by Ken Liu
In fact, you don’t remember much about the election at all. You remember reading about it and hearing others talk about it. But now that you think about it, you have no personal memories from that time at all.
You don’t like the strange feeling in your heart, so you try to change the subject.
“I think we should look for the Augustine Module,” you say.
“We’ll need a HCROT,” says Spring. “Have you figured out what is a HCROT?”
> say “no”
(to Spring)
“Then what are you going to do?”
> wander around the room aimlessly
Oh, that is a good plan.
No, actually I meant that’s a terrible plan.
> jump up and down
You’re looking silly.
Have we reached the try-anything-once part of the adventure?
> shake fist at Ryder
What are you supposed to do in an adventure whenever you’re stuck?
> inventory
You’re carrying the following items:
A sheaf of letters
An unlit torch, half filled with oil
> Ha! I got it, Ryder!
I don’t understand what you want to do.
> TELL Spring to light torch
Spring takes the torch from you.
He opens up his front panel, revealing the whirling gears inside. He touches the tip of one of his steel fingers against a spinning gear and sparks fly out. One of them lands on the torch. The smell of rose fills the room, dispelling the musty smell.
Spring hands the lit torch to you.
> shake torch
You hear something rattle inside the torch, a crystalline sound.
> hold torch upside down
Some of the oil drip out, but the rest, remarkably, stays put. You can feel the handle of the torch grow hot.
A rattling sound comes from inside the torch, eventually settling into a rapid tap-tap-tap.
“A TORCH,” you say triumphantly, “becomes a HCROT when turned around.”
Spring claps.
> move left
You are next to the wall.
The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.
> move forward
You move towards the window.
The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.
> move right
You’re standing in front of the desk.
The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.
Spring looks at you. “I don’t hear any difference.”
“I think it’s supposed to vibrate faster and make a different sound when it gets closer to the Augustine Module,” you say. “Supposed to. Maybe we need something else.”
> inventory
You’re carrying a sheaf of letters.
> examine letters
You have a burning torch held upside down in your hand. If you try that you’re going to burn the letters before you can read them.
> hand torch to Spring
Spring takes the torch from you.
“You might as well move around the room a bit,” you say. “Try the corners I haven’t tried.”
> examine letters
You read aloud from the next letter.
Castellan,
I am utterly devastated at this news.
Please have the body embalmed but do not bury her yet. Do not release the news until I figure out what to do.
Spring has wandered some distance away. The rattling in the torch has slowed down, more like a tap, tap, tap.
You’re too stunned by what you’re reading to stop. You turn to the next letter.
Artificer,
I would like you to fashion an automaton that is an exact replica of my poor, darling Alex. It must be so life-like that no one can tell them apart.
When the automaton is complete, you must install in it the jewel I have enclosed with this letter. Then you may dispose of the body.
No, do not refuse. I know that you know what it is. If you refuse, I shall make it so that you will never create anything again.
The campaign is so heated here that I cannot step away and let Cedric sway them. Yet, if the news is released that my daughter is dead and I am refusing to go home to mourn her, Cedric will make hay of it and make me appear to be some kind of monster.
No, there is only one solution. No one must know that Alex has died.
Spring is now in the hallway. The rattling in the torch has slowed down to an occasional tap, like the start of a gentle bit of rain. Tap . . . Tap . . . Tap . . .
> TELL Spring to return
Spring comes closer. Tap, tap, tap.
Spring is now next to you. Tap-tap-tap.
> TELL Spring to hand over the torch
Spring hands the torch to you. Tap-tap-tap.
“Did you know?” you ask.
“I have been with you for only four years,” Spring says.
“But I remember playing with you when I was a baby! You never told me they weren’t real memories.”
Spring shrugs. The sound is harsh, mechanical. “Your father programmed me. I do what I’m told to do. I know what I’m told to know.”
You think about the letters. You think about how vague and hazy your memories of your childhood are, how nothing in those memories is ever distinct, as if they were stories told to you a hundred times until they seemed real.
You bring the torch closer to your chest. The heat makes you flinch. TapTapTap.
You wonder where she’s buried. Is it in the garden, right underneath your bedroom window, where the lilies bloom? Or is it further back, in the clearing in the woods where you like to catch fireflies at night?
You bring the torch even closer. The flame licks at your hair and a few strands curl and singe. Tttttap.
You tear open the dress on you to reveal the flesh beneath. You put a hand against your chest and feel the pulsing under the skin. You wonder what will happen if you slash it open with a knife.
Will you see a beating heart? Or whirling gears and tightly-wound springs surrounding a rainbow-hued jewel?
It is one thing to be ignorant, and another thing to be unwilling to know.
>
About the Author
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Ken’s debut novel, The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015, along with a collection of short stories.
Grave of the Fireflies
Cheng Jingbo
February 16: Through the Door Into Summer
The Snow-No-More birds appeared in the sky, adding to the chaos that enveloped the world.
The fluttering wings that were supposed to signal clear weather scraped across the orange sky like the return of snow-laden billows. Ash-white feathers filled the air, drifting down until they fell into the black orbs of my eyes, turning them into snowy globes.
On the sixteenth of February, I was born on the road to light, a refugee. My ebony eyes were luminous and vivid, but no one came to kiss my forehead. All around, people sighed heavily. I lifted my head and saw the ash-white flock heading southwards, their cries as dense as their light-stealing wings.
To the south was the Door Into Summer, built from floating asteroids like a road to heaven.
The giant star that lit the way for the refugees gradually dimmed, the shadow crawling up everyone’s face. After the briefest experience of daylight, I saw the first twilight of my life: my mother’s image bloomed in the dim light like a secret flower.
Mankind streamed across
the river of time, aiming straight for the Door Into Summer. In that moment, our tiny planet was falling like a single drop of dew in a boundless universe, tumbling towards that plane made up of the broken remains of a planet.
New cries arose from the Snow-No-More birds. Gliding through the gravity-torn clouds, the soft, gentle creatures were suddenly seized by some unknown force. Alarmed, the flock wound through the sky like a giant electric eel, each individual bird a scale. They hovered near each other, their wingtips brushing from time to time with light snaps. Quickly, the snaps grew louder and denser—the birds drew closer together to resist the unknown force that threatened to divert them, and electric sparks generated by the friction of the wings hopped from wingtip to wingtip. A great, invisible hand wrapped its fingers around the throat of the flock, and the ash-white electric eel in the sky began to tremble, its entire body enshrouded by a blue flame.
And in a moment, the invisible force that had been pulling them higher into the sky dissipated. The eel writhed in its death throes among the clouds, the feathers shed by struggling birds falling like volcanic ash. Soon, the feathery snow descended over us. They slid in through gaps around the oxhide flaps, fell, moth-like, against the greasy glass of the gas lamps, floated in clumps over the dirty water in copper basins, caught in my eyebrows and the corners of my eyes.
The oxcart rolled forward slowly. My mother began to sing in the midst of this snowstorm of ash and sorrow. Gradually, I fell asleep, listening to her lovely voice. But her eyes were filled with the sights from outside the cart: in the suffocating, fiery air, tens of thousands of oxcarts headed in the same direction. The remnants of humanity flooded across the hills and plains. The further she looked, the more oxcarts she saw—each like the one we were in.
An old man rushed before our cart and knelt down. “The star is about to go out.”
Even before he had spoken, my mother already knew about the star. Even before he had opened his lips, her eyes had already sunken into gloom. Since the oxen’s eyes were covered by black cloth, the animals showed no signs of panic. But as the darkness fell, they felt the strange chill.
Rising clouds of dust drowned out the old man’s words, just like the endless night drowned my mother’s beautiful, bottomless eyes.
He had failed to notice the spiked wheels of the oxcart. Blood soaked into earth, a dark stain melting into the night. In my sleep, I felt the oxcart lurch momentarily, as though something had caught against its wheels. And then it rolled on as though nothing had happened.
My mother continued to sing. In her song, the white-bearded High Priest died on the way to see the Queen—because the news he was bringing was ill.
After that day, I never saw a Snow-No-More bird again.
Legend has it that on the day I was born, my small planet passed through the Door Into Summer. All the Snow-No-More birds died outside the door. Though they were birds of spring, when they died, it snowed: every flake was an ash-white feather; every flake was limned in pale blue fire.
On the day the Snow-No-More birds disappeared in the southern sky, we penetrated a wall made of 1301 asteroids and exited the Garden of Death through the Door Into Summer.
February 19: Curtain Call for the Crimson Universe
People called me Rosamund because, they said, I’m the rose of the world.
I thought the world was a fading rose. The cooling universe was filled with ancient stars like our sun—they collapsed, lost heat, aged, contracted into infinitesimal versions of themselves and stopped giving us light. Now, with shrunken bodies and failing sights, they could only offer us a useless prayer as they watched us flee at the edge of night.
A thousand years ago, nine priests secretly debated among themselves around a circular table and probed the will of the gods for the answer to the question: why had the stars suddenly decided to grow old and die? In the end, because they could not answer the question satisfactorily, the king punished them by taking their heads.
But one of them, the most powerful priest of them all, managed to survive. He lived because he had two faces, the second one hidden by his long, thick hair, and no one ever knew of its existence. If one gathered enough courage to pull aside the curtain of snake-like hair, one would see tightly pursed lips and wide-open eyes. When the king demanded that the priests yield up their heads, this priest split apart his own head with a double-edged sword and gave up the front half. Thereafter he became a wanderer far from home, and lived only with the secret half of his head.
It was rumored that the descendants of this man created Weightless City, the first planet we arrived at after passing through the Door Into Summer. The star collapsed behind us while the army of refugees dove like moths towards the last lit lamp in the universe.
No one could explain why the stars were dying. A thousand years ago, following an ancient prophecy, our ancestors altered the structure of our planet and adjusted its gravity to turn it into an Ark to flee towards those stars that seemed young still.
When we arrived at Weightless City, everyone was going to leave our own planet and move there. After its thousand-year flight, the Ark could no longer go on. And after we left our home, this planet that had once birthed and nurtured all of humanity would fall into the heat of a strange star and dissolve into a million droplets of dew.
That year, I turned six. The nineteenth of February was a special day. My mother, the Queen, set me on the back of a white bull, and I saw thousands, tens of thousands of oxen, all of them pitch black, pulling my subjects over the earth like a flood.
A lonely, golden tower rose from the distant horizon. By dusk, the refugees arrived at its foot. The tower, too, appeared as if it had been on a long journey. Behind the tower was a deep trench like a surgical incision; the rich, fleshy loam brought up from its depths gave off a burnt scent.
This was the Dock. The inhabitants of Weightless City, the dark green planet revolving overhead, had dropped it down. On this special day, the gravity between the two planets achieved perfect balance, enabling us to ascend this tower to our new home.
If anyone could have witnessed the coupling between these two tiny planets from a distance, they would have seen this: a golden rod emerged from one of the planets like a raised matchstick. As the two planets spun, the matchstick struck the surface of the other planet, scratching out a groove on its surface, and then stopped.
But for those on the ground, the sight seemed like a manifestation of divinity. Occasionally, through an opening in the clouds, we could see our future home—dark green, serene Weightless City. The mammoth golden tower in front of us had extended from that heaven like a dream, and then fixed itself inexorably into the earth. Everyone cried out in joy. They busied themselves with re-shoeing the oxen with strong, magnetic shoes, gilding the wheel spikes with silvery powder, patching the leaky oxhide tents . . .
Afterwards, the oxcarts began to climb the tower in order of precedence. Far away from the tower, I ran, barefoot. A few flowers hid in the grass, twinkling here and there. Wind seemed to come from somewhere deep within the ground, and I thought I heard a voice cry out between sky and earth: Rosamund, Rosamund. I placed my ear against the tips of the blades of grass: I wanted to know if it was my planet calling my name.
When I turned to look back, I saw the sky turn slowly, the horizon already tilted. The tower leaned away from the zenith until, finally, anyone could walk on it barefoot, like me.
Night fell, and the whole human race trod along this road to heaven. A woman carelessly knocked over a kitchen pail, and it fell all the way down the tower, clanging, banging all the way, until it plunged into a black, moist cloud, leaving nothing but ripples on the surface. It was so quiet that everyone heard the woman muttering her complaint. But then she pulled the rope attached to the pail—almost everything in the oxcarts had been tied down by rope to prevent it from moving about during the journey—and so her pail returned, filled with clear water.
We marched in the dark, silent night. In front of us was a new c
ity, shining like a piece of jade. Around the massive and long bridge formed by the golden tower, all we could see was the star-studded night.
The universe was alike a gigantic stage curtain that gradually fell. Fewer and fewer stars remained. We walked faster.
February 22, The Magician of Weightless City
My mother was the only one who did not cry after she saw Weightless City.
After we descended the tower, the sky rotated back into its original location. The horizon was no longer tilted. Everyone got a clear view of heaven: just another ruin.
This was the first thing my mother said to the first stranger she met: “Take me to your king, archon, headman, or . . . whatever you call him.”
“There’s no one like that here,” the man answered. “We just have a magician.”
And so we came upon a machine-man made of steel. It sat in the middle of an open space like a heap of twisted metal. Walking from its left foot to its right foot took five minutes. But to climb from its right foot to its waist took a whole afternoon.
“Listen,” my mother said. She squatted down to look into my eyes. “Rosamund, my precious, I have to go in there to talk to the magician. Wait for me here. My darling, my baby, do not leave before I come out.”
I nodded. She smiled and lightly kissed my forehead. No one saw this farewell, and that was why, in the stories that people told afterwards, the Queen died from mistakenly eating a poisonous mushroom in Weightless City. But I saw with my own eyes my mother climb onto the shoulder of that gigantic robot, enter through an ear, and then disappear.
In the six years after I became an orphan, after my planet and my mother had abandoned and forgotten me, I grew into a twelve-year-old, willful young woman. Everyone now called me Wild Rose.
In the new world of Weightless City, I discovered a plant that had also existed on my planet. The vines extended hundreds of miles, and had fragile stalks that ended in delicate, thin tips. I liked to run among them barefoot. As my feet crushed the stalks, bright yellow liquid oozed out, and the wind brought indistinct cries: Rosamund, Rosamund. I put my ear against the black soil: I wanted to know if it was my planet calling me now through this new earth. My loneliness grew without cease during those six years until it took root deep in my blood and bones.
