Laughter, like a low rumble shivered through the marble floors. And then a voice said, “Get up, Heng and you too, Yen. You may approach the throne.”
I stood up and approached, shivering, because majesty and eternity rolled from the August Emperor of Jade.
“Speak your case,” he said. “You and your wife have lain hell half to waste. In fact, there has not been such an uproar here since the Monkey Trickster got into hell. This disorder cannot be allowed to continue. And therefore I agreed to listen to you.”
Yen spoke. “Heng has been robbed of most of his life,” she said. “He was killed at nineteen, when the scroll of his life said he should have lived to ninety and sired many sons.”
“You have this scroll?” the Jade Emperor asked, leaning forward.
She bowed and proffered it. He read it, then looked up. “And you, Mistress of the Salt River, how came you to be here with him? How came you to be married to him?”
She looked embarrassed. “My people sold my bones to his parents, that they might perform a wedding with his corpse and thus–”
“How came you to have people, when you’d been dead that long?”
“I was buried with my jade girdle,” she said. “And all my effects. On the bank of the river. After centuries some robbers found my bones. It was not hard to talk in their minds and strike a deal with them. In exchange for my keeping my girdle, they could have all my cups and vessels and my earthenware boat. And they could sell my bones to someone who needed a bride for their son in the afterworld.”
The Jade Emperor frowned. He turned to a functionary standing at his elbow and whispered something. The whisper was repeated, from one end of the salon to the other, till it came to the end of the room.
For a moment everything was quiet. Then the golden gong sounded again and someone announced, “Qi Lin answers the Emperor’s summons.”
Into the room came the unicorn – a creature that I’d only seen in paintings. He had the body of a deer, the hooves of a horse, and a single, perfect, spiraling horn on his forehead. His body was a scintillating ivory.
“Lord Qi Lin knows the truths that are hidden, and he accuses the guilty and protects the innocent,” the Jade Emperor said. He proceeded to give a summary of my situation, and to ask the unicorn, “Who waylaid Heng in the dark night?”
The unicorn looked up and managed to look amused, though his features were not at all like a human face. “Two malefactors whose names are well and truly forgotten and so should be. They’ve died years ago, and they are being punished in the Pool Of Filth, in the Second Feng Du court, under Lord Qu Jiang Wang. They also stole the money to pay for Heng’s tomb, thereby leading to Heng’s being here, on an underworld court procedure brought by the seller of the land, who is seeking an eviction.”
The Jade Emperor was quiet a moment. His hand caressed his ineffably brilliant face. “But who ordered those crimes?” he asked. “Who suggested it?”
“The Goddess of The Salt River spoke in their feeble minds,” the unicorn said.
“Ah!” the Jade Emperor said, turning to my wife. “Defend yourself if you can!”
“Indeed, I cannot, save to say that I was once more powerful than you,” she said. “I once ruled the Earth and could stop the sun rising in the sky. When humans were nomadic and there was no idea of planting and no knowledge of the seasons, I ruled them and their heaven and hell. But then the Lord of the Granary, with his fields and domesticated animals, tricked me into accepting his girdle, and thus he killed me.
“I was a goddess, and as you see, the span of my life should have been forever. And I offered to share my domain with him, but he killed me by stealth.” Speaking, she produced another scroll from somewhere. “As you see, my scroll did not list a death date.” She showed him the scroll and he took it and read it.
His sublime fingers drummed on the arm of his venerable chair. “I see only one way to resolve this,” he said. “He lost the life he should have had and he must be compensated. She lost her life and she must also be compensated – but she must be punished also. We will give him immortality to compensate for his mortal life. We will give her immortality also, but to punish her she must be married to this boy who was once a mortal.”
Thus spake the Most Venerable Jade Emperor of the Heavenly Golden Palace, the Supremely High Emperor of the Heavens, the Holder of Talismans, Container of Perfection and Embodiment of Dao, The Most Venerable and Highest Jade Emperor of All Embracing, Sublime Spontaneous Existence Of the Heavenly Golden Palace.
A thousand years later, I’m not sure Yen considers me such a punishment.
With her knowledge and my academic talent was live very well indeed, on a palace at the edge of her river, attended by peacocks and amid gardens of surpassing delightfulness.
Truly, though she might have stolen my other life from me, I cannot grudge it. The happiness my wife has given me far surpasses what I could have attained in a long life in my village.
The only restriction she puts on my happiness is not permitting me to keep concubines. But when we enact the fifty known positions of pleasure and the thirty two refinements of joy, I am sure no other women, no matter how many, could surpass the exalted acrobatics or the tender affection of my wife, Yen, Goddess of the Salt River.
Shepherds and Wolves
IT STARTED WITH THE CALL ON CHRISTMAS EVE. I was at the distress console, a job that the Sisters of St. Lucia of the Spaceways always give to their oldest novice. “Old enough to be responsible, young enough to stay awake all night,” Mother Magdalene said, and I wouldn’t argue.
I’d been living with the Lucias for five years, a welcome respite from my life before, and the doubts I had about professing had nothing to do with not liking the life, the house or the rule. They had to do with myself. And I’d been wrestling with them in the dark of the night when the call came.
“Ship in distress,” it said. “Ship in distress.” There followed coordinates, so many degrees from Gilgamesh basin, to the north of Memphis town so many miles.
I wrote down the numbers and the names, but didn’t think about them – couldn’t think about them – because the voice sounded familiar. I flicked the com signal on, “What ship, and what is your call sign? State the nature of your trouble.”
I was working by rote. These were the questions I’d been told to ask.
The answer came, faint, distant, scratchy, “We have crashed through a failure of the—” static. “Our call number is—” static. “We have ten people.” The last made me sit back hard on the chair. Ten people. So it couldn’t be the normal miner craft. It had to be another sort of transport.
The static did not bother me so much. After all, in Europa, half the equipment worked badly, and the other half worked not at all. Mars might now be a semi-civilized planet in the dawning glory of the twenty sixth century, but Europa, once a forsaken wasteland, for many years a forgotten colony, remained a backwater: terraformed, but not comfortable, populated but poor, striving but forsaken. Europa was the basis of operation of asteroid miners – mostly desperate men who had long given up on seeking redemption – and of the women who amused them, most of them also desperate and seeking only to live another hour, another day, another week.
It is said – well, Mother Magdalene says it – that the order of St. Lucia was formed with the intent to go forth to the most desolate human colonies, to follow the ragged edges of the human diaspora out of Earth, burner in one hand and cross in the other.
We comforted the afflicted, fed the hungry, gathered in the lost – usually ten minutes before they died – and, because Mother Magdalene insisted, ran an unofficial rescue for anyone who crash landed near enough we could find them and bring them in to safety. The atmosphere in Europa was still thin, even after centuries of terraforming, and the nights became cold very fast. A broken ship could mean death.
Most of the people we helped were miners, in their two-men craft, often crashed through sheer mechanical failure. The ones I hated were
the rescues in space. But we had to get to them before the scavengers did. Like all places at the edge of survival, Europa bred scavengers and pirates aplenty.
I bit my lip, wondering if this crashed craft could be a pirate vessel. Ten people… yes, I could see the advantages of ten people when it came to boarding other ships, stealing the result of their mining labors. Or even, of course, scavenging stranded ships.
At the same time, ten people seemed excessive. Most miner craft had two men, poorly armed. What overcame them was superior weaponry and better – pirate – craft. And four people would be plenty for that.
I looked up at the wall, measuring the hours of Europa night. Three hours until early service, and until then all my sisters and Mother Magdalene would be tucked away in their beds. Of course, I had permission to rouse any or all of them, if I so chose, if I deemed the emergency was important enough.
Did I? Ten people in a downed craft. I could take the bigger flyer, the one we used to transport all of us on the rare occasions we needed to make an appearance somewhere. When the Pope flew through Europa, we’d all of us gone to the Spaceport for a blessing, because it couldn’t be thought that His Holiness would travel into the countryside to our poor abode. I could transport ten people, if a little cramped. The twenty of us had been cramped enough.
Why would I need help? If I woke up the house, or even one of the two novices more junior than I, just because I was afraid to go an collect the people in distress on my own, Mother Magdalene wouldn’t get half sarcastic.
I sighed. It wasn’t so much that I feared her sarcasm, but I liked her too much to want to incur her displeasure. She would ask me if I didn’t have a burner. And yes, I had a burner, and I’d taken the training, though we were always cautioned not to shoot to kill, not before the sinner could get absolution.
Nodding to myself, I clicked the com and asked again, just in case, “What is your call sign?” There was no answer but the steady beep, beep, beep of a distress beacon, and I sighed. Likely their com had given up the ghost, but even in Europa, ships made sure their distress signal was working.
I got up, headed for the back door to our compound, passing the doors to the cells of my sisters – little rooms, provided only with a bed and pegs on the wall for our two extra habits – on my right, and the dormitories for our charity cases on the left. There were two large dormitories, one for males and one for females. I was mildly surprised that this one time I did not hear sounds to indicate that the inhabitants of one were visiting in the other. I was sure if I looked closely I would find a few couples snuggled in a single bed, but my job was rescue not policing, and besides, Mother Magdalene knew as well as I did what happened almost every night. She’d once muttered something on the subject of comfort and excusable sin, and that was that. She was more concerned with those who smuggled in interesting hallucinogenic substances, or those who tried to rob others.
Down the hallway there were the baths and showers, and past that a sort of hallway that also served as a cloak room. I stopped and got a cloak with a hood. It wasn’t a matter of modesty. Yes, my novice’s habit, adapted to the sort of work we did in space, consisted of white pants and pale blue shirt, and it might be consider to reveal too much of my body. His holiness had talked to Mother Magdalene on the subject of allowed variations to the habit, or some such, during their ten minute conference. But the more important consideration was that it would be very cold outside, somewhere below freezing. The suit was indoor wear, and even my white wimple and veil wouldn’t keep out the chill. The heavy blue cloaks we wore outside kept us warm even in the worst weather.
I strapped on two burners – after checking the charge on them – and made my way to the flyer.
Attuning it to distress beacon took a bit of fiddling. I think we’d bought this thing used and fifth hand or so. But I managed it at last, set it on auto-pilot, standing by to rescue myself if the auto-pilot cut out. Flying over the mostly dark expanse of terrain, my mind returned to the fact that the voice on the com had sounded familiar. Awfully familiar. Something at the back of mind stirred, tried to wake up.
That voice, my mind told me, in no uncertain terms, sounded like Joe.
I ignored it. Joe was dead. Had to be after all these years, and given when and where we’d parted company.
I told myself, as I looked out at the expanse where lights were as sparsely scattered as the stars on the cloak of St. Lucia, that this was just my fear of professing, my fear of polluting the order with my presence. I was calling Joe to mind, because Joe and what Joe had been and what I’d been, and what we’d done together were probably reason to disqualify me from professing ten times over. Or more.
The ship started heading downward before I could see anything resembling a wreck. The site the beacon beamed from was inside a crater, dark in the shadow of night. It took landing next to it to see that it was a large ship – very large, doubtless equipped for interplanetary travel. And if it only had ten people in it, the travel it was fitted for had to be more than the jumps to Mars and back. For those little ships were used. This one clearly had supplies or cargo for much longer.
My alarms were ringing, and I had my hand on my burner handle as I called over the speaker outside, “Come out with your hands in full view. I want to see how many of you there are. And state your call code.”
There was a moment of silence, and then they started coming out of the ship. Two men, followed by eight… juveniles, male and female. Four male, four female, all looking very young and awkward, at that age when humans have stopped growing but haven’t yet gotten used to adult movements and poise. I counted them in the dim light, and looked them over. I couldn’t see weapons on any of them, and all of them were dressed in pants-and-tunic suits that looked more flimsy than my habit. The young ones appeared to be in sandals!
Appalled, I opened the door at the rear of the flyer, and spoke again over the speaker, “Come in, one by one.”
They did, first the adult males, slowly enough that I got the idea they were being very careful to display their lack of bad intentions, and then the boys and girls, half running, clearly anxious to be in out of the cold.
I closed the door with a whoosh behind them, ordered them to sit and strapped down, set home on the beacon, and tried to figure out where we would house all these people. I could put the two adult men in the male dormitory. They were well-built enough and looked capable of defending themselves. But the young ones… It would be a crime akin to throwing kittens into a lion cage to put them in with the drug-and-madness addled refuse of Europa.
I heard a seat belt unbuckle and turned to yell at my passenger to sit down, but before the words left my lips, I realized the man standing in the isle, a few steps from me was Joe. My old friend Joe, whom I’d left on Mars. When I’d last seen him, five years ago, he’d been seized by interplanetary customs for the theft of valuable property: his body. I’d barely managed to escape the like fate, by leaving the landing area on the arm of a gentleman who’d sworn I was his wife. No one would think to test the wife of a rich man from Earth. Or at least, they’d not think of it twice.
For five years I’d assumed Joe had been killed. It was the normal penalty for artifacts who hid what they were and their origins and, further, who were capable of escaping their tightly controlled existence and free themselves. But there he was, in the middle of the isle, his green eyes wide open, his red hair mussed as if he’d been in a fight. A three-day red growth glinted on his face, and I had a feeling he had blanched under his reddish tan.
I said, “Joe,” at that same time he said “Blossom,” and for a moment we stared at each other as the five years disappeared. We’d grown up together at the same crèche, Joe and I, destined to be Joy-bringers. But it wasn’t till we’d been sold to a brothel, in our teens, that we’d developed our friendship, or perhaps love. I’d thought it was love at the time, but it’s easy to convince someone like me of love. After all, born from a test tube and raised in a crèche, love was the hum
an thing I had never hoped to experience.
The brothel didn’t care what we did in our own time, and Joe and I had become friends; then we’d made mad plans for a future we’d known could never be. And then we’d put the plans into action, and escaped the brothel. A misbegotten adventure that had landed us in Mars Customs where our grand plans had come to an end.
I’d made my way to Europa, partly because it was the only place I could think of where no one would follow me and test me. And after a week of hospitality by the Lucias, I’d decided to become a novice. I wasn’t even a Catholic at a time. I wasn’t anything. All major religions agreed my kind lacked souls.
Over the last five years I’d come to wonder if that was true. More importantly, I’d come to believe there was something as souls – at least on my off hours, and when I squinted and wished really hard.
But now there was Joe and all the years rolled back. “Joe!” I said again. And then, at the same time, we both said, “I didn’t know—”
“An old friend is she?” the other adult man said. “I didn’t know you did nuns, Joe.” I turned, outraged, not because of the implication, but because the other man had got off his seat while I was talking to Joe, and had approached me on the other side, on my blind side, while I was looking at Joe, with no eyes for anyone else.
“Please, get back to your seat,” I said, reaching in my belt for the burner. The man was tall and blond, with a face crisscrossed with scars, and I had a feeling he was bad news, though I might be judging a miner by his kit.
“Listen, Avery,” Joe said. He sounded panicked. “It’s not like that. Listen, Blossom—”
I’d turned to look at him as he spoke, and I never heard the end of the sentence. Something hit me a sharp blow above the ear, and I went down into darkness.
I woke up, or rather I became aware of being awake while being pushed forward. I was on my feet. My hands were tied behind my back. I wasn’t so naïve that I couldn’t tell the pressure in the middle of my back was a burner muzzle. Likely my own burner. And there was a man behind me, pushing me just enough to keep me walking, while saying, “Steady, steady. Don’t even think of screaming. If you don’t scream, we won’t hurt anyone. We don’t want to have to hurt anyone.”
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 9
