by Lavie Tidhar
The occultist connected the suspended cables to the wires inside the non-human veins. He activated the apparatus by pressing a switch next to the control panel. Immediately, the prone bodies became stiff, as if they were being electrocuted. He ran to the aether cylinders and turned the valves only slightly to release a tiny amount of aetherfoam. The substance flowed through the tubes until it filled the fusion tank. He returned to the edge of the table and faced the control panel. It was diamond-shaped and over it was a gematria board, a stone abacus and a green phosphorus screen displaying the Tree of Life. Everything was connected by dozens of wires and cables leading to the analytical engine. Opposite him, the tank blending the non-humans' essences span faster and faster.
"Come on. Come on." They always failed in the first step. Calculations were correct and there was an obvious resonance between the two lovers. But in all attempts throughout the weeks, the tank had worked as a centrifuge, not mixing, but separating the essences from the aether.
The first two sephirotic houses shone in the monitor when a pale light started to emanate from the tank.
"Yes." Emilio jumped and punched the air and, when he looked again, the third house was alight. "No, no, no. Too fast." He found the controls for the mechanical arms under the table and quickly attached them to his own clockwork arm. Now he was like a puppeteer whose fingers moved spider-legs over his marionettes. The organic hand calibrated the analytical engine, moving the stones in the abacus. He lowered the robotic arms over Fritz and Chaya and, with his feet, he pressed a pedal to activate their drills and scalpels.
The vibration was felt, not heard.
Then a thundering noise hit the street several metres above. The blast almost tore the equipment away from the ceiling.
"No," Emilio moaned and stopped to listen, "not now, please." A second later another blast was followed by another quake and then machine-gun shots.
"Don't. Even. Consider. Stopping." Fritz had his arm raised, his gun triggered, and was pointing at the door. "Move on," he said, knowing the doctor hadn't considered stopping. He knew his friend craved paternity, too.
Fritz saw, right above him, a robotic arm handling a bright blowtorch and, on the table next to him, the shining scalpel hovering over Chaya. He tried to turn his sensors off, but it was too late. He felt the pain and the heat of the torch opening a big triangle in his belly, while his wife had a vibrating blade carving a doorway to her womb. Gunshots were closer now and already they could hear screams coming from Hotel Florida's garage. The doctor, abacus forgotten, now held a pistol, too, aimed at the door. The face and mind of the now-captain motolang convulsed with pain, while Emilio tried to find the correct gear inside him with his spidery arms. At the same time, the doctor looked for a specific root in Chaya.
A blast blew out the door. A mechanical hand pinched the coils inside Fritz's guts.
Fritz opened fire, but Emilio hesitated. The doctor barely had the reflexes to dodge the door flying across the room. It smashed the analytical engine's glass walls. A man in black uniform raided the room with a rifle, but was blown away by three shots from Fritz, who was trying to get rid of the wires tangled with his body. The man fell to the floor still shooting his automatic gun, hitting lamps and steam tubes. "Wake up, Chaya," he cried, pulling his wife to the floor, to a space between the stretcher and the multicoloured glass pyramid.
The golem opened her eyes to the dark fog and screamed as soon as she hit the ground. Immediately, she understood the situation. She grabbed the stretcher-table's feet and lifted it, improvising a shield with its hardened wood. She dragged the table to the door while Fritz covered her, exposing his own body to shoot the guards at the door. She'd managed to block the entrance, but it'd take only a few shots to tear down the already splintering barrier.
"Emilio," Fritz yelled.
The human had his back to the ground and was chewing off the cables from his mechanical arm. His left hand held the experiment's samples and his pistol was tucked inside his trousers. A big piece of wood landed close to his head and splinters forced him to shut his eyes. He cleared them from wood, tears and condensed steam. A spray of bullets flew inside the room.
Chaya used the dead soldier's gun to shoot the guards through a tiny hole in the barrier. "We have to leave, Fritz. The barrier won't stand much longer." She reloaded the machine gun with her last ammo clip. "Emilio, is there any other way out?"
He had stood up and was dodging the bullets, trying to stand in front of the control panel. "This is a basement, Chaya. There's no way out."
Fritz shot two more times through the crack, then stopped to reload. It was only then that he noticed the guards had stopped shooting back. He signalled to Chaya, who was prepared to spray another set of bullets. Then he looked at Emilio, who in a single movement opened the mixer, threw the samples in and locked it as fast as he could.
The only recognisable sound was that post-gunfight humming. Not even Fritz, nor the analytical engine, dared to break the silence. Maybe because they were both broken machines, afraid and with their guts exposed. "What happened?"
"I can't see anything," Chaya said, her eyes hunting for black uniforms on the staircase beyond the half-destroyed barrier. "It's as though they've disappeared. Just stopped shooting." She still heard some lonely shots beyond the layers of concrete, brass and asphalt above them. Other than that, there was only silence. But it wasn't like the silence one heard after surviving a gunfight. It was much more like the silence before passing away. A calm, serene death that took its time before taking away its burden.
"Hey, Fritz, help me out." Emilio was pulling a crank that apparently pumped up the fluids from the mixer to the glass vial atop the ziggurat.
Both non-humans exchanged looks. He slowly moved away from the door, counting on his wife for cover. "What do I do?"
"The mechanical arms are gone. Climb onto the table, and I'll give you the tank. I need you to fill up the uterus on top."
The automaton put his gun back in his trousers. He found an empty spot on the table and stood on it, trying to keep his balance. He stepped to one side and grabbed the mixer with one hand. A pale-bright whirlwind moved inside it with roots and gears dancing about. He grappled his way to a place from which to pour the liquid into the machine and finally bent his body towards the uterus, the sharp metal of his opened-up belly scratching the glass vials. He poured the tank's contents into the uterus, already full with some kind of repulsive solvent.
Almost immediately, the mixture became transparent.
"Now, step down," Emilio commanded.
"What?" Fritz was hypnotised. The two floating corpuscles were attracted to each other and, he could swear it, were blending together. But at the same time, they were multiplying. "Oh, Chaya! I think it's working." He turned smiling to wife, but her face was as hard as stone. She had her hands behind her head.
The low click as the gun was triggered woke the motolang from his dream.
"Down, Fritz." Emilio was pointing his pistol at him.
The troops of the Committee had forced the barrier and entered the basement. A dozen or more, he wasn't able to count. One of the soldiers walked around the table and grabbed the wooden box lying on the brown tarp. "What's happening? I- I don't understand." Fritz was experiencing something like reverse omniscience. He could see that Chaya had surrendered, that the soldiers were receiving orders from Emilio, and that a wood-and-metal embryo grew inside the glass uterus. He felt diluted, ephemeral in his confusion. Inexorably incapable.
"It doesn't matter. Come on, man, step down. Do what I say." The soldier put the opened box at Emilio's feet. There was a brass barrel mounted inside it. It was the same size as the uterus.
"You can't do this, Emilio. Please."
"Fritz—" he paused "—if you won't step down, I swear, my friend, I'll fire this shit off into your fucking head."
Tick-tock.
"No! Dear, no!"
Fritz grabbed the uterus as hard as he could and threw himself
to the back of the room. There was a sound of gunshots blasting and he felt two stabs in his back. Something heavy and metallic bounced on the floor. There were glass cutting cables and jamming gears inside his joints. Tick-tock.
He hit the ground, the impact deflating the balloons inside his chest. Oh, no. God, please no. The uterus is broken. He could feel the liquid spilled over him, flowing inside his open wounds. He embraced the vial with all the strength he had left. Tick-tock, tick-tock. He lay between the wall and the two fallen aetherfoam cylinders. He saw Chaya being shot four times in the back while trying to run to him. He saw the seeds in her eyes wither and die before she fell. Emilio and his soldiers were almost on him.
He made his decision.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
He drew his gun and fired it off at the cylinders. There was a blast and a glaring radiance like a star.
Silence.
Tick.
On occasion, a mortar. A dull machine gun talking in the distance was his only companion. Fritz climbed the stairs of an abandoned building at the heart of a deserted neighbourhood. The carbine had been turned into a crutch to keep his body straight. Each step needed more than the strength he had left in him. It was martyrdom. His body cracked, his joints creaked and he limped. His body was bent to one side, the cables that served as tendons were shattered. He could barely reach the crank in his back to wind himself up. He missed Chaya so badly. He had no clue as to what to think of Emilio.
The motolang dragged himself across the corridor to the room, his new home since the explosion back in the lab. The war was very distant now and would soon be over. He had turned from militiamen to refugee in the space of just two months, hiding as he could amongst the ruins of the revolution. It'll have to do for now. He felt bad.
There was a rocking chair close to the window. The reactor was framed in it, and high above, he could see an aethership docking at the station. He still had no way of escaping. He had no money for the tickets and the bribes. Besides, the trip was too dangerous these days. Maybe in a few more months.
He tried to relax, rocking on the chair, the carbine over his lap. Roots and wires sprouted up from the cracks in his carcass. The place wasn't exactly home, but he felt somewhat happy. Now there was another tick-tock inside him, a seed. In a glass vial embedded in his belly, he and Chaya shone together the way only impossible things are likely to shine.
Editor Biography
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the BSFA Award nominated novel Osama (2011), and of the steampunk Bookman Histories trilogy, comprising The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012). His other works include the linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007), novellas An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011), and Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011). He is also the author of the picture book Going to the Moon (2012). He edited the first volume of this anthology series, The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and maintains the World SF Blog at worldsf.wordpress.com, for which he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award.
Artist Biography
Born in Mexico City, cover artist Raứl Cruz first put colors to paper at a young age when television and films inspired him to create his first fantasy illustrations. At the age of twenty, Raứl began a successful and prosperous freelance career, creating science fiction and commercial artwork for books, magazines, CD booklets, posters, ads, set designs, booth designs, television concepts, and more.
Raứl uses a combination of digital and traditional techniques (particularly watercolor, acrylic, ink and airbrush) to create a signature look that defines his style. His art has been exhibited in New York City's Stehendall Gallery, in the Mexican Chamber of Plasticity, in numerous cultural spaces and events, and in different universities. Many of his pieces have also appeared in publications like Illustrators 39, Spectrum, Heavy Metal Magazine, Fantasy +3, and Erotic Fantasy Art.
To see more of his art and designs visit www.racrufi.com.
