And Dae never lied.
She looked to Dae.
“I have made the offer,” Dae said. “He can give me Ibren.”
Esthe’s hand closed around the vial remaining to her. The acid.
Something dangerous appeared in Dae’s lightless eyes. Something hard.
He could move as fast as gale winds when he wanted to. And acid would not hurt him.
“It looks like your lover is even less attached to you than I was,” Lun said.
Esthe’s keys opened the cell door, letting her escape.
* * *
She fled back to the hidden closet, where she knew she would not die.
Sitting inside it once again, she took out her keys and the vial of acid and held them in her hands.
The little vial, so like the vial Lun left her, glittered mocking in the light.
She was twice a fool.
Her imagination ran wild, promising visions of Dae and Lun laughing together, mocking her as she died at their feet. She envisioned her family dying and Lun living for years in happiness and luxury before his execution. Morbid fear whispered of herself broken on a wheel before a mob.
With such dread, with tears pricking her eyes and devastation in her heart, it would be madness to scry.
She could not scry Dae and Lun in that room, not with her brother there, not feeling like she did. Dae would know. Worse, it would doom her brother to the very fate she feared.
That was why Dae kept her brother with Lun, she realized. He knew that Esthe would not scry against her family, not deliberately. Every vision she saw of them was either forced on her by Othek’s scryers or one where she scryed others and her family entered during the vision.
Dae knew that she served him not from fear of death but rather from a desire to be avenged on Lun. He could not count on her support once she’d scryed out her victory—or, alternately, Lun’s victory over her. All Dae had to do to keep her from scrying Lun was to house Lun with her captured family members. Dae knew that was the way to hide from her what was coming, to keep her guessing, to keep her working for him.
Dae had told her that she no longer needed to scry. What was it he had not wanted her to see?
If she scryed, she would bring on her own doom. But she sought it out. She did the forbidden. She scryed her own death.
* * *
She saw herself lying on a circular bed in a tower room. It looked high in the air—nothing but bright blue sky showed through the windows that surrounded the room and strange jewel-green birds flew by. She looked no older than she was now—if anything, she looked younger, the faint lines on her forehead and at the corner of her unscarred eye smoothed away. She wore rubies at her throat, but she was naked otherwise. The bedclothes were rumpled.
Karnon Dae stood at one window, looking out. He was naked too.
“I know I’ve scryed this room before,” she heard herself say. “It’s familiar the way scryed things are.”
“Do you remember what you saw?” he asked, leaving the window and lying beside her.
Her future self regarded him for a moment and smiled a lazy smile.
“No,” she said. “It can’t have been important. I usually remember visions—it must have been lifetimes ago.”
He kissed her then. She nestled in his arms. Time passed. The blue sky outside deepened in hue, and wisps of clouds showed gold in the west. Her eyes slipped closed.
“Good night,” she murmured.
“Good night,” he whispered in return.
Her heavy sleeping breaths slowed and then stopped.
He looked up, and his eyes met her scrying ones.
“I have to leave, Isri,” he said. “I know you want to face your death, to know it’s coming. But you have lived more than five hundred years. Years of life untouched by age or illness make death harder. I do not want you to suffer, Isri.”
He was still holding her. He looked away from her scrying self to the body in his arms.
“I would take you with me if I could,” he said. “But humans cannot pass that way. And I cannot break my promise.”
He caressed her face, and the vision dissolved. She had finished dying.
* * *
The same hour that Ibren fell into Dae’s hands, Dae told Lun that there was no further need for his service.
Lun’s execution took place in a small metal room. There was a drain in the middle of the floor, crude plumbing to accommodate the crude plumbing of a human body. Esthe watched impassively. Her attendance felt strangely dutiful.
No one gave any speeches—not Dae, not her, not even Lun. He spared her a dull glare, but most of his attention went to Karnon Nameless Dae.
Dae was the one person who did not seem to belong in that room. Everyone else shared the crude plumbing of the condemned, from the soldiers in their electric armor to Esthe in her everyday finery. Esthe’s imprisoned brother, there to deter her past self’s scrying eyes, wore drudge’s gray and did not meet her gaze. Her brother had never personally sheltered Ibren. Dae had spared him and his family as a gift to her.
Lun’s blood ran down the drain, spilled by a bloodless neininki, and the rest of them went back to their lives.
Far from glorying, Esthe surprised herself by feeling sad.
* * *
Esthe went on to scry hundreds of thousands of visions over her life, until the early ones faded into the dim shadows of old dreams.
Of all the things she ever scryed, seeing her lover kill her was the most comforting.
Copyright © 2012 Anne Ivy
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“Anne Ivy” is the pen name for twin sisters who collaborate when writing fiction. “Anne” has a law degree from William & Mary and practices law in Atlanta. She is a previous recipient of a Young Georgia Authors writing award. “Ivy” has a medical degree from Duke University and practices as a doctor in Atlanta.
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AUTHOR INTERVIEW: ANNE IVY
by Kate Marshall
In a special author interview for BCS Science-Fantasy Month, BCS Assistant Editor Kate Marshall talks with Anne Ivy about “Scry,” alienness and hegemony, how Oedipus’s parents caused their prophesied end, and how a character who can see the future can still have free will.
BCS: The society depicted in “Scry” is a blend of antiquity and futuristic elements. What drew you to tell this tale in such a setting?
Anne Ivy: The simple answer is that we think those kinds of settings are really cool. Also, a society steeped in a cold, exacting mix of science and magic seemed like the kind of society that would give rise to a woman like Eyre Isri Esthe.
The more complicated answer is that we don’t subscribe to the myth of progress in human history. By that, I mean the fallacy that all societies develop the same technologies in the same order. This fallacy suggests that there’s some kind of inherent hierarchy to technology and development. It’s the idea that all societies will start out using supposedly inferior hunting and gathering, and then “progress” to farming and then “progress” to using animals in agriculture and then “progress” to the cotton gin, the Ford assembly line, and then the smartphone.
History itself proves that this is false. The Mayans and the Aztecs had pyramids and an accurate calendar—right down to predicting solar eclipses at a time when the rest of the world had not even figured out the correct way to handle leap days—but never invented the wheel. So, in an imaginary world, it’s pointless to divide technologies into “antiquity” and “futuristic.” Our antiquity could be their future; our future their antiquity.
BCS: Esthe foresees hideous futures, but she isn’t paralyzed by her knowledge. She’s active in using what she knows. What drew you to such a character?
Anne Ivy: Esthe has a lot of influences—from Esther (the scene where she gives her keys to Dae is somewhat inspired by the moment when Esther puts her life in the king’s hands in order to thwart her enemy) to Bertha Rochester—but
Esthe’s main inspiration came from Greek mythology.
Esthe has the power of Cassandra—she sees a future that will occur—but the determination and vengefulness of Clytemnestra and Medea. (Women bent on revenge are usually depicted as monsters. I wanted to write a vengeful woman who was sympathetic, the way vengeful men usually are.)
In Greek mythology, I was always driven mad by the way the victims of prophecy, for want of a better term, always flail around so uselessly trying to avert the future, when they ought to know that never works. I wanted to create a character who dealt with prophecy in an intelligent, productive way. If Cassandra were like Esthe, she would have said to herself, okay, Troy is going to burn and Clytemnestra is going to kill me. Knowing this will happen, what do I want and how do I get it?
Esthe’s empowerment results from recognizing what she can control and what she can’t control and making her plans accordingly.
BCS: There is a debate in the story over whether an unseen future is fixed or malleable. The only way to preserve uncertainty is to avoid scrying certain futures. Do the people of “Scry” need that uncertainty?
Anne Ivy: That Esthe gained strength (increased skill in scrying) from seeing that she could never have the future she wished for herself (happiness with Lun), would have been a rare thing even in a world filled with people who could see the future. People without her grit—most people in fact—would be paralyzed or thrown into despair upon seeing a bad future.
Worse yet would be the thought that if they had not seen it, it might not have occurred. Warnings about self-fulfilling prophesies would have abounded in Esthe’s world. Uncertainty would often be preferred.
In the story, sometimes seeing a future is what causes the future. So, of course, as you point out, one way the characters try to avoid bad self-fulfilling prophecies is to avoid scrying altogether, or to avoid scrying certain events (like their own deaths). Whether that’s effective or not is another question.
I don’t think the uncertainty and risk associated with scrying (or the rules about what you can and cannot scry) are what keeps people from scrying out their whole futures, though.
For one thing, they aren’t good enough at scrying to manage it. The more important issue, however, is that scrying doesn’t actually limit people’s power of choice (though they might think it does). So while uncertainty gives them a (perhaps vital) sense of freedom, the fact is, they’ve got freedom of choice regardless of whether their future is scryed or not.
Fate verses free will is, I believe, a false dichotomy. The two are not in conflict. Just because there is a future (as there is a past) does not mean that your free choices did not lead to it. In the most famous self-fulfilling prophecy, Oedipus’s parents freely chose to pierce his feet and abandon him on a hillside. Nobody made them do that.
Another way of looking at it is that prophecy (like time travel) implies that time is non-linear. So cause and effect works backwards as well as forwards. So, it’s not only: if the prophecy hadn’t predicted murder and incest, then Oedipus’s parents wouldn’t have abandoned him to die. It’s also: if Oedipus’s parents hadn’t abandoned him to die, then the prophecy wouldn’t have predicted murder and incest. If they had been the kind of people who would NEVER do such a thing to their baby boy, then the Oracle’s prophecy would have had to be different. Their actions caused the prophecy.
It’s worth noting that Dae always believes he can control his future. He has complete, utter faith in his own agency. He alone is not at all afraid of scryers’ visions. He thinks of scryer abilities as a mere asset, one tool of many he can use in carrying out his plans. He is confident of his ability to make choices that will turn any vision to his advantage.
BCS: Dae’s alien nature remains mysterious to the tale, but is essential to Esthe’s decisions and development as a character. How does his alienness have such a profound and disruptive effect on both Esthe and her society?
Anne Ivy: That is a great question. We know a lot about Karnon Dae that we did not go into in the story. We wanted Dae’s exact nature mysterious—he could be an artificially intelligent android programmed never to lie, or a space alien, or a demon—because the important thing about him is not his exact nature (which Esthe would view differently than we do, anyway, because she comes from a different background of culture and myth) but instead that he is an agent of change.
Almost like a plague or a tsunami, he is incredibly powerful, inhuman, destructive, and amoral. Unlike a nature-based agent of change, though, he can feel and think and bargain and plan.
Esthe comes from a society with a powerful hegemony. As strong-willed and intelligent as she is, it would have never occurred to her to fight against her society’s power structure if Karnon Dae had not shown up. It would never have occurred to most of the people in her society, at least not at the point in time of the story. The government of this system is worldwide. People in this story didn’t have a point of comparison, other than their own distant past, to contrast with their own lives.
As an alien (in the general sense), Karnon Dae didn’t belong to the system. Karnon Dae didn’t have the same paradigm, or the same hegemony, and he could make people see the hegemony they’d been blind to before. He brought change that could not have come from the inside—or only could have come slowly and gradually over generations.
Karnon Dae forces change in Esthe as in the society around her. Even though she tells Karnon that her family’s status means nothing to her (and she means it when she says it), it is easier said than done. She has an incredibly difficult time seeing her world’s power structure come apart, even though she is helping to tear it apart. Her society repressed her, convincing her that her worth lay in making Lun happy, but it also privileged her. A great deal of her self-image came from her status as an aristo. Like a lot of people in her society, I imagine, all her ambitions centered around improving her situation within her system, not overturning or even questioning the system itself.
BCS: “Anne Ivy” is, in fact, a collaborative duo. What was it like working with one another? What perspectives did you each bring to the story?
Anne Ivy: We are twin sisters. We had different majors, went to different graduate schools in different fields, lived a large portion of our adult lives in different states, and currently we practice in different professions (“Anne” is a lawyer, while “Ivy” is a doctor).
Separately, we have each published nonfiction in our respective fields under our own names. But from the time we could talk, we always invented stories together. The odd class assignment aside, we have never invented fiction alone. Half the time, we can’t even remember who first conceived a given character or plot twist. (For the record, though, “Ivy” thought up Karnon Dae, and “Anne” developed Esthe.)
We each have different expertise, though, which can be helpful. For example, Ivy knows what tuberculosis is and how it kills its victims in concrete, practical terms instead of fictional romanticizing. (La Boheme and Moulin Rouge notwithstanding, few TB victims are capable of singing by the time the end comes.)
Legal knowledge is useful because understanding how a government works in practice, what it does and how it does it, can be incredibly helpful in conceiving of balances of power in ways that aren’t limited by superficial clichés or ridiculous dichotomies. Plus, as an undergraduate English major, “Anne” had a wider exposure to literature than either one of us would have gotten reading strictly for pleasure.
BCS: What other work do you find inspiring, either fictional or otherwise?
Anne Ivy: Too many to name them all. Neal Stephenson is a genius. China Mieville does brilliant things with speculative fiction, finding imaginative ways to parse out aspects of society and human nature. C. S. Friedman and Barbara Hambly are both longstanding inspirations. Charlie Huston is also incredibly inspiring, in the sense that he can take the reader on an absolutely merciless breakneck ride. In terms of nonfiction, The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker is an incredible book for insight into human na
ture. We also both love anthropology.
BCS: What’s next for you? What are you working on at the moment?
Anne Ivy: We’re working on a novel that features Karnon Dae. We also have several other short stories in progress.
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COVER ART
“Gone,” by Mats Minnhagen
Mats Minnhagen is a digital artist living in Sweden. He has worked as Concept Artist on EA Dice and currently freelances with role-playing-game, book, and popular science illustrations. His fantasy painting “Floating Fish” was the cover art for Issue 19 of Clarkesworld Magazine, and his painting “King of Ruins” was the cover art for the BCS website before our premiere issue. His online galleries can be viewed at www.minnhagen.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
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