by Kris Schnee
"I'll be an apprentice glazier now, thanks to you, my lady."
She nodded. The data from his case would be valuable.
* * *
The next morning, Oya threw the windows open to the hot wind. She saw Cambio striding up to the gates and hurried down to him, abandoning only tedious paperwork.
Cambio's hands were steady but he couldn't meet her gaze. "The glaziers said that my eyes miss details. I can't do justice to true art, they said!"
From the facility's forested hill overlooking Alhambra, Oya could see the incomplete cathedral's red stone foundation. Its future windows would catch the sunrise beautifully. "You're asking for another fusion."
"I'll take anything!"
Eyesight. She needed an hour with her notes, but only a minute with the supply cages to pick out what she needed. Soon a red-tailed hawk preened on the platform opposite Cambio's. Oya moved the control jewels, set the slider at ten percent, and looked away.
The hawk had vanished. Cambio fell from the machine. Oya jumped to his side. He gasped as she helped him up. His eyes were piercingly bright, studying her face intently. As she took his hand, his yellowed nails -- part human, part wood and part avian -- dug into her palm.
"I'm better," Cambio said, running those changed hands through his hair. He had tufts of feathers on his head now like the missing hawk. "They won't deny me now." He turned to go.
Oya called, "Cambio! Visit again, once the job is yours."
* * *
The sun burned overhead the next day. Behind Oya her machine contained a rabbit and a sprig of quickweed for the latest experiment. If this one worked correctly she'd better understand how to modify the quality of speed. If she could isolate even one such abstract trait, she could create quick-growing corn that fed millions, medicines that sped healing, and horses like the wind itself. The gems clicked in their grooves as she tried one combination after another, filling notebooks.
"Silverhand, come." Her servant didn't answer. Oya rose with a sigh and went to the stairs, where she found the man sprawled unconscious on the floor behind a furious Cambio.
"It's not enough!" Cambio said, stomping toward her. She backed away. "My hands hold firm and my eyes miss nothing. But they said I 'lack the fire' for their work!"
Oya stammered, "I'm sorry. What did you do?"
Cambio scowled. "He tried to hold me back from 'bothering you'. Fix me! Make this right!"
She shook her head no, although equations rolled through her mind for what she could try. The slider had made him ten percent branch, then ten percent hawk. The third change would leave him seventy-three percent human. "A stained-glass window isn't worth this. Not even a life of making them. There's artistry and craftsmanship in leather, too."
"Have you seen her? Saint Eva in glass?" His hands clenched and unclenched, clicking faintly.
"I won't perform another fusion. Rest. We'll have a meal and a drink, and talk about this."
He moved like a hawk, striking her to the stone floor in an instant. She rolled, dazed, and he struck her again. The world blurred.
When she woke up and staggered into the fuser room, Cambio was sobbing and ransacking the supplies. He glanced back at her and said, "I have to! I'm sorry."
A wave of dizziness made her hesitate. Cambio saw her trying to interfere, and rushed to finish his work. He'd already thrown twigs and branches onto one side of the machine along with the quickweed that was sitting there. He'd swept aside the rabbit cage on the other platform, too, and now he jumped onto that side to take its place.
"What are you trying to do?" she said.
"I need fire!" He fumbled through his pockets for a stick tipped with phosphor -- a match. It struck and he ignited the pile of green on the machine. Oya lurched closer, shouting for him to stop. Cambio charged at her, shoved her out of the room, and barred the door.
"Stop this!" she said, and pounded on the door. "You don't even know how to operate the fuser properly!"
Jewels clicked loudly in the room she couldn't see now, leaving her to imagine him changing the settings at random. She winced.
A wave of heat washed out of the fuser room. It struck the door like a punch, bowing it outward and breaking the hinges. Oya jumped out of the way as it fell, but flames burst out of the doorway. The fire licked at her clothing and hair until she smothered it with a heavy curtain. Then, she dared to look into her laboratory.
The room was in disarray and coated with soot. On one platform of the sturdy fuser stood a bald figure wreathed in flame. The next moment he flickered to an almost human form with eyes like the sun, still trailing wisps of fire wherever he moved. She stood there thinking that he was strong-looking, keen of eye and steady of hand, surely worthy to etch Saint Eva in glass. Then he leaped through the window to the road three stories down and vanished into the woods.
Oya murmured a prayer as she raced to dump a bucket of water on the worst fire and stamp out the rest. Then she went downstairs again to look for the other assistants who'd been on duty. She found them trapped in an office where Cambio had locked them. They pelted her with questions. She said, "Later. First, we need to stop that boy!"
They hurried to the stables, and she jumped onto Savior, her mare. Oya's clever mount was fifteen percent human, made from a heretic who would otherwise have been burned alive. The poor soul had been grateful to survive even in this diminished form.
With her party of researchers, Oya and Savior led the way far downhill to the city of Alhambra where the air shimmered in the usual summer heat. The road was dusted with soot. Bits of it, once sand-coated, had fused into droplets of glass.
Cambio had outrun their horses. Oya's party argued over the location of the glassmakers' shop, but by the time they reached the Market District it was obvious. It was the building on fire.
They dismounted. Oya charged through the front door, stopped, and felt the others bang into her from behind. She saw a red stone hall filled with colored glass and flame. The window of Saint Eva hung horizontally at the workshop's center with fire below and a skylight above, so that its shining light splashed in all directions. Patterns of glass representing the lives of heroes made distorted colored shadows on every wall. Papers and furniture had caught fire all over the shop and created a haze of smoke that only made the palette more complicated.
"Cambio!" she said, coughing. The word echoed into the heat. There were spiral stairs leading up to the suspended window. There on a platform, the boy stood staring down into the saint's face. His body was burning, to the point where he seemed made of fire.
Oya, singed already, threw her cloak around her arms and hurried up toward Cambio. She was too late. The boy fell over, toppled from the platform, and crashed onto the lead framework of the window. Colored fragments spun and fell.
Oya and her assistants grabbed him and dragged him from the burning building.
Cambio was charred and unconscious, his breath heaving. Oya saw no doctors and doubted that any could help him now. She set Cambio across the back of her horse and fled with her party back into the hills. What had the glaziers thought of the burning boy who demanded to work with the saint's window? Had he fought them or had they fled? It didn't matter now.
She went back into the workshop with him. By then Silverhand had recovered under the care of an assistant who'd stayed behind. He sat up saying, "What happened?"
Focusing on him helped to calm Oya's thoughts. "He went much too far, and now he's badly burned." Flakes of charred skin scattered as the other researchers tried to load him onto an improvised stretcher. In a rare moment of humility she asked everyone, "What can we do with him?"
Silverhand stood, bracing himself against the wall with his metal arm. "He's lost too much of his humanity. I doubt he'd have much of a soul left even if he woke up."
Everyone looked uncomfortable. There'd been much late-night discussion over wine about the implications of the fuser, such as whether someone might "donate" part of their body or soul to an object, or to
another person. Normally the experiments treated one side of the balance as expendable. Nobody volunteered to try a donation.
One of the younger assistants said, "What if we made him still less human?"
"An animal, you mean?" said Oya. She thought of her horse.
Silverhand looked at his palm. The day he had that arm replaced was the result of a violent accident much like Cambio's, involving a prisoner and a wolf. That had at least started as a planned experiment. "We don't have anything resembling consent."
Oya's eyes narrowed. "He used the fuser without ours, specifically and repeatedly demanding changes. The question is whether to leave him to die, or try something further. And we already used an animal and vegetable matter for an unstable fusion. I hesitate to use another horse or the like."
The other assistant said, "Mineral matter. We haven't tried that." The comment made Silverhand wince, though his survival proved such a change could heal injuries.
The boy was barely breathing. Oya said, "We might as well try." There were shards of broken glass stuck in him, and bits of lead framing in his skin and clothing. She pulled them out without much gentleness, only partly because there was little time for it. Then, she put them onto the fuser's other platform.
"Those?" said Silverhand.
"They're what he was passionate about. What he was willing to risk his life over. Come and help me figure out the settings, quickly."
Together they looked over the fuser's controls, hurriedly conferring about the boy's injuries and what to do with them. The unspoken truth was that it was fairly likely Cambio was already dead, and that they were acting more out of curiosity than out of sincere hope. It was all that Oya could do for Cambio.
The machine flashed, then rumbled. When the glare faded, Oya looked at a heavy statue that had filled one side of the device. It was in the shape of a young man, made of an intricate cage of lead fitted with hundreds of glass facets in bright colors. The light that streamed through the windows filled him and flowed out to bathe the room in dazzling patterns.
The patterns shifted. The statue had begun to move, making the sound of glass sliding against metal. He was looking at his hands.
"Cambio?" said Oya. The statue's head tilted upward, showing a serene and unmoving face that would normally move her to praise the artist. She said, "We did what we could."
The new creature of glass and lead was less than half human in raw percentage terms. She had made choices about what parts of him to save and which to remake, based on her own limited knowledge.
He looked around slowly, turning in place to study the whole room, then stopped.
Silverhand said, "I don't think he understands." The other workers murmured. "What now?"
Oya was torn between wanting to analyze what she'd done, and to weep for having ever getting the boy's hopes up. "I think we can grant a little of his wish."
* * *
And so, as the cathedral of Saint Eva gradually rose over the years, the human workers did their tasks alongside what was left of Cambio. The silent automaton of glass and lead moved heavy stones, dug holes, assembled scaffolding. Whatever he was told. Oya came to visit sometimes, officially to study the creature's actions. She talked with Cambio because he had no one else around who was interested in simply talking, rather than giving orders.
"Did I fail you?" she asked one day at sunset, when the sun's last rays created a rainbow of shadows around him.
Cambio didn't answer; he never did. But he walked partway around the incomplete cathedral to where the light shined through an empty window frame and through his artificial body. He seemed to bask in it, spreading his arms so that the shadowed patterns were like phantom wings brushing the ground.
Oya hadn't made him an artist, but she'd made him a work of art. There was comfort in that, and in knowing that some part of the boy was still alive to appreciate what he'd become.
Where You Find It
Sunlight blazed down on the grad students. Simon had no desire to complain; it was an honor to get brought along on one of Professor Edgarton's dig expeditions. Still, the heat was getting to him. More and more of the jungle was chopped down each year for farmland, hacking bare sunny spots out of the steamy rainforest. This particular group was in a section of ancient jungle that was usually off limits. The Professor had gotten a permit by charming some officials and promising to teach the locals about ecology and their own history. Simon wasn't here to be a do-gooder, but it was nice to feel like he was helping people while getting academic credit and doing real science.
After hours of digging he dropped his pick and plodded over to the tent to grab a beer. The Professor was taking a break too, changing into a less sweaty shirt while frowning at a video screen that flapped on the tent wall. "Hey, Doc," said Simon, "Are you sure there's really anything here?" The known ruins stood mostly up in the mountains.
Edgarton tossed Simon a beer. "Sometimes I wonder. But just look at the ground-sonar readings. They're too strange to be a coincidence."
"Just 'strange'?" Simon had been hoping for something more definitive. Some of the others on this expedition were here for fun, not really as archaeologists, but Simon wanted to actually find stuff. He imagined his name in a glorious spot in the "Contributor" section at the bottom of a published research article.
Edgarton clapped him on the shoulder and headed out to dig again.
Simon sighed. For a while he stared at the data himself. One of the biggest advances in archaeology was the realization that where you found something could be just as important as what you found. (A Viking camp? Moderately interesting. A Viking camp in North America? Much more exciting.) It would be unusual to find a Mesoamerican temple in this part of the lowlands, given the known trend. But this scan data was so vague that there might be nothing at all. The Professor had had successful hunches before, and satellite readings said this general area had jungle cover that was younger than the surroundings, as though it'd once been chopped down by man. Or by disaster. So, the man was probably on to something.
Simon shrugged and checked for any patterns. He plotted the ground-sonar scan against where they'd actually been digging. They were covering the terrain methodically, but due to some confusion over the permit and the ground slope, it looked like they'd missed a likely spot.
He jotted down its coordinates and wandered out, grabbing a shovel. Before he knew it he'd left the sunny clearing and the air turned cooler. Counting paces, he looked at the paper in his hand again, feeling like a kid with a treasure map. The trees were starting to close in, here, making the light dimmer. The unexplored spot ought to be very close. He looked around but this patch of the jungle's edge seemed about the same as any other. Might as well poke around anyway. So long as he stayed in sight of the clearing he wouldn't be lost forever here. He shivered, stepping a bit back from the depths of the deeper forest.
He tripped backward over a root.
Simon landed on hard, cold ground, sending pain lancing through one arm. He winced and sat up, rubbing his arm. He'd only gotten badly bruised. What had he hit, anyway? He looked around for the offending rock, but the culprit was an especially solid patch where no grass grew. He brushed away a thin layer of dirt, then stared. There was a round patch of metal etched with dots and spirals resembling a Mayan solar calendar. But that was impossible! That wasn't the right style for this area, and the local cultures had at best barely invented bronze when Columbus showed up. This shiny metal looked like some sort of meteoric iron alloy.
Simon crouched there, laughing at his discovery. He ran his fingers along the deep engravings. They could bring him fame and fortune if they were real, or fifteen minutes of fame even if they were a hoax. One carved circle moved a bit when he touched it.
The whole metal panel gave a mechanical groan and dropped away under him! Simon went headfirst down the deepening tunnel. He didn't fall far, since the metal disc was only descending slowly, but the pit was lined with smooth stone and already too deep to jump out of.
He shouted for help but his voice echoed in the jungle with no one to hear it. The platform carried him into the cold underground. And then with an echo and a feeling of the ground shoving up at him, the platform stopped. He was stuck at the bottom of a well. No, there was a feeling of open space. He turned --
To find a vast hall lined with sand-colored statues. Each stood at attention in an alcove, towering over him with a giant obsidian-bladed macuahatl sword at its side. Simon whistled, and the sound echoed in the dim space. Not dark; there was light coming from somewhere ahead. He took a few steps forward and stood on the stone floor, stunned, hardly noticing the dust-clouds his boots raised. The architecture of the vaulted roof alone was beyond anything known in pre-Columbian America! His heart beat faster at the magnitude of his discovery. He could spend the rest of his career studying this place, writing books, going on TV. Maybe his Mormon friends were onto something with their talk of a previously unknown civilization in the New World. With shaking hands he fumbled his phone out of his sweaty jeans; though it was otherwise useless down here, he took some photos with it. He stepped closer to examine a statue. The thing looked sleek despite its bulk, painstakingly carved to resemble the animal-headed "jaguar knights" seen in many temple paintings. This one was draped with tattered cloth streamers and long-dead flowers. An idol? It felt sad, neglected here for so many centuries.
It was lit from behind by glowing designs on the alcove walls.
Just as Simon went completely wide-eyed from that, he felt the hum of the metal platform behind him whirring to life again. He spun, cursing, but the platform -- the elevator -- was already out of reach. He began to panic. There was a raised glyph on the wall nearby. He poked it, and the elevator swiftly returned. Simon exhaled. He let the machine go this time, since he was reasonably sure he could get it back when he was ready.
All of the statue alcoves had that glow inside, he now noticed. Simon returned to the one he'd been admiring and tried to read the writing. The base-five numbers looked familiar but meant little in the jumble of Mesoamerican script, not quite anything he recognized. Not that anyone living fully understood some of the languages that'd already been found. He leaned closer to one dense set of inscriptions. His fingers found the surface smooth and slick, glowing in intricate lines.
