The Dragon and the Stars

by Derwin Mak

  “Grammie!”

  She was lying in bed, in her blue hospital gown. He ignored her scrawniness and the bedsores, trying to see the ballerina he remembered, before her back injury, the cigarettes, the diabetes, and all the rest.

  She turned her blind eyes toward him. “Andy, my love,” she said.

  “Grammie.” He held her hands. Even through the gloves, her bones were so fragile. She reached up to stroke his forehead, but he ducked. MRSA bacteria. They weren’t supposed to touch skin-to-skin. “How was your day?”

  “The same, the same.”

  He forced a smile. “Want to go for a walk? We could use your prostheses ...”

  “They don’t fit any more.”

  “Maybe we could buy you new ones.” He could taste the lie. So could she.

  “That would be throwing good money after bad, Andy. I don’t need them. The nurses get me up in a chair every day and the physiotherapist does her best. Now you, my sweetheart. What’s new with you and your magical dance troupe?”

  “Nothing,” said Andrew, while Leah said, “Huh? What about—”

  He nudged her, but too late. Penny turned toward Leah. Her pupils were milky, yet strangely compelling. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing,” said Andrew, louder, but Leah was already talking.

  At last, Penny spoke. “I need those shoes.”

  Andrew shook his head. She felt the movement and squeezed his hand. Under the sheet, Leah saw the stumps of her legs stir.

  He grinned. “Red shoes. The ones from the fairy tale.” She was the only other dancer in the family, but more than that, they had the same spirit. She understood why he dumped an opening in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for a lower one in a magic company.

  For the first time in weeks, he saw a light in her sight-less eyes.

  “Do you love me, Andy?”

  “You know I do.”

  He entered the hospital slowly the next day, inhaling his surroundings. The steamy smell of reconstituted mashed potatoes and feces. The hallway crowded with linen baskets, wheelchairs, dressers with gowns and gloves, and an occasional commode. People crammed into rooms. A man with white wisps of hair, tied to his bed, calling, “Help me. Help me.” An intravenous machine beeped. A nurse called, “I’m coming, Mrs. Smith!” Through the window, the St. Joseph’s Oratory’s magnificent copper dome oversaw all of Montreal. Andrew paused in front of the window, trying to ignore the scrabbling in his backpack.

  At last, he silently entered Room 8311. He shut the door.

  His grandmother said nothing. Her fists clutched her thin blue bed sheet, her face alight with hope.

  Andrew turned away from her as he popped open the cat carrier. The red shoes sprang free and landed gracefully, almost silently, on the tile floor. They flexed and pointed again. Limbering up.

  At last, he spoke. “You can’t even see them, Grammie.”

  Her hand reached for his. He made no move toward her. Her hand faltered in the air. “I love you, Andy,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Damn. She always knew how to work it. He grabbed her hand, ignoring its tremor. He repeated, louder, “You can’t even see them.”

  The shoes ignored them both, launching into a scene from The Nutcracker.

  She licked her lips. “But I can hear them. Thank you, my love.”

  He choked back tears the only way he knew how. He danced with the shoes in that tiny box of a room. He was the toy soldier, the shoes were Clara. He didn’t have to lift her, but his hands rose automatically. The shoes sprang ever higher, ever greater, in sweeping strokes, as if they could clear the illness and sadness and regret from the air. Andrew found himself smiling. Dancing better than ever. Trying to out-do those goddamn shoes.

  Grammie clapped. She laughed, gurgled, and began to cough. Her face turned red. She bent at her waist, covering her mouth.

  “Grammie? Should I call a nurse?”

  She waved him off. She mastered the cough and sucked in her breath until it was almost normal. “Andy. Please leave me the shoes tonight.”

  He shook his head but said, “I love you, Grammie.”

  “Dammit!” It was the first time she had sworn at him.

  “I can’t. It was too much just to bring them today.” He said under his breath, “I know how much you miss dancing.”

  She snorted. “I miss walking.”

  He gaped at her, realized how futile it was to make faces at a blind woman, and shut his mouth.

  “I used to make my own decisions. Now I have to ring a bell if I want to loose my own bowels. More often, the nurse doesn’t come in time, and I sit in a filthy diaper, sometimes for hours. I have an ulcer on my buttocks that will not heal because of this.”

  “Grammie—” He wanted to cover his ears.

  “Your mother brings me geraniums. I hate geraniums.”

  “Grandma!” He almost laughed until she turned her face to his.

  She enunciated every word. “I want to live again, Andrew McMillan, or I don’t want to live at all.”

  “Okay. You’re upset. I shouldn’t have brought these. I’ll take them away—”

  “No!” she yelled and started coughing again.

  “I’m getting your nurse this time.” He pressed the bell again and again. No answer, as usual. He ran to the hallway. “Nurse! Nurse!”

  Grammie shook her head, still coughing. That boy. He was still so very young.

  Thump! Thump! The red shoes landed on the bed. She swung toward the pressure, pushing aside the blankets. She felt dead flesh and bone rub against her stumps. Then the red ribbons whipped around them, lashing her flesh to the dead girl’s ankles.

  “Thank you,” she managed through a final cough.

  Though the shoes trembled with the effort, they kept nearly still as she clambered out of bed and, even more treacherously, balanced her stumps on the cool, smooth, but not unpleasant ankle flesh.

  Then the shoes began dancing. First a slow step to each side. She grinned as her shrunken muscles jerked into action. Soon, the red shoes began faster steps, even a spin.

  “Grammie!” Andy shrieked. He dove at her feet, hands reaching for ribbons, but she jumped over his fingers and landed on the bed, kicking Highland dance steps.

  The Filipina nurse came running and screamed. “Mrs. Sebastien! Mrs. Sebastien! She‘s—call a doctor! Stat! No, a code! She’s—I don’t know what—look at her! Is it a seizure?”

  Her chest was caving in. She had no breath left. She mouthed “I love you,” and her eyes rolled up. Andy sprang at the bed, but her body soared into the air, the head and torso hanging at a bizarre angle as the shoes spun her legs, again and again, in a relentless pirouette.

  Leah dashed up the stairs. “Did you hear about Andrew’s grandmother?”

  Noah nodded. “And the role of the red shoes.”

  “But—she was dying, right? That’s what Andrew said. I mean, he was pretty upset, but it sounded like suicide to me.”

  “No matter what the circumstances, we forbid magic objects to commit murder or abet suicide. Law number 252.”

  “They’ll deanimate the shoes?” Leah’s stomach roiled with guilt. It was all her fault.

  “Yes. In the past, a wizard would have been summoned to the hospital and performed his duty then and there. Now we have to conjure the shoes away and stage a trial first.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Progress.”

  They sentenced the shoes to burn.

  A large crowd jostled around the bonfire. A few had signs: BURN, BABY, BURN warring with JUSTICE FOR ANIMATE BEINGS. Leah crossed her arms, the breeze blowing her hair. Noah said nothing. Neither did Andrew. He hadn’t spoken much since his minimum two-week suspension from the dance company. Despite the heat, he was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt and black cords.

  A limousine nudged its way up the hill. A flunky rushed to open the door. The black-hooded executioner stepped out holding the red shoes firmly around each foot.

  A free strand of ribbon lashed at his eyes. He jerk
ed his head back. An assistant had to snatch the ribbons out of the air while another man tied their ends in knots. The executioner stood impassive until they finished. Then he marched to the fire, careful not to hasten his pace. He tossed the shoes at the flames. “May you rest at last.”

  As he opened his hands, the red shoes launched themselves off his palms. The flames reached for the shoes, but Leah muttered a spell, and the winds blew the flames and the smoke toward the audience. When their eyes refocused, the red shoes were gone.

  Leah was suspended from her apprenticeship.

  “For a month,” said Noah. “To ponder what you have done. I will notify you if I will continue your apprenticeship.”

  The “real” world bit. Her parents in Toronto were pleased but startled to see her. What had she been doing since she dropped out of medical school? Nothing she could explain.

  She gossiped with friends. Shopped. Hit the movies. Went clubbing. All things she’d missed, but the lack of magic ate at her. She couldn’t drink too much, or she’d catch herself saying things like “That bouncer’s pretty big, but I once saw a giant . . .”

  The little things cut at her. She missed patting her three-headed dog and controlling the breezes instead of flicking an air conditioning switch.

  Five weeks later, she woke up at 5:00 AM to stare at the ceiling. Her life was empty. Her parents were impatient. Had she called med school yet? No? Well, what did she plan to do with her life?

  She drank a glass of water and logged on to her computer. “Anonymous461386” had emailed her a picture. She clicked on it. What the hell. A virus might help put off med school.

  It was a crappy jpeg. She squinted at swirls of black figures surrounding a fire. At the left side, far from the flames, she caught a glimpse of red.

  In fact, she’d swear there were two red blobs. Dancing with the gypsies?

  Leah’s heart stopped and started again. Then she clicked on her next email. From Noah. Subject: Coming back. As her server loaded up his message, she cranked up her Nelly Furtado CD and whooped as she danced.

  Intelligent Truth

  Shelly Li

  “LET me raise a white deer on my green slope, And ride to the great mountain when I have the need; How can I bow and scrape to men of high rank and men of high office, Who never will suffer from being shown an honest-hearted face.”

  Katie Huang glanced up from the paper she held in her hand, focused in on the robot sitting across the table from her. According to the robot’s paperwork, his name was Searle, produced in 2076, making him part of the Cobalt Generation.

  “Searle,” Katie said. “These four lines are the last lines of a poem by Li Bai, a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Will you give me your interpretation of them?”

  Searle blinked, his human-looking eyes staring back at her. No words came out of the robot’s mouth.

  Katie leaned back in her chair and waited as Searle processed the words, probably keying each line into his inner dictionary, comparing notes with various Internet sites, trying to find an answer to her question.

  But, in the end, Searle had to give his own interpretation. After all, that was what Katie had asked of him, and a robot could not disobey a human order.

  So Katie waited, meanwhile letting her thoughts separate. She thought of Charles, waiting at home with dinner. She thought of what he was cooking up today. He always had silly little surprises for her, whether it be a love letter hidden under the dinner plate or various presents taped to the bottom of the dining table.

  A smile crossed her face. Out of all the presents in the world, though, the only one she wanted was the one that Charles had yet to give her.

  “My interpretation of the four lines that you read to me,” Searle’s words bled into her thoughts, “is that this person lives on the outside of civilization. He spends his days with nature, because he does not like to interact with others.” Searle paused. “He thinks that everyone looks down on him because he was not blessed with an honest face.”

  Katie nodded and looked down at Searle’s robotic grading rubric. She scrawled at the bottom: Does not understand how to compare verses to historical allusions and cannot firmly grasp extended metaphors. Human status denied.

  “Thank you, Searle,” Katie said as she looked up. After another day of analyzing the psyche of all kinds of advanced robots, she still hadn’t been able to categorize one, just one, as a legal human being.

  After another day, she was still a failure.

  “You are dismissed.”

  Katie watched Searle walk to the door. He even had the swagger of a human, that little hunch sitting on his shoulders.

  In fact, if Searle were out walking the streets, Katie didn’t think that even she, one of the many doctors who conducted the robotic psychological examinations here at BioCorp, could tell the difference between him and a human.

  But if he can’t understand the inner meanings of a poem, Katie thought, then he will never be anything more than a robot.

  A machine.

  It took Katie less than ten seconds of sitting down at the dinner table to realize that something was off about Charles today.

  Her fingers started to tingle.

  Could this be the night? she wondered as she watched her boyfriend set the table.

  Over the year and a half that they had been together, Katie had gotten to know Charles pretty well. Well, more than pretty well. She knew Charles like she knew the back of her hand.

  And right now, Charles looked nervous. Charles never looked nervous, or frenzied, unless he had something important to say.

  Charles sat down at the table and noticed Katie staring at him. His lips formed a shaky smile. “Katie,” he said, reaching over the table to grab her hand.

  Katie had to grind her teeth together to keep from smiling. This must be the moment, she thought, readying herself. She could hear her heart thundering, pounding against the walls of her chest.

  He’s going to propose.

  “I have something I want to show you,” Charles said, his eyes glued to the table, refusing to look at her.

  “Oh. And what’s that?”

  Charles slid out of his seat, pulling Katie up with him as he led her to the bedroom.

  Katie’s hold on Charles’ hand tightened as he opened the door. “After you,” he said, staring deep into her eyes.

  And so Katie, barely able to breathe, entered the room.

  She took a look around, not seeing anything out of the ordinary. There was the king-size bed, carefully made that morning by their robot, Queenie. Queenie had also cleaned the wood floor and wiped down the floor-to-ceiling window that exposed Chicago’s glittering Lake Michigan.

  “Charles,” she said, turning around. “What—”

  All of a sudden the closet door burst open, and a woman jumped out between her and her boyfriend.

  Katie stopped.

  Her mouth dropped open.

  This can’t be happening, she thought, fighting the urge to scream as she stood in place, staring.

  After a few seconds, she found her voice. “Mom. What are you doing here?” Her gaze shifted to Charles.

  There was a helpless expression covering his face.

  “Aren’t you surprised, honey?” her mother said, opening her arms and pulling Katie into an embrace. Her mother was a couple sizes skinnier than her, and hugging her was like hugging a stick.

  “Very surprised,” Katie said. “But what are you doing here?”

  Her mother’s eyebrows furrowed to form a frown, and she made that tssk noise with her tongue, making Katie’s insides cringe, her stomach twist. That tssk was all too familiar, too haunting.

  “Why must you talk like that?” her mother said. Her English, after all these years, still carried an accent, a reminder of a separate life back in China. “Can’t a mother come visit her child when she misses her?”

  Her mother turned to face Charles, giving Katie an opportunity to pierce a glare into him.

  “Now, Charles
,” her mother said. “Before we all eat dinner, will you help me carry my things from the car? It’s parked downstairs.”

  “Yeah, no problem, Nina,” Charles said and followed Katie’s mother out of the room.

  Katie let out a sigh as she watched her mother and her boyfriend disappear out the door of the apartment.

  I can’t believe I was actually expecting a proposal tonight! Now, standing alone in the silence of her home, she wanted to slap herself.

  The reason Charles had been so antsy was because he had hidden her mother to surprise her.

  Dear God, Katie thought as she strode out of the bedroom.

  This wasn’t a surprise present. This was damnation.

  Her mother’s last piece of luggage arrived with yet another surprise, one that Katie was not sure how to feel about.

  “Do you like him?” Nina said, motioning for the robot to put down the luggage. “I got him cheap, on sale at an outlet mall in Indiana.”

  Katie took one look at the robot before tearing her eyes away and telling her mother, “Mom, there’s a reason you got this thing cheap. It’s an Aqua Generation robot. A first-generation machine that was made in the 2050s.”

  “Hey, this ‘robot’ has a name, honey buns,” the robot interjected.

  Katie’s head snapped back to the robot, who then said, “The name’s Carter.”

  “Carter.” Katie smiled and said to her mother, “The thing is even dysfunctional. A robot doesn’t interrupt communication between two humans. It’s one of the rules in his programming.”

  “Bite me,” Carter said.

  “Now, cool down, Carter.” Nina cast a disapproving look at Katie. “He’s more human than any of the ‘advanced’ robots that are sold nowadays, and I’m keeping him.”

  Katie threw her hands up in the air and looked to her boyfriend, who, again, offered no support. He was helpless against the five-foot-two bully standing in the room with them.