Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  But the rest of the cluster accepts your induction without comment, and you come to realise that perhaps each of them entered ansiblehood much the same way. A shared grief, a common wound. Being ripped apart so that there’s something to put back together. Your hurt made you all the more dear to them.

  Sometimes you wonder if Mingyue was a trap, deliberately set, sieving each batch of new mages to find more recruits for the ansible program. But dwelling on the idea will only bring you ruin. You love Ren. You love her as much as you possibly can.

  * * *

  The starmage has made steamed dumplings and other small eats. Curved glass sprawls along one wall of her quarters, exposing starfield marred by the shape of the Imperial Executioner’s ship. Her red dress clings to her, embroidered brocade interspersed with windows of translucent silk. Sequins glitter in the low yellow light. In comparison, you are clad in the shapeless grey that is the only thing populating your wardrobe.

  You bite into soft dumpling flesh and the hollows under your tongue fill with fragrant soup. The flavour is so rich a shiver passes through you. “How is it?” Officer Ouyang asks.

  “Incredible.”

  You almost didn’t come. Twice you walked in sight of her door and both times you turned back. On the third jaunt, you decide there’s nothing for her to trap you in: You are innocent of involvement in the murder, and your worst secret has already been revealed. So you go in.

  “Can men be ansibles?” she asks you.

  “Of course. Anyone with the gift can. It just takes practice.” You toy with a piece of chicken while you study the small shifts in her face.

  “They used to say only women of a certain closeness could do it. That was how they explained it.”

  “That’s not true. There’s nothing special learning it. They just don’t want to teach anyone else.” You add, deliberately, “You could do it with a man if you wanted.”

  She ducks her head. “I wouldn’t.” A blush creeps across her cheeks. “I could not be that close with a man.”

  You had suspected this, and you wonder why she’s telling you this now, at this fraught juncture, when you have been on this station for years.

  “I used to watch the ansible clusters in the temple,” she says very carefully. “I envied you, you know.”

  “Envied us?” Your chopsticks hit the table with a clink. You gesture at her massive quarters and the finery that she wears, the entitlement that was ripped from you when they caught you with your hand between Mingyue’s legs. “What is there to envy?”

  Her teeth tear at her bottom lip. “I only meant the way you could walk around so easily holding hands, touching each other.” She looks down at her own hands and says slowly, “I wanted something like that too.”

  You know exactly what she means. You refuse to show her sympathy. “So why didn’t you? It’s easy to be recruited. You know how.”

  She lowers her head still further. “I couldn’t. I would bring eternal shame to my family. It’s different for me.”

  “Unlike me, who was a farmer’s daughter?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I did not know of your background.”

  You push your chair back. “Ansible Xin,” she says, as you stand. “I apologise. I did not mean to offend.”

  A starmage should not be apologising to an ansible, it upsets the order of the world. “There’s nothing to envy about our lives,” you say. “If only you knew what we have endured. What we must continue to endure.”

  “I apologise.”

  There’s a note of misery to Officer Ouyang’s face that pulls at you. You sit back down: It would be rude to leave with so much food still unfinished. But you stay silent as you eat, and she follows suit.

  She only breaks the silence when you are preparing to leave. The words come out papery, fragile as mist: “Ansible Xin, I have behaved abominably today. But I wish to try again. Will you come tomorrow evening? I’ll prepare something for you.”

  “Tomorrow? Is that not the day of the execution?”

  “It is.” Mention of the execution sinks like black tar in the atmosphere between the two of you; the starmage fidgets, her brows knitting together in a difficult line. “Have you witnessed an execution before?”

  “I have not.”

  “I see.”

  The silence traps you like honey, heavy and cloying, and you are so tired of fighting it. You could drain it all away by grabbing her, kissing her on the lips, showing her what she has been missing in her lonely, hidden life. You could.

  “Will you come?” she asks again.

  “I will consider it,” you say.

  * * *

  The execution is broadcast on screens throughout not just Eighth Colony, but the length and breadth of the empire. Slaughter a chicken to warn the monkeys. You wait among the mass of Authority officers and auxiliaries packing Eighth Colony’s largest theater, which today will be a theater of death.

  On the stage the colony’s four starmages stand arrayed in a rectangle: Tiger, phoenix, dragon, horse. Each of them clutches in both hands a long metal rod, painted the red of justice. They drown out the thousand murmuring voices by pounding the rods onto the stage floor in an accelerating crescendo. Echoes drill into skulls. The house lights dim; the show is about to begin.

  Two masked figures haul a third onto the center of the stage. Traitor is naked except for the ropes that bind her hands in front of her. Once she had a name, but now and forever she will only be known as Traitor. Nine iterations of her family will be thus disgraced, their names wiped from the register and those two characters written in their place. Her skin is blanched funerary white but her face is swollen with the red of beaten flesh. They force her to her knees. The sound of bone against wood lingers.

  You look at her face. Its shape is young, its features arranged in despair. This girl could be Officer Ouyang. This girl could be you.

  The Imperial Executioner’s entrance is heavy: Heavy footsteps, heavy silence, heavy gasps from Traitor as fear floods her chest and lungs. She shakes as the Executioner stands behind her.

  The Starmage General comes to the stage carrying the imperial scroll: A small man made towering by his massive suit, nasal voice amplified to operatic volumes. He pulls the scroll open and proclaims:

  Traitor! You have been found guilty of colluding with rebels! You plotted to weaken our glorious empire from within. You were caught openly engaging in rebellious activities, but without shame, you refused to claim your treachery. You chose to protect your fellow traitors, the other scum who crawl through the grass like snakes!

  You, who have rejected the warmth of the Imperial spring, shall be made to feel the sting of winter’s wrath!

  The Executioner’s hands loom over Traitor’s head. A cocoon of magebright envelops them and springs around Traitor’s kneeling body, fine enough that you can see her through it.

  The magebright hums.

  Razorwire lines run from one side of the cocoon to the other. They descend. Where they meet skin they start to slice. Traitor shrieks, a high thin animal sound. Every muscle in her body strains, but there is nowhere to escape. Her hands are claws, her neck corded with veins and tendons as her screaming tears through it.

  The razorwire continues to strip her away, layer by layer, cell by cell. Blood springs from her in a fine mist as the cuts start stripping the flesh under the skin. Muscle peels from the face trapped in a rictus of agony.

  You can’t watch. You have to watch.

  The wires gouge deeper and deeper. Her face and eyes are almost gone now. Traitor still screams through her lipless mouth. Beside you one of the auxiliaries starts sobbing. A guard in executioner’s black comes and pulls him out of the line. He makes one sound, like a stricken rabbit; you dare not turn your head to see where they take him.

  The screaming comes to a choking halt as the flesh of her throat flays off. You wonder how long she remains alive after that. The heart is buried under layers of viscera, and the quivering brain is still shielde
d by bone. The pulp of Traitor’s body accrues in the shape of an arrow and turns black and hard, like metal. The Executioner is turning her ground meat into sculpture, a lesson that will sit in the atrium for all to learn.

  The flesh of your own body rebels and your throat fills with heavy sourness. You pinch your lips together and stare at the mask that obscures Officer Ouyang’s face until waves of dizziness envelop you. Is she watching? What is she thinking? How could she just stand there?

  But then, are you not also sitting where you are, and watching?

  * * *

  When you go to keep your evening appointment you find Officer Ouyang’s door barred in your face. A mage-locked door may stop others, but she forgets what you are. She forgets that you too have the gift.

  Your entrance startles her. She stumbles to her feet, face red and crumpled, voice cracked: “Why are you here?” She hasn’t dressed properly and hair sticks from her scalp.

  “You invited me.”

  Her surprise collapses into despair: She has forgotten. She turns away, her back forming an uneven, sloping wall. “Please leave. I cannot, I do not—”

  Your room is small, and cold, and you fear the things you might see when you close your eyes tonight. “Have you never witnessed an execution before?” you ask. You simply assumed that she had.

  The starmage shakes her head. Her knees find the floor for support as she folds over herself. You place your hands on her back, and a shiver passes through her body. But it is not just mourning that grips her. She presses her fists into the ground, the knuckles white through reddened skin.

  “Were you close with Traitor?” you ask.

  “Her name,” she hisses, “was Siyun.”

  Siyun, a gentle cloud. “So you were indeed close,” you say.

  “No.” She sits up and you detach from her, putting a small space between the two of you. She still won’t look at you. “Siyun and I were—we were only briefly acquainted. Perhaps if she had been receptive to my friendship, or to something more, we could have been.” Her voice goes low with rage. “She did not deserve this. She was barely involved in rebellious activities. She was unlucky, they caught her! And decided she would be a scapegoat. This is injustice.”

  “You could have stopped the execution. You were right next to her on the stage.”

  Now she turns to you, fury sharpening her features. “And to what end? Do you think I could have saved her, when the throne wanted her blood? Eighth Colony’s situation is precarious enough. Do you know what price open rebellion will demand?”

  “So we let them slaughter us like animals? Worse than animals. No butcher would be this cruel.”

  Officer Ouyang sets her shoulders. “There is a time and place for everything.”

  She is revealing things to you that she shouldn’t, not if she wants to keep herself safe. Her trust in you is dizzying. “And are there others you know who take part in these rebellious activities?”

  Ouyang Suqing looks away. Her silence is your answer.

  You reach for her hands and she lets you take them. You tell her that your room is cold, too cold, and has too much empty space in the dark. Space where ghosts can hide, and find you with their bloody fingers in the night. She simply nods. Here, the two of you can keep each other warm. Safe from ghosts.

  * * *

  In the course of the nights that come you dissolve into each other’s arms over and over again. You show her all the things that she has been denied and all the things that she has been denying herself.

  You tell her your name is Tian.

  “Can you teach me the song?” she asks, curled with her head against your shoulder.

  “No,” you say, and the hurt shows on her face, but 满江红 is your song, yours and Ren’s. It is not to be shared. “Pick another. Pick one I might know.”

  Suqing looks at the stars arrayed outside her window. Now that the Imperial Executioner’s ship is gone the view is clear. She breathes softly on your skin while she thinks. Songs nestle in her mouth in soft hums as she tries them out. Something seems to catch her fancy:

  「明月几时有? 把酒问青天 … 」

  The first two syllables of the song strike your heart like stones falling into a pond. You know this one, of course.

  我欲乘风归去、又恐琼楼玉宇、高处不胜寒。

  起舞弄清影、何似在人间？

  Suqing’s voice stumbles rough and unpracticed through the lyrics, the tones falling flat. You sing with her, you lift her voice. No portal opens between you—that kind of magic takes time and concentration—but you feel the stirrings of a connection, the right kind of purity. You fall asleep with the words lingering between you, as if you were back on the originworld, entwined with another under the moonlight, the sound of nesting swallows above your head.

  人有悲欢离合、月有阴晴圆缺、 此事古难全。但愿人长久、千里共婵娟。

  * * *

  Three weeks pass by like water in a river. A fresh processing officer joins you in the portal room as you prepare to resume your duties. A mountain of work awaits you: Shipments of perishable goods, important documents, and luxury items hunger for their destinations. Eighth Colony seethes with impatience after so long with no portal contact to other places. And it’s an impatience you share, but for other reasons: Your heart gladdens at the thought of being immersed in Ren’s song again.

  You raise your voice: 怒发冲冠，凭栏处 …

  The voice that joins yours is unexpected: low and smoke-roughened. 抬望眼、仰天长啸、壮怀激烈。

  The alien timbre of the words startles you so much, the song stalls in your throat. Aborted in half-formation, the portal dissipates into white mist. The processing officer frowns. “Ansible? What are you doing?”

  Ren, your Ren, your Wang-sun. Where is she? Is she still on leave? Why have they put a stranger, some unknown exocluster ansible, in her place?

  “Ansible Xin,” the processing officer says, irritation in his tone. “We cannot afford any further delays.”

  You have no choice. Three weeks of unspent work stands ahead of you. Shaking, shaken, you take up the song again, and the stranger on the originworld responds.

  Your songs don’t match; you can barely hold the portal open wide enough. You don’t know who the strange ansible is or where she comes from. You don’t know her name. These things matter. All the time spent together in the temple was not for nothing. 三十功名尘与土、八千里路云和月。 You feel like collapsing.

  There’s still a good half left to the shipments when the processing officer leaves in a cloud of frustration, muttering about your worthlessness. You are done for the day.

  Where is Ren?

  * * *

  Suqing tries to break the news gently. But the look on her face tells you everything. The exhaust-heat in this secluded service corridor can’t fight off the chill in your bones.

  “The Imperial Authority thought your cluster leader was compromised,” she says. “The corpse that came through here should have never left the originworld in the first place. So they decided to…” She picks her mind for words, her brow creased. “They decided to dispose of her.”

  The replacement Ren was taken from the ship ansible program, where they don’t form clusters, where they are trained to be flexible. A stopgap.

  You won’t let Suqing touch you, won’t let her comfort you. Traitor’s bloodfilled death stalks, sharp-toothed and slavering, through your memory. You think of Ren’s soft flesh disintegrating between lines of magebright, imagine her sweet voice torn by screams until the vocal cords are stripped away.

  “They wouldn’t have executed her like that,” Suqing tells you. “She wasn’t a traitor. To them she was just a malfunctioning ansible.”

  You know she’s trying to make you feel better. But the words sting. You are not a broken part to be replaced. “Leave me alone,” you hiss. You refuse to look at her until she withdraws.

  * * *

  That ni
ght, after hours of deliberation and a slow settling of your mood, you go to her quarters. The door has barely shut behind you when you say: “I wish to take part in rebellious activities.”

  Colour and expression drain from her face as though your words have punctured her somewhere. “What are you saying?”

  “I want to avenge Wang-sun. Introduce me to your rebellion.”

  Her breathing quickens. “You’ve gone mad. I can’t do that.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “It’s not a lie, I—”

  “I know where you go when you slip out at night for your walks. I know what’s happening on the evenings you tell me not to meet.”

  She hides her eyes from you, momentarily. “Do you?”

  “I know you keep things in the drawers you ask me not to open.”

  Her face crumples in a frown. “Those are just family treasures. You—”

  “The other day I saw you and Quartermaster Lu whispering together. When I came closer you stopped. What were you talking about?”

  She puts space between you. “Listen to yourself talk. Do you know what’s at stake? You’ve seen what they do to traitors.”

  You close the space she’s tried to make. “It doesn’t matter. My cluster has been broken. Ren is gone. They’re only waiting until they can replace us. I am already dead, it is decided.”

  Suqing grimaces. “I won’t do this. Leave me alone if you have nothing else to ask.” She retreats into the bedchamber and locks the door, a mechanical click that you would have to break into. You stand in the cold air of her room, waiting for her to re-emerge and recant her declarations, but she does not.

  * * *

  There’s a gap of hours before the knock comes on your door. You have been half expecting it, half dreading it. Suqing stands on the other side, the broad lines of her face taut and solid. “Come with me.” That’s all she says.

  She leads you silently and rapidly through the backdoor byways of Eighth Colony: unpatrolled, unadorned corridors with exposed piping and unfinished metal walls. For the first ten minutes of your journey she walks without talking, and you match her strides, equally silent. Blood sings in your ears, and your heart is a drum to accompany it.