Keiya wishes she could be flattered.
She’s just waiting honestly for this to break and blow over so she can get on with her silent life. Keiya doesn’t need memories of her time with the Guild. This is dangerous. Morit calls her, unknowingly, back to her old occupation, and nothing we can do babe no way around that.
So: act.
If I’m a strumpet you’re a whore / Tell me what you waiting for
Tell me what you’re waiting for.
“So, what’s one of these things?” Morit asks, half-slurrily, crazy eyes and lopsided grin, tilted the same angle as her glasses. She always starts with a So. “You were saying, there’s things where you do conform to stereotype, you seem like a litch, and then there’s litch qualities that impact you in unexpected ways. Give me an example, abya?”
Keiya laughs, leans forward to slam her fingers on the keypad. “So.” Echoing again. “We litches with my particular diagnosis. We’ve got a habit, we walk on our toes. See what that means…” She draws it out, amused by the need to explain toe-walking to an outsider. Heh heh. Secrets of the Trade. The trade, then, is a life of obscurity and humiliation.
Good enough.
“In short,” says Keiya, “I can walk really well in heels.”
Litch Woman Not Supposed To Be Capable
Mystery: Litch in Stilettos Takes Station By Storm
She’s like, I own a zillion pairs. I can show you if you want. It’s not even speech it’s this gabbling confession blurted out of her tablet without clear intent. She’s riding the edge of a dangerous thought into sheer ruin.
•
You open your closet. You’re like, ha, hang on a second. With the keyboard. Morit puts her hands in her pockets and waits in the living room of your quarters, leaving you in the bedroom to struggle with the shoes. They’re pretty damn high like four inches and you’re otherwise still clad in your bag of a janitor’s uniform. Ridiculous. But your hips can sway and you convince yourself for an instant you’re a woman.
Okay, you type, come back in.
Morit’s wearing a tie, loosened. You hate her. She raises her eyebrows and does that, Oho, thing people do. Like, Indeed I was not expecting that. Satisfaction curls low in your gut because you have succeeded—you have surprised her. Heh. Victory is ours. Litch pride. Or something.
You walk across the room and give a sort of celebratory, flourishy flap. You’re perfectly on balance.
Morit is chuckling like she got the answer wrong on an exam and she’s just now finding out why. You stumble into her space. She catches you by the shoulder. Your faces are in kissing distance whatever whatever and then she draws back and sits down on your bed, with a thump.
“Keiya,” she says, “Look, you’re not safe. Hanging round me.”
You turn into a monster with raging gnashing teeth. Shoulda known.
•
“I just want you to be safe,” she says. “I am worried they will do things to you again…”
Psh, concerned about my welfare. Keiya gnashes her monster teeth.
“Look,” says Morit—leaning forward, folding her hands. “There’s a implant…”
She doesn’t get any further before Keiya is typing as rapidly as she can and the tablet is speaking:
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
in an endless string, because really, what did Morit expect. Morit knows Keiya well enough. She ought to know what Keiya will find unbearable.
Morit draws back, concern-pity blooming on her face. When the no’s are done Keiya types slowly. Waits for the words to emerge. “You think that’s what I want?”
Morit shakes her head fast in exasperation. “No! No, of course I don’t! It’s just, Keiya, you know what the stakes are here. If you don’t accept some kind of reparative therapy, they—they might blank you out. They probably will. You’ve got too much clout for a litch, so unless they can classify you otherwise, they’ll just—want to get rid of you.” Her voice breaks on the last few syllables. “I shouldn’t have talked to you. We shouldn’t have started—whatever this is.” Hand-movement sloppy and vague.
Well that’s your fault aint it, thinks Keiya sourly.
She merely shrugs, like it doesn’t matter. Shoulda known. Nothing you can do. Should’ve assumed from the start, this wouldn’t work.
Nothin we can do babe
What you can do is finish the picture.
Like, once Morit leaves, you can wrangle yourself into an outfit befitting the heels, sway back out to the station bar. You can get trashed and return to quarters then lie back on your bed sideways with your feet on the floor, in your shimmery skintight dress that’s printed with lollipops, fishnet stockings, hair sparkles and a face full of makeup, and jerk off with your stilettos still on. You think that’s gross, huh. She wonders what it’s like for people who are allowed to do these things.
Dance around your room sans coordination, singing along to Nash’s most violently sad songs. Crash into a lamp and don’t bother to set it upright.
Litch Can Sing But Cannot Talk: Hoax???
Science Declares Speaking and Singing Use Very Different Brain Functions. But Can We Trust Science?
She wonders what it’s like to be a person, a woman, who is allowed to be in this situation and it’s letting off steam it’s didn’t work out the way we thought it would, it’s my girlfriend dumped me or I dumped my girlfriend, she was fucking eugenics on the side. And then you’d get sympathy. The crowd would go, Aww, Keiya, I’m so sorry. Your girlfriend is a sack of trash. And she’d go, Hey! I work with trash for a living. That’s an insult to my chosen discipline.
But Morit had never even even even.
Together was not a word they’d dropped in this story.
A romance conducted in asides and ellipses, a love story that never was. She’s full of words on how to describe it. Not so sure how to do anything but file it away in a memory box, hope the procedure blots out the details.
She’s counting on that.
•
Of course they do blank her out. Keiya’s not sure how they get the legal permission to do this—or if they even bother, anymore. It’s a selective erasure of memory, just the stuff that Morit may have told her. Just so she don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of the preps for the Euer and whatever she’s heard while janitoring her way round the place. It’s cool. Not like she was planning a conspiracy anyhow. Keiya doesn’t have the organizational skills for a coup.
Course you gotta be strapped down and your head put in one of those things and bright lights white walls blah blah. Arms bound with thick leaden cloth. Spread like an angel. Keiya is compliant. She’s always been a patient like that, so good so good, with the nurses and caregivers cooing at her like an obedient pet.
The doctor motions. Keiya spreads her arms wide.
I, too, am an unclaimed colony.
They strap her down to the machine. She slams her head back, closes her eyes.
If you’re the mantle I’m the core / Tell me what you waiting for
Tell me what you waiting for
Foolish mortals. You underestimate. Echo is stronger than diamond.
When she wakes up she will whisper it, the words of Nash still present on her lips, hovering and perfectly preserved—Tell me what you waiting for—and Morit will be in the corner of the room, arguing with the doctors. Her voice loud and clear and persistent. They will meet eyes, Keiya and Morit, and Morit will smile her grin crackling joy to see Keiya awake, alive, remembering a little, and Keiya will tell herself, sternly: You are never to speak to that woman again.
What a stupid thing to think.
•
Boat in Shadows, Crossing
Tori Truslow
Come, let me whisper you a tale of the city where I was born, the Town Where Salt-Plums Grow. A summer tale: dark and succulent, with a bite of chill—the kind we love to tell on warm thick nights.
Picture that place, between the soul-swallowing land and the heart-stealing
sea, where once a merchant prince carved himself fine pleasure-gardens out of the swamp. Picture dusk shivering the water; hear the night-bells blooming! Picture a broad waterway sinking into moth-thick twilight. On the bank red grasses murmur, and the sky is ruffled in patterns like lace or lizard-skin.
Hear the city shuffling its canal-streets, shifting its bridges. Just days until summer’s heart, the Carnival of Crossing. Time, soon, to shed old lives for new. Clots of wilted blossom hang over house-barges, dripping down, making way for festival fruit. Nestled there, under the trees’ shadows, is a carved red barge with fat yellow lanterns. Inside, a party of youths, all intent on astonishing each other with weird wild happenings.
One, in pretty robes and rueful laughter, told the rest how a sun-tree ghost followed him through the gardens all day, lithe and coldly shining, asking if he’d come live with her.
“I told her I already have a wife,” he said. “And besides, I prefer my lovers warm.”
The servant who sat with them laughed at that. A new boy, handsome and dark; good enough fun to invite to the gathering. “What a narrow view of love you’ve got, Cail,” he said. “Why, only yesterday I saw the happy fruits of a love between living and dead.”
The first’s man’s brother shook his head. “Don’t encourage him, Bue.”
“Ah, Jerrin, let the lad have a turn,” said Cail. “And let him fill our cups as he does.”
Bue poured their cups full to the brim, and served himself too, as none had forbidden him. Then, long fingers fidgeting with air, as if pulling words from the wine-scented lamplight, he spoke:
•
I always knew I’d get into the city, knew I’d not spend my life making fish traps in a swamp—though it was fixing a trap that got me here.
It’s old living, in the mangroves; quiet living when the men lay down their whiskey-songs. I’d sit up by night between our old walls, looking out to the shine of the city, listening for its bells, its beat. I thought of slipping off more than once, I can tell you; creeping upstream and finding all the dangers, all the temptations the drunks dribble about. But my thoughts were always interrupted by the house, the walls. Pa said those planks weren’t special, just bits of old market-boats. But late at night they smelled of salt; muttered in tide-voices like souls chewed up by the sea. Their sighing kept me fixed, and their rhythm steered my weaving.
One midnight I was mending a split trap, and thinking: I wish I had a way to make them better than the rest, get my Pa more fish. Mutter-stutter went the walls, and I stuck my fingers through the thing’s wicker mouth, grabbed hold of the death inside it—snagged like threads on the splinters—and wove it back into the sides. You follow me? Want, chase, take, I told it; swallow us a great fat catch. I made it fins and tail of palm, stones for eyes to see. And Pa took it next day and hung it in the water.
Now we’ll see, I thought. But when Pa went to fetch it that evening, it wasn’t full of a great fat catch. Can you guess what was inside? I must have been dreaming of city girls when I fixed it up, because—well!
Picture it: the trap tied to one house-pole by a long cord, and I’d patched it up with the hunger of dead things. Would you have stayed in one place? Ha! Maybe it swam as far as it could, death woven through it like veins, gaping its mouth in hope of swallowing some life. Maybe a plump fish came by, shining and quick! Maybe they liked the look of each other, maybe they danced, spun and tumbled in the current and turned the water milky.
So when Pa pulled it up he saw its middle swollen full. But no fish inside, just a clutch of wicker beads rolling about—a bellyful of eggs! Pa didn’t know what to make of that, so he left them in a bucket and went to pull up the rest of the traps. Well, Ma found the bucket, only by then they’d hatched: little basketshoal with kicking tails and sucking mouths. That’s what sent my folks off boasting about my talent, and that’s what got me here.
So I should thank that fish-trap, really, though I won’t say I’m not jealous it got all the fun that night.
•
So the servant finishes his tale. He tells it light, not as if it means anything much.
But I’ll tell you a little more. Listen: down in the mangroves, just a few days before this story-telling night, a certain fisher pulled up wicker eggs that turned into wicker fish. He showed his wife the trap that bore them, shiny stones tied onto it like eyes. She shook her head and turned to their daughter.
“It’s because you made it too lifelike,” she scolded, “and now something’s possessed it.”
“Oh, no,” the daughter said. “I made it more deathlike. So it’d suck fish to the same fate.”
And her parents thought, and conferred, and spoke to their cousins and their neighbors, who all agreed: a girl with such a talent could marry well.
One said he’d heard of a wealthy ice merchant from across the seas with an unmarried son, who needed someone with haunt-tricks to help their business—he had bought a ghostwood barge to use as a roving shop but couldn’t get it to go. Now, Bue’s parents cared for their daughter but not for ghosty fish-traps—and to be joined to a merchant family was a fine thought. So they asked her, as they sat down to supper, what she thought.
“But Ma, Pa, who’ll tend the traps?” Under her calm face, dismay tumbled with delight. The city, the city! But as a merchant’s wife?
“I can do that,” her mother said. “Just think! No more blistering your fingers with work, but sitting in a high chair and commanding a house! And there’d be money to send home.”
“So send me as a servant,” Bue said, ladling soup into their bowls. “I’ll earn you some coin, and I’d rather work with my hands than worry about accounts.”
“I’ve heard nothing good about rich boys and servant girls,” said her father.
Bue’s smile was not a delicate thing but a big rash grin when she said, “why should I be a girl?”
And her parents were not hard people. “Ah, is that how it is?” said Bue’s mother, who had seen her nodding at shrines to the double-god Kam. “It’s a week till Crossing, isn’t it?”
“Go as our son, then,” said her father. “If you find yourself happy, well enough. If you change your mind, come home for the Carnival, and we’ll send you back as our daughter.”
Have I confused you? Oh, to be telling this tale in my own tongue! They say a bad workman blames her tools, and maybe so, but your language throws up strange borders. Understand: to her parents, Bue was a daughter, but to herself? Neither “he’ nor “she’ is exactly right, and nor is any third word. But these are the words you understand, so I’ll do what I can with them.
Bue packed up her things: a pillow, spare shirt and trousers, her knife. She took the baby basket-fish, all tied on a string. The egg-bearing trap, she set quietly into the canal. Its spawn must have had a father—perhaps they’d wish to be reunited. In the dark water it beat its tail; went swift through the sluggish current.
Then she sat and fixed traps. The weaving hurt her fingers; the walls were silent, the night slow.
Morning came from the city, beckoning, and she was ready. She kissed her parents, set out with their neighbor. Out, over the ever-widening web of canals. Past the spiry silver and gold temples of the stars and moon, out to the north of the city, where ancient pleasure-gardens draped themselves over the banks. Where the bronze trees rang and the flame trees reached up to the sky; where rich squares of land were joined by sly pivoting bridges. Where the tall houses were dark shining wood with trailing silk curtains; where barges carried not goods but learning. Where the women wore organza gowns and grew their hair long, and only men kept theirs short. A glistering, jeweled web of a new world.
Its waters and trees, bridges and boards all swelling with more ghosts than Bue could fathom.
•
But let’s return to that night of skittish lamp-lit tales and see Bue savor the merchant-sons’ laughter, play for their admiration. “How we laugh at boys like you, in the mangroves!” he said. “Pale and flimsy with riches,
they say, but not me—I think you’re very fine. Your father too, Cail, a wise man! I knew, from the moment I met him.” He went on:
•
Wise to buy a boat built from old wicked wood, when all the modern merchants go scrabbling after craft made with demons’ trickery; wound-up ghosts in engines they were never meant to haunt. What speed is worth owing a debt to them?
No, give me natural haunting any day—but a ghosty boat with pretty carved fins won’t go if it doesn’t want to, and there’s my entrance: bundled off by my proud parents to earn some gold.
Bad luck, the village must’ve thought me, weaving death in the night while they worked and slept. Bad luck and good riddance, said their eyes when I went. But I think ghosts are like dice: you can be lucky or unlucky with them, and I got lucky.
So I told this ice-seller—your good father, I mean—I can do anything you like with haunt-stuff, no problem. Boastful? If you like, but I believed it that morning, when the world and I stared at each other like new things. “Good,” said he, and showed me his boat. It was splendid, I said—didn’t ask where he’d got it from, or whether its eyeless grinning face unnerved him. “You’ll be well treated, boy, if you get this boat swimming by tomorrow—otherwise it’s back to whatever you were before.”
Well, I bided my time till dark, waited up for that deep kind of night that gets ghosts restless. We’re heading toward that time now, and I’m sure the boat can hear us, so shush me if I crow too loud for beating it—it might swallow us all. Think it wouldn’t? Listen to the games it played last night. Under the brooding black I put my hands to its deck, which looked so smooth in day. It stuck me full of splinters.
Too late, the thought squirmed in my brain: this is nothing like the fishes’ ragged little deaths. Maybe my luck’s run out.
The canal ran colder, the dark got me sharper, and I felt the thing twitch. Not the surface; something under, full of size and pain and yells turned to knotty wood. Who’d cross that? Only a night-mad fool clinging to the city he’s only just won. Time to show what I’m made of, I thought, and spoke with a man’s swagger: “I’m your commander now, you’ll obey me.”
Heiresses of Russ 2014 Page 25
