Damn. There was still a possibility that Tecolli could have found the body earlier, but if so, why hadn’t he called the militia at once? Why had he waited so much?
Disposing of evidence, I thought, my heart beating faster and faster.
I should have arrested Tecolli. But instead I had clung to my old ideals, that torture was abhorrent and that a magistrate should find the truth, not wring it out of suspects. I had been weak.
Now . . .
I had him watched. He had been making phone calls. It was only a matter of time before he had to make some kind of move.
I sighed. Once a mistake had been made, you might as well drain the cup to the dregs. I’d wait.
It was a frustrating process. The afternoon passed and deepened into night. I attempted some Buddhist meditations, but I could not focus on my breath properly, and after a while I gave this up as a lost cause.
When the announcement came, I was so coiled up I knocked down the handset trying to pick it up.
“Your Excellency? This is Unit 6 of the militia. Target is on the move. Repeat: target is on the move.”
I grabbed my coat and rushed out, shouting for my aircar.
I met up with the aircar of Unit 6 in a fairly seedy neighbourhood of Fenliu: the Gardens of Felicity, once a middle-class area, had sunk back to crowded tenements and derelict buildings, sometimes abandoned halfway through their construction.
I had a brief chat with Li Fai, who was heading the militia: Tecolli had left the Black Tez Barracks and taken the mag-lev train which crisscrossed Fenliu. One of the militiamen had followed Tecolli on the mag-lev, until he alighted at the Gardens of Felicity station, making his way on foot into a small, almost unremarkable shop on Lao Zi Avenue.
Both our aircars were parked at the corner of Lao Zi Avenue, about fifty paces from the shop – and Tecolli had not emerged from there.
I looked at the three militiamen, checking that they had their service weapons, and drew my own Yi Sen semi-automatic. “We’re going in,” I said, arming the weapon in one swift movement, and hearing the click as the bullet was released into the chamber.
I stood near the closed door of the shop, feeling the reassuring weight of my gun. At this late hour the street was almost deserted, and any stray passers-by gave us a wide berth, not keen on interfering with Xuyan justice.
Li Fai was standing on tiptoe, trying to look through the window. After a while he came down, and raised three fingers. Three people, then. Or more. Li Fai had not seemed very certain.
Armed? I signed, and he shrugged.
Oh well. There came a time when you had to act.
I raised my hand, and gave the signal.
The first of the militiamen kicked open the door, yelling, “Militia!” and rushed inside. I followed, caught between two militiamen, fighting to raise my gun amidst memories of the War, of pressing myself in a doorway as loyalists and rebels shot at each other on Tenochtitlán’s marketplace —
No.
Not now.
Inside, everything was dark, save for a dimly-lit door; I caught a glimpse of several figures running through the frame.
I was about to run through the door in pursuit, but someone – Li Fai – laid a hand on my shoulder to restrain me.
I remembered then that I was a District Magistrate, and that they could not take risks with my life. It was frustrating, but I knew I had not been trained for this. I nodded to tell Li Fai I’d understood, and watched the militiamen rush through the door.
Gunshots echoed through the room. The first man who had entered fell, clutching his shoulder. A few more gunshots – I could not see the militiamen; they’d gone beyond the door.
A deathly silence settled over the place. I moved cautiously around the counter, and stepped through the door.
The light I had seen came from several hologram pedestals, which had their visuals on, but not their audios. On the floor were scattered chips – I almost stepped on one.
In the corner of the wood-panelled room was the body of a small, wizened Xuyan woman I did not know. Beside her was the gun she’d used. The militia’s bullet had caught her in the chest and thrown her backwards, against the wall.
Tecolli was crouching next to her, in a position of surrender. Two militiamen stood guard over him.
I smiled, grimly. “You’re under arrest.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Tecolli said, attempting to pull himself upright.
“Sedition will suffice,” I said. “Resisting the militia is a serious crime.” As I said this, my gaze, roaming the room, caught one of the images on a hologram pedestal, an image that was all too familiar: a Chinese man dressed in the grey silk robes of a eunuch, gradually fading and being replaced by thirteen junks on the ocean.
Papalotl’s holograms.
Things that should not have been copied, or sold elsewhere than in Papalotl’s workshop.
I remembered the missing chips in Papalotl’s pedestals, and suddenly understood where Tecolli’s wealth had come from. He had been stealing her chips, copying them and selling the copies on the black market And Papalotl had found out – no doubt the reason for the quarrel.
But for him it was different: he was an Eagle Knight, and subject to harsher laws than commoners. For a crime such as this he would be executed, his family disgraced. He’d had to silence Papalotl, once and for all.
He’ll suck everything out of you.
Mahuizoh could not have known the truth behind his words, back when he had spoken them to me. There was no way he could have known.
Tecolli’s eyes met mine, and must have seen the loathing I felt for him. All pretence fled from his face. “I did not kill her,” he said. “I swear to you I did not kill her.” He looked as though he might weep.
I spat, from between clenched teeth, “Take him away. We’ll deal with him at the tribunal.”
Yi Mei-Lin, one of the clerks, entered my office as I was typing the last of my preliminary report.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Still protesting his innocence. He says he found her already dead, and only used the extra half-hour to wipe off any proof that he might have tampered with the holograms – removing his fingerprints and wiping the pedestals clean.” Yi Mei-Lin had a full cardboard box in her hands, with a piece of paper covering it. “These are his things. I thought you might want a look.”
I sighed. My eyes ached from looking at the computer. “Yes. I probably should.” I already knew that although we’d found the missing chips in the black-market shop, the swan hologram’s audio chip had been nowhere to be found. Tecolli denied taking it. Not that I was inclined to trust him currently.
“I’ll bring you some jasmine tea,” Yi Mei-Lin said, and slipped out the door.
I rifled through Tecolli’s things, absentmindedly. The usual: wallet, keys, copper yuans – not even enough to buy tobacco. A metal lip-plug, tarnished from long contact with the skin. A packet of honey-toasted gourd seeds, still wrapped in plastic.
A wad of papers, folded over and over. I reached for it, unwound it, and stared at the letters. It was part of a script – the swan’s script, I realized, my heart beating faster. Tecolli had been the voice of the hummingbird, and Papalotl’s script was forcefully underlined and annotated in the margins, in preparation for his role.
The swan – Papalotl’s voice – merely recited a series of dates: the doomed charge of the Second Red Tezcatlipoca Regiment during Xuya’s Independence War with China; the Tripartite War and the triumph of the Mexica-Xuyan alliance over the United States.
And, finally, the Mexica Civil War, twelve years ago: the Xuyan soldiers dispatched to help restore order; the thousands of Mexica feeing their home cities and settling across the border.
The swan then fell silent, and the hummingbird appeared. It was there that Tecolli’s role started.
Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun, has just risen, and outside my cell I hear the priests of Huitzilpochtli chanting their hymns as they prepare the altar for my
sacrifice.
I know that you are beyond the border now. The Xuyans will welcome you as they have welcomed so many of our people, and you will make a new life there. I regret only that I will not be there to walk with you —
Puzzled, I turned the pages. It was a long, poignant monologue, but it did not feel like the other audio chips I’d heard in Papalotl’s workshop. It felt . . .
More real, I thought, chilled without knowing why. I scanned the bottom of the second-to-last page.
They will send this letter on to you, for although they are my enemies they are honourable men.
Weep not for me. I die a warrior’s death on the altar, and my blood will make Tonatiuh strong. But my love is and always has been yours forever, whether in this world of fading flowers or in the god’s heaven.
Izel.
Izel.
Coaxoch’s fiancé.
It was the Third Bi-Hour when I arrived at The Quetzal’s Rest, and the restaurant was deserted, all the patrons since long gone back to their houses.
A light was still on upstairs, in the office. Gently, I pushed the door open, and saw her standing by the window, her back to me. She wore a robe with embroidered deer, and a shawl of maguey fibres – the traditional garb of women in Greater Mexica.
“I was waiting for you,” she said, not turning around.
“Where’s Mahuizoh?”
“I sent him away.” Coaxoch’s voice was utterly emotionless. On the desk stood the faded picture of Izel, and in front of the picture was a small bowl holding some grass – a funeral offering. “He would not have understood.”
She turned, slowly, to face me. Two streaks of black makeup ran on either side of her cheeks: the markings put on the dead’s faces before they were cremated.
Surprised, I recoiled, but she made no move towards me. Cautiously, I extended Tecolli’s crumpled paper to her. “Papalotl stole the original letter from you, didn’t she?”
Coaxoch shook her head. “I should have seen her more often, after we moved here,” she said. “I should have seen what she was turning into.” She laid both hands on the desk, as stately as an Empress. “When it went missing, I didn’t think of Papalotl. Mahuizoh thought that maybe Tecolli —”
“Mahuizoh hates Tecolli,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Coaxoch said. “I went to Papalotl, to ask her whether she’d seen it. I didn’t think.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. Her skin had gone red under the makeup. “When I came in, she opened the door to me – naked, and she didn’t even offer to dress herself. She left me downstairs and headed for her workshop, to finish something, she said. I followed her.”
Her voice quavered, but she steadied it. “I saw the letter on her table – she’d taken it. And when I asked her about it, she told me about the hologram, told me we were going to be famous when she sold this, and the Prefect’s Office would put it where everyone could see it . . .”
I said nothing. I remained where I was, listening to her voice grow more and more intense, until every word tore at me.
“She was going to . . . sell my pain. To sell my memories just for a piece of fame. She was going —” Coaxoch drew a deep breath. “I told her to stop. I told her it was not right, but she stood on the landing, shaking her head and smiling at me – as if she just had to ask for everything to be made right.
“She didn’t understand. She just didn’t understand. She’d changed too much.” Coaxoch stared at her hands, and then back at the picture of Izel. “I couldn’t make her shut up, you understand? I pushed and beat at her, and she wouldn’t stop smiling at me, selling my pain —”
She raised her gaze towards me, and I recognised the look in her eyes: it was the look of someone already dead, and who knows it. “I had to make her stop,” she said, her voice lower now, almost spent. “But she never did. Even after she fell she was still smiling.” There were tears in her eyes now. “Still laughing at me.”
I said at last, finding my words with difficulty, “You know how it goes.”
Coaxoch shrugged. “Do you think I care, Hue Ma? It ceased to matter a long time ago.” She cast a last, longing glance towards Izel’s picture, and straightened her shoulders. “It’s not right either, what I’ve done. Do what you have to.”
She did not bend, then, as the militia came into the room – did not bend as they closed the handcuffs over her wrists and led her away. I knew she would not bend on the day of her execution either, whatever the manner of it.
As we exited the restaurant, I caught a glimpse of Mahuizoh among the few passers-by who had gathered to watch the militia aircar. His gaze met mine, and held it for a second – and there were such depths of grief behind the spectacles that my breath caught and could not be released.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Justice has to be done.” But I did not think he could hear me.
Back at the tribunal, I sat at my desk, staring at my computer’s screensaver – one of Quetzalcoatl’s butterflies, multiplying until it filled the screen. There was something mindlessly reassuring about it.
I had to deal with Tecolli, had to type a report, had to call Zhu Bao to let him know his trust had not been misplaced and that I had found the culprit. I had to –
I felt hollow, drained of everything. At last I moved, and knelt before my small altar. Slowly, with shaking hands, I lit a stick of incense and placed it upright before the lacquered tablets. Then I sat on my knees, trying to banish the memory of Coaxoch’s voice.
I thought of her words to me: it ceased to matter a long time ago.
And my own, an eternity ago: the War does that to you.
I thought of Papalotl, turning away from Mexica customs to forget her exile and the death of her parents, of what she had made of her life. I saw her letting go of the railing, slowly falling towards the floor; and saw Coaxoch’s eyes, those of someone already dead. I thought of my turning away from my inheritance, and thought of Xuya, which had taken me in but not healed me.
Which could never heal me, no matter how far away I ran from my fears.
I closed my eyes for a brief moment, and, before I could change my mind, got up and reached for the phone. My fingers dialled a number I hadn’t called for years but still had not forgotten.
The phone rang in the emptiness. I waited, my throat dry.
“Hello? Who is this?”
My stomach felt hollow – but it wasn’t fear, it was shame. I said in Nahuatl, every word coming with great difficulty, “Mother? It’s me.”
I waited for anger, for endless reproaches. But there was nothing of that. Only her voice, on the verge of breaking, speaking the name I’d been given in Tenochtitlán, “Oh, Nenetl, my child. I’m so glad.”
And though I hadn’t heard that name in years, still it felt right, in a way that nothing else could.
THE TEAR
Ian McDonald
British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, a chapbook novella Tendeleo’s Story, Ares Express, and Cyberabad, as well as two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His novel River of Gods was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, The Little Goddess, was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. His most recent book is another new novel that’s receiving critical raves, Brasyl. Coming up is a new collection, Cyberabad Days. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and he now lives and works in Belfast. He has a website at lysator. liu.se/^unicorn/mcdonald/.
The lyrical and dazzling story that follows is filled with enough wild new ideas, evocative milieus, bizarre characters, and twists and turns of plot to fill many another author’s four-book trilogy. He takes us to a quiet waterworld to follow a young boy setting out on a voyage of discovery that will take him to many unexpected destinations both across the greater universe and in the hidden depths of his own soul, one that will embroil him in the deadly clash of galactic empires and take him home the long way to find that enemies can be as close and familiar as friends.
PTEY, SAILING
ON THE NIGHT that Ptey voyaged out to have his soul shattered, eight hundred stars set sail across the sky. It was an evening at Great Winter’s ending. The sunlit hours raced toward High Summer, each day lavishly more full of light than the one before. In this latitude, the sun hardly set at all after the spring equinox, rolling along the horizon, fat and idle and pleased with itself. Summer-born Ptey turned his face to the sun as it dipped briefly beneath the horizon, closed his eyes, enjoyed its lingering warmth on his eyelids, in the angle of his cheekbones, on his lips. To the Summer-born, any loss of the light was a reminder of the terrible, sad months of winter and the unbroken, encircling dark.
But we have the stars, his father said, a Winter-born. We are born looking out into the universe.
Ptey’s father commanded the little machines that ran the catamaran, trimming sail, winding sheets, setting course by the tumble of satellites; but the tiller he held himself. The equinoctial gales had spun away to the west two weeks before and the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water. Twin hulls cut through the ripple-reflections of gas flares from the Temejveri oil platforms. As the sun slipped beneath the huge dark horizon and the warmth fell from the hollows of Ptey’s face, so his father turned his face to the sky. Tonight, he wore his Steris Aspect. The ritual selves scared Ptey, so rarely were they unfurled in Ctarisphay: births, namings, betrothals and marriages, divorces and deaths. And of course, the Manifoldings. Familiar faces became distant and formal. Their language changed, their bodies seemed slower, heavier. They became possessed by strange, special knowledges. Only Steris possessed the language for the robots to sail the catamaran and, despite the wheel of positioning satellites around tilted Tay, the latitude and longitude of the Manifold House. The catamaran itself was only run out from its boathouse, to strong songs heavy with clashing harmonies, when a child from Ctarisphay on the edge of adulthood sailed out beyond the outer mole and the feet of oil platforms to have his or her personality unfolded into eight.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection Page 107
