Contrary to claims which were raised at my trial in absentia and disproven with communication logs, throughout this time I spoke to Kostas regularly. I confused him, I think; I gave him all the intelligence which he needed to convey to the Esperigans, that they might respond to the next Melidan foray, but I did not conceal my feelings or the increasing complication of my loyalties, objecting to him bitterly and with personal anger about Esperigan attacks. I misled him with honesty: he thought, I believe, that I was only spilling a natural frustration to him, and through that airing clearing out my own doubts. But I had only lost the art of lying.
There is a general increase of perception which comes with the wings, the nerves teased to a higher pitch of awareness. All the little fidgets and twitches of lying betray themselves more readily, so only the more twisted forms can evade detection – where the speaker first deceives herself, or the wholly casual deceit of the sociopath who feels no remorse. This was the root of the Melidan disgust of the act, and I had acquired it.
If Kostas had known, he would at once have removed me: a diplomat is not much use if she cannot lie at need, much less an agent. But I did not volunteer the information, and indeed I did not realize, at first, how fully I had absorbed the stricture. I did not realize at all, until Badea came to me, three years into the war. I was sitting alone and in the dark by the communications console, the phosphorescent after-image of Kostas’s face fading into the surface.
She sat down beside me and said, “The Esperigans answer us too quickly. Their technology advances in these great leaps, and every time we press them back, they return in less than a month to very nearly the same position.”
I thought, at first, that this was the moment: that she meant to ask me about membership in the Confederacy. I felt no sense of satisfaction, only a weary kind of resignation. The war would end, the Esperigans would follow, and in a few generations they would both be eaten up by bureaucracy and standards and immigration.
Instead Badea looked at me and said, “Are your people helping them, also?”
My denial ought to have come without thought, leapt easily off the tongue with all the conviction duty could give it, and been followed by invitation. Instead I said nothing, my throat closed involuntarily. We sat silently in the darkness, and at last she said, “Will you tell me why?”
I felt at the time I could do no more harm, and perhaps some good, by honesty. I told her all the rationale, and expressed all our willingness to receive them into our union as equals. I went so far as to offer her the platitudes with which we convince ourselves we are justified in our slow gentle imperialism: that unification is necessary and advances all together, bringing peace.
She only shook her head and looked away from me. After a moment, she said, “Your people will never stop. Whatever we devise, they will help the Esperigans to a counter, and if the Esperigans devise some weapon we cannot defend ourselves against, they will help us, and we will batter each other into limp exhaustion, until in the end we all fall.”
“Yes,” I said, because it was true. I am not sure I was still able to lie, but in any case I did not know, and I did not lie.
I was not permitted to communicate with Kostas again until they were ready. Thirty-six of the Melidans’ greatest designers and scientists died in the effort. I learned of their deaths in bits and pieces. They worked in isolated and quarantined spaces, their every action recorded even as the viruses and bacteria they were developing killed them. It was a little more than three months before Badea came to me again.
We had not spoken since the night she had learned the duplicity of the Confederacy’s support and my own. I could not ask her forgiveness, and she could not give it. She did not come for reconciliation but to send a message to the Esperigans and to the Confederacy through me.
I did not comprehend at first. But when I did, I knew enough to be sure she was neither lying nor mistaken, and to be sure the threat was very real. The same was not true of Kostas, and still less of the Esperigans. My frantic attempts to persuade them worked instead to the contrary end. The long gap since my last communique made Kostas suspicious: he thought me a convert, or generously a manipulated tool.
“If they had the capability, they would have used it already,” he said, and if I could not convince him, the Esperigans would never believe.
I asked Badea to make a demonstration. There was a large island broken off the southern coast of the Esperigan continent, thoroughly settled and industrialized, with two substantial port cities. Sixty miles separated it from the mainland. I proposed the Melidans should begin there, where the attack might be contained.
“No,” Badea said. “So your scientists can develop a counter? No. We are done with exchanges.”
The rest you know. A thousand coracles left Melidan shores the next morning, and by sundown on the third following day, the Esperigan cities were crumbling. Refugees fled the groaning skyscrapers as they slowly bowed under their own weight. The trees died; the crops also, and the cattle, all the life and vegetation that had been imported from Earth and square-peg forced into the new world stripped bare for their convenience.
Meanwhile in the crowded shelters the viruses leapt easily from one victim to another, rewriting their genetic lines. Where the changes took hold, the altered survived. The others fell to the same deadly plagues that consumed all Earth-native life. The native Melidan moss crept in a swift green carpet over the corpses, and the beetle-hordes with it.
I can give you no first-hand account of those days. I too lay fevered and sick while the alteration ran its course in me, though I was tended better, and with more care, by my sisters. When I was strong enough to rise, the waves of death were over. My wings curled limply over my shoulders as I walked through the empty streets of Landfall, pavement stones pierced and broken by hungry vines, like bones cracked open for marrow. The moss covered the dead, who filled the shattered streets.
The squat embassy building had mostly crumpled down on one corner, smashed windows gaping hollow and black. A large pavilion of simple cotton fabric had been raised in the courtyard, to serve as both hospital and headquarters. A young undersecretary of state was the senior diplomat remaining. Kostas had died early, he told me. Others were still in the process of dying, their bodies waging an internal war that left them twisted by hideous deformities.
Less than one in thirty, was his estimate of the survivors. Imagine yourself on an air-train in a crush, and then imagine yourself suddenly alone but for one other passenger across the room, a stranger staring at you. Badea called it a sustainable population.
The Melidans cleared the spaceport of vegetation, though little now was left but the black-scorched landing pad, Confederacy manufacture, all of woven carbon and titanium.
“Those who wish may leave,” Badea said. “We will help the rest.”
Most of the survivors chose to remain. They looked at their faces in the mirror, flecked with green, and feared the Melidans less than their welcome on another world.
I left by the first small ship that dared come down to take off refugees, with no attention to the destination or the duration of the voyage. I wished only to be away. The wings were easily removed. A quick and painful amputation of the gossamer and fretwork which protruded from the flesh, and the rest might be left for the body to absorb slowly. The strange muffled quality of the world, the sensation of numbness, passed eventually. The two scars upon my back, parallel lines, I will keep the rest of my days.
Afterword
I spoke with Badea once more before I left. She came to ask me why I was going, to what end I thought I went. She would be perplexed, I think, to see me in my little cottage here on Reivaldt, some hundred miles from the nearest city, although she would have liked the small flowerlike lieden which live on the rocks of my garden wall, one of the few remnants of the lost native fauna which have survived the terraforming outside the preserves of the university system.
I left because I could not remain. Every step I took on
Melida, I felt dead bones cracking beneath my feet. The Melidans did not kill lightly, an individual or an ecosystem, nor any more effectually than do we. If the Melidans had not let the plague loose upon the Esperigans, we would have destroyed them soon enough ourselves, and the Melidans with them. But we distance ourselves better from our murders, and so are not prepared to confront them. My wings whispered to me gently when I passed Melidans in the green-swathed cemetery streets, that they were not sickened, were not miserable. There was sorrow and regret but no self-loathing, where I had nothing else. I was alone.
When I came off my small vessel here, I came fully expecting punishment, even longing for it, a judgment which would at least be an end. Blame had wandered through the halls of state like an unwanted child, but when I proved willing to adopt whatever share anyone cared to mete out to me, to confess any crime which was convenient and to proffer no defense, it turned contrary, and fled.
Time enough has passed that I can be grateful now to the politicians who spared my life and gave me what passes for my freedom. In the moment, I could scarcely feel enough even to be happy that my report contributed some little to the abandonment of any reprisal against Melida: as though we ought hold them responsible for defying our expectations not of their willingness to kill one another, but only of the extent of their ability.
But time does not heal all wounds. I am often asked by visitors whether I would ever return to Melida. I will not. I am done with politics and the great concerns of the universe of human settlement. I am content to sit in my small garden, and watch the ants at work.
Ruth Patrona
THE PEACOCK CLOAK
Chris Beckett
British writer Chris Beckett is one of Interzone’s most frequent contributors, having sold more than twelve stories there, but he’s also made several sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere. His novels include The Holy Machine and Marcher. His short fiction has been collected in The Turing Test. A former social worker, he’s now a university lecturer living in Cambridge, England.
Beckett usually writes about near-future England, but here he moves effectively into Roger Zelazny territory, with superpowered individuals facing off in a virtual reality world created by one of them, with the fate of the entire universe hanging in the balance.
UP TO THAT moment nothing much had been moving in that mountain valley apart from grasshoppers and bees, and the stream playing peacefully by itself over its stony bed. Then Tawus was there in his famous cloak, its bright fabric still fizzing and sparking from the prodigious leap, its hundred eyes, black, green and gold, restlessly assaying the scene. Tawus had arrived, and, as always, everything else was dimmed and diminished by his presence.
“This world was well made,” Tawus said to himself with his accustomed mixture of jealousy and pride.
He savoured the scent of lavender and thyme, the creaking of grasshoppers, the gurgling of the stream.
“Every detail works,” he said, noticing a fat bumble bee, spattered with yellow pollen, launching herself into flight from a pink cistus flower. Passing the small hard object he carried in his left hand to his right, Tawus stooped to take the flower stem between his left forefinger and thumb. “Every molecule, every speck of dust.”
But then, painfully and vividly, and in a way that had not happened for some time, he was reminded of the early days, the beginning, when, on the far side of this universe, he and the Six awoke and found themselves in another garden wilderness like this one, ringed about by mountains.
Back then things had felt very different. Tawus had known what Fabbro knew, had felt what Fabbro felt. His purposes had been Fabbro’s purposes, and all his memories were from Fabbro’s world, a world within which the created universe of Esperine was like a child’s plaything, a scene carved into an ivory ball (albeit carved so exquisitely that its trees could sway in the wind and lose their leaves in autumn, its creatures live and die). Of course he had known quite well he was a copy of Fabbro and not Fabbro himself, but he was an exact copy, down to the smallest particle, the smallest thought, identical in every way except that he had been rendered in the stuff of Esperine, so that he could inhabit Fabbro’s creation on Fabbro’s behalf. He was a creation as Esperine was, but he could remember creating himself, just as he could remember creating Esperine, inside the device that Fabbro called Constructive Thought. Back then, Tawus had thought of Fabbro not as “he” and “him” but as “I” and “me.”
And how beautiful this world had seemed then, how simple, how unsullied, how full of opportunities, how free of the ties and regrets and complications that had hemmed in the life of Fabbro in the world outside.
Tawus released the pink flower, let it spring back among its hundred bright fellows, and stood up straight, returning the small object from his right hand to his dominant left. Then, with his quick grey eyes, he glanced back down the path, and up at the rocky ridges on either side. The peacock eyes looked with him, sampling every part of the visible and invisible spectrum.
“No, Tawus, you are not observed,” whispered the cloak, using the silent code with which it spoke to him through his skin.
“Not observed, perhaps,” said Tawus, “but certainly expected.”
Now he turned southwards, towards the head of the valley, and began to walk. His strides were quick and determined but his thoughts less so. The gentle scents and sounds of the mountain valley continued to stir up vivid and troubling memories from the other end of time. He recalled watching the Six wake up, his three brothers and three sisters. They were also made in the likeness of Fabbro but they were, so to speak, reflections of him in mirrors with curved surfaces or coloured glass, so that they were different from the original and from each other. Tawus remembered their eyes opening – his brother Balthazar first and then his sister Cassandra – and he remembered their spreading smiles as they looked around and simultaneously saw and remembered where they were, in this exquisite, benign and yet to be explored world, released forever from the cares and complications of Fabbro’s life and from the baleful history of the vast and vacant universe in which Fabbro was born.
They had been strangely shy of each other at first, even though they shared the same memories, the same history and the same sole parent. The three sisters in particular, in spite of Fabbro’s androgynous and protean nature, felt exposed and uneasy in their unfamiliar bodies. But even the men were uncomfortable in their new skins. All seven were trying to decide who they were. It had been a kind of adolescence. All had felt awkward, all had been absurdly optimistic about what they could achieve. They had made a pact with each other, for instance, that they would always work together and take decisions as a group.
“That didn’t last long,” Tawus now wryly observed, and then he remembered, with a momentary excruciating pang, the fate of Cassandra, his proud and stubborn sister.
But they’d believed in their agreement at the time, and, having made it, all Seven had stridden out, laughing and talking all at once, under a warm sun not unlike this one, and on a path not unlike the one he was walking now, dressed so splendidly in his Peacock Cloak. He had no such cloak back then. They had been naked gods. They had begun to wrap themselves up only as they moved apart from one another: Cassandra in her Mirror Mantle, Jabreel in his Armour of Light, Balthazar in his Coat of Dreams . . . But the Peacock Cloak had been finest of all.
“I hear music,” the cloak now whispered to him.
Tawus stopped and listened. He could only hear the stream, the grasshoppers and the bees. He shrugged.
“Hospitable of him, to lay on music to greet us.”
“Just a peasant flute. A flute and goat bells.”
“Probably shepherds up in the hills somewhere,” said Tawus, resuming his stride.
He remembered how the seven of them came to their first human village, a village whose hundred simple people imagined that they had always lived there, tending their cattle and their sheep, and had no inkling that only a few hours before, they and their memo
ries had been brought into being all at once by their creator Fabbro within the circuits of Constructive Thought, along with a thousand similar groups scattered over the planets of Esperine: the final touch, the final detail, in the world builder’s ivory ball.
“The surprise on their faces!” Tawus murmured to himself, and smiled. “To see these seven tall naked figures striding down through their pastures.”
“You are tense,” observed his cloak. “You are distracting yourself with thoughts of things elsewhere and long ago.”
“So I am,” agreed Tawus, in the same silent code. “I am not keen to think about my destination.”
He looked down at the object he carried in his hand, smooth and white and intricate, like a polished shell. It was a gun of sorts, a weapon of his own devising. It did not fire bullets but was utterly deadly, for, within a confined area, it was capable of unravelling the laws that defined Esperine itself and, in that way, reducing form to pure chaos.
“Give me a pocket to put this in,” Tawus said.
At once the cloak made an opening to receive the gun, and then sealed itself again when Tawus had withdrawn his hand.
“The cloak can aim and shoot for me, in any case,” Tawus said to himself.
And the cloak’s eyes winked, green and gold and black.
The valley turned a corner. There was an outcrop of harder rock. As he came round it, Tawus heard the music that his cloak, with its finely tuned senses, had detected some way back: a fluted melody, inexpertly played, and an arrhythmic jangling of crudely made bells.
Up ahead of him three young children were minding a flock of sheep and goats, sheltering by a little patch of trees at a spot where a tributary brook cascaded into the main stream. A girl of nine or ten was playing panpipes. In front of her on a large stone, as if in the two-seat auditorium of a miniature theatre, two smaller children sat side by side: a boy of five or so and a little girl of three, cradling a lamb that lay across both their laps. The jangling bells hung from the necks of the grazing beasts.
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