Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I examined the flagship. As starships went, it had a certain grandeur. It was the fleet’s largest ship by far. The golden armor was, incredibly, decorated with fantastical treasures: cameos of queens and knights carved from mirrorstones, rubies and spinels glimmering with the bloodlight of small sacrifices, knives in caskets welded in archaeological splendor to the hull.

  “Are the weapons—”

  My mother spoke over me, as though she had heard another question entirely. “That one, in the rear guard,” she said. Her voice was becoming clipped, distant, like bones clacking together.

  Obligingly, I viewed the ship she had indicated. At first I scarcely recognized it as such. The flagship, for all its gaudiness, was an ellipsoid, a solid shape. This other ship looked more like a seethe of insects beneath the surface of the night, elusively visible even with the far-scryer’s customary adjustments for the limitations of human perception.

  “That is the pleasure-wrecker Five Hundred Stings and One Chalice,” my mother said. I was becoming increasingly unnerved, yet all I could do was look from her dimmed eyes to the ship, from the ship to her eyes. “Even here I have heard stories of its exploits. At full capacity, it carries over a million of its people. In the old days those would have been sculptors, calligraphers, perfumers, cooks. They designed ships to go to war for them—”

  “Aren’t these all warships?” I had gone on to examine the armaments on the others. Bombs, mines, putrescences (I wasn’t sure what this meant, except that I didn’t want to be hit by them), the occasional canister of apiarist’s fire. No two were the same, which struck me as strange.

  “They are indeed,” my mother said. “Well, we will send out the welcome-banner, and see what they have for us. I hope we can accommodate them all.” The fortress had its secrets of involute geometry, but so did the fleet we beheld.

  The welcome-banner changed not at all with the calendar’s groanings. My mother said that sometimes constancy was a virtue. It consisted of a pattern of particles, a display of dappled light. In it I often glimpsed the coalescence of stars, the alchemical nature of metals noble and otherwise, the asymmetry of yearning.

  The flagship asked for permission to send a single visitor, using an old protocol. My mother granted it. I hadn’t expected otherwise. The two of us went down to one of the fortress’s many antechambers, this one hung about with violet-green fronds and filled with a dense, cloying steam. I wore the minimum of protection necessary, the usual mesh. The steam would not do me lasting damage, but there was no need to be reckless.

  The visitor was a robot, darkly iridescent, with a shape not unlike my own. I envied it its sleek limbs, the precise joints, the sheen of its crested head. It and my mother rapidly agreed to switch to a different interlingua, one that better reflected the robot’s needs. Then it introduced itself as Hauth of the Greater Choreographical Society.

  By now I knew of dance, so I mistook Hauth for a form of artist. That wasn’t entirely inaccurate, at that. But Hauth would, it emerged, be better described as a historian or propagandist.

  At no point was Hauth’s manner anything but polite. It had come, it said with its buzzing accent, because it wished to interview my mother personally and incorporate the results in its chronicle.

  “If that is your wish,” my mother said, still burning with that sad blue light. “My hospitality is yours.”

  Hauth explained its recording instruments and editing procedures and the musical conventions by which the final work would be scored. Then it looked at me. I had lost interest and was examining a fern’s spores. It added, smoothly, “I would like permission to interview your ward as well.”

  “Eggling,” my mother said when I didn’t react; I hadn’t been paying attention. “I advise against it—”

  “Is she old enough to make this decision for herself?” Hauth interrupted.

  My mother sighed. “She is.”

  “Then I wish to hear her answer.”

  “Mother?” I asked waveringly.

  “I advise against it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t unknow things once you know them,” she said. “Because you can’t return to being a child once you become an adult.”

  I should have been paying attention to her phrasing here; I was not. Not that I was the first to make such a mistake, but I hope you will grow to be wiser than I was.

  “I would prefer,” Hauth said, even more crushingly polite, “that the decision be wholly her own.”

  “No decision is wholly anyone’s own,” my mother said, “but I take your point. It’s up to you, eggling. I will not send our guest away. However, if you would rather not hear what it has to say, I must insist that you not be further involved in its investigations. I will handle them myself.”

  This made me stubborn. She gave me a warning look, which I ignored; I had gotten to that age. At the time, I thought only that Hauth might be able to tell me things about my mother that she hadn’t wanted me to hear. I didn’t realize my mother was more worried about the things that I would have difficulty facing.

  “I will be available whenever you need me,” my mother said, addressing Hauth. “Ask what you will of my child, if she consents to answer. Eggling, if you want this to stop at any time, you know how to find me.”

  I watched as she snaked around toward one of the two doors out, her status lights flaring bright, then dimming almost to black.

  Hauth stood with its masked face, its edged patience. I stared at it, then said, “I can show you around the fortress.”

  It spoke. This time the buzzing accent sounded more harmonious, but that might have been my imagination. “I would be grateful if you would show me the places that make you think of your mother,” it said.

  What a peculiar request, I thought. Still, surely there was no harm. I glanced at the door where my mother had just left. “Come with me,” I said.

  These were the places I showed Hauth, and which I hope to show you:

  First was the kitchen. Well, one of the kitchens. There were multiples. For the purposes of baking cupcakes for me, my mother only used one kitchen, even if she occasionally strayed to the others if she thought I needed fish stew in my diet. I had to explain cupcakes to Hauth. It didn’t eat. I worried about what to offer as refreshments.

  I didn’t know whether Hauth never laughed, or robots in general never did, but it said, gently, “You will have figured out that I don’t metabolize the way you do. I am well-supplied for this visit. I appreciate that you are thinking of my needs, however.”

  Hauth asked me what cupcakes tasted like, perhaps because the chemical analysis was lacking in metaphor, or else because it was amused by how much I had to say about different flavors and textures. I believe its interest was genuine.

  Next came one of the gardens. Not my favorite one, because that wasn’t what Hauth had asked about, but the one where my mother spent the most time. I rarely went there unless specifically invited to. My mother had never forbidden my presence. Rather, the pillars of ice, the ashen winds, and the metallic light like bronze wearing thin, filled me with a tremulous unease. It was difficult to convince myself that I felt no physical chill, that my billowing mesh gave me plenty of protection. Yet this was where my mother came for the unnamed anniversaries that meant so much to her.

  The floor was raked by claw-marks, which formed sinuous and self-intersecting trails. Ordinarily my mother sheathed her claws. Even on those occasions when some accident necessitated scratching up the fortress, she was assiduous about repairs. Here, however, she wanted to leave some trace of her agitation.

  Hauth approached the shrine that formed the centerpiece of the garden and peered at the burnt-out stubs of incense sticks. Ash and sand stirred slightly, glimmered palely. It did not touch anything. “What does this mean to you?” it asked.

  Not: What does this mean to your mother? I supposed it already knew the answer to that. I was seized with the simultaneous and contradictory desire to know and not to know.
But Hauth had asked first. I explained about the anniversaries. “She comes here at such times,” I said, irrationally convinced that I was betraying her. Surely, though, she would have told me if there was anything I should refuse to answer? For that matter, I couldn’t imagine that she wasn’t monitoring us anyway, or incapable of intervening if she needed to. “I don’t often accompany her here.”

  Hauth walked around without fitting its footsteps to the claw-paths. I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not, for all its respectful demeanor. “You don’t know why she comes here,” it said.

  “Do you?”

  “She hasn’t told you?”

  “I’ve asked,” I said. “Her answers are vague. I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “I can tell you,” Hauth said after a pause, “but I will keep it to myself if you prefer.”

  It was too much, especially combined with my mother’s mysterious behavior earlier. “I want to know.”

  “Around now,” it said, “she is remembering the deaths of her comrades.”

  Comrades? I wondered. Certainly my mother could defend herself, but I rejected the image of her fighting alongside others of her kind—if, indeed, they had also been bonedrakes.

  “The most important one,” it went on, as if it had not noticed the way I was shivering, “commemorates the day she deserted.”

  “I can’t imagine—” I stopped. My mother, who loved cupcakes and carillons. I could see her as a deserter more easily than I could see her as a warfighter.

  Hauth turned away from the shrine. “Many people died,” it said.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” I said, before Hauth could tell me anything else. “I can show you the observatory.”

  Hauth was amenable. Doubtless it sensed that it had me trapped, and all it had to do to wait for me to succumb. The observatory didn’t have much to offer someone who had, I presumed, traveled a great distance to visit the fortress. Still, Hauth admired the telescopes with their sphinx-stare lenses, and the way a particular view of a nebula complemented mobiles that spun this way and that, catching the light. It told me about sites it had visited in the past: symphony-bridges of tinted ice, to be ruined attractively whenever the universe exhaled; stars in the process of colliding and merging; moons turned into sculptures exalted by sgraffito depictions of elemental valences.

  As the day wore on, I showed Hauth everything I could think of. Inevitably, I thought, it would demand to speak to my mother. But no: it listened to everything I had to say, however hollow it started to sound.

  Finally I cracked, and asked what it had not volunteered to tell me. “Why are you really here?” I said.

  “I came to find out more about your mother’s past,” Hauth said, “just as I told her. Since she still lives, it seemed appropriate to seek her out.”

  “Then why talk to me?”

  “Aren’t you a part of her life, too?”

  I bit my lip. I hadn’t seen her in all this time, showing Hauth around. We were sitting in the kitchen because I needed to be in comforting surroundings. For the first time, I didn’t feel comforted at all. The kitchen had been designed, I saw now, so that it could accommodate both a bonedrake and a human, for all that my mother could compress herself astonishingly when she had to. When had she thought to do that? And when, for that matter, had she fixed on cupcakes as her hobby of choice, when she didn’t eat them?

  When had she decided to rear a human child?

  “What are you going to do with your chronicle?” I said.

  “Share it,” it said. “With everyone.”

  “I want to see it,” I said.

  “Yes,” it said. “Yes. When it’s done. But it’s not, yet.”

  I knew what it was asking. “I will take you to my mother now.”

  We found her in the shrine of ashes, naturally. There was no incense. The place was as ethereally cold as ever, a cold that sapped the place of color and settled over me in a gray pall even as my mesh kept me incongruously comfortable.

  Hauth bowed to my mother. It looked both awkward and serious, because the length of its limbs weren’t right for the gesture. “Guardian,” it said, or an approximation thereof.

  “Say it,” she returned. “You know my old name as well as anyone.” She was coiled around the shrine, eyes slitted. If possible, her status lights were bluer than ever, almost to the point of being shadow-silvered. The tip of her tail lashed back and forth like a clock’s tongue. I could feel the seconds crumbling away.

  “Unit Zhu-15 Jiemsin,” Hauth said. “You haven’t answered to that name in a long time, but I imagine even now you remember the imperatives programmed into you, and the importance of rank hierarchy.”

  I didn’t know anything about imperatives. Military hierarchy, on the other hand, was a reasonably common concept. This intruder had come into our home and accused my mother of being a deserter, had made her sad and strange. If I had known that that was going to upset her like this, I would have begged her to turn it away, no matter how splendid the grave-offering of museum-ships it had brought.

  “Mother,” I said. She wouldn’t look at me, and I spoke again, louder. “Mother. Tell it to leave.”

  She shook her head. “Ask your questions, Hauth,” she said wearily.

  I wanted to grab one of her legs and shake it. It was a wonder that I restrained myself.

  “I will tell this side of the story too,” it said, as though an entire conversation to which I had not been privy had passed between them already. “I know the rest already.”

  “The rest of what?” I asked.

  Hauth turned its regard not on me, but on my mother.

  “Go ahead,” my mother said, “and tell her what you will tell the world, if she wants to know. It is not, after all, any news to me.”

  Hauth’s mask grew translucent. “Do you want to know?”

  “I cannot fail to know forever,” I said unsteadily.

  “Your mother is one of the greatest war engines ever devised,” Hauth said. “She was not the only one. The bonedrakes’ creators slaughtered their way into an empire. But the creators had not been as careful with their imperatives as they thought, and eventually the bonedrakes turned on their masters. Then they fought over their masters’ leavings.”

  “This means nothing to me,” I said. It was almost true.

  “There was one exception,” Hauth said. “Unit Zhu-15 Jiemsin, who did not turn against her masters, and did not turn against her comrades, and did not do anything but run.”

  I opened my mouth, resenting the critique implied in Hauth’s tone.

  Hauth wasn’t done. “Of course, she had few options, and all of them were bad. So she ran and hid and didn’t emerge until nothing was left but the smoke of legends. And then she retreated to this fortress, to guard the fossils of history even though no one was left to put them in any context.”

  “Which is where you come in, I suppose,” I said. I meant it to be savage. My voice betrayed me. “Mother, is this true?” Do you want this to matter to me?

  All she had to do was say something calming, call me “eggling” the way she always did. She had raised me. I owed nothing to this robot and its stories of a world that I needed not involve myself with. Besides, it itself had described the past as the “smoke of legends”; what did it matter anymore?

  “It’s all true,” my mother said. “I learned that there were things that mattered more than war. I did not want to fight anymore. So I left. But that can’t be the sum of your purpose, Hauth.”

  “I want to ask you to add my chronicle,” Hauth said. “To persuade your visitors of the futility of war. Which you know about better than anyone else.”

  My mother blinked at it. “Yes to the first, no to the second,” she said, crisp, sharp, unfailingly kind. “The fortress is neutral in all matters. I will answer questions if asked. I will accept new artifacts for the collection. But I will not press any viewpoint on another. That is all.”

  “I must insist,” Hauth said. “The
Greater Choreographical Society, as an ally of the Everywhere Pact, feels strongly about this point. Already the Pact would see you brought down. I was hoping to save a valuable historical repository by persuading you of the rightness of our cause.”

  My mother’s only response to this was a snort.

  “In that case,” it said, “the Everywhere Pact will have no choice but to turn against you. And my chronicle will only rally more to their cause.”

  “And you came here looking for help finishing it?” I demanded incredulously. My heart was thumping horribly.

  “Your fleet can’t do anything to me,” my mother said, “and nor can anything else that you care to throw at the fortress.” She had not moved, except that her tail-tip continued to lash back and forth. “But you’re right that I won’t keep you from departing, or sharing your chronicle with everyone who wants to hear it. With people who want to think of us as a monument to war rather than a simple collection of things that happened, good or bad or indifferent.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said, appalled. “Stop it from leaving.”

  “Why?” she said. “It is my choice.”

  Her agitation was palpable, however. The tail lashing was one thing, but her claws came out with a snick and the gun mounts at her sides coruscated.

  “I had originally thought you would have figured out this part of your mother’s past,” Hauth said. “In my interactions, however, it became clear that you had no idea. In all this time, then, you had no idea that your mother was a soldier, and that she had masters, and what kinds of orders they gave her.”

  My mother reared up to her full height. The ceiling was far above; nevertheless, her shadow fell over me like a shroud. “I don’t take orders from children,” she said to me, very quietly. “My masters were not that stupid. Adults are another matter. You were the last one. Your parents had put you in an ice-egg before they were obliterated; the other egglings didn’t survive. You slept for eons while I deliberated and gathered my strength. I thought enough time had passed that we could start over.”