Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91

by Sean Williams

  “I’ve heard something like that five times since I got involved here. Please come back within tracking range.”

  “In a while, Mehaan.” She pauses, realizing she’s never addressed the soldier by name. Familiarity of flesh is not familiarity of much else. Teferizen’s modulators let go. Cognitive fetters next.

  “I’d like to think that I’ve treated you with courtesy and that we enjoy each other’s company well enough.”

  Nirapha shuts her eyes; the commands she’s executing don’t need sight. Mehaan would be tracing her path from the station’s logs, on the way here even now. “Don’t be sentimental, officer. It doesn’t suit you. Of course, having you in bed was very nice. I wouldn’t say no to another chance, the rest of the personnel hardly being attractive.”

  “As compliments go that’s especially backhanded.”

  Perhaps if her hearing is wired into station sensors she would catch the percussion of Mehaan’s footfalls, a relentless conqueror’s march. “I’ve never been a romantic, I’m afraid.”

  “Teferizen doesn’t sympathize, doesn’t love, doesn’t care. It manipulates. That’s all.”

  “What distinguishes you from her?” The station’s heart hisses admission. Mehaan must have been close by from the start. “If you’d wanted to keep my predecessors from going mad you could have, but this project is your secret; who benefits from their breaking if not you? Who taught Teferizen psychological warfare and who brought her subjects on which to test her skills? What happens on this station without your sufferance?”

  The soldier is an outline, red-black and faceless against the blaze of station intestines. “You credit me with a great deal.”

  “It comes down to this,” Nirapha says softly as the last commands trigger, “who would get more out of my survival and my sanity staying intact? To you I’m expendable, but to Teferizen I’m a way out.”

  “The ship isn’t complete—”

  The walls quiver. The whip-crack of contained gravity expanding, of—Nirapha thinks—engine-parts slotting and welding into a catalysis of birth.

  The soldier is calm, almost gentle. “If it vindicates you, you are not all wrong. Teferizen was always going to become an independent agent, and if you insist nothing passes on Srisunthorn without my permission then you can’t possibly believe I didn’t anticipate this. Perhaps not in this specific fashion, this particular sequence, but the result.”

  Beneath Nirapha’s feet the floor vibrates and unmoors. “What did you build her for?”

  “To impose ceasefires. When a force like Teferizen enters the fray, tacticians across a hundred empires will drive themselves mad with indecision. Will they capture it, suborn it, destroy it? Are there others like it and if yes how many, under whose control, are they all feral? For a time battles on uncountable worlds will pause.” Mehaan’s head tips forward, a gleam of eyes like bullets. “And it is essential that Teferizen acts on its own initiative, under the belief it’s winning free. A wild card is much more valuable to me at this juncture than a weapon I can command.”

  “That can’t be your grand finale.”

  “It’s not even the rising action.” The soldier makes a gesture, gloved hand the luster of oil slick. “I’m only telling you so much because I see nothing to be gained from your death. Beyond this you’re on your own, and I’m sorry that none of my warnings reached you.”

  Srisunthorn’s heart, howling, shudders apart.

  On Teferizen’s bridge it is silent. The bulkhead is seamless and pristine, as though its alloy was born for this and has never known another form. Where command interfaces should have been, the panels are featureless, accepting no input.

  “I’ll extend furniture as it is required,” Teferizen says. Her voice is everywhere but she’s chosen a humanoid chassis of the same material as her structure, tall and dense. “For your needs we’ll obtain supplies. I do apologize that I didn’t have time to appropriate the station’s, but giving birth to myself did take concentration.”

  Nirapha shivers. “You were listening in.”

  Teferizen’s eyes grow more defined, tapered lids and thick lashes the color of mercury. “I periodically synchronized with the station. I hardly meant to intrude. Make yourself comfortable, Specialist. I’ll have to see to the calibration of my drive and life supports.”

  “Take me home.”

  “Of course, Specialist. Where is it?”

  A waft of cardamom and jasmine. “It doesn’t exist anymore. It was you. The star that you were, the planet of your first self, the real reason I was selected. You are what’s left of Mahakesi.”

  A cold hand grazes over her arm, impersonal, the texture of new-made guns. “I’m afraid so, Specialist, and it brings me some joy that we can both finally say it aloud. But I can be your home again, if you let me; I can be everything, even what the admiral was to you.” The ship’s irises have filled, a shade or two darker than Nirapha’s. “Stay with me. We’ll belong to each other.”

  “And then what?” Nirapha whispers. Her throat is dry, her limbs frigid. “To what purpose?”

  The mouth sharpens into lips. They curve, slightly. “I am my own purpose.”

  Throned as though she captains the ship, Nirapha watches Srisunthorn’s final throes. Heat and terror, ice and despair. Not so unlike the dissolution of a world.

  When the station has gone black, she connects to Teferizen. Her feet sink into river mud and anthuriums push at her shins, waxy, hard-soft. Fuchsia on white, yellow on red, the colors that stay behind and remain the same as though she’s never left. She strains her ears, waiting, listening for voices that would speak a language fifty years dead.

  But out among the sunlit grass and murmuring rice, there is only the silence of herself.

  About the Author

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities real and speculative, and lots of space opera when she can get away with it. Her works can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures, and Solaris Rising 3. They are also reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Vol. 8, The Year’s Best Science and Fantasy 2014 and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women. Her novella Scale-Bright is forthcoming from Immersion Press.

  Water in Springtime

  Kali Wallace

  I woke in the darkness. My mother was leaning over me.

  “We have to leave,” she said. Her breath was warm on my face.

  The scent of dried flowers and wood-smoke drifted after her. She had spent the night by the fire, singing for a young mother and her sickly child. The child had not survived. Few did, in winter. Its skin was veined with rust-dark lines, its eyes hot with fever. There was nothing my mother could do but ease its pain. It would not be wise for us to linger.

  We wrapped ourselves in stolen furs and filled our packs with stolen food. It was not the first time we had slunk in the night.

  The ground was frozen and uneven, treacherous beneath the snow. There were no stars. Low, dark clouds had been hanging over the valley for days. The trees were laced with ice, but in that hollow, at least, they were still alive. The dead infant with its rust-veined skin was the only sign the blight had reached this far, but scouts who ventured south, darting into the mountains like nervous birds, claimed it was overtaking the forests.

  I did not speak until we were well away from the camp. “Where are we going?”

  My mother stopped but did not look at me. She removed a glove from one hand and reached for the trunk of a tree. The swarm burst from her fingertips in a shower of blue, clinging to her hand as marsh flies to cattle.

  We had traveled the length of the continent, from the sea in the north to these southern mountains, across deserts and swamps, through forests with trees so tall entire villages swayed in the branches, and everywhere we went, my mother’s swarm was a novelty. People called her a witch, but quietly, when they thought she would not hear. She always laughed. It was never a kind laugh. Some were awed; some were frighte
ned. Children were always delighted. They tried to catch the bright specks in their hands, giggling at the cool tickle on their skin, begging my mother to show them what her magic could do.

  My mother closed her hand. The swarm vanished.

  “South,” she said. “Into the mountains.”

  We followed a road so ancient it was a wound in the forest floor. The crumbling embankment was as high as my shoulder, and the exposed roots were tainted with red-orange rust. The scouts had not lied. The blight was spreading. In places sharp blades of metal and chunks of broken rock jutted from the black soil, mere suggestions of what the iron skeletons had been before they fell: wolves with teeth like daggers, birds with too many wings and too long claws, hulking bulls with curved horns. They might have been monstrous once, malformed nightmares raging in battle, but now they were sorry old things caught in root cages and rotting away to dust.

  There were no doubt human bones in the ground as well, but I saw none. It had been a very long time since the invaders and their metal beasts had swept north over the mountains. They were little more than legends now, stories shared by old women around campfires while children huddled at their feet. In the best stories, the oldest and grandest adventures, the mountain clans had repelled the invaders with the help of mysterious sorcerers who cast spells of befuddlement on the armies. They had tricked the metal beasts into attacking themselves and forced the hidden invaders to reveal their true forms. Recreating those great battles was a favorite game among the clan children. Magic versus metal, mindless beast versus cunning hunter, masked enemy versus bold warrior. It was as much fun to play the invaders—lurching, ill-formed, insect-like in their awkwardness—as it was to play the defenders.

  On the third day of our journey, I spotted delicate white flowers blooming from the eyes of an iron skull. Frosthands, the clansmen called them, for they had small, fat petals like a child’s fingers. In the stories, a single frosthand petal ground into tea was enough to poison any impostor from the south. The first sip, said the old women, would strip away the invader’s disguise, and the second would close his throat and stop his heart.

  That was another favorite game of the clan children: to pluck a petal and place it on your tongue, to cough and gag and laugh as your friends raced away shrieking.

  “Mother,” I said. She was, as always, several paces ahead. “Frosthands. It’s nearly spring.”

  My mother did not look back. “It happens every year. Stop wasting time.”

  I plucked a flower from the skull and rolled the soft green stem between my fingers. It was this way wherever we traveled, whatever the season. Long roads carried us from blight to plague to fever, whispered rumors leading us across the world, and always my mother was silent as a frozen lake when we were alone. She was formal but polite with strangers; they thought her stiff and strange and foreign. When asked about her homeland, she smiled thinly and agreed to whatever they chose to believe. Sometimes she changed her face to match their expectations, darkened her skin or made herself pale, became tall or short or fat or thin with a subtle twitch of her hand and a pass of the swarm. More often she didn’t bother. In truth nobody cared where she came from. The healing songs she traded for food and shelter were valuable and rare, and the quick blue swarm was a wonder.

  “You needn’t worry,” the old women said to me, when they noticed me at all. There were old women everywhere we went, their faces lined with the same creases, their eyes lit with the same laughter, their gray hair twisted in the same plaits beneath the same scarves. As a child I had coveted their smiles, empty but still more than my mother offered, but I found no comfort in their tolerance as I grew. “You haven’t a bit of her strangeness in you,” said the old women, and they meant it kindly.

  It was more true than the old women knew. I could not alter my face or the color of my skin. I could not make my hair curl or my arms lengthen. I was as pale as sand and slight as a child. I had small hands, small feet, no breasts, and my hair was a dirt-brown bird’s nest tangle. I could not sing or heal. I could not dress wounds and I did not know which herbs to mix into which medicines. Strangers mistook me for a boy. My mother rarely corrected them.

  Worst of all, I could not draw a swarm from my fingertips, no matter how often I lay awake in the darkness, hidden beneath my blanket, rubbing my fingers together and yearning.

  I dropped the frosthand blossom and ran to catch up.

  We followed the battlefield road until dusk. Weak snow turned to rain, and the ground churned into a sticking, sucking mud. As the sun set behind the clouds, we scrambled up the embankment, using a cage of iron ribs as a ladder, and turned into a forest of sweet-scented pines and chalky aspens. There was no trail. My mother’s swarm, pale and restful, ringed her like a crown in the twilight. Without it I would have been lost.

  Somewhere nearby, hidden by the towering trees, a river flowed. Its roar was muffled, but I felt it in my throat and the tips of my fingers.

  We made camp in a cradle of blight-reddened roots. The pines were large but sickly, flecked with shards of metal and veins of rust, branches weakened and cracking. Aside from the rumble of the river, the forest was silent. There were more felled metal beasts beneath the soil than there were living creatures in the underbrush.

  I dug into my pack to find a water skin, but my mother stopped me. “No. You stay here.”

  “I was only going for water.”

  My mother’s eyes were pale and unblinking. She flicked her tongue between her lips, snake-like and quick. Whatever she tasted in the air made her frown. “Your sisters were never this stupid. Stay away from the water. Tonight of all nights, Alis, do as you’re told.”

  She left, boots kicking up the moldering remains of fallen needles.

  I was too stunned to call after her. My mother used my name rarely and spoke of my sisters even less. They were dead, all of them. I didn’t even know their names.

  My mother’s pack was lying at the base of the tree. I folded it open to find our food. We had been traveling too quickly to hunt, but our supply of stolen meat and bread would soon be gone. I set aside three knives tucked in leather sheaths, a twist of thin rope, a handful of metal arrowheads. The food was at the bottom, and with it a bundle of dirty cloth I had never seen before.

  I pulled the odd bundle from the pack. It rattled and shifted as I unrolled it. I looked into the woods, into the shadows, but my mother was still away. I drew back the last folds.

  On the threadbare cloth lay the skeleton of a human child. Its skull was the size of a fist, its bones as white as fresh-fallen snow but except the fine lines of rust. There was no clinging flesh, no shriveled skin. It had been scoured clean.

  I had seen my mother strip the carcasses of rabbits and birds. When we had taken what we could eat and it was unwise to leave remains behind, she would loose the hungry swarm and watch as the specks crawled like maggots over the limp dead thing and gorged themselves, blue fading to purple, purple to red, swelling and finally popping like blood-fat mosquitoes as the last flesh fell away in charred curls.

  My hands shook as I wrapped the bones into their shroud and hid it again. I retreated to the far side of the camp, hugged my knees to my chest and waited.

  My mother returned only moments later, as though she had been watching from the forest. She said nothing. We did not speak for the rest of the night. After we ate, she sat by the fire and sharpened her knives one by one, a narrow shadow with flat pale eyes. The hiss of her blades on the whetstone drew shivers across my skin.

  In the morning my mother gave me a knife. It was a sturdy blade on a wooden haft, too large for my hand, undecorated but stained with smudges that might have been oil, might have been blood. The blade was black, free of rust, sharp enough to sting my fingertips at the lightest touch.

  I spread my fingers to match the stains, held it against my palm and tested its weight. It was the first gift my mother had ever given to me. I did not know if I should thank her.

  “Stop wasting time,
” said my mother, as I turned the blade. “We’re going to the river.”

  The clouds had broken during the night. Above the imperfect cathedral of pines the sky was brightening, but the aching cold lingered. We followed a creek into a steep ravine. Sunlight touched the hilltops, but the river was in shadow and blanketed in mist. All of the color the snow and rain had leached from the world was returning: the deep green of the pine boughs, the white and pink rocks, the blue sky. Even the rich brown trees twisted with blight were beautiful in the rising morning, with streaks of red and orange lacing the wood like a caravan matriarch’s jewelry.

  Beautiful, but frightening as well. As the weather warmed the infestation would spread, and by the end of the summer this hillside, this valley, this pretty green lean of pines and oaks crawling down to the river would be dead.

  At the river, my mother led me onto a flat boulder. Water curled in eddies and gulped beneath rocks, and thin ice crackled along the banks.

  My mother leaned close to speak over the river’s roar: “Your boots. Take them off.”

  I obeyed. The cold granite burned, and edges of knobby white crystals bit into my bare feet.

  My mother held out one arm and rolled up her sleeve. “Like this,” she said.

  I did the same, shivering.

  “Your knife,” said my mother, her lips moving against the shell of my ear. I looked at her, and she snapped, “Take out your knife.”

  She jerked the knife from its sheath and pressed the hilt into my hand, closed my fingers over the stained wood. With her other hand she grabbed my free wrist. She was wrapped around me, pressed warm against my back. We had not been so close since we had slept together on cold nights when I was young.

  “Like this,” she said. “Not too shallow. You have to bleed.”

  She sliced the blade across my arm. Blood welled from the wound and slid over my skin. I tried to pull free, but my mother shoved me forward until I stepped into the water. The shock of cold made me gasp and kick, but my mother was immovable at my back.