Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  He released her wrist. She saw the cold and unmoved expression of his face.

  Grief made her voice grow shrill, but no less lovely. She knelt, and clasped her shaking hands around his waist. “Come away with me, I pray you, Owen! I offer what all men have dreamed in vain! Our joys do not pall, cannot grow stale and wearisome like other joys, for we can change unhappy days not ever to have been! All great men, except for those who died in public places, in the witness of many eyes, are gathered there. All these great men, your peers, will cheer your coming to our halls. You shall hear the thousand poems, each grander than the last, which Dante and which Homer have composed in all the many centuries since they have dwelt among us, or sample the deep wisdom Aristotle has deduced in his thousand years of subtlest debate with Gotuma, Lao Tsu, Descartes, and John Locke.”

  He said sternly, “What chance have I to open fire, and survive? To gather up my scattered people, and lead them once again against a foe, which, if my bullets find their aim, will be, for now, leaderless and demoralized? What chance?”

  She rose slowly. “I was told to tell you, you have none.”

  “But you cannot know for certain. You know only that, in the version of the history you know, I did not fire, but went away with you.”

  She bowed her head and whispered a half-silent, “Yes.” But then she raised her head again. Her eyes now shone with unwept tears, and now she raised her hand to brush her straying hair aside. “But come with me, not because you must, but because I ask. Give up your world: you have lost it. You have failed. I have been promised that, should I return with you, great love would grow between us. We are destined. Is this ruined land so fair that you will not renounce it for eternal youth, and love?”

  “Renounce your world instead, and stay with me. Teach me all the secrets of your age, and we will sweep my enemies away with the irresistible weapons of the future. No? If you change the past, you cannot return to find the future that you knew, can you?”

  “It is so,” she said.

  “You will not renounce your world for love? Just so. Nor will I, mine. Now stand away, my dear. Before the sun is set, I mean to fire.”

  She whirled away from him in a shimmer of pale fabric, and strode to stand where she had been when first he saw her. Now she spoke in anger, “You cannot resist my will in this! I need but step a moment back ago, and play this scene again, till I find right words, or what wiles or arguments I must to bend your stiff neck, and persuade you from your folly. Foolish man! Foolish and vain man! You have done nothing to defy me! I shall make it never to have been, till finally you must change your mind!”

  Now he smiled. “Let my other versions worry what they shall do. I am myself; I shall concern myself with me. But I suspect I am not the first of me who has declined your sweet temptation; I deem that you have played this scene before. I cannot think that any words or promises could stay me from my resolve.”

  She hid her hands behind her face and wept.

  He said, “Be comforted. If I were not the man you so admire, then, perhaps, I would depart with you. But if you love me for my bravery, then do not seek to rob me of this last, brave, final, act.”

  She said from behind her hands, “It may be that you will survive; but the future which will come of that shall not have me in it.”

  And with these words, she vanished like a dream.

  The sun was sinking downward into night. Against the bloody glimmer of its final rays, the warship which held his enemies rose up in gloomy silhouette. Now he raised his weapon to his shoulder, took careful aim, and depressed the trigger. There came a clasp of thunder.

  And because he knew not what might come next, his mind was utterly at peace.

  AKHILA, DIVIDED

  by C.S. MacCath

  Akhila fell out of the sky on Yule’s Eve, by lunar reckoning, and blazed across the icy twilight like a bright thing thrown by a god. She thought about dying while she fell, gave in to the tug of the moon’s mass and plummeted toward its embrace in the peace that precedes a suicide. Who would know, she wondered, that she hadn’t lost her way somewhere between thermosphere and troposphere? Who would be able to tell from the scattered fragments of her corpse that she had chosen to challenge gravity in the hope of failure?

  It was only when she sensed a gathering of Organics around a bonfire that she questioned the wisdom of her choice. Her flight path would take her too near them; they might be killed when she crashed. So she slowed, turned and dropped, courting the ground and not crushing herself against it, the reflected light of planet rise illuminating her descent.

  She was still a rocket when they approached but was struggling toward a different shape. There was a three-dimensional face on the skin of her silvery surface, and the base of her frame had toes. It was snowing, the first flakes of a heavy fall, and the frozen water evaporated as it fell toward her, leaving the hillside wreathed in mist.

  They were naked from the waist up and led by a tall, youngish man with black hair that fell to his hips. She watched them climb the hill with part of her consciousness while she sought the weak, reflected light of the rising gas giant with the rest. It would be morning before she could morph completely, she thought. It was too dark to transform now.

  The youngish man turned to wait for the others, and then she knew he was a monk, guessed that all of them were monastics. The skin of his spine bore the mark of each path he had traveled; the Valknut, the Pentacle, the Yin and Yang. After the company crested the hill he knelt down in front of her, too close for his safety, and pressed the tips of his fingers into the frozen grass.

  “Don’t be afraid. I’m human.” She used the last of her energy to force breasts from her middle. “A woman.”

  “I’m certain you’re many things, and I’m sorry for all of them. What is your business here, Augment?”

  “My name is Akhila. I have a name.” I could have already been dead, she thought. “Do you have a name?”

  “I do.” He didn’t offer it to her. “And I asked you a question.”

  Organics weep when they feel this way, she thought, but I don’t have the energy for tears. Her eyes rolled left, then right. One of the monks was shivering; a fine, white dust covered his blond hair and shoulders. She imagined the snow was ash and then willed the vision away. “I’m not here to hurt you. I don’t do that anymore.”

  The youngish man tensed like a predatory cat, or perhaps like its prey. She wasn’t sure. The other monks glanced at one another and backed away. Then she heard a roar, faint at first, louder as it approached the hillside.

  “It’s a bomb!” The roaring man crested the hill and leveled the barrel of a hand weapon in her direction. His iron gray beard and hair whipped in the rising wind. “Vegar, get out of the way!” He gestured down the hillside with his free arm, and the mantle of symbols on his back and shoulders rippled as he turned.

  Vegar rose, his hair falling forward as he looked from her to the weapon and back again.

  “No, I’m a person.” Her desire for life rekindled then.

  “Father, wait.” Vegar lifted a hand to block the weapon.

  “You don’t know what it can do, what those things have done.”

  “She hasn’t threatened us.”

  “I said to get out of the way!”

  “Sigurd, I can’t let you murder her.”

  “I take refuge!” Akhila cried. They would take her in. They were obligated by their oaths. “I take refuge in the spiral that leads outward and in the spiral that leads inward. I take refuge in the one road of many paths and in the company of fellow travelers. I beg the sanctuary of this hostel.”

  “You have no right to sanctuary!” Sigurd shifted his aim to avoid the younger monk and fired at the half bomb, half woman, but Vegar turned in that instant and flung himself over her frame. A stream of energy passed above them as they fell, and the sharp odor of burning flesh rose from their bodies. By the time they separated, several members of the priesthood had blocked the older monk’s
path.

  Sigurd’s lips curled downward, and he spat on the ground, but he didn’t fire again. Instead, he handed the weapon to one of the monks in front of him. “I’ll call the Councilor and let her know we have a problem.” His voice was flat. “Somebody treat Vegar’s burns and make sure that thing doesn’t go anywhere.”

  * * *

  Vegar refused to leave the hillside while a gun was pointed at Akhila, so a medic was dispatched to bring him warmer clothes and treat him where he sat. He also refused pain medication, which would have encouraged sleep. For a while, he hoped she might get up from where he left her, but she remained supine for the rest of the night. She didn’t speak again either, but her eyes continued to roll left and right, up and down until she had cooled enough that ice gathered on their surfaces. Then she stopped moving altogether. After a time the monk with the weapon relaxed, and Vegar withdrew to a place within where there was no weariness and no pain.

  Akhila began to transform again when the sun rose. Her rocket body split into a head, torso and limbs while her silvery skin grew caramel-colored and soft. By mid-morning she looked like the person she claimed she was, a full-hipped, brown-eyed woman with black hair cropped short. “Thank you for saving me,” she said to Vegar when she was done.

  He stood up from the place where he had kept vigil and began to pace. “I’m not doing this for you.”

  “I didn’t think you were, but thank you, nonetheless.” Her voice was low and soft.

  Vegar’s wounds were still blistering; he could feel the puffy pockets of fluid ballooning against his bandages. His eyelids felt heavy, and his limbs were weak. The muscles in his jaw knotted. “What kind of refuge do you expect us to provide while your people are butchering ours?”

  “I don’t know what I expected, and it’s war, not butchery.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked up at him. Her eyes were full of ghosts. “Even so, I’ve done some terrible things.”

  Vegar stopped pacing, and his lip lifted back from his teeth. “The Valfather counsels us that the path of strength is to atone for our mistakes, not run from them. I won’t be your confessor.”

  “What would you have me do, go back to the worlds I’ve blighted and make amends with the dead?”

  “Is that why you’re really here, to ‘blight’ us?”

  “Don’t be stupid. I took refuge in good faith. If I had wanted to kill you, you would be dead.” She glanced at the other monk, who had lifted Sigurd’s weapon, and smirked. “Good luck with that. I’m not so vulnerable in the sunlight.”

  “I should have let our Godman shoot you when he had the chance.”

  “Well, I’ve certainly earned it. Would you like to see how?” Before he could answer, her body began to stretch, thin, and re-shape into a pair of figures; a smaller replica of herself and a small boy dangling in her grip over a rocky outcropping.

  The stone under the replica’s feet melted away, and as it dissolved, it was drawn up through her legs and torso, which pulsed in a slow but steady rhythm. Then her mouth opened wide, and a flood of tiny, transformed particles poured from her nose and lips onto the face of the terrified child.

  “Little boys go to school,” Akhila said. “Little boys go home. And everywhere this one goes, I go too, forever. Let me show you something else.” She morphed again. This time she became the boy, a few years older now. He was half silver and half skin. His wrists and ankles were bound, and his ears trickled blood. “He was a good carrier, and he’s still alive somewhere in a small, dark place I can’t find. But his people are dead; my nanoparticles bled from his pores and burned their flesh away. I went back and collected them before the bones were buried.” She resumed her human shape. “It was easier than making new ones.”

  “Why?” Vegar’s vocal cords constricted as he spoke, and his vision blurred. He thought he might vomit bile out of his empty stomach.

  “How can you call yourself a holy man and not know why? Were you born on this moon? Have you never left? How could your Godman identify me by my profession, point a weapon at me, refuse to use gender-specific pronouns when he talked about me and never have told you why?” Her voice was growing mechanical, resonant. It whined like metal on metal.

  Then Akhila froze and swung her head to the left. “Three people are coming. They want to take me indoors.” She surged upward until her body was tall, thin and bulbous at the top. Her caramel-colored skin melted to silver, and the bulb widened.

  “For later,” some indistinct part of her said, “when I can’t see the sun.”

  Sigurd came over the rise with a pair of armed nuns. As Akhila morphed back, he watched her, a rarified hatred on his face. Two bowls of steaming food smelling of grains and honey shook in his tight grip. “I’ve been on the line with the Councilor all night,” he told Vegar. “She agrees the bomb can’t be trusted, but she asked me not to destroy it. Says it might be useful to study. I think she’s putting the hospital at risk, but I’ve told her we’ll keep it here until the military arrives from off-moon.”

  Vegar watched Akhila stare back at him as she was led down the hill. “Can we really hold her with three guns? She didn’t seem afraid of the one you gave to Clautho.”

  “Those weapons are mine, and they are sufficient, but the Councilor is sending a militia detachment over with a little more firepower. We’ll be all right for a few days.” He handed the bowls to Vegar and his companion. “Here, I’ve brought you something to eat. I can’t believe nobody remembered to feed you.”

  Vegar wondered for a moment how the elder monk could be so certain of his guns, but the bowl in his hands was warm, fragrant and distracting. His mouth watered, and his stomach growled.

  “Vegar . . .” Sigurd began, and then sighed.

  “You were right. I’m sorry I stood in your way.”

  “What happened?”

  Vegar shook his head. “It’s not important.”

  Sigurd nodded. “You tried to do a good thing. I’m just glad it didn’t cost you more than a bad burn.”

  Vegar began to walk down the hillside while he ate. Sigurd followed. Akhila’s back was long, straight and brown in front of them, and her hips swayed back and forth like a copper bell when she walked. She looks human, he thought, and remembered what she had said of his mentor.

  “Are you all right?” Sigurd put his hand on Vegar’s shoulder.

  Vegar blinked and realized he had stopped. “I’m glad too,” he said, and started walking again.

  They shut Akhila in a root cellar and posted the nuns outside. Vegar slept the rest of the day and most of the night in the monastery’s infirmary, where his bandages were changed at regular intervals and ointment was applied to his burns. While he slept, he dreamed Akhila was sitting in the dark, statue-still to conserve energy. He woke wondering what she thought he should know that he didn’t.

  In the early pre-dawn light, he went to the arboretum and paced the Stages of the Pentacle, pausing at each elemental shrine to remember its place in the natural world, its place in his body. The winterbound trees creaked above him in the wind, and a flock of sleepy birds hooted down at him from their icy perches. He closed his eyes at the southern shrine and listened awhile as the perpetual flame warmed his face and hands.

  The sky brightened. Vegar left the flame and approached the crest of the star where an empty stone vessel represented the human spirit. He usually offered a prayer here, of gratitude or charity, but this morning he felt as hollow as the bowl itself. He had prevented his Godman from protecting the people in his care and had saved a torturer of children, a mass murderer. Then Akhila the rocket and Akhila the woman blended together like watercolor paint in his thoughts, and he remembered she’d said she didn’t do those things anymore.

  Vegar wondered for a moment if Akhila’s nanobody made her less human, less worthy of redemption. He’d heard of radical augments, machines with human minds, and believed she could have killed them if she had wanted to in spite of Sigurd’s powerful guns. There was somethi
ng about the tone of her anger that sounded old, deep, and unhealed, some wound that seeped and poisoned. Did she hope to cleanse it here?

  There would be no answers to these questions in meditation, he knew, so he strode away from the shrine and made his way to the root cellar. Four men with heavy guns were posted outside the door, who refused to allow him in without an escort. Vegar relented after a brief exchange, and two of the guards accompanied him inside. Akhila was motionless as he dreamed she would be, sitting cross-legged on the cellar’s work bench, still naked as she had been the previous day. Her eyes opened, and a faint, blue light shone from them, the only light in the room.

  * * *

  “Hello, Brother Vegar. How are your burns?” Akhila heat-scanned his chest and arms as he closed the door. The flow of blood to his wounds was good. He was probably in pain, but he would heal.

  “Why were you so angry with me? What don’t I know?”

  She smiled. “You’re awfully brave to be so naive in mixed company.”

  “I didn’t come here for you to insult me.” Vegar turned to go and put his hand on the doorknob.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but a hint of humor remained in her voice. “I shouldn’t provoke you. It was good of you to ask at all.”

  His hand remained on the door, but he looked in her direction again. Her scent receptors registered nervous sweat, the medicine on his burns and the stale residue of burned incense. It was a pleasant counterpoint to the gunmetal stink of the guards’ weaponry, so she allowed herself a moment to soak it in. While she did, she thought about making conversation, perhaps asking about his faith. But then she remembered what she had shown him and what he had said to her.