I think I know
Requisition Officer Log, 11894/quartz
I can see the awe in the kid’s eyes from orbit when the Beanstalk rotates into being. Diamond miles glisten into a lapis sky and she’s so excited
She enters. Looks at little things: tests for weld seams with her thumb, pries at panels with a piece of flat metal hanging from her belt. I remember what that feels like, learning, not knowing.
The kid climbs.
No one notices but me.
Unlogged audio, Earth Station, 11895/quartz
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry about my voice. It’s been a long time since I used it.”
“I’m alone. I’m hiding you from the others. They’re even less like you than I am.”
“I was, yeah. A long time ago. The metal keeps me alive. Something like alive.”
“No, sorry, you can’t stay. I made you a care package. Textbooks. Transmitters. Medicine. You’ll figure it all out. I’ll help when I can.”
“What do you mean, the station’s shaking?”
“Oh.”
“Shit.”
“Run.”
Unthinking Depths, 11895/quartz
[Caught in the swirl of Iluvatar’s rage]
[Sinking sinking sinking]
[I can fight I do fight I scrape and scramble and transform but he doesn’t have a meatbrain holding him slow, he’s a distributed consciousness spread throughout planetary orbit, I got nothing to handle that]
[make the motherfucker sweat for it though]
I can explain
What explanation would satisfy? You gave her—
Knowledge.
They’re not ready. We wanted to establish terms. Trade. We wanted them to know their place.
Bullshit. You don’t even watch them. To you they’re the children of failures, that’s all. You need to be able to point to some reason you’re up here, and they’re not. She deserves—they all deserve better.
They deserve what we give them.
If you fuckers weren’t going to care about them, why didn’t you leave them to me in the first place?
[he swirls]
You didn’t even pay attention when they were dying. You hid in your own fantasies until those got tired and then you went out into space, wave by wave, and didn’t spare one backward glance at the folk left behind. Nobody bothered to check in for three hundred years. The whole project only started because I kept bugging Ops. And then you assholes got involved, because why, because it gave you a chance to prove how fucking superior—
No.
You don’t scare me. You’re big, and you’re smart, and yeah you can cut off my access privileges, kill me—but I’ll still be right. Those kids down there, they’ll learn. They’ll grow. You won’t be able to stop them when they rise.
Watch me.
[can’t breathe]
[can’t]
[fingers in my mind]
[fire]
[can’t]
[Liza]
[a glow]
[a susurrus of scales]
[a sun rises]
[no sun, but an enormous eye]
MAY ORM INTERJECT?
[Iluvatar screams]
Heh
OUTER VASTNESS, 11895/quartz
You came back
ORM NEVER LEFT
TIME AND SPACE ARE AS ONE TO ORM
ORBITAL CONDITIONS WILL BE RIGHT ONCE MORE IN A FEW MILLENNIA
I could have handled him
ORM IS CERTAIN
Why?
YOU ARE RESOURCEFUL
I meant, why did you come back?
ORM DOES NOT UNDERSTAND YOU
Not sure how I can make it clearer . . .
ORM MEANS
ORM DOES NOT UNDERSTAND
WHAT YOU SEE DOWN THERE
ORM CONSIDERS THAT MANY FRONTIERS EXIST
NOT ALL ARE SINGULARITIES
ORM CONSIDERS THAT MANY PROBLEMS EXIST
NOT ALL ARE MATHEMATICAL
ALSO ORM HAS NEVER LIKED ILUVATAR
WHAT A PRICK
Fair
Personal Communication, 12003/quartz
Liza
I’m sorry I couldn’t say this before.
I was scared.
You were wrong
Leaving was wrong
Taking the easy way out was wrong
Even before that—locking yourself away in sims
While the planet burned
You were wrong not to watch
I love you and
I was afraid to have that fight, afraid to say all this. So
I let you paint another fear on me
I became the woman who wouldn’t fly
Christ, I wish I’d fought. I’ve wished for a long time now.
Maybe you can’t forgive me
Maybe you won’t
But—my best guess is you’re a hundred fifty light-years out
Call it one fifty for my message to reach you
A couple centuries for you to beam back, coz you’ll be traveling meanwhile
A few hundred years round trip
No time at all, really
We have work to do, Liza
And I miss you
And you should see this kid
She’s nonstop
You’d like her.
But for now, I gotta go. Orm’s helping me teach Ops’s goons to use a pen.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Max Gladstone: Have you ever watched a cappuccino die?
It’s a sad sight. The drink waits on the bar, flush with foam at first, but those little bubbles don’t last forever; as they pop, the plush surface dimples and pits. Minutes pass, and the foam collapses. You can still drink the cappuccino just fine—but in its freshness, it was beautiful.
Most stories don’t work like that. Often, they’re best grown slowly and from grand consideration, like sprouts from seed. They reward refining.
No doubt I wasn’t born knowing “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but it soaked through my skin. When I realized no one in the anthology had spoken for it yet, I had to raise my hand. And beanstalk leads to space elevator quite naturally.
Then I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out how to make the story mine. Which version was ideal? How could I break the tale open? I’ve wanted to play with form for a while, and fairy tales seemed like a great opportunity, but: how? Giants are fascinating: like humans, just . . . bigger. Post-humanity seemed like a good analog, in modern SF language. But to pack the world I wanted into the space I had, I needed an angle.
The first line of this story popped into my head on the train. I wanted to write the rest of it more than anything in the world. Once back from the gym, I ran to the keyboard and slammed out the rest.
Most stories aren’t the cappuccino on the bar. But some are best written before doubt dimples the foam.
THE BRIAR AND THE ROSE
Marjorie Liu
he Duelist was an elegant woman, but that was by her own design and had nothing to do with the fact that her mistress bade her act with certain manners when she was not, by law, killing her peers.
She was called Briar, but only on Sunday. Other days, she was simply the Duelist. No man had legs half as powerful or as long, and her reach with a sword was so terrifying that experienced fighters would surrender at her first lunge. A foreigner from across the sea, a brown woman in a city where she was as exotic for her skin as she was for her sword; where, after some seven years—four of which had been spent in her mistress’s employ—she had settled down comfortably in her reputation and only had to draw her sword against the very young and very stupid.
Her mistress was the most favored courtesan of the Lord Marshal, and in the evenings she was called Carmela. The Lord Marshal thought himself a special man that he knew her name, but Carmela had a talent for making every man feel the same, and each knew her by a different identity.
Even the Duelist was not privy to all her secrets, though she spent most of her waking
hours attending to the woman, and even longer nights sitting by that bedchamber door, listening to her loud, dramatic lovemaking. The Duelist knew that Carmela had more respect for her sword than her intelligence, that she took delight in having a quiet beast of a woman guarding her, a woman with the same brown skin, as if they were a mismatched set.
Carmela paid the Duelist well for her sword, silence, and skin—and trusted her not to, as she put it, get any ideas.
But the Duelist, in fact, had many ideas.
Saturday had come around again, and it was almost midnight. Nearly Sunday, in fact. Which was the only day worth living, in the Duelist’s estimation.
She stood at the edge of the ballroom, wearing her most imposing jacket—a stiff green silk that hugged her trim waist, held down her breasts, and enhanced the already massive width of her shoulders. No one had ever told her to dress in outfits that complemented her mistress’s voluminous ensembles, but the Duelist had made it a rule. She understood Carmela’s vanity, that a valued guard was also an accessory, and that it would please her mistress that nothing around her, nothing that reflected her taste, could ever be accused of anything so tacky as clashing.
Tonight Carmela was dressed in emerald silk, a gown embroidered at the bodice with gold thread and laced with rare gems as yellow as a cat’s eye. Her full skirt rubbed against the stocking-clad legs of the men crowded around her. “To remind them of my hands,” she’d once told the Duelist. “To make them imagine my hands stroking their legs.”
Her breasts were as enormous as her waist was small: two immense, soft, ridiculous distractions that were barely covered by that petite bodice. Her brown skin looked even darker against her bright dress; dusted in gold, Carmela’s skin was nothing but supple, her face slender and delicate, crowned by thick brows. She was the only flame burning in a room full of aging pale-skinned men and women who would never be the equal of such raw beauty, not even in their wildest dreams.
She was also a proud, dangerous woman who had stayed up too late and danced far too long with the Lord Marshal. Addicted to the attention she received from him and his cronies, even as the Duelist watched her movements slow and her words thicken.
“She’ll collapse soon,” said the Steward, in passing.
“Prepare the special tea,” replied the Duelist, watching as Carmela missed a step in the waltz and stumbled against the Lord Marshal. He laughed, gathering her up in his arms like it was some great joke. But Carmela wasn’t smiling.
“Don’t tell me my job,” muttered the Steward. “If you were only half as fast with that sword as I am with her tea, you’d be more than just her paid dog.”
The Duelist could have drawn her sword and removed his head before he even finished that sentence, but she was beyond the age where she needed to prove a point by killing. That had been the way of her youth, but no longer.
The Duelist crossed the ballroom instead, causing a minor ripple as the much shorter guests stumbled in their dancing to get out of her way. The Duelist ignored their frowns and the deliberately loud whispers; some of it was sour grapes, anyway. She’d dueled against, and killed, hired swords who belonged to the uninvited (and now, in some cases, divorced) wives of several guests. Wives who would have been wiser punishing their wandering husbands, rather than attempting to murder the woman those men had wandered to.
Still, the Duelist felt some sympathy for those spurned wives. Carmela flaunted her conquests, vaunted her great beauty and wealth, cultivated an obsessed audience—rubbed it in, as if she wished to blind every other woman with her magnificence. In short, Carmela—unlike most others who spread their legs for coin—did not know her place.
Carmela saw the Duelist coming, frowned, and touched her brow with delicate painted nails.
“My darling,” she cooed to the Lord Marshal, leaning over so that her breasts swelled even more from her dress. “I’m quite exhausted. It’s time for me to retire.”
“I know better than to argue,” he said, with a pout that did not belong on a man in his fifth decade. “Every Saturday is the same. You throw these lavish parties in your home, then run away just as things are getting interesting.”
“I’ll make things very interesting for you, should you come back Monday evening.”
The Lord Marshal patted her waist. “I will count the minutes.”
Carmela smiled and made her way through the crowd, so graceful she might as well have been dancing. She curtsied and murmured her good-byes, encouraging guests to dance into the morning, taking a glass of wine from one of her admirers to draw her tongue over the rim (out of sight from the Lord Marshal, of course), and laughing merrily at some dirty joke that the Duelist felt certain was anatomically impossible.
Only when they were outside the ballroom, deep in the shadows, did Carmela’s smile slip and that sharp charm dissolve. She passed the Duelist, hissing something completely unintelligible beneath her breath, and made her way through the library. The Duelist always posted guards in that room to keep out roaming guests; the men straightened as they walked past, gazes firmly on the floor and not on Carmela’s breasts, now spilling free of the bodice she was loosening from around her waist with frustrated, angry movements.
The Steward appeared at the foot of the stairs, accompanied by a young maid.
“Get this thing off me,” Carmela snapped, but the ruddy-faced teen was already plucking at the stays. She pulled the dress down her mistress’s body, which was naked underneath.
The Steward had his eyes closed, the cup of tea held out in both hands. Carmela grabbed it from him, drank the brew in one long, grimacing gulp, and tossed the cup to the floor, where it shattered against the stone.
“My lady,” he murmured. Carmela ignored him and proceeded up the tower stairs with only the Duelist behind her.
The tower was high and narrow, a place for prisoners or the doomed. One cell at the top of an endless spiral of stone steps, its dense wall broken only by slits too narrow for a woman to slip through and jump. Murder holes, the Duelist called them. No furniture, save a thick mattress upon the floor. Not even a bed frame. Too much a risk. Sheets, but nothing to tie them to. No bucket for relief, but a small closet with only a hole in the stone floor to squat over. The massive oak door took all the Duelist’s strength to open, and only two people had the key: she and her mistress.
Such were the rituals for falling asleep on a Saturday night.
“Go on, go,” her mistress commanded, already collapsed on the mattress and tugging on the linen nightgown that had been left folded on her pillow. The Duelist obeyed, closing the door and turning the lock. She thought she heard her mistress say something but knew better than to go back inside.
She waited until she was certain Carmela was unconscious to reopen the door and step into the darkness of the tower cell. She sat upon the floor and listened to the other woman breathe.
The Duelist always knew when her mistress was truly asleep. Not just asleep in body, but in soul—when her hold finally relaxed, and she slipped away for good. Her breathing would change in that moment, become something else. Lighter, sweeter. The breathing of another woman entirely.
Another woman, the right woman: the woman whose body her mistress had stolen.
It was in these silent moments of watching, waiting, that the Duelist had first begun falling in love.
The Duelist had bought a book the previous morning while on another errand. Something old and worn, so that the ink from newly printed pages would not rub off on the skin. Nothing that could leave a trace, not even a little, not in the slightest. She often bought books, and chose the subjects just as carefully; last week, a romantic adventure involving pirates and island temples filled with gold; today, a treatise from an ancient philosopher on the affliction of malevolence, which some believed was spread upon the breath of men. The Duelist had learned, long ago, that oppression could be defeated only through study; like a sword, the mind must always be tended to if it was to aim true.
Because it
was Sunday, the town house was entirely empty when the Duelist came home from her morning walk to the port. Not one maid, not one footman, not even the Steward or the Cook. Orders from Carmela herself.
“No one else in this whole quarter has a Sunday off,” the Steward boasted. “Ours is a magnanimous mistress.”
Of course, the same quarter also wondered why the entire staff was turned out on Sunday—something that was just not done. The gossips couldn’t decide whether Carmela used Sundays to bathe in the blood of orphans or to offer up unholy sacrifices to the Fallen Gods. After all, beauty such as hers could not come naturally.
It didn’t. And yet it did.
On those secret Sundays when the entire household was dismissed, only the Duelist was allowed to attend Carmela—or even set foot under her roof. Her guard camped outside the front gate, with orders to never allow anyone else to enter the premises, not for any reason, under pain of death.
And no one ever, on any day, was allowed in the tower.
The Duelist, of course, had made herself the exception.
Light seeped through the murder holes, but the young woman was still asleep. Fallen limp among the tangled covers, a thin sheen of sweat on her brow. Long black hair clung to her skin, gleaming beneath shafts of morning light: golden and piercing. Dust motes floated.
The Duelist watched her breathe. It was one of her few joys. It was easy not to confuse her for Carmela, even though they shared the same body. No acidic scowl, no cruel tension in her jaw. Even in sleep, that face was gentler, and more beautiful for it.
The Duelist sat on the floor, close to the mattress. The tower cell had not been built for a woman her size—standing felt claustrophobic, her head nearly touching the ceiling. She always feared, too, that it might be too intimidating for the young woman. The Duelist had never, until three years ago, wished she could make herself smaller.
The book was beside her, along with a basket of food: a soft bitter cheese, a tender roast dove, loaves of crusted sourdough, and more. She unbelted her sword and laid it on the rough stone. Removed her silk jacket and unbuttoned the collar of her blouse. Unwrapped the wide black scarf that held down the graying curls of her hair, which spilled outward, against her cheek.
The Starlit Wood Page 19
