Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone

by Ian McDonald

  Helicopter blades rattled from the walls of the College of Theoretical Physics and then retreated across the Central Canal. The silence in the warm, dimly lit little faculty cell was profound. At last, Serejen said, “I think we could go now.”

  On the street, cold stabbed even through the quilted layers of Serejen’s great-coat. He fastened the high collar across his throat and still he felt the breath crackle into ice around his lips. Seriantep stepped lightly between the half bricks and bottle shards in nothing more than the tunic and leggings she customarily wore around the college. Her motes gave her full control over her body, including its temperature.

  “You should have put something on,” Serejen said. “You’re a bit obvious.”

  Past shuttered cafés and closed up stores and the tall brick faces of the student Hearths. The burning tram on the Tunday Avenue junction blazed fitfully, its bitter smoke mingling with the eternal aromatic hydrocarbon smog exhaled by Jann’s power plants. The trees that lined the avenue’s center strip were folded down into tight fists, dreaming of summer. Their boot heels rang loud on the street tiles.

  A darker shape upon the darkness moved in the narrow slit of an alley between two towering tenement blocks. Serejen froze, his heart jerked. A collar turned down, a face studying his—Obredajay from the Department of Field Physics.

  “Safe home.”

  “Aye. And you.”

  The higher academics all held apartments within the Conservatorium and were safe within its walls; most of the research staff working late would sit it out until morning. Tea and news reports would see them through. Those out on the fickle streets had reasons to be there. Serejen had heard that Obredajay was head-over-heels infatuated with a new manfriend.

  #

  On the intersection of Tunday Avenue and Yaskaray Wharf, a police robot stepped out of the impervious dark of the arches beneath General Gatoris Bridge. Pistons hissed it up to its full three meters; green light flicked across Serejen’s retinas. Seriantep held up her hand, the motes of her palm displaying her immunity as a Prebendary of the Clade. The machine shrank down, seemingly dejected, if plastic and pumps could display such an emotion.

  A solitary tea shop stood open on the corner of Silver Spider Entry and the Wharf, its windows misty with steam from the simmering urns. Security eyes turned and blinked at the two fleeing academics.

  On Tannis Lane, they jumped them. There was no warning. A sudden surge of voices rebounding from the stone staircases and brick arches broke into a wave of figures lumbering around the turn of the alley, bulky and shouldering in their heavy winter quilts. Some held sticks, some held torn placards, some were empty handed. They saw a man in a heavy winter coat, breath frosted on his mouth-shield. They saw a woman almost naked, her breath easy, unclouded. They knew in an instant what she saw. The hubbub in the laneway became a roar.

  Serejen and Seriantep were already in flight. Sensing rapid motion, the soles of Serejen’s boots extended grips into the rime. As automatically, he felt the heart-numbing panic-rush ebb, felt himself lose his grip on his body and grow pale. Another was taking hold, his flight-or-fight Aspect; his cool, competent emergency service Fejannen.

  He seized Seriantep’s hand.

  “With me. Run!”

  Serejen-Fejannen saw the change of Aspect flicker across the tea shop owner’s face like weather as they barged through his door, breathless between his stables. Up to his counter with its looming, steaming urns of hot hot water. This tea-man wanted them out, wanted his livelihood safe.

  “We need your help.”

  The tea-man’s eyes and nostrils widened at the charge of rioters that skidded and slipped around the corner in to Silver Spider Entry. Then his hand hit the button under the counter and the shutters rolled down. The shop boomed, the shutters bowed to fists striking them. Rocks banged like gunfire from metal. Voices rose and joined together, louder because they were unseen.

  “I’ve called the police,” Seriantep said. “They’ll be here without delay.”

  “No, they won’t,” Fejannen said. He pulled out a chair from the table closest the car and sat down, edgily eying the grey slats of the shutter. “Their job is to restore order and protect property. Providing personal protection to aliens is far down their list of priorities.”

  Seriantep took the chair opposite. She sat down wary as a settling bird.

  “What’s going on here? I don’t understand. I’m very scared.”

  The café owner set two glasses of maté down on the table. He frowned, then his eyes opened in understanding. An alien at his table. He returned to the bar and leaned on it, staring at the shutters beyond which the voice of the mob circled.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t be killed.”

  “That’s not what I’m scared of. I’m scared of you, Serejen.”

  “I’m not Serejen. I’m Fejannen.”

  “Who, what’s Fejannen?”

  “Me, when I’m scared, when I’m angry, when I need to be able to think clearly and coolly when a million things are happening at once, when I’m playing games or hunting or putting a big funding proposal together.”

  “You sound… different.”

  “I am different. How long have you been on our world?”

  “You’re hard. And cold. Serejen was never hard.”

  “I’m not Serejen.”

  A huge crash—the shutter bowed under a massive impact and the window behind it shattered.

  “Right, that’s it, I don’t care what happens, you’re going.” The tea-man leaped from behind his counter and strode toward Seriantep. Fejannen was there to meet him.

  “This woman is a guest in your country and requires your protection.”

  “That’s not a woman. That’s a pile of… insects. Things. Tiny things.”

  “Well, they look like mighty scared tiny things.”

  “I don’t think so. Like you said, like they say on the news, they can’t really die.”

  “They can hurt. She can hurt.”

  Eyes locked, then disengaged. The maté-man returned to his towering silos of herbal mash. The noise from the street settled into a stiff, waiting silence. Neither Fejannen nor Seriantep believed that it was true, that the mob had gone, despite the spearing cold out there. The lights flickered once, twice.

  Seriantep said suddenly, vehemently, “I could take them.”

  The tea-man looked up.

  “Don’t.” Fejannen whispered.

  “I could. I could get out under the door. It’s just a reforming.”

  The tea-man’s eyes were wide. A demon, a winter-grim in his prime location canal-side tea shop!

  “You scare them enough as you are,” Fejannen said.

  “Why? We’re only here to help, to learn from you.”

  “They think, what have you got to learn from us? They think that you’re keeping secrets from us.”

  “Us?”

  “Them. Don’t scare them any more. The police will come, eventually, or the Conservatorium proctors. Or they’ll just get bored and go home. These things never really last.”

  “You’re right.” She slumped back into her seat. “This fucking world… Oh, why did I come here?” Seriantep glanced up at the inconstant lumetubes, beyond to the distant diadem of her people’s colonies, gravid on decades of water. It was a question, Fejannen knew, that Serejen had asked himself many times. A post-graduate scholar researching space-time topologies and the cosmological constant. A thousand-year-old post-human innocently wearing the body of a twenty-year-old woman, playing the student. She could learn nothing from him. All the knowledge the Anpreen wanderers had gained in their ten-thousand-year migration was incarnate in her motes. She embodied all truth and she lied with every cell of her body. Anpreen secrets. No basis for a relationship, yet Serejen loved her, as Serejen could love. But was it any more for her than novelty; a tourist, a local boy, a brief summer loving?

  Suddenly, vehemently, Seriantep leaned across the table to take Fejannen’s face
between her hands.

  “Come with me.”

  “Where? Who?”

  “Who?” She shook her head in exasperation. “Ahh! Serejen. But it would be you as well, it has to be you. To my place, to the Commonweal. I’ve wanted to ask you for so long. I’d love you to see my worlds. Hundreds of worlds, like jewels, dazzling in the sun. And inside, under the ice, the worlds within worlds within worlds… I made the application for a travel bursary months ago, I just couldn’t ask.”

  “Why? What kept you from asking?” A small but significant traffic of diplomats, scientists, and journalists flowed between Tay and the Anpreen fleet around Tejaphay. The returnees enjoyed global celebrity status, their opinions and experiences sought by think-tanks and talk shows and news-site columns, the details of the faces and lives sought by the press. Serejen had never understood what it was the people expected from the celebrity of others but was not so immured behind the fortress walls of the Collegium, armoured against the long siege of High Winter, that he couldn’t appreciate its personal benefits. The lights seemed to brighten, the sense of the special hush outside, that was not true silence but waiting, dimmed as Serejen replaced Fejannen. “Why didn’t you ask.”

  “Because I thought you might refuse.”

  “Refuse?” The few, the golden few. “Turn down the chance to work in the Commonweal? Why would anyone do that, why would I do that?”

  Seriantep looked long at him, her head cocked slightly, alluringly, to one side, the kind of gesture an alien unused to a human body might devise.

  “You’re Serejen again, aren’t you?”

  “I am that Aspect again, yes.”

  “Because I thought you might refuse because of her. That other woman. Puzhay.”

  Serejen blinked three times. From Seriantep’s face, he knew that she expected some admission, some confession, some emotion. He could not understand what.

  Seriantep said, “I know about her. We know things at the Anpreen Mission. We check whom we work with. We have to. We know not everyone welcomes us, and that more are suspicious of us. I know who she is and where she lives and what you do with her three times a week when you go to her. I know where you were intending to go tonight, if all this hadn’t happened.”

  Three times again, Serejen blinked. Now he was hot, too hot in his winter quilt in this steamy, fragrant tea shop.

  “But that’s a ridiculous question. I don’t love Puzhay. Nejben does.”

  “Yes, but you are Nejben.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you…” Serejen bit back the anger. There were Aspects hovering on the edge of his consciousness like the hurricane-front angels of the Bazjendi Psalmody; selves inappropriate to Seriantep. Aspects that in their rage and storm might lose him this thing, so finely balanced now in this tea shop. “It’s our way,” he said weakly. “It’s how we are.”

  “Yes, but…” Seriantep fought for words. “It’s you, there, that body. You say it’s different, you say it’s someone else and not you, not Serejen, but how do I know that? How can I know that?”

  You say that, with your body that in this tea shop you said could take many forms, any form, Serejen thought. Then Fejannen, shadowed but never more than a thought away in this besieged, surreal environment, heard a shift in the silence outside. The tea-man glanced up. He had heard it too. The difference between waiting and anticipating.

  “Excuse me, I must change Aspects.”

  A knock on the shutter, glove-muffled. A voice spoke Fejannen’s full name. A voice that Fejannen knew from his pervasive fear of the risk his academic Aspect was taking with Seriantep and that Serejen knew from those news reports and articles that broke through his vast visualisations of the topology of the universe and that Nejben knew from a tower top cell and a video screen full of stars.

  “Came I come in?”

  Fejannen nodded to the tea-man. He ran the shutter up high enough for the bulky figure in the long quilted coat and boots to duck under. Dreadful cold blew around Fejannen.

  Cjatay bowed, removed his gloves, banging rime from the knuckles and made the proper formalities to ascertain which Aspect he was speaking to.

  “I have to apologize; I only recently learned that it was you who were caught here.”

  The voice, the intonations and inflections, the over-precisions and refinements—no time might have passed since Cjatay walked out of Manifold House. In a sense, no time had passed; Cjatay was caught, inviolable, unchangeable by anything other than time and experience. Lonely.

  “The police will be here soon,” Seriantep said.

  “Yes, they will,” Cjatay said mildly. He looked Seriantep up and down, as if studying a zoological specimen. “They have us well surrounded now. These things are almost never planned; what we gain in spontaneity of expression we lose in strategy. But when I realized it was you, Fejannen-Nejben, I saw a way that we could all emerge from this intact.”

  “Safe passage,” Fejannen said.

  “I will personally escort you out.”

  “And no harm at all to you, politically.”

  “I need to distance myself from what has happened tonight.”

  “But your fundamental fear of the visitors remains unchanged?”

  “I don’t change. You know that. I see it as a virtue. Some things are solid, some things endure. Not everything changes with the seasons. But fear, you said. That’s clever. Do you remember, that last time I saw you, back in the Manifold House. Do you remember what I said?”

  “Nejben remembers you asking, where are they migrating to? And what are they migrating from?”

  “In all your seminars and tutorials and conferences, in all those questions about the shape of the universe—oh, we have our intelligences too, less broad than the Anpreen’s, but subtler, we think—did you ever think to ask that question: Why have you come here?” Cjatay’s chubby, still childish face was an accusation. “You are fucking her, I presume?”

  In a breath, Fejannen had slipped from his seat into the Third Honorable Offense Stance. A hand on his shoulder; the teashop owner. No honor in it, not against a Lonely. Fejannen returned to his seat, sick with shuddering rage.

  “Tell him,” Cjatay said.

  “It’s very simple,” Seriantep said. “We are refugees. The Anpreen Commonweal is the surviving remnant of the effective annihilation of our subspecies of Panhumanity. Our eight hundred habitats are such a minuscule percentage of our original race that, to all statistical purposes, we are extinct. Our habitats once englobed an entire sun. We’re all that’s left.”

  “How? Who?”

  “Not so much who, as when,” Cjatay said gently. He flexed cold-blued fingers and pulled on his gloves.

  “They’re coming?”

  “We fear so,” Seriantep said. “We don’t know. We were careful to leave no traces, to cover our tracks, so to speak, and we believe we have centuries of a headstart on them. We are only here to refuel our habitats, then we’ll go, hide ourselves in some great globular cluster.”

  “But why, why would anyone do this? We’re all the same species, that’s what you told us. The Clade, Panhumanity.”

  “Brothers disagree,” Cjatay said. “Families fall out, families feud within themselves. No animosity like it.”

  “Is this true? How can this be true? Who knows about this?” Serejen strove with Fejannen for control and understanding. One of the first lessons the Agisters of the Manifold House had taught was the etiquette of transition between conflicting Aspects. A war in the head, a conflict of selves. He could understand sibling strife on a cosmic scale. But a whole species?

  “The governments,” Cjatay said. To the tea-man, “Open the shutter again. You be all right with us. I promise.” To Serejen, “Politicians, some senior academics, and policy makers. And us. Not you. But we all agree, we don’t want to scare anyone. So we question the Anpreen Prebendaries on our world, and question their presence in our system, and maybe sometimes it bubbles into xenophobic violence, but that’s fine, tha
t’s the price, that’s nothing compared to what would happen if we realized that our guests might be drawing the enemies that destroyed them to our homes. Come on. We’ll go now.”

  The tea-man lifted the shutter. Outside, the protestors stood politely aside as Cjatay led the refugees out on to the street. There was not a murmur as Seriantep, in her ridiculous, life-threatening house clothes, stepped across the cobbles. The great Winter Clock on the tower of Alajnedeng stood at twenty past five. The morning shift would soon be starting, the hot-shops firing their ovens and fry-pots.

  A murmur in the crowd as Serejen took Seriantep’s hand.

  “Is it true?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  He looked up at the sky that would hold stars for another three endless months. The aurora coiled and spasmed over huddling Jann. Those stars were like crystal spearpoints. The universe was vast and cold and inimical to humanity, the greatest of Great Winters. He had never deluded himself it would be otherwise. Power had been restored, yellow street light glinted from the helmets of riot control officers and the carapaces of counterinsurgency drones. Serejen squeezed Seriantep’s hand.

  “What you asked.”

  “When?”

  “Then. Yes. I will. Yes.”

  Torben, melting

  THE ANPREEN SHATTER-SHIP blazed star-bright as it turned its face to the sun. A splinter of smart-ice, it was as intricate as a snowflake, stronger than any construct of Taynish engineering. Torben hung in free-fall in the observation dome at the center of the cross of solar vanes. The Anpreen, being undifferentiated from the motes seeded through the hull, had no need for such architectural fancies. Their senses were open to space; the fractal shell of the ship was one great retina. They had grown the blister—pure and perfectly transparent construction-ice—for the comfort and delight of their human guests.