On the Razor's Edge

by Michael Flynn

  “I have seen a mobile, a khinyo, of the fall of the Borneo Beanstalk,” the Fudir told them. “And it fell of itself.”

  “Nonsense,” said the bartender. “The Names scythed them down.” The Old Terrans, at least, had not forgotten the old lore.

  “With monstrous cannon they cut the stalks,

  And the roots dried up and the petals fell.”

  The Vendor shrugged. “Or the People of Sand and Iron did so and the Names reaped where the prehumans had sown. What matter to such as us?”

  The others sucked in their breaths. But the Vendor was undeterred.

  “Will you inform on me, O Khenrik Jal? Or you?” He turned to the next stool over. “Or you, Jemdar Smidt, my cradle-companion? What do these sword cuts mean…” He fingered the scar on his cheek. “… if they do not mean we may trust one another? As for this man…” He tossed his head at the Fudir. “… he has the accents of the Periphery in his breath. He might more fear our tattling than we his.”

  “Neither was it the prehumans,” insisted the Fudir. “The towers were derelict long before they fell, and they fell because they were no longer maintained. The world had grown too poor and too sparsely filled to support them. I know that two fell in this wise—at Kenya and at Borneo—and I think the other ten as well.”

  “Perhaps the Names knocked down the remnants,” said the bartender, salvaging some puissance for the rulers of the Central Worlds. But it occurred suddenly to Donovan buigh that the Old Names may have done so from mercy, dismantling the surviving Beanstalks before they too could topple uncontrolled. It might not be wise to judge the early Names by the decadence of their epigones. If he had learned anything during his hajj, it was that the end of an age might differ vastly from its birth.

  “The Commonwealth,” said the Keener of Blades, dropping his voice to a habitual whisper when naming the old regime, “would never have permitted such decay.”

  “Maybe not,” the Fudir agreed. “But permission was not in it. The Ice had begun by then, and the farmlands dried up and the growing season shrank. And ‘many young men of twenty went away.’”

  “There is a song,” admitted the Keener.

  The Vendor’s cradle-companion scratched his cheek. “That one?”

  “How runs the lay?” asked the Fudir.

  The Keener looked about the room quickly, then lowered his head as the others crowded close to hear. It was a lively, bouncy tune for a matter so poignant.

  “The Ship she lifts in half an hour to cross the starry heavens.

  My friends are left behind me now with grief and sorrow leavened

  I’m just about to slide away in the liner Kat’kutirai

  It’s disengaged and the hatch is sealed, I’m leaving dear old Terra.”

  The others joined in on the chorus.

  “And it’s good-bye, Krish, and good-bye, Chang, and good-bye, Mumbai Mary.

  She’s disengaged and the hatch is sealed, I’m leaving dear old Terra.

  And now the Alfvens’ grabbing space, I have no more to say.

  I’m bound for the Periph’ry, boys, a thousand lights away.

  “Then fare you well, old Terra dear, to part my heart does ache well.

  From old Kamchatka to Cape Fear, I’ll never see your equal.

  Although to half-formed worlds we’re bound where wild beasts may eat us

  We’ll ne’er forget the Holy Ground—the daal and beans and taters.

  “And it’s good-bye, Krish…”

  The bar patrons tittered nervously among themselves when they had finished and two of them glanced once more behind them in case anyone had entered the bar and heard. But it was what the Fudir had not heard that interested him. He had heard no hint of coercion in the song. No indication that the departure had been anything but voluntary. Yet the legends on the Old Planets were that the Dao Chettians had defeated Terra, scythed the Beanstalks, and herded her people onto the Ships of Exile—to be dumped ill prepared on the barely terraformed worlds of the Periphery.

  “What if,” he said, as much to himself as the others. “What if the Cleansing took centuries? What if ships began to leave as the world dried out, and it was only at the very end that the Names—or the prehumans—forcibly removed the excess.” An excess that the world could no longer support?

  “They sent them to the Periphery to die,” said the Vendor.

  “But if the arable land was shrinking, so was Terra’s carrying capacity. To leave them here would leave them to die.”

  “Then at least they would have died at home,” said the bartender, surprising the Fudir with unlooked-for outspokenness.

  Jemdar Smidt shook his head. “What matter? Others came, and now they too are leaving. We will not see again Terra as she was: bountiful with green, warmed by hot breaths of zephyrs, when only ‘mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun.’”

  “I’ve always wondered,” the bartender, Khenrik Jal, mused, “what was an Englishman?”

  “A native of the Brythonic Isles,” the Fudir told them. “Islands now swallowed by the Ice. This land of yours was called Vraddy.”

  “I have heard this said,” the bartender commented as he began washing glasses. “Men from hereabouts went out and settled New Vraddy.”

  “They were the old Taņţamiž, who held the Mandate of Heaven after the Zhõgwó—those you once called the Cinakar.”

  The others looked uncomfortable. “I’ve never called anyone Cinakar,” said the bartender, and his careful eye assured the others that they had never done so, either.

  The Keener of Blades laughed. “It was the Cinakar who filled Dao Chetty. My friends here fear that if they mention certain things too often, the Names will hear and cause them to vanish.” He turned on his stool and called out into the empty bar, “Cinakar! Names! Commonwealth!” The others flinched.

  The Keener laughed again and faced the bar. The bartender smiled and said in a whisper, “I note that you did not call upon Ulakaratcakan, the Savior of the World.”

  But the Keener had an answer ready. “So, why push my luck?”

  The Fudir said, “Who is Ulaka—” But he was cut off.

  “He Who is Not Named is the One Who is to come at the end of days and restore the Commonwealth. But it will be the heavenly Commonwealth, not the earthly one. The Names do not understand that the Nameless One is not a rival Name. He is not even of their aetherial plane. His regency is not of this world. Meanwhile…” And the bartender reared back and spoke in a normal voice, “The clack dancers will come through tonight and entertain us. You will stay, of course, O Fudir?”

  Of course he would. If only to learn what a clack dancer was.

  * * *

  They arrived just before sundown in a train of booger-vans with enormous tracked wheels, the sides of which were painted with colorful pictures of men like trees: smiling dancers with skin the texture of bark against a background of bright yellow and red. The folk who emerged from the vans wore veiled, ankle-length gowns that concealed even their feet. And they clacked when they walked.

  “Clackers cannot wear ordinary shoes, you see,” the Keener explained to the Fudir, who did not see at all. Everyone filed into the theater, where the troupe’s grounds-crew had already set up the light and sound systems. These were a bad-skinned lot with warts on their faces and hands. “They came from Old Eighty-two,” the Keener said, leading the scarred man to a seat front and center of the stage, “along with the klattriya and all the other itarar.”

  Klattriya must derive from kalatiyayttiriya, which meant “to lead a wandering life.” And itarar was a disparaging term for outlanders. Donovan wondered why his host was using fragments of the old Taņţamiž. To show solidarity? To hint that even here there was a clot of the Terran Brotherhood? Donovan leaned toward him.

  “Knowest thou aught of the Shadow War?” he whispered in the Tongue.

  The Keener smiled. “May each side slay the other, and the de’il eat the last.”

  “Hast the Bro
therhood chosen sides?”

  “Brotherhood? Sahb! What Brotherhood be that?”

  Donovan grunted. The Brotherhood was banned across the Confederation and it would be death to admit to membership. But if the Brotherhood had agreed to join the rebellion, as Oschous Dee had claimed, Donovan had yet to find a footprint of that agreement in the words of the Terrans he had bespoken on Zãddigah.

  The dancers filed onto the stage and, in unison, dropped their concealing robes.

  The farmers clapped with delight, for it is always cheering to look on people more unfortunate than oneself. The clack dancers were naked, though not that one could readily tell. Most of them were covered with warts, but such warts as the scarred man had never seen. They grew in massive clusters—on hands, ankles, torsos, arms, even faces—and indeed endowed the men with the appearance of tree bark. Some of the warts were long and sticklike, others were wide and flat, and all had the appearance of having been carefully shaped and cultured.

  Cutaneous horns, said the Pedant, eager as ever to reveal his fund of knowledge. They were discovered by a man named Pappy Loma. An immune system deficiency allows Pappy Loma’s virus to take over the machinery of the skin to produce the horny growths.

  The Silky Voice wondered what purpose the old Commonwealth engineers had had in creating a race of such people. Or had they viewed people only as objects, to be experimented upon, and done this simply because they could? The young man in the chlamys winced in pain. How heavy their hands and feet must be!

  Then they began to dance. A percussionist used the rodlike growths on his fingers to work a variegated set of drums and cymbals. The dancers picked up the rhythm and began to shake their hands, feet, and bodies. The wide, flat horns on their torsos clapped in tempo; the rodlike horns rattled and rustled, as of shaking a whisk broom. The different timbres and tempos gave the clacking something like a harmony and a counterpoint. It was a wild clattering, a symphony of rhythm. Some dancers wore metallic clips on their horny extrusions, others wore bells, and for variety they would beat on various objects scattered about the stage. Now and then, feet would stomp the stage in unison, and the Sleuth noticed that none of the growths occurred on their soles or palms.

  Some of the dancers had only the rods on their hands and ankles and their torsos were otherwise bare, save of moles. When the dance-line parted and let these through for a solo, the farmers in the audience whooped, for these dancers included women.

  Donovan was not a man for cringing, and he blamed his discomfort on the young man in the chlamys. He “felt” for the dancers, their discomfort, their embarrassment, their shame at being reduced to making a spectacle of their infirmity.

  And yet, said another part of him, they are no more abnormal than sharpies or foxies or Jugurthans. And who are we to tell them they must not make a living as dancers? What other sort of work might they perform, whose hands are as encumbered as these?

  And I suppose, said the Silky Voice, that a colony of lepers might form a bell choir for the entertainment of strangers.

  But there was something familiar about the rattling of the “drumsticks,” something that reminded him of …

  * * *

  … an old sugar-processing plant gone to seed. The cane has taken root and the wind blowing downriver rattles them like drumsticks. He staggers up on the western bank of the river, and throws himself to the ground among the cane. It is marshy here. He wants nothing more than to lie there and sleep undisturbed until morning. But there is a safe house in the O’erfluss District, if he can reach it.

  He looks back the way he has swum and marvels that he had the reserves to cross the river. Flames light the sky over the Secret City, and the hissing of the fires blends with the murmur of the river’s current, the creaking of insects. He hears the distant crackle of bolt tanks and thud of buildings.

  Not much left of the Revolution, he thinks.

  But whatever you rescue from a burning house is a gain.

  Motion through the riverside growth! He recedes into the shadows and slips a knife from his belt. A voice whispers his name.

  His true name.

  It has been years, a lifetime, since he has heard it. And he recognizes the voice.

  In relief, he rises from the shadows and whispers urgently, “Over here.” He waits to see if he has made one last mistake but recognizes the other when he steps forth. “You made it out of the Chancellery, then.”

  The other rebel steps forward and embraces him. “Glad to see you got free, chief. Are there any more with you?”

  “No. I … I thought for a while there were, but…”

  “I understand.” He kisses him once on each cheek. “I hope you do, too.”

  And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of them punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend, and asks him, “Why?”

  And that man shrugs and will not look at him. “Close fits my shirt,” he answers, “but closer far my skin.”

  * * *

  Donovan gasped and sat bolt upright in his seat in the theater. The Keener turned to him in solicitude. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. No.” He rose and hurried up the aisle to the exit. The dancers did not falter at his apparent rudeness. Their rhythmic clacking followed him until cut off by the theater doors. In the lobby, Donovan bent over, hands on knees, huffing.

  The Keener of Blades had followed behind him. “You are ill,” he said. “I would take you to the doctor, but he’s in there.” He waggled a thumb at the theater.

  Donovan sucked in a deep breath and stood upright. “Is the bartender in there, too?”

  * * *

  Nowhere in the official accounts Donovan had read or resimulated on Oschous’s Black Horse or Gidula’s White Comet had there been any mention of the internal organization of the Rising. But he remembered now. Padaborn had had four section chiefs for the assault on the Secret City. Rajasekaran had died in the first rush. Lai Showan had been lost trying to hold the Security Police Center. O’Farrell had gone down with the Chancellery Building. And from the ruins of the Education Ministry—from the Lion’s Mouth itself—the fourth chief had escaped unseen: Tomas Krishna Murphy.

  Only to be betrayed on the far side of the river by Geshler Padaborn himself, who, having been captured earlier, had broken under duxing kaoda.

  He was a great man, said the Sleuth. But it is not given even to great men to endure the third degree of torture.

  He seemed hale enough when last we saw him, the Pedant retorted

  “Not all scars show,” said Donovan.

  “What?” said the Keener, who had accompanied him to the tavern.

  The scarred man shook his head. He thought that Padaborn had buckled under the Threat and not the Tools. Before the Shadows of the Names employed the Tools, they would first tell you in great detail about them. Then the Shadows would show them to you. Then they would demonstrate the Tools on another prisoner. It often saved considerable time.

  I wonder what became of him?

  Who cares? He turned traitor!

  Consider what Those did to us, said the young man, and he was the greater threat. He had the charism that O’Farrell and we lacked. He could inspire men to die. He may have been harvested, or pithed, or—

  “Or they did to him what they did to us.”

  That might explain why the rebel Shadows confused the two of us. The simulations and reports named no other rebels but Padaborn. Part of a deliberate strategy, Donovan supposed, to minimize the Rising by minimizing the participants.

  “Something still does not feel right.”

  “I knew it,” said the Keener. “You stay here. Take care of our guest, Khenrik Jal, and I will fetch the Dispenser of Efficacious Medicines.” The Keener then ran off, leaving Donovan in the tavern.

  Donovan turned to the barte
nder. “You heard him. Give me some of that ‘efficacious medicine.’”

  * * *

  And so, following a night of sleepless turmoil, Tomas Krishna Murphy came at last to the last site of all: Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds. If the Commonwealth had had a center, if it could have been said to be in any one place, that place was here, in this great sprawling metropolis, in the Hall of Suns.

  “She’s a creeping place,” the earnest Terrans of New Bramburg had warned him before he had departed. “There are ghosts among the ruins.”

  From the air, the site of Antapak had shown clearly. As the rain forest had dried out and withered, it had stripped the cloak from the Capital of All the Worlds and exposed her bones to the eyes of strangers. Donovan parked his rented hopper in a broad plaza near the center of town. Perhaps it had once been an outdoor theater, or a sporting venue, or perhaps it had actually been a hopper-park. Now, it was simply an open space littered with a spill of white blocks.

  More remained of Antapak than of any of the other sites he had visited, but that is not to say that very much remained. Layered upon the neglect and decay of years was evidence of more deliberate destruction. Those portions of the capital that had sat on the shoreline bluffs had been tumbled into the waters below, where the proud towers of other days could yet be spied gleaming through the crystalline sea. The Names of Dao Chetty had vented a certain measure of spleen on this place, Donovan decided, because it was a reminder to them that they had merely built on the bones of others. Yet by reducing Antapak to ruins they may only have underscored that very fact.

  Perhaps they had given up. Some parts of the sprawling city seemed untouched. The old Commonwealth had built for the ages; and, though an age had come and gone, a portion of their work remained. Donovan remembered how parts of the Commonwealth Ark that he and Méarana had found scant years before had remained in working condition.

  After an hour or so of wandering, Donovan stopped for a drink of water and a bit of a mustard-and-cheese combination known locally as “music.” He sat upon one of the overturned blocks that had once foundationed a building, and tried to imagine what the street before him had been like when this had been a lively capital and crowds of people had thronged its busy avenues.