vision. Couldn’t have.”

  Samanei spat at him, growling.

  Meji, whose head had dropped at the sound of the Founder’s voice, lifted their eyes and asked that which could not be answered.

  “Freedom. You’re sure that’s all you want, Founder? I sense a larger agenda here, forgive me my impudence. You spoke of ruling this world, of turning against our species. This is just wanting freedom?”

  While Meji asked their pointed questions, Brando made his decision. He was tired of the speeches, of wondering whom to blame. Perhaps there would never be an end to the assigning of culpability: perhaps the chain of responsibility was so long and interconnected that there was no honest way of singling out a villain. He suddenly felt weary to his very heart, a sapping weariness that could never be erased because it required the kind of rest only a family could provide: that sense of belonging, that peaceful fulfillment that would never come to him again, he feared. It was time to act.

  Rushing up the steps as Samanei rose to perhaps flay Meji with words and prophecies, Brando struck his sister-in-law at the base of the skull with the edge of his open hand, and she collapsed in his arms. He hurried down again, slinging Samanei’s unconscious form over his right shoulder. She was as light as a child.

  Meji inhaled air sharply.

  “What are you going to do, Brando-shi?”

  “Take this crazy fem off this planet to a place where she can’t hurt anyone, first off. Then I’m going lose myself out there, somewhere. Alone like I’m meant to be.” He hefted Samanei’s emaciated form, threw her over his shoulder, and walked over to the chirurgic. “Come with me, understand? Show me the fastest way out of this place. One that avoids the guards of the Close.”

  “Yes, Mr. D’Angelo. Follow, please.”

  Leaving Meji standing amid shattered illusions, Brando followed.

  CHAPTER 49

  Halfway to his home, Brando noticed that Samanei had woken up and was gently trying to pull free from the compression tape he’d used to strap her into one of the passenger seats. She looked over and saw him staring at her. Across her face spread an ironic smile.

  “Guess this means you don’t trust me, right? And after all I did for you: hacking into Nawabari’s central frame, impersonating Jeini Andrade, doing the research to create a believable recreation of her tragic demise, monitoring the station, making sure years in advance that there’d be a couple of helpful souls on the platform—”

  “Yeah, yeah, shutting down the gravity, the list goes on and on. Weighed against the murder of my wife and child, plus all the other deaths you caused, it’s bloody insignificant, Sam.”

  “Ah, from Oracle to Samanei to Sam. Wh
at’s next: Sa? Ssssss? Yessssss I like Ssssss.”

  “You would.”

  Samanei laughed outright and with apparent glee. “I’m so glad that your sense of humor wasn’t pounded out of you. It’ll make life with you so much easier.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable.”

  Samanei craned her neck around the back of her seat. She laughed again, a girlish giggle.

  “What now?”

  “You brought the chirurgic along. Not confident in your own abilities, eh?” She looked forward at the display and became very serious. “Thank you. I was trapped in there twenty-five years. It’s nice to be out, even taped to a seat.”

  Brando decided not to reply. Let her babble.

  But she fell silent, and he was left with his thoughts. Once things calmed down, there would be a tribunal. Despite the good he had done, Brando had engaged in multiple illicit activities, highest among them the killing of thirty-odd squad members with a very illegal weapon. Perhaps he would get a civilian trial and avoid military execution, but he would certainly be put away forever. That would be justice, but he had lost faith in justice, or at least in its power to heal. He’d killed three of the people responsible for his wife and daughter’s deaths and had the fourth in his hands, but he felt no relief. Instead, the other collateral deaths were already weighing on his mind.

  Listening to Samanei’s babble, he’d also begun to understand that Ona ra-Oni was not the Way that Tenshi would have wanted him to follow. Its overwhelming power blotted out all else but the task at hand, keeping him from tracing a route into the future. He didn’t want to be the dervish anymore. He wanted to be a father, a husband, a planner and a thinker. He wanted quiet warmth, snuggling softness, crinkly paper between his fingers. Gentle, thoughtful habits repeated every day in simple wonder.

  Brando had to bite his tongue not to cry in front of his sister-in-law. Perhaps none of that could be his. Perhaps he deserved nothing. The crimes and brutality he had committed demanded payment, not rewards. It was possible that he had never deserved happiness. But he would try to be happy, try to recreate a family, despite all the facts and laws in existence.