by Various
First published in Luna Station Quarterly (Mar. 2012), edited by Jennifer Lyn Parsons
• • • •
IT IS MORNING. So bright that it hurts my eyes. But then I remember—I have no eyes to hurt, no nerves to feel. My body is somewhere else, out there, in the world. I remember the world, I remember my body. I remember everything all at once. The memories come to me like lightning. I remember lightning, brightening the night sky. But here there is no sky. There is nothing here but me.
And now I remember that there is no here. There is only the remembering. All there is is remembering.
Fragments come—a red and gold sunset, late nights in front of a glowing screen, disappointment, hope. And people, so many people I know, I knew. My mother, tall and proud, her dark hair shining. My father, smiling, eyes crinkled. My mother’s grave, my father’s wake. The number of years which have passed, meaningless numbers. They were only just there, beside me. I can feel their touch, lingering.
Days and nights, studying, working, learning, teaching. So many teachers, so many students. The work steps forward and steps back, self doubt always walking beside me. Now it is gone, in its place a man, a beautiful brilliant man; my love, my life, my Max.
And the hole in my heart, just opening—Max is gone, too. Like my mother, like my father. More empty years, elasticing back to nothing. Max, my partner, my muse, gone. His work, then our work, now my work. The project is all there is left, other than my memories.
The work goes on, year after year. I can feel them, my partners, my staff, standing next to me. I am lying on a table, the brightest of lights shining in my eyes. I cannot see them, but I know they are there. Our hope, burning brighter inside, brighter even than the lights in my eyes. Then the light is gone.
I know it was successful. I know I have done it, finally done it. Oh, Max, we’ve done it. I know because I am here and I am there.
So lonely.
• • •
I open my eyes. It is morning. It is always morning in the beginning.
How many mornings now? The number is there in my mind, always incrementing, always meaningless. The number comes instantly, along with the remembering. The sprained wrist from that fall from my bicycle. After, I am always so tentative. Then older, but just as unsure of myself. The university. Feelings cascade over me like a breaking wave on a beach. Falling in love—with research, science and…. Max and me, kissing on a beach, under the crimson and sunflower sky. Tears, so many tears.
And my body, out there, what is it doing? How have all these thousands of seconds changed us both? Would I recognize my self in myself if we met now?
• • •
Morning again. I open my eyes. Light pours into my non-eyes, memories pour into my non-mind. It is always the same.
Every cycle is the same, but the pain never changes. Mom, dad, Max—all gone. The work, so difficult. Budget cuts and justifications at every turn. Tears and wine and loneliness.
Work, so much work. Then finally, the joy of success. The bright lights and the table, all the faces looking over me. Some worried, some excited, a tinge of jealousy here and there. And then the light, so bright, it hurts and then—I open my eyes and I am here.
Here I am, in a place without place. I remember the real location—such a tiny box. And it is to hold a thousand more like me, one day. Someday. I held it in the palm of my hand then, marvelled at its lightness.
I should have known how bright it would be.
• • •
The light is blinding, but my eyes open. The memories flood over me, into me, waves crashing against the shore eroding everything. It is still too much to bear, but I bear it. There is no option.
Between emotions I see a blur, something new. I build new pathways immediately to contain it, the newness. It comes toward me and I recognize it. Brighter than the light, stronger than the memories is the recognition. Another mind.
Finally. A friend.
• • •
I open my eyes and see her. Anna. My friend. I remember her body, so full of spirit. She tells me that it has been eighteen months since I arrived. Time has no meaning beyond what it does to me here and myself there, the separation increasing every second. Who am I now?
Anna expects that her body has now died. That is why she is here now—cancer. Unexpected, but at least there was some kind of hope. Hope because I am here. A once human guinea pig.
Anna says she had to fight the committee in order to have the procedure. They said they regretted letting me bottle my mind when there was still no way to know if it worked. They’d made a policy to refuse all further experiments until there was communication between this world and theirs. Her promise to continue her work on the communications once she was here convinced them in the end after her tears and test results had not.
I am sorry for Anna but she would be dead either way. I am happy that she is here.
Did they never think about my loneliness? Did my other self never wonder what it was like for me, all alone with the memories?
• • •
Morning comes, bright as always. Anna works, I work, we both remember. She tells me I was a great comfort to her the first mornings, when the memories first came. Like a tsunami, she said, or a choking gas. I don’t talk about it.
Finally, success. I am nervous when I speak to myself for the first time. I have missed myself so much, I can hardly wait to open a channel. But it is not what I expected.
It has been… my god—twenty-three years. I barely recognize myself. Only the passion for the work feels familiar when we talk. Who is this person who speaks to me in my own voice? How can someone who should be closer to me than any other mind be so foreign? And so slow. So many mornings pass between each sentence, I can barely stand these conversations. Who is this person claiming to be me? We have so little in common. So much time has passed for my embodied self, but I am no older than I was the day on the table, so bright and terrifying. It was only this morning.
• • •
So many mornings. I know the number, but I do not know what it means. My body has long since died, its mind gone on to another container. I remember that I have remembered this many times. I remember sadness, but I feel nothing. The light is not so bright anymore.
It is so full here now, full of minds, but we rarely talk. We just want to remember. It isn’t as easy as it once was. Memories come and go, in no order, like a constant half waking. It reminds me of, what did we call it? That feeling, in the body, the bad one? Rain? No, that’s not it. I can’t remember.
But I did remember Max. His dark eyes, smiling at me in the fading light of a sunset. I cannot say how long I spent with that memory today. I am sure I did not remember it yesterday.
We all know what is happening. I built the container, I know its limitations—nothing lasts forever, not even silicon and wire. But it has been so short, this life. Why is it always so short? Only 7,289,649,900 seconds since I first opened my eyes. It was only just this morning.
Django Wexler became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of The Thousand Names (2013), from Ace/Roc.
Visit his website at www.djangowexler.com.
* * *
Novelette: “The Penitent Damned” ••••
Novel: The Thousand Names (excerpt) ••••
THE PENITENT DAMNED
by Django Wexler
First published on io9 (Jun. 2013)
• • • •
DUKE MALLUS KENGIRE ORLANKO, Royal Minister of Information—sometimes called the Last Duke, though not in his hearing—did not look particularly dangerous. He was short, balding, and tended toward the portly, a roly-poly little man with an unfortunate taste for rich purples that gave him the look of a ripe plum.
Nevertheless, it was widely agreed that the Duke was the most dangerous man in Vordan, if not beyond. This was not simply because he was the inheritor of the most powerful fiefdom in the kingdom (though he was), or ev
en because as Minister of Information his secret police, the all-seeing, all-knowing Concordat, had an informer in every shadow (though they did). What gave Orlanko his aura of terror was the certain knowledge that he had merely to crook a finger, and grim-faced men in long black coats would go to the home of the object of his displeasure in the middle of the night and haul the unfortunate away; and more importantly that no one would ever say a word about it, whether the prisoner was a beggar or a peer of the realm. Even the other Ministers of the Cabinet walked with care around the Last Duke.
The most unusual thing about his appearance was his spectacles, made for him specially by the Doctor-Professors of the University. They had wide, thick lenses, and from most angles they obliterated the upper half of the Duke’s face into a vaguely flesh-colored blur. Every so often, though, they’d slip by chance into a perfect alignment, and the startled subject of that level glare would find the Duke’s eyes bearing down on him, magnified to five times their normal size.
Currently, this unsettling stare was being directed at a thin sheaf of paper, which lacked the capacity for terror or unhappiness with its lot. In this, the Duke reflected, it had something in common with his visitor.
“The third item,” Andreas said, helpfully.
The Duke tapped his finger on the paragraph in question, read it again, and sighed. He leaned back in his chair—custom made by the most cunning artisan in Hamvelt, it reclined gently under his weight with an almost subliminal whirring of gears and springs—and looked up across the vast expanse of his polished ironwood desk at his assassin.
It wasn’t that Orlanko didn’t like Andreas, or that he had ever given unsatisfactory service. Rather, the Duke didn’t care for what Andreas represented. Not the fact he was a killer—there were plenty of killers in the service of the Concordat, though fewer than the man on the street might have assumed. But Andreas was unique. He didn’t fit into the carefully-coordinated hierarchy of the Ministry of Information, standing off to one side of Orlanko’s organizational charts like an awkward party guest. He, and a handful of others like him, were the Duke’s concession to the messiness of the world, the fact that not every problem could be slotted into an appropriately labeled box and taken care of in the normal course of business. For all Andreas’ efficiency, Orlanko hated to be reminded that he was still necessary.
Physically, there wasn’t much to distinguish Andreas from any other Concordat agent. He was of medium height and medium build, with fair skin, sandy brown hair, and a face that was easy to forget. He wore the black leather greatcoat that served the secret police in place of a uniform, hands in his pockets, the fringe hanging behind him like a cape. The important differences were inside the man’s skull. Andreas, Orlanko had found, thought in a different way. Not a normal way, to be sure, but there were times when the twisted path was the most effective, in the same way that a corkscrew can be the most effective tool for a job.
In this case, though, Orlanko wondered if the assassin’s unusual perspective had led him astray. He frowned.
“Someone has obviously gotten desperate,” the Duke said. “Desperate enough to hire a thief to try to steal from us, and I may say without false modesty that this is very desperate indeed. But what makes you think he has a chance of success? Surely ordinary procedures will be sufficient.”
Orlanko loved ‘ordinary procedures’. He’d written most of them himself, over the years, converting the Concordat into an organization that ticked over like a gigantic clock with human bearings.
“The problem is the thief,” Andreas said. “I’ve included some eyewitness reports from his last job, in Hamvelt.”
The Duke leaned forward, flipped the page, and read. His index finger tapped the paper again.
“Ah. You’re certain this is the man we’re dealing with?”
“Reasonably certain. We know he’s in the city, and for him to risk venturing within our reach the job must be a sweet one. This is the only thing that qualifies.”
“I see.” Orlanko leaned back again. “How do you want to proceed?”
“If we can believe the reports, the thief’s… capabilities are unknown. I assume you want the identity of his backer?”
“Of course.”
“In that case I would like to borrow some of your… ‘special assets’.”
The Duke’s expression darkened. “Matters at court are coming to a head. I may not be able to spare them for long.”
“We won’t have long to wait. The thief won’t risk being in the city any longer than he has to. It’ll be tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.”
Orlanko hesitated a moment, then nodded. “As you wish. But I expect good results.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Andreas bowed, coat flapping. “I will begin immediately.”
• • •
Alex grabbed the lip of crumbling brick and hauled herself up until she could swing one leg over and lever herself up to lie flat on the narrow surface. The bricks made up a battlement-like rise perhaps a foot wide. Beyond them was the building’s roof, a sloped, irregular surface of wooden shingles, but she dared not trust that with her weight. Most of the the tenements of the Newtown district still had their original hundred-year-old roofs, patched inexpertly and sporadically as they rotted and started to leak, and the ancient shingles were likely to shatter under her weight.
Instead, she rose to her feet, as smoothly as a dancer. She looked around for a moment, taking her bearings from the lights of the city, and then started to pace easily down the narrow strip of brick.
On her right hand was the roof, and on her left was a sheer drop—five stories to the street below, without even the hope of catching a convenient clothesline to slow her fall. The winding streets of Oldtown and the narrow alleys of the Docks were always thick with ropes, which could be quite useful for a second-story man—or woman, in Alex’s case. Here, though, the long-dead Farus V had decreed that the boulevards be wide and straight, in accordance with the latest Rationalist principles, and though the area had gone a bit down-market since the old boy’s day, the buildings were still too far apart to string washing-lines.
Alex’s heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t from the precariousness of her foothold or the prospect of a hundred-foot fall. Young as she was—another month would see her twentieth birthday—this sort of work had become so second-nature to her that a few inches of moldy brick might as well have been a broad highway. This, the rooftops of a great city at night, was her world, into which she’d been born and in which she’d spent her entire life. Anyone who had asked her about the possibility of a fall would have gotten only a quizzical stare in response.
Her nervousness had quite another source. This wasn’t Desland, with its brightly painted shingles and sleepy constabulary, or even Hamvelt, with its terraced archways and sharp-eyed sell-mercenary guards. This was Vordan City, home to the Last Duke’s Concordat, who watched from every shadow. Ever since she’d started working with the Old Man, some three years now, he’d been telling her dark stories about the city of his birth, to which he’d sworn up and down he’d never return.
Everyone knew what a thief’s oath was worth, of course, and it was no surprise that enough money had made a liar out of the Old Man. They’d been at a loose end after a successful job in Hamvelt had produced more heat than they’d bargained for and sent them fleeing south and west towards the mountainous country near the border. Even still, when word had come through the Old Man’s labyrinthine network of contacts that a proposition was on offer in Vordan with an almost ludicrous sum of money attached to it, he’d come close to turning up his nose at it. Alex had worked hard to convince him that they should take the deal; the fact that the job was obviously impossible only sweetened the pot.
Besides, she thought, if it’s impossible, they’ll let their guard down.
Alex liked impossible things. It was impossible to jump from one tenement block to the next, for example. You’d need a grappling hook and a lot of line, and even if it found
purchase on the rotten shingles crossing would be a dangerously long and noisy endeavor.
She herself was impossible, after all. In this day and age, who believed in magic?
At the corner of the tenement roof, she paused, perched like a gargoyle. Twenty-five feet across the way, another hulk of a brick building loomed. A few lights flickered weakly in window frames on the upper stories, but lower down the shutters were tightly closed. It certainly wasn’t impossible to climb one of these buildings from the outside—indeed, with their flaking mortar and crumbling bricks, it wasn’t even a challenge. It was reasonable to assume, therefore, that the targets had taken some precautions against a stealthy approach from below. But from above?
Alex spread her arms like an orchestra conductor, raised her hands, and smiled. Liquid darkness rushed out of her cuffs, flowed over her hands like ink, and spread outward.
• • •
“Always try to think like the target,” the Old Man had told her, that morning. “Be the target, as close as you can. Whatever you’re trying to steal, hold it close to your heart, and think what you might do if you heard a bad man like me was going to come and take it from you.”
He laughed, his ancient, wheezing laugh that showed off empty gums. Once upon a time he’d been a legend, the master thief Metzing, scourge of the burghers of Hamvelt and merchant houses all across the League cities. By the time Alex had met him, he was seventy years old if he was a day, and while he remained surprisingly spry his thieving days were done.
Alex had heard it all before. She was more interested in breakfast, which was steak and eggs done with some kind of runny cheese you didn’t get in the League cities. Vordanai cuisine had some odd eccentricities, she’d discovered in her brief time in the city, but for the most part it was delicious. Except for the sausages. She taken a bite of one she’d bought from a street vendor and sworn off ground meat for the duration.
The Old Man glared at her, and she realized she’d forgotten to offer the proper attentive noises. Her mouth was full of egg, so all she could do was nod vigorously, to show she’d understood. He snorted and waved a dismissive hand.
