by Tricia Reeks
I come to the entrance of the central pyramid. It’s the tallest of the seven structures, three stories high from here, with translucent walls flashing in random colors. Red-yellow-green, purple-blue-orange, all vibrating to the same repetitive rhythm from a song I don’t quite recognize. Is he throwing a New Year’s Eve party in there? I’ll find out, in a minute . . .
A voice crackles in my ear. “Fat Man to Little Boy: What’s wrong, Ray? Access hatch stuck?”
“Uh, yeah,” I say into the mic, “but give me a sec, I can get it.”
Officially, this is an exploratory event, the first of three. For the next week, my colleagues will pore over the data and images I bring home, all the while telling Emil what a great man he is and yipping at his heels like obedient little pups. But I have unofficial business here too. This dog has territory to protect.
I switch off the mic and unzip the front of my jumpsuit.
“Can you feel that, Emil? Something warm and wet dribbling on your scalp?”
Doubtful. My bladder probably holds half a micro-liter at this size. Better save some.
I zip up, unlock the hatch, and crawl inside.
The pyramids are 3N—neuro-nano-nodes—invented by this sleeping playboy genius. Modern science can farm riverbeds on Mars and shrink me to the size of a flea, but we have yet to fully plumb the depths of the human brain. 3N will change that. I believe in the project—I really do—just not in the arrogant guy getting all the credit. And if inventing it wasn’t heroic enough, Emil had to go and make himself the guinea pig too.
What a self-sacrificing jerk.
The node interior combines the workings of an old watch with a Saturday night discotheque. Crystal gears turn everywhere, lit by flickering colors and lighted upon by phantoms from his memory. Ghosts appear and disappear. Murmuring voices provide a white noise background. A few bars from an old pop song play over and over again. I can smell cookies baking and lilac perfume. At the center of this clockwork chaos is the manual interface, a hexagonal pedestal broadcasting a thin pillar of light all the way to the pyramid’s apex.
I insert the recording cube. The vertical beam changes from idle orange to active green. The ghostly chatter and phantom images all vanish, leaving me alone in the dark crystal tomb with the quiet grinding of gears. I can feel Emil’s pulse under my feet.
I had to memorize a list of verbal prompts, the official plan of this miniaturized odyssey. I’m supposed to speak these magical words and see what his memory does with them. The recording cube will capture the images and track all the mnemonic pathways as they zigzag like lightning bolts through his brain. Of course, the whole time Ricardo was going over the list with me, I was thinking of something else. What can I say? I love my wife. And I’m a tiny bit selfish, so for now, the list can wait.
Clearing my throat, I speak her name loud enough to penetrate his sleeping unconscious: “Jennifer.”
The green pillar expands into a huge emerald eye. It’s hers, dominating the pyramid like Cleopatra’s own. It glares down on me, streaked hazel and wreathed in long lashes, unblinking, accusing, almost scolding. For an instant I feel my righteous armor falling away and the stare penetrating me; I bleed a few drops of guilt before it finally blinks. Then her whole lovely face appears above me, an elfin grin on her thin lips. And I can smell her apricot shampoo.
She giggles for Emil and my guilt dries right up.
His memories of Jennifer flash through the empty space. She’s wearing a white lab coat and explaining a holographic neural map. She’s lobbing another egg into the slimy, sun-colored mess that’s sliding down the wall with her homemade catapult. Jenn took home the gold that day in our Laboratory Olympics. Then, in the next blink, she’s at the Christmas party, dancing awkwardly alone in her black dress. Orbison’s perspective watches her butt on the dance floor, then her cleavage as she goes for more eggnog.
Colors flash through me now. Mostly a furious, bloody crimson, but also a sickly yellow feeling that sags in my guts.
I have another verbal prompt for the interface, but it gets stuck in my throat. I swallow hard and force it out. “Sex with Jennifer.”
This sends the images spinning again, like a hand to the wheel of fortune. I watch, nervously awaiting my fate.
There are flashes of her laughing, brushing her dark hair away from shining green eyes. Now she’s strutting away from him, obviously cat-walking for his benefit. She bends over a control console. Licks her lips as she’s measuring samples; you can always tell by her small mouth when big things are happening inside her head. She slips out of her lab coat and starts undressing, then notices him and closes the office door. She gives him a steaming cup of coffee, their fingers brushing in the hand-off.
But she never comes up naked. No sex scenes appear from his unconscious memory. She hasn’t slept with him.
I can breathe again. My fists relax and blood pumps back into my fingertips.
“I’m still going to get you, Emil,” I grumble.
The ethereal gallery spins again. I’ve accidentally triggered more memories.
Now Doctor Shepherd appears above me: gray-bearded, frail, angry. They’re shouting at one another.
“I’m still going to get you, Emil,” says Shepherd’s ghost. “3N was mine! You couldn’t even spell it without me and you’re not going to get away with this!”
But he is. I watch, slack-jawed, as Emil’s hands choke the life out of his old mentor. The pair of them stumble into the desk, and Shepherd’s Bellman Prize trophy clatters off and breaks from its base. Panicked, nasally breaths wheeze through this pyramid of memories. Their tangled dance trips over a chair, and both men fall to the floor. The old man’s eyes bulge, and his red face slowly turns blue.
My own hands twitch. My lungs get anxious.
Emil lets go when Shepherd’s expression of pain shifts from can’t breathe to heart attack. He clumsily locks the door and closes the blinds. Shepherd curls up into the fetal position. And Emil just stands over him, watching him die.
Nausea and glee chase each other in my stomach. Glee wins out the second time I see it.
“Fat Man to Little Boy. How’s it going in there, Ray?”
I wipe my sweaty brow with one hand and pull the recording cube with the other. “It’s freakin’ awesome in here, Ricardo. Wish you were here. I’ve got just one more thing to finish up and I’ll be on my way home.”
Zip.
“Can you feel this, Emil? Is your unconscious mind dreaming of a tiny man marking his territory inside your brain? You think that’s bad, just wait till I get out of here . . .”
By Bargain and by Blood
Aliette de Bodard
Originally appeared in Hub Magazine, no. 108, January 2010
The blood empath came when my niece was eight.
I should have suspected something like that—but my sister Aname had told me little about the begetting of her daughter, little beyond her certainty that everything would turn out right in the end. Her death in childbirth had left my questions forever unanswered.
Nevertheless, when Aname told me about her child to come, she spoke of a bargain struck. And thus I should have known someone would come to honor it—that someone would walk through the rice paddies and the forests until he reached our jati, our small community isolated from the affairs of the world.
But, just as you know about death but do not think about it, so I did not think about him.
A mistake. Perhaps I would have been better prepared, had I thought of his coming.
***
It was the Night of Mourning in the jati: the night when the spirits of the dead descended from heaven to commune with us. I’d just finished painting the tilak, the sacred tear-drop mark, on my niece Pamati’s forehead, when she spoke.
“Auntie?”
“Yes,” I said, knowing what was coming: the same question Pamati asked every year on the Night of Mourning. I turned briefly, to wash my hands clean of the red paste.
“Will Mo
mmy be here?”
“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. Shanti, the priestess of the Destroyer, had said that Aname would be in the heavens, that she’d descend to earth with the other dead. But although in eight years many dead had possessed Shanti during the ceremony, none of them had been my sister. Perhaps—my stomach felt hollow—she was already reborn, not knowing me or Pamati.
“You said she loved me,” Pamati said, her face twisting in the beginning of a sulk.
“Yes,” I said. “She loved you so much she let Bhane, the god of Death, take her instead of you.” I remembered the birth; remembered Aname’s face, distorted by pain; remembered the fear that filled her as she realized it was going wrong and that nothing would help her; remembered praying, desperately praying to all the small gods of the jati, praying she would be spared.
The gods have their own ways, which are not ours: Aname died, but Pamati was spared.
Pamati leapt to her feet, in a gesture too reminiscent of Aname as a child. “She’ll come. She’ll have to, Auntie. She just can’t leave me.” The hope on her face made me look away, for I suspected she’d be disappointed again tonight.
“She may come,” I said at last, not wanting to add to her enthusiasm.
“You don’t think she will,” Pamati said.
“I don’t know.”
“You never know anything,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes.
“No,” I said, finally. I couldn’t make promises I wouldn’t keep.
Sometimes I hated Aname. Sometimes I hated her for striking her strange bargain, for becoming pregnant without a husband or even a serious suitor, for dying and leaving Pamati to me, forcing me to turn my back on the priesthood—for the Protector is not a god who can be served with a divided heart.
My bleak moods never lasted, but they came more and more often those days, when I saw what Pamati was reduced to.
“There’s still some time before the sun sets,” I told her. “Why don’t you go play outside?”
Pamati shrugged. “What for? The others won’t talk to me.”
As a child without a father, Pamati was an outcast in our community: her mother’s transgression had left its mark on her. I lived outcast from the jati, eking out a living for both of us. “I know, sweetheart,” I said, even as my heart twisted. “But you’re young; you shouldn’t be cooped up.”
“Can’t I stay here and help you cook flatbread?”
“There won’t be any flatbread tonight,” I said. “Remember? I have to light a strong fire in the hearth, so that the dead can find their way home.”
Pamati’s face fell. Even at eight, she knew that flatbreads required smoldering embers. To cheer her up, I handed her the boxes of paste, and said, “You can finish the good luck drawing in the courtyard, if you promise you’ll stick to the pattern.”
She snatched the boxes from me, annoyed. “I always stick to the pattern.”
I watched her run out into the courtyard, and kneel by the abstract design I’d started in the afternoon: two circles crossed by a straight line, and then teardrop-shapes blossoming around the core, until the drawing seemed like two hibiscus flowers entwined forever.
Aname had loved hisbicus flowers.
Alone in the room, I stripped away my mud-soiled sari, which still smelled of rice and spices, and went looking for my festival clothes. I had a sari made of the finest cotton, bartered long ago from an itinerant merchant on a year of good harvest.
I couldn’t find the sari. I knelt by the clothing chest, rummaging through Pamati’s scant things, through my other saris, and finally through Aname’s things, until my hands met soft cloth. Odd. I must have taken out Aname’s clothes to show Pamati since the last Night of Mourning.
There was no warning—no scuffle of feet, no other noise. But, as I rose with the sari in my hands, I slowly became aware that someone was watching me.
“Pamati?” I asked, but even as I did so, I knew that Pamati was never that silent.
I stood, naked, save for a flimsy blouse that hid nothing. I was alone and defenseless—as was the custom in the jati, neighbors lived far away, out of respect for one another’s privacy.
It could have been a merchant or an itinerant priest, but they would have warned of their coming.
I turned as fast as I could, a hollow deepening in the pit of my stomach. I held the sari against myself to hide my nakedness.
A man stood just outside of the back door, watching me. His face was utterly expressionless, his eyes two pits of darkness.
The last rays of the sun glinted on both his arms: he wore bracelets of burnished copper, and I knew they would be engraved with leaping tigers.
A blood empath. An enforcer of the king’s justice. A man who could destroy me with a word, if the fancy took him.
“What do you want?” I asked. Blood empaths lived in their solitary holdings, only venturing out to arrest the traitors who rebelled against the Pahate Dynasty.
“Aname.”
My heart started beating faster. “You’re joking,” I said.
“I never joke,” he said. Not a muscle of his face moved. Blood empaths were well-known for having no feelings whatsoever—every human thought had been burned out of them during their training. “Where is Aname?”
Something snapped in me. That he should speak of her as if she were still alive—that he should come here unannounced and watch me as he’d watch an insect—that, deep, deep down, I knew, or suspected what he had come for, for Aname’s unfulfilled bargain—
“Do you think you can barge here?” I asked. “Tell me your name first.”
He smiled, a bare tightening of the lips. “Tyreas. You may dress if you wish.”
I bit back an angry reply, not knowing how long I could test his patience. I wrapped the sari around me as fast as I could.
He watched me all the while. When I was finished, I met his gaze, and although I was now clothed, I still felt laid bare.
“Tyreas,” I said. “I’m Daya. Aname’s sister.”
“She spoke of you,” he said, in the same flat tone—he sounded almost bored, but I knew he wasn’t, couldn’t be.
I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the feeling the past had risen to haunt me. “Aname is dead,” I said. “She has been dead those past eight years.”
I watched him. I gathered it was news to him, although with his aloof nature it was hard to be sure. His eyes flicked a bit; he remained silent for a while. But when he spoke again, his voice was the same. “A shame,” he said.
His eyes moved, focused on the courtyard where Pamati, her face creased in thought, was drawing a red diamond on the ground. “I would have thought you would know about me,” he said.
I looked at Pamati, and back again at him. “You’re the one Aname . . .”
“Slept with,” he said. He did not sound embarrassed in the least. “The eight years have passed. I have come to end our bargain.”
My heart sank. Aname had told me almost nothing about Pamati’s father, and now I knew why.
A blood empath. She’d slept with a blood empath.
I couldn’t imagine this man ever loving anyone—couldn’t imagine this man ever feeling passionate about anything. I wondered what that night had been—all cold, mechanical precision on his part, while Aname panted and moaned beneath him?
It was obscene.
“How do I know you’re the one?” I asked.
“You think me a liar?”
I said nothing, merely stood my ground.
He spoke quietly, as if reciting facts from a list. “I am a stranger to this jati, and yet I know your house, and your name, and your sister’s name. I know the child is not yours, but your sister’s, and I know how long ago she was conceived. And I know a bargain was struck—do not tell me Aname spoke of that to everyone.”
I knew, deep down, that he was telling me the truth—blood empaths were cold and callous, but they never lied. “No, she didn’t speak of your pact. Except to me, but she never told me
the terms,” I said.
“I suspect you know all there is to know, Daya.” He sounded amused this time. “The child is mine.”
No. No. He couldn’t— “You—” I said, groping for words. “It’s not possible. You can’t take her.”
“You think to tell me what I can and cannot do?” And, although Tyreas had not moved, he seemed taller, exuding a sense of menace that filled my small house.
I knew blood empaths could do nothing to you without your living blood. I knew they were bound by law.
I knew Tyreas didn’t care about any of that.
“I wasn’t part of your bargain,” I said, forcing the words through lips that had turned to stone.
“But you are still bound by it.”
“I raised her as my own child,” I said, trying to imagine my house without Pamati—trying to imagine Tyreas leaving the jati with a small hand tucked in his own.
No.
“Aname is dead,” I said. “Your bargain is void. You never gave her anything.”
I had a feeling—I had a feeling every one of my words vanished in his dark eyes, and that he dismissed them immediately.
“Her death changes nothing,” he said. He paused for a while. “If you wish, I will give you what should have gone to her. You did raise the child in her place.”
“Pamati,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Her name is Pamati. And I don’t want whatever Aname was foolish enough to accept.”
“More wealth than she could dream of,” Tyreas said. Somehow he made my sister sound like a grasping woman, selling the fruit of her womb in exchange for mere gold and jewels.