Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 88

by Ken Liu

  The Garden, when it opened up before them in a staggering splendor of chokingly humid air and pearlescent lights, was choked with children, newborn to ten or eleven years old. It was impossible to tell how many there were, or how big the Garden was. They were sprawled every which way, a spill of limbs and crooked necks and lolling heads, and from them grew red pulsating vines, and from the vines shone red murmuring fruits. Perhaps it would have been less overwhelming if the children had been neatly organized, stacked by height or size in rows. Probably not.

  In spite of himself, Ruharn looked among the faces for some echo of Merenne’s features. Some echo of his own. It was impossible to tell amid the red tangles.

  “The raw liquor is effective,” the Falcon Councilor said after giving him just enough time to confront the sight, “if that’s what you’re thinking, but painful. Dragon is the only one who imbibes it in that form, and Dragon is a little peculiar. I’m surprised you didn’t just have me take you to the wine cellars.”

  “No,” Ruharn said. “This is what I want.”

  “The other councilors won’t stand for this, you know.”

  “They won’t have to.”

  She still didn’t understand. “When they come after you—” Tellingly, she didn’t say we: he was almost certain it was deliberate.

  “Forget that, this is damage control,” Ruharn said savagely, resisting the temptation to hit her. Stupid, considering he had already broken her arm and threatened systematic torture. “You made a bargain you only half-understood and you sent children to die in the most wasteful way possible, without even the leadership of someone like General Khy so they’d have a chance. The mercenaries aren’t providing any sort of generalship themselves and I trust you weren’t assuming that a bunch of children that age were going to spontaneously turn up any convenient tactical geniuses to do the job.”

  “This is rich,” the councilor retorted, “from someone who turned his back on those same children during all the years they were bought as fodder for the Garden. Or did you manage to lie to yourself about what wine it is I drink when I’m not in your arms?”

  He flinched. “Oh yes,” he said, “I would rather be fucking you than dealing with this. I’m not unaware of what I am.” The red silken sheets, her fragrant skin, the coils of glossy hair. The marks her mouth of living crystal left on his skin. “But apparently even I have limits.”

  Ruharn removed his ceremonial knife and laid it on the floor. Then he stripped, aware of her staring even though his body was no secret to either of them. He picked up the knife again, squared his shoulders, and waded into the Garden.

  For all the useless ornamentation on the knife’s hilt and sheath, its blade was just fine. He had no intention of wasting further time plucking fruit or squeezing it into his mouth. Instead, he cut directly into a handful of vines and brought them, spurting livid red, up to his mouth.

  She was right. It burned going down, and burned his skin too, not like fire (he knew something of fire) but like hopes crushed down to singularity nights. But he swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed, even as he choked; even as the red fluid dribbled down his chin and soaked his clothes. When the spray slowed, he grabbed blindly and cut again, and again, and again.

  “Ruharn!” the Falcon Councilor cried out behind him. “Ruharn, you have to stop, it’s too much—”

  Good to know that she wasn’t interested in that particular perversion. At least with him. He kept drinking, unable to see although his eyes were wide open, so nauseated he couldn’t even throw up. Finally he dropped the knife and sank to his knees, coughing out an ugly pink-tinged spray.

  After a while he became aware of her hand on his shoulder. Her touch, too, burned with the sticky-slick traces of the fluid. He shivered. Her hand felt large, and he felt thin, small, vulnerable in a way that hadn’t been true for years. He looked down, not at his own hands, but at his thighs and their scars, not all of which had been received in battle. Looked up. She was taller now, larger.

  “Ruharn,” she said in a wretched voice. “You look—I never imagine you’d ever looked so innocent. Except your eyes.”

  “Childhood isn’t about innocence,” Ruharn said, both cynically amused at the way she cringed at how high his voice was now, and hating the sound of it himself. “It’s about being powerless.”

  She didn’t contest the point.

  “Your mercenary company,” Ruharn said. “You must have a way of contacting them still. Tell them to take me next.” He assumed it would be the fastest way, instead of wandering around in some city waiting for them to find him. “If children are the coin they desire.”

  “You’re even more crazed than I thought you were if you think I’ll do that.”

  Hell of a time for her to get maternal. “I’m not Khy,” Ruharn said. “I didn’t go to the nobles’ battle schools, or to the collegium for strategists. But I know more than those children do. Because that’s who the mercenaries are, aren’t they? Our children, transformed. Let me go.” He shook off her hand and rose to his feet.

  The Falcon Councilor rose as well. “You have no guarantee that you’ll be anything more than a drone while you’re up there as—as whatever you become,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “If there’s a chance I can do some good, I have to take it.”

  “Fine,” she said, distant, formal. “You have my gratitude, General.”

  She drew out two bright-and-dark balls, no larger than Ruharn’s fists, and whispered into them. He couldn’t hear the words. Then she set them down, dry-eyed, and stepped back. A door ruptured the air above the balls.

  You won’t feel grateful for long, Ruharn thought. But he bent his head to her, and went.

  In five months and twenty-four days, the mercenaries reclaimed sixty-three percent of Nasteng.

  In the fifteen days after General Loi Ruharn vanished, the invaders were repulsed entirely.

  General Khy’s attempts to tally the mercenaries’ losses in both phases of the campaign, as opposed to the enemies’ losses, were blocked.

  Merenne watched for Gardeners in all the years that followed, but never saw any. She made toys for her next grandchildren; there were a few. No dolls.

  The final attack came not from the invaders, who were driven off in a scythe-surge of explosions, but from the newly-coordinated starflyers and groundswarmers. Their original task done, they needled toward the Garden and crashed into it, raising a pillar of fire and monstrous ash.

  The councilors, who were in the midst of a victory celebration, had nothing left to fight with. Then, as their forces failed them, they fled one by one, except the Falcon Councilor. She and General Khy stayed in the command bower to the last, playing cards.

  The Garden’s protections were sundered. It lay with its ruined red-black mass of vines and charred, sunken skeletons like a sore jabbed open over and over. Nothing would ever grow there again.

  Deep in the mass were two broken beacons and two collapsed mannequins, their uniforms fused to their skin. One was a woman, its face candle-melted entirely away. The other was a man, probably; hard to tell, given the damage. But the sutures holding its mouth shut from the inside had torn open, and it was smiling.

  About the Author

  Yoon Ha Lee’s works have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. Currently she lives in Louisiana with her family and has not yet been eaten by gators.

  Ship’s Brother

  Aliette de Bodard

  You never liked your sister.

  I know you tried your best; that you would stay awake at night thinking on filial piety and family duty; praying to your ancestors and the bodhisattva Quan Am to find strength; but that it would always come back to that core of dark thoughts within you, that fundamental fright you carried with you like a yin shadow in your heart.

  I know, of course, where it started. I took you t
o the mind-ship—because I had no choice, because Khi Phach was away on some merchant trip to the Twenty-Third Planet—because you were a quiet and well-behaved son, and the birth-master would have attendants to take care of you. You had just turned eight—had stayed up all night for Tet, and shaken your head at the red envelopes, telling me you were no longer a child and didn’t need money for toys and sweets.

  When we disembarked from the shuttle, I had to pause—it was almost time for your sister to be born, and I felt my entire body had grown still—my lungs afire, my muscles seized up, and your sister in my womb stopping her incessant thrashing for a brief, agonizing moment. And I felt, as I always did during a contraction, my thoughts slipping away, down the birth canal to follow your sister; felt myself die, little by little, my self extinguishing itself like a flame.

  Like all Minds, she was hungry for the touch of a human soul; entwined around my thoughts, and in her eagerness to be born, she was pushing outwards, dragging me with her—I remembered pictures and holos of post-birth bearers, their faces slack, their eyes empty, their thought-nets as pale as the waning moon, and for a moment—before my lips curled around the mantras of the birth-masters—I felt a sliver of ice in my heart, a hollow of fear within my belly—the thought that it could be me, that it would be me, that I wasn’t strong enough . . .

  And then it passed; and I stood, breathing hard, in the center of the mind-ship they had laid out for my daughter.

  “Mommy?” you asked.

  “I’m fine, child,” I said, slowly—breathing in the miracle of air, struggling to string together words that made sense. “I’m fine.”

  We walked together to the heartroom, where the birth-master would be waiting for us. Within me, your sister was tossing and turning—throbbing incessantly, a beating heart, a pulsing machine, the weight of metal and optics within my womb. I ran my hands on the metal walls of the curving corridors, feeling oily warmth under my fingers—and your sister pulsed and throbbed and spoke within me, as if she were already eager to fly within the deep spaces.

  You were by my side, watching everything with growing awe—silenced, for once, by the myriad red lanterns hung on rafters; by the holos in the corridors depicting scenes from The Tale of Kieu and The Two Sisters in Exile; by the characters gleaming on doors and walls—you ran everywhere, touched everything, laughing; and my heart seemed full of the sound of your voice.

  The contractions were closer together, and the pain in my back never seemed to go away; from time to time, it would rack my entire body, and I bit my tongue not to cry out. The mantras were in my mind now; part of the incessant litany I kept whispering, over and over, to keep myself whole, to hold to the center of my being.

  I had never prayed so hard in my entire life.

  In the heartroom, the birth-master was waiting for us, with a cup of freshly brewed tea. I breathed in the flowery smell, watched the leaves dance within the shivering water—trying to remember what it felt to be light on my feet, to be free of pain and fatigue and nausea. “She’s coming,” I said, at last. I might have said something else, in other circumstances; made a comment from the Classic of Tea, quoted some poet like Nguyen Trai or Xuan Dieu; but my mind seemed to have deserted me.

  “She is,” the birth-master said, gravely. “It’s almost over now, older aunt. You have to be strong.”

  I was; I tried; but it all slid like tears on polished jade. I was strong, but so was the Mind in my belly. And I could see other things in the room, too—the charms against death, and the bundle at the back of the room, which would hold the injector—they’d asked me what to do, should the birth go wrong, should I lose my mind, and I had told them I would rather die. It had seemed easy, at the time; but now that I stood facing a very real possibility it seemed very different.

  I hadn’t heard you for a while. When I looked up, you were still; watching the center of the room, utterly silent, utterly unmoving. “Mommy . . . ”

  It looked like a throne; if thrones could have protrusions and metal parts; and a geometry that seemed to continually reshape itself—like the spikes of a durian fruit, I’d thought earlier on, when they hadn’t yet implanted your sister in my womb, but now it didn’t feel quite so funny or innocuous. Now it was real.

  “This is where the Mind comes to rest,” the birth-master said. He laid a hand in the midst of the thing, into a hollow that seemed no bigger than a child’s body. “As you see, all the proper connections are already in place.” A mass of cables and fibres and sockets, and other things I couldn’t recognize—all tangled together like a nest of snakes. “Your mommy will have to be very brave.”

  Another contraction racked through me, a wave that went from my womb to my back, stilling the world around us. I no longer felt huge or heavy; but merely detached, watching myself with growing anger and fear. This, now; this was real. Your sister would be born and plugged into the ship, and make it come alive; and I would have done my duty to the Emperor and to my ancestors. Else . . .

  I vaguely heard the birth-master speak of courage again, and how I was the strongest woman he knew; and then the pain was back, and I doubled over, crying out.

  “Mommy!”

  “I’m—fine—” I whispered, trying to hold my belly—trying to keep myself still, to gather my thoughts together—she was strong and determined, your sister, hungry for life, hungry for her mother’s touch.

  “You’re not fine,” you said, and your voice suddenly sounded like that of an adult—grave and composed, and tinged with so much fear it brought me back to the world, for a brief moment.

  I saw on the floor a puddle of blood that shone with the sheen of machine oil—how odd, I thought, before realizing that I was the one bleeding, the one dying piece by piece; and I was on the floor though I didn’t remember kneeling, and the pain was flaring in my womb and in my back—and someone was screaming—I thought it was the birth-master, but it was me, it had always been me . . .

  “Mommy,” you said, from somewhere far away. “Mommy!” Your hands were wet with blood; and the birth-master’s attendants were dragging you away, thank the ancestors. There were strong hands on me, whispering that I should hold, ride the crest of the pain, wait before I pushed, lest I lose myself altogether, scatter my own thoughts as your sister made her way out of my womb. My tongue was heavy with the repeated mantras, my lips bloodied where I had bit them; and I struggled to hold myself together, when all I longed for was to open up like a lotus flower; to scatter my thoughts like seeds upon the wind.

  But through the haze of pain I saw you—saw, in the moment before the door closed upon you, the expression on your face; and I knew then that you’d never forget this, no matter how it all ended.

  Of course, you never forgot, or forgave. Your sister was born safely; though I remained weak ever after, moving slowly through my own home, with bones that felt made of glass; and my thoughts always seemed to move sluggishly, as if part of me had really followed her out of the birth canal. But it all paled when they finally let me stand in the ship; when I felt it come to life under my feet; when I saw colors shift on the wall, and metal take on the sheen of oil; when the paintings slowly faded away, to be replaced by the lines of poetry I’d read to your sister in the womb—and when I heard a voice deeper than the emptiness of space whisper to me, “Mother.”

  The mind-ship was called The Fisherman’s Song; and that became your sister’s name; but in my heart she was always Mi Nuong, after the princess in the fairytale, the one who fell in love with her unseen fisherman.

  But to you, she was the enemy.

  You put away the Classics and the poets, and stole my books and holos about pregnancies and Minds—reading late at night, and asking me a thousand questions that I didn’t always have the answer to. I thought you sought to understand your sister; but of course I was wrong.

  I remember a day seven years after the birth—Khi Phach was away again to discuss shipments with some large suppliers, and you’d convinced me to have a banquet. You’
d come to me in my office and told me that I shouldn’t be so preoccupied with my husband and children. I almost laughed; but you looked so much in earnest, so concerned about me, that my whole body suddenly felt light, infused with warmth. “Of course, child,” I said; and saw you smile, an expression that illuminated your entire being.

  It was a huge banquet: in addition to our relatives, I’d invited my scholar classmates, and some of your friends so you wouldn’t get bored. I’d expected you to wander off during the preparations, to find your friends or some assignment you absolutely had to study; but you didn’t. You stood in the kitchen, fetching bits and pieces, and helping me make salad rolls and shrimp toasts—and mixed dipping sauces with such concentration, as if they were all that mattered in the world.

  Your sister was there too—not physically present, but she’d linked herself to the house’s com systems, and her translucent avatar stood in the kitchen: a smaller model of The Fisherman’s Song that floated around the room, giving us instructions about the various recipes, and laughing when we tore rice papers or dashed across the room for a missing ingredient. For once, you seemed not to mind her presence; and everything in the household seemed . . . harmonious and ideal, the dream put forth by the Classics.

  At the banquet, I was surprised to find you sitting at my table—it wasn’t so much the breach of etiquette, I had never been over-concerned with such strictures, as something else. “Shouldn’t you be with your friends?” I asked.

  You glanced, carelessly, to the end of the room, where the younger people sat: candidates to the mandarin exams, like you; and a group of pale-skinned outsiders, who looked a bit dazed, doing their best to follow the conversations by their side. “I can be with them later,” you said, making a dismissive gesture with your hands. “There’s plenty of time.”