by J L Forrest
“Isn’t that terribly wasteful?” I asked, enjoying the view of his botanical gardens, grateful for a cup of tea. “Wouldn’t it be better if the UPRC, Nesteler, and Avidità brokered a peace and worked together to create the best System they possibly could?”
“You’re right,” he said. “It would be best, but it’ll never be, so we’re stuck in a classic prisoner’s dilemma, filled with mistrust, always fighting for dominance.”
“Why? Why can’t there be peace? Surely it’s the most rational desire, the only one which guarantees a continued existence for all sides.”
He refilled my teacup. “I don’t believe peace is possible. Do you follow me? I lead Avidità Corporation. It exists and does what it does at my pleasure, and I do not believe peace is possible. Therefore Avidità will never lower its guard, will never stop seeking supremacy over its enemies, no matter how unlikely we’ll obtain such supremacy.”
Was the tea bitter, over-steeped? “I understand, Your Grace.”
“Here’s how it is—the UPRC doesn’t believe it either, and their Party Leaders are a bunch of bigoted pricks anyway.”
He didn’t need to remind me about Nesteler. Over the years the Nesteler Oligarchy had made its attitudes clear. In its eyes, everyone outside Nesteler’s stock-holding families were surplus population. The UPRC gave citizenship only to those who could trace their lineage to Yuan-dynasty China.
“I could force myself,” said Mr. Avidità. “I could wake tomorrow and tell myself, ‘It’s the right thing to do, to give peace a chance, Lennon style. We’ll turn the other cheek. We’ll take the high road. Today,’ I could declare, ‘the dove of peace will fly, and we’ll make the first overtures to stop the violence.’”
Mr. Avidità used clichés as weapons of disdain.
“What would happen then?” I asked.
He stared at the tablecloth, at the tea service, at the empty plates. His fingertips traipsed along the china teapot, played with the lid, wrapped around the handle. He flung it at the nearest wall and it shattered into countless, tiny, glittering ceramic fragments. The remaining tea splashed across a fortune in gold-woven wallpaper.
“We wouldn’t last long,” he said, “and the UPRC and Nesteler would divide our carcass between them.”
I was pretty sure I agreed. I’m pretty sure I agree now.
“Don’t forget this, Aur.” He fixed me with his gaze, that peculiar shade of green and gray in his irises. “All victories are only temporary—until your enemies cease to exist.”
XXIII. Reprieve
2131.4.13.14:53 PST
58°15’52.8”N 134°28’24.3”W
Alt 630m
The Faen
New Juneau
Hall of the Queens
Comfort, softness, warmth. Mainly from the woman cuddled against me.
A fading ache at the back of my head. Irritation along the soles of my feet.
I’m naked. So is she.
Luxurious sheets enfold us and I remember I’m lying in a bower inside the Hall of the Queens. The climb from Douglas Island’s northwest shore had followed a meticulously laid flagstone stair edged with springtime grasses, budding flowers, and skulls. I’d walked on my own, then leaned on the shoulders of the celebrants who’d come to witness my death. Finally, they’d carried me after my bleeding feet failed.
Now, the woman presses against my back, stretches, and arcs with the feline happiness of a satisfying nap. About my age, relaxed, trusting, round, beautiful—mousy-brown hair, skin fair and soft as whipped cream. Her brown eyes blink, focus, and take me in.
“You need to bathe,” she says.
“Agreed,” I reply.
“At least you’re not cold anymore.”
“Early springtime seas? This close to the arctic circle? Lashed to a goddamned pole? Goddamn, yes, I was cold.”
Her legs, hooked over mine, tug me against her. “Hypothermia and shock can kill.”
I’m probably tougher than she believes. “You’ve got that right.”
She snuggles, as if we were lovers, as if I knew what the hell her name was.
“Where am I?” I ask.
“In the Hall of the Queens.”
“I understand, but where am I?”
“In my bed.”
“Whose bed?”
“I’m Ruby.”
“I’m Aur.”
“I know.”
“Why am I in your bed?”
She rolls her eyes.
“This is a thing? You bring cold men into your bed?”
“Today I did.” She tugs the blankets around us. “I could have let you freeze.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” I say. “I’m grateful.”
She snorts softly, dismissively. “In the future, maybe I’ll keep my bed to myself.”
On any other day, in any other circumstances, I’d stop asking questions and nestle in. She’s soft and curvaceous and smells like lavender.
Also, I’ve never been this close to an undressed woman before.
“This morning,” I say, “what the fuck happ—”
She presses her fingertip to my lips. “Shh.”
This morning, I think, I was lashed to splintered wood and offered up to a—
A what?
Its presence echoes. Cthulhu fhtagn. The words won’t leave me alone.
“You’re safe,” she says.
No such thing as safety, said the Horned Lord.
Curtains enclose the bower, but the narrow parting between them frames a portion of the Hall of the Queens, including a length of the central hearth. Daylight streams from clerestory windows, bathing the flagstones in gold. Other voices, eight which I can discern, talk about nothing I care about. Fishing, farming, changes in weather. Someone laughs. Sounds of intimate conversation—friends or lovers chatting.
“Why am I still alive?” I ask.
“The Old One didn’t want you,” says Ruby.
Old One.
“Even if I survived that,” I say, “the spies of competing powers are usually imprisoned, questioned, tortured, and eventually either exchanged as leverage or executed. They’re not cuddled in bed to save them from hypothermia.”
She rolls onto her side, leaning on her elbow and propping her head against her hand. “I don’t know much about spies or what powers do with them.”
A faint stain colors her lips, not makeup but a rosy, pink-petal discoloration of the flesh.
“What is it you do here, Ruby?”
She opens her mouth to answer but, before she can, Bettina’s voice fills the hall: “She serves me, Aur.”
I sit, bunching the sheets around my waist. Ruby stretches, shakes off her nap-time languor, and still naked she climbs from the bed. Her breasts sway, pendulous and hypnotic, before she sweeps aside the curtains and descends a ladder to the floor. Around the hall are a dozen other members of the Queens’ retinue, relaxing but also keeping half an eye on me. Near the laminate thrones, three Horned Lords stand guard.
Bettina walks toward me, passing between the thrones. The old dog accompanies her.
“Don’t suppose,” I say, “you’ve got my clothes?”
Ruby meets Bettina, kisses her, then saunters by the smaller hearth to a heavy door. Once she’s gone through it, the door closes, the sound reverberating.
“We burned them,” Bettina says.
“It’s a little cold outside,” I say, “don’t you think?”
She shrugs. “You’d be surprised. Some of New Juneau’s residents bathe in ice water.”
“Not your thing?”
“No!” She laughs. “Gods, no. I’m embarrassed to say so, but I hate being cold, despise cold weather. Before Blight, living in Winnipeg, I loathed wintertime.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“When I was still living with my parents,” she said, “I had a poster of Costa Rica on my bedroom wall, some idyllic beach, tropical trees.”
“Underwater now.”
She nodded. “I’ll ha
ve some clothes brought to you. Then I’d like you to meet me in the Square.”
“All right.”
“Though you must promise me something.”
“What?”
“No more assassination attempts.”
I cannot help but smile. “All right.”
Two young men bring me to a tub of hot water. They provide soap and sponges, and I scrub myself until I’m fresh as a soaped-down newborn calf. Simple leather shoes, a tunic, and pants of finely spun alpaca, the clothes Bettina provided me took skill to make but, to be honest, they itch. They’re loose, too, something of a trash-bag fit. The young men also give me a fleece coat, too hot for afternoon sunlight, but I sling it over my shoulder.
I step through the hall’s front doors and find a city alive. Tents and booths cram the hilltop plaza which was, last night, empty. Hundreds of people crowd the aisles, trading dozens of kinds of wares. Nowhere does anyone exchange money, physically or digitally, but a marketplace exists here, one whose rules of commerce I don’t understand.
Children play. One girl hides behind the legs of her mother, then leaps at a small boy, giggling and chasing. There’re children, I realize, who’ve lived in New Juneau their entire lives. This is their normal, the only reality they’ve ever experienced.
The adults, more serious, bear the signs of long-suffered trauma, hyper-aware, untrusting. PTSD. Yet they too chatter, laugh, share. What the Queens have built here, it’s better than whatever came before it, safer for these people than anywhere since Blight or in the years after the Third Pulse, during the economic collapses, the riots, the food shortages.
As Bettina approaches me, accompanied by two Horned Lords, everyone in their path bows or kneels.
The Queen tugs a bearskin cloak around herself. “Can your feet handle a hike?” she asks me.
“I can manage.”
“Good. I want to show you something.”
For less than a klick, Bettina, the Lords, and I walk west through the winding, bustling, crowded streets. As always the Lords have their spears. Unarmed, Bettina carries only a backpack across her shoulder.
Along the way I note stormwater grates, signs of a sewage system, and water pipes. From wells? An aqueduct or pipeline from the mainland? At the city’s far edge, a timber wall divides the streets from the forest. For a moment I fear we’re returning to the sacrificial clearing, that at the shore Bettina will offer me up once more, but instead we follow a different path, taking us southwest. We return to the waterline, yes, but this time to a wharf.
“Where’re we going?” I ask.
“A graveyard.”
Hard for me to imagine a real graveyard. On Station, by comparison, we compost the dead.
The four of us board a boat and the Horned Lords row us south, toward a promontory on Admiralty Island. They’re strong, tireless, and grim. The waters slosh, the air once more near freezing, and now I wrap myself in the fleece coat.
“You must be hungry?” Bettina asks me.
“I am.”
“Ask for food.”
“What?”
“Ask me for food,” she says.
Sitting at the transom, I’m the only one of the four of us who watches where we’re going. The Horned Lords, at the rowing benches, look back at me, their expressions hard. Bettina sits across from me, close enough I could strike her.
But I promised.
“All right,” I say, “may I have some food?”
She unslings her backpack. “What did you see this morning?”
“A monster.”
“What kind of monster?”
Terrifying? Horrific? Pestilential?
Then I realize, “An old monster.”
“Good.” She pulls a smaller bag from her backpack and unties it. The aroma of fresh meat and vegetables mixes with brine. “What does that tell you, Aur?”
I am hungry. “It tells me—”
“It’s hard to say it, right? Go ahead, say it.”
“It tells me, whatever the monster was, it’s not something made by the UPRC, not produced by Nesteler, not bred by any industry.”
“What does that mean?”
“I—I don’t know what the fuck it means.”
She smiles and, even more than last night, she reminds me of Imka. Before leaving EIK-Cel I had, of course, studied dozens of images of Bettina Ukweli. Her hair has grown wilder, and now she wears woven clothes and leathers and furs instead of secondhand clothes bought in the San Francisco markets, but she hasn’t aged a day. She unpacks a wooden bowl and a hand-forged fork, then fills the bowl with chunks of tender chicken and sautéed root vegetables.
It’s delicious, the Grist of the Gods, savory and fresh. I wolf down a few mouthfuls.
“It means,” she says, “everything you know is wrong. Everything.”
“Do you worship that—that thing?”
She laughs. “Hell, no! Those slimy motherfuckers?”
“What, then, what was all that about, the offering, the sacrificing? Those Chinese, it took them all, they’re dead.”
“We supplicate the Spawn, the Deep Ones, the Gods of the Horizon—children of Dagon. Our pacts with them are critical for our future.”
“I don’t understand.”
With a few more greedy bites, I empty the bowl. Bettina takes it from me, refills it, and hands it back. Simple food, yes, but some of the best I’ve ever tasted.
“It’s nothing I can explain so simply,” she says. “That’ll be true for a lot of revelations. You’ll have to experience what you experience, Aur, and make your own sense of it. Now, go ahead and enjoy your meal. Fill up.”
Leaning against the starboard gunwale she studies the water, the islands, the coastal landscape, the mountains capped in ice and snow, the endless verdure. Though we have another hour until sunset, Sol has eased behind the ridge line of Admiralty, dropping us into shadow. No one speaks another word until we reach a dock at the easternmost curve of Young Bay, and the Lords tie off the boat.
Another stone-laid path leads us through the trees, over a short peninsula, and into a massive clearing. I stop here, slack-jawed, goggling and unable to explain what’s before me.
Thirteen meters above the high-tide line, a junkyard extends seven hundred meters toward the island’s interior. It’s a kilometer wide, a mountain of metals, plastics, and ceramics—
drones,
rockets,
robots,
automated vehicles,
missile tubes,
chassis,
rotors,
bombshells,
—and military scraps of every kind.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“I told you,” says Bettina, “a graveyard.”
“Looks more like a trash heap.”
“What makes a grave?” Her smile taunts me. “The body inside it? Or the soul which has escaped it?”
“I’m an atheist.” My breath lacks force, my lungs weak as paper bags.
She laughs. “Perfect. Then what’s the difference between a meat machine and a metal machine?”
Most if not all these machines would have carried artificially intelligent systems, would have followed the guidance of remote pilots or would have flown under their own impetus. Is an AI a kind of soul? To someone who doesn’t believe in souls, does it matter?
Some of these scraps bear the corporate markings of Avidità. Mr. Avidità has said as much, that over the Panhandle our machines tend to disappear.
“How do these end up here?” I ask.
“The Old Gods put them here,” she says.
“Gods, huh? I’m surprised you’re not salvaging the scrap.”
“Sometimes the Horned Lords will scour for conventional explosives. We recover a lot of the titanium, too, have gotten pretty good at melting it down, reworking it.” She gestures to one of the Lord’s spearheads.
A sonic boom smacks over us. I flinch and a secondary boom rolls past, followed by pluming dust. A column of ejecta bur
sts from the graveyard’s heart.
“Most of what’s here was manufactured by Nesteler,” Bettina explains. She wipes the dust from her eyes, then says, “They keep adjusting their technologies, increasing their speeds, but the Gods swallow their devices or break them apart before anything gets close.”
My tumbling laugh surprises me. “This is insane,” I say, “all of it.”
“The Gods bring us everything but the nuclear warheads. Isn’t that something?”
“Something?!” I run my hands through my hair, turn from her, try to find some perspective on what I’m experiencing. All this, well outside the precepts of biology, information theory, thermodynamics, chemistry, physics, basic epistemology. “Insane, all of it insane. Insane.”
“You’re right, Aur. Everything is insane. By definition. It’s been insane a long, long, long time. Since before you were born.”
I don’t bother explaining what born means to me.
“Before I was born,” she adds. “Before the birth of England, before the unification of China, before the building of the Great Pyramid. I’ve gotta tell you, Aur, it’s been absolutely insane from the moment monkeys figured out how to light their own fires.”
The sky deepens into mauve, a brushstroke of orange across the west, silhouetting Admiralty’s peaks. An owl hoots.
“Prometheus,” says Bettina, “was an asshole.”
The Horned Lords chuckle.
“Ready to head back?” asks the Queen.
Rubbing my chin, I turn to her and nod. There must still be rational explanations.
“If she wants you,” Bettina says, starting back down the path toward the docks and our waiting boat, “you can share Ruby’s bed tonight. My guess is she’s not done with you. My guess is she’d like to fuck you like an animal.”
“I—” I don’t know what to say.
“If she doesn’t,” adds Bettina, “just remember that no really does mean no.”
I’m the last to leave the scrapyard. Its contours disappear in the deepening dark. I trail behind the Horned Lords, who don’t seem in the slightest worried I might jump them from behind.