Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 88

by Ken Liu

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, as simple and sharp as a mirror-break. And: “I thought something of your old voice would remain. But I wouldn’t have known it was you at all. Come in.”

  Ruharn’s mouth twisted. He hadn’t thought about his voice, now a tenor, for years. But he stepped through the threshold. The place was too quiet. Where was everyone? Not that he had so much as known that Merenne herself was still alive. For all he knew, some plague had killed them all years ago.

  “I almost didn’t come,” he said. “But I did. Say what you have to say.”

  Merenne didn’t respond, but instead led him through the house. It didn’t take long. The Falcon Councilor would have considered it barely adequate as a closet. Ruharn had always been amused by her misconceptions about how many people you could squeeze into shelter if you really had to.

  There were three rooms, and people would all have slept together in the largest, partly for warmth, partly for community. The first thing that caught Ruharn’s eye was the dolls: two of them, one-third scale. They had been covered neatly by cloths. He wondered if some absent child had left them that way, tucking them in for the night.

  The dolls he had grown up playing with had had brass tacks for eyes that were forever falling out. (“Poison gas rots out their eyes in battle,” he had said to wide-eyed little Merenne, long ago. It had been funnier then.) The dolls here were made of some smooth, lambent resin, and their eyes shone like sea-lenses over delicately sculpted noses and lips painted perfect dusky pink. Their hair had been carefully styled, with miniature enameled clasps holding the strands in place. He had seen less beautiful statuettes in the councilors’ homes.

  “Go on,” Merenne said. “Look.” As he bent to lift one of the cloths, she added, “You used to have a grand-nephew and a grand-niece.”

  Ruharn didn’t ask what if they had been her own grandchildren, or those of their siblings. Or what had happened to their siblings, for that matter.

  Beneath the cloth the doll was naked, and he thought of the crude paper dresses that he had sometimes pinned together for Merenne, back when she had had dolls of her own, colored with markers he had stolen from a store. The doll was shaped like a preadolescent boy, but at the join of its legs was a mass that resembled spent bullets melted partly into each other.

  In the doll’s hand was a toy gun. (At least, he hoped it was a toy.) He eased the gun out of the doll’s grip. “A credible Zehnjer 52-3,” he said without thinking, “other than the fact that they did the cartridge upside-down.”

  He became aware that Merenne was staring at him. “You’d think,” she said, “I had all this time to get used to the idea of you as a soldier.”

  Well, it was better than the other things she could be calling him. “You didn’t call me here to identify this toy,” he said.

  “No,” Merenne said quietly. “I called you here because the children have been disappearing. I woke in the night and they were gone. The dolls were left as you see them.”

  “Kidnappers?” Ruharn said dubiously. Poor people’s children were terrible currency if you weren’t a Gardener. He knew how noisy they got, adorable as they could be. To say nothing of the messes, and the fact that you wouldn’t get any decent ransom for them.

  Her mouth half-lifted in a ghost of the smile he remembered, as though she knew what he was thinking. Then the smile died. “Ru,” she said, “I asked around. No one’s seen a Gardener since the children started to vanish.”

  He said, because he needed to know, “Has payment been left for anyone?” Because it wasn’t inconceivable, even in the midst of the crisis, that the councilors would upgrade their system of harvest. So to speak.

  Everyone knew how much you could expect for a whole child in the desirable age range, in reasonable health. Even now Ruharn knew. The payment had changed over the years, but it was impossible not to remain aware.

  For years he had taken the system for granted, the way everyone had. Part of the bargain, horrible as it was, was that the families who sold their children received something in return. Admittedly the dolls weren’t nothing, but he doubted that you could sell them for the equivalent sums. Even if it wouldn’t surprise him if someone had started collecting the ghoulish things; there were always such people in the world.

  “As if people would tell me?” Merenne said. “But no. I haven’t heard so much as a rumor. And I looked for payment”—she said this without shame—“but I saw nothing, because it was one of the first things I thought of. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to care about, when our world might not survive. But I have to know what happened to them. And you’re the only person I could think to ask.”

  “I know where to start,” Ruharn said carefully. “I can’t guarantee any results, though. Most especially, I doubt I can bring the children back.” Understatement, since he did think the councilors were involved, the way they were involved with everything of note. He had few illusions about his ability to influence any of them, least of all the one who had taken him for a lover.

  “I didn’t expect that,” she said. “Just find out what you can. So that we know what to expect.” Her mouth trembled for a moment, so briefly that he almost thought he had imagined it.

  Ruharn wondered what to say next. Everything seemed inadequate. At last he said, “Sometime after this is over, if I ever see you again, tell me their names.” He didn’t mention death-offerings. The deaths of children, especially small children, were so unremarkable that few people bothered.

  Merenne eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  He smiled. He had always liked her honesty. After all, it wasn’t as if she owed him anything. “All right,” he said. “Let me take one of the dolls.”

  “Take both,” Merenne said, with commendable steadiness. “It’s not as if they do me any good.”

  He gathered them up under one arm. Considered resting his free hand on her shoulder, then decided that he had better not. This time he did bow, although he spun on his heel before he could see the expression that crossed her face, and walked out of the house. She didn’t follow him or call out a farewell.

  The Falcon Councilor did not greet Ruharn when he returned to the underground fastness. One of the servants did, however, present him a note upon paper-of-petals. It instructed him to attend her that night.

  First he took the precaution of wrapping up the dolls and putting them in a case that he bullied out of Supply. The supply officer looked at him oddly, but he gave no explanation. It wasn’t as if he owed one.

  Ruharn reported next to the generals’ bower, and stood at attention in the doorway. General Khy sat at a table with her feet on a chair, playing cards with her aide. She was a woman once handsome, but still dangerous, with hair shaved short and a conspicuous blank expanse where her medals should have been; she declined to wear them even on occasions of state. As one of the senior generals, she had taken Nasteng’s impotence hard. She and her cards were always here, and even now, as her aide contemplated options, Khy brought up a map to study the latest intelligence.

  A quartet of cards burned for additional points sobbed prettily as they crumpled into ashes. Ruharn wished Khy wouldn’t use that particular feature, but Khy was entertained by the oddest things. Besides, she was one of the generals who understood strategy, so he preferred not to pick fights with her, on the grounds that she was more important than he was.

  Khy liked Ruharn, a fact that he tried not to think too hard about. She waved her hand at him while assiduously keeping the cards’ faces out of her aide’s view. “General Loi,” she said genially. “At ease.”

  It took a moment for him to recognize the house name he used now. Funny how long it had been since he’d lapsed. “General,” Ruharn said. “Any interesting developments?” He doubted it: Khy would hardly be tormenting her cards if something that required her attention were going on.

  She sneered, which took him by surprise because she ordinarily approached everything with cockeyed levity. �
��Look,” she said, and flung her cards down. Her aide kept them from fluttering off the edge of the table.

  Khy’s hands tapped rapid patterns on the nearest interface. Maps flowered, crisscrossed by troop vectors and dotted by the bright double-squares of bases, the cluster-clouds of aerospace fighters. Nasteng’s forces were violet. The enemy was green. The mercenaries were gold. Her hands tapped again. The troops moved as their positions and engagements were replayed over time.

  “We might as well retire now,” Khy said. “Oh, maybe not you, you’re young yet, and there’s always a use for good staffers.” From anyone else it would have been a veiled insult, but Khy had never treated Ruharn as anything but a competent colleague and Ruharn was not so paranoid as to believe that things were different now. “But look, the mercenaries are doing all the work.”

  “That doesn’t mean there won’t be more attacks, now that the outsiders know we’re here,” Ruharn said. And, when Khy didn’t respond, he hesitated, then said: “The mercenaries fight with numbers. But they don’t fight well.”

  “You’re one of the people who can see it, let alone who is willing to say it,” Khy said bitterly. She flipped a pointer out of her belt, caught it, switched it on. Scribbled indications, in light and hissing sparks, on the maps. “There, there, there, there. Victory by attrition. So wasteful.”

  “I understand there’s a noninterference clause,” Ruharn said neutrally.

  “Noninterference, hell. I’ve had the scanners on it and they can’t even tell what our allies are. They come from nowhere and the corpses of their units degenerate with astonishing rapidity. There’s probably a paper in it for some scientist somewhere.”

  Khy brought up more photos and videos. At first Ruharn didn’t recognize what he was seeing, too busy being distracted by fractal damage, stress marks, metal sheening red-orange in response to unhealthy radiations. Familiar shapes.

  Except those weren’t the only familiar shapes. Burnt into the wreckage were symbols he remembered from his childhood. The depressions of board games he had played in the dirt, or score-tallies chalked onto walls, or warding-signs around which he and his friends had danced in circles, chanting rhymes to keep the Gardeners away. He glanced sideways at Khy, wondering, but she met his eyes with no sign that she saw anything in the faint symbols at all.

  Then again, Khy would have grown up playing board games with real boards, made of marble or jade or mahogany veneer. If she played in the dirt, it would have been in a high-walled, well-tended garden while watched by anxious servants and the occasional guard. And she would never have had to worry about being sold to the Gardeners.

  Still, it was dismaying to have one of the generals he respected confirm his observations. “Is there something you wish me to do, sir?” he asked carefully. For a mad moment he wished the answer was yes.

  Khy only sighed and eased herself back down into the chair, swung her feet up again. “If only,” she said. “You go on, Loi. Your next shift here isn’t for hours anyway, isn’t it? Enjoy yourself.”

  Ruharn saluted and passed out of the bower. He headed next to his quarters, where he opened the case and unwrapped the dolls. “You’d better not be bombs,” he told them. They didn’t answer, which didn’t make him feel better.

  Dealing with bombs wasn’t one of his skills, but if the dolls were what remained of the stolen children, that wasn’t relevant. Besides, even if they were bombs, they were probably advanced foreigner bombs, and the fastness’s scanners had failed to pick up on them when he brought them in.

  The two dolls were nearly identical. Prodding one revealed that the hair was a wig, and beneath it the top of the skull came off. The head was hollow. The eyes, half-domes with luminous irises, were held in place by putty. Systematically, he took apart the rest of the doll. The doll was jointed, and elastic ran through channels in the body and limbs so that it could be posed.

  As for the slag of bullets, they appeared to be real metal, not resin. He prodded them and jerked his hand back involuntarily. They were the exact temperature of his own skin. Feeling like a squeamish six-year-old, he pressed his fingertips against the resin just above the slag. The surface was cool; significantly cooler, in fact.

  Logistical necessities, Ruharn thought, staring down at the dolls. Then he wrapped them back up, laid them carefully in the case, and put the case under his bed. Stupid hiding place, but it wasn’t as if he had a better one. And anyway, the real hiding place was where he had kept it all these years, the pitted lump he had for a heart.

  At the appointed time, Ruharn went to the Falcon Councilor’s chambers. He did not wear his uniform. Lately she liked him to wear what the courtiers did, necklaces of twisted gold and fitted coats with their undulating lace, dark red brocades. He obliged her; he understood his function. The guards with their falcon insignia acknowledged him merely with nods, making no comment.

  The councilor stood looking at a tapestry-of-labyrinths when he stopped just short of entering, the way she liked him to. “Madam,” he said. In the very early days she had liked it when he knelt. Her mood varied, however, and he didn’t care one way or another. If pride had been important to him, he wouldn’t be here.

  “Come in,” she said in the clear sweet voice whose inflections he knew so well.

  Ruharn came up behind her and undid, one-handed, the clasps and knots and chains that held her veil in place. She had told him once that she only wore it here; everywhere else it was the familiar falcon mask. Ruharn found it telling, although he did not say so, that the fastenings were more elaborate than the veil itself. He was no pauper, but a bolt of the fabric, with its infinitesimally shimmering threads and texture like moondrift silk, would have beggared him. He always had the disquieting feeling that his fingerprints would sully the fibers, leave scars deep as trenches and hideous as gangrene. But he didn’t say that either.

  “Your hands are cold,” she murmured.

  It always took him a while to undo all the fastenings. “Sorry,” Ruharn said mildly, “but you didn’t like my last pair of gloves and it’s not as if I’ve had time to go shopping.”

  She didn’t call him on the lie, and he bent to kiss the back of her head, inhaling the fragrance of her hair.

  The veil fell away, drifting through the air like a feather, or a fall of light, or a flower’s breath. Ruharn always felt ridiculous whisking it away to lay it on the councilor’s dresser without folding it, but she had never complained. He lifted her hair, which was hooked through with crystal—it was getting near the time where she would have to tear off her face again—taking care not to tug the dark coils. Unhurriedly, he pressed his lips to the back of her neck, once, twice. Again. Her perfume smelled of dried roses and wood-of-pyres. Inhaling it made his heartbeat quicken. Reportedly she wore it only for her lovers.

  “Tell me,” he said right into her ear, “is it true what’s been happening to the children lately?”

  He wanted her to tell him the truth, however familiar; however horrible. If she told him the truth, he would accept his complicity and forget Merenne again. He had been doing exactly that for all these years, after all. Surely he had earned a little truth in exchange for the years they had spent together.

  The councilor’s laugh came more as a vibration against his chest than a sound, and her voice was teasing. “You’ll have to be more specific than that, my dear. Are we talking about schools, or orphanages, or some incident involving crawfish-racing?” (Naheng’s crawfish were surprisingly large and fast, or this game would have been less popular than it was.)

  Ruharn heard the lie and was surprised by the force of his own rage. He brought his hands up and down and around. She cried out as she landed against the wall, hard, breath slammed out of her, her arm bent close to breaking in his grip. “Are the mercenaries harvesting the children now, or is it still you?” He added, “It’s been a long time since I did hand-to-hand. I could still get the mechanics wrong. So think about your answer.”

  “Why does it matter to you?�
��

  He broke her arm. She screamed.

  No one came. She hadn’t triggered an alarm, and the guards were used to noise.

  “Madam,” he said, very formally. She went very still, very quiet. “Answer the question.”

  “We haven’t sent out the Gardeners since the mercenaries came,” the Falcon Councilor said raggedly. “It’s their doing this time around.” And, in a different voice entirely: “I had always hoped you might hesitate a little before doing—this.”

  “Neither one of us has ever been under the illusion that this relationship was about love,” Ruharn said. “Did the mercenaries say outright that they would be recruiting the children?”

  “They didn’t say, but we knew.”

  “Is it too late to send them away?”

  “We’ve paid,” she said. “They will give us what we paid for. Don’t you think we considered that people powerful enough to save us would also be powerful enough to plunder us? To wreck our way of life? But it was either submit to our destruction or choose the chance of salvation.”

  Ruharn thought for a moment. “All right. Take me to the Garden.”

  The councilor’s laugh was ugly. “It always comes down to this. It took you longer than most, at least. What, are you concerned that the mercenaries will destroy the supply before you get your chance at youth unending?”

  Let her think what she wanted. “Madam,” he said, “you have a lot of bones and breaking them all would take time I don’t have. I would speak you fair, but I’m done with niceties. The Garden.”

  “You picked one hell of a time to stage a coup, lover,” the Falcon Councilor said in a voice like winter stabbing.

  Is that what you think this is? Ridiculous that he wanted her to believe better of him, yet there it was. “Shut up,” he said evenly. She was silent after that. It had been a long time since he had been anything but deferential to her, except in bed when she required otherwise.

  It was a long way to the Garden. Ruharn expected her to call for help after all, or try to escape. But she kept looking at him, her eyes pierced through with pain, and she did neither. Sometimes she drew in a breath that might have become a sob; but then she controlled herself. He tried not to think about what he’d done to her.