Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  Her entire body trembled as she rose to her feet, but not with fear. Standing all but naked before the lord, her nature awoke within her. The nature her father fought so hard to keep in check, for fear of what it would do. Male or female, whichever form they took, all of their caste felt it. For males, in the wet season, the passion was different. Safer. Kinder.

  Neniza was female, in the dry season, and she was not kind.

  She reached out for the feathered serpent, bold with the power that was in her, and drew him toward her, onto her, as she laid herself once more on the altar. Even had this not been their purpose here today, he could not have resisted her. She cried out as he entered her, not in pain, but in triumph.

  As he moved above her, she felt her power envelop him. Women of other castes rarely if ever wanted what the males of her kind gave them—the strange, unnerving children they birthed—but it was a gift, freely given. Neniza’s rage inverted that power: she gave nothing, and took everything.

  Blood dripped from the lord’s mouth where he had pierced his tongue. She licked it off her own lips, tasting his life in that blood, feeling it in his body as he rode her. Feeling it flow from him into her. The sensation was intoxicating, exhilarating; she grew drunk with that power, and a laugh built deep within her.

  The feathered serpent shuddered above her, spine rippling like water. She put one hand on the scales of his chest to support his weight.

  And he froze, staring at the fingers of her hand.

  He tore himself free of her more quickly than she could follow, slithering down from the altar to the temple floor. “Show yourself to me!”

  His voice struck her like thunder. However much she despised him, however much he despised her people, she was a woman of his domain, and he was her lord. She could not refuse his command. The power of it forced the mask of flesh from her at last, revealing what lay beneath.

  Skin and muscle gave way to wood. The soft, lush body of a young alux woman dissolved, leaving behind the roughly-hewn form of a xera, like the toys children would sometimes carve for themselves before their mothers saw and took them away to be burned. In shape like a person, but not of flesh, and each hand bore only four fingers, mute testimony to the lesser, inferior, outcaste nature of her kind. She could hide anything with the mask, except that.

  He bellowed something in Court Speech, and with a clattering rush the ocelotlaca were there, weapons out. Neniza did not care. She knelt on the floor where his command had left her, and she laughed.

  “I am no Rain Bride to be sacrificed,” she said, proudly baring her wooden face to them all. “There is no skin to flay from me, no heart to cut out. Your rains can come or not; I do not care.”

  “I will sacrifice you anyway,” the quetzalcoatl spat, his words almost unintelligible through his accent. “I will burn you, as I burned your people.”

  Her rage could not overcome the power forcing her to kneel, but she snarled and jerked against it. “My father told me what you did. Yes, we live—you will never be rid of us. Not so long as one male of our kind lives to sire more xera on your women. We are always fertile. It is our gift.” She laughed again. “But I am not male. Not since I heard the tale of what you did, and knew what it is to want to kill. Where my father gives, I take. And I have taken your life. Within three days you will be dead. Burn me; I am of wood. But I have no blood from which to take your power back.”

  They bound her there inside the temple, and gagged her so she could mock the lord no more. He sent the priests to choose another maiden from the crowd at the base of the mound; Neniza watched as the quetzalcoatl took her on the altar, then listened as they finished the ritual outside. The girl asked for her family to be cared for. The lord promised to honor her request. Then they cut out her heart and flayed the skin from her to bring the rains, because that was how the world worked; everything that mattered was paid for with sacrifice.

  Listening to the drums that followed in the wake of the girl’s screams, Neniza wondered if her own blasphemy had tainted the ritual beyond repair. Would there be drought, famine, death?

  She did not care. All that mattered was that the lord would not be there to see it.

  The signs were already beginning to show when he returned that night. His sleek face was drawn, his delicate scales dulled. The spark that had been in him was in Neniza now, and nothing could take it back.

  But they tried. They dragged her from the temple mound back to the palace, and there they ritually abused her wooden body, piercing and splintering it as if she were an enemy noble captured in battle. Neniza laughed at the ironic honor.

  She could not bleed, though, and so in the end they did as she knew they must.

  The quetzalcoatl stepped in front of her as they hauled her up. She could see the pyre looming large behind him, and shuddered uncontrollably. Watching her fear, the lord said in grim tones, “You may yet escape it. Restore me, and I will spare both you and your father.”

  Her father? Neniza would have spat in his face, if her wooden mouth had any moisture in it. She was dry, so dry. Her father was a coward, soft and wet and weak. She would give nothing for his life.

  “Take her,” the quetzalcoatl snarled at last, his smooth voice distorted with rage and despair.

  They dragged her to the pyre and bound her at its peak, and soon the flames danced up around her, licking eagerly at her dry wooden form. She began screaming, then, and did not stop.

  But as she burned she saw, through the smoke and the wavering air, the lord’s withered feathers, ghosting to the ground. And no one, not even Neniza, could tell then if she was screaming or laughing.

  SEVEN SCENES FROM

  HARRAI’S SACRED MOUNTAIN

  by Jennifer Crow

  I.

  I first saw the sacred mountain as I lay in the blood between my mother’s legs. There are those who say this cannot be; that an infant sees only blurs, vague hints of color and form. But to this day, the smell of blood makes my stomach churn, and I remember—as clear as the sky on a summer morning—the broken pyramid, dark in the frame of the window. I recall the hushing sound of silk, a whisper from the coming night as they covered her body, and the sound of my father’s weeping. He never cried again—never in my presence.

  XX.

  The mountain watches over fools, and the peasants say a man who sleeps in the mountain’s arms will come home a poet or a madman. Nothing is said of women; perhaps they are thought too practical to fall to the mountain’s embrace. Or it may be that the fools who call themselves wise do not believe a woman can be a poet, and that her madness is an ordinary thing, built of thwarted love and the steady drone of days. But my first love went up to the mountain. She cut short her hair and put on her brother’s clothes, and I watched her figure grow smaller as she walked up the mountain’s flanks. She dwindled to nothing. I waited at the window for a day, two days, five. But only the mountain remained. I never saw my love again.

  LXXV.

  The summer the great ship appeared in the sky, the mountain burned. Smoke crowned it, blurred the sharp edges of its broken face. The thick, oily sap of the red-leaved thorn tree flared slowly, but burned long. For months the thorn trees died in flame, and the silver body of the ship reflected them, the scarlet and orange light reflected like a searing glance. We watched the black line creep down the mountain’s sides, the promise of destruction ever closer. On the last day of summer, with rain only a memory on our parched skin and in the dry wells and dusty courtyards, the chief judge laid himself on the steps of the temple and his eldest son folded his mantle of office and set it out of reach. And then that son took a knife born from the mountain’s heart and cut his father open. We watched the life flow out of him. In three days the rains came, a season too late, and as we buried the chief judge, the ship reflected the red silk of his bier and vanished. But unlike my love, it would return.

  CCCLX.

  My first wife insisted we move house. She saw the mountain as a threat; she never believed that I wou
ld not run to it some night and leave her bereft. She wept tears stained red by the tarrac-earth she used to highlight her eyes. She lay in front of the door at night, even after we moved, in case the mountain-fever came upon me unawares. I confessed to her that I was no true poet, that I had no desire to risk madness for art. But she clung to the ties of my robe whenever we left the house, and even the slow festivals of the winter months I could not attend alone. Such lack of trust dooms a life. The swelling sickness ate her from within; four days after her death, I returned to my family’s home.

  MC.

  Though I swore never to approach the sacred mountain, once I broke that word, or near enough. My daughter, my light, fell ill, some slow poison in her heart that wasted her bit by bit, a fading out of life. Her skin smelled of flowers past their bloom, her hands felt cold against my fingers. I sang to her, all the old songs, the ones that sob in the throat. The chief priest came, and the chief judge, and they smoked the room with incense and ordered the spirit of illness to depart. The herb-woman brought poultices and tisanes, and still my daughter faded like a painting left too long in the sun. At last I walked out into the red sunrise and turned to face the sacred mountain. It waited, the snow on its brow like a sign of age and wisdom. I walked into the hills, listening for its song, but I heard only the birds and the wind, and at last, by the stream that runs down from the eastern side, I stopped and drank and then turned back. By the time I reached my home, the girl had died. And I took up my pen and began to write.

  MCCXXV.

  When the snows melt and the wind from the south freshens, an old man’s thoughts turn to war. Thus it was that I lifted the red banner with my brothers, and we marched—with the young men in a frenzy of passion beside us, and their lovers trailing behind—around the skirts of the mountain toward the city of Xerane, with its tarnished silver domes and equally tarnished morals. Under the broken dagger of the mountain, we slew their finest men and were slain in turn. In the end, they tore down our red banners and sent the survivors home. They asked for nothing but peace; we gained nothing but honor. The mountain waited in my window, a fire burning near the peak. I watched it for days, but it never died and never spread. When I showed it to the chief judge, he said the souls of our dead burned on the mountain.

  MML.

  The sky ship has returned with its brothers, and their red lights are searing away the top of the sacred mountain. Shorn like a harlot, it still watches over the city. But my time is past, and I wish I had not lived to see this day. I close this book, and stroke its red cover, and lay it aside. Tonight, I will wait for the mountain’s last call. And when that voice comes to me, I will turn my face one last time toward the remnants of its glory, and walk into darkness on its slopes.

  OBLIVION: A JOURNEY

  by Vandana Singh

  Memory is a strange thing.

  I haven’t changed my sex in eighty-three years. I was born female, in a world of peace and quietude; yet I have an incomplete recollection of my childhood. Perhaps it is partly a failure of the imagination that it is so hard to believe (in this age of ours) that there was once such a place as green and slow as my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was the last of the great world-shells to fall, so any memory of childhood is contaminated with what came after: the deaths of all I loved, the burning of the cities, the slow, cancerous spread of Hirasor’s culture-machines that changed my birth-place beyond recognition.

  So instead of one seamless continuum of growing and learning to be in this world, my memory of my life is fragmentary. I remember my childhood name: Lilavati. I remember those great cybeasts, the hayathis, swaying down the streets in a procession, and their hot, vegetable-scented breath ruffling my hair. There are glimpses, as through a tattered veil, of steep, vertical gardens, cascading greenery, a familiar face looking out at me from a window hewn in a cliff—and in the background, the song of falling water. Then everything is obscured by smoke. I am in a room surrounded by pillars of fire, and through the haze I see the torn pages of the Ramayan floating in the air, burning, their edges crumpling like black lace. I am half-comatose with heat and smoke; my throat is parched and sore, my eyes sting—and then there are strange, metallic faces reaching out to me, the stuff of my nightmares. Behind them is a person all aflame, her arms outstretched, running toward me, but she falls and I am carried away through the smoke and the screaming. I still see the woman in my dreams and wonder if she was my mother.

  In my later life as a refugee, first on the world of Barana and after that, everywhere and nowhere, there is nothing much worth recalling. Foster homes, poverty, my incarceration in some kind of soulless educational institution—the banality of the daily struggle to survive. But there are moments in my life that are seared into my mind forever: instants that were pivotal, life-changing, each a conspiracy of temporal nexuses, a concatenation of events that made me what I am. That is not an excuse—I could have chosen a different way to be. But I did not know, then, that I had a choice.

  * * *

  This is the first of those moments: the last time I was a woman, some ninety years ago in my personal time-frame. I was calling myself Ila, then, and doing some planet-hopping, working the cruisers and blowing the credits at each stop. I found myself on Planet Vilaasa, a rich and decadent world under the sway of the Samarin conglomerate. I was in one of those deep-city bars where it’s always night, where sunshine is like a childhood memory, where the air is thick with smoke, incipient violence and bumblebees. I don’t remember who I was with, but the place was crowded with humans, native and off-world, as well as mutants and nakalchis. There was a bee buzzing in my ear, promising me seven kinds of bliss designed especially for my personality and physical type if only I’d agree to let the Samarin Corporate Entity take over half my brain. I swatted it; it fell into my plate and buzzed pathetically, antennae waving, before it became non-functional. Somehow I found this funny; I still remember throwing back my head and laughing.

  My fingers, slight and brown, curved around my glass. The drink half drunk, a glutinous purple drop sliding down the outer surface. Reflected on the glass a confusion of lights and moving shapes, and the gleam, sudden and terrifying, of steel.

  There was a scream, and the sound of glass breaking that seemed to go on for ever. This was no barroom brawl. The raiders were Harvesters. I remember getting up to run. I remember the terrified crowd pressing around me, and then I was falling, kicked and stepped upon in the stampede. Somehow I pushed myself to safety under a table next to a stranger, a pale woman with long, black hair and eyes like green fire. She looked at me with her mouth open, saying one word:

  “Nothen . . .”

  A Harvester got her. It put its metal hands around her throat and put its scissor-like mouth to her chest. As she bled and writhed, it rasped one long word, interspersed with a sequence of numbers.

  Her body turned rigid and still, her face twisted with horror. Her green eyes froze in a way that was simultaneously aware and locked in the moment of torment. It was then that I realized that she was a nakalchi, a bio-synthetic being spawned from a mother-machine.

  The name of the mother-machine is what pushes a nakalchi into the catatonic state that is Shunyath. When they enter Shunyath they re-live the moment when that name was spoken. Since the nakalchis are practically immortal, capable of dying only through accident or violence, Shunyath is their way of going to the next stage. Usually a nakalchi who has wearied of existence will go to one of their priests, who will put the candidate in a meditative state of absolute calm and surrender. Then the priest will utter the name of the mother-machine (such names being known only to the priests and guarded with their lives) so that the nakalchi may then contemplate eternity in peace.

  For first-generation nakalchis, Shunyath is not reversible.

  That is when I realized that this woman was one of the ancients, one of the nakalchis who had helped humankind find its way to the stars.

  So for her, frozen in the state of Shunyath, it would seem as though
she was being strangled by the Harvester all the rest of her days. No wonder she had asked me for Nothen, for death. She had known the Harvesters had come for her; she had known what they would do. I remember thinking, in one of those apparently timeless moments that terror brings: somebody should kill the poor woman. She was obviously the target of the raid.

  But to my horrified surprise the Harvester turned from her to me, even as I was sliding away from under the table to a safer place. While the Harvester had me pinned to the floor, its long, flexible electrodes crawled all over my skin as it violated my humanness, my woman-ness, with its multiple limbs. Through the tears and blood I saw myriad reflections of myself in those dark, compound eyes, from which looked—not only the primitive consciousness of the Harvester, but the eyes of whoever manipulated it—the person or entity who, not content with finding their target, fed like a starving animal on the terror of a bystander. In those eyes I was a stranger, a non-person, a piece of meat that jerked and gibbered in pain. Then, for a moment, I thought I saw the burning woman from my memories of childhood, standing behind the Harvester. This is death, I said to myself, relieved. But the Harvester left me a few hair-breadths short of death and moved on to its next victim.

  I don’t know how many they killed or maimed that night. The nakalchi woman they took away. I remember thinking, through the long months of pain and nightmares that followed, that I wish I had died.

  * * *

  But I lived. I took no joy in it. All that gave my mind some respite from its constant seething was a game I invented: I would find the identity of the person responsible for the Harvester raid and I would kill them. Find, and kill. I went through endless permutations of people and ways of killing in my head. Eventually it was no longer a game.