Asimov's SF, July 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  With Shi and Morir, Clio trained in the Sedlec Ossuary church in the Czech Republic, where the disinterred bones of forty thousand dead men cover the walls and ceiling and are joined to form fantastical crosses, coats of arms, and monstrances.

  She trained in the Valley of the Kings, four hundred miles up the Nile from Cairo, where sixty tombs are known to living men, and sixty more are not. In the echoing chambers of the dead, the mummies of priests, magicians, generals, and the sons of sons of kings shuffled up to Shi and Morir to pay their respects, their voices like fire through dry grass.

  She trained in the Aokigahara woods of Yamanashi Prefecture, where bankrupt businessmen come to hang themselves from the pines. Mists gathered in the hollows of the forest; high over the trees the snow-covered cone of Mount Fuji shone in the moonlight. Foxes and feral dogs barked, deep in the forest. Shi fired a submachine gun. Its slugs chased Clio through the boxwoods and beneath the hemlocks, chewing into the mossy fallen tree trunks that covered the forest floor. Woodcocks, startled from their sleep, flew upward through the trees.

  “Your bullet dance is perfect,” Shi said when they were done. Clio was breathing heavily from exertion and her sweaty skin was just beginning to become uncomfortable in the chill of the night. “Come,” Shi said. “Morir has work to do before we go."

  They walked down a forest trail, then another that diverged from it, then another, until they were at the heart of the Aokigahara. Clio noticed that a man's body was hanging by the neck from a pine branch. It was dressed in a suit. As Clio watched, Morir floated up into the air a few feet and whispered in the hanging man's ear. Then he took the man's hand, and both descended. No, the man was still hanging. But he was also on the ground, holding Morir's hand. His face was sad. Morir continued speaking to him for a minute longer before both walked off together into the dark forest.

  Shi and Morir never came for her again.

  * * * *

  Years passed.

  One day, returning to Cairo from a gymnastics meet in Marseilles, Clio heard the pilot announce shortly after take-off: “La Sardaigne est sous nous. Gauche de l'avion.” She looked out her window. Sardinia glowed green and buff against the dark Mediterranean. Clio could still remember the warmth of its sun-heated rocky hills against her feet when she ran with Shi and Morir.

  Shi and Morir?

  How long had it been? She had almost forgotten.

  She had run across the Mediterranean with them? How was that possible? That couldn't have happened.

  It was like waking up from a dream so vivid and compelling that it takes minutes, or even hours to fully convince oneself it isn't real. Clio's heart banged in her chest, and she felt short of breath. She stared at her lap, wondering whether everyone was looking at the crazy girl with fantastical imaginary friends. Her ears burned.

  The bald man in the seat beside her sniffed, and turned the page of his L'Express. The flight attendant pushed her drink cart down the aisle. One of its wheels squeaked. Below, Sardinia slowly passed from view.

  Clio relaxed back into her seat. She was safe. She needn't tell. No one need know her fantasies from years ago. She was thirteen years old. The adult world beckoned her, and adults do not have death gods as imaginary friends.

  * * * *

  Over the next two years Clio took a few more medals in international gymnastic competition, but realized she didn't want to pursue it further. That intensity of physical training and privation necessary to be an Olympian repelled her. “An Olympian must be her art,” Herr Dresdner told her. “To excel at the highest level, you must exclude everything else from your life. You must eat, sleep, breathe, dream, be gymnastics."

  Clio shook her heard. “I like gymnastics, Karl,” she said, “but I don't want to be gymnastics."

  Her fellow gymnasts gossiped about injuries, about bulimia, about how a gymnast's career was over by age twenty. The way children were prepared to live in the adult world began to seem as cruel as Procrustes’ bed or Chinese foot-binding: it stretched, chopped, and deformed children to fill adult roles and adult needs. Clio understood her bullet dance fantasy as an attempt to escape this fate, to pretend she could dodge the manipulation of adults and the perils of the world in which they lived. The world into which Clio, midway through adolescence, was rapidly and unstoppably being pulled.

  Quitting gymnastics, though, produced a sort of cabin fever when she could no longer expect to fly off to Barcelona or Stockholm several times a year. Her father in his official capacity traveled frequently, however, and she often successfully begged him to let her come along, to Tel Aviv, to Riyadh, to Athens, to Rabat. To Davos.

  * * * *

  The Steigenberger Belvédère Hotel emerged from the slope of the mountainside behind it like a Vitruvian experiment in geometric form, blocky and Swiss, surmounted by a leaden mansard roof. Clio's father and a few of his staff had come to Davos for the yearly World Economic Forum. Soldiers and police stood on every corner. Armored vehicles blocked off many streets.

  Even at nine o'clock at night, Promenade Strasse burned with light: street lamps reflected off the snowy road and the snow-covered Mercedes and Audis parked on its southern shoulder. Brightly lit shop windows and cafés beckoned.

  Floodlights lit the front of the Steigenberger Belvédère. A colonnade framed the lobby door. Wide fluted pilasters with square capitals divided the building's façade. Clio thought the building beautiful, and reassuring.

  She began to hum a melody, one she hadn't thought of in years. She wrapped her scarf around her neck and over her mouth against the January wind. Memory danced at the edge of her thoughts, tantalizingly close. What was she trying to remember? In her imagination she saw the Steigenberger Belvédère ruined, its windows broken, its roof collapsed, its white stucco crumbling off the bricks beneath. She caught her breath.

  Turning away from the hotel, she crossed Promenade Strasse, her boots crunching on the street's packed snow. Nighttime lights twinkled in Davos Platz in the valley below. She hummed, and her right foot tapped in time with the music.

  “Clio?"

  She turned. It was a boy about her own age, whose face she didn't immediately recognize. A rubber band held his hair in a stubby ponytail. He was trying for a soul patch, but didn't quite have the beard to make it convincing.

  “Hi,” he said. “You probably don't remember me. James? I met you when my dad and I went to Cairo a few years ago. My dad just ran into your dad at the hotel and he said you were here.” James's cheeks and nose were reddened by the cold. “I wanted to apologize to you. For, you know."

  “You already did. After it happened,” Clio said.

  “Yeah, but ... that was because Dad told me to. I was still mad at you. But I've been really embarrassed since then, whenever I think about it. So, I'm sorry."

  They exchanged stories. James prepped at Phillips Academy. He was second string on the lacrosse team, played keyboards, and did martial arts. “One thing I wanted to ask you,” he said, “was, what school was that? That thing you did, dodging punches."

  “School?"

  “Yeah, what fighting school? It was pretty fly."

  “It was ... just something I made up,” Clio said. It was the bullet dance song she had been humming, she realized.

  “Really?"

  “Maybe I saw it on TV."

  James shook his head. “Look, if you don't want to tell me, it's okay, but—"

  Imaginary death gods taught me.

  “—I'd really like you to teach it to me. If you want to."

  “It was a joke,” Clio said. “There's nothing to teach."

  James's nostrils flared. The muscles in his temples tightened. The bullet dance song chanted so loudly Clio could barely hear James's words. Her feet wanted to move. The bullet was coming.

  James's fist lashed out. Clio didn't move. The blow stopped, millimeters from her face.

  “You see? You see?” James was triumphant. “You knew I was going to hit you, and you knew it was a feint."<
br />
  “You're still a moron,” Clio said.

  She expected him to strike at her again, as he had in the ballroom years ago. Instead, his gaze fell away, and he stared across the valley at the lights of Davos Platz. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. But if I could do that stuff, I wouldn't hide it. I'd be proud of it."

  She tried to parse out the feelings in his voice. Resentment? Envy? Admiration? Or all together? For the first time, though, Clio believed he was sincere, and was touched.

  “All right,” she said. “I'll teach you a little."

  * * * *

  Clio couldn't sleep that night. She hadn't thought of Shi and Morir in years. She hadn't sung the bullet dance song in years. She had dismissed all that as daydreams, like imagining you were a bride, or an equestrienne.

  The bedcovers were too hot and too heavy, and she threw them back. In the other bed, her father grunted and rolled over. How was it possible for her to dodge a blow? When had she learned to do that? She had been able to teach James only a tiny fraction of her art. She was astonished by the depth and subtlety of what she knew, scarcely realizing she knew it.

  All the places Shi and Morir had taken her, she might have seen in books or on television, and worked into a fantasy. Hadn't the Brontë sisters, as children, created vast imaginary worlds? Didn't everyone do that? But everyone could not dodge blows.

  She got out of bed. Humming the bullet dance song under her breath, she danced in the hotel room in near-darkness broken only by a slash of light from beneath the door. Somersaulting and twisting, bounding over her bed, she danced in her pajamas, danced to understand whether her dance was real, or made-up, or whether that made any difference.

  Her father stirred in his sleep, and Clio stopped. He grunted and rolled over, but didn't wake.

  She got her cell phone from her luggage and went into the bathroom. She dialed. Ringing, interminable. She prayed his father wouldn't answer.

  James's voice: “Yeah? Who—?"

  “It's Clio. We're going to Arles."

  * * * *

  A Eurostar coach brought them to Paris by mid-afternoon, and the TGV Paris Sud-Est to Avignon by midnight. In the Gare d'Avignon station they spent a restless night trying to sleep, Clio's head cushioned on a rolled-up sweater against James's shoulder. A commuter train brought them to Arles by eight AM. They took a bus to the Alyscamps.

  It had snowed a few days before. Although the road was mostly clear, tatters of snow still lay beneath the stands of cypress, and cupped in shadowed corners inside the empty sarcophagi. Despite the cold, a few sightseers wandered down the road and gathered at the door of the chapel of Saint Honorat. Clio could hear their voices and laughter.

  She walked down the gravel road, letting her fingertips brush the tops of the stones. James tagged behind until she took his hand and brought him even with her. Gray-green lichen grew over the granite sarcophagi, but on the ones of marble or limestone, the lichen was red-orange, like splatters of dried blood. The January sun barely cleared the trees, glittering gold and silver through the bare branches. Their spidery shadows chilled Clio as she walked beneath them.

  Had she really been here? Or had she just seen photographs of this place in books? She knelt to examine one sarcophagus. There were groups of pockmarks in the limestone, where the lichen had been knocked off and was just beginning to grow back, and the stone beneath had been chipped. Clio pulled off her gloves and ran her fingers over the chipped stone, letting the cold soak into her fingertips. Her heart beat fast. She pressed her fingers so hard into the rough stone that they hurt, as if the stone spelled out a message that she could read, if only she tried hard enough.

  “Finding what you're looking for?” James asked.

  Clio stood up and brushed twigs from her coat. “Almost,” she said. She put an arm around his waist and pressed his cheek with the tips of her fingers. He hadn't wanted to wear a suit, she remembered. Long ago. She reached around his head and flicked his absurd little pony tail. “How does your dad like this?” she asked.

  “He's not crazy about it."

  She stood on tiptoe, put her mouth against James's, and kissed him hard, pulling his head down to hers. She thrust her tongue into his mouth, because she thought that was something her own father probably wouldn't be crazy about, either.

  * * * *

  A month after Clio returned to Cairo, the number of Marine guards at the gate doubled. Her father now carried a Glock 18 in a shoulder holster. The Embassy held emergency drills weekly. Clio became accustomed to being rousted out of bed in the middle of the night and stumbling down the stairs to the hardened shelter in the building's basement.

  “Are we in danger?” Clio asked him.

  Her father grunted, “Things aren't getting better."

  Only in the past year had his hair become very gray at the temples, and his face deeply lined. Or hadn't she noticed these things before?

  “I want to learn to shoot a gun,” Clio said.

  “In heaven's name, why?"

  “So the embassy won't fall down."

  At first her father didn't take her wish any more seriously than Shi and Morir had, but he was here for her to wheedle every day, and they were not. Eventually he gave in, and Clio began taking shooting lessons from a Marine sharpshooter, firing a .22 pistol at the range in the Embassy basement.

  She missed Najwa. Najwa's cousins and uncle had owned a clothing shop. When it was destroyed by a mob stirred up by a radical imam, they had emigrated to New South Wales, where they had relatives, and Najwa had gone with them. Some of Clio's classmates from the American school had been sent back to the States. Clio's father had begun to talk about sending Clio to stay with her grandparents in California.

  “I'm safe here,” she'd told him.

  “I'd like to believe that,” her father said, “but—"

  “I'm safe anywhere."

  “Oh, to be as young, and as certain as you!"

  It was nearing Clio's bedtime one night. She sat in the apartment's living room in pajamas and robe, doing her homework while her father read a book. Thunder rumbled. It sounded like thunder.

  A minute later the phone rang. Clio's father picked it up. He spoke a few curt syllables before putting the receiver down. He rose from his chair and grabbed Clio by the arm. “Ow, that hurts,” Clio said.

  Her father's gun was in his hand. “There's been an incursion past the perimeter,” he said. “It was a car bomb. Some Marines were killed. There may be hostiles about. We'll go down to the shelter until the all-clear.” Clio nodded. She was closest to the hall door, and reached for the knob.

  “Wait,” her father said, right behind her, “I'll go—"

  The roar of automatic weapons fire outside. The door splintered, bits of wood and paint chips spalling off. It sprang open. A man wearing a kaffiyeh wrapped around his face stood in the doorway. He held an Uzi.

  The bullet dance music sang in Clio's body, sang of the unity of flesh and nerve and thought and desire.

  The gunman fired. Clio leaped. The bullets passed harmlessly under the flowing arc of her body like water beneath the span of a bridge. Her father was behind her, and the bullets struck him full in the chest. He groaned, and his body fell to the floor.

  Rage filled Clio. Tears escaped from her eyes. The gunman swung his Uzi toward her, but Clio cartwheeled away across the floor, the bullets chasing her futilely, thumping into the carpet. She leaped into the air, pushed off against the wall, bounded off a sofa, and then she was upon the gunman. Her heel struck his temple and knocked him to the floor. He dropped the Uzi.

  Now what?

  The man she had kicked grunted in pain, but half rose and scrambled across the floor to retrieve his gun.

  How long could she dance?

  Her father's Glock 18 had fallen from his hand when he'd gone down. Clio picked it up and thumbed the mode selector to full auto. Music sang inside her, ascending to a crescendo of despair and resolve.

  The gunman picked up his Uzi and turned towar
d Clio. She trained the Glock on him, and squeezed the trigger.

  The Glock roared and emptied its magazine into the gunman's chest. Flame erupted from the compensator slots. Ejected brass sailed up over Clio's right shoulder, the shells ringing as they struck the wall behind her. The recoil knocked her backward onto the carpet. The echoes of the gun's discharge faded, but Clio's ears still rang. She dropped the Glock and burst into tears.

  Sobs as painful as blows wracked her chest. She pushed herself up on her hands, and stumbled across the floor to where her father lay. Blood, everywhere. She knelt and grabbed his shoulders, her fists knotting the blood-soaked fabric, warm crimson rivulets oozing out between her fingers. She shook him as hard as she could. “Dad! Dad! Father!” His eyes stared upward.

  The world was blurry. There were other figures moving in the room. The Marines had come too late, she thought. Then she saw it wasn't the Marines.

  Morir bent over her father. Clio wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her robe. Shi said to her, “Your bullet dance was perfect."

  “But my father is dead!” Clio screamed at her. “It doesn't matter!"

  Shi knelt beside her. “Sorrow is the bullet you cannot dodge,” she said. “Dear, your father was supposed to die."

  We know there is a bullet coming toward you, Shi had said to her long ago. We know it must not hit you.

  It took a moment, and a lifetime, for the meaning of that to sink in.

  “It wasn't for me,” Clio said at last. “None of it was for me."

  “All of it was for you,” Shi said. Morir lifted her father up by the hand, although his body still lay on the floor. “You must take your father's place in the mechanism of the world. That is the fate of children."

  Clio reached for her father's hand, but already he was out of her reach, walking away with Morir into the darkness.

  “You're like every other grown-up,” Clio said. Her lips felt thick, and her words were slurred. “Damn you, you're just like everyone else."

  Shi nodded. “As you, too, will be some day."

  “Never,” Clio said. “Never. I will never treat a child like you treated me.” Her anger dried her tears. She stood up. Her hands, still sticky with her father's blood, clenched into fists. “Never. Never,” she said, knowing that she lied. “Never,” she said, as if her anger could make her words and intentions true, because the ugly and necessary truth could not be borne. “Never. Never. Never."