by Annie Bellet
By their side was someone who had to be the bride’s sister, carrying a very young infant in her arms. The baby’s face was turned towards the couple, eyes wide open in an attempt to take everything in; and a little brother in fur clothes was prevented, with difficulty, from running up to the bride. The baby was three months, four months old, perhaps? With the pudgy fingers and the chubby cheeks—her own child would be like that one day, would look at her with the same wide-eyed wonder.
“Life goes on,” Akanlam said, her face softening. “Always.”
“Of course.” That was why Rechan had gotten herself inseminated, against the family’s wishes: she might have been a failure by their standards, thirty years old and unmarried—for who would want to marry someone without a breath-sibling? But, with the war over, it was time to think of the future; and she didn’t want to die childless and alone, without any descendants to worship at her grave. She wanted a family, like the bride; like the bride’s sister: children to hold in her arms, to raise as she had been raised, and a house filled with noise and laughter instead of the silence of the war, when every month had added new holos to the altar of the ancestors.
“I’ll go present our respects,” Akanlam said.
“You never had much taste for cooking,” Mau pointed out, and Akanlam snorted.
“Elder Aunt cooks quite well,” she said with a smile. “Better to leave everyone do what they excel at, no?”
“You impossible child,” Rechan said as she so often did, with a little of her usual amusement. Akanlam was the niece with the closest quarters to her own; and she and Mau and Rechan often got together for dinners and after-work drinks—though none of them ever let Akanlam cook. As Mau had said: not only did she not have much taste for it, but left without supervision she’d burn a noodle soup to a charred mess before anyone could intervene. She did mix superb fruit chunks, though. “What are you going to do when you get married?”
“You’re assuming I want to get married,” Akanlam said, without missing a beat. “And even if I did, I’d stay with you. You’re going to need help with raising those children of yours. How many did you say you wanted?”
“I’d be lucky to have one,” Rechan said, finally. But she’d dreamt of a larger family; of the dozens brothers and sisters and cousins of her youth, before war carved a swathe through them—a horde of giggling children always ready to get into trouble. If she could find her breath-sibling again… “And I’m old enough to do what I’m doing.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. But it’s still a job for two people. Or three.” Akanlam smiled. “I’ll see you outside.”
After Akanlam had gone, Mau swung from her wooden stool and came to stand by Rechan. “Let me have a look.”
Rechan almost said no, almost asked what the point was. But she knew; too many things could go wrong at this stage. It wasn’t only birth without her stoneman that could kill her baby.
Mau’s hands ran over the bulge of her belly, lingered on a point above her hips. “The head is here,” she said, massaging it. “He’s shifted positions. It’s pointing downwards, into your birth canal. It’s very large.”
“I know,” Rechan said. “My doctor said the same after the scan. Said I’d have difficulty with the birth.” There were new systems; new scanners brought by the Galactics, to show a profusion of almost obscene details about the baby in her belly, down to every fine hair on its skin. But none of them had the abilities and experience of a stoneman.
“Mmm.” Mau ran her hands downwards. “May I?” After a short examination, she looked up, and her face lay in shadow.
“What is it?” Rechan asked. What could she possibly have found?
“You’re partly open,” Mau said, finally. “You’ll have to be careful, elder aunt, or you’re going to enter labour early.”
“I can’t—” Rechan started, and then realised how ridiculous it would sound to Mau, who could do little more in the way of medical attention. “I have to get back to the plateaux.”
Mau shook her head. “I didn’t tell Akanlam—because you know this already—but the path gets impracticable by aircar after a while. You’ll have to walk.”
As she had, all those years ago. “You’re right,” Rechan said. “I did know.” She braced herself for Mau to castigate her, to tell her she couldn’t possibly think of taking a mountain trail in her state. But the stonewoman’s face was expressionless, her hands quite still on Rechan’s belly.
“You’ll have to be careful,” she repeated at last.
She couldn’t read Mau at all. Perhaps it came from never having lived with a breath-sibling of her own. “You never told me why you came,” Rechan said. “Akanlam—”
“—came because she’s your niece, and because she knew it was important to you.” Mau nodded. Was it Rechan’s imagination, or was the baby stirring at her touch? Mau was Akanlam’s breath-sibling, not hers. She could deliver the baby, but couldn’t give it the breath that would quicken it—yet still, perhaps there was something all stonewomen shared, some vital portion of the planet’s energy, a simmering, life-giving warmth, like that stone she’d touched all those years ago before she started her carving. “I came because I was curious. You’re a legend in the family, you know.”
Rechan snorted. “The one without a breath-sibling? That’s hardly worth much of anything.”
Mau turned, so that the light caught on the stone of her arms, throwing every vein of the rock into sharp relief. “But you do have a breath-sibling, don’t you, elder aunt?”
How much did she know, or suspect? Rechan’s official story had always been she couldn’t remember, and perhaps that had been the truth, once upon a time, but now that they were in the mountains again—now that the sky lay above them like a spread cloth, and the air was sharp with the tang of smoke—memories were flooding back.
“I know the story,” Mau said. “They measured you when you came back down, attached electrodes to your chest and listened to the voice of your heart. You had no breath left in you; even if they gave you lamsinh, you wouldn’t have been able to bring a carving to life. You’d already given it to someone. Or something.” Her gaze was shrewd.
So that was it, the reason she’d come with them: knowledge. Akanlam was happy with her art gallery and her shows; but of all the curious apathy she could show with life, none of it had gone into her breath-sibling. “You were curious,” Rechan said.
Mau smiled, that odd expression that didn’t reach her eyes. “You carved something in the mountains—came back covered in stone dust. What was it, elder aunt?”
• • • •
She remembered her last trip into the mountains as if it was yesterday: going barefoot in the morning, with a curt message left on her parents’ comms unit. She’d taken the set of carving tools that had been given to her on her sixteenth birthday—the straight cutter, the piercer, the driller, and all that would be necessary for her exhalation ceremony. It was a beautiful set, given by Breath-Mother: the finest hardened glass, as translucent as the best lamsinh stone, and hardly weighed anything on her back. As she walked away through the sparse scattering of buildings on the edge of the city, she heard, in the distance, the rumble of bombs hitting the Eastern District—the smell of smoke, the distant wail of militia sirens—and turned her head westwards, towards the mountains.
The mountains, of course, weren’t better—just further away from any hospital, Flesh-Mother and Father would say with a frown—more isolated, so that if you were captured no one would know where you were for days and days. They’d have a block of lamsinh brought to her for the exhalation; everyone did, paying militia and soldiers and the occasional daredevil to cart the life-sized stone into the city. She just had to wait, and she’d be safe.
Rechan could not wait.
She was young, and impatient; and tired of being cooped up for her own safety. She should have been off-planet by now, sent off to Third Aunt for a year’s apprenticeship in the ship-yards; except that the previous summer all spacepor
t traffic had been halted when a bomb exploded in the marketplace; and the apprenticeship went to some other relative who wasn’t from Voc, who didn’t have to cope with bombs and battles and food shortages. By now—if it hadn’t been for those stupid rebels—she could have had her hands in motor oil; could have climbed into pilots’ cabins, running her hands on the instruments and imagining what it would be like, hanging suspended in the void of space with only the stars for company.
Life wasn’t fair, and she certainly wasn’t going to wait any longer to become an adult.
• • • •
There probably was a divinity somewhere watching over thoughtless adolescents; for Rechan had made it into the mountains, and to the plateaux, without any major trouble. She hitched a ride on a peddler’s cart—so many things that could have gone wrong there, but the peddler was nice and friendly, and glad for the company—and then, when there no longer were villages or people, she walked. From time to time, she’d had to duck when a flyer banked over the path. At this height, it had to be rebels, and they’d kill her if they found her, as they had killed Second Uncle and Seventh Aunt, and Cousin Thinh and Cousin Anh; all the absences like gaping wounds in the fabric of family life. Demons take the rebels, all of them; how much simpler would life would be if none of them were here.
And then she stood on the plateaux—her feet hurting, her bag digging into the small of her back, her breath coming in fiery gasps—and it didn’t matter, any of it, because there was the stone.
She’d only seen the blocks the traders brought down. The one for her cousin’s exhalation had been roughly the size of a woman; of course, with lamsinh at such a dear price, people would buy only what was necessary. But here were no such constraints. The stone towered over her, cliffs as tall as the Temple of Mercy, broken bits and pieces ranging from the size of a skyscraper to the size of her fist; colours that ranged from a green so deep it was almost black, to the translucent shades Flesh-Mother so valued, the same colour used for all the family’s breath-siblings—all the stone’s veins exposed, streaks of lighter and darker nuances that seemed to be throbbing on the same rhythm as her own frantic heartbeat.
She walked among them, letting her hand lightly trail on the smooth surfaces, feeling the lambent heat; the faint trembling of the air where the sun had heated them through, like an echo of her own breath. People had always been vague about exhalation: they’d said you’d know, when you saw your block of stone, what kind of breath-sibling you wanted to carve, what kind of birth master you wanted to give to your children yet to come. But here she didn’t just have one block of stone, but thousands; and she wandered into a labyrinth of toppled structures like the wreck of a city, wondering where she could settle herself, where she could make her first cut into the incandescent mass around her.
And then she rounded the edge of the cliff, and saw it, lying on the ground.
It was huge, easily ten times her size, with streaks the colour of algae water, and a thousand small dots, almost as if the stone had been pockmarked; a pattern of wounds that reminded her, for some absurd reason, of a tapestry that had used to hang on Seventh Aunt’s wall, before the bomb tore her apart in the marketplace.
In all the stories she’d heard, all the tales about girls running off to have adventures, there was always this moment; this perfect moment when they reached the plateaux, or when someone showed them a block of stone, and they just knew, staring at it, what it would look like when whittled down to shape; when they’d freed, measure by agonising measure, the limbs and head and body of their breath-sibling, the one who would be their constant companion as they travelled over the known planets. In the stories, they didn’t carve; they revealed the stone’s secret nature, gave it the life it had always longed for.
Rechan had never given that credence. She was the daughter of an engineer, and believed in planning and in forethought; and had brought sketches with her, of how her own stoneman would look, with delicate hands like her mother, and large strong arms that would be able to carry her to hospital if the delivery went badly.
Except that then, she stood in front of the stone, and saw into its heart. And knew, with absolute certainty, that it wasn’t a stoneman that she needed or wanted to carve.
• • • •
Later, much later, when she thought about it all, she wondered how she’d endured it—months up in the plateaux with scant rations, sleeping rough, sheltering under the rock face when the rain came—day after day of rising and going back to her block of stone; carving, little by little, what would become her breath-sibling.
She did the outside first: the sleek, elegant hull, tapering to a point; the shadow of the twin engines at the back, every exhaust port and every weapons slit rendered in painstaking detail. Then she turned inwards, and from the only door into the ship, made corridors inch by agonising inch, her tools gnawing their way through the rock. All the while, she imagined it hanging in space—fast and deadly, a predator in a sea of stars, one who never had to cower or shelter for fear of bombs or flyers; one who was free to go where she wished, without those pointless restrictions on her life, those over-solicitous parents and breath-mothers who couldn’t understand that bombs happened, that all you could do was go out and pray, moment after moment, that they wouldn’t fall on you.
It was rough carving. She didn’t have the tools that would be available to the generation after hers—not the fineness of Akanlam’s carving, who would be able to give Mau fingernails, and a small pendant on her chest, down to the imprint of the chain that held it. She carved as she could—hour after hour, day after day, lifted into a place where time had no meaning, where only the ship existed or mattered; stopping only when the hunger or thirst brought themselves to her attention again, snatching a ration and then returning, hermit-like, to the translucent corridors she was shaping.
Until one day, she stepped back, and couldn’t think of anything else to add.
There was probably something meaningful one was supposed to say, at an exhalation’s close. She’d read speeches, all nonsense about “your breath to mine” and meters and meters of bad poetry. It didn’t seem to matter very much what one said, truth be told.
“Well,” she said to the ship, laying a hand on the hull, “this is it.” Winter had come by then, settling in the mountains, a vice around her lungs; and her breath hung in ragged gasps above her. “I’m not sure—”
The stone under her hand went deathly cold. What—? She tried to withdraw her hand, but it had become fused to the lamsinh; and the veins shifted and moved, as lazily as snakes underwater.
There was a light, coming from the heart of the stone, even as the breath was drained out of her, leaving her struggling to stand upright—a light, and a slow, ponderous beat like a gigantic heart. Breath-sister, the stone whispered, and even that boomed, as if she stood in the Temple of Mercy, listening to the gong reminding the faithful to grow in wisdom. Breath-sister.
Her hand fell back; and the ship rose, casting its shadow over her.
He was sleek elegant beauty—everything she had dreamt of, everything she had carved, all the release she sought—and he didn’t belong on Voc, anymore than she did.
Come with me, the ship whispered; and she had stood there in the growing cold, trembling, and unable to make any answer.
• • • •
“A ship,” Mau said, thoughtfully.
Rechan shivered. It had made sense at the time. “I named him Sang,” she said at last. Illumination, in the old language of the settlers—because he had stood over her, framed by light.
“I didn’t even know you could carve ships.”
“Anything living,” Rechan said, through clenched teeth. She was going to feel sick again. Was it the baby, or the memories, or both? “Stonemen are tradition, but we could have carved cats or dogs or other Old Earth animals if we felt like it.”
“Whoever you’d want assisting at the birth of your children,” Mau said with a nod. She smiled, her hand going to the
impression of the pendant on her chest. “I suppose I should be grateful Akanlam followed tradition. Being an animal wouldn’t have been very—exciting.”
But you wouldn’t know, Rechan thought, chilled. You’d be quite happy, either way. That’s what you were carved for, to give your breath to Akanlam’s babies, and even if you hadn’t been born knowing it, everyone in our society has been telling you that for as long as you can remember. How much responsibility did they have for their carvings? How much of themselves had they put into them; and how much had they taught them?
And what did Sang owe her, in the end—and what did she owe him?
“Your ship is still up there,” Mau said. Her voice was quiet, but it wasn’t difficult to hear the question in her words.
“Yes,” Rechan said. “The crossfire you heard about, it’s not between the rebels and the government soldiers. It’s Sang mopping rebels up.” It hadn’t been what she’d dreamt of, when she’d carved him; she’d wanted a spaceship, not a butcher of armies. But, consciously or unconsciously, she hadn’t put that into her carving.
“The ship you carved?” Mau lifted an eyebrow.
“I was young once,” Rechan said. “And angry. I don’t think I’d carve the same, if I had to do it again.” Though who could know, really. She’d always wondered what would have happened, if she’d answered the question Sang had asked; if she’d said yes. Would she still be on Voc, still going over the bitter loneliness of her life? Would she be elsewhere on some other planet, having the adventures she’d dreamt of as a teenager? If she could do it again…
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t have much choice. If we don’t reach the plateaux in time…” She didn’t dare say it, didn’t dare voice the possibility; but she felt as though someone had closed a fist of ice around her heart.
