by Nisi Shawl
The beaver must have caught on to my plan. I caught a glimpse of it flipping out a metal tube from the legs of its mechosuit, and aiming it straight at me.
A pistol. Those beavers thought of everything.
I froze, then realized that wasn’t exactly helpful, and kept climbing down. The wind was dying and my line was swinging back away from the Dayton, which gave the beaver a better angle on me; but I was also getting farther away and bobbing around in the air. The beaver’s first shot went wide; its second, too. After that it stopped, waiting for me to close in again.
That I did; Hawk was still maneuvering for position, after all, and I was nearly at the end of the rope. It was a perfect swing: Hawk had me sailing straight toward the deck, and right into line with the beaver’s tiny gunsight.
But just as the beaver took its shot, something hit it from behind, and knocked its mechanized legs out from under it. The gun fired high, and the beaver toppled backwards onto the deck.
A few seconds later I sailed over the railing. One of my feet caught on it, and for a second I feared I might fall back into the sky, but I had just enough momentum to carry me forward into an ignoble pile on the deck.
The beaver, I saw, was tangled up with a monkey in a midshipman’s uniform. This one’s fur looked a good deal lighter than the monkey that had boarded the ship, so it must have been one of those already on board. It seemed to have the beaver well in hand, although the mechosuit’s arms were still jerking uselessly around him.
“Thanks,” I said. It seemed the decent thing to do.
In return, the monkey started screeching at me, and gesturing above us (with its head, as both arms were still occupied). And at around the same moment, something very large blocked the sun.
I looked up to see Wakinyan, very close above us now, with a nasty gash cutting through her hull. By the way the torn canvas was fluttering outward, she was clearly losing gas; and by the speed at which she was falling toward us, she had already lost quite a lot.
Evidently, one of the beaver’s shots hadn’t missed completely.
“Get inside!” I shouted, although I had no idea if that was a command the monkeys would understand. For my part, I dove through the hatch into the Dayton’s hull, then found a ladder that led between two of the ship’s giant gasbags and clambered downward as fast as I could.
Before I could reach the bottom, the entire ship lurched, with a series of shudders and a rending noise that put the previous day’s excitement to shame. The gasbag behind me bulged outwards—in the manner, I suppose, of a great bladder when sat upon—and crushed me into the ladder; thankfully my face and one of my knees passed between the rungs, but I knew immediately that my legs would be useless for quite a while. Then the entire world pitched sideways, the gasbag shuddered and let out a roar as it began to deflate, and all I could do was hold on and hope we didn’t land too hard.
∫
If we had been much higher in the air, I imagine our story would have ended there, and I would have had no chance to relate it to you. Fortunately, both our craft found their way (mostly) into the river. Like any good Navy ship, the Dayton was still lighter than water, and she acted rather like a gigantic cushion for Wakinyan.
Our airship, of course, had taken no small amount of damage from the collision, but Hawk had managed to direct the impact onto our engine—the heaviest and sturdiest part of the vessel. Even so, neither craft would be flying anywhere any time soon.
“That ship was the cornerstone of the American Central Fleet,” said Commander Kendrick, shaking his head from the shore. His uniform was a mess, his hat had gone missing, and he didn’t seem to mind. “It will take months to restore our capacity now.”
“Then I guess you should hope the Canadians don’t invade in the next few months,” Hawk said. Then she left me to smooth things over.
“You’ve got something of theirs now,” I noted. “That beaver’s mechosuit can’t be something they’ll be happy to part with.”
Kendrick nodded. “Beavers. We knew the Canadians were training beasts, but animals that can impersonate a Navy officer and hijack an airship? This could be the greatest threat our Navy has ever faced.”
I was beginning to wonder about Kendrick’s ability to judge a threat. “By our best guess,” I said, “we’re only about thirty miles north of Grand Forks. If you could float the Dayton down the river, could be you might salvage her.”
Kendrick frowned at that. “Float an airship? I don’t know if it’s ever been tried. But if we can repair the gasbags, and bring up a riverboat to guide her…damned if it just might work.” He nodded, as though he had just decided something important. “You’ve done a service to your country, Mr. West. You and your captain both.”
“I appreciate your saying so, Commander,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound arch. “And I hope you’ll remember it didn’t come without sacrifice on our part.”
“Yes, of course,” Kendrick said. “I know what it’s like to lose a vessel, Mr. West. I’ll make sure it’s not forgotten.”
I limped after Hawk, who was standing by the river and looking out at the half-sunk, mangled ruin of the two airships. The Dayton’s nose had dug into the riverbank, and the monkeys were busy dragging ashore what supplies they could salvage.
“New York in ten days,” she said, with a shake of her head. It was the first she’d spoken to me since our argument of the previous night, which now felt like it had vanished into the wind. “We would have made it, too.”
“Something always happens,” I said. “This isn’t the end, though. The Navy seems happy with us, and I think they might salvage the ships.”
“The Navy.” Hawk was still staring at Baines and the monkeys. “This whole mess started because they put uniforms on beasts and thought that made them soldiers, but they’re already right back at it. I suppose it’s just too convenient.”
I shrugged. “They’re going to do what they want to do, and make up the reasons later. That’s how it always works. Best we can do is make it work for us.”
Hawk either didn’t hear me, or had something else in mind. “Did I ever tell you why I chose the name Wakinyan?” she asked, nodding at the wreck. Our ship’s hull had snapped near the center, and her nose was sticking upward from the mess of torn canvas and broken girders. With imagination, it might look like a baby bird poking its head out of a ruined nest. “I lost almost everything I knew about my people while I was in that school. But I remember Wakinyan Tanka, the great bird who isn’t a bird, whose eyes are lightning and whose voice is thunder. I don’t think I ever learned what it was all supposed to mean, but when I remember it, I feel free.”
I shook my head, although she still wasn’t looking at me. “You never told me that, exactly. But I remember asking why you wanted to fly airships so bad. You said that when you were up there, it felt like you’d stolen the sky.”
She turned back around at that. If I were a more daring narrator, I would claim to have seen tears in her eyes, but in truth there was just something in the set of her jaw. For Hawk, that was quite a lot.
“That’s why you kept your own name, isn’t it?” I continued. “To be a bird that isn’t a bird.”
A little off to our right, two apes were setting down a slightly waterlogged crate. Hawk took to staring at them for a moment, and then she got her troublemaking look again. “Hold that thought a minute.”
With a glance at Baines off in the distance, she strode up to the nearest of the apes. In a motion so quick I barely followed it, she produced a blue Navy cap from her pack and set it on her head—at a fairly jaunty angle, I should say.
“When he goes to sleep—” She pointed at Baines. “—get out of here. Go away. Then do whatever you want. Do anything. Tell all the others, too. Tell all the beasts.” The ape ambled off, and Hawk tossed away the hat, turned, and walked right back to me.
I wasn’t nearly as surprised as I thought I should be, so I just let out a breath. “So that’s where Kendrick’s hat went.�
� Hawk just shrugged. “Do you suppose that’ll work?”
“It might,” she said. “Or they might not understand. That might be for the best; a bunch of monkeys might have a hard time in the Plains. And they might even like flying on airships; I wouldn’t blame them for that.”
“So why bother?” I asked.
Hawk shrugged. “When people dream of Wakinyan Tanka, seeing the spirit changes them. It turns you upside down and backwards, and everything you do is contrary. Because that’s how the spirit works.” Then she got the same sly smile she’d had when she told Kendrick to let the monkeys out of the cage. “Or maybe I just like possibilities.”
As the sun inched lower, it passed behind a new mass of grey clouds rolling in from the west. Thunder boomed off in the distance, and we looked destined for another summer rain, though it might still miss us to the south. There in the moment, though, I couldn’t bring myself to think it mattered so much. We’d been through storms before.
/sit
Jeremy Sim
Andre Papakostas woke up the Friday before Christmas with a fierce itch in his nose and a sudden, strange craving for meat. The itch had bothered him all night: a sharp, fishhooked pain that felt, weirdly, like an ear infection in the middle of his face.
Andre sat up in bed and shook his head experimentally. Ouch, he thought. It was definitely worse than yesterday.
He inspected his nostrils in the bathroom mirror. Was it his imagination, or did his nose look larger? There was a flush of color, bruise-purple, around the edges.
When he spat after brushing he realized that his teeth felt a bit funny too. He ran his tongue over them a few times and grimaced at himself in the mirror. They felt…misaligned. Like they were too clean.
He sighed, eyeing the little tube of hydrocortisone that Dr. Lee had sold him yesterday. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t the kind of problem that could be solved with anti-inflammatories.
He picked up the phone and Skyped Mom.
Ψ
The phone rang eight times before she answered.
“Hello?”
“Mom? It’s Andre.”
There was a gust of static. Mom’s voice piped through, louder than expected. “Oh hi, dear. Guess where we are?”
“You sound like you’re standing in a wind tunnel.”
“We’re at Myrtos. It’s beautiful here, Andre. Paul?” she yelled, suddenly. “Paul, come here. It’s Andre, on the phone. Tell him how beautiful it is here.”
“It’s beautiful,” came his stepfather’s voice, slightly muted.
“Mom,” said Andre.
It was a few seconds before she came back to the phone.
“Hello?” she said.
“Mom.”
“Yes?”
“I think I’ve been hexed again.”
Mom was silent for a second. “Oh Andre, again? Are you sure?”
“Yeah. My nose is turning purple and my face is changing shape.”
“Oh, Andre. Right when Paul and I are out of the country, too. Are you sure it’s a hex, dear? Did you go to Dr. Lee’s?”
“He said it was a blocked sebaceous gland and prescribed cortisone.”
“Oh, Andre. Oh dear. Didn’t I tell you to learn the nine basic counter-hexes? Awareness is all you really need, Andre. It’s a self-defense skill.”
“That’s nice, Mom. When are you coming back?”
“Paul?” she yelled. “When are we going back? What? The twenty-sixth? The twenty-sixth,” she said, at regular volume.
“I’ll wait until then,” said Andre.
“Are you sure, dear? It’s more than a week. You could always ask Nico—”
“I’m not calling Nico, Mom.”
“Are you sure? He’s been practicing his spells. I think you should give him another chance.”
“No.”
“Okay. I just thought—well, I thought you should give him a chance to redeem himself.”
“No, Mom. I’ll wait till you get back. Have a good vacation.”
“Alright—”
He hung up. His face hurt.
The twenty-sixth. Eight days away. He stood up, went over to the mirror, looked at himself, and carefully smeared another dose of hydrocortisone cream all over his nose and cheeks.
Ψ
It was someone in the family, obviously. A distant cousin, nephew, aunt, or step-uncle twice removed. It was always the same story. They wanted to keep their hex spells in practice, you know, so they didn’t get rusty. And the perfect target? No-magic Andre, who had sworn off magic and publicly insulted Granny Delphine at the family gathering fifteen years ago.
Andre’s family had a good memory. And he had a big extended family.
He sighed and prodded at his nose. At least it was Christmas. The official season for putting up with annoying relatives.
He tried to look on the bright side. At best, the curse would peter out on its own after a few days. At worst, Mom would be here the day after Christmas to fix him up. See? Not so bad. He’d survive.
Ψ
At noon, he found a whisker. A whiskertip, actually, protruding from his upper lip like a lone, silvery pioneer. His face tingled when he touched it.
A part of Andre was glad that it wasn’t going to be a repeat of any of the year’s hexes. Since last January he’d endured a week of tripping over invisible obstacles, a month of saying everything backwards, and a frantic, memorable day where his toenails had started growing out at sixty times the normal rate. This had been a bumper year for crappy hexes.
Animal transformation was a new one. He wondered who had gone to all the trouble. Animal spells were complicated things.
Regardless, thought Andre, he knew how to deal with this.
It was time to go grocery shopping.
Ψ
Andre squeezed through the front door of his apartment that afternoon with eight bulging bags of food. Since he didn’t know what sort of animal he was turning into, he’d decided to be prepared. Five loaves of enriched wheat bread, the kind with oats and sunflower seeds on the crust. Fruits and vegetables: bananas, apples, cucumbers, spinach, kale, watercress, seaweed, squash. And lots of meat, since something told him there was a good chance he was going to be carnivorous. Ground beef, raw chicken, roasted chicken, pork bones. And four large packages of bacon, which he’d felt an odd attraction to as he was leaving the store. He laid out a deflated kiddy pool in the middle of the kitchen, just in case of aquatics.
It was enough to last him until Mom came back, most probably. And at least he wouldn’t have to go through the humiliation of calling Nico to come feed him.
He wrestled everything into the fridge and leaned on the door until it shut. Then he tied up the plastic bags, put them in the cabinet under the sink, and went through his trash, carefully snipping up all the six-pack rings he found.
Ψ
It was 5:30 p.m. when Andre finally sat down in the cool leather of his computer chair. His desk was clear, still smelling slightly of lemony cleaning solution. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he straightened up, woke his computer, and started AoA.
A blue-and-red splash screen invaded his screen for an instant, then:
== Welcome to Age of Absolution Online! ==
You have logged in.
Age of Absolution. It was an older game, but still Andre’s game of choice.
A bulky grey rock giant named Bruhjack knelt in a patch of crabgrass in Jordvandr Steppe. The sky was a light cyan, dotted with wispy clouds that ticked forward like a clockwork postcard. The hill on which Bruhjack knelt was textured with brown-and-green mottle.
Andre admired the view. Bruhjack’s big arms swung as he ran down the hill, and the world stretched out before him in panorama. Hills extended into the distance. Every now and then, tufts of pixelated grass ruffled in the wind. White tigers roamed the steppe, executing their wandering routines just as they always had, sometimes tilting crazily over the ruins of stone huts. Everything around
him was peaceful.
This is what normality is, thought Andre. The media loved to portray online gamers as addicted, socially-inept freaks, but that wasn’t it at all. For Andre, AoA was just a place where everybody understood the rules. A place where personal boundaries were respected and intelligence was rewarded. Sometimes he just felt like all he wanted out of reality was a place like Jordvandr Steppe, where life was simple and things moved forward with purposeful routine.
In reality, you could wake up any day and find yourself turning into an animal.
This was his online life. And it had structure. It had privacy. It had—
Saamx>> there you are!
Saamx>> we were wondering if you’d log in at all today ;)
Andre felt a smile form on his lips. “Hey Saam,” he typed. “I was caught up with something annoying all day.”
Saamx>> ahh…that’s too bad.
Saamx>> officially, I have to warn you that the rest of your night is likely to be filled with annoyance as well, if you don’t join us in New Aldeum in the next five minutes :)
Saamx>> come on, we’ve got things to do!
“Okay, okay.” Andre stopped his character and started a teleport spell. Saamx and his wife Pinky were two of his best friends in the game. It was impossible to count the number of times they had adventured together, failing or succeeding based on the strength of their teamwork. Some nights they simply sat in a tight triangle and chatted. They even had dinner in real life a couple times, years after they had grown accustomed to seeing each other’s names on their friend lists.
He liked Saam and Pinky. Strictly speaking, there hadn’t been much to do in the game since the last major update three years ago. After ten years, AoA was finally starting to show its age. But Saam and Pinky made everything fresh. They made the mundane exciting again.
As Bruhjack’s teleport spell finished, Andre closed his eyes and tried to ignore the dull, throbbing ache in his jaw.
Ψ
The next morning, big, brown eyes blinked back at Andre in the mirror. Long lashes. A pronounced—yes, a pronounced snout. No wonder it had felt like his face was stretching open. He raised his hand and fiddled with the inch-long whiskers that had sprouted from his moustache. The tingly feeling was stronger. His ears were large, with pointy tips. His nose was beyond recognition now, darker and flatter, with tiny surface bumps. When he ran his finger over it, he nearly jerked back from the intensity of the odors that assaulted him. There was sweat, and salt, and kale, and food wax. There was plastic and lemon oil and cleaning fluid.
