Clockwork Phoenix 5

by Brennan, Marie

  You like to eat Black Forest cake. Did you know it’s called Schwarzwaldkuchen in German, named for the Schwarzwald, the spooky forested mountains where wolves eat people in fairy tales? Well, it is. Think about it—you are what you eat, right?

  Black forests are everywhere. I found one in India, just at the border of Nepal. You’d think it would contain bamboo. You’d be right. But would you think it would have a yaksha riding a unicorn? Because it didn’t have that. I did see a yaksha†, though. He seemed a little perturbed and offered me a wish if I’d go away. Maybe one day I’ll tell you what I plan to wish. Maybe if you’re nice to me, I might even share the wish with you.

  What would you wish for, brother dearest?

  Love always,

  Your adoring and most devoted sister Jyoti

  P.S. Are you ever coming home?

  P.P.S. Do you still look for me in the stars?

  *As per Dr. M. P. Bhatt’s Bestiary of the Dark Dreaming. (No, I didn’t make that up. Go do some research if you don’t believe me.)

  †He had your face. And your weird string-bean body. And that stupid smile you get when you think you’ve done something clever.‡

  ‡Was it you? Are you really a yaksha? You can tell me. §Or maybe you’re a bhoot. Your hair’s certainly ragged enough. Do you ever wash it?

  §Seriously, are you ever coming home?

  * * *

  Sanjay didn’t look at Kiran but instead at the bottle of black wine. “You’re not the only one who wants something else.”

  “But—” Kiran began, not certain what it was she protested. She did want something else, it was true. Just perhaps not the same thing he wanted?

  Rekha observed them, her head cocked at an angle like a bird’s. A bird of prey, thought Kiran, quills taut with the same undisguised predacious glee. “You still have not told me what you truly want of me,” Rekha nearly purred.

  Kiran took another sip of tea, grateful for the few seconds the act bought her. “I could stay here, too,” she said at last, each syllable as false as the cheer with which she imbued it.

  “But you don’t want to,” Rekha pressed.

  “No,” Kiran admitted. No, she didn’t.

  “And I don’t want you to, either,” Sanjay said. “Really, it’s all right.” He poured himself another glass of the prismatic black wine. “Beetle wings.”

  “You have a decent eye,” Rekha said, nodding.

  Was she saying the wine really was made of insect bits? How?

  Kiran chided herself. None of that mattered. “What—what will I tell the elephants?”

  “They’ll still have you,” Sanjay said. “It’ll be fine.” He picked up another bottle, one filled with flickering orange flame, and began to question Rekha about the contents.

  “What are you so afraid of?” Rekha murmured so only Kiran could hear.

  The word came back to her in a flurry of whispers: alone. Alone, alone, alone. She had never been alone, not really. Not in any way that counted.

  Kiran didn’t reply. Why waste her breath when Rekha already knew the answer?

  * * *

  Bindul hung his head and tried not to make eye contact with any of the customers he passed. He’d failed. He’d failed to distract even a single vendor long enough to snatch a laddoo or a samosa or, at worst, an unripe mango. He’d always been a mediocre thief, and today, with his leg still sprained and tender to the touch, it was a wonder he’d escaped without notice.

  When he neared the nook where his sister waited, his cheeks flamed, and his heart spasmed painfully. How could he have failed her?

  Resentment burned in him. He didn’t want this responsibility! Wasn’t it bad enough to have been cast out by his parents without another person to worry about, too?

  But the image of Sri’s round, happy face, her eyes lively even through the haze of sand, beckoned.

  They would find something, he told himself. They had to.

  Sri hopped out of the space then, throwing herself at him. “Look what I have!” she sang. Little fingers pushed a greasy bundle into his.

  “I told you to stay put,” Bindul said, but he couldn’t really be mad.

  “I was hungry. I told you,” she said, blithe as ever. “I already ate two of the laddoos.”

  Taking care that no one was watching, Bindul loosened the rag. There, hastily wrapped and somewhat flavored with sand, were three crushed samosas, four soft yellow laddoos, and a heaping handful of saffron pulao, the grains of rice mashed together.

  “I can take care of us, too,” Sri informed him, earnest.

  “I guess you can at that,” said Bindul, trying not to laugh. Who was the burden now?

  * * *

  Skin torn from unscarred skin,

  Wounds weeping,

  O brother, you swore it,

  You said you would stay

  For always.

  Yet under the million-eyed

  Gaze of the star-flecked sky

  Unstitched, ripped asunder,

  By thread of night looped through

  The eye of a starlight needle,

  The eye, the eye,

  The unseeing eye,

  We are unbound for all time,

  Brother and sister,

  Kith and kin,

  Alone against the relentless dark.

  —from “The Star-Crossed Sister’s Lament”

  * * *

  Sanjay had chosen, and now Kiran scowled at him. “All the things you could have asked for, and you wanted to get away from me?”

  “Yes,” he said, his jaw clenched. “It feels like you’re always there, always in my face. When I turn around, there you are. It’s as if we were sewn together at birth, and I can’t breathe.”

  The remark slashed at her like teeth. How could he even suggest that?

  Kiran growled. “You’re lucky you have me to keep you from messing up.” How many hasty barters had she saved him from? How many unwanted suitors had she chased off? And this was how he thanked her?

  “You two are linked in time and space and destiny,” said Rekha, with a firm shake of her head. “I could no more separate you than rob the moon of his starry consorts.”

  Instead, she offered another wish. “Choose.”

  Kiran shoved a fist against her quaking lips. She thought of all the times when no one watched, all the myriad ways to be invisible. She felt frail as the cosmos newly born, still cradled in the gods’ arms and suckling the sweet Ocean of Milk.

  “You don’t need me,” Sanjay insisted. “Not like this.” Then he pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m tired. Aren’t you?”

  She pretended not to feel his gaze on her, but of course she did. Of course she felt the link between them. It was far older than they were.

  “This is not your first birth,” Rekha muttered, her eyes narrowed to slits of focus. “Nor, if you do not act, will it be your last.”

  Memories rushed through Kiran, of other lives, other loves. Of the dark thread and shining needle that trussed two siblings together.

  Cut the cord.

  If she did that, she would be alone, truly alone once and for all. In the dark. Adrift.

  She couldn’t even imagine life severed. How would she breathe? No Sanjay to bring her sun-ripened bananas straight from the tree. No Sanjay to spin her stories about fools whose sloth and stupidity won the day as reasons why he shouldn’t do his half of their chores. No Sanjay to comfort when the woman he fancied chose someone else. No Sanjay, no Sanjay, no Sanjay. It felt like drowning in the beetle wine, black and heavy as ink.

  It felt like sticky gray spider silk enveloping her in a cocoon, with nothing and no one else to hold her up when she stumbled, unable to see. Kiran didn’t know if her legs could bear her own weight.

  She couldn’t cut the cord. She couldn’t. No Sanjay meant no home, no place that was hers. Alone.

  But if she didn’t, Sanjay would hate her. His eyes would go dark again and turn from her. And she would lose all those things, anyway
.

  “Scissors,” said Kiran at last, rubbing her temples. “Where are the scissors that could cut the cord?”

  Rekha reached behind the counter. “I’m certain I can find a pair that will do.”

  The gleaming copper grip could have been forged for Kiran’s fingers, it fit so well. She opened and closed the crystal blades. Open, shut. Open, shut. They reminded her of beetle wings unfurling. She despised them.

  Then the cord, too, was in her hand, thread black as wine, black as night, stitching her heart to Sanjay’s.

  The scissors glinted. All it would take was one snip. Just one.

  I can’t.

  “Do it,” whispered Sanjay. He swallowed so hard, she could see it. Rekha merely smiled.

  Kiran ignored them both. He was hers! Her brother.

  “Please,” Sanjay added, and the cord shivered.

  Kiran looked at him, from his pleading face to the cord joining them and finally to the pair of scissors, its blades opening like jagged wings in flight.

  * * *

  I leaped at him then, fangs bared and flashing. My brother reached out to meet me, his claws bursting forth, eager to rend flesh from bone.

  Once we were done tearing each other to shreds, all that remained was a black space encompassing everything, a void lit only by the luminous gifts we’d cast aside in our hunger to win. If you’re feeling poetic, you might even call it the first sky.

  I made a wish aloud never to be alone. What use to me was the sticky gray spider’s web of solitude in a universe of never-ending black?

  “Yes,” he said, seeing no reason to lie. “I’ll be by your side always.”

  And so he gave me the stars.

  And I, I gave him the moon.

  It’s my favorite love story.

  Two Bright Venuses

  Alex Dally MacFarlane

  Year 1 inferior Venus sets on Shabatu 15 and after three days rises on Shabatu 18.

  Inferior Irunn sent the first transcription of inferior Venus’s voice to superior Irunn a week after launch, adding, “It gets louder every day. What do you hear?”

  The reply wasn’t immediate.

  Inferior Irunn sat strapped into the console chair of her spacecraft, watching inferior Venus. It grew in her screen. Overlaid data on the left and right sides of the screen showed her craft’s speed (as expected), trajectory (on target), summary updates on superior Irunn’s craft (on target to superior Venus), solar panel status (powering well), life-support system status (no surprises), summary readouts from the fifteen instruments already examining inferior Venus (steadily collecting data), transmissions from ground control (none new), global news updates (she had stopped caring as soon as she launched and her ears filled with inferior Venus). In the centre: inferior Venus as seen by the naked eye. The screen allowed her to enhance it, to see the planet up close across the electromagnetic spectrum. She preferred to wait.

  It shone bigger and brighter than in any terrestrial sighting, but it was not yet a planet, not yet filling her screen.

  To be the first to see its size, its white-yellow skies—

  Inferior Irunn slept every night-cycle in her chair, closed her eyes in the console lights and drifted into dreams, and woke to that bright, glowing light.

  The reply from superior Irunn arrived. “How did you write it? I tried—it falls apart; I can’t use words for it.” And an admission: “I’m glad it’s not just me. I started worrying …”

  Inferior Irunn paused, unsure, before replying, “I listened. I wrote. I—it felt like Venus wrote, like my hand was its input screen.” Saying it frightened her.

  It took a long time, far longer than the currently tiny time lag in transmissions between their two spacecraft, for superior Irunn’s reply: “I don’t think I want to try writing it again.”

  “I don’t think,” inferior Irunn said, “I can not write it. It fills me.” She stopped.

  Silence from superior Irunn.

  Inferior Irunn left her chair to do the day’s exercises, to eat, to manually check the algae banks that extended the oxygen tanks’ lifespan, to look at Earth through a small screen. It was pretty. Inferior Venus sang in her ears.

  * * *

  Year 5 superior Venus vanishes E on Kislimu 27 and after two months, three days appears W on Shabatu 30.

  Two spacecraft, two trajectories to two bright Venuses.

  Superior Irunn remembered being Irunn and drinking the air of the two Venuses in a two-chambered, two-tongued bottle, hearing a voice like yellow clouds as she swallowed.

  Two pilots, precisely paired like the planets.

  The Babylonian astrologers had thought they observed one planet when they wrote their observations about superior and inferior Venus in the reign of King Ammisaduqa in the seventeenth century BCE. The Greeks had been less sure. Only the work of Arab scholars in Aleppo and Baghdad had determined the true nature of Venus: two Venuses sharing the same orbit, two worlds of identical size. The astrolabes of the legendary Mariam Al-Ijliya in the tenth century CE were the first to depict the two Venuses in solid gold and gilt, bright as those bodies in the sunrise and sunset skies. The names superior Venus and inferior Venus were taken from the ancient Babylonian tablets excavated and translated by Baghdad scholars. It took centuries of fine-tuning to understand the co-orbital configuration of the Venuses. It took the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries to determine how to send a crewed mission. Probes sent alone and to only one planet stopped functioning at the exosphere. Distant flybys sent back inconsistent data. Hao Yiting, a scientist in Shanghai, had a theory. At the height of its funding in the first half of the twentieth century, the Chinese Space Agency sent two probes, superior Dongfang Shuo and inferior Dongfang Shuo, coordinated to arrive at the two Venuses at the same time. Hao Yiting’s theory proved true: the probes collected data and samples of the Venusian air. Together, the space agencies of China and Baghdad created the crewed mission.

  Creating paired people took years.

  To drink the air of two Venuses, to split into two people—that was successful. To stay sane was not. Irunn was the first.

  Superior Irunn reread inferior Irunn’s transcription: yellow low in leaving skies, your—

  She swiped the screen empty. It unsettled her. It was wrong: What she heard was not words, not translatable, not even transcribable unless she wrote a series of sounds unlike any language she knew—not the Norwegian of her first years, not the Shanghainese and Mandarin she had learned to live with her Chinese relatives in Shanghai and get sex reassignment surgery there, not the Arabic she had learned in the Chinese Space Agency astronaut program. The sound of superior Venus filled her ears, as constant as the whirs and clicks of the spacecraft. She could try to learn it. She shuddered.

  “This is what destroyed the first probes,” she said to herself, staring at the transmit icon. She should talk to inferior Irunn. She should talk to ground control. “This is what made even the Dongfang Shuo data difficult.”

  She wanted to see Venus. She always had—she had joined the astronaut program to walk on another world, any world, anything to get to space—and now superior Venus sang her to it. Ground control might recall the mission if they feared for her survival.

  She stayed silent.

  The growing glow of superior Venus lit her as she slept.

  * * *

  Year 9 inferior Venus sets on Adar 12 and after two days rises on Adar 14.

  “What worries me,” superior Irunn said, unexpectedly, “is that we’re hearing different songs or sounds or—”

  Inferior Irunn looked up from her fourth transcription, her longest yet: started as six lines that repeated at least hourly. It had developed over the week. Only a week? Inferior Irunn glanced at the date on her left screen. A week and a day. Superior Irunn’s face overlaid the date. It had been six days since they spoke of anything other than the standard updates.

  “What do you hear?” inferior Irunn asked.

  “Sounds.” Distress folded sup
erior Irunn’s mouth. “I can’t write it! It’s like—”

  Over a hundred and sixty lines now. Inferior Irunn wondered where to stop it. The six lines repeated throughout the transcription, ordering the other lines. Some of those were starting to repeat.

  “That’s the problem,” superior Irunn said, calmer. “It’s like no noise I’ve heard. It’s too—you know how when a noise is so loud, you feel it? Your whole body feels the vibrations in your bones?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel that, but far more complex than someone playing a song too loud. How can you write a sound like that?”

  “It’s not—”

  If inferior Irunn wrote a thousand lines, would she be close to seeing the full pattern? She swiped it aside to think about what superior Irunn had said.

  “It’s not like that for me,” she said. “I don’t feel it in my bones.”

  “I feel it on my skin, too,” superior Irunn said. “I feel like I’m an instrument, being played.”

  “Like I’m keys,” inferior Irunn said, “or an old brush being used to write. You know how writing is very visual? Beautiful writing, that is, not briefing lists or tests. The best poetry uses the right words and multiple meanings and builds it up into imagery, yes, and it uses the image, the shape of the poem. Seeing the shape of what I’m writing is making me understand it better. I think.”

  “Huh.”

  “Maybe,” inferior Irunn said after a pause, “you need to dance what you’re hearing.”

  “In zero gravity?” superior Irunn asked, grinning. “I’m not good even on the ground.” They laughed as close together as the time lag allowed.

  The grin gave inferior Irunn a feeling of discomfort at seeing herself, but not herself. It quickly slid away.

  “I’m not a poet,” she said. I’m. We’re. “I can constantly see it, sort of. My eyesight is fine”—one of the numerous tests they had been subjected to after swallowing the air of the Venuses, after splitting—“but how I hear it is shaped.”