The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013

by Angela Slatter

  Shaya turned her face into his throat. The scent was there too, subtler than perfume, mingling pleasantly with the familiar smell of his skin. “Tell me more.”

  That was how two days later she found herself in the corporate sector of the city, in the pentagonal square outside the genEx building, with Zali a smug tour guide at her side. She had only been to this part of the city once before, joining a financial co-operative when she came of age at twenty. Her uncle had been with her, a big solid presence greeting every official they met by name in his deep slow voice.

  It had still been unusual to see women in management positions then, despite the late Sultan’s very specific equal opportunity decrees, but in the genEx lobby they were greeted by a stunning thirty-something in formal white business robes. Her hair was tucked demurely beneath a designer scarf, indicating her position as a second tier member of the Sisterhood. Shaya, in a thin azure modesty robe and glittering wedge-heeled sandals, was a third tier. She felt instantly overexposed. She had been lectured at school by women like this. Men will try to objectify you, she had been told. They will ask you to wear sluttish clothes and demean yourself to please them. You must not allow that. Remember, you are a woman. You are precious as you are.

  Then again, she wasn’t the one working for a cosmetic enhancements company.

  The woman introduced herself as Yasmeen and ushered them into a modernist office furnished with 20th century antiques and white vinyl wall-liner. Shaya slid into an organically curved chair she’d swear was authentic plastic and tried not to stare. She was pretty successful for a musician, but this kind of luxury was way out of her league and spoke volumes for the popularity of genEx.

  “You have to understand,” Yasmeen said, sliding gracefully onto a lime green stool, “genEx is not really about looks. I know, I know—” she lifted one beautifully manicured hand to stall Shaya, whose eyebrows had soared upward. “That’s how we’re usually portrayed, but it’s an unfair slant. What we do is enhance all that is wonderful about what you already are. We believe that everybody has the right to feel beautiful in their own skin.”

  Shaya thought about the delicate scent of Zali’s sweat. She remembered friends who never put on weight or broke out, who swore by genEx and took shots of it in their coffee like sugar. She had always been comfortable with her own looks, safely ranked as the pretty one of the family by her younger cousins, but she didn’t want to be left behind while everyone in her circle jumped aboard with improvements. What harm was there in an enhancement or two, anyway? A shot of antiblush and she would never be caught red faced again. A follicle augmentation and no more bad hair days, ever.

  In the end she was uncharacteristically cautious, opting for a mild skin enhancement like Zali’s. The procedure took less than ten minutes. She was then sat down by a smiling specialist who provided her with a pack of booster shots and instructed her to take one every six to eight days.

  “Otherwise the augmentation stops activating,” she explained. “If you’re taking your boosters and you feel it’s not working properly, though, come and see me. Some people do get reactions. Just sit quietly for a few more minutes, then you can go.”

  As it turned out, Shaya had to wait considerably longer than that, pacing around a stylishly spartan waiting room while Zali underwent some impulse augmentations of his own. She was beginning to suspect those muscles of his owed less to his health regime and more to some sneaky muscle stimulants.

  He emerged almost hyper with energy, wanting to head straight out to a club. When Shaya quashed that one, he suggested some other forms of exercise involving the bed back at her apartment. She was still irritated at having to wait and kicked him petulantly in the ankle.

  “Did you get a libido booster in there or something?” she snapped. “I want to go home. And no, not to get love drunk. I need to practice for tomorrow’s show.”

  He jerked back, insulted. “You’d rather be with that string stick than me?”

  “It’s a zither!” Shaya shouted. “And right now, yes, yes I would!”

  She didn’t remember the rest of the fight, only that it was loud and bitter and very public. They ended up on the steps of the genEx building screaming abuse at each other. Zali grabbed her by the upper arms, gripping tight enough to hurt, and when she shrieked at him to let her go he shoved her away so hard she fell down the stairs into the square.

  She landed awkwardly onto her elbow. The bone jarred numbingly; she made a sobbing noise of pain and shock and looked up in automatic accusation. Zali was white-faced. He started down the steps towards her, holding out his hands, saying her name, but she somehow scrambled to her feet, swearing at him, telling him to stay away or else. What exactly she would have done against him with one arm out of action, she didn’t know, but Zali got the message. He fell back, watching her go without interfering.

  Shaya caught a shuttercraft home. She was shaking the whole way. It was only when it dropped her off on a relay roof close to home and she was climbing down the steps into her street that she realised the sleeve of her modesty robe was ripped, stained with blood. But it didn’t smell of blood. At some point during the flight, maybe even during the shouting match outside genEx, her enhancements had kicked in. Her torn skin smelled sweet, of sandalwood, and spice.

  * * *

  Shaya has always loved stories. That is why she became a balladeer in the first place. She remembers stalking a street storyteller when she was fourteen, ignoring his uneven teeth and the fifteen-year age gap, enchanted by the magic he made with his voice. He couldn’t play an instrument; his accompaniment came from an eCord, plugged into a discreet speaker concealed by a fold of his robe. She thinks her uncle probably paid for balladry lessons just to end that particular crush. It worked. Shaya fell head over heels for the idealised hero of her favourite ballad instead.

  It occurs to her like a bolt from the blue. She cannot remember the second verse of that ballad. She has forgotten.

  Horror freezes her veins. She rifles rapidly through her mental catalogue of stories, wondering how many more are fading like ink-print left too long in the sun. A sob tears its way through her throat with an ugly ripping sound. Shaya rocks back and forth, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, shuddering uncontrollably. She opens her mouth. She has to clear her throat three times before her voice emerges without cracking.

  In a dead land beside a dead sea he was born

  In the dying years of a century

  The sky forever red, the ground forever black

  But he was alive, alive as any man can be.

  Halfway through the first verse she remembers how to begin the second. The melody flows from her throat, and she finds herself on the third verse, the fifth, the tenth. She has sung this ballad so many times but every time she seems to hear it anew—as though she, like the audience, has no idea what will happen next. How did Gashir end up in a robot-run junkyard, immune to the poisoned air of the radioactive wastes? Who is the beautiful girl imprisoned in the tunnels beneath the wrecking yard? Can he save her before she sickens and dies?

  Shaya sings until her throat is dry and sore. By the fourteenth verse she has to stop, breaking off as Gashir falls into the fiery pit. Her panic has subsided, lulled by the familiar rhythm of a beloved story. She rests her forehead against her knees, chewing on her tongue to work up enough saliva to soothe her dry throat. When she looks up there is a jug of water in the circle at her feet.

  She stares at it, nonplussed. This never happens. The water comes with meals, and unless she slept far longer than usual she is not due for more supplies yet. Is she really going mad, conjuring hallucinations from her wishes? But when she reaches out, the jug handle is smooth and firm to her hand, the liquid inside cool and wet. She tips it into her mouth, gulping gratefully.

  “Finish the story.”

  Shaya drops the jug. It rolls away across the floor in a spreading pool, but she hardly notices; she is choking. Whether it is misdirected water lodged in her throat or her
hammering heart, she can’t tell. She has heard a voice. A voice. In this cube. Which is impossible.

  “I said, finish the story. What happened? Did he fall?”

  Shaya looks around wildly. The voice seems to come from everywhere, the way the light does; it is deep and husky, definitely male, completely unfamiliar. She is suddenly intensely aware of someone, somewhere, watching her. Listening to her.

  Her throat contracts. “Who—who are you?”

  “Just finish the fucking story!”

  She has never failed an audience yet. Somehow, Shaya sings. She can barely hear herself through the pounding of her blood in her ears, which is a shame—she has always loved this part, when Gashir meets the cyborg queen in her timelocked citadel, the battle with her mechanised serpents. His return to Topaz, his love, only to find her dying from radiation poisoning.

  She lay in his arms, the beautiful husk,

  Of a beautiful heart, a beautiful love

  Now just a dead woman beneath a dead sea

  In a dead, dead land, in a dead century . . .

  She falters again towards the end, and once more a jug of water appears at her feet. This time she snatches it up without hesitating. Her brain has done some quiet calculations without her and now clues her in. Someone out there wants to hear her stories; someone who is not only prepared to communicate with her, but perhaps reward her. Is this, the first turning point in God knows how long, really the right time to fall apart? By the time she puts down the jug, Shaya has pulled herself together. She sings the final verses with a return of some of her old flamboyance. Her fingers quiver, the music of her zither playing on the inside of her skull. In the final verse she reveals the denouement no one ever sees coming, and lets the final notes ring out triumphantly.

  They fall to silence. She waits, but there is no congratulation, no response at all.

  The silence lengthens. Shaya drums her fingers nervously against the sides of the jug, then realises she is still holding it and quickly replaces it in the circle. It disappears. She is left with no reason to believe that anything out of the ordinary has occurred, only the ramblings of an unreliable memory.

  She runs her wet tongue over her lips. She’s not giving up so easily.

  She chooses another ballad. An older one, full of bloodshed and tragedy and evil warlords, and begins to sing. Five verses in, she breaks off and waits.

  The silence is very loud.

  “Go on. Keep singing.”

  Shaya feels the corners of her mouth tug in what feels like the first smile in a hundred years. She has stories. She has an audience. This is solid ground.

  She sings.

  * * *

  They got married. Third tier Sisters were allowed to date a man for one year before making the decision to marry or move on, and for some reason Shaya stayed. The wedding was very elaborate and arranged entirely by Zali’s mother, who had more than enough enthusiasm to power the project alone—perhaps a good thing, since the actual couple spent the four months of their engagement engaged in either violent feuding or passionate sex. Zali’s mood swings collided with Shaya’s hot temper and resulted in explosions.

  “It’s the stress, my love, he is about to be married!” Zali’s mother insisted. “You must try to understand him. You are very lucky to be marrying such a handsome boy.”

  Shaya found it hard to think straight. It was true, her cousins swooned over Zali every time he flexed his biceps and kept calling the two of them a ‘glamour couple’, the most hackneyed phrase in the entire language as far as Shaya was concerned. She was equally to blame in most of their fights, if she was completely honest with herself. She had slapped him across the face on more than one occasion—what was so much worse about the times he hit her? She loved him, didn’t she? She wasn’t trying hard enough.

  The wedding was a blur of congratulations drowned in alcohol. By the end of the night she and Zali were in a minishutter, on their way to their new home in a leafy, family-friendly corner of town. They were both exhausted and more than a little drunk. Shaya suddenly desperately wanted to be walking through the teeming bazaar to her own little apartment to spend the night alone. Zali seemed to read her thoughts.

  “Too late to get out now, beautiful,” he slurred. “You’re my wife now. Mine.”

  Shaya didn’t know whether to burst into tears or kick him hard with her gem-studded slipper. Instead her body took over and she threw up, twice. It was mostly bile—she had barely eaten all day—but Zali recoiled from her in revulsion. He, she remembered, had received an augmentation a month or two ago to prevent involuntary vomiting. It was getting hard to keep track of his enhancements; he seemed to be in at genEx every few days, like a piece of faulty machinery that needed constant alteration. He kept trying to convince Shaya to come with him but after that first visit she had dug in her heels and refused. There were times she even thought about removing her only enhancement, but then she would arrive late at a show one day, coated in sweat, and would be complemented by the backstage staff on her perfume.

  Compliments had, after all, always been her weakness.

  Shaya had back-to-back matinees for a week shortly after the wedding. Zali and his mother had briefly joined forces during the wedding preparations, trying to make her cancel, but she had steadfastly refused; she had never cancelled a show and wasn’t about to start now. Every evening when she got home Zali was there, taking up space, demanding her attention, complaining that she was never there for him. He would either ignore that she had had a show at all or question her minutely on every detail.

  “Who was there? Did anyone talk to you afterwards? Who? What did he look like? What did he say to you?”

  “What does it matter to you?” Shaya snapped. “It’s not like you ever come!”

  The next day she saw him in the audience, close to the stage. He was waiting when she came down, fully assured of his welcome. Shaya stopped uncertainly with her hand against the curtain, a foot or so away from him.

  “You came,” she said, flatly.

  “I have to make sure you don’t run away with another man,” he said. He used to make jokes like that and she would laugh, knowing he didn’t mean it, but there was something off in his smile that night. She didn’t laugh.

  “What’s going on with you?” she demanded. “I don’t know who you’ll be from one day to the next. This isn’t you, Zali. This isn’t the man I love.”

  He jerked as though she had cut him. “You don’t love me.”

  “That isn’t what I said—“

  “You don’t love me!” he shouted. “I knew it! You’re a liar, a cheating lying cow!”

  “How can you say that?” Shaya shrieked. “It’s you who’s lying! It’s you!”

  He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her hard. They were screaming things at each other, terrible things, and then she was just screaming, teeth rattling inside her skull with each time Zali shook her. A passing servitor saw them. He called for help and two men came running, dragging Shaya’s husband away from her, asking her what was happening, was she all right. His hands were gone, but she was still shaking.

  * * *

  Shaya sings.

  She is still a prisoner. The daily humiliations are even harder to endure knowing that every time the deluge comes and plasters her shift against her skin, every time she performs her ablutions over the phasing circle, there’s a man somewhere watching. She wonders what he’s like, the owner of this disembodied voice. What he looks like. Not for the first time, she hopes fervently he is not a pervert.

  But in another sense she is powerful. She has a head full of stories, a voice to sing down the angels, an eager listener—and she can play her audience like she played her zither. She takes longer breaks between verses, claiming tiredness, testing her unseen listener’s patience. She tantalises him with snippets of stories and asks him to choose the next for her to sing. She is frequently surprised by his choices. The warden of a deep-sea prison apparently likes tragic romances.

/>   Shaya sings until her voice throbs with sorrow. Her listener never applauds, but one night after finishing an epic thirty-verser the jug of water arrives with a plump red pomegranate. It is the first time she has tasted fresh fruit since she was imprisoned. She savours every mouthful and sucks her fingers until they’re sore.

  She begins to venture questions of her own.

  “What’s your name?” No answer. “Oh, please. Wouldn’t you be curious?”

  More silence. Then, finally, when she has given up hope of a reply:

  “Xever. My name is Xever.”

  Gradually she eases little details from him, greased with many anecdotes of her own. He soon knows everything there is to know about her childhood, her career as a balladeer, the foods and colours she likes. She learns he is an only child. His parents, like her own, are dead. And the year is 3044. The breath goes out of her when he lets that detail drop. She has been imprisoned for two and a half years.

  “Why are you doing that? Shaya. Shaya, what is it?”

  He sounds uneasy. He should be. She is doubled over on the floor, racked so hard with heaving sobs that she thinks she might be sick. It takes her a long time to drag herself back together. As she leans her back against the wall and draws her knees up against her chest, she realises that was the first time Xever has used her name. The first time he has asked a question not directly related to the story she is telling. She wipes her sleeve across her sore eyes and looks up.

  There is a handful of dates in the middle of the circle.

  A choked laugh cracks from her throat. Is he trying to comfort her? If he is, it works. The sweet flavour of the dates overwrites the bitter salty taste of tears on her tongue. She licks her sticky fingers clean and looks up. She does not know from what angle Xever is looking at her, how he sees her at all, but as a rule she has decided to look up when she talks to him.

  “Thank you,” she says softly. “You’re kind.”

  Xever says nothing. He is not a talkative man, Shaya has learned. She wishes she could see his face. It is so difficult to judge a man from his voice alone. But she returns his generosity with the comic ballad The Zero Hounds, one of her originals, and is rewarded when, during the chase scene in verse twelve, he laughs, a startled bark of sound. It is only the professionalism of nine years performing that keeps her singing while her mind is wiped white with shock. She wonders how long it has been since her taciturn prison warden last laughed.