“Where are you taking my steel?” asked Engineer. They flaunted their ingratitude. You were supposed to let the steel be. Otherwise they couldn’t build and build you again.
The human dethreaded the wires connecting Engineer’s arm meat to her cyborg logic center. “It will be repurposed for whatever is most needed. Ships, chips, knives, bolts, screws. Useful things.”
“And the meat?”
The human decoupled the segmented joints of her shoulder. Without the steel exoskeleton for support, Engineer’s meat hung limp and dripped red. “You can keep it. We don’t have a use for it.”
“But there are,” said Engineer. “So many uses,” and her voice faded as they stripped away the connections, “if you would just give me a moment to demonstrate.”
Tiny, desperate meat-thoughts bombarded her logic center like cold fingers plucking at tendons. Last shooting pleas from stringy muscles in her steel, unseen servants in the wall, shouting that Engineer had been a fool. There was never any honor in service, no final star to complete a constellation. You offered yourself up for consumption, and when they had eaten you down to the bone, they stole again. Stole your heart, your steel, your everything, to use as forks in their restaurants.
Gwendolyn Clare
Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast
from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
The fruit of Hasam hang from the vine like holiday baubles, fat firm globes of midnight blue. I expected a deep inky color and strong tannins even before the legionaries found the vintner’s aging cavern. Indeed, when they broke inside and fetched me a bottle, it looked as thick and dark as cloth dye in the glass. The finish stretched long, bitter-dry with a hint of clove spice, as if reluctant to depart.
We moved on to the town of Shom this morning. Here the grapes have the polished luminescence of cabochon rubies. Last year’s harvest, now aging in the barrels, is bright and sharp on the tongue, with clumsy overtones of citrus and a quick finish. The three-year bottle has mellowed and matured, but I still find it somewhat lacking in body.
I cannot help but ponder what a very fine mix these two varietals would have made together, if only their respective vintners had consented to trade portions of their harvests. But this was never the way of Qati vintners; they were a proud people, the Qati, too proud for such compromises.
In Rambekh there is a body floating in the mashing vat—gray and bloated and utterly disgusting, though I could not say whether from the plague itself or the putrefaction after death. Such a waste, eighty or ninety gallons in total, all of it ruined. The whole harvest from the west-facing slopes above the city, if I had to guess.
It comes as a consolation when I discover their early harvest red is nothing special anyway. Their late harvest white is by far their finer achievement—sweet as an overripe peach, with subtle mineral undertones and a lemon finish that lingers on the tongue.
Thank the gods the late harvest fruit is still ripening on the vine, all across the unsullied expanse of the east-facing slope. The grapes cluster together like nests of tiny quail eggs, with thin but firm blush-colored skins. A different varietal altogether from what they used in the early harvest red.
Centurion Vikas is reluctant to lend me a messenger, but I insist it cannot wait until the survey is complete. I am sending word to the capital to request that vintners be assigned to Rambekh immediately. I shudder to think of the emperor’s rage were we to lose this autumn’s precious yield.
When we arrived in Tomaq, we found the streets clogged with corpses. Apparently the plague spread too fast here, and the population had no time to bury their dead. Now the legionaries must clear the streets, or else drag the war machines through the roadless hill country south of the town. I gather there is some concern about the prospect of broken axles, and I must confess I’d worry about the wine carts if the horses were to be led off-road.
Still, they’ve been throwing corpses on the pyres all morning, and the whole town reeks of charred, spoiled meat. The stench has put off my palate quite thoroughly, and the air is so thick with smoke I’ll be surprised if the late harvest fruit doesn’t wither on the vine. Words cannot describe my vexation.
But no, I mustn’t complain. It is a stroke of the finest fortune that our beloved emperor has such passion for the vinifying arts. The emperor honors me with his patronage, and with this assignment especially.
We hit a road mine on our way out of Ghitam, and now the legion’s stuck here until we can send for a stonemage to check the road ahead.
I’m told the Qati designed the mines to trigger under heavy weight, intending them for war machines. But of course with my luck the wheel that rolled atop the mine belonged to a full-laden wine cart.
It was a distressing sight. One legionary died instantly with a splash of stonemelt to the face; another only got the stuff on his feet, so the medician hacked him off at the knees and dragged him away. But three other legionaries and both cart horses were instantly and irreparably mired in the creeping gray goo. And the wine cart! Centurion Vikas would let his men rescue only four of the wine barrels, refusing to “endanger” them further.
Among the losses were two crates of a rare and lovely bottled white from Taranekh. Off-dry and softly effervescent with a tang of green apple. When eaten with a sharp, aged cheese, it truly blossomed in complexity, drawing out the undertones of white pepper, vanilla, and herb. Perhaps it would be best not to report this loss to the emperor; long has he envied the wineries of Taranekh.
After the initial splatter, the stonemelt spreads slowly. It’s still spreading now; I cannot hear the legionaries pleading for a quicker death over the noise of the horses screaming. The sound makes my head ache and I long for silence, but no one dares silence them. When it’s done, the emperor will want to add the afflicted—legionaries and horses both—to his stonemelt statue collection. So they’ll keep screaming until the stonemelt crawls into their mouths and clogs their throats.
I try my best to focus on my work—to leave the politics to the emperor’s advisers and the strategy to his centurions. But how am I supposed to work under such conditions?
By the time we arrive at the city of Arakesh, the forward legion has already barricaded the gates from the outside. The plague is at work within, and a panicked mob pounds on the eastern gate, trying to escape. The centurion from the forward legion who greets us does not seem especially concerned about the situation, though.
I suppose, even if they broke through, a crowd of sick civilians isn’t much of a match for two legions of well-trained foot soldiers and their accompanying war machines. This is the advantage of a well-made plague—the last of the Qati will die, sooner or later, while the emperor’s soldiers remain untouched. The outcome is inevitable.
But I’ll let the forward legion worry about those details. The main winery of Arakesh is up in the terraced hills above the city, so I do not have to wait for them to finish with the purge before beginning my work.
No one bothered to tell me the breathmage would be waiting for me at the winery. Centurion Vikas warns me to be polite and accommodating with him. I am a master vintner, not a palace hostess. One more in a long list of indignities I have endured on this campaign.
The breathmage is an odd man—sharp and terse one minute, then dazed and distractible the next. He says he wants to see what all the fuss is about, so we sit on the patio in front of the mash house and I pour him a selection of the southern coast’s best.
I praise the subtle nose of a six-year Arakesh white—hazelnut and anise with a hint of wild jasmine—and the breathmage sniffs dutifully at his glass before tasting but offers no commentary of his own. He does the same with the late harvest Rambekh, and again with a full-bodied Ghitam red. Can he feel those velvet-smooth tannins against his palate? If so, he gives no sign of it.
His silence disconcerts me. Whenever I stop speaking, each long pause becomes filled with the distant muffled screams of dying Arakeshi, carried up to us on the oce
an breeze. A fire has broken out in the northeast quadrant of the city, and the column of smoke obscures our view of the water. I keep my own eyes on the wine, ready to pour the next tasting as soon as our glasses are empty, but the breathmage gazes into the distance.
The legionaries assigned to guard us have made themselves scarce. They’re afraid of him. No one has said as much, but I suspect this is not just any breathmage but the Master of Plague himself—the artisan of this whole campaign. He who created the Qati disease.
I cannot tell if my efforts at hospitality have pleased him. As he seems unmoved by the wine itself, I try drawing his attention to the fine work of the glassmage who crafted these Arakesh bottles. Yet even this subject elicits little response, so what can I do but keep pouring?
When he speaks, it is not to discuss the campaign or the wine or the glasswork. He tells me of his family in the capital—his three sisters and their husbands and sister-wives, his nieces and nephews. He stares out across the wreckage of Arakesh and sees their faces. At least they will live in comfort, he says. At least they are safe.
I do not know what to say to this. The emperor rewards service and punishes disobedience, as is his divine right. The breathmage understands this better than most, I suspect.
So I say nothing, and I pour him a sweet Arakesh red. Blackberry and dark plum bursting over gentle earthiness, balanced with a long acid finish.
Sometime in the night, the breathmage filled his pockets with stones and drowned himself in the mashing vat. By the time we find his body, the pigment from the grape skins has dyed his clothes and face and hands a livid purple-red.
To be honest, I’m not convinced this was worth it, purging the Qati just to acquire their vineyards.
Don’t ever tell the emperor I said so.
Charlie Jane Anders
Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue
from Boston Review: Global Dystopias
The intake process begins with dismantling her personal space, one mantle at a time. Her shoes, left by the side of the road where the Go Team plucked her out of them. Her purse and satchel, her computer containing all of her artwork and her manifestos, thrown into a metal garbage can at a rest area on the highway, miles away. That purse, which she swung to and fro on the sidewalks to clear a path, like a southern grandma, now has food waste piled on it, and eventually will be chewed to shreds by raccoons. At some point the intake personnel fold her, like a folding chair that turns into an almost two-dimensional object, and they stuff her into a kennel, in spite of all her attempts to resist. Later she receives her first injection and loses any power to struggle, and some time after, control over her excretory functions. By the time they cut her clothes off, a layer of muck coats the backs of her thighs. They clean her and dress her in something that is not clothing, and they shave part of her head. At some point Rachel glimpses a power drill, like a handyman’s, but she’s anesthetized and does not feel where it goes.
Rachel has a whole library of ways to get through this, none of which work at all. She spent a couple years meditating, did a whole course on trauma and self-preservation, and had an elaborate theory about how to carve out a space in your mind that they cannot touch, whatever they are doing to you. She remembers the things she used to tell everyone else in the support group, in the Safe Space, about not being alone even when you have become isolated by outside circumstances. But in the end Rachel’s only coping mechanism is dissociation, which arises from total animal panic. She’s not even Rachel anymore, she’s just a screaming blubbering mess, with a tiny kernel of her mind left, trapped a few feet above her body, in a process that is not at all like yogic flying.
Eventually, though, the intake is concluded, and Rachel is left staring up at a Styrofoam ceiling with a pattern of cracks that looks like a giant spider or an angry demon face descending toward her. She’s aware of being numb from extreme cold in addition to the other ways in which she is numb, and the air conditioner keeps blurting into life with an aggravated whine. A stereo system plays a CD by that white rock-rap artist who turned out to be an especially stupid racist. The staff keep walking past her and talking about her in the third person, while misrepresenting basic facts about her, such as her name and her personal pronoun. Occasionally they adjust something about her position or drug regimen without speaking to her or looking at her face. She does not quite have enough motor control to scream or make any sound other than a kind of low ululation. She realizes at some point that someone has made a tiny hole in the base of her skull, where she now feels a mild ache.
Before you feel too sorry for Rachel, however, you should be aware that she’s a person who holds a great many controversial views. For example, she once claimed to disapprove of hot chocolate, because she believes that chocolate is better at room temperature, or better yet as a component of ice cream or some other frozen dessert. In addition, Rachel considers ZZ Top an underappreciated music group, supports karaoke only in an alcohol-free environment, dislikes puppies, enjoys Brussels sprouts, and rides a bicycle with no helmet. She claims to prefer the Star Wars prequels to the Disney Star Wars films. Is Rachel a contrarian, a freethinker, or just kind of an asshole? If you could ask her, she would reply that opinions are a utility in and of themselves. That is, the holding of opinions is a worthwhile exercise per se, and the greater diversity of opinions in the world, the more robust our collective ability to argue.
Also! Rachel once got a gas station attendant nearly fired for behavior that, a year or two later, she finally conceded might have been an honest misunderstanding. She’s the kind of person who sends food back for not being quite what she ordered—and on at least two occasions she did this and then returned to that same restaurant a week or two later, as if she had been happy after all. Rachel is the kind of person who calls herself an artist despite never having received a grant from a granting institution or any kind of formal gallery show, and many people wouldn’t even consider her collages and relief maps of imaginary places to be proper art. You would probably call Rachel a Goth.
Besides dissociation—which is wearing off as the panic subsides—the one defense mechanism that remains for Rachel is carrying on an imaginary conversation with Dev, the person with whom she spoke every day for so long, and to whom she always imagined speaking whenever they were apart. Dev’s voice in Rachel’s head would have been a refuge not long ago, but now all Rachel can imagine Dev saying is, Why did you leave me? Why, when I needed you most? Rachel does not have a good answer to that question, which is why she never tried to answer it when she had the chance.
Thinking about Dev, about lost chances, is too much. And at that moment Rachel realizes she has enough muscle control to lift her head and look directly in front of her. There, standing at an observation window, she sees her childhood best friend, Jeffrey.
Ask Jeffrey why he’s been working at Love and Dignity for Everyone for the past few years and he’ll say, first and foremost, student loans. Plus, in recent years, child support and his mother’s ever-increasing medical bills. Life is crammed full of things that you have to pay for after the fact, and the word plan in payment plan is a cruel mockery, because nobody ever really sets out to plunge into chronic debt. But also Jeffrey wants to believe in the mission of Love and Dignity for Everyone: to repair the world’s most broken people. Jeffrey often rereads the mission statement on the wall of the employee lounge as he sips his morning Keurig so he can carry Mr. Randall’s words with him for the rest of the day. Society depends on mutual respect, Mr. Randall says. You respect yourself and therefore I respect you, and vice versa. When people won’t respect themselves, we have no choice but to intervene, or society unravels. Role-rejecting and aberrant behavior, ipso facto, are a sign of a lack of self-respect. Indeed, a cry for help. The logic always snaps back into airtight shape inside Jeffrey’s mind.
Of course Jeffrey recognizes Rachel the moment he sees her wheeled into the treatment room, even after all this time and so many changes, because he’s been Facebo
ok-stalking her for years (usually after a couple of whiskey sours). He saw when she changed her name and her gender marker, and noticed when her hairstyle changed and when her face suddenly had a more feminine shape. There was the kitten she adopted that later ran away, and the thorny tattoo that says STAY ALIVE. Jeffrey read all her oversharing status updates about the pain of hair removal and the side effects of various pills. And then, of course, the crowning surgery. Jeffrey lived through this process vicariously, in real time, and saw no resemblance to a butterfly in a cocoon or any other cute metaphor. The gender change looked more like landscaping: building embankments out of raw dirt, heaving big rocks to change the course of rivers, and uprooting plants stem by stem. Dirty bruising work. Why a person would feel the need to do this to themself, Jeffrey could never know.
At first Jeffrey pretends not to know the latest subject, or to have any feelings one way or the other, as the Accu-Probe goes into the back of her head. This is not the right moment to have a sudden conflict. Due to some recent personnel issues, Jeffrey is stuck wearing a project manager hat along with his engineer hat—which, sadly, is not a cool pinstriped train-engineer hat of the sort that he and Rachel used to fantasize about wearing for work when they were kids. As a project manager, he has to worry endlessly about weird details such as getting enough coolant into the cadaver storage area and making sure that Jamil has the green shakes that he says activate his brain. As a government-industry joint venture under Section 1774(b)(8) of the Mental Health Restoration Act (relating to the care and normalization of at-risk individuals), Love and Dignity for Everyone has to meet certain benchmarks of effectiveness, and must involve the community in a meaningful role. Jeffrey is trying to keep twenty fresh cadavers in transplant-ready condition, and clearing the decks for more live subjects, who are coming down the pike at an ever-snowballing rate. The situation resembles one of those poultry processing plants where they keep speeding up the conveyer belt until the person grappling with each chicken ends up losing a few fingers.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 22
