But no reply has come.
Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps her enemy does not care, after all.
The pilgrims follow guides down the path of wisdom. Red departs and wanders narrow, twisting passages in the dark.
Darkness does not bother her. Her eyes do not work like normal eyes. She scents the air, and olfactory analytics flash into her brain, offering a trail. At a particular niche, she draws from her satchel a small tube that sheds red light on the skeletons arrayed within. The first time she does this, she finds nothing. The second, her light glints off a pulsing stripe on this femur, that jaw.
Satisfied, she adds femur and jaw to her bag, then banishes the light and wanders deeper down.
Imagine her in utter night, invisible. Imagine the footsteps, one by one, that never tire, never slip on cave dust or gravel. Imagine the precision with which her head swivels on her thick neck, swinging a measured arc from side to side. Hear (you can, just) gyroscopes whir in her gut, lenses click beneath the camouflage jelly of those pure black eyes.
She moves as fast as possible, within operating parameters.
More red lights. More bones join the others in the sack. She does not need to check her watch. A timer ticks down in the corner of her vision.
When she thinks she’s found the bones she needs, she descends.
Far below the path of wisdom, the masters of this dark place ran out of corpses. The niches remain, waiting—perhaps for Red.
Even the niches stop, eventually.
Soon after that, guards set upon her: eyeless giants grown by the sharp-toothed mistresses of this place. The giants’ nails are yellow, thick, and cracked, and their breath smells better than one might expect.
Red breaks them quickly and quietly. She has no time for the less violent approach.
When she can no longer hear their moans, she reaches the cavern.
She knows by the changed echoes of her footsteps that she has found the place. When she kneels and stretches forth her hand, she feels ten centimeters of remaining ledge, then the abyss. Strong cold wind gusts past her: the Earth’s own breath, or some great monster’s far below. It howls. The noise clatters off the bone mobiles the nuns make down here, to remind themselves of the impermanence of flesh. The bones sing and turn, hanging from marrow twine in the darkness.
Red feels her way along the ledge until she finds one of the great anchored tree trunks from which the mobiles hang. She shimmies out upon the trunk until she reaches the bones of some ancient nun, hung by some other.
The countdown clock in her eye warns her how little time is left.
She cuts the old bones free with her diamond-sharp nails and takes her replacements from her pack. Strings them one by one with marrow twine, connecting skull and fibula, jaw and sternum, coccyx and xiphoid process.
The timer ticks down. Seven. Six.
She ties the knots rapidly, by touch. Her limbs inform her that they ache where they clutch this ancient trunk above an unfathomable drop.
Three. Two.
She lets the bones fall into the pit.
Zero.
A rush of wind splits the earth, a roar in darkness. Red clutches the petrified trunk closer than a lover. The wind peaks, screams, tosses bones about. A new note rises above the ossuary clatter, woken by the cavern’s wind whistling over precise fluted pits in the bones Red has hung. The note grows, shifts, and swells into a voice.
Red listens, teeth bared in an expression that, if she saw it mirrored, she could not name. There’s awe there, yes, and fury. What else?
She scans the lightless cavern. She detects no heat signature, no movement, no radar ping, no EM emissions or cloud trail—of course not. She feels gloriously exposed. Ready for the gunshot or the moment of truth.
Too soon, the wind dies, and the voice with it.
Red curses into the silence. Remembering the era, she invokes local fertility deities, frames inventive methods for their copulation. She exhausts her invective arsenal and growls, wordless, and spits into the abyss.
After all that, as prophesied, she laughs. Thwarted, bitter, but still, there’s humor in it.
Before she leaves, Red saws free the bones she hung. The pilgrim Red meant to shape is gone, and the hermitage will be unbuilt. Now Red will have to fix the mess to the best of her ability.
The abandoned bones tumble and tumble and fall and fall.
But don’t worry. The seeker catches them before they land.
* * *
Dear Red, in Tooth, in Claw,
You were right that I laughed. Your letter was very welcome. It told me a great deal. You imagined the fire glinting off my teeth; knowing your fine attention to detail, I thought I’d put a little devil in it.
Perhaps I ought to begin with an apology. This is not, I’m afraid, the omen you were anticipating; while you listen to my words, you might give a little thought to whose bones are cored and pocked with this letter. That poor pilgrim who might have been! Why leave a self-destructing paper trail when one can enjoy an asset-destroying scrimshaw session and let the wind take a turn tickling some ivory?
Don’t worry—he lived a fine life first. Not the life you would have wanted for him, perhaps—unhappy but useful to posterity, harbouring the vulnerable, dimpling the future’s punch cards one new life at a time. Instead of building a hermitage, he fell in love! Made glorious music with his fellow, travelled widely, drew tears from an emperor, melted her hard heart, bumped history out of one groove and into another. Strand 22 crosses Strand 56, if I’m not mistaken, and somewhere downthread a bud’s bloomed bright enough to taste.
It flatters me to find you so attentive. Be assured that I’ll have looked long and hard at you while you assembled my little art project. Will you go still or turn sharply when you know that I’m watching you? Will you see me? Imagine me waving, in case you don’t; I’ll be too far off for you to see my mouth.
Just kidding. I’ll be long gone by the time the wind turns right. Made you look, though, didn’t I?
I imagine you laughing too.
I look forward to your reply,
Blue
* * *
Blue approaches the temple in pilgrim’s guise: hair shorn to show the shine of circuitry curling around ears and up to scalp, eyes goggled, mouth a smear of chrome sheen, eyelids chrome hooded. She wears antique typewriter keys on her fingertips in veneration of the great god Hack, and her arms are braceleted in whorls of gold, silver, palladium, glinting brighter than bright against her dark skin.
Seen from overhead she is one of thousands, indistinguishable from the slow press of bodies shuffling towards the temple: a borehole in the centre of a vast, sun-baked pavilion. No one enters it: Such worshipful heat would wither their god on its silicon vine.
But inside is where she needs to be.
Blue drums her key-clapped fingers against one another with a dancer’s precision. A, C, G, T, backwards and forwards, bifurcated, reunited. Their percussive rhythm sequences an airborne strain of malware she’s been breeding for generations, an organism spreading invisible tendrils through this society’s neural network, harmless until executed.
She snaps her fingers. A spark flares between them.
The pilgrims—all ten thousand of them, all at once—collapse, perfectly silent, into one vast ornamented heap.
She listens to the hiss and pop of overheated circuits misfiring in filigreed brains and walks peacefully through the incapacitated pilgrims, their twitching limbs like surf lapping softly at her ankles.
It amuses Blue to no end that, in disabling their temple, in mounting this attack, she has, herself, performed an act of devotion to their god.
She has ten minutes to navigate the temple labyrinth: down the service ladder hand over hand, then one palm against the dry, dark wall to follow its broken lines to a centre. It’s cold underground, colder on her bare skin, colder still the deeper she goes, and she shivers but doesn’t slow.
At the centre is a boxy screen. It lights
up as Blue approaches.
“Hello, I’m Mackint—”
“Hush, Siri. I’m here for the riddles.”
Eyes and a mouth—it can’t quite be called a face—animate the screen, regard her evenly. “Very well. How do you calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle?”
Blue tilts her head, stands very still, except for the flexing of her fingers at her side. She clears her throat.
“ ‘ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.’ . . .”
Siri’s screen blinks with static before it asks, “What is the value of pi to sixty-two decimals?”
“ ‘The sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing.’ ”
A fistful of snow skitters across Siri’s face. “If train A leaves Toronto at six p.m. travelling east at one hundred kilometres per hour, and train B leaves Ottawa at seven p.m. travelling west at one hundred twenty kilometres per hour, when will they cross?”
“ ‘Lo! the spell now works around thee, / And the clankless chain hath bound thee; / O’er thy heart and brain together / Hath the word been pass’d—now wither!’ ”
A flash of light: Siri powers down.
“Further,” Blue adds, stepping lightly towards the box, making to lift it into the heavy bag next to it, “Ontario sucks. As the prophets say.”
The screen flashes again; she steps back, startled. Words scroll across the screen, and as they do, her eyes widen, and the screen’s blue-white light catches on the chrome paint of her mouth as it spreads, slowly, into a ferocious grin.
She clacks her keys one final time before shedding them from her fingers, the sheen from her mouth, the metal from her arms. As she steps sideways into the braid, the heap of ornament shrivels, rusts, flakes, indistinguishable from the fine grit of the cavern floor. The seeker, following after, distinguishes every grain.
* * *
Dearest Blue-da-ba-dee,
A daring intrusion! Mad props. I never would have believed your party would risk working Strand 8827 this far downthread until I recognized your distinctive signature. I shudder to imagine an equal and opposite incursion—may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb. I harbor no illusions I’d succeed. You would find me in an instant, crush me faster—I’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light I tried to step. I have a Cherenkov-green thumb.
(I know, I know: Cherenkov radiation’s . . . well . . . blue. Never let facts break a good joke.)
But you’re subtle. I barely heard the signs of your approach—I won’t tell you what they were, for reasons you’ll understand. Imagine me, if you want, crouched atop a stairwell, knees to chin, out of sight, counting the burglar’s footfalls as she climbs. You’re not half-bad at this. Did they grow you for this purpose? How does your side handle this sort of thing, anyway? Did they engender you knowing what you’d be; did they train you, run you through your paces at what I can only picture as some sort of horrific summer camp under the watchful eyes of concerned counselors who smile all the time?
Did your bosses send you here? Do you even have bosses? Or a queen? Might someone in your chain of command want to do you wrong?
I ask because we could have trapped you here. This strand’s a prominent tributary; Commandant could field a swarm of agents without much causal risk. I imagine you reading this, thinking you would have escaped them all. Maybe.
But those agents are busy elsewhere, and it would be a waste of time (ha!) to recall them and dispatch again. Rather than bother Commandant with something I could handle on my own, I interceded directly. Easier for us both.
Of course, I couldn’t let you steal these poor peoples’ god. We don’t need this place in specific, but we need something like it. I’m sure you can picture the work required to rebuild such a paradise from scratch (or even recover its gleam from the wreckage). Think, for a second—if you succeeded, if you stole the physical object on whose slow quantum decomposition this strand’s random-number generators depend, if that triggered a cryptographic crisis, if that crisis led people to distrust their food printers, if hungry masses rioted, if riots fed this glitter to the fires of war, we’d have to start again—cannibalizing other strands, likely from your braid. And then we’d be at one another’s throats even more.
Plus, this way I can repay you for that trick in the catacombs—with a note of my own! But I’m almost out of room. You like the Strand 6 nineteenth century. Well, Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide to Etiquette and Correspondence (London, Gooseneck Press, Strand 61) suggests I should end by recapitulating my letter’s main thrust, whatever that means, so, here goes: Ha-ha, Blueser. Your mission objective’s in another castle.
Hugs and kisses,
Red
PS. The keyboard’s coated with slow-acting contact poison. You’ll be dead in an hour.
PPS. Just kidding! Or . . . am I?
PPPS. I’m just screwing with you. But postscripts sure are fun!
* * *
Trees fall in the forest and make sounds.
The horde moves among them, judging, swinging axes, bowing bass notes from pine trunks with saws. Five years back, none of these warriors had seen such a forest. In their home stand sacred groves were called zuun mod, which means “one hundred trees,” because one hundred were all the trees they thought might be gathered in one place.
Many more than a hundred trees stand here, a quantity so vast no one dares number it. Wet, cold wind spills down the mountains, and branches clatter like locust wings. Warriors creep beneath needled shadows and go about their work.
Icicles drip and snap as the great trees fall, and felled, the trees leave gaps in green that bare the cold white sky. Warriors like those flat clouds better than the forest’s gloom, but not so much as they loved the blue of home. They loop the trunks with cord and drag them through trampled underbrush to the camp, where they will be peeled and planed to build the great Khan’s war machines.
A strange transformation, some feel: When they were young, they won their first battles with bows, from horseback, ten men against twenty, two hundred against three. Then they learned to use rivers against their foes, to tear down their walls with grappling hooks. These days they roll from town to town collecting scholars, priests, and engineers, everyone who can read or write, who knows a trade, and set them tasks. You will have food, water, rest, all the luxury an army on hoof can offer. In exchange, solve the problems our enemies pose.
Once, horsemen broke on fortifications like waves against a cliff. (Most of these men have not seen waves, or cliffs, but travelers bear stories from distant lands.) Now the horsemen slaughter foes, drive them to their forts, demand surrender, and, should surrender not ensue, they raise up their engines to undo the knot of the city.
But those engines need lumber, so off the warriors are sent, to steal from ghosts.
Red, hard-ridden for days, dismounts within the wood. She wears a thick gray del belted with silk around her waist, and a fur hat covers her hair, preserving her scalp from the chill. She walks heavily. She broadens her shoulders. She has played this role for at least a decade. Women ride with the horde—but she is a man now, so far as those who give her orders, and follow hers in turn, are concerned.
She commits the enterprise to memory for her report. Her breath smokes, glitters as ice crystals freeze. Does she miss steam heat? Does she miss walls and a roof? Does she miss the dormant implants sewn through her limbs and tangled in her chest that could shore her against this cold, stop her feeling, seal a force field around her skin to guard her from this time to which she’s been sent?
Not really.
She notes the deep green of the trees. She measures the timing of their fall. She records the white of the sky, the bite of the wind. She remembers the names of the men she passes. (Most of them are men.) Ten years into deep co
ver, having joined the horde, proven her worth, and achieved the place for which she strove, she feels suited to this war.
She has suited herself to it.
Others draw back from her in respect and fear as she scans the piled logs for signs of rot. Her roan snorts, stamps the earth. Red ungloves and traces the lumber with her fingertips, log by log, ring by ring, feeling each one’s age.
She stops when she finds the letter.
Kneels.
The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?
The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.
She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.
Her eyes change. The men nearby have known her for a decade but have never seen her look like this.
One asks, “Should we throw it away?”
She shakes her head. It must be used. She does not say, Or else another might find it and read what I have read.
They drag the logs to camp. They split them, trim them, plane them, frame them into engines of war. Two weeks later, the planks lie shattered around the fallen walls of a city still burning, still weeping. Progress gallops on, and blood remains behind.
Vultures circle, but they’ve feasted here already.
This Is How You Lose the Time War Page 2