by Cat Rambo
Her name was Zuleika, and she was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and smelled only faintly of the grave, because every evening she bathed in the river that flowed silently beneath her window.
“Marry me,” the rat said. It stood upright on its back legs, its tail curled neatly around its feet.
She was pretending to eat breakfast. A pot steamed on the table. She poured herself a deliberate cup of chocolate before speaking.
“Why should I marry you?”
The rat eyed her. “To be sure,” it admitted. “There’s more in it for me than for you. Having a bride of your stature would increase mine, so to speak.” It chuckled, smoothing its whiskers with a paw.
“I fear I must decline,” she said.
Leaving the rat to console itself with muffins, she went into the parlor where her father sat reading the same paper he read every morning, its pages black rectangles.
“I have had a marriage proposal,” she told him.
He folded his paper and set it down, frowning. “From whom?”
“A rat, just now. At breakfast.”
“What does he expect? A dowry of cheese?”
She remembered not liking her father very much when she was alive.
“I told him no,” she said.
He reached for his paper again. “Of course you did. You’ve never been in love and never will be. There is no change in this city. Indeed, it would be the destruction of us all. Shut the door when you go out.”
She went shopping, carrying a basket woven from the white reeds that line the river’s banks.
Passing through a clutter of stalls, she fingered fabrics lying in drifts: sleepy soft velvet, watery charmeuse, suedes as tender as a mouse’s ear. All in shades of black and gray, whites lying among them like discarded moonlight.
The rat sat on the table’s edge.
“I can provide well for you,” it said. “Fish guts from the docks of Tabat and spoiled meat from its alleyways. I would bring you the orchard’s gleanings: squishy apricot and rotted peaches, apples brown as bone and flat as the withered breasts of a crone. I would bring you bits of ripe leather from the tannery, soaked in a soup of pigeon shit and water until it is soft as flesh.”
“Why me?” she asked. “Have I given you reason to suspect I would accept your advances?”
It stroked its whiskers in embarrassment. “No,” it admitted. “I witnessed you bathing in the river, and saw the touch of iridescence that gilds your limbs, like plump white cheeses floating in the water. I felt desire so strong that I pissed myself, as though my bones had turned to liquid and were flowing out of me. I must have you for my wife.”
She looked around at the market she had visited each third day for as long as she had been dead. At the tables of wares that never changed but only endlessly rearranged their elements. Then back at the rat.
“You may walk with me,” she said.
The rat hopped into the basket and they strolled along in silence. At length, he began to speak.
He told her of the rats of the city without a name, who have lived so long so close to magic that it has seeped into their skin, their eyes, and down into their very guts. How they have seen their civilizations rise and fall over the centuries, and their sorcerers and magicians have learned cunning magics, only to see them torn away each time they re-descended into savagery. How the white-furred rat matrons ruled their current society, sending their swains out to gather them food, eating more and more, in order to gain greater and greater social weight.
“That is what first drew me to this idea,” he said. “A human bride would have more weight than any of them. But then when I saw you, it seemed a meaningless and stale calculation.”
She felt a thrill of warmth somewhere in her chest. Upon reflection she realized that it was an emotion that she had not felt before she died. It was part interest, and part intrigue, and part vanity, and part something else: a twinge of affection for this rat that promised to make her his world.
“There is no question,” her father said. “This would bring change to the City.”
“And?”
“And! Do you wish to destroy this place? We are held by the Wizard’s spell—fixed in a moment when, dying because we cannot change, we do not die because we cannot change.”
Zuleika frowned. “That makes no sense.”
“That’s because you’re young.”
“You have only forty years more than my own five thousand, three hundred and twelve. Surely when one considers the years I have lived, I can be reckoned an adult.”
“You would think so, if you overlooked the fact that you will always be fifteen.”
She stamped her foot and pouted, but centuries can jade even the most indulgent parent. He sent for a Physician.
The Physician came with eager steps, for new cases were few and far between. He insisted on examining Zuleika from head to toe, and would have had her disrobe, save for her father’s protest.
“She seems well enough to me,” the Physician said in a disappointed tone.
“She believes she wishes to marry.”
“Tut, tut,” the Physician said in astonishment. “Well now. Love. And you wish this cured?”
“Before the contagion spreads any further or drives her to actions imperiling us all.”
Zuleika said nothing. She was well aware she was not in love with the rat. But the idea of change had seized her like a fever.
The Physician overlaid her scalp with a netting of silver wire. Magnets hung like awkward beads amid crystals of midnight onyx and gray feldspar.
“It is a subtle stimulation,” he murmured. “And certainly Love is not a subtle energy. But given sufficient time, it will work.”
He directed that Zuleika sit in a chair in the parlor without disturbing the netting for three days.
The days passed slowly. Zuleika kept her eyes fixed on the window, which framed a cloudless, sunless, skyless world. She could feel the magnetic energies pulling her thoughts this way and that, but it seemed to her things remained much the same overall.
On the third day, the rat appeared.
“My beautiful fiancée,” it said, gazing at where she sat. “What is that thing you wear?”
“It is a mechanism to remove Love,” she said.
Its whiskers perked forward, and it looked pleased. “So you are in love?”
“No,” she said. “But my father believes that I am.”
“Hmmph,” said the rat. “Tell me, what is the effect of such a mechanism if you are not in love?”
“I don’t know.”
It considered, absently flicking its tail.
“Perhaps it will have the opposite effect,” it said.
“I have been thinking about that myself,” she said. “Indeed, I feel fonder towards you with every passing moment.”
“How much longer must you wear it?”
Her eyes sought the clock. “Another hour,” she said.
“Then we must wait and see.” The rat sniffed the air. “Did your family have muffins again this morning?”
“I’ve been sitting here for three days; I didn’t have breakfast.”
“Then I shall be back within a half hour or so,” it said and withdrew.
At the hour, the door opened, and her father and the Physician entered. The rat, licking its chops, discreetly moved beneath her chair where, hidden by her skirts, it could not be seen.
“Well, my daughter,” her father said, patting her on the back as the Physician removed the apparatus. “Do you feel restored?”
“Indeed I do,” she said.
“Good, good!” He clapped the Physician’s shoulder, looking pleased. “Good work, man. Shall we retire to discuss your fee?”
The Physician looked at Zuleika. “Perhaps another examination…” he ventured.
“No need,” her father said briskly. “Love removed, everything’s fixed. Our city can continue on as it has for the past millennium.”
When they had gone, the rat crept ou
t from beneath her chair, regarding her. “Well?” it said.
“I do not wish to be married down here.”
“We can make our way to the surface and say our vows in Tabat,” the rat said. “I know all the tunnels, and where they wind to.”
And so she took a lantern from where it hung in the garden, shedding its dim light over the pale vegetation nourished there by sorcery rather than sunlight. They made their way to the first tunnel entrance, the rat riding on her shoulder, and started towards the surface. Behind them, there came a massive crash and crack.
“What was that?” the rat said.
“Nothing,” Zuleika said. “Nothing at all, anymore.”
She marched on and behind her, the City with No Name continued to fall.
“The Dead Girl’s Wedding March” was written in the fall of 2005, after Clarion West. It started with the initial image of the rat proposing to the girl, and what happens as a result. It is more of a fairy tale set in Tabat than a “real-life” history, but there is indeed a zombie city without a name far below Tabat, where part of the action of “The Bumblety’s Marble,” which appeared in the collection Paper Cities in 2008, takes place. This story appeared in Fantasy Magazine in 2005.
Worm Within
The LED bug kicks feebly, trying to push itself away from the wall. Its wings are rounds of mica, and the hole in its carapace where someone has tacked it to the graying boards reveals cogs and gears, almost microscopic in their dimension. The light from its underside is the cobalt of distress.
It flutters there, sputtering out blue luminescence, caught between earth and air, between creature life and robot existence. Does it believe itself insect or mechanism? How can it be both at once?
I glide past, skirting the edge of the light it casts, keeping my hood up, watching fog tendrils curl and dissipate. A large street, then a smaller one, then smaller yet, in a deserted quarter that few, if any, occupy. Alleys curling into alleys, cursive scrawls of crumbling bricks and high wooden fences. My head down, I practice walking methodically, mechanically until I find a tiny house in the center of the maze. Mine. Another LED bug is tacked beside the entrance, but this one is long dead, legs dangling.
Once inside, I linger in the foyer, taking off my cloak, the clothes that drape my form as though I were some eccentric, an insistent Clothist, or anxious to preserve my limbs from rust or tarnish. Nude, I revel in my flesh, dancing in the hallway to feel the body’s sway and bend. Curved shadows slide like knives over the crossworded tiles on the floor, perfect black and white squares. If there were a mirror I could see myself.
But after only a single pirouette, my inner tenant stirs. He plucks pizzicato at my spine, each painful twang reminding me of his presence, somewhere inside.
He says, They’ll find you soon enough TICK they’ll hunt you down. They’ll realize TICK what you are, a meat-puppet in a TICK robot world, all the shiny men and women and TICK in-betweens will cry out, knowing what you are. They’ll find TICK you. They’ll find you.
I don’t know where he lives in my body. Surely what feels like him winding, wormlike, many-footed and long-antennaed through the hallways of my lungs, the chambers of my heart, the slick sluiceway of my intestines—surely the sensation is him using his telekinetic palps to engage my nervous system. I think he must be curled, encysted, an ovoid somewhere between my shoulder blades, a lump below my left rib, a third ovary glimmering deep in my belly.
He says, You could go out with TICK a bang, you could leap into TICK the heart of a furnace or dive TICK from a building’s precipice, before they put you TICK in a zoo with a sign on the wall TICK, “Last Homo Sapiens.” Last Fleshbag. Last Body.
I do not reply. I gather my clothing back to myself and shrug my shoulders underneath the layers, hiding. He flows back and forth, like a scissoring centipede, driving himself along my veins.
In the kitchen, I stuff food in my mouth without thinking about it, wash it down with gulps of murky fluid from the decanter I fill each night from the river. The liquid glistens with oily putrefaction as it pours through my system.
He says, You disgust me. There are TICK hairs growing inside your body, there TICK are lumps of yellow fat, there are TICK snot and blood clots and bits of refuse TICK. Why won’t you die and set me free?
If only I could wash him away, I’d wallow by the riverside, mouth agape in the shallows, swallowing, swallowing bits of gravel and rusted bolts and the tinny taste of antique tadpoles.
I can’t, but even so he doesn’t like the thought. He saws at the back of my skull with fingers like grimy glass, until the bare bulb shining above the kitchen table shatters, rains down in shards of migraine light, my vision splintering into headache.
When I sleep, I lie down on a shelf beneath the window on the upper floor. I don’t know who used to live in this house—when I found it, the only closet was full of desiccated beetles and rows of blue jars. I fold the spectacles I wear– two circles of glass and brass that I found in a drawer. I set them on the windowsill with the drawing of a clock face I have made. I slide my eyelids closed.
Even asleep, I can feel my parasite whispering to himself, thoughts clicking and ticking away. Turning the circuitry and gears of my brain for his own use.
I dream that I am dreaming I’m not dreaming.
The morning sky unfolds in the window, mottled crimson and purple, like marbled bacon, speckled sausage. Brown clouds devour it to the sound of morning shuffling. I get up. I take the mass transit, I go to the store and buy replicas of food, the same pretense everyone else makes, mourning the regularities of a lost life. I stand on a street corner with a pack of robots, looking at a wall screen. A few are clothed, but most are bare, moisture beading on their chrome and brass forms. Some are sleek, some are retro. No one is like me.
I walk in the park. Where did all these robots come from? What do they want? They look like the people that built them, and they walk along the sidewalk, scuffed and marred by their heavy footsteps. They pretend. That’s the only thing that saves me, the only thing that lets me walk among them pretending to be something that is pretending to be me.
I sit on a bench by the plaza’s edge, a bend of concrete, splotched with lichen. Little sparrows hop along the back, nervous hops, turning their heads to look at me, one beady eye, then the other. I hold my hand out, palm upward. One hops closer.
Inside my ears, inside my lungs, vibrating inside my bones, I hear him whispering. He tells me where I could throw my body in front of a tram, where I could undermine a bridge, where I could leap in a shower of glass, where I could embrace a generator.
The sparrow lands popcorn-light on my palm. My fingers close over it. The other sparrows panic and fly away as my hand clenches tighter and tighter, latching my thumb over the cage my hand has become, feeling the crunch beneath the fluff.
My fingers spasm before my thumb swings away to let them open. Tiny gears fall and bounce on the concrete, and fans of broken plastic feathers flutter down. I stand and try to walk away, but he keeps talking and talking in my head.
You disgust me, he says, and then for once he is silent, as another presence intrudes, as something touches my arm. It is the creature that raised me, it is my mother robot, made of lengths of copper tubing and a tank swelling for a bosom. Carpet scraps are wrapped around its wrists and ankles. It says through the grillework, its beetle-like mouth hissing and crackling with static. You are not well, you must come home with me, won’t you come home with me? I worry about you.
How can robots worry? I shake my skull, I turn away so it won’t see the meat, the flesh, the body.
You don’t know what you’re doing, who you are, what you are, it says. The voice is flat, emotionless.
It pulls at me again, but I brace myself and it cannot budge me. It walks away and does not look back. It will come tomorrow and say the same words.
He begins in my head again and I make it only a few steps before crouching down in the middle of the plaza, feeling the passing
robots stare at me. I must master this, must master him before the Proctors come and discover me.
I say to the insides of my wrists, the delicate organic bones of my wrists, clothed in blood and sinew, Listen to me, listen to me. Let me get home, home to safety and I’ll give you what you want, whatever you want.
He releases his grip on my sanity and we walk home quietly. I eat and drink and say What do you want?
Sleep, he says, and for once the voice is gentle. That’s all. Go to sleep. Things will be better in the morning.
At half past midnight, I open my eyes. On the floor are legs torn from an LED bug, dried shells, silver scraps. I watch and he lifts one, then another, drifts and clicks so quiet I cannot hear them. One, then another, and then both. As though he was practicing. As though he was getting better. Stronger.
I didn’t know he could use his telekinesis outside my body. As the last shell falls, I feel him lapse, exhausted, into his own simulacrum of sleep.
Downstairs there are no knives in the kitchen, but there is a piece of metal molding that I can peel away from the counter’s edge. Slipping and sliding across the floor and the fungus growing on the ancient bits of food scattered there, I go into the living room, an empty box like every other room here, but here the walls are red, red as blood. The blood I imagine, over and over, in my veins.
I poise the knife before my belly and I say goodbye to my body, to the burps and the shit, to the unexpected moles and the cramps and the itches, and flakes of skin and hot sore pimples. To my good, hallucinatory-rich flesh. To my bones that have pretended to carry me for so long. To my delusive blood.
He wakes and says What are you doing? And No. Even as the length of metal slides into me, and I look down to see my foil skin sliding away, to reveal my secret’s secret to the world, to show my gears and cogs and shining steaming lunatic wires, and in the midst of it, the clockwork centipede uncoiling, he is my brain seeing itself uncoiling and recoiling and discoiling, my mechanical, irrational brain saying No and No and No again.
