The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  You are halfway through a lychee, its slippery flavour delicate on your tongue, wetness running over your knuckles and down to your elbow in a thin line. You swallow. “Why three weeks?”

  “You must have time to rest,” she says. “The colony can cope without the outside world for a short period of time.”

  You bow your head. “This humble one is most grateful.”

  “You need not be so formal with me,” she says.

  You study her face, noting how sharp and bright it is. She is as young as you are, perhaps younger. A terrible burden to carry, the title of starmage. You wonder if she ever tires of it.

  “Thank you again for the fruit,” you say. “I appreciate it.”

  She smiles and the expression triggers a memory of another face, a broad rectangle, dappled in the sunlight.

  As she leaves she hesitates at the door. Half a moment passes with her back to you. Then she turns, “May I visit you again?”

  Like a festival drum your heartbeat quickens. “My quarters are too small. They are not a suitable place for visitation.”

  “Then you must come to mine. I would like to ask you over for dinner. Seventh-day evening. Will you come?”

  Starmage’s word is law, but the confidence that comes imposed on her manner is missing. You wet your lips with a tongue still slick with lychee juice. “I will.”

  • • • •

  Your separation from Ren is inevitable, yet it is no easier to bear when it comes. The night before you leave for Eighth Colony you cling to her damp skin, trying to breathe in as much of her as possible, terrified of losing the piquancy of her scent to the wash of time. She kisses your jaw and neck and lips with the fierceness of one who does not know when they will eat again. You are the last of the cluster to be assigned a position; the bed yawns with the blankness of missing bodies.

  “We have our song still,” she says, but you both know it is not the same, it is not sufficient, it will forever be insufficient. You spend the weeks in the lightspeed cocoon feeling empty, bereft, bereaved, halved.

  Eighth Colony greets you with huge metal struts and too much air, cold and recycled, the sounds of swarming multitudes carried upon it. You spill from the belly of the cocoon into lifelike chaos. The mage-crafted glass floor of the arrival dock hangs over a marketplace, and beneath your feet shouting, haggling bodies weave between the bright lights, citizens and officers and grey-clad auxiliaries. Their faces are hidden from you; all you see are impenetrable black dots.

  And then you raise your unhappy eyes from the ground and your heart trips over itself. The old ansible has come to greet you, to introduce you to the life you are meant to take over. Beside her grey-clad self stands a starmage, dragons alive on her suit. Her hair is short, her eyes deep-set, and her jawbone could shatter iron. When you look at her all you see is someone else, laughing in leaf-filtered sun, glowing in blue-tinted moonlight.

  “Ansible Xin,” she says. “I am Officer Ouyang Suqing. Welcome to Eighth Colony.”

  • • • •

  The Imperial Executioner’s ship arrives on sixth-day. Its shape eclipses the stars, an arrowhead of pitch blotted above the glass domes of Eighth Colony. The sounds of life go quiet in its shadow.

  In the main atrium, couples stroll between drooping fringes of vegetation, framed by starscape and warmed by lantern balls suspended in the air. You enjoy spending your off hours as a spectator to this thoroughfare of romance, collecting impressions of smiles and shy glances as if for a vault.

  Then the Imperial Executioner appears on the walkway circumnavigating the upper dome, robed in red and gold and black, and masked. White bisects crimson across its furious features. The citizenry freezes. Trailing in the Executioner’s wake are two starmages, Officers Ouyang and Wu. Tigers prowl the latter’s suit.

  Faces in the atrium turn white with terror, sharp with anxiety: A tableaux of miseries drawn up by the Imperial Executioner’s pull. A burning spreads in your belly, too.

  The three of them pass through the upper deck of the atrium in a wreath of silence. When the last glimpse of brocaded robe vanishes through the doorway, the whispers boil to the surface. Brows furrow, tongues curl desperately around fears of saying the wrong thing. Rebellion burns throughout the breadth of empire, and the Imperial Authority is less than pleased with Eighth Colony’s involvement in it. Their bliss shattered, the couples dotting the atrium retreat into the shadows.

  You imagine that, in her passage, Officer Ouyang turned her head to look at you for the briefest moment. A comforting thought. A terrifying thought.

  • • • •

  Your first lover is a girl named Mingyue. Her face is broad and rectangular and her laugh fills the atria of your heart. You met on the grassy courtyard of the temple, two young mages beginning their journeys towards greatness, away from their hometowns for the first time. The days lengthen into weeks spent enraptured, intoxicated. Lying in the sun under the nesting swallows she reaches for your hand, and you pull it away. Later that day, in the evening, she says: “We can meet where no one will see us. No one will know.”

  And you are young, and you have the gift, and the world is wide, so it’s easy to believe those words. Her flesh dances tart, sweet, bitter, and hot against your tongue.

  But of course, you are found out. They come for you in the moonlight when your unclothed limbs are entwined like vines, so it is impossible to deny what has happened. Like a startled rabbit you try to run, but Mingyue freezes, and you cannot abandon her. So they take you, too. Where would you run to, anyway? They know who you are.

  They separate the two of you in ansible training; you never see Mingyue again. On the second day, when your crying has stopped, they bring you to meet Ren and the rest of the cluster. Your name becomes Xin, the last to join them.

  You hate Ren. You hate her soft round face, you hate her meekness, you hate her sweetness toward you. The twinning song feels rancid on your tongue, cuts like grit in your ears. You sing it tonelessly and improperly and the portals won’t form within the cluster. If the other ansible girls resent you, you don’t care. When Ren tries to take your hand to pull you aside you hiss at her. You sleep alone, even if it means curling on the cold floor with your back to the cluster.

  Ren never gives up. She keeps reaching for you, keeps talking to you, keeps coaxing your voice into the harmony. She joins you on the floor at night, wrapping thin arms around your rigid shoulders. Placing kisses on the line of your bones. You watch her grow pale and tired and wish she would just leave you be.

  Hatred turns to pity turns to exhaustion. No one has the energy to fight forever.

  One day Ren sits by you during the afternoon meal, her leg pressed flush against yours. “I too had a name before this,” she says. “My father named me Wang-sun. I am the third of three girls.”

  Wang-sun, a wish for a son. The sentiment her family wanted her to carry for the ages. You ask: “Do your sisters have the gift also?”

  “No. I am the first. They thought there was to be a starmage in the family.”

  But instead she became ansible, just like you.

  You study the shape of her face, which has become familiar to you over the weeks, if not quite cherished. You realise you can choose to be happy, and accept the love you have been given, or you can remain in despair forever.

  You take her hand. “My name was Tian,” you tell her. An empty field, a paddy waiting to be filled. The relief that envelops Ren’s face provokes deep shame and guilt.

  But the rest of the cluster accepts your induction without comment, and you come to realise that perhaps each of them entered ansiblehood much the same way. A shared grief, a common wound. Being ripped apart so that there’s something to put back together. Your hurt made you all the more dear to them.

  Sometimes you wonder if Mingyue was a trap, deliberately set, sieving each batch of new mages to find more recruits for the ansible program. But dwelling on the idea will only bring you ruin. You love Ren. You love her as mu
ch as you possibly can.

  • • • •

  The starmage has made steamed dumplings and other small eats. Curved glass sprawls along one wall of her quarters, exposing starfield marred by the shape of the Imperial Executioner’s ship. Her red dress clings to her, embroidered brocade interspersed with windows of translucent silk. Sequins glitter in the low yellow light. In comparison you are clad in the shapeless grey that is the only thing populating your wardrobe.

  You bite into soft dumpling flesh and the hollows under your tongue fill with fragrant soup. The flavour is so rich a shiver passes through you. “How is it?” Officer Ouyang asks.

  “Incredible.”

  You almost didn’t come. Twice you walked in sight of her door and both times you turned back. On the third jaunt, you decide there’s nothing for her to trap you in: You are innocent of involvement in the murder, and your worst secret has already been revealed. So you go in.

  “Can men be ansibles?” she asks you.

  “Of course. Anyone with the gift can. It just takes practice.” You toy with a piece of chicken while you study the small shifts in her face.

  “They used to say only women of a certain closeness could do it. That was how they explained it.”

  “That’s not true. There’s nothing special learning it. They just don’t want to teach anyone else.” You add, deliberately, “You could do it with a man if you wanted.”

  She ducks her head. “I wouldn’t.” A blush creeps across her cheeks. “I could not be that close with a man.”

  You had suspected this, and you wonder why she’s telling you this now, at this fraught juncture, when you have been on this station for years.

  “I used to watch the ansible clusters in the temple,” she says very carefully. “I envied you, you know.”

  “Envied us?” Your chopsticks hit the table with a clink. You gesture at her massive quarters and the finery that she wears, the entitlement that was ripped from you when they caught you with your hand between Mingyue’s legs. “What is there to envy?”

  Her teeth tear at her bottom lip. “I only meant the way you could walk around so easily holding hands, touching each other.” She looks down at her own hands and says slowly, “I wanted something like that too.”

  You know exactly what she means. You refuse to show her sympathy. “So why didn’t you? It’s easy to be recruited. You know how.”

  She lowers her head still further. “I couldn’t. I would bring eternal shame to my family. It’s different for me.”

  “Unlike me, who was a farmer’s daughter?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I did not know of your background.”

  You push your chair back. “Ansible Xin,” she says, as you stand. “I apologise. I did not mean to offend.”

  A starmage should not be apologising to an ansible, it upsets the order of the world. “There’s nothing to envy about our lives,” you say. “If only you knew what we have endured. What we must continue to endure.”

  “I apologise.”

  There’s a note of misery to Officer Ouyang’s face that pulls at you. You sit back down: It would be rude to leave with so much food still unfinished. But you stay silent as you eat, and she follows suit.

  She only breaks the silence when you are preparing to leave. The words come out papery, fragile as mist: “Ansible Xin, I have behaved abominably today. But I wish to try again. Will you come tomorrow evening? I’ll prepare something for you.”

  “Tomorrow? Is that not the day of the execution?”

  “It is.” Mention of the execution sinks like black tar in the atmosphere between the two of you; the starmage fidgets, her brows knitting together in a difficult line. “Have you witnessed an execution before?”

  “I have not.”

  “I see.”

  The silence traps you like honey, heavy and cloying, and you are so tired of fighting it. You could drain it all away by grabbing her, kissing her on the lips, showing her what she has been missing in her lonely, hidden life. You could.

  “Will you come?” she asks again.

  “I will consider it,” you say.

  • • • •

  The execution is broadcast on screens throughout not just Eighth Colony, but the length and breadth of the empire. Slaughter a chicken to warn the monkeys. You wait among the mass of Authority officers and auxiliaries packing Eighth Colony’s largest theater, which today will be a theater of death.

  On the stage the colony’s four starmages stand arrayed in a rectangle: Tiger, phoenix, dragon, horse. Each of them clutches in both hands a long metal rod, painted the red of justice. They drown out the thousand murmuring voices by pounding the rods onto the stage floor in an accelerating crescendo. Echoes drill into skulls. The house lights dim; the show is about to begin.

  Two masked figures haul a third onto the center of the stage. Traitor is naked except for the ropes that bind her hands in front of her. Once she had a name, but now and forever she will only be known as Traitor. Nine iterations of her family will be thus disgraced, their names wiped from the register and those two characters written in their place. Her skin is blanched funerary white but her face is swollen with the red of beaten flesh. They force her to her knees. The sound of bone against wood lingers.

  You look at her face. Its shape is young, its features arranged in despair. This girl could be Officer Ouyang. This girl could be you.

  The Imperial Executioner’s entrance is heavy: Heavy footsteps, heavy silence, heavy gasps from Traitor as fear floods her chest and lungs. She shakes as the Executioner stands behind her.

  The Starmage General comes to the stage carrying the imperial scroll: A small man made towering by his massive suit, nasal voice amplified to operatic volumes. He pulls the scroll open and proclaims:

  Traitor! You have been found guilty of colluding with rebels! You plotted to weaken our glorious empire from within. You were caught openly engaging in rebellious activities, but without shame, you refused to claim your treachery. You chose to protect your fellow traitors, the other scum who crawl through the grass like snakes!

  You, who have rejected the warmth of the Imperial spring, shall be made to feel the sting of winter’s wrath!

  The Executioner’s hands loom over Traitor’s head. A cocoon of magebright envelops them and springs around Traitor’s kneeling body, fine enough that you can see her through it.

  The magebright hums.

  Razorwire lines run from one side of the cocoon to the other. They descend. Where they meet skin they start to slice. Traitor shrieks, a high thin animal sound. Every muscle in her body strains, but there is nowhere to escape. Her hands are claws, her neck corded with veins and tendons as her screaming tears through it.

  The razorwire continues to strip her away, layer by layer, cell by cell. Blood springs from her in a fine mist as the cuts start stripping the flesh under the skin. Muscle peels from the face trapped in a rictus of agony.

  You can’t watch. You have to watch.

  The wires gouge deeper and deeper. Her face and eyes are almost gone now. Traitor still screams through her lipless mouth. Beside you one of the auxiliaries starts sobbing. A guard in executioner’s black comes and pulls him out of the line. He makes one sound, like a stricken rabbit; you dare not turn your head to see where they take him.

  The screaming comes to a choking halt as the flesh of her throat flays off. You wonder how long she remains alive after that. The heart is buried under layers of viscera, and the quivering brain is still shielded by bone. The pulp of Traitor’s body accrues in the shape of an arrow and turns black and hard, like metal. The Executioner is turning her ground meat into sculpture, a lesson that will sit in the atrium for all to learn.

  The flesh of your own body rebels and your throat fills with heavy sourness. You pinch your lips together and stare at the mask that obscures Officer Ouyang’s face until waves of dizziness envelop you. Is she watching? What is she thinking? How could she just stand there?

  But then,
are you not also sitting where you are, and watching?

  • • • •

  When you go to keep your evening appointment you find Officer Ouyang’s door barred in your face. A mage-locked door may stop others, but she forgets what you are. She forgets that you too have the gift.

  Your entrance startles her. She stumbles to her feet, face red and crumpled, voice cracked: “Why are you here?” She hasn’t dressed properly and hair sticks from her scalp.

  “You invited me.”

  Her surprise collapses into despair: She has forgotten. She turns away, her back forming an uneven, sloping wall. “Please leave. I cannot, I do not—”

  Your room is small, and cold, and you fear the things you might see when you close your eyes tonight. “Have you never witnessed an execution before?” you ask. You simply assumed that she had.

  The starmage shakes her head. Her knees find the floor for support as she folds over herself. You place your hands on her back, and a shiver passes through her body. But it is not just mourning that grips her. She presses her fists into the ground, the knuckles white through reddened skin.

  “Were you close with Traitor?” you ask.

  “Her name,” she hisses, “was Siyun.”

  Siyun, a gentle cloud. “So you were indeed close,” you say.

  “No.” She sits up and you detach from her, putting a small space between the two of you. She still won’t look at you. “Siyun and I were—we were only briefly acquainted. Perhaps if she had been receptive to my friendship, or to something more, we could have been.” Her voice goes low with rage. “She did not deserve this. She was barely involved in rebellious activities. She was unlucky, they caught her! And decided she would be a scapegoat. This is injustice.”

  “You could have stopped the execution. You were right next to her on the stage.”

  Now she turns to you, fury sharpening her features. “And to what end? Do you think I could have saved her, when the throne wanted her blood? Eighth Colony’s situation is precarious enough. Do you know what price open rebellion will demand?”