Raine smiled, a grimace few Races knew to read with confidence. We all had speeches prepared for today. “Your point?”
“Some people say the soul-stones aren’t corpses, aren’t Nobodoi remains at all, but a translation payload, a residue artefact: what’s left of a Nobodoi when it withdraws, changes phase.”
“Some people?” Raine was relentless.
“Humans, Lord.” This woman knew how trapped she was. “It’s natural that we’re equally curious. But you - none of you are sure about any of this either. You must discuss it. No harm is done. No harm can possibly be done. But not Nobodoi corpses, that’s what -”
“You truly think the Nobodoi might approve?”
Josephine Cantal didn’t hesitate. “Lord, they have not intruded. Have not disallowed. A were-suit could destroy this place so easily. Send in its Snake, have its Companion -”
“By implication, this visit is their response. Our attention, our presence today, becomes the appropriate countermeasure, surely.”
Pressed into the archway, Fond Louie humphed in delight. “Hah! Caught you, Goddy-two-shoes! You ‘specting ‘piphany, you phoney Josey Josephine! Big god moment. Ooh! Were-suit saving the day. You shrewdy-pants!”
Josephine Cantal swung about, hands up, imploring. “Not at all, Lord - Fond Louie! You’ve taught us well. The Nobodoi have always been absolute in what they do and don’t allow. Remember the Link! The Advent itself! Ruthless, decisive! This place harms no-one.”
“An aide-memoire,” Holding-in-Quiet said, as if to itself. “Memento vivi!”
Josephine turned to the Matta and smiled fleetingly, probably not knowing those particular Antique terms, but cued by the gentler reflective tone of the Matt’s words.
“It helps make life better.” Again she turned to the Hoproi. “Like your war-garden, Fond Louie. A comfort beyond easy telling. Something to be proud of.” She faced Raine now. “Like whatever tasks and diligence make your terrible ordeal easier, Great Lord. Like that flower Aspen Dirk speaks of.”
Raine, of course, thought immediately of the overlapping circles that showed how the Races connected with each other, some directly, others through various interface species. “The Donalty Flower?”
“No, Lord. The other flower. There’s a Human, a boggier of Nobodoi artefacts. The siswitch troupes speak of him. There’s a flower he speaks of -”
“I know this one!” Fond Louie boomed behind them, scrinching so firmly in against the pillars that the walls creaked alarmingly. “This Dirk the boggier! He nosey-posey! Got flower too!”
“What flower?” Raine demanded. His hands were still at his sides, composed, curved into hooks. His crest-spines were so fully displayed that a distension chime now rang in his skull, the tinnitus that for the unquickened meant amok and reprisal. His localization raged at it. Anything like anger, surprise, disengagement were neatly turned aside. Cool judgement remained. Cool decisions prevailed. Arm of Law.
“I know this! I know this!” Fond Louie could hardly contain his excitement, snatching whatever he could from the old rotes. “Ancient story. Celluloid by Lewis Carroll. Two royal houses. Two flowers. Lancaster, built Lancaster bombers. Red rose. York, famous for Yorkshire puddings, something. White rose. Two put together to build a Two-Door Rose for Henry the Aitch. Get it? Two flowers into one. Donalty Flower the same, bejeez! Hothouse mix. Forced growth. All overlaid, all in together. Dirk’s flower the Bedlam Rose.”
“The what?” Raine asked, ringing beautifully, perfectly, holding the tone.
“No mattress! All together. Best flowers. Nobodoi plan.”
Part of it troubled Raine, part of it provoked, even delighted. “Three parts to this then. The Window, this flower and the false Lady who has become so real.”
Josephine snatched at the possibility of reprieve. “Humans are good at finding signs, Great Lord. Making signs. All peoples probably, all Races. But Humans constantly. Leave us alone; it’s what we do. It makes us meaningful to ourselves.”
“Especially now,” Raine said, the chime diminishing, pushing away, resolved but close. So close.
“Especially now, Lord. May I be direct?”
“Go on.”
“Lords, what I’ve already begun to say. Listen to yourselves. Even calling the Nobodoi the Recalled Ones, as you do, suggests that they too have overlords controlling them, able to recall them at will once a task is done.”
“Or much simpler. Their own leaders have Recalled them.”
“I have to allow that too. But what if not? Perhaps your view comes from your habit of being in such a hierarchy for so long. Perhaps it is wisely judged. But what if not? Instead of feeling chosen, privileged to be called into service, you put your rulers in their place in turn. We as Humans, with our inclination for absolutes, go with Dirk’s flower, would grant that they have absolute dominion and simply stepped away to see what would come of it.”
“Which is the same self-absorbed arrogance you accuse us of. You reserve some special role for yourselves despite everything. This Bedlam Rose.”
“They chose this world, Lord. This place, this combination this time.”
“And they chose us to govern it. They accept - want - the solution we bring. By default, by implication, our decision will be theirs.”
“But, Lord, I could say the same about Humans. They want the solution we bring. This Bedlam Rose they have made.”
“Except that it remains our decision, our prevailing custodianship.”
“Yes, unless that changes, Great Lord. Unless you accept the simple lesson of the flower. The evidence suggests it.”
“Or doesn’t, Josephine. Your world may have no special place in anything, is just another world they have chosen. The way it often is. We have been client Races for millennia.”
“But what if there is a special purpose, Lord? What if the Nobodoi have not been Recalled? What if they are still here? Changed but here and watching? You’ve all considered it.”
“This Lady Mondegreen is a dangerous Lady. You are a dangerous lady.”
“Bad flower!” Fond Louie boomed.
Josephine ignored the outburst. “Or not, sire. Just showing natural curiosity. So new to no longer being at the top of the life hierarchy ourselves. What will you do?”
“Your question again?”
Josephine gestured to the Window, to the building around them. “Can we continue here? Will you leave us in peace?”
“This is not necessarily why we have come. Again, make your case.”
“I needn’t, Lord. The Window is not here, but here.” She placed a finger against her forehead. “You know this. The Lady, whatever she is, however she is, is beyond one place, beyond facts from broken histories. The Rose is all around us.”
“Very dangerous,” Raine said, so keenly aware of the moment as this Josephine no doubt was, of the waving prairie beyond, of the distant roar of the force walls, of the goldwire curling out of the Matt’s chest, telling the moments of their lives.
“Lord, I am at that point where nothing I can say will save this place if you decide against it. But whether as fact, symbol or metaphor, the Window will remain. You know this of us. The Lady will stay, may even become stronger by seeming to be something worth destroying.”
“Let us go outside,” Raine said.
Fond Louie pulled back at once. Raine crossed to the entrance and stepped out into the day. The Matt activated its havel and followed.
“I can promise nothing,” Raine said when Josephine finally joined them in the road. The sun was westering, already a fierce golden coin high in the washed sepia mirk of Rollinsgame. “Even if I withhold, Fond Louie and this house-lord will decide as they feel suits this special time.”
“Lord, then there are a few possessions I’d like to retrieve before -”
The strike was like a scalpel of light, sharp and final. The temple was gone, shattered, just like that, the discardo, the dust, the shock wave and intense energy wash contained in a security sleeve that
came an instant before and held nearly a full minute afterwards.
The strike echo came in those first seconds too, a tearing that snapped the day asunder but was quickly stolen away in the eternal roar of the corridor.
Fond Louie’s summons rode that echo, a high-pitched keening that brought his choi running. The stink of hot-glass was instantly there as well: Raine’s Elsewheres phasing in - three, six - their heads no longer averted, no longer in far-look.
“Agius!” the Matt house-lord said in its own tongue, one arm raised and pointing down the road.
And there moving towards them was a were-suit, the classic Nobodoi artefact: its off-white mummiform advancing with a roiling, twisting ground effect that almost but never quite looked like legs stepping out. Above its right shoulder, joined by a network of unseen energy, was the flattened horse-skull of the Snake. To its left, rolling along on a skirted four-ball platform, was the Companion, an elongated ovoid two metres tall, with a canted featureless dish at its top. Flickering about the whole triune were the ghostworks, the half-seen firefly glints that marked most things Nobodoi, made even more vivid by the shadowing early afternoon light of the corridor. Inside that dirty white mummiform talos was a soul-stone, a chalky ball with a leathery kernel at its heart, all that was left of its Recalled occupant.
Or not.
Fond Louie had made choi, trunks locked firmly in the spinal sockets of its four choi-mates, and now that mighty fighting wheel moved off the road to let the triune pass. Raine’s Elsewheres did the same in one precise, mind-linked movement. All watched as the were-suit approached and passed them by.
Fond Louie humphed in pleasure. “So ends today’s lesson. Holy roller come to play! Warn off piracy. Seamen on the Mount. Biggest pirate chip played.”
“But why, Lords?” Josephine said. “Nothing changes. The Window is still there.”
Raine gave the fierce Darzie smile. “Winning, losing. It is no longer easy to know who gets what?”
Then Holding-in-Quiet spoke, chest gleaming with goldpoint. “Build again, Josephine Cantal. It was not the Vanished One who took your house today.”
“You, Lord? But why? Why?”
The hatch of the Matt’s charabanc was even now lifting away, preparing to receive its master.
“What was said before. A Two-Door Rose. How can one resist this newest flower with two doors? It is the way through. Worth the intent. All coinage.”
Josephine Cantal bowed her head, acknowledged the honour as best she could. “Thank you. Thank you, Great Lord, for this.”
Raine listened to the exchange, wondering. He had not acted. And had, by not acting. Yes. Had kept to his task enough. In an instant he sent his Elsewheres back to Nobion, was vaguely aware of Fond Louie’s troupe running off yipping and shouting through the grasslands to where the luda endlessly fired in the golden afternoon and the great force-walls of Rollinsgame and Bassantrae reared into the sky. He easily allowed that Holding-in-Quiet had departed, that only Josephine Cantal would be waiting in the road behind him.
You are a wise and very dangerous woman, he thought to himself. By the Lady!
But he did not turn to her yet. Rather he watched the were-suit continuing down the road, forever wandering the world. Amid his eternal agony, in spite of it, he smiled fiercely into remains of the day. Arm of Law.
* * * *
Terry Dowling (www.terrydowling.com) is one of Australia’s most acclaimed, awarded and versatile writers of science fiction, dark fantasy and horror. As well as being author of the internationally acclaimed Tom Rynosseros saga, his US retrospective Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear earned him a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly and won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection.
Terry’s stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best SF, The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Best New Horror and many times in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as in such anthologies as Dreaming Down Under, Wizards and The Dark.
Recent titles include, Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder; the retrospective Sf collection, Make Believe; and the novel Clowns at Midnight.
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Nightship
KIM WESTWOOD
Here the linen smells of mice and the men of old boots. I lie beneath a slaughter of ferals, cushioned in my guilty comforts and waiting for this black-caulked hulk to sink; but it glides like death along the briny channels of a shrouded city half-submerged — a Grey Zone, neither sea nor shore.
Past my porthole other nightships slice the mist thickening on dank canals. Blunt-nosed, barnacled, they nudge from lock to lock, deals done and deliveries made under cover of a perpetual fog.
Now that I am owned — ship’s boy to a Baron — I have been sewn up to make certain. And if it wasn’t me they’d chosen for those rough, practised hands, it would have been another. Ship’s surgeon Crake, who did the work on me, doubles as a dentist for the crew and, Gods help the bleeders, a midwife. Midshipman Nog went to him for bunions on his toes. The lancing knife took the ends off each in one quick disconnection, Crake shouting as he cut, You’ll fit a smaller shoe and use less leather! A bloody stump Nog has now, and cries at night in his bunk across the bulkhead from me.
I know, since he is not captive, he could jump ship for shore at any time. But for what? For where? Galley Ma would say for Kosciusko, a distant mountain, west, that climbs above our creeping winter into sunlight. But none of us — the bonded, sold — have ever seen it, or will ever go; and the crew, all five of them Barons including Nog, won’t speak of it.
Three years ago, at thirteen, I was bonded to my captain, a metal merchant and fur trader. Some say it’s a sorry pact compared to smelter work, but she is better than most, and amid the business of it I feel a fierce attachment. The Barons, although powerful among the Iron Families, are not the cruellest, and tucked between her threats are rough endearments and promises of protection, safe passage. So when she brings out the knife to tease — threatening to cut my stitches then have them resewn tighter — I listen with a hellish joy, and behind my pleas and protestations there is desire for her hand to snick.
Above deck the ship’s bell sounds EYES PORT! and it’s force of habit that makes me press my face to the rimy glass as we pass below a row of bodies, heads in sacks, suspended from canal-side cranes. Pacifists mainly, and any others — the infidelitous and effete — that threaten the Family system.
From my pelted bower I hear shouts starboard, and tinkly bells, the graunching of a girl barge alongside. The captain and her first lieutenant are off to spend what leisure time they have. Later, when the barge returns, she will fall sated into bed smelling of glitter and oil and a barge girl’s milky seed, but it’s of no matter to me: I am her true companion, kept for an entirely different pleasure.
I close my eyes to the caress of air, a quick filigree touch, then the sharp edge of a fingernail down my cheek — not my captain, but the ghost of ship’s boy Aggi at my bedside.
You like it too much, she says, aglimmer.
I make as if to grab her, but she jinks away. An old game. She was always faster, lighter than me; a mere slip of a boy whose misfortune it was to be too lithe, too handsome at thirteen and in the short years she had beyond that age when fate and Family collude to choose our adult occupations.
Until then we are considered children, and ungendered. At that deciding time we are given titles — man, woman, girl or boy — according to our station. All those in the Iron Families, irrespective of their physiology, are named as men, while those of us born out of Family who pass through puberty and never bleed are sewn up and called boys. We become deck and kitchen hands on the ships — and sometimes, with mixed fortune, captains’ companions; others go to work in the shipyard smelters, or eke a living scavenging for scrap uranium in the waste pits. The last brings better pay, but a shorter life.
Those at menarche — bleeders (and there are far fewer of
them than us) — are the only ones announced as women. Exchanged by their own families for a generous stipend, they are sent to the birthing farms for procreative duty, the Iron Families being mostly barren. And only when they are fully spent do they rejoin the populations in the Grey Zone, living out their broken spinsterhood cared for by those of their siblings not sold at auction.
But the girl barges are another thing. Decked with swathes of coloured cloth and strings of bells, they are a floating misery, a tinselled gaol for those youths born out of Family and whose seed has been deemed unworthy of another generation. Most of these ‘ill-affected’ are drowned before they reach thirteen, but the rest the Iron Families visit for distraction.
Aggi used to say she could hear the crying long before a barge appeared.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 12
