He spat at the dice. He threw. Eleven with the red, ten with the green, three with the white. A bad augur, uneven syllabics to work with. Ling must have gone limp, because the prostitute underneath the table scurried out, hitting his head on the edge in the process.
My muscles tightened, ready to pounce away from an attack. A few soldiers crowded at the eaves of the backroom door, itching to fight me. Ling scratched his new beard; forbidden by his father, worn by Ling exactly for that reason.
Suddenly, with a bellowing voice, Ling stood up and shouted:
With seriousness and wall-nature, the moons.
I wait to put the moons inside a cup.
Moons, don’t fall.
The syllabics the koan dice gave him were difficult, but he pulled it off with vigor. The iambic pentameter in the second line was an antiquated but eloquent rhythm. The men nodded, pinching snuff from their satchels, satisfied that Ling had taken their earnings in an honorable way. They didn’t mind being beaten by him. My presence, on the other hand, was next to intolerable.
“Are you his nanny?” the tallest said, placing the tobacco in his wide nostrils and snorting it.
“Yes,” I said, on the verge of growling, because it was once true.
Ling struggled not to shout at me, decry the name of his father. I only did what his father decreed from his orbital satellite palace (he called living on the planet itself “tawdry”). Ling found me an easier target.
“Ling here,” the shortest man, with a hare-lip, said, “is able-bodied. Able to take care of himself.”
I arched an eyebrow. “His father doesn’t apparently think so.”
Ling at last couldn’t control himself. “I never want to see Father again! Hear from Father again!” He stood up, a vein bulging on his forehead. One of the men behind him stood and began stroking Ling’s hair. The crowd at the door swelled considerably. The tide was about to crash.
“Yes,” the hare lipped one said. “Ling will become a soldier, like us. Fight the Yegg in glory.”
“No glory to it,” I said. My EKG monitors were rising, and my weapons systems began to hum. “Just backfucking an enemy you can’t beat.”
The three men next to Ling shoved him down — this barely involved him anymore — and leaped over the table towards me. A few clamored to reach me from the door, their bright yahangthes swirling in the air. The shouts of their weapons were deafening. I laced my hands with sarin injectors and crouched, waiting a few seconds for them. Ling sat back, dazed and blinking. Was he even a bit sorry about my impending death? Probably not.
As the throng was a meter from me, as I was about to strike, a huge surge from outside toppled over the tavern. Sooner than I expected, the monsoon had come. I heard the moorings snap and the roof groan open. Salty, cheesy water spilled onto us, and I tried to tumble away from the weapons bearing down on me. One of my attackers had impaled himself on his babbling sword. I crouched low, trying to blend into the surf pouring in through the floor and wall seams. Looking around for Ling, I only had one glance of his horrified face — as if this natural catastrophe was all his fault — before his body plunged into the foam.
The timbers of the room began to break apart.
The prostitute, who I did not expect to be dangerous, swept towards me, knee deep in water, and bludgeoned me on the head with a blackjack. Focusing strength, I snapped his neck with a high kick and waded to the window, my feet unsteady. “Ling!” I called out, but he was nowhere to be found. Crashing sounds and cries; for the most part I was forgotten as each tried to save their own lives and, as an afterthought, the lives of those in their company. The entire tavern began to shatter from the relentless waves, and I clutched onto a board.
After about fifteen minutes, the vortex ebbed, though the rain was still intense. My knee throbbed, and I slipped in and out of consciousness. The air was cold; the water all around me phosphorent and churning. I had no idea where Ling was, or whether I’d ever see land again.
I became alert again when the pungent smell of tangerine filled my lungs. I checked my systems. Geosat link, gone. Immunocompromization routines, down. Luckily, my meds hadn’t given way yet, though they strained.
My vision cleared and I could see that I was far out to sea. The two moons were over me, in their uneasy dance.
A skimmer craft — crude in its design — bobbed in the water next to me, engines off. The Yegg scents of fructose were heavy. My muscles stiffened, and I struggled to keep alert.
Was Ling alive? Would I be for much longer? I had never encountered a Yegg in person before, and all accounts from the field fighting them were, to say the least, ambiguous.
The Yegg were not known for their naval prowess. But of course, territorial expansion for them was only an afterthought, as was trade, art, the trappings of our galactic civilization. They mimicked us. Their boats were careless constructions of lashed-together wicker that somehow didn’t capsize. I floated, clutching the board, right next to the hull. I touched the hull; what looked like wicker, wasn’t. It was the substance humans called comachrome. My hand passed through in a blur. It didn’t go all the way through, but was repelled, as if by magnetic force. My hand felt cold after I did that.
I was hauled up to the deck. Two Yegg stood over me as I coughed and sputtered. I couldn’t get a good view of their featureless, shimmering bodies. They stood over me with no great interest for a few minutes before moving away. The comachrome deck didn’t feel solid against my nearly broken body. In a way, I was in their world. The normal rules of engineering — structural or otherwise — barely applied.
I could hear Ling moaning in the boat’s interior. Though he couldn’t have been far away, his voice sounded dilated. “Ling,” I whispered, but my voice was hoarse from the sea-water.
I had no idea what the Yegg were doing so close to Wang Wei; they shouldn’t have been able to intercept the floating tavern, unless the front was much closer than I had thought. It was entirely possible that Wang Wei was smoldering from a Yegg invasion.
After I’d gathered enough strength to stand, and tried to hoist myself up, the two that had stood over me before came back. One put its foot on my neck, soft but insistent. I didn’t have the strength to fight it; the sole was bone-chilling cold. I put my cheek along the deck. The other Yegg started cooing, and then pressed its hands against the busted skin on my forehead. It crouched and began whistling, high-pitched. There was a resin on this one’s hands, a cobalt sheen to its otherwise featureless skin.
I felt a sizzle along my anodes, my lymph nodes, where most of my implants were. I screamed; the Yegg cooed louder. The resin on its hand thickened and burned my cheek. It drew its hand away and began licking it.
My meds, and my recording devices, were seared and dead.
When the Viceroy declared an all-male mercenary core to fight the Yegg — a year before I was of age to join and fight — one of the reasons he gave was “scientific evidence” that the Yegg would inflict unspeakable horrors upon females. There was no proof of this; Yegg did unspeakable things to both men and women they conquered (or, just as likely, ignored them; their actions were as random as Ling’s koan dice). Still, I had goosebumps as I lay there for another few hours. The waves were high, but not high enough to buckle the craft. An engine started below me, sounding like an Earth whale, and the boat started churning north, away from the shore.
I could hear Ling’s screams and begging for mercy down below, mixed with the tapering of the monsoon. The comachrome below me gained warmth, though it could have been my imagination. I wondered why I didn’t sink right through. When we were out of the monsoon’s path — no land in sight — they stopped torturing him and brought me in to meet him.
I was a nanny and a bodyguard and not a scholar, but I knew some things about the Yegg. The Yegg appeared just three years after humans landed on the planet of Xavier. The original settlers were Christian Chinese exiles. The planet was the most hospitable of scores discovered. After three years, with many
more refugees of all kind settling there and trying to make a life for themselves, the Yegg appeared. This was a surprise to all — why had “first contact” been delayed by years? The Yegg showed up one day in one of the fledgling provincial capitals. They were humanoid, but literally blank-faced. Featureless and smooth, arriving in groups of anywhere from two to twelve, but mostly seven. They didn’t communicate with the startled human governor, but stood in front of her for a few hours before walking away.
Two days later, they attacked, with weaponry remarkably like our own.
I read an article about how some cryptozoologists from the Syncretis considered the Yegg to be metaphysical creatures, not fully a part of this world, but somehow acting as mere simulacrums of real, physical beings. That would explain their use of the comachrome — which always produced altogether unpredictable effects on humans. There was speculation that the Yegg existed in several dimensions at once, or that they were shapeshifters who could manipulate matter and energy in ways unknowable to humanity. No one knew for sure, however; in the fifty years of inhabitance on Xavier, not a single Yegg had been captured alive.
They weren’t, however, immortal, or impervious to harm. Otherwise, Xavier would have been abandoned decades ago. Orbital weapons could rarely pinpoint Yegg formations, and macrobombing proved to be of little strategic value. It took old-fashioned efforts — soldiers in the field, equipped with handheld weapons — to kill Yegg. Blades or clubs worked most effectively, but that was hard labor, with plenty of casualties. The humans were losing the planet, but they killed enough Yegg to foster the illusion, at times, of eventual victory.
The most grievous casualties of all were not the soldiers who died, but the ones that lived. Something happened after combat with the Yegg, triggered by contact with the comachrome. It was described as a drifting away from linear progressions of the everyday, an uprooting from time itself. My own father had his many comas from the comachrome. I remember as a child how I would make tea for him, even though it wasn’t really him in the corner — it was a form that, though once valiant and full of jokes, stirred only once in awhile without recognizing anyone, or acknowledging the beverage set in front of him. I continued that tortuous ritual for a year after he was sent home from the front — brewing the tea, placing it near his hands, pulling it away after it turned cold, trying not to cry into the full cup.
I was fifteen then. Before my father died, his beard had stretched nearly to his ankles, and when my sisters and I burned him in the mountain cove, the scents of tangerine filled the air, like an assault.
I tried to keep my head clear as I was dragged into the bowels of the boat. I couldn’t see the Yegg’s faces from a good angle, and they walked with an angular gait. Their skin looked so shifting and fluid. My body still throbbed from their extinguishing of my implants. Sensory information swam around me; I couldn’t grab onto anything. The stairs bobbed as I walked on them. At the bottom, there was a basement, with about five centimeters of dank water on the floor. Two of Ling’s Mongol cohorts were kneeling in this water, their faces badly bruised, their foreheads spangled with blood. Fear was in their eyes, and I didn’t blame them. A Yegg stood over them, a torch springing from its hands. I used the word springing because the torch wasn’t a separate part of its body. It was an appendage.
They pushed me to the center of the room. Only there, in the dimness, could I see Ling in the corner. I barely recognized him. His neck had been eviscerated, and there was lumpy matter in his stomach that he was struggling to hold in. It wasn’t working.
“What have they done to you?” I shrieked, rushing to stand next to him. But I was repelled by that same magnetic-like tug I felt when I put my hand inside the boat’s hull. I couldn’t get closer than a meter to him. He seemed kilometers away. The other two soldiers gave me wild looks, but didn’t say anything.
One of the Yegg, the one with cobalt skin, came behind me and hugged me. There was a shock of pain all through my body and I fell sideways into the brackish water. The Yegg stayed on top of me, and I moaned, “Let me go.” After a few seconds, the Yegg slithered off me.
The two human soldiers looked at me, but didn’t recognize me, and Ling had his lacerated back to me. His body was a compendium of bodily harm; it seemed like every known method of hurting a person was upon him.
Then the cobalt-skinned Yegg began speaking to me, in my language. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was communicating in story form.
“The protector looked all around her,” the Yegg said, sitting next to me, “and couldn’t believe her eyes!” Its voice was lilting and yet halting at the same time, like a scratchy predigital recording of a great opera singer. “She wondered what could possibly be these creatures — heavenly and nefarious — scattered around her.”
I looked up, trying to meet its eyes, trying to find its eyes. There were none. Its voice didn’t project out of its face as much as trickle, muffled.
“. . . in a boat made of diverse materials. Things she couldn’t touch were all around her. And she said, ‘Oh, whatever will I do to protect the ones I’m caring about? Because we are all human and they are not.’”
It didn’t appear any of the other humans were listening, or could hear the story at all. The Yegg was talking about me, in the third person. I couldn’t understand why.
“. . . and this neglectful boy disregarded her. How awful. In a world resplendent with pain, how could she have found anything that she needed? ‘I’m more than a noir lapdog,’ she enjoined, appraising those dying around her.”
The Yegg came closer, and several of the others followed, forming a ring around me. Bound, Ling flopped sideways. In the shallow, clammy water, he was drowning.
“The others, while she wasn’t listening, were telling each other stories of their battles,” the cobalt Yegg continued. “How beloved friends had died in their arms in fighting an unslakable enemy. An enemy that might appear serene one day and a shiva the next.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to stay warm. Double moonlight, silver and gold, entered from the narrow window; the sea was suddenly calm.
The Yegg appeared in no hurry. I was too drained to scan their talk for hidden clues. “She didn’t hear any of these stories, however, and instead pondered her own fate. She remembered when she was more of a playmate and nurturer than watchdog for her young stead. Those days filled her with great happiness, and she tried to hold onto those, so that there would be some remembrance of what he was.”
“Shut up!” I said, my voice croaking. I considered that this might have been their preferred method of interrogation, of elliptical brainwashing.
The crazy thing that happened next was that they did shut up. The four of them moved to the two soldiers that Ling had befriended in the tavern. They pressed their smooth, delicate hands over the soldiers’ mouths for a few seconds, like perverted faith healers. Then they left, climbing the squishy stairs.
It wasn’t always so hard between Ling and I. In the first nine years of Ling’s life, I protected and nurtured him as if he was my own son. This was what I was hired for originally, out of hundreds of applicants — not to be an excellent nutritionist, or a superb cleaner of Ling’s seven rooms, but rather to give Ling affection. I was to be the inkwell of love that he would dip his calligraphy pen into, so that he could write his name. His father understood that he was incapable of giving this to Ling, and so hired me. The Viceroy considered this “dirty work.”
Panicking and aching in the Yegg ship, I remembered Ling, the old Ling. I remembered coaxing Ling to practice Manadarin with the mnemonica with the promise of sweets. I remembered salving his skinned knee with a bandage that sang a song for him; I remembered how he squealed with delight and tried to sing along. I remembered his wildness, his shock of long hair, his craving for insects in the palace’s arboretum — with long, letterboxed views of Xavier below, trooper ships descending into the atmosphere to fight the Yegg — insects that he would try to dissect and, if on the verg
e of being caught, eat. I remembered, and my eyes stung from sea water and tears. It was almost unbearable for me to think about Ling’s changes, and our separation. When he was ten or eleven, he became more surly and distant towards me. He was thirteen when he tried to run away for the first time, bribing an artifact smuggler to stow him on a cargo trawler back to Earth. The Viceroy was furious, and decided that Ling needed no more nurturing. I was relieved of my post as a nanny. Helpless, unable to express to Ling how I felt about his well-being, I decided the only thing I could do was to push my emotions out of the equation, and keep Ling safe in any way I could. I petitioned the Viceroy to become Ling’s bodyguard. He was surprised, but conceded to my request — thinking, perhaps, that I was malleable on one hand, and that I was incapable of deceit on the other. Though I was not an old woman, I was not a young one either, and I trained hard with combat mnenonicas, honing my body into a weapon, cramming my skull full of implants — enough, I reasoned, to dull and fray the emotional bond that held me to Ling.
When I was Ling’s age, I wanted to be a soldier as well. I wanted to fight the Yegg, even if it meant dying with the comachrome leaking into my lungs. I understood, after I entered the Viceroy’s service and realized how precious another human being could become to me, how foolhardy that urge to fight was. But I had no interest for blaming Ling for possessing the same craving. It was his youth, his choice. Even when I tried to draw him back to his father, even when Ling said he hated me, I wanted him to soar away, on his own if need be.
The Best of Talebones Page 19