Beneath Ceaseless Skies #88

by Maloney, Geoffrey

  Restored, Aspley looked up. Major Powell still stared at him with a hungry look in his eye. “She dreams the world, Aspley. Makes poodle-fakers of us all. It is time that we controlled our own destiny.”

  * * *

  Coda: In the Eye of the Future

  Aspley turned to see Powell standing at the top of the steps to the pool. His skin was puffy and white. His legs shook beneath him. He looked like the drowned man he was, Aspley thought, but in his hand was the God-Killer.

  “Major Powell, please put your gun aside,” Aspley said.

  “She’s a goddess, Aspley. One of the last of the ancient empires. Hidden away in places they believed Her Majesty’s Empire would never reach. It is the quest we are upon.”

  “She is beautiful,” Aspley said. “You can mean her no harm. She has done nothing to you. I saved your life. You told me this just now.”

  “She tried to drown me, Aspley. She dreams the world in defiance of the Empire. There is only one queen now, the one that duty calls you to. Stand aside, Aspley. Let the future begin.”

  Aspley looked down at the sleeping woman. She did not stir. Was she a goddess? Once, they were drowned men. Once, he had lived another life, grown old. Another wonder? So be it. I understood none of it before, so I must try to understand now. “She is a sleeping beauty. Perhaps, I shall kiss her before she dies.”

  It was subterfuge on his part. Had he not kissed her before, at least in his mind’s eye, and that had been enough, but Powell did not know it.

  Powell laughed. His face looked hideous, but he was enjoying the game of it. “Oh, go on, kiss her then, Aspley. Please do. You are such a splendid fool. Go and kiss your beauty. By all means make love to her if she will have it.”

  Aspley glanced at Powell, then slipped over the edge into the pool. He felt his skin crackle as he hit the water, as though he had broken through some barrier, and lightening danced all around him. He swam to her, took her head in his hands. “Show me the future as you promised,” he said. He kissed her lips and felt her hand rise up to seize him by the hair. She pulled him down, into the waters of the pool with her, and her words sounded in his mind. Breathe, breathe the water. I promise you shall not drown. As Aspley went under, he heard Powell’s laughter echoing above.

  Breathe, breathe. Her words. She had promised him. He trusted her. He felt that he might love her forever. He opened his mouth with the full screaming force of his lungs. He inhaled the water, felt it surge into him, and knew she had given him the book she had promised. He saw his whole life in that moment and saw no end to it. The Empire that he knew had reached its peak. It would crumble and fall, in slow decline. Minor empires would rise up and fall again; then another Empire, the grandest that had ever been would come and he would be part of it. He could walk among the stars, if he wished. The same stars he had seen in the desert sky. It all belonged to him now if he but chose to kill Powell.

  Aspley pulled himself out of the pool. Dripping wet, he stood there.

  “Come away from her, Aspley,” Powell said. “I granted you your silly wish, to kiss the sleeping beauty before she dies. Now the time for the killing has come.”

  “You’ll need eleven chambers to kill her, fired simultaneously. Do you trust it to deliver your life at eleven? Like Adams trusted twelve?”

  “You should be telling me that she knows so much, that I should not kill her, that the Queen needs her. That is what I expected of you.”

  “Or perhaps you should use the full twelve chambers, just to be sure,” Aspley said. “As Adams was.”

  “Aspley, you are bewitched,” Powell said. “A traitor to Queen and country.”

  “I have tasted the future,” Aspley said. “She has granted me this. Come with me too.”

  “Out of my way Aspley, get out of my way, damn you!” Powell cried. He fired at Aspley. One shot from the Adams. The bullet flew straight and hard, stopped suddenly, and fell into Aspley’s open hand.

  “Give me your gun, Major,” Aspley said. “Why do you need it?”

  “It is my duty, the Black Flag’s most precious duty,” Powell said, but his voice was weak and thin now. “I...”

  Aspley tossed the bullet aside. “Give me the God-Killer.”

  “...have seen a bullet stopped that way before. Major Anderson, Akaela...he saved my life...”

  “A remarkable man,” Aspley said, easing the God-Killer from Powell’s hand.

  “The man I always wished to be,” Powell said.

  Aspley looked up at the dome of the opalescent ceiling, saw the great big eye shining there and all the stars beyond it. “I promised Akaela I would be present for you, Major Powell, when you needed me. Please look up, Major, look up, and see that we have won the prize.”

  Powell looked up at that terrifying eye. His body began to shake, and Aspley knew that he too glimpsed the future, and now saw the past for what it was; a means to a much greater end. “We are all dead men walking,” Powell said, and fell to his knees.

  Aspley let the God-Killer slip from his fingers. Its journey was over. “Come, breathe the water, Major,” he said. “There is much to do.”

  Copyright © 2012 Geoffrey Maloney

  Read Comments on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Geoffrey Maloney lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and three daughters. He has had over one hundred short stories published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, USA, Australia, and Ireland. Tales from the Crypto-System, published by Prime Books in 2003, collects the best of his stories from the 1990s. His most recent stories, “Insecta in Camera,” “Through a Scanner Darkly,” and “Things that Dead People Do” appeared in Aurealis, Australia’s longest running F/SF magazine, and his novelette “Mr Morrow Becomes Acquainted with the Delicate Art of Squid Keeping” appeared in BCS #64 and as BCS Audio Fiction Podcast 057.

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  THE PROOF OF BRAVERY

  by David Milstein

  Archivist’s Note: The following text was discovered by researchers from the American Society for the History of Mathematics during their survey of the 19th century archives of the Davidson College Historical Trust.

  It may surprise those who remember that l’Empereur Bonaparte himself named me a Marshal of the Empire, Prince of Moscow, and le brave des braves, to hear that I have spent the three decades of my exile as a professor of mathematics. I teach at the embryonic college of Davidson, engendered by parochial ambition on the broad fertile plain of Carolina.

  My students are all rude and indolent scions of plantation gentry whose interests lie entirely outside the field of mathematics and more reside in the mounted pursuits, both of game and of females, between which they hardly seem to differentiate. They judge me a dry old tapette and laugh at me behind my back as they whisper of their conquests. I envy them nothing in either equestrianism, I who ravished one hundred nymphs across Europe.

  I foresee a war between the North and South of these not-so-United States; the hatred and contempt of the Yankee in my students intensifies year after year. Sometimes a perverse voice from within urges me to take up the marshal’s baton here in the New World as well. Just so was my mentor General Moreau lured, and also pushed by his woman, back to the field of battle and then to the firing squad that awaited him. But I left my wife Aglaé long ago and have no woman to push me now. And I have already faced my firing squad, yes, and given them their order to fire.

  I have always been able to see strengths and weakness at a glance and identify the various minimums and maximums of systems. That is my gift, as applicable in the classroom as on the field of battle. Like all things in this world given to us by le mathématicien suprême, war is but the graphical expression of an equation, comprehensible by those with the eyes to identify the variables and the brain to solve for their values.

  As I see defeat looming for Carolina and the other southern states in a war to defend their property of Africans, so I smelled the putrefaction of the Bourbons and anticipated their demis
e. As I served the revolutionary committees, I sensed from afar the storm clouds that would unleash a rain of blood in the summer heat of thermidor to drown them.

  The one man I met who was without flaw was Bonaparte. So we called him in those days, the humorless Corsican tough. I did not like him, but as I followed his career I could not help but love him. As he said, he always fought his battles with the same plan: hold the center, turn your enemy’s flank, then charge and split them, whilst all the time intersecting them with parabolas of destruction from one’s cannon.

  Not only was he an unparalleled general. By enforcing the système métrique, he changed the way the world measured and weighed. As he gave order to the world of matter, so too did Bonaparte bring order to the rules of men, in the form of the code civil. Evenhandedness, clarity, fairness, justice, efficiency: so was his system of law.

  Bonaparte was quite simply the greatest man in the world, the most modern and unafraid of grand scale. As I was the man who could factor, he was the master of integration. Together, we were two sides of a golden coin, and the world bowed down before us.

  Time alone l’Empereur could not master. In the face of fierce resistance by the ignorant and superstitious, he gave up on the calendrier républicain. How much more beautiful and logical, to say “It is the month of wine, vendémiaire,” than “It is the 7th month (when it is actually the 9th!), September.” Or to say, “It is the month of heat, thermidor,” instead of “It is the month of Caesar Augustus.” But the day after 10 nivôse, on the tenth day of snow-month in the fourteenth year after the Revolution, we fell back into two-faced barbarity, the first day of the month of the god Janus in the Year of Our Lord 1806.

  Perhaps that failure presaged the greater one to follow, when Bonaparte passed his zenith and began to descend. The triumphant system of the future was defeated by the forces of nature, by the catastrophe of our invasion of Russia in the Second Polish War and the subsequent mortification of our flesh. Though this happened in the days that the world remembers as the autumn of 1812, the prime of my life was in the Republic, and I will always order the days by the calendrier républicain, even in recounting its downfall.

  I have seen Charles Minard’s graph of our campaign, and though there are those who esteem it as a triumphant scientific abstract and chronicle of the disintegration of l’Armée, simultaneously charting time, location, number of men, and temperature, I tell you that it is missing its most important component: the Z-axis of suffering. Said axis would be asymptotic, starting low but rising to the limit of all that is possible.

  The point of inflection was the Battle of Moscow, or as the Russians call it, Borodino. Before that, it was a magnificent war. From the time we crossed the bridge over the Niemen at Kovno with over four hundred thousand men, on the first day of messidor, the harvest season, our harvest seemed to be of victory. From Vilnius past Minsk, all the Russians could do was fall back. The waving rye-stalks of the fields and hawks circling a sky of purest blue live on in my memory as my high-water mark of that greatest feeling in life, anticipation.

  My skills were at their height, and the Emperor was brilliance itself. By the time of heat in thermidor, when we bested them at Borissov, at Krasnoe, Smolensk, Dorogoboui, and Viazma, we knew the Russians were beaten. Beaten, I tell you, though they refused a decisive battle.

  At last, in that glorious but cursed fructidor we bit into the poisoned apple of triumph. They gave us our battle at Borodino.

  It was a strange battle. Some say we lost that day, but I was there and I tell you we beat them. We never lost a battle, but only the whole war. This time, though, they did stand and fight.

  Five times I led my cuirassiers against them, and five times they repulsed us with heavy losses. Despite everything, as we marshaled for the sixth, I knew they would break. But in our moment of triumph, the finger of God touched the battlefield and struck me down, in the form of an incandescent piece of shrapnel that whirled out of a cloud of smoke and buried itself in my neck.

  As the charge moved on without me, I saw my life pass before my eyes. They all say that, because it is true. What else can one do when faced with eternity but turn away to review for a last time one’s memories of the past? But throughout my reveries of my childhood, wife, family, and glorious career, I became aware of two most incongruous figures wandering about the battleground.

  One was Russian, a noble of some kind by his marvelous clothes. His top hat was a sparkling white to match the lace collar peeping from beneath his splendid dark jacket, decorated like the night sky with silver stars across his broad chest. As they drew closer, I noticed the contrast between the great strength of his enormous shoulders and the diffident sensitivity of the eyes behind his spectacles.

  The other was swarthy and slight, and his billowing cloak was of good quality but much used. I took him for a merchant Gypsy or perhaps a Persian or a Turk. As he drew closer, though, I saw by his hat he was a Jew.

  “Tsk, tsk, look at this, Pierre,” said the Jew. “What a splendid uniform this one is wearing! He must be a general. Might you be able to identify him for me?”

  Pierre straightened his spectacles with his index finger, stooped, and drew out a corner of my cape to better examine me. He had the eyes of an elephant, enormous and wise yet placid. “By his unique leopard cloak, I recognize him from the stories of my friend Prince Bolkonsky. This is Marshal Ney, bravest of Bonaparte’s generals.”

  I spit out a mouthful of blood and managed to gasp a few words. “Sir, are you a doctor? Save me, I beg you!”

  The Jew gave a low whistle. “The bravest? My, that’s brave. Monsieur Ney, I’m sorry, but you are most surely doomed. Your artery has been severed; you will be dead in but a minute. I would respectfully suggest you commend yourself to your God.”

  “But Monsieur Lazarus, surely—” The big Russian cut himself short at a glance from his companion, and I sensed an opportunity, which I grasped as a man will at any straw to arrest his fall into the abyss.

  “Sir, we French of the Empire are not like the Russians and their hunting dogs the Cossacks who persecute the Jews. I would aid you were our circumstances reversed.” I spat blood, and started again. “Do you know what the Emperor has stated of the Jewish people in France?

  ‘I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France, because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country. It takes weakness to chase them out of the country, but it takes strength to assimilate them.’”

  The Russian turned again to his companion and said “Surely this is most fair-spoken, Monsieur Lazarus? Must you not also be interested in his qualities as an exemplar of bravery?”

  “You are a gentleman of quality, sir,” I said, “and I beg the name of those that rescue me so I might suitably reward them later.”

  He frowned but tipped his white top hat and inclined his head. “I am Pyotr Kirilovich, Count Bezukhov. If it were in my power to help you, I would. But the kind of help you need can only be supplied by my companion, who I once again implore on your behalf.”

  “Let me think about it, Pierre.” The Jew leaned over me and spoke more gently. “It is very fine that you and your Emperor don’t hate my people. You don’t know how rare that is. I would like to do you a favor, but I’m not sure which way that cuts upon this question. What I can do for you, you may not thank me for. Tell me one thing, Monsieur Ney: would you want to go on living if you lost what meant the most to you?”

  I drew shuddering breath to reply. “The surgeon’s knife is no stranger to me, and I am ready for whatever sacrifice may preserve my life. Even if I am to be a cripple, I want to live to witness the coming triumph of France and the new day of reason and glory just dawning.”

  I sensed it was too late, whatever medical genius the Jew might possess. I felt my soul leave my body. I floated up out of the cloud of smoke into the breezy sunlight above, so high I saw the plain and beyond it the forest, and beyond it rivers, mountains and the curvatu
re of the Earth. It was wonderful. I was suffused in light, floating in radiance like a warm bath, dissolving into the light of the world that is to come.

  Then I heard words but in a different voice, as in a dream, “So be it.” All went dark.

  Then I woke up, and a medical officer was standing over me saying “Sir, you are blessedly lucky, I see no serious wound.”

  There was no sign of the mysterious stranger and his burly companion, and no sign either of that shard of metal and the gaping hole it had carved in my neck. I lived, though I had died, and I wondered at the meaning of the stranger’s words.

  I learned that the rest of the day had been a stand-off, after which the Russians retreated. So we declared victory. We advanced and conquered the great oriental capital of Moscow, city of onion-domes and Asiatic mystery, waiting for the official surrender and victor’s tribute which were never to come.

  The calendrier républicain has twelve months, each with three décades of ten days. At the end of fructidor came in the last five days of the year the festival of sans-culottides, for the sans-culottes, the common man without (for him unaffordable) trousers, whose violent passion for a change of circumstance had given us our revolution and Republic. Their five days were named for their prime qualities (as judged by the poets Chénier and Fabre d’Eglantine, who came up with the names of days): Virtue, Genius, Labor, Opinion and Rewards. A sixth complementary day, added in leap years, was named Revolution. I respectfully submit that the poets erred in omitting Intoxication from the list. I know not on which of those days our sans-culottes set fire to the city, but I know they did so.

  Though in our histories we blame it on the fleeing Russians, I saw hundreds of our drunken troopers making bonfires of unoccupied houses for the sheer exuberant pleasure of watching them burn. The China-Town in particular I recall they burned most excitedly, because in a few of the structures were stored the fireworks for which the Chinaman is so justly famed. They set fire to whole streets of mandarin architecture five centuries old, in anticipation of the moment when the flames found these fireworks’ storing places and the resulting brilliant rainbow explosions so reminiscent of the celebration of the storming of the Bastille.