We have already been to Paradise and we left.
My friends can argue with my words all they like, but they will not be able to argue with this kind of evidence.
Rip it up, Absolon screams. Rip it up and eat it and—
I pick up the photograph and run as fast as I can.
• • • •
In the cathedral, after the bombing, Bethen puts the virtue-cup down, and hands the sin-cup to the sacristan. Her eyes turn towards mine. She wants to say something, but she can’t. The virtues are multiplying in her head.
The sacristan sees my nervous tremor and gulps, his Adam’s apple wavering. Does he think I will attack him and make him drink the sin-cup?
Should I?
It must be you, he says. You are the last of your line.
Pick someone else, I say. I do not want this.
The sacristan tips the sin-cup against my lips hard enough to bruise me, like I need more sin, like there isn’t enough here in the broken, bloody cathedral. I taste my father’s blood—dusky like fear, tangy like metal, the nanobots that supported our society thrilling against my lips. I gag. Once I drink, nobody will be able to touch me, lest my blood transfer the sin to them as well.
Your father is dead, he responds. Nobody cares what you want.
I have to drink. I have no choice. I am the last sin-eater.
• • • •
Somehow, I reach the steerage mess without tearing the photograph in half. I know everyone here —every face, every soul, everything they said about me before I became sin-eater and most of the things they said afterward. There is obscenity on my tongue and babble stuck in my teeth, but everyone is so used to this by now that very few of them look up.
My old scrub-team is seated by the door. I knock the spoon out of my old boss’s left hand and drop the photograph in her lap. Soup splatters her face, and she stands, angry. The attention of the room follows, a hundred people rubbernecking to gawk at the sin-eater getting a sin-eater’s due.
“Look,” I say, and point to the photograph. I cannot say more. Absolon is sitting on my throat.
I am afraid for a moment, but she sees the truth like I saw the truth; she stares, and moves very slowly, picking up the photograph and staring at it with a silent, intent gaze. Tears glisten at the corners of her eyes.
“This can’t be true,” she whispers. “The captains can’t lie. They can’t lie. They only know grace.”
“Knowing grace doesn’t make you incapable of doing evil,” I manage. It feels like speaking through dark glass, from the darkness outside an airlock.
She stares for five long seconds, then looks up, scanning the crowd. She walks over to the table where the schoolteacher sits—the only one of us who was born in second class, the only one of us who can read. She hands it to him, and he mutters under his breath as he runs his finger over the words scrawled at the top, the faces of the shining, smiling people wearing the ancient sigils of Home.
My teacher speaks slowly. The room is so quiet now that you can hear nothing but the humming of the engines and your own heartbeat. “A com-mem-or- a-tiv eh-dish-un uh-pun the ar-rival of tha fee-nix to pare-a-dyse—”
The room erupts in screaming.
• • • •
They say new sin-eaters go crazy from the very first moment of the very first touch of sin on their tongue.
Before the bombing, I alone knew this was untrue. My father would hold me at night and rock me back and forth, whispering terrible things in my ear, but his touch was always tender and his tears were always hot and real. I knew what was truth. He only looked insane. Others told of his actions, but I told of his heart. And now that I can speak of Absolon and Madelon and Pyar and the others, I know he was stronger than any of them.
In the cathedral, surrounded by so much death, I vowed to be stronger than him.
• • • •
The police come immediately, of course. The bridge is always watching for unrest. The police wrest me from the grasp of my boss, my teacher, my friends, and shove me towards the cathedral. They are wearing gloves. Of course they are wearing gloves. They always wear gloves. They are scared of touching me.
They have guns at their waists, the kind of guns that Absolon used to make bones of the mutineers in my memory. I wonder if they will make a little hole in my forehead and shove me in a sacristy myself. So I ask them what I have done wrong. I want to tell them I am no mutineer, I simply found a photograph, I don’t know what it means.
They just hear screaming.
They open the doors to the cathedral, and I choke on the smell of old death. The scrub-teams have made progress on removing the blood from the carpet, but some stains remain. The walls are still scorched where the fire snacked on the old homeworld wood.
Captain Bethen presides over the ruined space in a great velvet chair where her father’s bier had lain, her fingers laden with titanium rings and her hair wound through with roses from steerage hydroponics. She is swimming in her father’s robes. She has not yet had them cut down for her smaller frame. The light of the star coming through great emerald window behind her make her look even less human than I remembered.
One of the policewomen walks the photograph to Bethen and lays it in her lap. The room is tied in desperate silence as she stares at it, reads the words, her eyes darting from detail to detail.
Her hand is shaking.
Finally, when I think I can stand no more, she puts the photograph aside and arranges her hands on her lap. “I was wondering when you’d get here. My father said they all come eventually. No, don’t kneel.”
When I try to answer, I hear the babble building at the back of my throat. The pain behind my eyes, so bright I can hardly see.
“Be quiet, Grandfather,” Bethen snaps. “Let my sin-eater speak.”
I meet her eyes.
“I understand so little. Some of the things I do, I cannot countenance, but they seem right… and that seems wrong, after the cathedral, you know? After all those people died? And now this photograph. What brought you here?” Her lips glint emerald in the starlight. She slides her shaking hand into her robes so that I cannot see it. She is too late for that.
“Absolon. And the people he killed.”
Bethen blinks. “He killed no one. I would know.”
“He—” Absolon’s fingers grab my throat and twist, and I cannot speak for the shock of it.
“Grandfather,” Bethen snaps.
I feel a rush of freedom, and the words come like runoff from an open valve. “I can show you the bones. He killed them all. He shot them point-blank in the head and then put them in the sacristy and closed steerage off from the stars. But you don’t know that. Of course you don’t know that,” I say.
Bethen rises from her chair. The starlight catches in her earrings. Her robes are a mess of sound—clanging and rustling and chiming, metal on metal on silk. My heart bangs against my ribs. My muscles ache.
“My sin-eater,” she says. “You see a massacre. I see a victory, a necessary one. Yet, I—” She falters. “I only know that it was a victory. I feel happy about it. I feel… the rush of power he felt, the certainty that it had to be done. Not what was done. It makes me sick to not know, to only suspect—”
My stomach churns. How dare she. “I’m your sin-eater, not your confessor.”
Bethen looks away.
She had asked me not to kneel, but inside my chest, the hundred are screaming for it, to give Bethen and the ghosts in her head the respect none of them deserve. I refuse them; I will not kneel here, not in my father’s own blood, not in the place where he died, not to the person who would justify it as good. This causes Absolon to rail in my lungs, in my throat, in my veins, to cause me to shake, to scream. I fight. The floor feels like a magnet, full of the hundred telling me to kneel, to fall. Finally, my body betrays me. My knee hits the ground at a bad angle, and I cry out in pain.
“I’m sorry,” says Bethen, her voice hasty and kind, her hands still laced t
ogether against the gold of her bodice. “Do you know what they’re telling me to tell you right now? That this—you on the ground, me up here—is how our world must function. They ask me if I want the ship to fall apart. If I want a civil war. If I want blood in the cathedral. If I do not want my children to rest quietly in Paradise. It is deafening.”
I stop fighting and Absolon lets me shiver on the ground.
“Do you believe them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you tried to talk to them?” I ask.
“I—tell them that there has already been enough blood in the cathedral,” Bethen says.
My voice wavers. It is difficult to speak. “You saw the photograph. You know as well as I do that we have already rejected Paradise. And steerage knows, too. Do you think they will not come for you?”
Her voice is faint. “If Absolon chose to take us away from Paradise, there has to be a very good reason.”
I do not feel well. I look around at the bloodstains, the ruined cathedral, the emerald light from the new star choking everything in green. Bethen’s voice echoes: My father said they all come eventually. Had my father had this conversation with Captain Pyar, and his father with Captain Carelon and on and on back to Edrime and Absolon and the nameless ghosts who never stopped screaming? Is this why his every step was made in despair?
“They asked him to give up his power,” I manage to say.
Bethen shakes her head. “But he was the captain.”
I stare. I writhe. “Not on the planet, he wasn’t.”
“He had to leave. Because of the steerage rebellion that kept us on the ship—”
“Why would we rebel? We dream of nothing but Paradise!”
Bethen paces the edge of the sanctuary, her shoes jingling with the sound of bells. “There must have been a reason,” she repeated. “Absolon is so sure. He is so sure that no one could take care of Home better than him. And, now, he tells me there is no one that can do that better than me—”
I drag myself to a sitting position. The anger chokes me more than Absolon’s fingers at my throat. “He kept us all enslaved here because he did not wish to give up his power! His stained conscience! Stars, Captain! You’re just like him!”
In my head, Absolon laughs.
And laughs.
And laughs.
Speaking feels like death now, but I cannot stop my words. No dead thing will silence me. I cannot make a bomb. All I have are my words. “You know, Bethen, it must be incredible. Being you. Never doubting your place. Not even for a second. Your clear conscience. What kind of sins are you going to commit? How many people are you going to kill, knowing that my children are going to be there to absolve you? That you are not going to have to remember what you’ve done? That you can just make me choke it down? Are you looking forward to that?”
Bethen fixes her eyes on the place where my father knelt.
Her hands are shaking.
• • • •
One last memory of the bombing.
This one is mine. There are so few of those now that every single one is precious.
We are in the cathedral. We are singing. It is seconds before the bombing. The sacristans are escorting my father to the front of the aisle, where he will take the dead captain’s sin-cup. He has already been sin-eater for fourteen years. I barely remember a time before he ranted and raved and called himself Absolon. Madelon. Edrime. Carelon.
Of course it is my father who made the bomb. Of course he would have the strength. Maybe I would, too, after so long a time hearing their filth.
Fourteen years of pushing through the sins he sees to find the only solution he can manage, after drinking down all of that hate. Hate matched with hate. He thinks he will kill them all. That killing will be the thing that actually stops this. He has spent so much time listening to the captains that he sees no other way.
He turns around. He smiles at me. He has a bright, round thing in his hand. He mouths: “For you, Mey.”
Then: the fire.
There must be another way. But what choice did he have?
• • • •
“I don’t want to kill,” Bethen says. “Don’t you understand what I am saying? Don’t you understand how alone I am?”
The golden captain with the power of life and death, reaching out to the sin-eater who has not showered in a week, asking her to understand what loneliness feels like? It is a marvel that I do not spit at her feet.
“You’re a hundred, just like me,” I cough. “You are never alone.”
Bethen sweeps her hand over the dead cathedral. Over the dead, in their uncontrollable power: in the air, in my blood, in hers.
“They tell me everything is worth the captain’s chair. The deaths. The decisions. The long journey that will never end, now. But that photograph, and this cathedral, and all those dead people— to justify this? I don’t understand. I need to see the truth. Absolon and the others—they won’t let me turn around, they won’t let me go back to Paradise, and I do not know why.” She plucks at her robes and her voice breaks. She is crying.
For that moment, she is just a girl.
The steerage-rat in me, the one who works through hunger, that stares out portholes, that dreams of a better life. She is the one that speaks.
“My father should have showed you,” I whisper. “I can show you.”
“How?”
I offer her my wrist.
I can hardly breathe.
Bethen’s eyes are flint at the offer, and she squats next to me, her eyes going up and down my body. The sweat on my forehead. The memories under my skin. Absolon and the others come to realize what I’m offering her, and my mind becomes a writhing sea of the worst things they’ve ever shown me. I see blood spurting from the foreheads of mutineers. My mother dying. The cathedral bomb. Two girls in the cold black outside, their mouths gasping at nonexistent air, their eyes popping like grapes in a vise.
Show me Paradise, I rage at them. And they do. They show me Paradise: the crystal seas, wind rustling the leaves of blue trees. The knowledge that here, he would be no better than anyone else. That he would have to give up the gold, the salutes, the best food, the power. I am seized with jealousy. Rage. Covetous anger. What would the steerage-rats do, if not for my paternal guidance?
If I cannot convince you, he says, I will take you. You are not so powerful.
I no longer have control over my breath. My fingers.
He is in my bowel, in my brain.
I cannot stop the darkness.
“Captain,” I gasp, “please.”
“I’ll see everything?” Bethen steadies herself by placing her hand on my sweating forehead, smearing the sin-eye I drew there this morning. “I’ll see the truth?”
For a moment, I think she might slap me.
“Get a knife,” I manage to say. I gasp for breath. “And the cups. I’ll drink your truth. You’ll drink mine.”
There is a wailing silence.
“Do what she says.” Bethen barks the order at the policemen in the back like she’s been giving them her entire life. Like she’s been giving them for a thousand years. And once they shuffle out, fear tightening their shoulders, she turns back to me, and slides her arm under mine, helping me stand.
“Show me,” she says.
• • • •
Bethen writhes.
It is the first memory we share together.
• • • •
Before Bethen marries me, I draw the sin-eye on my forehead in red and black and show her how to do it, as well. She walks down the aisle in emerald green, roses in her hair. We drink together from both cups and vow to be together until we die. It is a political marriage to keep the peace, but her eyes are dark and lovely and her body is warm, and I feel something bright and new whenever she smiles.
We will need the strength of two if we are to overcome the hundred, the uncontrollable dead, the voices that whisper their ancient hate so loud we can hear it in our own world,
where they do not belong. And as she takes my hand under the streaming stars, our ship turns around and aims for Paradise.
When we die, we will turn Home—the Fee-nix, the ancients used to call it, but my spelling might be wrong, I am still learning to read—over to someone new, someone who will never hear Absolon. They had their time. Bethen and I will ensure the descendants have theirs.
And then it will be their choice: how they live, how they sin, where they go.
* * *
Karen Osborne lives in Baltimore, MD, with two violins, an autoharp, a theremin, three cameras, a husband, and a bonkers orange cat. Her short fiction appears in Escape Pod, Robot Dinosaurs, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, and Uncanny. Her debut novel, Architects of Memory, will be published in 2020 by Tor. She emcees the Charm City Spec reading series, plays the fiddle in a ceilidh band, and once won a major event filmmaking award for shooting and editing a Klingon wedding trailer. You can find her on Twitter at @karenthology.
Fisher-Bird
By T. Kingfisher
Fisher-Bird had a crest like iron and eyes as dark as the last scale on a blacksnake’s snout. She had a white collar and a gray band and a belt the color of dried blood.
Fisher-Bird had a chatterjack voice that she used to cuss with, and she flew like the air had personally offended her. Her beak was long and shaped like a spearpoint, and she could see the ripples fish made when they even thought of swimming.
Fisher-Bird knew things. Not like crows know things, or ravens—not that you can ever find a raven around these parts. Not like whippoorwills know the taste of your soul or thrushes know the color of music. But nothing happened in the woods or along the stream without it reaching Fisher-Bird eventually.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 10