The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Onyx didn’t comprehend half this peroration, but she understood the yearning in the words of Anna Tingri Five.

  “Both of you want to leave this place?” Anna Tingri Five asked.

  Yes. Both.

  “Come into our encampment then” said Anna Tingri Five. “It’s warm inside. Let me repay you for your interesting kindness.”

  They came to the place the fireborn had made for themselves. No one in Buttercup County had seen the fireborn arrive, and their camp was over the rim of a hill where no one went in the leafless winter. But the camp itself was not leafless. A mortal commoner passing by, Anna Tingri Five explained, would see nothing unusual. Some ensorcellment kept the campground hidden from casual glances. But Anna Tingri Five allowed Onyx and Jasper to see the place and pass inside its perimeter. Inside, the fireborn had undone winter. In their enchanted circle, it was a pleasant summer night. The trees were leafy, the meadow plants flowering. Vast silken pavilion tents of many colors had been staked to the fragrant ground, and hovering radiant globes supplemented the pale moonlight. It was late, and Onyx supposed most of the fireborn were asleep, but some few were still passing between the tents, talking in unknown languages, as lean and tall and perfect as flesh can be. Supple robots moved silently among them, performing inscrutable robot tasks. Onyx marveled at the warmth of the air (she shrugged out of her woolen coat, loosened a button on her hempen shirt), and Jasper’s eyes grew big with awe and eagerness.

  “Spend the night with us,” said Anna Tingri Five.

  Anna Tingri Five had never been out of contact with her compound even after her bodymaker failed; at the first tickle of a wistful thought a robot would have flown her home through the January sky. But she had been intrigued and interested by the helpful commoners who appeared out of the darkness. She had met few real commoners and was curious about them. She thought that this pair might be worth keeping. That was why, a few days later, she offered them jobs in the encampment and a free ride, come the end of summer, to the continent’s great Harvest Festival.

  Onyx’s parents begged her not to accept the offer. Her mother wailed; her father raged; but they had known they were raising a rover ever since they named their restless baby girl Onyx. And they had two stout and unimaginative sons who were bound to remain in Buttercup County and lead useful and sensible lives.

  Jasper’s father had milled grain all his life, had continued to mill grain after the death of his wife ten years ago, and would mill grain until the day he died. He had once harbored his own ambition to see the world outside Buttercup County, and was pleased and terrified in equal parts by the prospect of his son’s departure. “Write me letters from foreign places,” he demanded, and Jasper promised to do so. When father and son said goodbye, both wept. They knew that life was short and difficult and that, as a rule, commoners only lived once.

  It was soon obvious to Onyx that the fireborn had no real need of hired help. It was not that she and Jasper did no work—they did—or that they were not paid for their work—they were, in genuine copper dollars. But the carrying of water and the serving of food had previously been conducted by robots, and Onyx felt embarrassed to be doing robot work, even for generous wages. The fireborn said please and thank you and smiled their thin, distant smiles. But we’re pets, Onyx complained to Jasper one day. We’re not good for anything.

  Speak for yourself, said Jasper.

  It became increasingly clear that Anna Tingri Five favored Jasper over Onyx.

  Onyx assigned herself the task of learning all she could about the fireborn. The first thing she learned was that there were greater and lesser ranks among them. Some of the fireborn in the skydancer camp were firstborns, who had never passed through the rejuvenating fire and who had trivializing Ones attached to their names. As old as some of them might seem, the first-borns were novices, junior members of the troupe. They watched, listened, kept to their own circles. They were not skydancers but apprentices to skydancers; they managed the small incomprehensible machines that made the dances possible.

  The dancers themselves were many-born: some Fives, some Sevens, a couple of Nines. And despite her reservations, Onyx loved to watch them dance. Whenever they danced she would leave her unimportant work (folding ceremonial silks, crushing seeds to flavor soup) and study the process from its beginning to its end. The dancers’ apprentices helped them don the harnesses they called bodymakers, and in their bodymakers the dancers looked like some robot’s dream of humanity, perfect coffee-colored flesh peeping out between lashings of glass and sky-blue metal. But there was nothing awkward about the way the harnessed dancers moved. They grew buoyant, they stepped lightly to the launching meadow, they flexed their supple limbs as they assembled. Then they flew into the air.

  And once they were aloft, still and small as eagles hovering on an updraft, the bodymakers made their bodies.

  Onyx understood that the bodies were projections of the dancers’ bodies, and that the projected bodies were made of almost nothing—of air momentarily frozen and made to bend light to create the illusion of colors and surfaces. But they looked real, and they were stunningly large, one mile or more top to bottom as nearly as Onyx could calculate. Because they were insubstantial, the bodies were not affected by even the most powerful winds, but they touched and rebounded and gripped one another as if they were real things. In the rondo dances, vast hands held vast hands as if air were flesh.

  “I’ll bet I could do that,” Jasper said yearningly, on one of the mornings when they sat together at the edge of the flying meadow and watched until their necks ached with up-staring.

  “Bet a copper dollar you couldn’t,” said Onyx.

  “Some day you’ll die of not believing.”

  “Some day you’ll die of dreaming!”

  The greatest of the dancers—a category that included Anna Tingri Five—were rivals, and they danced alone or with single partners selected from among the lesser dancers. During the Harvest festivities, a single Finest Dancer would be selected, and that individual would be offered transit to the Eye of the Moon. Only two dancers in the troupe were eligible to compete for this year’s Moon Prize: Anna Tingri Five and a man named Dawa Nine.

  Both danced beautifully, in Onyx’s opinion. Anna Tingri Five danced as a blue-skinned goddess with bells on her wrists and ankles. When she flirted with the white clouds that climbed the sunlit mountains from the west, her bells tolled sonorously. Dawa Nine danced as an ancient warrior, with silver armor and a silver sword on his hip. Often in his practice, he rose to impossible heights and swooped like a predatory bird to within a feather’s-breadth of the treetops.

  But Jasper had eyes only for Anna Tingri Five, an attention the fireborn dancer enjoyed and encouraged, much to Onyx’s disgust. Jasper pleased Anna Tingri Five by befriending the apprentice who maintained her gear, helping him with small tasks and asking occasional pertinent questions. On idle days he folded Anna Tingri Five’s silk and poured her dinner wine. What he hoped to accomplish with this foolish fawning was beyond Onyx. Until it became clear to her.

  One cloudless night in spring, when the fireborn were gathered under a great pavilion tent for their communal meal, Anna Tingri Five stood and cleared her throat (like the sound of a silver flute clearing its throat, Onyx thought) and announced that she had revised her plan for the Festival and that she would teach the commoner Jasper to dance.

  The fireborn were startled, and so was Onyx, who nearly dropped the pitcher of wine she was carrying. Last month, she had been given a device the size of a pea and the shape of a snail, which she wore behind her ear, and which translated the confusing languages of the fireborn into words she could mostly understand. In that startled moment, the device conveyed a tumult of dismay, disapproval, disdain.

  Anna Tingri Five defended her decision, citing examples of novelty dancers who had been admitted to tournaments in supporting roles, citing the elevation of certain commoners to near-fireborn status for certain sacred functions, citing Jasper’s
fascination with the dance. A few of the fireborn nodded tolerantly; most did not.

  Jasper had been training in secret, said Anna Tingri Five, and tomorrow he would make his first flight.

  Jasper wasn’t present in the tent that night, or Onyx would have given him her best scornful glare. She was forced to save that for the morning, when she joined a crowd of the fireborn for the occasion of his ascent. She watched (he avoided her eyes) as Jasper was strapped and haltered into a bodymaker by Anna Tingri Five’s sullen apprentices. She watched with grim attention as Anna Tingri Five escorted him to the launching meadow. She watched as he rose into a mild blue sky, bobbing like a paper boat on a pond. Then he engaged his bodymaker.

  Jasper became a mile-high man. A man dressed like a farmer. A flying peasant. An enormous gawking rube.

  The false Jasper flexed its county-wide limbs. It turned an awkward, lunging pirouette.

  Now the fireborn understood the nature of the dance: they laughed in approval.

  Onyx scowled and stalked away.

  “It’s a silly custom,” Onyx said. “Skydancing.”

  Perhaps she shouldn’t have said this—perhaps especially not to Dawa Nine, the troupe’s other keynote dancer. But he had come to her, not vice versa. And she guessed that he deserved to hear her true and honest opinion.

  “You only say that because you’re jealous.”

  Dawa Nine was a tall man. His skin was dark as hard coal, even darker than Onyx’s skin. His head was well-shaped and hairless. He had lived nine lives and that was enough for him. He aimed to dance his way into immortality, and the most immediate obstacle in his path was Anna Tingri Five. “I am not jealous,” Onyx said.

  It was noon on a spring day and the sun was shining and he had come to her tent and asked to speak with her. Onyx had agreed. But what could Dawa Nine have to say that would interest Onyx? She cared very little about the fireborn or their ambitions. In five days, the troupe would leave Buttercup County for the windswept granaries of the Great Plains. Onyx planned to leave them there and make her own way to the cities of the Atlantic Coast. She had saved enough copper dollars to make the journey easier.

  “Be honest,” Dawa Nine said. His voice was not a flute. His voice was the wind hooting through the owl-holes of an old tree, and his smile was soft as moonlight. “With yourself, if not with me. You came here with Jasper, and he was your everyday boyfriend, and now he’s flying with a beautiful fireborn dancer. What sane woman wouldn’t be jealous?”

  “It’s not like I ever would have married him,” Onyx protested.

  “In that case, you should stop paying him such close attention.”

  “I’m not! I’m ignoring him.”

  “Then let me help you ignore him.”

  I’m doing fine in that department, thought Onyx. “What do you mean?”

  “Work as my apprentice.”

  “No! I don’t want to fly. I don’t want to be some dancer’s clown.”

  “I’m not suggesting that you learn to fly, Miss Onyx. But you can husband my machinery and harness my bodymaker. The boy who does it for me now is a mere One, and you’re smarter than he is—I can tell.”

  Onyx took this for fact, not flattery. And—yes—Jasper would be gratifying annoyed to find Onyx working for Anna Tingri Five’s bitter rival. “But what do you get out of this, Old Nine? Not just a better apprentice, I’ll bet.”

  “Of course not. You’re a commoner. You can tell me about Jasper. Who he is, what he wants, how he might dance—what Anna Tingri Five might make of him.”

  “I will not be your spy,” Onyx said.

  “Well, think about it,” said Dawa Nine.

  Dawa Nine’s offer was on Onyx’s mind as the troupe packed its gear and left Buttercup County.

  The fireborn all rode robots, and robots carried their gear and supplies, and even Onyx and Jasper were given robots to ride. The troupe found and followed the road that ran through Buttercup Town, and Onyx was able to wave to her parents from the comfortable shoulder of a tall machine. They waved back fearfully; Jasper’s father was also present, also waving and weeping; and Onyx burned with the pangs of home-leaving as they passed the hotel, the counting house where she had worked, the general store, the barber shop. Then Buttercup Town was behind them, and her thoughts moved differently.

  She thought about commoners and the fireborn and the Eye of the Moon.

  Now that she had dined and slept and bathed with them, the fireborn were far less daunting than they had seemed to her in stories. Powerful, yes; masters of strange possibilities, yes; rich beyond calculation, surely. But as striving and envious as anyone else. Cruel and kind. Thoughtless and wise. Why then were there two kinds of people, commoners and fireborn?

  Legend had it that commoners and fireborn had parted ways during the Great Hemoclysm centuries ago. But not even the fireborn knew much about that disaster. Some said the Eye of the Moon had watched it. Some said the Eye of the Moon had only just come into existence when the world began to burn. Some said the Eye of the Moon had somehow caused the Hemoclysm (but Onyx kept that notion to herself, for it was a heresy; the fireborn considered the Eye a holy thing).

  Onyx cared little about the Eye. It was where the fireborn went after they had lived their twelve allotted lives—or sooner, if they tired of life on Earth and could claim some worthy achievement. In the Eye, supposedly, the fireborn wore whatever bodies they chose and lived in cities made entirely of thought. They could travel across the sky—there were Eyes, some claimed, on other planets, not just the moon. One day the Eye would rule the entire universe. Or so it was said.

  As a child on a pew in Buttercup County’s Church of True Things, Onyx had learned how Jesu Rinpoche had saved wisdom from the Hemoclysm and planted the Four Doors to the Moon at the corners of the Earth. The story of the Fifth Door, in which Jasper so fervently believed, was a minor heresy much favoured by old pipe-smoking men. What was the truth of it all? Onyx didn’t know. Probably, she thought, nine-tenths of these tales were nonsense. She had been called cynical or atheistic for saying so. But most of everything people said was nonsense. Why should this be different?

  All she really knew was that there were commoners and there were fireborn. The fireborn traveled at will and played for a living and made robots that mined mountains and cultivated harvests. The commoners lived at the feet of the fireborn, untroubled unless they made trouble. That was how it had been since the day she was born, and that was how it would be when she left the world behind. Only dreamers like Jasper believed differently. And Jasper was a fool.

  Jasper’s foolishness grew so obvious that Onyx gave up speaking to him, at least until they argued.

  The troupe descended in long robotic marches from the mountains to the hinterland, where the only hills were gentle drumlins and rolling moraines, and where the rivers rippled bright and slow as Easter ribbons. Some days, the sky was blue and empty. Some days, clouds came rolling out of the west like gray monsters with lightning hearts.

  The road they followed was paved and busy with traffic. They made their camps by the roadside where wild grass grew and often stayed encamped for days. A month passed in this lazy transit, then another. Where the plains had been farmed, a vast green bounty mounded and grew ripe. The Harvest approached.

  Jasper’s dancing skills improved with practice, though Onyx was loathe to admit it. Of course, he wasn’t as good as the fireborn dancers, but he wasn’t supposed to be. He was a foil, as Dawa Nine explained to her: a decorative novelty. The theme of Anna Tingri Five’s dance was the misbegotten love of a fireborn woman for a young and gawkish commoner. It was a story the fireborn had been telling for centuries, and the tale was always tragic. It had been set to music many times, though Anna Tingri Five would be the first to dance it. Jasper was required only to clump about the sky in crude yearning poses, and to adopt a willing stillness while Anna Tingri Five beckoned him, teased him, accepted him, loved him, and forsook him in a series of highly symbolic set-dances.
The rehearsals were impressive, and with her head turned to the late-summer sky, Onyx even felt a kind of sour pride: That’s our Jasper a mile high and another mile tall, she thought. That’s the same Jasper who walked behind a mule cart in Buttercup County ten months ago. But Jasper was as stupid and bemused as the peasant he portrayed in the dance.

  And then, one night as she served wine, Onyx discovered Jasper with Anna Tingri Five in a dark corner of the fireborn pavilion, the two of them exchanging bird-peck kisses.

  Onyx left the pavilion for the bitter consolation of the prairie night. Jasper guessed what she had seen and followed her out, calling her name. But Onyx didn’t stop or look back. She didn’t want to see his traitorous face. She went straight to Dawa Nine instead.

  Jasper caught her the next day, as she passed along a row of trees where a creek cut the tabletop prairie. The day was warm. Onyx wore a yellow silk skirt one of the fireborn women had given her, and a yellow silk scarf that spoke in gestures to the wind. The troupe’s lesser dancers rehearsed among clouds high above, casting undulant shadows across the wild grass.

  “Don’t you trust me?” Jasper asked, blocking her path.

  “Trust you to do what? I trust you to do what I’ve seen you doing,” said Onyx.

  “You have no faith!”

  “You have no sense!”

  “All I want is to learn about the Eye of the Moon and how to get there,” Jasper said.

  “I don’t care about the Eye of the Moon! I want to live in a city and look at tall buildings! And all I have to do to get there is walk toward the sunrise!”

  “I’ll walk alongside you,” said Jasper. “Honest, Onyx!”

  “Really? Then let’s walk!”

  “ . . . after the Dance, of course, I mean . . . ”

  “Hah!”