by Anthology
When I calmed for a moment, his hand dropped down to the ground with a thud, fingers bruised black and crushed flat. Staring into the still-flickering, trembling bloody filaments of braincrystal at my feet, I realized that nothing could stop me as long as I could swallow the pain. I could be like a giant snake, too, and swallow the stricken crane of my instincts.
My mind choking, I fled the palace into the night.
* * * *
The other cai were horrified when, a few days later, I returned at dawn. I told them, all these wives of the monsters, about the abandoned truck I'd found not far away full of guns and bombs and dead soldiers, and told them what I wanted to do.
"Come with me," I begged.
"Are you insane? Leave, now," hissed the thinnest cai, who'd never liked me. "They'll kill us all. After the murder..."
"I want to," I explained, bristling at the word murder. "I can't go unless I destroy this place. I'm bound here. It's some kind of..." They wouldn't understand the notion of programming. "A... a spell," I said.
"We can't leave either," whined a younger cai. "You know that. The pain...it's too much." She shook her head.
"You can. If I can do it, you can."
"No," several of them said at once, and backed away from me. I worried that they might call the peng-zu. They didn't.
"Please," I repeated over and over again, weeping. "I'll carry you. Anything. I have to destroy this place." A sharp-edged squirm tore at my insides, and I knelt down in pain. "I'm going to burn it to the ground."
They all stood there staring at me. Most of them frightened, but a few looked relieved to know it might soon end. A few of them even smiled.
When I left, to return to my truck, I went alone. But not one of them tried to stop me.
* * * *
Why haven't the soldiers come?
Surely they've seen the smoke by now, pouring skyward. Perhaps their programming, like mine, went silent after the palace was burned to cinders. Or have they fled, terrified that whatever burned down Taishan complex--the center of peng-zu society---will come for them next?
I can't be bothered to kill them. Standing outside the ruins, I have stared for hours into the smoking mess. The sweet stink of burning flesh turned my stomach as I waited for their piled corpses to finish burning, but now it is done. They are as charred as possible---a fire that would turn them to ash and cinder was too much to ask for.
First, the wives. Rummaging through the charred mound of bodies, I dig out each of the skulls. With a hammer, I smash each one open. The blood is baked around their crystalline brains, and I have to completely shatter the skull to free it. Still quivering and glinting---still thinking---their crystal brains wriggle free and, as they do, I hammer them to tiny, mindless fragments. The tiny shards are still budding new filaments, glittering, but they cannot house a whole mind. This is the best mercy I can show them, to make them finally free.
Then I turn to the peng-zu's shot, stabbed, bodies, now burned as well. So many tried to flee. And failed. With their skulls, I am far more careful. If they break free and connect to other crystal brains, perhaps they will build or steal themselves new bodies and live again.
I handle each skull like a fragile egg, wrap it in a thick square of plastic cut from the tarpaulins left on the truck. That will do until I can embed them in iron and bury them. Minds whole, they can flicker alone, forever, in darkness.
That tug: I feel it again. Smoke still thick in the air, human grease and ash caked on my hands and face, I turn northward...to Beijing. I can see the ruined city, the red gate, and the peng-zu palace beyond it, in my mind. I touch my bulging belly, wonder, "How can I go there like this?"
I begin to sing my mother's song, for strength.
Dark Planet
Lavie Tidhar
One: Weirdies and Bombies
The Weirdy was directly ahead of Chamberlain, partially obscured by the thick foliage of the jungle, but there. Chamberlain's gun was in his hand but it was hard to take aim. The Weirdy was moving. It looked like a localized maelstrom of air, a cone of turbulence tapering onto the ground where it stirred the rotting leaves into new configurations. The only organic part of the Weirdy was at the top where air gave way to a face like a dragonfly, at least if the insect had been gene-spliced with a tiger. Worse, the head remained still while the body-storm continued to rotate. Chamberlain's gun was a Vacuum 300 and, theoretically, it could take out one of the Weirdies, no problem. Theoretically.
Chamberlain took a careful step forward and brought the gun up...
The maelstrom stopped moving. Dark multi-faceted eyes seemed to look directly at him and for a moment he thought---it knows I'm here.
He pressed the trigger.
The blast tore through the foliage, bursting veins in the living trees' trunks, creating a localized implosion that threatened to suck Chamberlain into it. He'd fallen down as soon as he'd fired, minimizing the amount of exposed body, but still it tugged at him, trying to drag him into the temporary vacuum. He shut his eyes and his fingers dug into the mud.
When the blast had abated, Chamberlain opened his eyes and stared forward. Total devastation. Where before there had been a thick, almost impenetrable jungle, there was now a clearing, and the ground was covered in bleeding, fresh kindling; the only remains of the living trees.
There was no sign of the Weirdy. A blue-black insect as thick as an eye-patch buzzed over Chamberlain's head and settled on his outstretched fingers. He stared at it for a long moment. The insect's feelers moved as if in a greeting. Then some knowledge forced its way back into Chamberlain's mind and the fear was back, a thousand times worse, and he had to bite down on his lip, drawing blood, trying to stop himself from moving, to be perfectly and absolutely still.
The insect was a Bombie.
It seemed to stare at him. Chamberlain stared back at the Bombie, trying not to blink. Silently, he counted planets, based on their distance from the sun: Monkey, Jaguar, Wolf, Fly, Elephant, Dog, Firefly. There was a song by Li Tsheng you learned, like a children's song, like a nursery rhyme, (although it didn't rhyme), when you came here:
Firefly is dead and cold
Monkey burns, Jaguar sleeps
Wolf and Dog circle
Elephant is home
---Don't send me to Fly.
The Bombie buzzed at him. How did he get into this mess? It was Colonel Piet, old Colonel Piet with his yellow teeth and close-cropped grey hair who sent him like this, to his death. So calmly, too. The order came in the night. Chamberlain, Mastorakis and Shen, report to Command immediately. When they came, Colonel Piet saluted them and then showed them a map of the nearby territory. "Having some problems around this area," he said, circling one bit of jungle that looked exactly like any other bit of jungle. "We need some people to go in and take a look, thought of you. Got good records. If you could just pop in there and look around, see what you can find, why the Weirdies seem so bothered about this particular area. Think that would be all right?"
"Sir."
"Sir."
"Sir."
"Good." The colonel gestured at the projected map. "Kill any Weirdies you find, of course. And come back, do you hear? We need at least one of you alive."
"Sir."
"Sir."
"Sir."
"Dismissed."
Mastorakis got it not five hours out of base: a living tree engulfed him in its branches and by the time they got to him, the tree was pulsating with blood, its branches shaking, and Mastorakis's emaciated corpse was lying on the ground. They had torched the tree, but that didn't help Mastorakis.
Shen was with him up to and including the region of penetration. A Gorp got him. Chamberlain shuddered. He didn't want to think about the Gorp.
The shudder seemed to have alarmed the Bombie. Chamberlain froze. The Bombie stopped (it was now positioned half-way up his arm) and began to vibrate. The vibrations went up Chamberlain's arm. Please please please don't.
The vibrations grew more frantic. Please pleas
e pl---
"Bombie makes baby," a voice close to his ear said. He almost jumped. The voice was pleasant, soft, a little childish. "Makes many baby. You no like?"
Trying not to move his lips, the words escaping like a hiss of air through closed teeth: "Don't want to die."
"What is die? You think."
Somehow he understood the speaker. The voice made him picture a young girl standing there, which was insane. There were no young girls on Fly. But he did what the voice told him. He thought of death.
Pain, and the absence of pain...and the thing that is, that was, Chamberlain spread out over a large area, no heart to beat blood into the brain, neurons no longer firing, the I/We group-mind that is the human brain dispersing like mist---
The voice said, "Die---strange. You wait."
On his arm the Bombie was ready to explode. Its wings juddered and its feelers moved frantically in an ecstatic display. It had grown larger, inflated, until it was the size of a hand-grenade.
He whispered: "Can't...wait. No time."
"You no like? Bombie funny."
Funny?
Something leaned over him. He tried not to see it. It was nothing human. It was like two transparent arms made of glass, or air, passing over him, through him, and delicately cupping the Bombie. He saw it as a glass globe encircling the insect, right there on his arm.
The Bombie exploded. Chamberlain screamed.
"You silly," the voice said in his ear.
The Bombie exploded inside its cage. A cage, Chamberlain thought. He tried to ignore the spreading wetness in his combat suit. The Bombie exploded into a thousand tiny fragments, sharp black slivers that shot away from it as it disintegrated, ready to cut, maim, and embed themselves in any and all available surfaces, but instead---
They'd frozen in a perfect moment of explosion, within the boundary of an invisible globe. The globe rested on Chamberlain's arm. He stared at it. "Better now?" the childish voice said. "Pretty Bombie."
Chamberlain rolled on his back, bringing the gun up in one smooth motion, pointing it at the---
Weirdie.
A maelstrom of wind, a face above it like a whiskered cat, eyes bright and twinkling. His finger tightened on the trigger---
"Release Bombie?" the voice said. It came from the Weirdie, although the lips in that face did not move. And Chamberlain froze with his finger on the trigger. The threat in the words was self-evident, with or without the childish voice.
He relaxed his finger, slowly, and equally slowly he stowed away the gun. Above him the Weirdie was holding the Bombie. It looked like a grotesque aquarium, like something you got in the restaurants back on Elephant, only with a living bomb inside.
"You...Chamberlain? Pretty name. Pretty face. Me---"
Instead of words, an image, shoved into his brain like fingers into soft dough. Images, confused, incoherent. Weirdies, in formation. An area of jungle like all the others and yet somehow he knew it was the one he was in, the one he had been sent to, although it looked strange, somehow, as if the jungle were overlaid on top of something else, like two versions of the same thing getting mixed up. The area of penetration, he thought.
"Penetration," the Weirdy voice said. More images. This Weirdy, with a companion, travelling through the forest. The companion-Weirdy disappearing in a blaze of---Chamberlain closed his eyes. The Weirdy had been killed with a vacuum gun. His.
"Mission, take look," the Weirdy said. "Mission---learn. After fix. No problem. Now I learn you. Yes?"
"No," Chamberlain said.
"Now I learn you," the Weirdy said. "No problem."
And again, it was like fingers digging into his skull, but this time it was worse, and he screamed. The maelstrom of wind picked him up and tendrils of air stroked him, touched him... "Please!" he said.
"No problem," the Weirdy said. "Must relax."
Tendrils of air studied him, caressed him, from his ears down to his neck, to his chest and back, to his buttocks and---
"No, you don't understand," he said.
"Is true," the Weirdy said. "Not understand. Must learn. You now. No problem."
"Stop saying that!"
Then a tentacle of air entered him and he screamed, and his mind was filled with images of the war, and back, back, back to:
* * * *
Two: Brainstorm
He is at home and there is a solar-system swirling above his head made of soft colourful foam, all six planets in rotation. Daddy stands above him. "Monkey," Chamberlain says. "Monkey!"
"And this one, little Shambi?" Daddy says.
"Monkey!"
"Jaguar," Daddy says. "And this one?"
"Monkey?"
"Firefly. And this one is Wolf, and this one is Dog---see how they always circle close to each other, but never quite meet?---and this is home, this is---"
"Elephant!" Shambi says, and Daddy smiles and lifts him from the crib and gives him a hug. "You are a smart boy, Shambilan."
(somewhere far away---No, don't call me that! I'm Chamberlain now, and Shambilan is long gone, along with the house, the crib and that old useless toy---
---Where is other one?
---What?
---Where other one?
---There is no other one.
---No! Must look again!
And dissolve)
"Monkey!" Little Shambilan says.
"And this one?"
"Monkey!"
There is another planet on a string, but it is small and ugly, and father sees it and he frowns and he says, "That's not supposed to be there. Hold on," and he goes and he comes back and he has scissors and he cuts the wire and everything is pretty again. And Shambilan thinks of a word he had heard somewhere but doesn't know where, and he shouts, "Fly!"
"What did you say?"
"Monkey?"
"You should not talk of that place. It is evil."
(---What is evil?
---This is.
---No, this memory only. No evil. What is evil?
---Fly, Chamberlain says. Fly is evil.
And fade)
"What is evil, Daddy?"
Daddy is looking at him as if looking at something alien and strange. "Get away from my son," he says.
"Daddy?"
But his father still looks at him as if he has never seen him before, and there is a hard, scary look in his eyes. "There is no such place as Fly," he says. "Get away from him. Now."
And the scene disappears and it is later, years later, and---
(---Man no like new friend?
---Is this real?
---What is real?
And Chamberlain groans, and the wind probes deep inside him---
And dissipate)
---and he is lying in the grass under the stars with Rashmi and they both have their shirts off and her skin is soft and dark and his heart is beating loudly in his chest and she says, "One day I'm going to go to the stars."
"Why? Nothing there," he says, and his fingers trace a line under her arm and she giggles. "Don't you wonder what it's like, up there?"
"Rocks," he says, with the certainty of a boy. "Why go anywhere? Our ancestors came here because it was the best place to be."
"Do you really believe it?"
"The Party says---"
"I'm not asking you what the Party says. I'm asking what you believe."
"If they call me I'll go," he says, changing tack, his fingers trying to work their way below her navel, but she turns and blocks him. "Go where?"
"Into the service. You could come with me. Then we'll see what it's really like out there, on Firefly and Monkey, Jaguar and Wolf and Dog, maybe even further, back where people come from, I forget what it's called."
"Mars," Rashmi says. He shrugs. "Whatever." She smiles and turns toward him for a kiss---
(---Where is one?
---Oh, come on!
---You are distressed? Young boy likes young girl?
---Just...can we go back? Just for a moment?
--
-But where is other? Where is one?
---I---
And disperse)
"Rashmi? What is it?"
But she is backing away from him now, and her eyes are round with fear.
"What did I say?" He doesn't understand. "We could go to all of them," he says again, trying somehow to get her back. "You'll like Fly. It's beautiful. When the living trees are in bloom and the Gorp are hunting through the woods, and you can hear the music of the Skaar-et-lam when true night falls---"
"Get away from me! Get away!"
(---But I don't understand! This never happened. I don't know what Skaar-et-lam is---
---Very beautiful. Must experience. Now more.
---No more.
---Must.
---Kill me.
---I do not understand kill.
---Dying?
---Ah, yes, picture-story you tell. No, no dying.
And---)
The Party Congress, and he is a young man, standing in the auditorium with all the other cadets. The Chairman speaks, an elderly man in a plain blue shirt. "Prosperity is our watchword," the Chairman says. "Under the Party's leadership the six worlds are at peace. The world we have made for ourselves is a world of good."
Cheers.
"Unity!"
Cheers.
"The path of enlightenment is glorious before us---"
(---Not understand.
But Chamberlain does not even remember a party conference, does not remember the auditorium, does not remember the speech, and he says---What are you looking for?
---One! One plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one!
---Ah, Chamberlain says. Mathematics. Right.
---Where is one?
And---)
He stands up in the audience and everyone turns to look and their eyes are hard and uncomprehending. He shouts, "What about the seventh planet?" and there is an uproar, and somebody screams, and the soldiers turn and the guns are pointing at him and the speaker roars---"There is no seventh planet!" and the guns---
(and fade. And back. And---)
* * * *
Three: Soldier Plus One
The Weirdy hovered above him. "One dark," it said. Its body swirled in an excited turbulence. "One missing. Like puzzle, in memory of you, one time. You make puzzle with Daddy, and piece is missing. You cry."
